Earth Dead or Alive: The Matter in Synchronicities, and Dinesen’s “Blue Stones” as Paradigmatic Example of Literature’s Reanimating Power

Abstract

In his effort to establish the existence of the objective psyche, Jung privileges deformed rather than perceived images, a practice that unintentionally devalues the material aspects of synchronicities. Jungians and post-Jungians focusing on the material aspects of synchronicities can help heal what von Franz has identified as an illness. She proposes that as the collective lost its sense of matter and earth as animate, humans became possessed by matter in the form of materialism. This illness is a cause of human irrational degradation of the earth. Reanimating the earth in the collective psyche requires experiencing it as alive. Literature, according to Jung a way the creative unconscious counterbalances a culture’s limitations, is a realm where imaginative experience of the earth as alive can occur. Isak Dinesen’s “Blue Stones” is a paradigmatic example of this reanimating power.