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Resurgence 184. Jay Griffiths reviews
"The Soul's Code: in search of character and calling."
by JAMES HILLMAN Random House, 1996, $23.00
(Distributed by Schumacher Book Service 01803 865051), £17.99
http://resurgence.gn.apc.org/184/Griffiths184.htm
THE ACORN THEORY OF PERSONHOOD.
Jay Griffiths believes that what every child needs ... after pocket money and peanut butter ... is understanding.JAMES HILLMAN tells a story of Yehudi Menuhin, aged three, hearing a violinist play, and immediately asking for a violin for his fourth birthday. Something in the wee Yehudi knew what he needed, and he got it. But. He was given a toy violin made of metal with metal strings. Maestro mortified; tantrum inevitable. ''I burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing more to do with it.''
Hillman uses stories from various childhoods to illustrate his thesis that there is an inborn essence ... call it character or personality, Daimon or soul or ''calling'' ... in everyone, and this Daimon knows what it needs as surely as Menuhin needed his violin. Hillman calls it the ''acorn'' theory of personhood; that in each small child there is a tight bundle of compressed future-self, the acorn practically exploding with the furious frustration of all its huge and royal oakness desperate to grow. But the acorn, or Daimon, is stuck. Stuck in this unlikely bald little speck of a being, a baby's body, a child's mind. The indignity of the thing. The Daimon, by contrast, never was a child. It wants, in Hillman's beautiful phrase, what its hands cannot hold.
I dare you to read this book and not revise memories of your childhood. You will remember, as you read, bits of your childhood when your Daimon, furiously demanding, saw what it needed. For me, what I needed was books. I read War and Peace when I was eight, and pulled the Interpretation of Dreams off the library shelves before I was ten. I read it. It frustrated me till I cried with incomprehension, but I had to read it.
Hillman would interpret this kind of event in every child's life as the boiling ''becoming'' that is your acorn, your calling. So the book ''champions children'', but more specifically champions the acorns behaving badly, the tantrums, the grabbing, unsocialized, demanding Daimon, the force that through the green child drives its character. What every child needs ... after pocket money and peanut butter ... is understanding.
The Soul's Code is ''about'' psychology, philosophy and spirituality. Its style is exact, its evidence precise. It turns now to entertaining anecdote, now to sophisticated analysis. It is a profoundly cultured book, travelling wide and travelling wise.
In it you see some of the intellectual history of the idea of personality. You could begin with the almost incomprehensibly compact statement ''Character is Fate'' from that ineffable old hippy, Heraclitus (hero of ''Everything flows, ho hum,'' and other half-haikus). Then the story runs through a couple of writers and poets and really got exciting with Freud. The theory of personality we have today can be stated, roughly, as one of two things. Either ''it's in your genes'', or ''blame your parents''. These choices, genetic determinism or ''parental fallacy'', are concepts so pervasive as to have become almost transparent and therefore invisible.
Hillman disagrees with both and, by disagreeing, makes them visible once more. In fact, Hillman's own acorn is positively popping to make his point, ''Two worldwide authorities on mothering attribute the hollow-eyed lassitude and sadness of young children in Cambodia . . . to loss of mothers and disturbances in the mother-child relationship taking no note of the overwhelming horrors in the world. Had these children been 'well-bonded' with 'good enough mothers' the genocide and despair would have been incidental!'' Mockery is a fine tutor.
It's a lonely and brave intellectual position to hold (taking issue with Alice Miller, D. W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, et al.), but it has a hugely liberating effect, respecting the soul's autonomy and enhancing its intrinsic individuality. To the question, ''Who are your spirit's ancestors ... parental experience or genetic inheritance?'', Hillman can say, ''Neither. Something else.'' ''In other societies'', he writes, ''an ancestor could be a tree, a bear, a salmon, a member of the dead, or a spirit in a dream.''
So far so good. A child's Daimon cannot be reduced to either parents or genes. But when Hillman reaches a sticky part of his argument ... your soul chose this mother and that father to be born from, chose certain configurations of genes through which it could grow ... to me, this smacks at once of medieval theology and the cosiness of Christian beliefs that you have a friend in your guardian angel. Hillman, here, goes into the Realm of Unprovability and, though it is courageous to go into such an unsheltered place, its very unprovability renders it a position hard to defend.
Back on terra firma, Hillman develops the subject of the relationship between child and mentor, and here you see an intellect at work both graceful and witty, and a wisdom at once generous and shrewd. In his chapter ''Esse is Percipi ... To Be is To Be Perceived'', he discusses mentors as those who have the potential to ''see'' the oak-tree in the acorn. Acorns need mentors to grow into themselves, to fill out their calling. He quotes a teacher, Catherine Wood, who ''saw'' Truman Capote as a child and ''who not only shared his faith in himself but believed it was her duty, her mission and sacred obligation to help bring his talents to blossom.'' Hillman goes on to say: ''You expect less from your natural parents, and they become easier to bear once you have discovered the other family tree on which the life of your soul depends.'' Books, too, as he points out, can be mentors, and he quotes R. D. Laing, as an adolescent, finding Kierkegaard: ''I felt somehow or another within me, the flowering of one's life.''
In one part, Hillman discusses not the relation of child to world, but child to its own Daimon ... and the need for adults to respect this relationship. ''The acorn is obsessive. It is all and only concentration, undiluted, like a drop of essence. A child's behaviours elaborate this condensity. . . . Its play is its work. Play is a child's job. . . . By means of its concentration, a child gains breathing space and practice for . . . its innate truth, allowing this truth to articulate itself. . . . Courtesy is called for. Knock before entering.'' It represents the tone of much of the book; an observant and profound kindness of the mind.
Hillman pulls no punches over the question of ''innate evil''. He disagrees with the dominant convention which says children are innocent and only do evil when ... and because ... evil has been done to them. Hillman would say ''Yes, there are poisonous acorns. Yes, innate evil exists.'' This debate has probably raged for the entire course of human history, and you may not share his conclusions, but his arguments are important if only because he uses them to further neither a particular political dogma nor a specific religious credo.
Hillman wears his learning lightly. Until, that is, you reach his short coda. This is not so much a shy postscript as a virtuosic cadenza; and, here, read his learning with awe. Hillman is exuberant, connecting myth to reality, dextrous with etymologies and morphologies, roaming imperceptibly from Socrates to Kurt Cobain, from Les Enfants du Paradis to Druids and oaklore. ''All trees are wise,'' according to a West African teacher, quoted here, ''because their movement is imperceptible, the connection between above and below so firm, their physical presence so generously useful.'' Hillman is a bit of a wise old oak himself.
Some books make you love life more. This is one. It is a book for every child's parent and every parent's child, and all selves in between. Read it and to thine own acorn be true.
Jay Griffiths writes regularly in The Guardian and The Observer.Resurgence Online
