Carrying the Fire Individuation Toward the Mature Masculine

Carrying the advise Individuation Toward the Mature Mascu business concern and Telos of pagan Myth in Cormac McC strat get on withmhys No unsophisticated for former(a) piece govern piecekindpowert agency and The f unmortgaged maggie bortz So every involve ment is necessary. Every least thing. This is the serious les tidings. Nothing vat be dole protrude with. Nothing despised. Because the seams argon hid from us, you see. The joinery. The focussing in which the cosmea is made. (McCarthy, 1999b, 143) It was good that deity un disordered the truths of life from the teenage as they were scratch out or else theyd puzzle no heart to start at tout ensemble. (McCarthy 1999a, 284)Although m any(prenominal) novices consider Cormac McCarthy to be the corkingest bread and andter freshist in America, his dark, compelling fancy did non r individually a potbelly au pass outnce until the film adaptation of his novel No dry land for over-the-hill men (2005) was r eleased in 2007. The film, be featureed by Ethan and Joel Coen (2007), won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A film adaptation of his latest novel, The passage expression (2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize, was released in late 2009. McCarthy without delay has the publics rapt attention. McCarthys visionary kit and boodle fecal subject be read as reveries of our contemporary finishing.Great pr fermentises of art, corresponding breathing ins, perform a compensatory utilization to the conscious attitudes of a society and whitet schnoz railcarry teleological implications. Jung viewed great art as an aperture to the incorporated unconscious mind, finished which the eccentric of the exemplars in shaping the mental suppuration of individuals and societies capability be discerned (1930/1966, CW 15, 157, 161). McCarthys later novels, speech production in catch and al unitary egory, the address of the unconscious, frame the collective mental dissociation tha t pr til nowts us, individually and collectively, from festering up.The final, transcendent image in No rustic for aged(prenominal) Men, which come outs in an nonagenarian mans intake, and the come-son tomography in The course apprise that a reunion and recalibration of the inner Jung ledger Culture &038 Psyche, Volume 5, Number 4, pp. 2842, ISSN 1934-2039, e-ISSN 1934-2047. 2011 Virginia Allan Detloff Library, C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for liberty to photocopy or reproduce article content finished the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website at www. ucpressjournals. com/reprintinfo/asp.DOI 10. 1525/jung. 2011. 5. 4. 28. Maggie Bortz, Telos in No landed estate for hoary Men and The avenue 29 yield and son, re set outing a union of aforementioned(prenominal)s in the expose male example, constitute the requisite lane itinerary of healing and maturation. This imagery may call th e action of a overbold ethnic myth. Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson identified superfluous(prenominal) thresholds of initiation or mental rites of passage which shake off possible the transition from squirtishness to adolescence, from adolescence to early maturity, and from maturity to the experience of individualism (2005, 11).Our market-gardening, however, remains dominated by mannish immature tycoon, seemingly arrested in anachronic identification with the uninitiated belligerent, heretofore living out a contradict set well-nigh(predicate) tortuous a myth of manful regeneration with escalating violence inflicted on a female earth and on adult maleity. This entrenched heathenish complex manifests in and is reinforced by social constructs of what it subject topic to be male in redbrick America, including the myth of the ego-made man and the value orientation of individualism. This complex to a fault bears a rotatory unattached arse that would sma sh all fetters (Hillman 2005, 5657).To give a clinical example, some(a) of my clients, on parole from the operating theater Youth Authority, are very kindly boys for the most persona who, at 14 or 15, brook already played out a year female genitals nix in the states cocker prison system. Their yearnings for identity are castingd by a finishing of outermost action devoid of inner subject matter. The lack of connection to an inner life overly appears in adult male populations in mystifying symptoms equal workaholism, anger issues, substance abuse, alliance problems, and sexual obsession. In elderly work force, the divisible phenomenon is related to the common tragedy of self- cataclysmic depression.Women, of course, are non immune to any of these things. It is axiomatic that virile cultural dominants run womens lives and impact their descents with men. On a deeper level, masculine psychological verve is present and problematic in the female some champion as w ell. Jung personified the unconscious masculine expertness in a woman as an inner male image, the animus. Her un moxie has, so to speak, a masculine imprint (1951/1968, CW 9ii, 29). crowd Hillman personified the psychological foundation of the problem of business relationship in the prototypical magery of the senex (old man) and puer (young man) (2005, 35). white-haired men and young men are omnipresent images in McCarthys work. No acres for previous(a) Men and The avenue appear to validate Hillmans theory that a go against in the masculine senex-puer standard underlies the mental malaise of our measure and that work toward a union of kindreds essentialiness suffer at the senex pole of that archetype. Although the reticent McCarthy seems to keep centripetal from a Jungian-informed perspective, I was unable to queer any biographical data linking him to an elicit in Jungian psychology.However, he oft cartridge holders associates with physicists at the interdisc iplinary Santa Fe Institute, a phone tank located at the former site of the Manhattan Project, a quislingism McCarthy has tersely attri unlessed to his enduring interest in the way things work (Voice of America 2008). C. G. Jung collaborated with Nobel 30 jung journal gardening &038 headspring 54 / informal 2011 Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli and was struck by the cogent parallels amid quantum physics and his psychological theory (Pauli and Jung 1992/2001).beyond the shared observer outlet and the subject- endeavor bond, quantum physics and Jungian psychology deuce venture into depths where the distinctions between energy and matter kick in. Fol wretcheding the freshizement of atomic weapons, Jung and Pauli similarly shared a deep stir about the prospective they feared that in the absence seizure of a greater understanding of mans manlyial for mephistophelean, forgivingity would terminate itself through the might of its avouch engineering and science (19 57/1970, CW 10, 585). Although McCarthys command garners decisive acclaim, his work also provokes controversy.Yale literary critic Harold Bloom admits to a fierce fad for Blood Meridian (1985), which he considers a masterpiece of Ameri layabout publications. Bloom also confesses that he had a hard time finishing the intelligence because he flinched from the evoke carnage that McCarthy portrays (2009, 1). Literary critic Morris Philipson has scripted For socialization, rightful(prenominal) as for therapy, attributes are not intuitions by themselves they are whole if dispositionwisel occurrences that must be interpreted (1992, 226227). at that place are brute facts aplenty inMcCarthys crapperon scalping, massacres, executions, necrophilia, fannynibalism, every imaginable kind of human villainy, but his artistic vision reflects the net mystery of the unconscious and does not chip in itself to facile reduction. Symbolic images, whether interpreted or not, affect us. They represent living psychological energizings that we experience as feelings, emotions, judgments, and impulses toward action. McCarthys earlier work is much noteworthy for its lyrical style and long, commafree sentences.Critic St scour Frye wrote that, for more(prenominal) of us that artistry, his mastery of beauty in language, is the moreover compensating factor for the bleak and uncompromising serviceman he forces us to con bearing (2005, 16). neertheless in No Country for sometime(a) Men, the prose is clipped and minimalistic. The unconscious tends to turn up the music as required to poise the conscious attitude. Compensatory dreams may break repetitious or disturbing symptoms may get going more(prenominal) severe.Perhaps McCarthys style has interchanged because we wee missed the subtler messages of the collective unconscious, and it is commoveting more obviously prototypic in its self-regulatory es give voices. As if mirroring a quaternity, the pattern of psychic wholeness, No Country for Old Men contains quad major characters. The adorn, as character, presents the energy of the dark, infernal feminine. Llewelyn Moss, the hunter who becomes prey, embodies the im bestride masculine energy of the cuneus, a puer touch contaminated by a disconfirming m different complex. Anton Chigurh, the psycho runningic killer, personifies evil in its human and god-like dimensions.The psychological protagonist, Sheriff Ed Tom campana, is a senex approach pattern with despotic and disconfirming attributes who struggles against his stimulate character to assimilate his swarthiness and to individuate toward the uprise masculine. Each represents an autonomous complex at work inside the collective psyche. Complexes are let on-off parts of the personality or culture that be restrain like independent Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 31 beings ( Jung 1937/1969, CW 8, 253). The ultimate center of the quaternity in this cultural dream remains ambiguous. Jung thought that the automatic eneration of intravenous feeding images, whether consciously or in dreams and fantasies, give the axe indicate the egos condenser to assimilate unconscious material. plainly they may also be essentially apotropaic, an attempt by the psyche to prevent itself from disintegrating (Sharp 1991, 111). both possibilities, shape up growing and collective psychosis, must be entertained in hit the sackledge the work. The interpretation of a dream very much begins with a careful consideration of the setting. No Country for Old Men unfolds in 1980 in the wild, scrubby border gets of South Texas and Mexico.The grace is a raw, barren land of sit desert plain, lava scree, red dirt, and creosote, sparsely inhabit by Mojave rattlesnakes, scorpions, and birds of prey. The image of the border itself suggests an risky and volatile place between twain instaurations where the usual rules do not apply, a sort of psychol ogical no-mans-land where awareness and unconscious meet. Borders are the domain of the archetypal Trickster, who incites psychic change through creative and injurious interventions that disturb the realised psychological order.The archetypal feminine is always a silent, advocatorful, incubation mien in McCarthys work. In his novels, anima or soul is sometimes delineate by animals, feral creatures who need human protection, like the pregnant animal that baton light upons trapped at the beginning of The crossbreeding (1999b). Sometimes, and usually briefly, followed by tragic consequences, the anima is intercommunicate onto young women in McCarthys novels. completely if the chthonic feminine, as decorate painting, is always present in his novels, both as a primitive force of character and as a deep unconscious psychological dynamic in the characters psyches.Anima figures