Quote:
Originally Posted by Chi_town/Philly
Thanks for the posts, Elgarian.  I suspect that it hasn't, and that's a good thing. Now, what follows should be preceded by the disclaimer "in my dilettente opinion..." The Howitzer responsible for the hulking derelict wreck where once stood Donington's 'Jungian interpretation' of The Ring can be found in the "Objectivity in Interpretation" section of Deryck Cooke's I Saw the World End. Sample passage:
The defect of Jungian interpretation is that it imposes its own categories on the work interpreted... in HAMLET, say, Ophelia would have to be Hamlet's anima, Claudius his shadow, and Gertrude the Terrible Mother, and the whole work would have to be treated as a therapeutic development of the psyche; likewise, the last stage would have to be nobody's actual death, but a general rebirth, except for the shadow, which would disappear, leaving the psyche in one final healthful state of transformation- and the peculiar quality of the masterpiece HAMLET unilluminated. |
Thanks for such a thoughtful response.
May I join you in the dilettante corner (with all the reservations about my limited understanding that that implies), and wholeheartedly agree with you? The example you quoted is a clincher, isn't it? And it perfectly demonstrates how destructive it can be to cling to every element of a theory that may be generally or broadly useful in its basic principles, but can only be taken so far. I mean, I'd by no means want to throw out the Jungian babies (the notion of the collective unconscious and of the archetype, say), along with the Jungian bathwater; but much of the rest does, for me, obfuscate rather than clarify. Or at least, as far as I understand it - which isn't far.
To tell the truth, I gained far more from reading John Culshaw's
Ring Resounding. Not only did it send me back to the music, again and again (his enthusiasm was so infectious), but also it turned my vague wish to own the Solti set into something more like a need (still unsatisfied, except for highlights).