ABSTRACT
In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, C. G. Jung reviews his theory of the complex. Four points reiterated in his review echo key ideas in Wright's essay. These are: fear, resistance, trivialisation, and the value of finding words “to push the dialogue with a complex deeper and deeper into fear-bound regions”. Jung links instinctive “fear of invisible things that move in the dark” to the fear of movement and voices (in self and society) “driving away sleep or filling it with bad dreams” (Collected Works 8, paras. 213 and 209). Wright, in this essay and in her other works, depicts unquiet things that provoke restless sleeplessness in the culture and fill the country's dream life with fears that at the same time are minimised or denied. Jung writes of the resistance to admitting the complex to consciousness, and like Wright, suggests that a defence against discomforting irritations is to trivialise, minimise, and silence the outspoken (moral) voices in society or within oneself. Wright appeals to cultural storytellers of all races, including her own, to speak out against paralysis of mind and feeling.
“A Question of Fear” is kindly reproduced here with permission from Allen and Unwin and Sydney PEN Voices—the Three Writers Project, from Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2008. PEN International is dedicated to the support of writers anywhere who work under persecution, exile, or imprisonment or “silencing”. In 2007 Sydney PEN commissioned three of Australia's leading writers (Christos Tsiolkas, Gideon Haigh, and Alexis Wright) to give a series of lectures on topics of vital importance to contemporary Australia and these were published by Allen & Unwin with an Introduction by Nobel Laureate, J. M. Coetzee. The editors thank Sydney PEN and Allen & Unwin for graciously allowing Alexis Wright's essay to be reproduced in total in this volume.