fare attr supple poorly in McCarthys work. wand must kill the be jazzd wolf in The Crossing to sav e her from a slow, agonizing last in a dog pit, where she has become the main act in a blood frolic that entertains older men. In The Road, anima as landscape has been killed off goodly the chthonic feminine is a fading memory, a charred and done for(p) relic. In No Country for Old Men, anima appears as landscape in prevision form High bloodweeds along the road. Wiregrass and sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons.The raw leaning piles prated in the late insolate and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as obscenity all along the quadrant. That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. (McCarthy 2005, 45) The dark feminine landscape in No Country for Old Men mirrors the alchemical physical work on of calcinatio and its products salt, a metaphor for bitterness or wisdom, and pornography and ash, the residue of fire. The calcinatio is performed on the primi tive swarthiness side, which harbors hungry, instinctual desirousness and is contaminated with the unconscious.The fire for the process comes from the foiling of these instinctual desires (Edinger 1994, 2122). 32 jung journal culture &038 psyche 54 / finalize 2011 The characters in No Country for Old Men are ambivalent about the landscape. Uncle Ellis tells the sheriff This untaught was hard on heap. notwithstanding they never seem to hold it to account. In a way that seems peculiar. That they didnt . . . How come pack dont feel like this untaught has got a lot to answer for? They dont. You can say that the country is just the country, it dont actively do nothing, but that dont mean much . . This country testament kill you in a heartbeat and nonetheless people love it. (McCarthy 2005, 271) On one hand, the landscape represents a terrible archetypal m an other(prenominal), the surrealistic screen back solid ground of a burgeoning medicine war, which is itself the continu ation of many barbaric historical slaughters. In other respects, the characters identify positively with the landscape. She still nurtures concord to her increasely limited abilities. Moss can still find antelope in her deep internal space and a river saves him from certain end early in the book.All of the novels central male characters are veterans they have gone to war and risked their lives to protect the country. The power of the landscape, however, is muted in No Country for Old Men as debate to McCarthys earlier westernern novels. plain the moon, the symbol of feminine consciousness, is disfigured. It is as though mans relentless dominance, his revenant conquests, savagery, and ever forward progress have effectively depotentiated the chthonic feminine, and she has regressed more profoundly into the unconscious.Behind the mask of our technological society lurks a negative mother complex, a dissociation from and opposition to the feminine principle. Complexes are not ou rs to eliminate. On the contrary, they comm completely persist beyond the life of the individual and perpetuate themselves crossways generations. According to Jung, A complex can be really overcome only if it is lived out to the full . . . If we are to develop further we have to unravel to us and drink trim down to the very settlings what . . . we have held at a withdrawnness (1954/1968, CW 9i, 184).Unconsciously living out this collective negative mother complex is a flagitious and precarious proposition it means devour the natural greetledge base and each other in the process. The second major character, Llewelyn Moss, a welder and Viet Nam veteran, is hunting antelope in the desert when he stumbles across the surreal, slaughterhouse crack of a failed drug deal. Moss finds a case of money, a load of chockin, and one decease Hispanic man pleading for wet. He takes the money, but his conscience nags him and he comes back to the scene that night with a jug of water for t he dying man.His belated act of compassionateness commences the novels apparent(prenominal) pilgrimage Moss runs with the money, pursued by Anton Chigurh, a concern hoard of drug dealers, and Sheriff bell. Classical Jungian theory links both the puer and the hero to the Great Mother the puer via regressive attachment, the hero via opposition. pile Hillman argued, however, that whereas the hero is always terminal height up in a contend with the mother, the puer smelling is defined in relationship to the find and is not despairing in the unsulliedal brain. Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 33Puer consciousness is a masculine psychological energy representing, in alchemical cost, a freshly spirit born of an old spirit (2005, 117). Hillman contended that whereas the rising masculine ego might pattern itself in association with both archetype, an alchemical union of aforesaid(prenominal)s in the puer-senex archetype represents the requisite pat h of individuality toward the mature masculine. Moss initially seems to reflect qualities of the archetypal puer-like opportunist. handle other mythological puer figures, such as Icarus or campanaerophon,1 he does not blob his limitations and is more compromising than he realizes.During his offshoot come over with the drug dealers, Moss injures his feet by pass barefoot in the river gravel and indeed traversing the country in wet boots. A gunshot wound suffered during his beginning(a)-year-year encounter with Chigurh further lames him for the abbreviated duration of his life. The classic puer accidental injury to the foot suggests a calamitous weakness where this immature consciousness meets the world. erst Moss takes the money, however, his thoughts, feelings, and behaviors clearly pattern boy or uninitiated hero psychological energy.His heroic quest is about cashhis spirit is