Reading Jung for Magic: “Active Imagination” for/as “Close Reading”

Abstract

In this essay, I want to pivot the topic of C. G. Jung and “reading” into a bold argument about the evolution of academic disciplines (and later about evolution itself ). Relatively recent forms of academic study, such as psychology, were constructed by dividing a heritage along lines of “respectable” proto-scientific ideas versus esoteric practices better forgotten and darkened. After all, how we read Jung and why concerns not just reading The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, but also how such work might affect reading texts of all kinds. The act of reading might be defined as interpreting words and other signifying material such as dream images. This definition opens up large spheres of knowledge: hermeneutics; the study of imaginative literature; and, in pre-Enlightenment eras, reading arts such as alchemy and magic. My core proposition is that Jung proposed a method of working with unconscious images – “active imagination”, he called it – that was simultaneously an act of liberation and repression. Comparing active imagination with its historical parallel from the discipline of vernacular literary studies, “close reading” makes visible its structure of reduction and expansion. As offered by Jung, active imagination represses its nature as an art, while proposing an expansion of reading sorely needed by literary studies. In turn, an examination of close reading and its antecedents reveals a structurally similar and opposite repression, that of the creative psyche, while expanding the role of reading as an art of making. In this way, Jung’s psychology and literary studies may re-form each other to show both active imagination and close reading as acts of magic for the twenty-first century. We begin by recognizing that positing an unconscious subverts conventional assumptions about reading. Words and images are not unproblematically paired with “meaning” if a part of the psyche resists conscious control. Therefore, Jung devised active imagination to “read” images generated primarily by the unconscious as symbols. Suggestively, active imagination arises contemporaneously with another development of reading from another recently founded academic discipline. Because literature was traditionally a staple of universities, albeit in Latin and Greek, the newness of literary studies or “English” as a degree in higher education has often been overlooked. However, literary studies, a degree subject invented in the late1890s, differs radically from the classics in constructing vernacular literature as a basis for knowledge. My essay argues that Jung’s method of subjecting unconsciously generated symbols to the process of active imagination has a deep historical relationship with literary studies and its originating research method, known today as close reading. By examining the roots of close reading and active imagination in hermeneutics, Renaissance philosophy, and magic, I explore how Jung re-oriented the reading of symbols in the service of cultural transformation. Furthermore, I show that this cross-disciplinary comparison allows active imagination to be reimagined as a skill to be practised. In effect, I am suggesting that active imagination be regarded as magic, for it becomes an imaginative reweaving into the body of the earth.