Michaela Kopp-Marx PhD, Starlite Terrace: A Contemporary Jungian Novel, or The Death of the Old King
March 18, 2024 at 09:56PM
Program presented to the C.G. Jung Club of Orange County on March 17, 2024. Program web page at https://ift.tt/F2n3hUg.
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 – Rex, Moss, Gary, and June – tell their highly personal stories, centered on “average” people in or past midlife, whose thoughts, feelings and actions are influenced to a high degree by movies and the movie industry. In each of their singular collisions with life, a universal and mythical pattern is gradually revealed 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 their life shards into four “Hollywood individuation stories,” as Roth calls them.
In this lecture we will deal with the first story of the book entitled “The Man at Noah’s Window.”
Listen to Patrick Roth reading “The Man at Noah’s Window” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZkYeBrJF6E&ab_channel=Mythograph
The first part of this program is about the novel itself, its highly Jungian worldview, its depth psychological approach to events and conflicts as they appear in the lives of the Starlite Terrace tenants. In the second part we will deal with Rex, “The Man at Noah’s Window,” an image of a man about to be hit by the onrush of the unconscious. We will take a closer look at certain themes and associated motifs as they unfold in the story, for example Rex’s lifelong search for “hands.” In his case, it is a brilliant allegory for someone suffering from a father complex. We will also consider the significance of the window as a gateway to the world of the objective psyche and, finally, we will focus on the major themes of the flood and the divine storm that grip and transform Rex.
View on YouTube