This remarkable and monumental seminar of Peter de Kuster at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of ‘basic stories’ in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling. Including and most important – the stories you tell yourself, about yourself, to yourself about who you are and what you are doing.

But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are ‘programmed’ to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Peter de Kuster then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years.

Peter analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind’s psychological development over the past 5000 years.

You can watch the movie “Beowulf” following this link 

This online seminar  opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.

About Peter de Kuster

Peter de Kuster is the founder of The Heroine’s Journey & Hero’s Journey project,  a storytelling firm which helps creative professionals to create careers and lives based on whatever story is most integral to their lives and careers (values, traits, skills and experiences). Peter’s approach combines in-depth storytelling and marketing expertise, and for over 20 years clients have found it effective with a wide range of creative business issues.

Peter is writer of the series The Heroine’s Journey and Hero’s Journey books, he has an MBA in Marketing,  MBA in Financial Economics and graduated at university in Sociology and Communication Sciences.

Introduction

In the mid 1970s queues formed outside cinemas all over the Western world to see one of the most dramatic horror films ever made. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws told how the peace of a little Long Island seaside resort, Amity, was rudely shattered by the arrival offshore of a monstrou shark, of almost supernatural power.

For weeks on end the citizens are thrown into a stew of fear and confusion by the shark’s savage attacks on one victim after another. Finally, when the sense of threat seems almost too much to bear, the hero of the story, the local police chief Brody sets out with two companions to do battle with the monster. There is a tremendous climactic fight, with much severing of limbs and threshing about underwater, until at last the shark is slain. The community comes together in universal jubilation. The great threat has been lifted. Life in Amity can begin again.

It is safe to assume that few of the millions of sophisticated twentieth – century moviegoers who were gripped by this tale as it unfolded from the screens of a thousand luxury cinemas would have paused to think they had much in common with an unkempt bunch of animal-skinned Saxon warriors, huddled round the fire of some draughty, wattle – and – daub hall 1200 years before as they listened to the minstrel chanting out the verses of an epic poem.

The first part of Beowulf tells us how the little seaside community of Heorot is rudely shattered by the arrival of Grendel, a monster of almost supernatural powwer, who lives in the depts of a nearby lake. The inhabitants of Heorot are thrown into a stew of fear and confusion as, night after night, Grendel makes his mysterious attacks on the hall in which they sleep, seizing one victim after another and tearing them to pieces.

Finally when the sense of the threat almost too much to bear, the hero Beowulf sets out to do battle, first with Grendel, then with his even more terrible monster mother. There is a tremendous climactic fight, with much severing of limbs and threshing about underwater, until at last both monsters are slain. The community comes together in jubilation. The great threat has been lifted. Life in Heorot can begin again.

In terms of the bare outlines of their plots, the resemblances between the twentieth century  horror and the eight century epic are so striking that they almost be regarded as telling the same story.  One which moreover has formed the basis for countless other stories in the literature of mankind, at many different times and all over the world.

So what is the explanation?

You can watch the movie  “Jaws” following this link 

Why Do We Need Stories?

It is a curious characteristic of our modern civilisation that, whereas we are prepared to devote untold physical and mental resources to reaching out into the furthest recesses of the galaxy, or to delving in to the most delicate mysteries of the atom – in an attempt, to discover every last secret of the universe – one of the greatest and most important mysteries is lying so close beneath our noses that we scarcely even recognise it to be a mystery at all.

At any given moment, all over the world, hundreds of millions of people will be engaged in what is one of the most familiar of all forms of human activity. In oue way or another they will have their attention focused on one of those strange sequences of mental images which we call a story.

We spend a phenomenal amount of our lives following stories: telling them, listening to them, reading them, watching them acted out on the television screen or in fims or on a stage. They are far and away one of the most important features of our everyday existence.

Not only do fictional stories play such a significant role in our lives, as novels or plays, films or operas, comic strips or  TV ‘soaps Through newspapers or television, our news is presented to us in the form of ‘stories’.  Our history books are largely made up of stories. Even much of our conversation is taken up with recounting the events of everyday life in the form of stories. These structured sequences of imagery are in fact the most natural way we know to describe almost everything in our lives.

But it is obviously in their fictional form that we most usually think of stories. So deep and so instinctive is our need for them that, as small children, we have no sooner learned to speak than we begin demanding to be told stories, as evidence of an appetite likely to continue to our dying day.

So central a part have stories played in every society in history that we take it for granted that the great storytellers, such as Homer or Shakespeare, should be among the most famous people who ever lived. In modern times we have not thought it odd that certain men and women such as John Wayne and Bradd Pitt or Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren should come to be regarded as among the best known figures in the world, simply because they acted out the characters from stories on the cinema screen.  Even when we look out from our own world into space, we find we have named many of the most conspicuous heavenly bodies – Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Orion, Perseus, Andromeda – after characters from stories.

Yet what is astonishing is how incurious we are as to why we indulge in this strange form of activity. What real purpose does it serve? So much do we take our need to tell stories for granted that such questions scarcely even occur to us.

In fact what we are looking at here is really one mystery upon another. Because our passion for storytelling begings from another faculty which is itself so much part of our lives that we fail to see just how strange it is: our ability to ‘imagine’,  to bring up to our conscious perception the images of things which are not actually in front of our eyes. We have this capacity to conjure up the inward images not only of places, people and things not present to our physical senses, but even of things, such as a fire – breathing dragon, which have never existed physically at all.

And it is of course this ability to conjure up whole sequences of such images, unfolding before our inner eye like a film, which enables us to have dreams when we sleep, and when we are awake to focus our attention on these mental patterns, we call stories.

What I set out to show is that the making of these stories serves a far deeper and more significant purpose in our lives than we have realised; indeed one whose importance can scarcely be exaggerated. And the first crucial step towards bringing this into view is to recognise that, wherever men and women have told stories all over the world, the stories emerging to their imaginations have tended to take shape in remarkably similar ways.

The Basic Stories

We are all familiar with the teasing notion that there may be only seven (or six or five or two) stories in the world. It is tantalising.

I found my attention focusing on the 1001 great stories I have ever read or seen.  They included stories in literature like a Shakespeare play Macbeth and Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, stories in the movies like The Deerhunter,  The Godfather, Thelma and Louise, myths like the one of Icarus,  legends like Faust. On the face of it, these stories might not seem to have much in common. But what intrigued me was the way, that at a deeper leve, they all seemed to unfold rond the same general story we – as humans – tell ourselves.

Each begins with a hero, or heroes, in some way unfulfilled. The mood at the beginning of the story is one of anticipation, as the hero seems to be standing on the edge of some great adventure or experience. In each case he finds a focus for his ambitions or desires, and for a time seems to enjoy almost dream-like success. Macbeth becomes king, Humbert embarks on his affair with the bewitching Lolita, Icarus discovers that he can fly; Faust is given access by the devil to all sorts of magical experiences. But gradually the mood of the story darkens.

The hero experiences an increasing sense of frustration. There is something about the course he has chosen which makes it appear doomed, unable to resolve happily. More and more he runs into difficulty; everyting goes wrong until that original dream has turned into a nightmare. Finally, seemingly inexorably, the story works up to a climax of violent self-destruction. The dream ends in death.

So consistent was the pattern underlying each of these stories that it was possbile to track it in a series of five identifiable stages from the initial mood of anticipation. Through a ‘dream stage’ when all seems to be going unbelievably well, to the ‘frustration’ stage when things begin to go mysteriously wrong, to the ‘nightmare stage’ where everything goes horrendously wrong, ending in that final moment of death and destruction.

Think about a good many dramatic tragedies such as Romeo and Julia or Carmen, the story of Don Juan,  the dreams turned to nightmare of those two unhappy heroines, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, both ending in suicide. Or Bonny and Clyde, describing the two young lovers who lightheartedly embark on a career as bank robbers and end up riddled with a hail of bullets.

Again and again through the history of storytelling it was possible to see this same theme, of a hero or heroine being drawn into a course of action which leads initially to some kind of hectic gratification and dream-like success, but which then darkens inexorably to a climax of nightmare and destruction. And at this point two questions began to intrude.

First, why was this so?  Why has the imagination of storytellers in the history of mankind seemd to form so readily and regularly round the same theme? Why do we recognise it as such a satisfactory shape to a story.  Secondly, were there other patterns like this underlying stories, shaping them in quite different ways? What about all those stories which have ‘happy endings’? Were there any similar basic patterns underlying these too?

The Big Question

As soon as I began to look at stories in this light,  a number of basic themes in the great stories began to suggest themselves. There were, for instance, all those stories about ‘overcoming of a monster’ like Jaws or Beowulf, in which our interest centers on the threat posed by some monstrous figure of eveil, who is then challenged by the hero and finally, after a climactic battle, killed.

There is the theme of ‘enormous personal growth’ like The Ugly Duckling or Cinderella, where our main interest lies in seeing some initally humble and disregarded little hero or heroine being raised up to a position of immense success and splendour. There were stories based on the theme of a great quest, like the Odyssey or The Lord of the Rings, where our interest centres on the hero’s long, difficult journey towards some distant, enormously important goal.

I embarked on a quest, looking and reading through hundreds of stories of every type of story imaginable: from the myths of ancient Mesopotamia and Greece to James Bond and Star Wars; from ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Proust; from the Marx Brothers to the Marquis de Sade and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre; from the biblical story of Job to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty -Four; from the tragedies of the Roman myths to Sherlock Holmes; from the operas of Wagner to The Sound of Music; from Dante’s Divine Comedy to Amelie. And it was not long before I began to make a startling discovery. Not only did it indeed seem to be true that there were a number of basic themes or plots which continually recurred in the storytelling of mankind, shaping tales of very different types and from almost every age and culture. Even more surprising was the degree of detail to which these ‘basis story plots’ seemed to shape the stories they had inspired; so that one might find, for instance, a well – known nineteenth-century novel constrected in almost exactly the same way as a Middle Eastern folk tale dating from 1200 years before; or a popular modern children’s story revealing remarkable hidden parallels with the structure of an epic poem composed in ancient Greece.

The stories seemed to be completely diverse: several were classic children’s stories, like Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland; there were a long list of novels, from Robinson Crusoe to Brideshead Revisited; there were science fiction stories, like H.G. Well’s The Time Machine; there were films ranging from The Third Man and the Wizard of Oz to Gone with the Wind. The further my journey proceeded, the more clearly two things emerged. The first was that there are indeed a small number of story plots which are so fundamental to the way we tell stories that it is virtually impossible for any storyteller ever entirely to break away from them.  The second was that, the more familiar we become with the nature of these shaping forms and forces lying beneath the surface of stories, pushing them into patterns and directions which are beyond the storyteller’s conscious control, the more we find that we are entering a realm to which recognition of the plots themselves proves only to have been the gateway. We are in fact uncovering nothing less than a kind of hidden, universal story language; a nucleus of situations and figures which are the very stuff from which stories are made.

