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Starlite Terrace is the Los Angeles apartment building where four protagonists live in the eponymous novel by Patrick Roth. Over the course of a year, from June 2002 to June 2003, four residents tell their highly personal stories. At their centers they are “average” people in or beyond midlife, whose thoughts, feelings and actions are influenced to a high degree by movies and the movie industry. However, in each of their singular collisions with life, a universal and mythical pattern is unfurled which gives these so-called ordinary people a dignity they have long since lost in everyday life. It is the narrator, a fifth protagonist as it were, who assembles the life shards of his characters into four “Hollywood individuation stories,” as Roth calls them.
In this program we will deal with the third story, entitled “Rider of the Storm.” It is the seemingly ordinary story of Gary – a man shaped by the hippie movement whose attempt to build a late-in-life romantic relationship is thwarted by the lingering shadow of a past rape. On the transpersonal-archetypal level of the narrative, in the imagery of the flood, the storm, and the downfall, the dark, destructive god of instinct reveals himself – an aspect of the fading divine image under the signs of Wotan and Yahweh. Swept up in the whirlwind of the great transformation and at the same time identifying with the rejuvenated image of God – the puer aeternus – which is emerging in his psychological background, Gary finds himself caught between all sides. His only salvation lies in clinging to the anima, the feminine principle of feeling that mediates between the opposites.
Listen to Patrick Roth read “Rider of the Storm“ (26 minutes)
Purchase Starlite Terrace on Amazon
Michaela Kopp-Marx, PhD, is in training as a Jungian analyst at the Research and Training Centre for Depth Psychology according to C. G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz in Zurich and is authorized to conduct control case analyses. She is also a professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Heidelberg. Her field of work and research is modern and contemporary literature, especially the interrelations between visual art, film, and literature (Rilke and Rodin: In Search of the True Way of Writing, 1999). She is particularly interested in C.G. Jung’s analytical psychology, including the theory of archetypes and symbol theory in contemporary literature, especially in the work of the author Patrick Roth. In addition to interpretive essays and anthologies on Roth’s literature, she published an annotated new edition of his Die Christus Trilogie in 2017.
Purchase Die Christus Trilogie, in German,
with commentary by Michaela Kopp-Marx, on Amazon
Learning objectives:
- Explain how the anima can play a mediating role in a man’s individuation journey.
- Appreciate how various god images can emerge and change in the psyche, especially during a period of transformation.
Image: Peter Birkhäuser, Puer Aeternus (Oil, 1960)