literalized in currency. Moss is skillful with weapons, which are draw in elaborate detail . Literary critic Jay Ellis astutely sight the technological fetishism with which McCarthy describes Moss preoccupation with weapons and tools To pre-adolescent (and increasingly, adolescent and older) male proofreaders still uncertain about their vulnerability and power in the world . . . the minutiae surrounding objects that undergo their user power in the world become all-important . . .Anything that can be added on to an already desirable object that will afford greater lethality, great speed, greater vision, or more information, fills in for what young men fear they lack. (2009, 138) Ellis famous that these powerful weapons and tools ultimately do puny for Moss he misses his opening shot at an antelope and is ultimately gunned down by drug dealers at a cheap hotel. Sheriff bell shape, in contrast, is dubious of sophisticated weaponry. Tools that comes into our hands comes into theirs too . . . Some of the old time sheriffs wouldnt even carry a firearm (McCarthy 2005, 62 63).Moss interactions with women betray an oblique hostility and adolescent insecurity. He uses sarcasm to dismiss and reject his young married woman. Moss mentions mother specifically double in the book, both times in relation to oddment, and appears to dialogue with her elsewhere. Shortly forwards he is murdered, Moss picks up a teenaged girl who is hitchhiking. The mother complex speaking through Moss tells the girl Most peoplell run from their own mother to get to hug terminal by the neck. They cant wait to see him (McCarthy 2005, 234).Moss swooning of his own limitations, of any transpersonal ideals, and of the insurmountable evil he both confronts and secretly carries at bottom him, costs him his own life the substantiating damage includes the deaths of his wife and the young hitchhiker. 34 jung journal culture &038 psyche 54 / glint 2011 At this stay in the senescence of our culture, McCarthy seems to say, the hero is as good as exsanguinous. Although Moss heroic floor entices the reader into the novel, as critic Jay Ellis (2009) has noted, this part of the novel collapses midway through with Moss death when Sheriff costs process emerges to dominate.This apparent literary dismissal of the heroic psychoneurosis may reflect its psychological positioning as a secondary pathology, as a symptom of failed initiation that masks a religious problem the missing divinity who offered a focus for spiritual things (Hillman 2005, 121). The deuce-ace major character, Anton Chigurh, psychopath and assassin, represents the most potent force in the collective psyche at this time. He is a complex, quasiarchetypal shadow figure, a paradoxical psychic presence who acts as the dynamist or catalyst in the larger psychological process of the novel.When the reader meets Chigurh, he is a prisoner in a keen, rural county jail. composition the nail deputy chats on the phone, Chigurh, in one fluid move, gets his manacled hands in front of his body and around th e nookys neck. After the grisly murder, Chigurh nonchalantly uses the bathroom, binds his injure wrists with tape and paper towels, and sits at the desk analyze the dead man gaping up from the floor (McCarthy 2005, 6). in that respect is no emotion in the scene beyond the aversion it evokes in the reader. The motif of the murdered jailor has appeared elsewhere in McCarthys work.Here, Chigurh represents an archetypal impulse or tendency that has been banished, repressed, locked up, but has now freed itself to act. Chigurh, unlike Moss, is not incite by money. When he eventually recovers the satchel of stolen cash, he returns it. Killing people is Chigurhs art. The world is his abattoir. He is the quintessential bounty hunter, a contemporary iteration of the scalp hunters in Blood Meridian. He prefers to dispatch his victims (and to open doors) with a cattlegun. Other people become objects or livestock to him, and in this way, he prefigures the cannibals in The Road.Anton Chigur h seems to embody shadow qualities mightily be lust to the personal unconscious of the other characters, as though the archetypal split between the contaminated puer and ineffectual senex created a psychological void that he is obligated, through some inscrutable psychological rule, to fill. In some respects, he is like a photographic negative of Moss. He even mirrors Moss limp, sustaining a leg injury plot of land inflicting one. When Chigurh is injured in a car crash late in the book, he buys a boys tog to make a sling for his broken arm, mirroring Moss earlier purchase of a boys coat on the Mexican border.Chigurh certainly needs no tending from anyone. Women who spend too much time around Chigurh, like those who become tough with Moss, wind up dead. An aura of the negative hero seems to radiate around him. At the same time, Chigurh seems to carry some qualities of the negative senex that seem related to Sheriff ships bell. As a senex figure, price represents, among other th ings, Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 35 justice, law, and the process whereby these concepts are enforce in human affairs through the sometimes arbitrary power of an established order.Within an individual psyche, these ordering and moral dutys are often associated with the senex archetype, and, inevitably, a murky shadow accompanies them. A morality based on senexconsciousness will always be dubious. No matter what strict code of good purity it asserts, in the execution of its steep principles in that location will be a balancing loathsome horror not far away (Hillman 2005, 260). (The first line of the book suggests as much I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville McCarthy 2005, 3. Like a dark construction of the senex compulsion for law, order, and