Lily, Rosemary and Bob gambol in a little seaside village

Broken Signs

© 2003 Copledale Press

Broken Signs is a philosophical fiction which explores determinism via the trickster archetype. As to whether the archetype is a causal phenomenon (as E O Wilson and the sociobiologists argue) or acausal (as the Jungians believe), that is left to the reader to decide. The causal viewpoint provided the foundation, from the late 16th century, for the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment; Jung’s conception of the acausal archetype harks back (via the German Idealist tradition) to the medieval outlook of alchemy.

In The Confidence Man Herman Melville suggested that trickster psychology is at the heart of the American psyche. Melville was writing as an American. Broken Signs is written from the point of view of the non-American who comes under the spell of the American psyche. The plot is loosely based upon the archetypical American trickster song, ‘Lily, Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts’, written and recorded by Bob Dylan.

Peripatetic Bob’s songs are those that made their way from Europe to America from the late 16th century onwards. The clever fool who doesn’t know what’s going on but usually has the right song for the moment selects from a repertoire of Child Ballads and other staples of the Appalachian Mountain communities, songs which were subsequently transported by Harry Smith’s ‘Anthology Of American Folk Music’ to New York for the 60s folk music revival which spawned the Dylan phenomenon.

Having been captivated by what he experienced as a ‘breakthrough sound’ while driving around the American South in a Buick, Quentin Boyd played Bob Dylan songs over and over in the period from 1965 until 1974. His younger brother, Mark, heard them and they subsequently made their way into his dreams. Mark suffers from a phobia which his therapist, Flamsteed, treats as if it is caused by an Oedipus complex. Anyone can be seen to be suffering from an Oedipus complex if you selectively edit their dreams (or their songs). This is not because we are all suffering from a forbidden desire for the mother but because, as Karl Popper noted, Freudian psychoanalysis is unfalsifiable in principle. The more likely cause of Mark’s phobia is the protein composition of his amygdala – highlighted in the pathology report.

The characters in The Confidence Man were not so much ‘characters’ as representations, and so, too, are they that in Broken Signs. The weak and insubstantial Mark, for example, is the confidence trickster’s mark. Each of the characters is marked in one way or another by the trickster archetype. The trickster song ‘Lily, Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts’ leaves the listener in doubt as to who committed the crime. This is consistent with the fact that in the ‘real world’ there is no-one looking down from above to tell us what really happened. And neither is there is an omniscient narrator, here, to tell the reader who the murderer is because, since the Enlightenment, all that is available to us is a set of plausible assumptions, the evidence and sound judgement.