ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores C. G. Jung’s Liber Novus or The Red Book as arts-based research in Rolling Jnr.’s four modes of analytic, synthetic, critical-activist and improvisatory. All four modes reveal aspects of The Red Book, despite Jung’s decision that it was too aesthetic. Research by Jill Mellick, Medea Hoch, Thomas Fischer and Bettina Kaufmann, and others, shows that The Red Book reflects artistic experimentation and modernism. The Red Book is Dionysian in that it enacts a dismembering and re-membering of discourses of religion, science, psyche, gender and social criticism. It is a hybrid text of many genres. Izdubar, an earlier name for Gilgamesh, plays an important role in a dialogue about psychic reality. Critical-activism emerges in The Red Book as a disciplinary treatment, releasing the soul from “stuckness” about religion, science, gender and war. Improvisatory in its core methodology of Jung’s active imagination, The Red Book discovers the dialogism of chaos and craft, as Randy Fertel puts it in A Taste For Chaos, or of Eros and Logos, as The Red Book itself explains. Finally the chapter argues for Jung’s entire Collected Works to be regarded as literary modernism, using the example of W. B. Yeats’ “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.”
