Too Jung to Die: A Timeless Body and Its Shadows

While it has not gathered a great deal of critical acclaim when it was first
published, Christopher Moores 1992 speculative fiction novel, Practical
Demonkeeping, portrays a rather innovative approach to the various issues of
consciousness. The primary goal of this paper is to examine the intricacies of the
relationship between Travis, the books lead protagonist, and Catch, a demonic
entity who has been accidentally bound to the young man, granting him
biological immortality as an unexpected side effect. The task will be carried out
by utilizing the analytical psychology framework developed by Carl Gustav Jung.
As might be expected, the concepts of the shadow and the ego will take center
stage during this analysis, but the other aspects of human psyche will not be
ignored either. Naturally, being a hellish fiend, Catch seems like a suitable
candidate for a secondary shadow figure, but the connection he shares with
Travis is not as one-dimensional as the typical depictions of demonic possession
that saturate todays media. The secondary goal is to examine the influence that
the protagonists temporal displacement has on his identity and, by extent, on
his overall state of being. As a man who has not aged physically for nearly one
hundred years, the main character is an amalgam of plainly visible bodily,
mental, and societal anachronisms. However, the fact that OHearn identifies
himself as an actual human being makes the whole predicament more akin to the
contemporary posthuman concerns regarding longevity and augmentation than
to the different undead conditions that presently dominate the pop cultural
mediascape. Even though its a work that shamelessly flaunts its supernatural
elements, Moores attempt at speculative fiction both insightfully highlights some
of the current posthuman issues and effortlessly maintains its literary relevance
despite the worldly changes the that have taken place since its inception more
than two decades ago these are the main reasons why it warrants a scholarly
investigation.