And once we become acquainted with this symbolic story language, and begin to catch something of its extraordinary significance, there is literally no story in the world which cannot be seen in a new light: because we have come to the heart of what stories are about and why we tell them.

Our Program

This is a great hero’s journey. Before we embark I should set out a brief route map, so that it will become clear how the different stages of this hero’s journey build on each other in working towards the eventual goal.

This hero’s journey is divided in four parts.

Part One,  The Seven Stories of Your Life examines each of the seven great stories of mankind. At first kind, each is quite distinctive. But as we work through the stories, we gradually come to see how they have certain key elements in common, and how each is in fact presenting its own particular view of the same central preoccupation which lies at the heart of storytelling.

Part Two, ‘They Lived Happily Ever After, looks more generally at what all this main story types have in common. In particular we find that they are not only basis plotsto stories but a cast of basic figures who reappear through stories of all kinds, each with their own defining characteristics. As we explore the values which each of these archetypal stories represents, and how they are related, this opens up an entirely new perspective on the essential drama with which storytelling is ultimately concerned. But we also come to see how there are certain conditions which must be met before any story can come to a fully resolved ‘they live happily ever after’ ending. This leads on to part three to an hero’s journey into one of the most revealing of all factors which govern the way stories take shape in the human mind.

The third part of this hero’s journey,  ‘The Tragedy” concentrates almost entirely on stories from the last 200 years, explores how and why it is possible in a storyteller’s imagination, for a story ‘to go wrong; or as we say end tragically. The first two parts of the seminar have been primarily concerned with those stories which express the archetypal patterns underlying them in a way which enables them to come to a fully resolved and satisfactory ending. In the third section of the seminar we see how, in the past two centuries, something extraordinary and highly significant has happened to storytelling in the western world. Not only do we look here at such an obvious question as why in recent times storytelling should have shown such a marked obsession with sex and violence. As we look at how each of the basic story plots has developed what may be called its ‘dark’ and ‘light’ versions we see how a particular element of disintegration has crept into modern storytelling which distinguishes it from anything seen in history before. But this in turn merely reveals one of the most remarkable features of how stories take shape in the human imagination; because we also see how those archetypal rules which have governed storytelling since the dawn of history have in no way changed.

This third part of the seminar ends with a discussion on what are arguably the two most centrally puzzling stories produced by the Western imagination, Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Only at this point have we at last completed the groundwork which is necessary to looking at the deepest questions of all. Just why in our biological evolution has our species developed the capacity to create these patterns of images in our heads? What real purpose does it serve? And how do stories relate to what we call ‘real life’?

These are the questions we look at in the fourth and final part of the journey ‘Why We Tell Stories’, which begins with two very significant types of story we have not looked at before. This relates myths about the creation of the creation of the world and the ‘fall of innocence’ to the evolution of human consciousness and our relations with nature and instinct. In unravelling these riddles, what we see is how and why the hidden language of stories provides us with a picture of human nature and the inner dynamics of human behaviour which nothing else can present to us with such objective authority. We see how a proper understanding of why we tell stories sheds an extraordinary new light on almost every aspect of human existence: on our psychology; on morality; on the patterns of history and politics, the nature of religion and most importantly on the underlying pattern and purpose of our individual lives. We look at the question what the storytellers tell about the power of the story you tell yourself – about yourself – and how you can rewrite your story and thus transform your destiny.

Once Upon a Time

Imagine we are about to be plunged into a story – any story in the world. A curtain rises on a stage. A cinema darkens. We turn to the first paragraph of a novel. A narrator utters the age – old formula ‘Once upon a time….’

On the face of it, so limitless is the human imagination and so boundless the realm at the storyteller’s command, we might think that literally anything could happen next

But in fact, there are certain things we can be pretty sure we know about our story even before it begins.

For a start, it is likely that the story will have a hero, or a heroine, or both; a central figure, or figures, on whose fate our interest in the story ultimately rests; someone with whom, as we say, we can identify.

We are introduced to our hero or heroine in an imaginary world. Briefly or at length, the general scene is set. The purpose of the formula ‘Once upon a time ‘ whether the storyteller uses it explicitly or not, is to take us out of our present place and time into that imaginary realm where the story is to unfold, and to introduce us to the central figure with whom we are to identify.

Then something happens: some event or encounter which precipitates the story’s action, giving it focus. In fact the opening of the story is governed by a kind of double formula ‘once upon a time there was such and such a person, living in such and such place… then, one day, something happened.’

We are introduced to a little boy called Aladdin, who lives in a city in China… then one day a Sorcerer arrives and leads him out of the city to a mysterious underground cave. We meet a Scottish general, Macbeth, who has just won a great victory over his country’s enemies… then, on his way home, he encounters the mysterious witches. We meet a girl called Alice, wondering how to amuse herself in the summer heat… then suddenly she sees a White Rabbit running past, and vanishing down a mysterious hole. We see the great detective Sherlock Holmes sitting in his Baker Street lodgings… then there is a knock at the door and a visitor enters to present him with the next case.

This event provides ‘the Call’ which will lead the hero or heroine out of their initial state into a series of adventures or experiences which, to a greater or lesser extent, will transform their lives.

The next thing of which we can be sure is that the action which the hero or heroine are being drawn into will involve conflict and uncertainty, because without some measure of both there cannot be a story. Where there is a hero there may also be a villain (on some occasions, indeed, the hero himself may be the villain). But even if the characters in the story are not necessarily contrasted in such black – and – white terms, it is likely that some will be on the side of the hero or heroine, as friends and allies, while others will be out to oppose them.

Finally we shall sense that the impetus of the story is carrying it towards some kind of resolution. Every story which is complete, and not just a fragmentary string of episodes and impressions, must work up to a climax where conflict and uncertainty are usually at their most extreme. This then leads to a resolution of all that has gone before, bringing the story to its ending. And here we see how every story has in fact leading its central figure or figures in one of two directions. Either they end as we say, happily with a sense of liberation, fulfilment and completion. Or they end unhappily, in some kind of discomfiture, frustration or death

To say that stories either have happy or unhappy endings may seem such a commonplace that one almost hesitates to utter it. But it has to be said, simply because it is the most important single thing to be observed about stories. Around that one fact, and around what is necessary to bring a story to one type of ending or the other, revolves the whole of their extraordinary significance in our lives.

It was Aristoteles in Poetics who observed first that a satisfactory story – a story which, as he put it, is a ‘whole’ – must have a beginning, a middle and an end’. And it was Aristotle who, in the context of the two main types of stories first explicitly drew attention to the two kinds of ending a story may lead up to. On the one hand, as he put it in the Poetics, there are tragic stories. These are stories in which the hero’s or heroine’s fortunes usually begin by rising, but eventually ‘turn down’ to disaster (the greek word catastrophe means literally a down stroke, the downturn in the hero’s fortunes at the end of a tragedy). On the other hand, there are, in the broadest sense, comedies: stories in which things initially seem to become more and more complicated for the hero or heroine, until they are entangled in a complete knot, from which there seems no escape. But eventually comes what Aristotle calls the peripeteia or ‘reversal of fortune’. The knot is miraculously unravelled.  Hero, heroine or both together are liberated; and we and all the world can rejoice.

This division holds good over a much a greater range of stories than might be implied just by the terms ‘tragedy’and ‘comedy’. Indeed, with qualifications, it remains true right across the domain of storytelling. The plot of a story is that which leads its hero or heroine either to a ‘catastrophe’ or an ‘unknotting’;  either to frustration or to liberation; either to death or to a renewal of life. And it might be thought that there are almost as many ways of describing these downward or upward paths as there are individual stories in the world. Yet the more carefully we look at the vast range of stories thrown up by the human imagination through the ages, the more clearly we may discern there are certain continyally recurring shapes to stories.  It is at the most important of these underlying shapes of stories that we now look.

Overcoming the Monster

In 1839 a young Englishman, Henry Austen Layard, set out to travel overland to Ceylon, the island now known as Sri Lanka. Halfway through his journey, when he was crossing the wild desert region then known as Mesopotamia, his curiosity was aroused by a series of mysterious mounds in the sand. He paused to investigate them, and thus began one of the most important investigations in the history of archaeology. For what Layard had stumbled on turned to be the remains of one of the earliest cities ever built by humankind, biblical Niniveh.

Over the decades which followed, many fascinating discoveries were made at Niniveh, but none more so than a mass of clay tablets which came to light in 1853, covered in small wedge-shaped marks which were obviously some unknown form of writing. The task of deciphering this ‘cuneiform’ script was to take the best part of the next 20 years. But when in 1872 George Smith of the British Museum finally unveiled the results of his labours, the Victorian public was electrified. One sequence of the tablets contained fragments of a long epic poem, dating back to the dawn of civilisation, it was by far the earliest written story in the world.

The first part of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh tells how the kingdom of Uruk has fallen under the terrible shadow of a great and mysterious evil. The source of the threat is traced to a monstrous figure, Humbaba, who lives half across the world, in an underground cavern at the heart of a remote forest. The hero, Gilgamesh, goes to the armourers who equip him with special weapons, a great bow and a mighty axe. He sets out on a long, hazardous journey to Humbaba’s distant lair, where he finally comes face to face with the monster. They enjoy a series of taunting exchanges, then embark on a titanic struggle. Against such supernatural powers, it seems Gilgamesh cannot possibly win. But finally, by a superhuman feat, he manages to kill his monstrous opponent. The shadowy threat has been lifted. Gilgamesh has saved his kingdom and can return home triumphant.

In the autumn of 1962, 5000 years after the story of Gilgamesh a fashionable crowd converged on Leicester Square in London for the premiere of a new film. Dr No was the first of what was to become, over the next 40 years, the most popular series of films ever made (even by 1980 it was estimated that one or more of the screen adventures of James Bond had been seen by some 2 billion people, then nearly half the earth’s population). With their quintesssentially late – twentieth century mixture of space – age gadgetry, violence and sex, anything more remote from the primitive world of those inhabitants of the first cities who conceived the religious myth of Gilgamesh might seem hard to imagine.

Yet consider the story which launched the series of Bond films that night in 1962.  The Western world falls under the shadow of a great and mysterious evil. The source of that threat is traced to a monstrous figure, the mad and deformed scientist Dr No, who lives half across the world in an underground cavern on a remote island. The hero James Bond goes to the armourer who equips him with special weapons. He sets out on a long, hazardous journey to Dr No’s distant lair, where he finally comes face to face with the monster. They enjoy a series of taunting exchanges, then embark on a titanic struggle. Against such near – supernatural powers, it seems Bond cannot possibly win. But finally, by a superhuman feat, he manages to kill his monstrous opponent. The shadowry threat has been lifted. The Western world has been saved. Bond can return home triumphant.

Any story which can make such a leap across the whole of recorded human history must have some profound symbolic significance in the inner life of mankind. Certainly this is true of our first type of story, the plot which may be called ‘Overcoming the Monster’.

The Essence of the Monster

The realm of storytelling contains nothing stranger or more spectacular than the terrifying, life-threatening, seemingly all-powerful monster whom the hero must confront in a fight to the death.

