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Friday, 31 January 2025

Undermind and underground

There are two authors who talk about getting underneath their writing, surprisingly, in two somewhat similar ways. Those authors are Stephen King and Enid Blyton.

Stephen King, who - in the novel, Bag of Bones (1998) - created a central character who was experiencing a terrible case of writer's block. The protagonist talks about "the boys in the basement" as "an old trick from my writing days. Work your body, rest your mind, let the boys in the basement do their jobs" (King, 1998, p. 120). We let our consciousness get on with other functions while our "under mind" (Blyton, 1952, p. 81) freewheels in the depths, and Lo! Suddenly the answer, the connection, the inspiration comes to us. Giving licence to the "boys in the basement" allows our creativity to rise.  

The "under mind" mentioned by Blyton above was more fully explained by Druce (1992):

"In 1953 Peter McKellar, later to be Professor of Psychology at the University of Otago, New Zealand, approached Enid Blyton in the course of research for his book, Imagination and Thinking (1957). During the next five years she wrote in all nine letters to him, describing how her imagery had begun in childhood in what she called her 'thoughts' or 'night stories', narrative visions which came to her in bed at night when she shut her eyes and let her mind 'go free'. Her childhood 'thoughts', while not night-dreams, were closely allied to conventional daydreams" which were "stories about myself, of course - and I did brave deeds .. .. I had many adventures, the favourite of which was being wrecked on an island somewhere, and having to do as Robinson Crusoe did and make a home for myself. Sometimes it was in a tree, sometimes it was in a cave" (Druce, 1992, p. 25; also Blyton, 1952). 

When "establishing the characters for a story, they would 'walk about' in her head, take over her dreams and 'give her little rest until she got back to her typewriter the following day (Druce, 1992, p. 26). Blyton clearly differentiated her "under mind" process from the scrambled reality of normal dreaming: her under mind imaginings were coherent, plotted and she was the spectator (Stoney, 1974, p. 134). 

"McKellar's associationist theory postulates that the content of unconscious imagery is entirely made up of memories of past experiences: that in appearing to 'imagine' we are in fact recollecting and rearranging past perceptions. Enid Blyton was highly sympathetic towards McKellar's thesis, convinced as she was that her unconscious mind was a store of everything that she had ever seen or heard, of things her conscious mind had 'long forgotten', and that all that she 'imagined' was in some way drawn from that store, modified, fragmented, and recombined. 'All the odd bits and pieces' of her life and thoughts and reading, she felt, sank down into her 'undermind' and 'simmered there, waiting for the time when they would be needed again for a book' ; then they would reappear, 'changed, transmuted, made perfect, finely-wrought - quite different from when they were packed away' (Druce, 1992, p. 26; also Blyton, 1952). Very often a conscious memory would break through, and then she would recognize 'things thrown up from [her] undermind, transmuted and changed - a castle seen long ago, a dog, a small child, words long forgotten - in a new setting'" (Druce, 1992, p. 26; Stoney, 1974, p. 205).

Interesting that two influential 20th century writers draw from a cool, deep well of similar metaphor.


Sam

References:

Blyton, E. (1952). The story of my life. Grafton.

Druce, R. (1992). This day our daily fictions. An Enquiry into the Multi-Million Bestseller Status of Enid Blyton and Ian Fleming. Radopi B.V.

King, S. (1998). Bag of Bones. Scribner.

Stoney, B. (1974). Enid Blyton: The biography (2006 ed., reprint 2011). Tempus Publishing Ltd.

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