The Storyteller

Over the course of the semester, we have talked many times about C. G. Jung’s idea of the collective subconscious. Each of us has a subconscious that is connected to everyone else’s. This goes hand in hand with the idea that we don’t learn anything, we just remember. The moment we come into this world, we already have all the knowledge we could ever want. We simply need to be reminded of what we have forgotten.

“Talking the way a storyteller talks means being able to feel and live in the very heart of that culture, means having penetrated its essence, reached the marrow of its history and mythology, given body to its taboos, images, ancestral desires, and terrors . . . That my friend Saul gave up being all that he was and might have become so as to roam through the Amazonian jungle, for more than twenty years now . . . is something that memory now and again brings back to me . . . and it opens my heart more forcefully than fear or love has ever done.” (Llosa, pgs. 244-245)

As we go through life, we hear things and take in our surroundings, interactions, feelings and ideas and these shape the individuals we become. Our collective subconscious regulates what we remember and what we re-forget as we grow up; steering us in the direction we were meant to go.

Saul Zaratas is an exemplary case of this happening. He doesn’t fit in anywhere; he is constantly labeled as different, an outsider, a foreigner, because of his appearance. Our collective subconscious led him down the path where he would hear and experience the right things, he wouldn’t learn but he would remember a precise combination of pieces of knowledge, unique and different from everyone else. All of which would lead him to the Amazonian jungle where he would find his place.

Each person has their own path which is set for us the minute we come into this world. The collective subconscious of humankind influences what we remember, what we re-forget, and what never remember. Our paths are already laid out for us, we just have to be the ones unique enough to experience them in the right way.