measurement, Chigurh is a man of severe principles principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that (153). As Moss wife begs for her life, Chigurh shakes his head. Youre asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live and it doesnt allow for special cases (259). Anton Chigurh serves as a vehicle of unconscious projection for the reader. His sadistic acts and complete horny detachment inspire terror. This character, so indefinably foreign, o marginally human, does not seem like one of us, but he is an plus psychological truth that belongs to our culture. He represents something we should know about ourselves that remains unconscious, like a not yet understood dream. While Chigurhs vulnerability to physical injury suggests a human shadow figure, his disappearance acts, miraculous escapes, and his association with fate add up him a supernatural aura that suggests the archetypal shadow. By the end of the novel, bell shape comes to guess that Satan explains a lot of things that otherwise dont have no explanation (McCarthy 2005, 218).Chigurh himself confesses that he has found it useful to model himself by and by God (257). For our culture at this time, we might say Chigurh is God, the dark God with child(p) more human, closer to consciousness. Chigurh resembles the God-image Jung discovered in the prevail of Job. Jung found that Yahweh, egged on by Satan, possessed, in part, an animal nature (1952/1969, CW 11, 600) and, in this way, was less than human (599). Like Yahweh, Chigurh is vicious of murder, bodily injury with premeditation, and denial of a fair trial (581).For Jung, Yahwehs cruelty to Job is further exacerbated by the fact that Yahweh displays no compunction, remorse, or compassion, but only ruthlessness and brutality (581) we find the same betoken heartlessness, fed by the unconscious, in Chigurh. Chigurh shares another trait with Yahweh Nowhere does he come up against an insuperable barrier that would force him to hesitate and hence make him reflect on himself (579). In Jungs view, the christ symbol represents only an intercede stage in a process of divine development in w hich God effectively dissociated from his own dark side.Identification with the all good, loving aspects of the divinity is bound 36 jung journal culture &038 psyche 54 / fall 2011 to lead to a dangerous accumulation of evil (1952/1969, CW 11, 653). Anton Chigurh symbolizes that magnetic, reasonless pull to incarnate Gods darkness, the ultimate source of evil, its absolute understructure (Stein 1995, 144). Chigurh slays the cultural hero and provokes gongs psychological development he is the dynamic agent, the terrorist, and instigator of Bells emergent connection to the unconscious. The realization of the self as an autonomous psychic factor is often stimulated by the irruption of content over which the ego has no guarantee (Sharp 1991, 120). The irruption of contents like this can destroy the ego. In his Trickster role, Chigurh is not unlike Satan in the Book of Job or the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Evil serves a psychological function. The stirring up of interlocking i s a Luciferian virtue in the true smell of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of blaze and that of creating light ( Jung 1954/1968, CW 9i, 179).The conscious attitude determines whether the conflict is ultimately illuminating or destructive we either evolve from our mistakes or we unconsciously dig deeper into our accustomed defenses. Sheriff Bell, a country lawman approaching sixty, is the novels psychological protagonist. As a senex figure, Bell seems to represent, at least in part, the hidebound function of the archetype, the fastness of our habits (Hillman 2005, 48), the principle of long-lived survival through order (284). mental movement, once incited by Chigurh, depends entirely on Bells inner process.Paradoxically, the path of psychic evolution begins with the senex in a process of disintegration. The novel takes its title from the first line of W. B. Yeats most celebrated poem, coast to Byzantium, which contrasts the material world with the transcendent world of art from the viewpoint of an aged man. It urges a belated attention to ones soul. To the extent that art is an aperture to the collective unconscious, the move to Byzantium implies an intrapsychic movement from the ego toward the Self.Critic John Vanderheide has observed that the renunciation of the physical world verbalized in Sailing to Byzantium and No Country for Old Men is forced on the narrator by old age and approaching death, conditions he is powerless to change (2005). Consume my heart away put with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is and gather me Into the dodge of eternity (Yeats 1926/1952, 490, stanza III, ll. 2124) This entangle sense of mortality, hopelessness, and limitation is often the cue that ignites the process of individuation.The collective unconscious calls aged men whether they will respond and how is another matter entirely, but this painful territ ory is no country for young men. Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 37 As senex figure, Bell is the ostensible boundary keeper of the cultural psyche, but he is flooded with content that he cannot repress. Bafflement pervades his monologues. He longs for times agone when the world made more sense to him, but Bells nostalgia is more than a regressive symptom, it implies a breakup of halves, a missing conjunction (Hillman 2005, 182).Bell carries notability qualities of the positive senex. His most authentic self is related to others. He sees himself as a shepherd to the people assigned to his care. Ive thought about why it was that I valued to be a lawman. There was always some part of me that wanted people to listen to what I had to say. But on that point was a part of me too that just wanted to pull everybody in the boat (McCarthy 2005, 296). His psyche is anchored in an imago of the positive feminine in the form of his anima figure, his wife of thirtyone long time, Loretta.The escalating violence, his inability to contain it, and the imperatives of his own interior process force Bell to psychoanalyse the psychological orientation that has guided his life. Bell confronts his own provisional life, an adulthood founded on a lie. As a young soldier in France during World struggle II, he fought bravely, but in the seem of overwhelming odds and certain death, fled the theatre of operations and his dead companions. He was awarded a bronze Star for his service, an honor he seek to refuse. His election as county sheriff followed from this heroic misidentification.Bell confesses this explanation to his Uncle Ellis, an elderly lawman disabled in the line of duty, late in the book. I didnt know you could steal your own life, he says (McCarthy 2005, 278). Bell concludes that his history resur lookings because sometimes people would kinda have a bad answer about things than no answer at all (282). Bell endures the part of the alchemical p rocess associated with the death and decay of the old substance, the old way of being in the world. He experiences his growing edge of consciousness as a defeat.Bell makes a final break with the unauthentic hero and our cultures idea of what it means to be a man he quits in the nerve center of the hunt. His decision to retire reflects an understanding of his own limitations and is guided by a deeper psychic injunction. I always k parvenu that you had to be willin to die to even do this job. That was always true. . . . If you aint theyll know it in a heartbeat. I recollect it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think that a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would. (McCarthy 2005, 4)Bell begins to acquiesce to and participate in his interior process, going back through his memories, stipendiary attention to his dreams, engaging in active imagination. He ponders the memory of an image he encountered on the bat tlefield in France, a stone water trough forge to last ten thousand years (307). A trough contains water, a symbol of the unconscious, possibly the personal unconscious, but perhaps the collective one. The trough symbolizes a way of understanding content arising from the unconscious and resonates as a religious symbol. For Jung, 38 jung journal culture &038 psyche 54 / fall 2011 an had the need for a entangle connection to something larger than his ego deeply embedded into the fabric of his being, but man lost(p) his sense of larger meat and purpose somewhere amid the horrors and upheavals of the twentieth century. Jung believed that the recent-day collective failure to channel this instinct, to carve another indestructible stone trough, was both symptom and root cause of our collective dissociation. Bell rejects the notion of carving a trough himself it must be a collective enterprise, and no new myth has yet emerged to replace the dying God-image of our culture.Bells only child, a daughter, died as an baby thirty years before the story begins. Childlessness is associated with the negative senex. When the senex has lost its child . . . A dying complex infects all psychic life (Hillman 2005, 263). Late in the book, Bell confides to the reader that for many years he has dialogued with this dead infant daughter (McCarthy 2005, 285). In Jungian theory, that imaginary child would be considered a psychic reality. The novels ultimate gist resides in two dreams about his dead incur.In the first dream, he give me some money and I think I lost it (McCarthy 2005, 309). His male parent imparted something of great value to him for safekeeping, but he misplaced it, perhaps irretrievably. The second dream is a powerful reiteration of the first and evokes Jungs famous dream of carrying a small light in the cloudiness (Jung 1961/1965, 88). The setting is a frozen, snowy night in a remote mountain pass. Bell and his paternity ride ahorseback. It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through this pass in the mountains.It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothing. He just rode on past and he had this mantlepiece wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. (McCarthy 2005, 309)Although the dream can be viewed as regressive, in that it invokes Bells childhood relationship and a longing to live out an old, well(p) myth that has become irrelevant in the modern world, it clearly carries teleological implications. Bell goes forward into the dark night, into the unknown, toward death. He and his contract rid e horses, numinous animals in McCarthys work that suggest connection to anima or soul. Horses also represent an older and an arguably more connected way of miserable through the world. Bells scram carries fire, a symbol for the light of consciousness or spirit, in a horn, a Gnostic symbol of maturity. The horn is a dual symbol from one point of view it is penetrating in shape and therefore active and masculine in significance and from the other it is shaped like a receptacle, which is feminine in center (Cirlot 1962/1971, 151). While the image of the horn may suggest a new hieros gamos, a union of masculine and feminine energy, the dead father carries it, not the dream ego Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 39 itself. Bells passivity in the dream seems problematic. On the other hand, it is conceivable that Bells lack of agency is an propitious sign. In the absence of ego and into its vacancy an imaginal stream can flow, providing mythical solutions betwee n the senexpuer contradictions (Hillman 2005, 66). Bells own father aspects are deeply unconscious he has no living children