something that has been identified in many guises and which may be an aspect of
the I maginal Realm. What then are the correspondences between the resulting de-
centred consciousness or de-centred self and what I have identified as the place-
elsewhere-place continuum? When considered together, I suspect they reveal
something about a fundamental mystery that underlies human existence, that of the
boundaries of the soul.
Aldous Huxley wrote that most men and women lead lives at the worst so
painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the
longing to transcend themselves, if only for a few moments, is and has always been
one of the principal appetites of the soul (Huxley, 1956:42). Even Goethe said that
in seventy-five years he had experienced barely four weeks of being truly at ease
(Bettelheim, 1983:111), and Salman Rushdie has one of his fictional characters
opine:
Life is fury – sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal – drives us
to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes
creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain,
pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from
which we never recover.... This is what we are, what we civilize
ourselves to disguise – the terrifying human animal in us, the
exulted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammelled lord of
creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each
other limb from bloody limb (Rushdie, 2001:30-31).
A major, almost Gnostic, theme in much contemporary literature is that of
the de-centred self and an inescapable sadness that is part of the life of any
reflective person; of the individual confronted with what they perceive as the failure
of their life, its melancholy, its dark side and the knowledge that in true
Shakespearean sense, a fatal flaw can undo each woman and man. I t is, however,
mythopoeic literature that serendipitously reveals a new redemptive paradigm of
interconnectedness between the seemingly mundane finitude of the places we
inhabit and the infinitude of the psyche, between the insubstantial and the
substantial. I t intimates the primary nature of place as archetypal, reaffirms Jung’s
theory of the primordial lineage of the human psyche, and also points to the intense
and complex relationship of the self to the I maginal Realm.
My research is designed to determine if imaginal writers, represented by the
three writers who participated in my research, have an intention to bring about an
altered state of consciousness in their readers and also to determine the
characteristics of that state of consciousness. And of the participating readers: can