From “Jack of Shadows” to “Knight of Shadows”
— Roger Zelazny’s Fascination with Shadow
“Life, after all, is a place where we steal for pleasure and profit, each in our own way, and we, of course, are but shadows who have stolen a little of light ...”
— from “Shadowjack” by Roger Zelazny
Zelazny was deeply immersed in the work of Carl Jung. One of the major terms that comes up in Jungian psychology is — you guessed it — “shadow.” “The shadow contains,” writes Jung, “besides the personal shadow, the shadow of society ... fed by the neglected and repressed collective values.” And what is the shadow? It is everything of which we are consciously unaware which is nevertheless part of us (or our society, as Jung has expanded the concept in the given quote). Some maintain that the job of art is “to make visible that which is invisible;” that is, to show society what is hidden from the conscious mind, to reveal our “shadow.”
There is yet at least one more aspect to what may have led to Zelazny’s fixation on this word. There is Plato’s “allegory of the cave.” The allegory: We mortals are likened to prisoners chained up in a cave in such a way that we can only view the cave-wall before us, while behind us and unseen by us (due to the manner in which we are chained) is a screen concealing folk who move about or walk back and forth, a fire behind them, holding aloft objects or manipulating puppets while also providing music, theatrical sounds (such as boards, brushes, sheets of metal, rasps and other instruments capable of producing the sounds of thunder, rain, wind, wildfire, creaking whispers of the forest, etc.), and dialogue. The objects and puppets cast shadows on the cave-wall, the sounds of the unseen players echo off the wall and seem to emanate from the shadows. The Platonic notion of a higher plane where the abstracted ideal forms exist which are the source of the multiplicity of their imperfect realizations in the physical world is implied by that allegory. There is a higher reality, but we inhabit a world made up merely of the distorted shadows cast by the ideal forms dwelling in that higher plane, and for the most part are only capable of guesses and glimpses of what is really going on.
The following quote from Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, describing Shadow, where alternate histories of the world are found, restates the allegory of the cave: “Amber had always been and always would be, and every other city, everywhere, every other city that existed was but a reflection of a shadow of some phase of Amber.” From Shadowjack comes the next quote, riffing on the Jungian concept: “Then, drawing upon the shadow force, I summoned back that part of myself which had gone into the making of the doppelganger.”
Finally, Zelazny, as a fan of Tarot and the Grail, was familiar with Gnosticism and the idea of going between opposites, of finding the place where opposites overlap, interact and are mystically reconciled, of passing through the no-man’s-land where neither of the polarities of the world hold sway. This place, which is spiritual in nature but embodied in the physical world via various myths, stands neither in full daylight nor under the cover of nighted darkness, and thus is regarded as the borderland between conscious and unconscious, between material and spirit worlds. It is the country of Twilight, where elves, unicorns, dragons and demons move half out of view, seen out of the corner of the eye, the land of Shadows.