I played a game as a boy in which I tried to get away from my shadow; no matter how hard I tried I could not get away from it. As an adult I learned from Carl Jung that I have a shadow repressed in my unconscious that I cannot get away from. All the things I want to disown about my self are there in the shadow. Richard Strauss composed, “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (The Woman without a shadow). She descends from a God so she cannot bear a child, and, this defines her as not having a shadow. Ultimately she has to become human and bear a child or her husband will turn to stone. For our purposes to be human is to have a shadow. I soon take a course on James Joyce’s Ulysses and each of the three main characters, Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Daedalus, possess significant shadow.
Roland Barthes would probably approve of Joyce’s characters as he says, “There are those who want a text (an art, a painting) without a shadow, without the “dominant ideology”; but this is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text (see the myth of the Woman without a Shadow). The text needs its shadow: this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds: subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro.” The chiaroscuro is the binary opposition of light and dark. I agree with Barthes that a text without a shadow is sterile. So much of my life is keeping pace with the moments of light and the moments of dark.
Roland Barthes would probably approve of Joyce’s characters as he says, “There are those who want a text (an art, a painting) without a shadow, without the “dominant ideology”; but this is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text (see the myth of the Woman without a Shadow). The text needs its shadow: this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds: subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro.” The chiaroscuro is the binary opposition of light and dark. I agree with Barthes that a text without a shadow is sterile. So much of my life is keeping pace with the moments of light and the moments of dark.
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