The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [152]
But the servant kills the bird. The touch of anger in him and the touch of greed in the Jew dominate and prevent the union. Then a “spirit of mischief” comes over the servant and he tortures the Jew. What might have been a simple anger at the start of the story has turned into a bitterness that possesses the servant and sours him for the rest of the tale.
When the robbed Jew goes to find the judge, the imaginative tension of the tale collapses. The judge carries a solidified collective attitude. He seems to know only one law—“Thou shalt not steal”—and applies it first to the servant and then to the Jew, never looking into the particulars of the case. At the end the Jew is simply murdered, and the problems of the story are left unsolved. The miser is never dealt with (a miser who is not a Jew, by the way); the servant’s meanness and greed (it is he who steals the gold) are not addressed; his naïveté is left intact. Nor does the Jew’s wonder and spiritual longing lead him anywhere. The bird is killed. There is no dialogue, no change. The death at the end of the tale redeems nobody, it is simply brutal.
There are three or four ways of dealing with shadow figures. The Christian way has been to say that everything on the dark side is “not-God” and must be avoided or attacked. Another way is to face the shadow, address it and see what it wants. Such a dialogue requires that the ego position be suspended for a moment so that the shadow may actually speak. There is a similar mystic or Buddhist approach in which one disidentifies with both the ego and the shadow. Finally, one could switch allegiance and identify with the shadow itself. In a Black Mass, for example, the priest approaches the dark side not to fight it or debate it but to worship. Many cultures have annual festivals— like the Mardi Gras—during which everyone may put on a mask and act out what is hidden during the rest of the year.
The servant in our story never gets close to the shadow, of course. He doesn’t take the Jew seriously enough to either talk with him or be wary of him. As a result, his own shadow side takes control without his conscious self becoming aware of it. At the end of the story the servant himself has become what one expects will be a sanctimonious miser, bad-mouthing the Jews as he invests his stolen gold. In short, he leaves the tale a possessed simpleton, skipping and singing and killing birds!
Ezra Pound, from the time he left college until sometime in the 1920s, was the hardworking servant—the first out of bed in the morning and the last to sleep at night. Like our hero, he had an authentic sense of the gift and its power; not only was he personally gifted, but his relationship to the outer world was successfully mediated by generosity. At the same time, however, he seems to have suffered some insult that became buried in the unconscious. William Carlos Williams says that he and Pound had an ongoing argument about which was the correct food for a poet, bread or caviar. Pound favored caviar. Some part of Pound felt he was a king—and yet he had no castle and no kingly powers. Out of some disappointment— an unreciprocated gift, a lost kingdom—the poet turned to the money question and began looking for a thief. As if in answer to his own invocation a figure came toward him, a Hermes/Jew who might have been carrying the missing farthing. If he were an Old Testament Jew, he might have been able to teach Pound how to protect his gift, how to deal in cash at the edges of the self so that life might go on within.
But Pound, like the servant, went haywire when he met the Jew.
For a man given to invoking deities, Pound was strangely scornful of psychological phenomena. He once wrote to Joyce that “Preserving public morality is more important than exploring psychological hinterlands.” As for modern psychotherapy:
The general results of Freud are Dostoievskian duds, worrying about their own unimportant innards with the deep attention of Jim drunk occupied with the crumb