Dark Thoughts.

I just finished reading one of my favourite Shirley Jackson short stories. It’s called What a Thought, and the plot goes something like this:

A husband and wife are relaxing at home after dinner, and the story is told almost entirely through the medium of the woman’s thoughts. She watches her husband as he reads his newspaper and smokes his cigar. She reflects on how fortunate she is to have such a good, kind, considerate man to share her life with; how their marriage of ten years has been a happy one, and how they’re as fond of one another now as they were at the beginning.

And yet she feels unsettled and begins to have thoughts about how she might murder him. Various possibilities suggest themselves to her, but she keeps pushing them away because she can’t understand why she should have such thoughts. They persist, nonetheless, and eventually she succumbs. She chooses the first option that came into her mind and smashes a heavy glass ashtray over his head, while thinking ‘I didn’t want to do this.’

I gather Carl Jung talked about the need for us to acknowledge our dark side; to let it into our conscious thought where it might be observed, examined and worked upon. That way, according to Jung, it was far less likely to do any harm. The concept means something to me because I have occasionally had similar dark imaginings during my life, and they surprised and even shocked me because they were so diametrically opposed to the person I thought I was. At the same time, they also held a certain fascination, and so I did observe and examine them, and no one came to any harm.

So does this mean that I concur with Jung’s theory? Not really, because I’m the sort to consider theories merely theories, there to be added to other theories on the mental shelf reserved for theories. Not that I dismiss any of them, of course. Theories are, by their very nature, unprovable, but the sheer mystery of existence suggests to me that virtually nothing is impossible. And so I keep an open mind.

But the compelling nature of Jackson’s narrative is further evidence of something I’ve long realised: that, to me at least, good fiction illustrates the human condition more clearly than any number of academic theories or self-help books. It took me a long time to get there.

(And, purely as an irrelevant aside, my other favourite Jackson short story is called All She Said Was Yes.  Clearly, I have an abiding fondness for women who are quietly weird. The few truly weird women I've known in my life have all been too loud and aggressive in projecting their weirdness, and that's a turn-off.)