Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

12 Chicken Little: The Inside Story
Now doesn’t that echo the old alchemical saying, “All that is
above also is below”? Brillig continues:
If we accept the word “up” here, we are in all honor driven to inquire,
as some already have, whether it is to be taken as an adverb or
a noun. If the latter, we are obliged to ask which part of the body it
refers to. I can only compare it to the old oxymoron journalism students
are alerted to—“A police spokesman said Ms. X was shot at
close quarters and the bullet is in her yet.”
Only in Chinese acupuncture is any part of the human anatomy
designated as “yet,” namely a tiny bone in the inner ear. Although
the time frame of the Kraznac tablets doesn’t entirely negate this correspondence,
it stretches one’s credulity to imagine a fox licking his
lips over a chicken’s inner ear. Of course, we might take “up” as an
early variant of, or shorthand for, “pudendum,” but I suggest we escape
what threatens to become a precipitous descent into absurdity
by leaving Foxy Loxy out. 9
In some accounts Chicken Little is hit by an acorn; in others by a
falling coconut, a piece of ripe fruit or a branch (variously a limb
from an acacia tree, an elder or a Japanese maple). One study suggests
she was struck by lightning, which, in accordance with Jung’s
thoughts in “A Study in the Process of Individuation,” 10 would
point to a strong message from the Self. Another, with weak supporting
evidence, questions whether she was hit by anything at all
and implies it was all in her mind (the hysteria theory). Adam Brillig
accepts that Chicken Little was felled by a piece of tree (though
of indeterminate flora) but questions just about everything else.
For instance, how old was Chicken Little? The tablets are quiet
on this point; yes, they imply pubescence, but possibly that’s a
modern projection. And was her grandmother’s really her destination?
Perhaps it was simply a plausible excuse for being out at all.
Indeed, Brillig raises the possibility—more thinkable today than
twenty years ago, thanks to the recovery movement—that she was
escaping abusive parents.
The feminist Chickle Schticker Janet Marble, in an article com-
9 Ibid.
10 “Lightning signifies a sudden, unexpected, and overpowering change of psychic
condition.” (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 533)