We first usually encounter these extraordinary creations early in our lives, in the guises of wolves, witches and giants of fairy tales. Little Red Riding Hood goes off into the great forest to visit her kindly grandmother, only to find that granny has been replaced by the wicked wolf, whose only desire is to eat Red Riding Hood. In the nick of time, a brave forester bursts in to kill the wolf with his axe and the little heroine is saved.

Hansel and Gretel are cruelly abandoned to die in the forest, where they meet the apparantly kindly old woman who lives in a house made of gingerbread. But she turns out to be a wicked witch, whose only wish is to devour them. Just when all seems lost, they manage to push her into her own oven and burn her to death, finding, as their reward, a great treasure with which they can triumphantly return home.

Jack climbs his magic beanstalk to discover at the top a new world, where he enters a mysterious castle belonging to a terrifying and bloodthirsty giant. After progressively enraging this monstrous figure by three successive visits, each time managing to steal a golden treasure, Jack finally arouses the giant to what seems like a fatal pursuit. Only in the nick of time does Jack manage to scramble down the beanstalk, and bring it crashing down with an axe. The giant falls dead to the ground and Jack is left to enjoy the three priceless treasures he has won from its grasp.

The essence of the ‘Overcoming the Monster’ story is simple. Both we and the hero are made aware of the existence of some superhuman embodiment of evil power. This monster may take human form (e.g. a giant or a witch), the form of an animal (a wolf, a dragon, a shark) :  or a combination of both (the Minotaur, the Sphinx). It is always deadly, threatening an entire community or kingdom, even mankind and the world in general. But the monster often also has in its clutches some great prize, a priceless treasure.

So powerful is the presence of this figure, so great the sense of threat which emanates from it, that the only thing which matters to us as we follow the story is that it should be killed and its dark power overthrown. Eventually the hero must confront the monster, often armed with some kind of  ‘magic weapons’ and usually in or near its lair, which is likely to be in a cave, a forest, a castle, a lake, the sea, or some other deep and enclosed place.  Battle is started and it seems that, against such terrifying odds, the hero cannot possibly win. Indeed there is a moment where his destruction seems all but inevitable. But at the last moment, as the story reaches its climax, there is a dramatic reversal. The hero makes a ‘thrilling escape from the death’ and the monster is slain. The hero’s reward is beyond price. He wins the treasure. He has liberated the world – community, kingdom, the human race – from the shadow of this threat to its survival. And in honour of his achievement, he may well go on to become some kind of ruler.

The Monster in Greek Myths

There have been few cultures in the world which have not produced some version of the Overcoming the Monster story. But a civilisation we particularly associate with such stories is that of the ancient Greeks, whose mythology was swarming with monsters of every kind, from the original Titans overcome by Zeus or the one-eyed giant Polyphemus blinded by Odysseus to the mighty Python strangled by Apollo or the riddle-posing Sphinx who could correctly answer her riddle (for which he was chosen to be king over Thebes).

One of the most celebrated of the Greek monster – slaying heroes was Perseus, who had to overcome not one monster, but two, one female, one male. When, as a young boy, he is cast adrift in the world with his beautiful mother, the Princess Danae, the two fall under the shadow of the cruel tyrant Acrisius, who demands that Danae should succumb to his advances. In a desperate bid to save his mother from this fate, young Perseus offers to perform any task the tyrant should set him. The cruel Acrisius therefore sends the boy off to the end of the world to obtain the head of the dreadful Gorgon Medusa, the mere sight of whose face is sufficient to turn a man to stone.

Perseus is equipped by the gods with magic weapons, a pair of winged sandals, enabling him to fly, a ‘helmet of invisibility’ and a brilliantly polished shield, in which he will be able to see the Medusa’s reflection without having to look at her directly. Perseus reaches the Gorgon’s lair at the Western edge of the world, and severs the Medusa’s snake-covered head. It might seem that he has triumphantly concluded the task that has been set him; but we now learn that this was merely the essential preparation for a further immense task which awaits him on his journey home. As he flies back with his prize, he looks down to see a beautiful, weeping Princess Andromeda, chained to a rock by the sea. She has been placed there as tribute to appease a fearsome sea-monster, which has been sent by Poseidon to ravage her father’s kingdom. Perseus sees the huge reptile rising out of the deeps to seize Andromeda and swoops down to engage in battle. He is able to use the trophy of his first victory, the head of Medusa, to turn the monster to stone.  He is rewarded with the hand of the Princess, for liberating her father’s kingdom from the awful threat. He returns home, where he uses the Medusa’s head to turn the tyrant Acrisius to stone, and eventually goes on to become king of Argos.

Another celebrated monster – slayer was Theseus, who also grows up alone in the world with his mother. On coming of age he goes to rejoin his father, King Aegeus in Athnes, having to kill a series of monsters and villains on the way. But when he arrives he finds his father’s kingdom under a terrible shadow, cast by a rival kingdom across the sea in Crete, ruled over by the grim tyrant King Minos.

Every ninth year the Athenians must pay a tribute to the tyrant, by sending the flower of their city’s youth to feed the frightful monster the Minotaur, half – bull, half man, which lives iat the heart of the mighty Labyrinth. A dark, enclosed stone maze from which no one has ever found a way out. Theseus volunteers to lead the party of young men and maidens who are to be sacrificied to this creature; and on arriving in Crete he wins the love and support of the tyrant’s daughter Ariadne, who secretly supplies him with the ‘magic aids’, a sword and a skein of thread, he needs to win victory.

Finding his way to the centre of the Labyrinth, unravelling the thread, he confronts the Minotaur and kills it. Ariadne’s thread enables him to retrace his way back through the maze of tunnels to the open air. It is true that, when they then flee together back to Athens, Theseus abandons his Princess on the island of Naxos. And as he comes within sight of the mainland, and forgets to hoist a white rather than a black sail to show his father that he has returned victorious, King Aegeus throws himself in grief into the sea which afterwards bore his name. But this also means that, like many another monster-slaying hero, Theseus succeeds to the kingdom, becoming the greatest ruler Athens ever had. He also eventually marries the Princess, by making Ariadneś sister Phaedra his queen.

The Monster in the Dark Ages

Another notable constellation of monster tales were those which loomed up in the imaginations of the inhabitants of northern Europe, amid the mists and darkness of the first millenium of the Christian era. The world has rarely seen such a parade of giants, dragons, trolls, treacheous dwarves, foul fiends and ‘loathly worms’ as infested the Norse sagas and Germanic and Celtic epics of these times.  And here the hero’s immediate reward for slaying the monster was likely to be a fabulous treasure.

One such tale, later to achieve wider currency from its adaption by Wagner, was the episode in the Volsunga Saga which tells of how the young hero Sigurd, with the aid of his ‘magic weapon’, the great sword Gram, slays the horrible monster Fafnir, who sits in the middle of a wilderness brooding over a great treasure, which includes access to all sorts of runic knowledge, such as an understanding of the song of the birds. But he then goes on to discover ‘the beauteous battle-maiden’ Brynhild, lying asleep on a mountain top guarded by a ring of magic flames which only the true hero can enter; and it is the treasures and the secret knowledge he has won from his victory over Fafnir which enable him to waken her and win her love.

Another celebrated Overcoming the Monster story from the Dark Ages is that of Beowulf. Again we begin with the familiar image of a kingdom which has fallen under a terrible shadow: the little community of Heorot which is nightly menaced by the predatory assaults of the mysterious monster Grendel. The young hero Beowulf comes from across the sea and eventually in a great nocturnal battle, deals the monster a mortal wound: only to disover when he tracks the trail of Grendel’s blood that he must confront the monster’s even more terrible mother, in the lair at the bottom of a deep lake where she is brooding over the body of her dead son. Although Beowulf’s immediate reward for his victory over the two monsters is a rich hoard of ‘ancient treasures and twisted gold’ from a grateful king whose kingdom he has saved, he then returns home to become king over his own kingdom (many years later, at the end of his life, he has to confront a third monster, in a profoundly symbolic episode which we shall look at much later in this seminar).

Of the many Overcoming the Monster stories thrown up by Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, probably the most familiar is that of St George and the Dragon, which appears to be a Christian adaptation of the Perseus myth. The hero comes to a kingdom which is being ravaged by a dragan and, like Perseus finds a beautiful Princess tethered by the edge of the sea, where she has been placed by her countrymen in a last desperate bid to buy off the monster’s attacks. The monster approaches and George slays him; but unlike Perseus, George is not then able to marry the Princess he has freed. Since this is rather self consciously a ‘Christian’ version of the tale, his reward is simply to insist that all the inhabitants of the country should be baptised: in other words, that they should all succeed in another ‘kingdom’, the kingdom of Christ.

The Bloodsucking Monster

During the centuries of diminishing faith in the supernatural which followed the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the more obviously fantastic dragons and monsters of old slipped below the horizon of European storytelling (although it never faded away altogether). But then, in a way which to the rationalistic age of the Enlightment or even through most of the literal, materialistic Victorian era would have seemed wholly improbable, fabulous and terrifying ‘monsters’ came back into vogue in a quite remarkable fashion.

It all happened quite suddenly, in the closing years of the nineteenth century.  Over the previous 100 years there had been a number of premonitory signs notably in the taste for ‘Gothic horror’ which had been such an important reflection of the rise of the Romantic movement with stories as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But in the space of just a few years in the 1890’s there appeared in England a rash of stories of the kind which have played such a dominant part in popular entertainment ever since – ghost stories, tales of horror, science fiction – in which monsters of the most grotesque and improbable variety once again surged to the forefront of Western popular storytelling.

An Anglo-Irish former civil servant, Bram Stoker published in 1897 Dracula.  Stories blood-drinking vampires had been told at various times before in history but Stoker’s version was conceived on a new plane of horror. The story divided in two parts. In the first, the hero, a young English lawyer named Harker, makes a visit to a mysterious, ruined castle deep in the wolf-infested forests of Transylvania. There is an air of indescribable evil, both about the place and about his client, Count Dracula, a man with sharp, protruding teeth and unnaturally red lips.

Harker discovers that he is trapped by a man who can crawl face downwards on the castle wall by moonlight; whom he finds one day lying as if dead, ‘bloated’with blood, ‘like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion’ ; who seems to be in command of a whole army of equally horrible supernatural spirits.

Just how the hero escapes from seemingly certain doom is never made clear, but the second part of the story tells of how Dracula ‘invades’ England, and in particular the battle by Harker and a group of friends to prevent the monster taking over two young girls, one of them Harker’s intended wife Mina, to recruit them into his shadowy army of the living dead. The first of them, Mina’s friend Lucy, falls fatally into Dracula’s power.  Having destroyed one ‘princess’, Dracula then turns his nocturnal attacks on the other, the hero’s financée Mina. Gradually we see her sinking away into the monster’s deadly power. Harker and his friends eventually Dracula down and pursue him back to his Transylvanian lair where, just in the nick of time before Mina finally expires, they manage to operate their ‘magic weapon’by plunging a stake into the monster’s heart (the only way a vampire can be killed).