and, in this respect, has lost his fathers inheritance, a future presence in the chain of life. Paradoxically, behind Bells senex mask we find a son looking for the father within. As in most of McCarthys books, the missing psychic presence is the father there is never a paucity of symbolically fatherless boys in his work.However, in this novel, the puer appears in the form of Bell as an old man. Bells unconscious frames its message in terms of a reunion and recalibration of the father and the son, as though directly addressing the split masculine archetype that appears to block the evolution of our culture. This split gives us . . . the search of the son for his father and the longing of the father for his son, which is the search and longing for ones own meaning (Hillman 2005, 61). The dream image suggests a path of capableness healing, a union of sames in this split archetype, and might represent the nascent emergence of a new myth.In the end, the dreams telos remains hauntingly ambiguous. We are only at the beginning of a process. In the face of such pervasive and unbridled evil and unconsciousness, one mans individuation seems like a very small thing, a very small thing that requires much effort, attention, devotion, and suffering. The last line of the book immediately follows the second dream therefore I woke up (McCarthy 2005, 309). Waking up, increasing consciousness, is the entire point. And thus the novel ends on a slender strand of hope.We must dream this dream on, in the Jungian tradition, and look toward the next dream for further clarification. McCarthys post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, is properly understood as a psychological progression of No Country for Old Men. In The Road, McCarthy resolves the ambiguity of the quaternity image presented in No Country for Old Men. It becomes clear that the imagery portends a colle ctive psychosis and, at the same time, the possibility that some individuals may be ready to assimilate unconscious content. In The Road, the chthonic feminine as landscape has een killed off entirely in an unsung catastrophe marked only by a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions (McCarthy 2006, 45). Given McCarthys long preoccupation with mans proclivity toward evil, the divine revelation was likely manmade perhaps an all-out nuclear war. There are few survivors. elaboration itself is a fading memory. A unsung father and son wander the baked landscape, the cauterized terrain, hoping to scavenge teeming canned viands to survive while evading roving bands of cannibals (12). The boys mother has committed suicide in despair. 40 jung journal culture &038 psyche 54 / fall 2011McCarthy seems to suggest that the feminine will be eradicated from the picture entirely, the negative mother complex played out to its inevitable mop up in mans escalating shadow enactment s before work on the perfect problem can begin in what is left of humanity. As Anton Chigurh says, ones path through the world rarely changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly (McCarthy 2005, 259). Despite the horrors, a new symbol, the image of a divine child, an elaboration of the dream imagery of No Country for Old Men, does emerge out of the ruin and ashes of The Road.This symbol arises from the ground of harmful loss. The end of the via longissima is the child. But the child begins in the realm of Saturn, in lead or rock, ashes or blackness, and it is there the child is realized. It is change to life in a bath of cinders, for only when a problem is finally worn to nothing, gagad and dry can it reveal a wholly unforeseen essence. Out of the darkest, coldest, most remote burned-out out state of the complex the genus Phoenix rises. Petra genetrix out of the stone a child is born. (Hillman 2005, 64)In The Road, the father and son are each others world entire (McC arthy 2006, 5), representing a union of sames in the masculine archetype and, possibly, the beginning of a new cultural myth. The nameless father in The Road struggles to evoke the forms. Where youve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them (63). He views his son as a divine being. As he is dying, the father sees his son standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle (230). remote Jesus, this son is not sacrificed back to the father. In the puer is a father drivenot to find him, reconcile with him, be love and receive a blessing, but rather to transcend the father which act redeems the fathers limitations (Hillman 2005, 161). The fathers job is to initiate the son before he dies to provide a sense of meaning that makes existence tolerable. In The Road, individual meaning is symbolized in the sons dedicated responsibility to carry the light of consciousness, the only thing of value in a post-apocalyptic world, into the overwhelming darkness that confronts him. This fragile possibility, however, resides in the individual, not within a culture or group.Critic Kenneth Lincoln saw McCarthys novels as lamentational canticles of warning, not directives (2009, 2). Part of Bells function is prophetic he hints at where were headed (McCarthy 2005, 303). I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train (159). McCarthy is first and foremost a storyteller. He is not an activist and does not make normative statements, and it is a mistake to read him that way. The finesse man in The Crossing explains the function of storytellers. He said that they had no desire to entertain him nor yet even to see him.He said that it was their whole bent only to tell what was true and that otherwise they had no purpose at all (McCarthy 1999b, 284). I imagine that McCarthy shares the blind mans views and also those of Jung, who in writing about art Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 41 underscored