Wisdom and Woe

NOTE: Click on "Read more" to see the entire meetup description and links.

Wellington Redburn is a fifteen-year-old from New York who dreams of following in the footsteps of his deceased father. He sets out on a voyage to England, but is quickly confronted by the bitter demands of ship life, the abject horror of poverty in Liverpool, and revelation of the world's moral depravity.

Inspired by Melville's own coming-of-age aboard a cargo ship, Redburn (1849) is a confessional tale of lost innocence. As he gradually awakens to an understanding of evil, "Redburn comes to realize that not only is his earthly father lost forever, but that there is no spiritual father to look after the welfare of mankind either." (John Bernstein)

But the novel is also "arguably [Melville's] funniest work" (according to Hester Blum), a fascinating sea journal in its own right, and understated by Melville himself to be "a plain, straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experience... no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale."

Note: This meetup will be recorded for private use.

Week 1: Chapters 1-22
Week 2: Chapters 23-42
Week 3: Chapters 43 -62

Redburn:

NOTE: Click on "Read more" to see the entire meetup description and links.

Wellington Redburn is a fifteen-year-old from New York who dreams of following in the footsteps of his deceased father. He sets out on a voyage to England, but is quickly confronted by the bitter demands of ship life, the abject horror of poverty in Liverpool, and revelation of the world's moral depravity.

Inspired by Melville's own coming-of-age aboard a cargo ship, Redburn (1849) is a confessional tale of lost innocence. As he gradually awakens to an understanding of evil, "Redburn comes to realize that not only is his earthly father lost forever, but that there is no spiritual father to look after the welfare of mankind either." (John Bernstein)

But the novel is also "arguably [Melville's] funniest work" (according to Hester Blum), a fascinating sea journal in its own right, and understated by Melville himself to be "a plain, straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experience... no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale."

Note: This meetup will be recorded for private use.

Week 1: Chapters 1-22
Week 2: Chapters 23-42
Week 3: Chapters 43 -62

Redburn:

NOTE: Click on "Read more" to see the entire meetup description and links.

Wellington Redburn is a fifteen-year-old from New York who dreams of following in the footsteps of his deceased father. He sets out on a voyage to England, but is quickly confronted by the bitter demands of ship life, the abject horror of poverty in Liverpool, and revelation of the world's moral depravity.

Inspired by Melville's own coming-of-age aboard a cargo ship, Redburn (1849) is a confessional tale of lost innocence. As he gradually awakens to an understanding of evil, "Redburn comes to realize that not only is his earthly father lost forever, but that there is no spiritual father to look after the welfare of mankind either." (John Bernstein)

But the novel is also "arguably [Melville's] funniest work" (according to Hester Blum), a fascinating sea journal in its own right, and understated by Melville himself to be "a plain, straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experience... no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale."

Note: This meetup will be recorded for private use.

Week 1: Chapters 1-22
Week 2: Chapters 23-42
Week 3: Chapters 43 -62

Redburn:

The Symbols of Transformation (1912) represents a milestone in the rupture between Freud and Jung. Concluding that sexual desire is inadequate as a universal explanation for neurosis, Jung rejects Freud's "so-called Oedipus complex with its famous incest tendency." Instead he theorizes "a 'Jonah-and-the-Whale' complex, which has any number of variants, for instance the witch who eats children, the wolf, the ogre, the dragon, and so on."

The defining feature of this complex is the subject's irrational desire to regress to the safety of the womb, distinguished from Freud's Oedipus as a non-sexual reunion with the mother. But Jung's myth is also distinguishable by its optimistic (rather than tragic) resolution. Just as Jonah's internment in the belly of the whale incites repentance and restores his relationship with God, so the neurotic subject--through a radical confrontation with one's inner darkness--may gestate a profound psychological emancipation and "rebirth."

For Jung, then, religion is not a mere fugitive of Enlightenment rationality (ala Freud), but a custodian of symbolic stories to facilitate self-realization, constructively channeling instinctual forces into vital civil and spiritual purposes.

In "Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth" (Part 2, chapter 5 of The Symbols of Transformation), Jung uses his case study of "Miss Miller" to analyze maternal imagery and motifs, and elaborates his theory of the "Jonah-and-the-Whale complex."

The Symbols of Transformation: