“The Reality of the Singular”: Anima and Unus Mundus in Laurens van der Post’s A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place

Abstract

Laurens van der Post’s A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place include a variety of Jungian themes and motifs but dramatize most thoroughly the ways in which the anima mediates between reason and other faculties necessary for wholeness. In the writings of C. G. Jung, the anima is not only the contrasexual in men but also a unifier akin to the unus mundus or unitary world. In the two novels the anima bridges binaries such as reason and intuition and provides an antidote to the twentieth-century malaise arising from loss of the archaic. Although van der Post’s work on Jung does not mention the unus mundus, Wind and Place depict not only various connections among matter, psyche, and spirit, but also portray the main characters, François and Nonnie, as a necessary hybrid of European and native African qualities.