‘before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.’

Mina – and mankind – are saved!

In 1898, the year after Dracula, H.G Wells published ‘The War of the Worlds’. Again, it was by no means the first science fiction story, but the comparatively cosy fantasies of Jules Verne had contained nothing like this. Puffs of fire are seen on Mars, huge meteorites flash across the sky and some come to earth in southern England. The initial mood of excited curiosity changes to alarm, when it appears that these mysterious, half buried cylinders contain life.

The nightmarish realisation dawns that these huge ‘fungoid’monsters climbing out of the cylinders are implacably hostile. They assemble great ‘tripod machines’whih stride across the countryside, armed with ‘Heat Rays’and the deadly ‘Black Smoke against which mankind has seemingly no defence. Southern England is laid waste, as towns and cities burn, corpses pile up and the countryside is gradually submerged beneath the horrible ‘Red Weed’. Can the world survive?

Then as the hero cowers in a cellar in south London, all alone and imagining his wife to be dead, he hears floating across the deserted, half ruined city a ghastly, wailing cry ‘Ulla, ulla, ulla. He cautiously picks his way up to Primrose Hill, where he sees the great machines standing silent, the dead Martians hanging out of them as strips of decaying meat. The invading monsters have fallen prey to humble earthly bacteria, the one thing against which they had no defence. Mankind is saved and the story ends on the image of the hero being joyfully reunited with his wife who turns out, like him, to have miraculously survived.

The Purpose of the Monster

What is this monster which, since time immemorial, has so haunted the imagination and fantasies of mankind?

It is a question of deepest importance to the understanding of stories, relevant to tales of many kinds other than just those centred on the plot we have been discussing. The question may be put in the singular – speaking of one ‘monster’ rather than many – if only because of the essential characteristics of this creature are so unvarying, regardless of the variety of outward guises in which he (or she) appears.

For a start, throughout the world’s storytelling, we find the monster being described in strikingly similar language. It tends, of course, to be highly alarming in its appearance and behaviour. It may be:

•   horrible, terrible, grim, mis-shapen, hate-filled, ruthless, menacing, terrifying

As goes without saying, it is mortally dangerous:

• deadly, bloodthirsty, ravening, murderous, venomous, poisonous

It is deeply and tricky opponent to deal with:

• cunning, treacherous, vicious, twisted, slippery, depraved, vile

There is also often something about its nature which is mysterious and hard to define. It may be:

• strange, shapeless, sinister, weird, nightmarish, ghastly, hellish, fiendish, demonic, dark.

In other words, in its oddly elusive way, we see this ‘night creature’ whether it is a giant or a with, a dragon or a devil, a ghost or a Martian, representing (often vested in a kind of dark, supernatural aura) everything which seems most inimical, threathening and dangerous in human nature, when this is turned against ourselves.

Then there are the monster’s physical attributes. And here we must not be misled by the fact the monster is so often represented as an animal, or even a composite of several animals: e.g. the dragon.  Such monsters may be animal in form, but they are invariably invested with attributes no animal in nature would possess, such as a peculiar cunning or malevolence. They are in fact preternatural, having qualities which are at least partly human.

Not Completely Human

There are many monsters in stories which are human, but invested with animal attributes, either directly, like the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull. They are seen as less than wholly human. And even when monsters are shown as entirely human in appearance, they tend to be in some way physically abnormal: abnormally large (giants), abnormally small (dwarves) or in some way deformed (e.g. missing an eye or a limb, or hunchbacked).

By definition, the one thing the monster in stories can never be is an ideal, perfect, whole human being.

Then there are the monster’s behavioural attritutes. We invariably see it acting in one of three roles:

1.  In its first ‘active’ role, the monster is Predator. It wanders menacingly or treacherously through the world, seeking to force or to trick people into its power.
2. The monster’s second, more ‘passive’ role is as Holdfast. It sits in or near its lair, usually jealously guarding the ‘treasure’ it has won into its clutches. It is in this role a keeper and a hoarder, broody, suspicious, threatening destruction to all who come near.
3. When its guardianship is in any way challenged, the monster enters its third role as Avenger. It lashes out viciously, bent on pursuit and revenge.

In fact, we may often see the same monster acting out all three roles at different stages of the same story. In Jack and the Beanstalk, for instance, we first see the giant as Predator, prowling about, demanding human food. We next see him as Holdfast, brooding in miserly fashion over his treasures. We finally see him, when Jack steals the treasures, running angrily in pursuit, as Avenger. And the point about these three roles is that they represent all the main aspects of the way human beings behave when acting in an entirely self-seeking fashion. When people are at odds with the world, behaving selfishly or anti-socially, they are after ‘something’ as Predators; wanting grimly to ‘hold on to something, as Holdfasts; or as Avengers, resentfully trying ‘to get their own back’.

One may sum up by saying that, physically, morally and psychologically, the monster in storytelling thus represents everything in human nature which is somehow twisted and less than perfect. Above all, and it is the supreme characteristic of every monster who has ever been portrayed in a story, he or she is egocentric. The monster is heartless; totally unable to feel for others, although this may sometimes be disguised beneath a deceptively charming, kindly or solicitous exterior; its only real concern is to look after its own interests, at the expense of everyone else in the world.

Such is the nature of the figure against whom the hero is pitted, in a battle to the deat. And we never have any doubt as to why the hero stands in opposition to such a centre of dark and destructive power: because the hero’s own motivation and qualities are presented as so completely in contrast to those ascribed to the monster. We see the hero being drawn into the struggle not just on his own behalf but to save others: to save all those who are suffering in the monster’s shadow; to free the community or the kingdom the monster is threatening; to liberate the ‘Princess’ it has imprisoned. The hero is always shown The hero is always shown as acting selflessly and in some higher cause, in a way which shows him standing at the opposite pole to the monster’s egocentricity.

And even though the monster wields such terrifying power that, almost to the end, its dark presence is the dominant factor holding sway over the world described by the story, it has one weakness which ultimately renders it vulnerable. Despite its cunning, its awareness of the reality of the world around it is in some important respect limited. Seeing the world through tunnel vision, shaped by its egocentric desires, there is always something which the monster cannot see and is likely to overlook.  That is why, by the true hero, the monster can always in the end be outwitted: as was the mighty Goliath by little David, who was able to stay out of reach of the giant’s strength by using his little slingstones. As was the Medusa by Perseus with his reflecting shield, which meant he did not have to look at her directly; as was Minos by his own daughter secretly presenting Theseus with the sword and thread; as were Well’s Martians by their overlooking even something as apparently insignificant as the destructive power of bacteria. It is this fatal flaw in the monster’s awareness which is ultimately its undoing. Despite its power, the monster is shown not only as heartless and egocentric. It is also, in some crucial respect which turns the day, blind.

The Monster in Melodrama

The shadowy figure is of the greatest significance in stories, not just because of the more obvious and lurid appearances it makes in myths, folk tales, horror stories and science fiction, but because to a greater or lesser extent these characteristics describe the dark, negative and villainous characters who appear in stories of almost every kind.

Indeed, once we have identified the monster’s essential attributes, we can see how there are a great many types of story shaped by the Overcoming the Monster plot other than just the more literal examples we have so far been looking at.  As in Melodrama.

There were, for instance, many of those melodramatic tales beloved of the nineteenth century which may be caricatured as ‘the hero having to rescue the beautiful maiden from the clutches of the wicked Sir Jasper’.  A familar example is Charles Dickens’s  Nicholas Nickleby. Like the hero of many a fairy tale, young Nicholas is left orphaned by the death of his father and having to provide for his penniless mother and sister. He is taken in hand by a seemingly kind uncle, Ralph, who arranges a teaching post for him at the grim Northern school Dotheboys Hall. And when we meet the tyrannical owner of this establishment Mr Squeers we might think we had met the story’s chief ‘monster’. But no sooner has Nicholas overcome this particular villain, by giving him a thrashing and escaping from the school, than it gradually emerges that the hero and his family are in fact threatened by a kind of mysterious, Hydra headed conspiracy, of which Squeers had merely been one lesser ‘head’.

In fact the chief monster at the centre of this web of evil is the wicked usurer, Uncle Ralph himself. The action centres first on the liberation of Nicholas’s sister Hawk, another ‘Hydra-head;  then on the even more hazardous rescue of his own chosen ‘Princess, the beautiful Madeleine Bray, from a vile plot to marry her off to yet another Hydra – head, the unpleasant old Arthur Gride.

Finally all Ralph’s wicked schemes are exposed and brought to naught. Nicholas, the triumphant hero, is free to marry his ‘Princess’ who, it is then discovered, has inherited a great ‘treasure’ from her father.

The Monster in War Movies

A very different kind of tale shaped by the Overcoming the Monster theme is the war story, particularly those set at the time of the Second World War. In the past 70 years the immense drama of World War Two has inspired many more fictional stories than any other real – life episode in history. One reason for this was the way Hitler’s Nazis, and to a lesser extent their Japanese allies, provided storytellers with such an extraordinarily rich store of ‘monster-imaginery’.

In countless films from the 1940’s on, we saw Hitler’s Germany cast as invading Predator, with all the diabolic paraphernalia of the blitzkrieg as Holdfast, exercising ruthlessly tyrannical sway over Occupied Europe; or as Avenger, lashing out at resistance heroes, prison camp escapers or anyone else who dared challenge its murderous authority. The vast majority of such stories were based on the plot of Overcoming the Monster, with the underlying pattern of the story in almost every instance the same. At first there is a preparatory stage of anticipation, as of some great forthcoming ordeal. We see the seemingly insuperable power of the German war machine. There is then a gathering sense of danger, as battle is joined, and the heroes seem to have all the odds stacked against them. Then comes the climactic confrontation and finally the miraculous victory. The Nazi (sometimes Japanese) monster is overthrown. The dark armadas of the Luftwaffe (as in Battle of Britain) are hurled back. The great Predator ship (as in The Sinking of the Bismarck) is destroyed.  The invasion of Europe (as in the Longest Day) is successfully achieved. The Nazi’s counter-offensive (as in the Battle of the Bulge) is fought off. The beautiful city of Paris (in Is Paris Burning), like a rescued Princess, is at the last moment saved.

But never far from the surface of these apparently modern, and even ‘historically accurate’ accounts were the patterns and imaginery of a story as old as the imagination of man.  Alistair Maclean’s  The Guns of Navarone, a typical fictional Second World War adventure story, tells how five heroes land on a closely guarded Aegean island to destroy two huge German guns concealed in a clifftop cave, which holdfast like dominate a narrow strait. We are aware that this is the only way through which a large number of beleaguered Allied soldiers can be lifted to safety from a nearby island. Thousands of lives are at the mercy of these mighty engines of destruction. Painfully the heroes make their way across the island, narrowly escaping every kind of disaster, until at last they reach the cave and see, against the night sky:

‘crouched massively above, like some nightmare monsters from another and ancient world, the evil, the sinister silhouettes of the two great guns of Navarone.’

Evading detection as they catch the sentries on their ‘blind spot’ the heroes fix their little explosive charges against the guns, like ‘magic weapons’ against something so massive and overpowering. Finally, as the ‘tremendous detonation tore the heart out of the great fortress it is at one level not just the guns of Navarone which are being destroyed, but Humbaba, the Minotaur, Dracula and every other monster who has ever been. After the mounting suspense of the long ordeal, penned in at every moment by the prospect of sudden death, liberation is here! Life has triumphed over death! Humanity can breathe again!

The Monster in Hollywood Western

So basic is the outline of the Overcoming the Monster plot that there is almost no limit to the variety of story-types it can give rise to. We can recognise it wherever our interest in a tale is centred on the steady build-up to a climactic battle between the hero and some dark, threatening figure, or group of figures, whether this be the wicked witch in a fairy tale or invading aliens from outer space, Spielberg’s flesh-eating dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or the outlaw gang in a Western.

The Magnicifent Seven begins in classic Overcoming the Monster style by showing a community living under the shadow of a monstrous threat: a little Mexican farming village being terrorised by an outlaw gang, led by the villainous Calveros, who regularly arrive at the village to rob the famers of food. We see one such predatory visit, when one old farmer tries to protest. Calveros shoots him in front of the villagers, thus underlining just what a heartless and predatory tyrant he is.

A wise old man living nearby advises the farmers that the only way to stop this reign of terror is that they should buy guns. Three of them ride over to the American border where they see two professional gunmen ( played by Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen) fearlessly standing up to the inhabitants of a small town in insisting that an Indian who has died in the town should be buried in the whites only cemetery. This establishes that the two heroes are not racially prejudiced and are willing to fight against injustice. For a small sum of money, all they can afford, the Mexicans persuade the two gunmen to come back to their village to defend them against the outlaws. The two recruit another five, and the seven gunmen arrive in the village to train its inhabitants in self-defense.

When Calveros’s gang next returns it is beaten off with heavy losses. But when the seven ride out into the countryside to see what the gang is up to, Calveros outwits them by secretly occupying the village in their absence. When they return they discover they have fallen into his clutches. In front of the cowed villagers, he removes their guns, and allows them to leave. Foolishly, however, showing the monster’s blind spot, he allows their guns to be returned to them when they have left town. He cannot imagine that, as mere hired gunmen, they will not just ride away to avoid any further trouble, leaving him free to carry on oppressing the villagers. But, bruised by the humiliation, the seven ride back into town for a final climactic battle, in which Calveros and his gang are routed, not least because the villagers recover their courage and join in. Four of the seven are dead. One decides to remain in the village because he has fallen in love with a village girl, which allows the story to end on the image of a man and woman united in love. But the two original brave heroes ride off into the wide blue yonder, having overcome the monster and saved the community.

Another classic Hollywood Western based on this plot was Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952. Again we see a community living under the shadow of a monstrous outlaw gang., the little town of Hadleyville in the old West. The story begins on the morning when the hero Will Kane (played by Gary Cooper) having resigned as town marshal is getting married to the pretty young Quaker (Grace Kelly). No sooner is the ceremony over than Kane unpins his badge of office and he and his new bride prepare to leave the town for ever. But then shocking news arrives. Some years earlier Kane had been responsible for arresting Frank Miller, a psychopathic gang leader who terrorised the town, and now Miller has been released from prison. He is heading back to Hadleyville on the noon train, due to arrive in just two hours time. The three unsavoury members of his gang are already at the station waiting for him and for the moment when they can settle their score with Kane and reimpose their reign of terror.

Scarcely have the newly-weds set out from town than Kane realises he cannot leave the townsfolk defenceless. He turns back, hoping to round up a posse of townsfolk to help defeat the gang. But the people are so cowed that they dare not help. Just like some of the villagers in The Magnificent Seven they would much rather Kane left them, in the appeasing hope that trouble might be avoided. Amy herself, as a Quaker, refuses to have anything to do with bloodshed and leaves for the station to catch the same train. Suspense mounts, as clocks tick away the two hours, and Kane finds no one to support him. At last a distant whistle is heard from across the plan. The train approaches. Miller disembarks to join his gang and the four men swagger into the now deserted town looking for a showdown with the solitary hero.

The gun battle begins and Kane manages to kill first one of his opponents, then another. But finally he is trapped in a building, its exits covered by Miller and the other outlaw. It seems all is lost and he is at their mercy. Then a miracle takes place. A shot rings out from across the street and a third villain lies dead. At the last minute Amy has jumped off the train and returned to town and she is standing at a window with a smoking gun in her hand. Frank Miller seizes her, pushes her out in front of him into the street and tells the hero, that unless he comes out to surrender,s he will be killed. As Kane emerges, Miller pushes Amy aside to fire, bravely she jogs his arm, giving the hero a chance to get his shot in first. All four outlaws are dead. Hero and heroine embrace as the shamefaced townsfolk emerge from their hiding places to cluster round their saviours. The loving couple can at last ride happily off together to start their new life.

Beneath this comparatively modern trappings (guns, the train) there is nothing about this story which could not have been presented in the imagery of an ancient myth or egend: with the little town as a kingdom threatened by the approach of a terrifying dragon, and Kane as a princely hero who, against all odds, finally slays the monster – although, like Theseus, he only manges to do this with the help of a loving ‘Princess’, who unexpectedly comes to his aid just when all seems lost.

The Monster in Thrillers

Another genre of story usually shaped by the Overcoming the Monster plot is the thriller: and here again we see how often thriller writers unconsciously fall back on the age-old stock of ‘monster imagery’, as they look for the kind of language which will help them to build up their hero’s chief antagonist into a shadowy figure of immense menace and evil.

In that early thriller-adventure story Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844), the action centres on the long struggle between the hero D’Artagnan and the evil Lady de Winter, who lures the hero’s chosen Princess, the beautiful young Madame de Bonancieux, into her clutches. When we look at the imagery used to describe Lady de Winter, whose sinister influence extends all over France, we see her not only characterised explicitly as ‘a monster’ who has ‘committed as many crimes as you could read of in a year’, but as a ‘panther’, a ‘tiger’, a ‘lioness’ and several times as ‘a serpent’.

When in The Final Problem Conan Doyle wished to create a villain who was at last a worthy match for the powers of his hero Sherlock Holmes, he conjured up the ‘reptilian’ Moriarty, like Dracula a ‘fallen angel’, a man of ‘extraordinary mental powers’ who has perverted them to ‘diabolic ends’. ‘For some years past’ says Holmes, ‘I have been conscious of some deep organising power which stands forever in the way of the law’. He realises that it is the shadowy Moriarty, eternally elusive, a master of disguise, ‘the most dangerous criminal in Europe’ who:

‘sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of his web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he well nows every quiver of them’.

The thrillers of John Buchan made lavish use of similar imagery. In ‘The Thirty Nine Steps, for instance, the hero Richard Hannay learns of the materialising of some vast, shadowy threat to the ‘peace of Europe’: behind all the governments and the armies, there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by some very dangerous people. When he tracks down the chief villain at the heart of this immense conspiracy to a remote Scottish moor, he is a German master-spy described as ‘bald-headed’ like ‘a sinister fowl’.

In those most successful of all twentieth – century thrillers Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories, the imagery again and again quite explicitly builds up the ‘monster’ with echoes of myth and fairy tales. Le Chiffre, the villain of Casino Royale is ‘a black-fleeced Minotaur’; Sir Hugo Drax in Moonraker has ‘a hulking body’ with ‘ogre’s teeth’; Mr Big in Live and Let Die has ‘a great football of a head, twice the normal size and nearly round’ the villain of Dr No, bald and crippled, with steel pincers instead of arms, ‘looked like a giant venomous worm, wrapped in  grey tin-foil’.

Indeed one of the key reasons for the initial success of the Bond stories, even before they wer translated to the cinema screen was precisely the way they tapped so unerringly into those springs of the imagination which had given rise to similar stories for thousands of years. So accurately did the typical Bond novel follow the age old archetypal pattern that it might almost serve as a model for any Overcoming the Monster story.

As conceived by Fleming, the basic Bond story unfolds through five stages rather like this:

1.  The Call to Adventure. The hero, a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service, is summoned by ‘M’, head of the service and told of suspicious goings-on somewhere in the world which appear to pose a deadly threat to Britain, the West or mankind as a whole.

The Monster in Science Fiction

Just when Ian Fleming was publishing his first Bond novels, some of his British contemporaries were producing particularly striking examples of that type of story which in the past century has revived the imagery of archetypal monsters more grotesquely inhuman than anything seen in storytelling since the Dark Ages and the myths of ancient Greece. In the early 1950’s, as the world awaited the imminent arrival of the space age, two genres of science fiction story swept into fashion: the first, following H.C. Wells centred on deadly invasions of the earth by monsters from outer space; the other featuring some world threatening catastrophe unleashed by mankind’s ow growing technological ability to interfere with nature.

In 1953, just after the Queen’s Coronation had prompted millions of Britons to install their first primitive television sets, the first serial on the new medium to catch the nation’s imagination was Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment, with its hero a shrewd and robust scientist, Professior Bernard Quatermass. As head of the world’s first manned space-flight project, Quatermass is horrified when the spaceship returns with only one of the three astronauts alive.  Gradually it becomes clear that the survivor, Victor Caroon, has not only absorbed the personalities of his two dead colleagues but has been taken over by some diabolically ingenious extra-terrestrial power which is using his body as a vehicle to take over the earth.

The ‘frustration stage’ sets in when Caroon appears to be turning into a cross between a cactus and a fungus., then disappears. When next sighted he has become a huge and fast-profilerating fungoid monster spreading over the interior of Westminster Abbey, about to throw out millions of spores which will wipe out humanity, allowing the aliens to take over. In this ‘final ordeal’ Quatermass confronts the monster and somewhat implausibly persuades the three human beings who are still mysteriously part of it to resist its influence, even though this will involve their own suicide. This leads to the ‘miraculous escape’by which humanity is saved.

The underlying five-stage pattern of these stories is only too familiar. As each of them begins with the arousal of curiosity, then continues with frustration as the monster’s true deadly nature becomes apparent, leading to a ‘nightmare stage’ when catastrophe seems inevitable, finally ending in the ‘miraculous escape’, their pattern is exactly the same as that which we first came across in some of the simplest stories of our childhood, such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Little Red Riding Hood.

The Monster in Star Wars

As a last example, to underline just how fundamental a pattern to storytelling this is, we may look at what became the most successful science fiction film ever produced in Hollywood, George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977)

The Star Wars story is set in the distant future, when the many planetary worlds of our galaxy are ruled by one government. For centuries this had exercised benevolent sway as ‘the Republic’, with the aid of the brave and honourable Jedi Knights. But the government has now been seized by a conspiracy of power-crazed politicians, bureaucrats and corporations, headed by a shadowy ‘Emperor’ and no-one, it seems wields greater power in this tyrannical new ‘Empire’ than the ruthless ‘Dark Lord’ Darth Vader, once himself a Jedi knight, now, like Lucifer, a ‘fallen angel’. Scattered across remote reaches of the galaxy dispossessed supporters of the old order, ‘the rebel Alliance’, are hoping one day to overthrow the dark Empire, to reclaim the universe for the forces of light.

The story opens with a rebel spaceship being attacked by an ‘Imperial cruiser’ captained by the terrifying Vader, whom we only see hidden in menacing black armour. As his Imperial forces take over the rebel ship, a tiny spacecraft escapes, containing See Threepio and Artoo Deetoo, two ‘androids’or humanised computers, who land safely on the surface of a nearby planet, Tatooine. Still on the rebel ship is the beautiful Princess Leia, daughter of the leader of the rebel Allicance, whom Vader takes prisoner.

We thus begin with the familiar image of a Princess falling into the clutches of the ‘monster’. But the one thing the ‘Dark Lord’ is desperate to discover is the whereabouts of the rebel organisation’s secret headquarters, so he can destroy it, thus making the victory of the Empire complete.  What he does not realise is that the resourceful Princess has programmed Artoo Deetoo with this vital information, along with an urgent appeal for help, before the androids bail out. By the fatal mistake of allowing them to escape, because he thinks their little craft is unmanned, the arrogant Vader has revealed a first ‘blind spot’.

Only now do we at last meet the young hero of the story, Luke Skywalker, who lives with his uncle and aount on a lonely farmstead on Tatooine, dreaming of future glory as a space – pilot. When the two androids arrive at the foarm, Artoo lights up with a hologram of the Princess. Luke is at once smitten by her beauty. She utters the baffling message ‘Obi – wan Kenobi, you are my only remaining hope’. Which Luke vaguely connects with a mysterious bearded hermit, ‘a kind of sorcerer’ who lives in an even more remote part of the desert. He and the androids set off to find him and, after Kenobi has miraculously intervened to save them from death at the hands of desert-dwelling monsters, they find themselves in the ‘wizard’s’ cave. The old man reveals he is one of the last surviving Knights of the Jedi, with supernatural powers, and that Luke’s lost father had been another, one of the bravest of all. Interpreting the Princess’s cry for help, Kenobi asks Luke to accompany him on a hazardous mission to rescue her.

This marks the end of the ‘Anticipation Stage’. The hero has received the ‘Call’; giving him and the story a focus. We can see now what the story is centrally to be about; and the hero’s sense of being impelled towards this mysterious new destiny is reinforced when they return to the farmstead to find that the uncle and aunt who have brought him up have been vapourised by Imperial troops. There is nothing left to keep him at home.

Despite further threats, fought off with Kenobi’s supernatural aid, Luke gradually assembles a team to make the journey; and in the nick of time, pursued by Imperial soldiers, they make a ‘thrilling escape’in a deceptively battered old spacecraft, piloted, solely for the money, by a reckless mercenary Han Solo.  This enables them to throw off their pursuers as they head off faster than light to their mystery destination. On the journey Kenobi imparts some of the ancient Jedi secrets to Luke, not least the importance of the mysterious ‘force’ with which the Knights learn to ally themselves, giving them supernatural powers. As the wise old man explains, this is ‘an energy field, and something more. An aura that at once controls and obeys, a nothingness that can accomplish miracles’.  He describes the optimal experience of ‘flow’. During this phase of the story, the hero and his companions seem to enjoy a magical immunity to danger: the “Dream Stage’. But we are reminded of the dark reality prevailing elsewhere, as we glimpse the Princess being subjected by Vader to horrific tortures, trying to force her into giving up the secret whereabouts of the rebel headquarters, the distant planet Alderaan.

Then suddenly, as they near their destination, they see the horrifying sight of a vast, mysterious man-made structure floating in space ahead of them. It is the Empire’s own secret weapon, the Death Star, a spaceship so powerful it can destroy a whole planet. This is where the Dark Lord Vader is holding the Princess prisoner. Even as they approach, this monstrous engine of death pulverises Alderaan, including the Princess’s father, to atoms. At the same time, the hero and his companions feel their own small spacecraft itself being sucked inexorably down a powerful beam into the heart of the Death Star. As their ship comes to rest it seems they are the monster’s prisoners. Like Bond, when he penetrates the lair of one of his monstrous opponents and falls into his clutches, they have reached the ‘Frustration Stage’.

Now begins the terrible ordeal of the ‘Nightmare Stage’. Pursued all the way threatened by one horror after another they wander through the endless, dark, metallic labyrinth of this huge structure, first to track down and release the Princess from her prison cell; then to thread their way back to their own spacecraft, having first immobilised the gravity beam which had taken it prisoner. Finally, thanks to old Kenobi sacrificing his life in a hand-to-hand struggle with his one time pupil, the Dark Lord, they make their miraculous escape, with the freed Princess on board – hurtling through space to another unknown planet where, hidden beneath ancient ruins in a jungle, is the true secret command headquarters of the rebel Alliance.

Here indeeds begins the true ‘final ordeal’ of the story as a small team of space pilots, including Luke, who has now captivated the Princess as surely as the had entranced him, set off for a final showdown with the Dark Empire, on which the whole future of the universe will rest. Thanks to Artoo having programmed himself with the entire layout of the Death Star, they have learned its vital secret. There is just one tiny aperture on the entire face of that immense, impregnable structure where a perfectly-aimed missile might penetrate to the central reactor which is at its heart. After a deadly prolonged aerial battle between two groups of small spacecraft, more reminiscent of a World War Two dogfight than anything belonging to the space age, Luke and Darth Vader, hero and monster, finally come face to face.  Just when it seems all is lost for the hero, he is miraculously saved. Han Solo, after refusing to risk his life in the battle because his only interest was money, had decided after all to intervene, arriving in the nick of time to blast Vader’s craft helplessly out into space. Simultaneously, even more miraculously, Luke has become at one with Kenobi’s supernatural ‘force’uncousciously managing to launch his missiles at just the right split – second to hit the mark. Scarcely have Luke and Solo withdrawn to a safe distance than the whole articifical planet explodes into a trillion fragments, in a sunburst which lights up that corner of the cosmos for days.

The monster has been overthrown. The victorious heroes return to a tumultuous welcome at the Alliance headquarters. In a vast temple hall, before a delirious crowd respresenting peoples from all over the universe, they walk up to a dais to be presented with gold medals by a radiant figure dressed in flowing white. As Luke receives his prize, he can scarcely hear the cheers. His thoughts are solely occupied by the smiling face of the Princess before him.

The Thrilling Escape from Death

Again and again in all these expressions of the Overcoming the Monster plot we see a moment which is of fundamental significance to storytelling: one whih, like the characteristics of the monster itself, is relevant to stories of many kinds other than just those shaped by this particular plot.

To the huge relief of the hero (and of ourselves as the audience, identifying with his fate), just when it seems all is lost and that his destruction is inevitable, he makes a miraculous escape. Always it is only in the nic of time, just when all seems lost, that Luke Skywalker escapes from the final deadly assault by Darth Vader; that Quatermass saves mankind from the extra-terrestrials; that James Bond escapes from the clutches of his villains; that Well’s invading Martians are killed by bacteria; that the guns of Navarone are blown up; that Gary Cooper in High Noon is saved by the unexpected shot fired by his wife; that Jack manages to scramble back down the beanstalk; that the forester bursts in to save Red Riding Hood from the devouring wolf. From the constricting sense of imminent death, often physically represented by some dark, enclosing space in which the hero or heroine is trapped, they, and we the audience, are suddenly liberated.

The significance of the thrilling escape from death runs very deep. It is one of the most consistent motifs in storytelling, cropping up again and again in stories of every kind, and it is hardly surprising that we should find stories based on little else but the build up to a thrilling espace.  For instance, Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Camus’s La Peste are both stories set in a city which has been attacked by a mysterious, deadly pestilence. From small beginnings, we feel the virulence of the plague becoming more and more obvious and terrifying until it seems no one can possible survive: then suddenly, as by a miracle it fades away. The mysterious plague in such stories is playing the part of the monster, all – conquering, deadly, remorseless in its power: except that we never see this particular monster face to face because it cannot be directly personified, but remains just a shadowy, increasingly threatening presence.  Similarly the hero is not personally responsible for overcoming the monster. At the story’s climax, the reversal comes when the threat suddenly recedes. We experience such stories, in fact, through the eyes of a hero who is merely a more or less helpless observer, sucked into a nightmare which seems certain to end in his death, until brought to an end by agencies beyond his awareness or control.

Stories on this pattern have again become familiar in recent times in the form of those ‘disaster movies’ so popular from the 1970s onwards such as ‘Airport’.  This film is centred on a group of passengers caught in the ‘enclosing space’ of a crowded airliner at night, threatened with imminent destruction by the presence of a madman armed with a bomb. At least here the threat is partly personified, and when the bomb explodes and the madman is sucked out into the darkness, it might seem that the ‘monster’ has been ‘overcome’: except that the real source of the nightmare is not the madman himself, as it would be if he were a true monster, but simply the fear of the plane crashing; and this remains unitil, with enormous difficulty and to universal relief, the plane is at last brought safely to the ground.

In fact this story of the hero’s delivrance from the nightmare of being trapped in some dark, enclosing spae, threatening death is one of the oldest in the world. An obvious example is the tale of Jonah, who falls overboard an is swallowed by the ‘great fish’. For three days he lies in its cavernous interior, sure he is about to die:

‘the water encompassed me round about, even to the soul; the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottom of the mountains; the earth with her bars was round me forever’

Then miraculously his prayers are answered and the fish ‘vomited out Jonah on the dry land’.

Jonah does not, of course, kill his ‘whale’, which is why again this adventure cannot be considered strictly an Overcoming the Monster story. But this is only one of the countless tales of a hero swallowed by a monster, found in mythology and folk tales from Europe, North America, Polynesia, Japan and almost all over the world in many of which the hero does actually slay the monster from within.

Overcoming the Monster: Summing Up

One way in which a story seems naturally to form in the human imagination shows the hero being called to face and overcome a terrible and deadly personification of evil. This threatening figure is defined by the fact that it is heartless, egocentric and seemingly all-powerful although we ultimately see that it has a blind spot which renders it vulnerable. As the story is usually presented, there is a long build-up to the final decisive confrontation, and the story is likely to run through these five stages:

1. Anticipation Stage and ‘The Call to Adventure’. We usually first become aware of the monster as if from a great distance, although in some stories we may be given some striking glimpse of its destructive power at the outset. Although initially we may see it as little more than a vaguely menacing curiosity, we gradually learn of its fearsome reputation, and how it is usually casting its threatening shadow over some community, country, kingdom or mankind in general. The hero then experiences a ‘Call to Adventure’ to confront it.
2. Dream Stage: As the hero makes his preparations for the battle to come (e.g. as he travels towards the monster or as the monster approaches), all for a while may seem to be going reasonably well. Our feelings are still of a comfortable remoteness from and immunity to danger.
3. Frustration Stage: At last we come face to face with the monster in all its awesome power. The hero seems tiny and very much alone against such a supernaturally strong opponent. Indeed it seems that he is slipping into the monster’s power (he may even fall helplessly into the monster’s clutches), and that the struggle can only have one outcome.
4. Nightmare Stage: The final ordeal begins, a nightmare battle in which all the odds seem loaded on the monster’s side. But at the climax of the story, just when all seems lost, comes the ‘reversal’.
5. The Thrilling Escape from Death, and Death of the Monster. In the nick of time, the monster is miraculously dealt a fatal blow. Its dark power is overthrown. The community which had fallen under its shadow is liberated. And the hero emerges in his full stature to enjoy the prize he has won from the monster’s grasp: a great treasure; union with the ‘Princess’; succession to some kind of ‘kingdom’.

