Jane Saint and the Backlash

by Josephine Saxton

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Time Travel

Synopsis

New readers will be amazed at Jane Saint's bizarre adventures on her journey through the sticky Quagmire of patriarchal ideas, and those who followed her in earlier travails will be delighted to meet up again with Mr Rochester the cat, the loyal demon Zip and Agatha Hardcastle the witch of Hepstonhall.

Release date: November 14, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 176

Sample

The two stories in this volume, although apparently very disparate, have been specially chosen to share a cover because they show how I have used basically the same ideas in two ways, and twenty years apart. The idea which they share is that of the Collective Unconscious, as a real place, another dimension into which we may go, travel around, and discourse with the people and creatures there. I first came across it in the writings of Carl Gustav Jung, unless you count Fairy Mountains, bigger on the inside than the outside and with a totally different time-scale from this one. And they should be counted really, because they are peopled by just the figures which Jung seized upon and correlated with alchemy, Taoism and other rich seams of imagery from the human mind, common to all cultures and all times, in various guises. He used them at times to heal and make whole, and these two stories, quite coincidentally, are on that very theme as well.

The Consciousness Machine is a story within a story, written to elucidate an earlier story, and here appears in a revised version. It was first published in June 1968, in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and emerged in that form at the instigation of Ed Ferman, to whom I had submitted a very odd piece of work called The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith, which was to be published by Doubleday the following year, under their Science Fiction label. It was not by any measure Science Fiction, unless psychology is considered SF, but the version for Ed Ferman did count, because besides concerning events and images from deep within the unconscious mind, it also had a Machine. This Machine, which I have renamed the Cave, is similar in principle to devices used of late by some of the (so-called) Cyberpunk writers, but different in its intention. It aims to heal the mentally ill, and by happy accident does much more, whereas later use of machine-to-brain links, although far more adventurous, tend towards mayhem and hell.

Ed liked the work but thought it would be completely incomprehensible to most readers. I responded like an eager puppy with the idea of taking extracts from it, and framing them with a quite different story which would make the whole thing very clear. If you are still with me, I can explain why this seemed a good idea at the time.

The work of Carl Gustav Jung has never quite flooded popular culture to the same extent as that of Freud, probably because he was more influenced by spiritual matters than obsessed by the sexual difficulties of a handful of moneyed Viennese. Spiritual matters will never make as hot copy as sex, and a model of the world which has sex as just part of the total life experience is far too balanced to run riot through the whole of literature, art and life, unfortunately.

It turned out though that even Jung had a problem with sex, because as I eventually discovered, to my utter dismay, he had a completely different canon of symbology for the psychological interior landscapes of a woman from those of a man. He warned that any woman using his ‘male’ series of archetypes did so ‘at her peril’. This may explain much about my mental peculiarities, for I had been interpreting my own dreams quite wrongly for years! Or it may show that he was quite wrong, and that people are people, not merely biological function to the core.

I feel the original work to be an authentic piece of ‘Jungian’ literature, because I began writing it from a dream which woke me one night, and which had a feeling of importance and clarity to it, what is called a lucid dream. I knew that I had to wait until the dream was ready ‘to be continued’, and about nine months (seriously) later, one day I thought yes, today I must begin that book. I had no idea what it was about or where it might go, I simply started describing in all too much detail the dream, and went on from there. I was almost doing automatic writing, a process called, in Jungian terms, Active Imagination. Now, an interesting aspect of all this was that at that time of writing, I had not read Jung’s works nor was I familiar with his concepts of Anima, Animus, Shadow et al, not had I any idea what to call my strange novel. My then husband Colin was reading one of several massive tomes, for he began the Jungian craze in our household (I was still floundering with the knotty self-tortures of Gurdjieff) and as I was typing away at one end of the room, he suddenly felt moved to read something out to me from the other. The passage contained the phrase Hieros Gamos and as he said it, I gleefully claimed it as the title.

‘That’s my title!’ I cried. ‘What does it mean?’ It transpired that it was spot on; it means the marriage of heaven and earth, or literally, Heavenly Marriage, and it also means the unification of two aspects of a person’s soul. It might be represented, in my opinion, by the Yin-Yang symbol. Although working blindly, not really aware that my theme was the eternal one of male and female principles, I knew that Hieros Gamos was it. Anyway, I subsequently realised that I had a nice piece of Jungian Synchronicity there, and felt encouraged.

But that was all then, 20 years ago, and a great deal of change has taken place in my life, and thinking. With respect to such weighty methods of spiritual development, I have fallen completely by the wayside, and find myself more often blundering about in a dark wood, not unlike Dante. And neither have I thrown myself wholeheartedly into political activity, often the substitute used by the lost religious maniac. But I still write, with the difference that now I do not actually believe I have anything left worth saying. There is nothing in this Universe, from where I am standing, which when scratched does not reveal the Gnostic Hell beneath. I wish profoundly that I could always have written light humour (as in Little Tours of Hell, Pandora, 1986) rather than the ‘genuine laugh mirthless’ of Beckett, or that I could have done something useful such as be a stand-up comic. But as we know how funny women were viewed 40 years ago, I may be forgiven for giving up that dream. I seem to repeat my themes though. In fact, I have just written almost the same thing I wrote 20 years ago, in a very different guise it is true, but the same, nevertheless. I did not intend it so; it would seem that I am endowed with few new ideas, for I have found this theme occurring like a thread through almost everything I have produced.

Jane Saint and the Backlash, far from being the tale of masochism which its title might suggest to some, subtitled The Further Travails of Jane Saint, is about a journey in the land of the Collective Unconscious, but this time taken by our female protagonist, the now middle-aged Jane Saint, past heroine of the Revolution and mother of three fine girls. God alone knows what Jung might have made of that, or Gurdjieff, or Freud come to that – and I certainly do not think it matters at all. I do know that I deliberately chose an attractive red-haired heroine because this is a universal Anima image for men, and also a common choice of male writers of science fiction. I wanted to give a voice to the inflatable doll so she could answer back. She now has a boyfriend who is an example of the New Man (he is caring, understanding, pleasant, not patronising but helpful and lives more for love than to dominate – a complete figment in other words), and she has been almost lulled into apathy about feminism. Her starting point is, you see, somewhat in our future, and it is hardly necessary to elaborate upon what kind of world this will soon be for women if the present shrugging and sighing doesn’t stop. I am rather in a state of stasis bordering upon despair, doubtless the effect which a Backlash is meant to have. I hope by the time you read this I shall have cultivated some fierceness again, and begun behaving less like a beaten puppy and more like a full-grown bitch, a desirable status at my age. Jane knows what I mean. She felt stymied and apathetic at the beginning of the book. By the end it is quite a different matter, and, come to think of it, I possibly do have a new idea there. If only its psychological equivalent could be effected, the entire world would change for the better. And you can’t ask for much more than that from a novel, not without being greedy.

The unearthly music sung with the words ‘The mirror is of human gold’ is a real experience of mine, and I instantly recognised it as alchemical symbolism. When I awoke listening to this I was deeply grateful for the effect it had upon my then flagging spirits; messages from the Unconscious have a certain ‘flavour’ which gives them a kind of super-reality, very stimulating and inspiring. And it is precisely this flavour which I strove to capture in earlier works, and which I hope I convey of late with less self-consciousness. My early influences were Samuel Beckett and Iris Murdoch, Maurice Durrenmatt, John Bunyan, Louisa M. Alcott, Gurdjieff, Kafka and The Goon Show, so perhaps it is not surprising that I have not been seen as a popular entertainer on the whole (although I used to think that everyone would get my jokes).

I have also been accused of deliberate obscurity, which I deny. I never sent any work out which I did not believe to be as clear as crystal – but I do think I must have been completely on my own trip as we used to say. I marvel that Ed Ferman published the work, because even with the new format and the scientific Machine it reads more like the secret ravings of a walled-up hermit, discovered when they dug out her skeleton. I was a typically isolated housewife on an estate of pill-shocked battery hens, with three small children at the time. Sensory deprivation experiments can produce some pretty strange results, but there is strange and there is infelicitous. Upon re-reading the earlier work I found it necessary to pinch out the tops of several etiolated phrases, and cut back completely the patriarchal old grandad figure of Owenvaun, the heroine’s employer and mentor. They still exist of course, these gurus, but I’ve had them, and it is my story to revise how I wish! It might have been interesting academically to see how even I took so much for granted the inferior status of all females, blindly following the now outmoded SF cliché of the woman who fucks up quite a lot, and who goes to her male superior for fatherly help, but I just could not bear to read it.

