The 'shadow'
Sir: I fear that Ann Christopher cannot have read my review of John Fowles's two books very carefully before writing her letter last week. Of course 1 did not generally define the 'shadow' as 'the ordering principle'. I was referring quite specifically to the relationship of the mysterious figure of Conchis to the hero of The Magus. I suspect that, like many academic Jungians for whom the teachings of 'the master' have become something of a doctrinal straitjacket, Ann Christopher has not sufficiently appreciated the extent to which the archetypes, far from being mutually exclusive, in fact overlap and merge with one another.
At the risk of shocking Ann Christopher still further I will suggest that Conchis in fact contains elements not just of the 'shadow' but also of the 'Wise Old Man' and the 'Terrible Father' all rolled into one – as do many other figures in literature, such as the Sorcerer in Aladdin or Mephistopheles in Faust. The contents of the human psyche cannot be neatly catalogue like a stamp collection. That is one of the reasons why they are so interesting.
Christopher Booker 56 Doughty Street, London WC1
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