Constriction and Release

So powerful is the effect on us of one element in this plot – the growing sense of nightmare as the hero seems to be slipping into the monster’s power, followed by the surge of relief at his thrilling escape from death – that a whole subgroup of tales has grown up which use just this element in the story to make a plot in itself. And this serves to introduce another very important general aspect of the way stories are constructed, and the way in which we all experience them.

At the most basic level, whenever we identify with the fate of a hero or heroine, we share their experience as the story unfolds in a particular sense. As they face ordeals, or come under threat, so we feel tense and apprehensive; even in extreme cases so terrified that we can scarcely bear to watch or listen. As the threat is lifted, we can relax. Our own spirits are enlarged. In other words, along with the story’s central figure, we feel a sense either of constriction or of liberation; either of being shut in and oppressed, or of being opened out. And in a story which is well-constructed, these phases or constriction and release alternate, in a kind of systole – diastole rhythm which provides one of the greatest pleasures we get from stories.

But of course these alternations are not evenly pitched throughout the story. As it unfolds, the swings from one pole to the other may become more extreme until usually the most violent of all comes just before the end, with the story’s climax. This is the point where the pressure of the dark power is at its greatest and most threatening, followed by the miraculous reversal and release of the ending.

If again we take Jack and the Beanstalk as a simple example, we initially feel, as Jack and his mother become poorer and poorer, a vague sense of constriction. How are they going to escape from their plight? As we then follow Jack up the beanstalk and his exhilarated discovery of a whole new mysterious world at the top, our spirits expand. As Jack enters the castle, and begins to pass under the menacing shadow of the giant, we feel a more violent constriction setting in. Three times this happens, punctuated by Jack’s escapes with the golden treasures (each more valuable than the last). But on the third occasion the giant is roused to angry pursuit; and, as Jack runs back to scramble down the beanstalk in a nighmare chase, it seems he is about to be caught by the giant thundering ever closer behind him. This is the climax of the story, when constriction is at it most acute, until in the nick of time Jack manages to bring beanstalk and giant crashing to destruction. The shadow is at last lifted. We feel a surge of liberation; and as it fades, we are left with the warming knowledge that, in the treasures he has won from the giant’s grasp, the hero has some much deeper hold on life which will last indefinitely into the future. As the phrase has it, he will ‘live happily ever after’.

In other words, the inmost rhythm of our experience of the story is of an initial sense of constriction, followed by a phase of relative enlargement, followed by a more serious constriction. Then the story works up to its climax, when the threatening pressure on the hero is at its greatest. This is released in a final, much deeper act of liberation, coupled with the sense that something of inestimable and lasting value had been won from the darkness.

Such is the underlying structure of most Overcoming the Monster Stories. But, as we shall see, this fundamental rhythm is so central to the way we tell stories that we find it, in different guises, almost all through storytelling.

We can now move on to our second great story plot.

“Once Upon a Time”

Early in our lives, most of us became familiar with a story which ran something like this.

Once upon a time there was a young hero or heroine, not yet embarked on adult life, living in lowly and very difficult circumstances. This humble little figure, almost certain an orphan, was regarded as of little worth by most people around, and may even have been actively maltreated. But one day something happend to send our hero or heroine out into the world where they met with a series of adventures which eventually brought about a miraculous transformation in their fortunes. Emerging from the shadows of their wretched former state, they were raised to a position of dazzling splendour, winning the admiration of all who beheld them. The hero won the hand in marriage of a beautiful Princess; the heroine won the love of a handsome Prince. They succeeded to rule over a kingdom. And from that day forth they lived ‘happily ever after’.

So familiar did this plot become to us in childhood that we take its almost unvarying regularity for granted. It is of course the story of how the little orphan Cinderella, dressed in rags and forced to sit in the ashes by her cruel stepmother and vain stepsisters, is enabled by her fairy godmother to go out to the ball – which eventually wins her the hand in marriage of her Prince. It is the story of how the little orphan Aladdin is led out of the city by his wicked ‘uncle’, the Sorcerer, to retrieve the magic lamp, thus embarking on the strange series of adventures which transform him into a rich and admired national hero, winning the hand of the Princess and finally succeeding to the kingdom of her father, the Sultan.

Most of the variations on this Rags to Riches story we met in childhood were adapted from folk tales, and it is perhaps not until we begin reading through folk stories from many different countries and cultures that we come to appreciate how universal this type of story is. The basic outline of the story we know as Cinderella is reckoned by the students of folklore to have given rise to well over a thousand different versions, found in every corner of Europe, in Africa, in Asia and among the indigenous peoples of North America. Other permutations on the Rags to Riches theme appear so often in folklore that on this score alone it must be regarded as one of the basic stories in the world.

But the story of the humble, disregarded little hero or heroine who is lifted out of the shadows of a glorious destiny is by no means, of course, confined only to only folk tales. We have already touched on such familiar examples as the opening episodes in the mediaeval story of King Arthur; or the modern fairy-tale transformation of the ragged little flower-girl Eliza Doolittle into a grand and beautiful lady which made one of the most popular stage and film musicals of our time, My Fair Lady (although without Shaw’s original happy ending in Pygmalion, where Eliza finally marries and lives happily ever after).

We can find the Rags to Riches theme in almost every form in which stories have been told. It is as ancient as the biblical story of Joseph, the little dreamer so despised by his brothers that they want to kill him, who eventually rises to a position as the Pharaoh’s chief minister, ruler over the might kingdom of Egypt. It is as modern as the countless versions produced in our own time by Hollywood, so that the very phrase ‘rags to riches story’ is these days likely to conjure up for many people the type of film which shows how a poor, obscure chorus girl dances her way to stardom or a poor boy from the slums battles his way to the top to become a world boxing champion.

Indeed there are certain categories of popular storytelling which seem so naturally drawn to the Rags to Riches plot, that we often think of this kind of story, with its ‘fairy tale happy endings’as being essentially rather simple and sentimental, the stuff of wish fulfillment rather than great literature. The Rags to Riches theme has, for instance, traditionally been associated with that type of romantic fiction which was mainly written by and for women, telling how some poor and beautiful (or plain and disregarded, but secretly admirable) heroine rises from obscurity to win the heart of a prince, dashing duke or millionaire.

But equally the Rags to Riches plot has inspired some of the most serious and admired novels in Western literature. An obvious example is David Copperfield, in which we see how an unhappy, persecuted little orphan goes out into the world and eventually rises, after many adventures, to become a rich and famous writer, at last happily united in the closing pages to his ‘true angel’. Agnes Woodward. In Jane Eyre, we again follow the fortunes of an unhappy, persecuted little Cinderella like orphan as she goes out into the world, where she eventually becomes an heiress and, against all odds, marries her adored ‘Prince’ Mr Rochester. In each of these novels the fundamental plot shaping the story is precisely that of the childhood fairy tales: that of the unhappy and disregarded little child at the beginning gradually developing and maturing through the vicissitudes of life to the fulfillment, united at last with a beloved ‘other half’.

In general terms, such a story obviously makes some profound appeal to the human imagination. But when we come to look more closely at a wide cross section of such stories, we find that they have, we find that they have much more in common than just a vague, generalised outline. Wherever we find the Rags to Riches theme in storytelling, we may be struck by how constantly certain of its features recur.

Features of the Rags to Riches Story

First of these is that, more consistently than in any other type of plot the Rags to Riches story first introduces us to its hero or heroine in childhood, or at least at a very young age before they have ventured out on the stage of the world. As yet they are not fully formed, and we ware aware that in some that in some essential way the story is concerned with the process of growing up.

When we first see them in this initial state, it is always emphasized how the little hero or heroine are at the bottom of the heap, seemingly inferior to everyone around them. Often they are the youngest child and disregarded for being so. They thus begin in the shadows cast by more dominant figures around them, who not only can see no merit in them but are usually deeply antagonistic to them.

These ‘dark’ figures who overshadow the hero or heroine in the early stages of the story fall into two main categories. Firstly they may be some adult figures, often acting in the place of a parent, such as Cinderella’s wicked stepmother, who replaces her loving real mother; or David Copperfield’s cruel stepfather Mr Murdstone and his grim sister Miss Murdstone, who replace his real parents when they die; or Jane Eyre’s guardian Aunt Reed, and the fearsome Mr Brocklehurst who takes her away to an orphanage. Secondly there are those figures nearer to the hero or heroine in age and status: Cinderella’s vain, scornful stepsisters, Joseph’s hostile older brothers, who want to kill him; the Ugly Duckling’s fellow ducklings who, along with the other animals of the farmyard, jeer at him for his awkwardness and ugliness.

Whichever of these categories they fall into, these dark figures are always presented in the same light. In their scornful attitude to the hero or heroine, they are both hard-hearted and blind: they can neither feel for them nor perceive their true qualities. They are also, like Cinderella’s stepsisters, wholly self-centred: vain, puffed-up, short-tempered, deceitful, concerned only with furthering their own interests. Later in the story, other ‘dark’ figures may emerge to stand between the hero or heroine and their ultimate goal: as we see in David Copperfield’s rival for the hand of Agnes, the treacherous Uriah Heep; or in Jane Eyre’s egrerious suitor St John Rivers. But these characters are typified by precisely the same negative qualities; they are defined by their egocentricity, their blinkered vision, their incapacity for true, selfless love.

What we see in the ‘dark’ figures of Rags to Riches stories is thus a combination of characteristics already familiar from our first plot, Overcoming the Monster. Psychologically, they share the same essential attributes as the monster. And against this we see the hero or the heroine themselves set in complete contrast. The hero or heroine begin the story largely unformed, in the shadows cast by the more dominant figures around them. But it is central to the story, as they gradually emerge from these shadows toward the light, that the hero or heroine are not marked by these same hard, self-centred characteristics. We always see them as a positive against the overshadowing negative: and in this sense, as the story unfolds, they do not change their essential character. All that happens is that they develop or reveal qualities which have been in them, at least potentially, all the time: to the point where, by the end of the story, two things have happened.

Firstly, all the dark figures have either been discomfited or have just faded away. And seconly, the hero or heroine have at last emerged fully into the light, so that everyone can at last recognise how exceptional they are. It is this which has essentially been happening in the story, and the fact that their material circumstances may also have gone through such a transformation – e.g., that they have exchanged their original poverty and rags for riches and fine clothes – is only an outward reflection of what has inwardly happened to them, lending it dramatic emphasis.