In 20 years some profound changes have taken place in the world, in literature, in politics and, thank heavens, in me. I hope the changes continue, that the Backlash spends itself without wrecking what little progress we have made, and that soon I shall come up with something utterly new to write.

I bet that when it is done I shall suddenly realise I have cooked up the same thing once more. And yet, it will also be completely different, as I hope you are now about to find out.

Josephine Saxton Leamington Spa 1989



 

The boy was walking slowly, for he was not going anywhere, and the clay over which he walked was sticky and impeded him. The summer was coming; there had been a lot of rain, and this day in particular was very warm, the air was still, and everything was very pleasant. This morning he had heard a bird singing and the sound had excited him until he had tears running down his face, and he had been very happy. It was a long time since he had heard anything at all, except the sounds that he himself made. The bird had stirred something in him, and he had enjoyed the experience, although he felt it to be dangerous. It was foolish to set up longings for sounds, and other beings. They were not frequent, so one must not become attached to the idea of them; it was the only way. The boy had learned that years ago; it was a conclusion that perhaps he had been taught or that he had come to himself. It was for this reason that if ever he saw another human being, he would avoid contact; in this way trouble was avoided. But it was not often that he saw anyone. Last summer he had seen an old man standing on a hill looking up at the sky, and also a girl near a tree, but he had run away, for the girls were more to be avoided, he remembered being told it, long ago, as a very serious and definite thing.

He had been walking slowly uphill all morning, feeling with pleasure the warmth of the sun on his back through his new shirt. He liked to have his clothes and person smart and clean, and today he hoped to find a stream where he could wash his hair, for it felt rather greasy and lank, and in his pocket he had a bottle of shampoo that smelled of almonds. He brushed the offensive hair away from his eyes, lifting up a strand to look at it, admiring the colour, fair and golden when clean, and the curl in it which sprang back to his shoulder off an extended finger.

‘I think my body needs food,’ he said suddenly, feeling his inside hollow very empty. Perhaps there would be a fish in the stream, if he found a stream. Now that he was out and away from the towns there would be little ready-made food. Fruit perhaps, that would be nice.

He felt he would like to rest and turned around to face downhill and sat down on a stone that had a bit of grass growing at its base. Everything was wonderful; the world stretched before him, square upon square of earth, brown, black, grey, white, yellow. There were two trees far away, close together, and these he gazed upon for a while, interested because they moved slightly in the gentle wind. And a silver-gold stream. If he continued upwards for a while, he would come to the stream where it wound out of the back of the incline. It would be some time after the zenith, which would be just right; by that time his appetite would make him more careful in his fishing.

He began to walk again, slowly, more tired. It was odd that after a rest everything was more effort for a while. Among the rocks he noticed bits of rubbish: a polythene bag, a tin can, little bits of paper that had once wrapped sweets, a pair of shoes with narrow heels. He did not pick up any of these things; they repelled him, but they were interesting. The tin cans were not rusty, meaning that the person who dropped them could be nearby. He hoped not. It would be unpleasant to have to retrace his steps, and he wanted to wash his hair today because the shining sun would dry it quickly.

Then he heard a sound and stood rigid with attention, listening to the thin note. This sound was entirely new to him, and it frightened him considerably. It was an animal noise, and this made him very wary; a wild cat or dog could be formidable if one had no food to offer. He felt a prickle of sweat on his back, and held a breath to steady his listening.

The sound was like two animals fighting, now, and he hoped a large animal was killing a smaller one, so he would be safe. But both sounds were very distressed. There was one louder and stronger, bellowing and sobbing, and the hopelessness in it moved him to pity. He was uncertain what to do, listening to the sound become fainter. One thin cry, and a fading moan, softer and softer.

He began to walk upwards again, and in a few minutes he had reached level ground and bent down cautiously to look around again. He could see the stream not far away, glinting in the light, and hear the thin cry from behind some rocks. Perhaps he could reach the stream and wash his hair without being disturbed. He made his way carefully, fingering the bottle of shampoo, looking forward to the smell and the rising lather. He reached the bank and was pleased to see it was clean with a sandy bottom. He knelt down and began to undo the knot in his tie. The animal sound continue. . .