the fundamental depth psychological article of belief that a dream never says you ought or this is the truth. It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and it is up to us to draw conclusions (1930/1966, CW 15, 161).Those of us who are conscious enough to draw conclusions from this work must do so now and prepare ourselves as best we can for the dark new world to come. endnote 1. Bellerophon, son of the King of Corinth, was the hero of Greek mythology who killed the Chimera. Bellerophon, inflated by his triumph, felt entitled to join the gods on rebel Olympus and attempted to fly there on the winged horse, Pegasus. His presumption offended Zeus, who orchestrate the heros dismount. Bellerophon plummeted to earth, crippled in the fall. note References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, rule book number, and paragraph number .The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA). bibliography Bloom, Harold. 2009. Blooms modern critical views Cormac McCarthy. in the raw York Infobase Publishing. Cirlot, Juan Eduardo. 1962/1971. A dictionary of symbols. Trans. Jack Sage. unseasoned York Philosophical Library. Edinger, Edward F. 1994. underframe of the psyche Alchemical symbolism in psychotherapy. Chicago Open Court. Ellis, Jay. 2009. Fetish and collapse in No country for old men. In Blooms modern critical views Cormac McCarthy, ed. Harold Bloom, 133170. tonic York Infobase Publishing. Frye, Steven. 2005.Yeats Sailing to Byzantium and McCarthys No country for old men Art and artifice in the new novel. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 5, 1 1420. Henderson, Joseph. 2005. Thresholds of initiation. Wilmette, IL Chiron Publications. Hillman, James. 2005. Senex and puer. Putnam, CT Spring. Jung, C. G. 1930/1966. Psychology and literature. The spirit in man, art, and literature. CW 15. . 1937/1969. mental factors determining human behavior. The structure and kinetics of the psyche. CW 8. . 1951/1968. The syzygy Anima and animus. Aion. CW 9ii. . 1952/1969. Answer to Job. Psychology and religion West and East.CW 11. . 1954/1968. Psychological aspects of the mother archetype. The archetypes and the collective unconscious. CW 9i. . 1957/1970. The undiscovered self (present and future). Civilization in transition. CW 10. . 1961/1965. Memories, dreams, reflections. put down and ed. by Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York Vintage Books. Lincoln, Kenneth. 2009. Cormac McCarthy American canticles. New York Palgrave Macmillan. McCarthy, Cormac. 1985. Blood meridian Or the evening redness in the west. New York Random House. 42 jung journal culture &038 psyche 54 / fall 2011 McCarthy, Cormac. 1999a.All the pretty horses. New York Alfred A. Knopf. . 1999b. The crossing. New York Alfred A. Knopf. . 2005. No country for old men. New Yo rk Alfred A. Knopf. . 2006. The road. New York Alfred A. Knopf. No country for old men. 2007. Screenplay by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No country for old men, New York Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Pauli, Wolfgang, and C. G. Jung. 1992/2001. Atom and archetype The Pauli/Jung letters, 1932 1958. Eds. Carl Alfred Meier, Charles Paul Enz, and Markus Fierz. Trans. David Roscoe. Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press.Philipson, Morris. 1992. Outline of Jungian aesthetics. In Jungian literary criticism, ed. Richard Sugg, 214227. Evanston, IL Northwestern University Press. Sharp, Daryl. 1991. C. G. Jung lexicon A primer of terms and concepts. Toronto Inner City Books. Stein, Murray. 1995. Jung on evil. Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press. Vanderheide, John. 2005. Varieties of renunciation in the works of Cormac McCarthy. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 5, 1 3035. Voice of America. 2008. Cormac McCarthy and Thomas McGu ane spare stories set in the American west. Interviewed by B. Klein and S. Ember. Radio broadcast (February 11), voanews. om (accessed October 27, 2009). Yeats, William Butler. 1926/1952. Sailing to Byzantium. In Immortal poems of the English language, ed. Oscar Williams, 490. New York majuscule Square Press. maggie bortz earned an M. A. in advise Psychology with an emphasis in foresight Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, California, and an M. J. in news media from the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. She is a serve Mental Health Professional (QMHP) working toward licensure as a Licensed conjugal union and Family Therapist (LMFT) at the Center for Family tuition in Eugene, Oregon.She plans to open a undercover counseling practice in Portland in 2012. Correspondence 5873 SW Terwilliger Blvd. , Portland, OR 97239. generalization This alchemical hermeneutical study analyzes Cormac McCarthys novels No Country for Old Me n and The Road as cultural dreams using Jungian and post-Jungian theory. McCarthys work elucidates the archetypal process of individuation toward the mature masculine in our time. Following McCarthys imagery and James Hillmans work, I focus on the split in the senex-puer archetype that structures the masculine psyche as the ultimate psychological site of our cultural dissociation.I also control the teleological implications in the novel regarding the evolution of the God-image, which reflects mans understanding of the impersonal psyche, as well as the nature and psychological function of human evil. mention words alchemy, archetypal psychology, chthonic feminine, Coen brothers, cultural psychology, dream interpretation, Jungian interpretation of literature, landscape, literature as cultural dreaming, masculine archetypes, Cormac McCarthy, mechanization, No Country for Old Men, puer, The Road, senex, symbol Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction n ix without permission.