Even in the simplest folk-tale versions of the Rags to Riches plot, we can see how carefully this point is brought out. By the end of the story, no one ever doubts that the originally derided and humble little hero or heroine should be worthy of their final glorious destiny, however improbable it might have seemed from their circumstances at the beginning that they have already revealed along the way qualities which show their true inner worth. When Cinderella goes to the ball and meets her Prince for the first time, it is not just the magnificent clothes in which she has been dressed by her fairy godmother which catch every eye; it is her innate beauty and obvious sweetness of nature, which fine clothes have only helped to ‘bring out’ (it is a telling detail at the end that when the Prince finally sees  her in her rags, he at once recognizes her as the girl he loves; she does not need external trappings to be seen as beautiful in the eyes of the right person).  Similarly, when Aladdin is decked out by the genie of the lamp in all sorts of splendor for his wedding to the Princess, the formerly scorned little urchin win all hearts by his generosity and noble bearing, and astonishes his prospective father-in-law the Sultan by his ‘eloquence and cultured speech’,  his ‘gallantry and wit’.

Yet obviously these dazzling young heroes and heroines are not exactly the same people that we saw, unhappy, confused and rejected, in the earlier scenes of their stories. What has happened to them is that they have at last revealed or developed what was potentially in them all the time. They have matured. They have grown up. They have fully realised everything that was in them to become. In het best and highest sense, they have become themselves.

An example of a Rags to Rigs story which makes this point particularly clearly  – because, stripped down to this essence, the story consists of very little else – is Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling. Being a duckling, the hero can hardly make the journey from literal rags to literal riches. But he is certainly looked down on by everyone at the beginning, and almost our entire interest in the tale centres round the contrast between that long initial period of misery and confusion when he suffers because he does not know who he really is, and that final moment of joyful self-realisation when he flowers into his true self as a beautiful swan.

In the majority of Rags to Riches tales, however, the joy and perfection of the central figure’s final state are also expressed by those two other ingredients which equally have nothing to do with literal riches, but which are so fundamental to the world’s storytelling that they are almost synonymous with our notion of a ‘happy ending’.

The first is that, somewhere along the way the hero should have met the girl of his dreams, a beautiful maiden or ‘Princess’. The heroine has met her handsome ‘Prince’. Nothing more profoundly conveys our sense of resolution at the end of the story that they should be united ,two lovers brought together in perfect love.

The second is that the hero, or the newly united pair, should then succeed to some kind of kingdom, inheritance or domain, over which they can rule. There we can leave them, with the sense that, after a long period when it seems that dark forces and uncertainty ruled the day, everything has at last been brought or restored to where it should be. We may at this point be told that ‘they lived happily ever after’ and we do not necessarily need to know anything more about them: because we have reached that mysterious central goal in storytelling, where everything seems to be perfect and complete.

The Central Crisis

At first sight it might seem that the process whereby the hero or heroine of a Rags to Riches story eventually reaches this goal is fairly simple. But the more systematically we examine such stories, the more we may be struck by the way the hero or heroine’s emergence from the shadows is rarely presented as a simple, unbroken climb. In fact there is usually a particular moment in the story when, after an initial improvement in the hero’s or heroine’s fortunes (sometimes so great that it might in itself seem the cue for a happy ending), they suddenly hit a new point of crisis, when all hopes of a happy ending seem to have been snatched away forever.

A central moment of crisis and despair is in fact so natural to the pattern of the Rags to Riches story that there are few examples where in some form or another it does not appear. Even in the Ugly Duckling there is no moment when the hero’s spirits are at a lower ebb than after his first glimpse of the ‘kingly’ swans: a prevision of the unthinkable glories life might hold. But then the swans disappear, leaving the duckling alone to face the hardships of a long, terrible winter. He has never been so cold, short of food or miserable. It is only when he has been through this last greatest ordeal that at last spring arrives, bringing with it the miraculous moment of his transformation into a ‘kingly’ swan himself, ‘the most beautiful of them all’.

Similarly in Cinderella, there is no moment when everything seems more hopeless for the heroine than after her third visit to the ball. Three times she has left her rags and ashes to dance with the Prince, winning universal admiration and catching a glimpse of the unthinkable happiness life might hold for her. Now, as she returns to her miserable, imprisoned life as a maid-of-all-work, with no prospect of ever seeing the Prince again, all seems blacker than ever. But of course, in her headlong flight from the palace on the third visit, she has left behind her dainty slipper; and, quite unknown to her, the Prince has found it, and sent out far and wide across the kingdom to see whose foot the slipper will fit. As with Arthur and the sword in the stone, the trying on of the slipper is a version of that motif familiar from many of the world’s myths, legends and folk tales, ‘the test which only the true hero, or heroine, can pass.’ Cinderella comes through her ordeal triumphantly. The Prince at once recognises her in her rags, and they proceed to the traditional happy ending.

In each of these examples we see the same essential structure to the story, as it falles into two distinct stages, separated in the middle by the central crisis. First there is the initial rise in the hero’s or heroine’s fortunes, as they are taken out of their original state of helpless misery and may have a glimpse of the glorious state they might one day attain Then comes the terrible crisis, when all seems lost again. Then comes the second half of the story, which shows them being prepared unwittingly for their final reversal of fortune, their final emergence into the light and the glorious state of completeness at which they arrive at the end.

We can already see this pattern at work in by far the earliest example of a Rags to Riches story of which we have record, the story of Joseph from the biblical book of Genesis When young Joseph’s jealous brothers, after first planning to leave him to die in the desert, then sell him into slavery in Egypt, he eventually rises to rule as an overseer over the household of Potiphar, the captain of the king’s guard. This is an important position, and considering Joseph’s earlier plight, when he faced death in the desert, it might seem like a miraculous happy ending to the story. But just then Joseph is falsely accused by Potiphar’s temptress wife of attempting to seduce her.  He is thrown into prison and his life seems irrevocably in ruins. Only after a long time of utter despair is Joseph’s talent for interpreting dreams (the very thing for which he had nearly been murdered by his brothers) quite unexpectedly brought to the attention of Phaoroah himself. Through this he is eventually raised up to infinitely greater heights as chief minister, the second most powerful man in the kingdom. But even then, as Joseph enjoys his position of immense wealth and splendor, there is a crucial piece of unfinished business remaining before the story can come to a completely happy conclusion: Joseph’s rift with his brothers. As famine stalks the land of Israel, they come to Egypt pleading with this mighty, powerful figure to be given enough corn to survive. At first Joseph rejects them, until he is so moved by the sight of his youngest brother, ‘little Benjamin’, who had not been party to his earlier persecution, and by the thought of his aged father Jacob starving back in Israel, that he relents. He gives them the food they need. Only when he has passed this final test, and been reunited with his family in a state of love and forgiveness, can the story end on an image of complete resolution.

Equally it is by no means just in the older and more traditional forms of the Rags of Riches tale that we see this pattern of the story’s division into two ‘halves’ interrupted by a ‘central crisis’. We are just as likely to find it in versions as far removed from the world of the traditional folk tale or biblical legend as could be imagined.

Rags to Riches in Hollywood

An early instance of the fondness of Hollywood for the Rags to Riches theme was Charlie Chaplin’s silent classic The Gold Rush (1921).  The first half of the story shows Chaplin in his familiar ‘tramp’ role, as an unsuccessful little Alaskan gold prospector, whose dreams of happiness centre on Georgia, a dance hall hostess he has met in a nearby town, and with whom he has fallen in love. He invites her to a New Year’s dinner in his shack, and all might seem set fair for a happy ending to his years of loneliness. But she had only accepted the invitation as a joke and fails to turn up. The central crisis has arrived. He has not discovered any gold; he has lost the girl who had become the dearest thing to him in the world; his life is in ruins. But then comes the second half of the story, when he helps his friend Big Jim to discover a lost gold mine and is rewarded with a share which makes him fabulously rich. We see him embarking on a ship back to San Francisco as a multi – millionaire, posing on the deck for photographers in his tramp’s clothes.

He slips and falls down onto a lower deck, where who should be first to see him but Georgia, travelling steerage on the same boat. From his clothes she imagines he must be a stowaway and offers to pay his fare but revealing his good fortune, he invites her to join him in first class and the film ends with the couple in joyful embrace.

Another form of the Rags to Riches theme particularly beloved by Hollywood has been the story of the poor, struggling artist, inventor or scientist who for long is scorned by an uncomprehending world – but who is eventually recognised as a genius and ends in a blaze of universal acclaim (usually in fond embrace with the wife or girl he loves, who alone has stood by him during the years of rejection and apparant failure).

Typical of this genre was The Benny Goodman Story, made in 1956 about the life of the 1930s bandleader. And although the film was based, as they say, on a ‘true story’ it is fascinating to see how the scriptwriters chose to arrange their material to mae it into a satisfactory story for the screen.

A poor Jewish boy, born into the Chicago slums in the early years of the twentieth century takes up the clarinet and is early spotted by his wise old white haired teacher to have remarkable talent. Growing up in the ‘Jazz Age’ of the 1920s he is drawn to the unconventional new music and eventually after various struggles and rebuffs becomes leader of his own band. He enjoys initial success, rather as Cinderella enjoys her initial moments of success at the ball. But then comes the crisis. The band’s new brand of ‘swing music’ has developed beyond the point where public taste seems ready to follow. As the musicians travel on a make-or-break tour across America, audiences dwindle, bookings fall off, money runs out and it seems the orchestra will have to disband. Failure stares Goodman in the face. When they reach California, they have just one last engagement left, at the Palomar ballroom in Los Angeles. A huge crowd of dancers has turned up, but when the band begins to play straight dance music, they seem bored. It seems like the final moment of rejection, until in a final gesture of defiance, Goodman decides to go down fighting, by switching to the hottest music his musicians can play. The dancers break off from dancing and cluster round the bandstand simply to listen. Suddenly cheering breaks out. It is clear that ‘swing’is just what America has been waiting for. Headlines pour across the screen recording the band’s success, until the film ends with Goodman winning the hand of his ‘Princess’, his rich young impressario’s beautiful upper-class sisten, while the band faces its final test, a concert in Carnegie Hall, the first time a mere jazz orchestra has ever been permitted into the hallowed citadel of America’s classical music. A close-up shows the feet of the heroine’s elderly, conventional, rich parents surreptitiously beginning to tap to the rhythm of the music. The entire audience rises to give Goodman an ovation. The slum-born hero has triumphantly won his way into the ‘kingdom’.

Rags to Riches: Aladdin’s Story

We are now in a position to see how, as it unfolds in the mind of the storyteller, a story based on the Rags to Riches story plot tends to take on a certain, quite specific shape. The longer and more fully developed such a story becomes, the more apparent this is likely to be, and this may be illustrated in some detail by way of two last examples. On the face of it, these stories could scarcely seem more dissimilar: one is the ancient Middle Eastern folk tale of Aladdin; the other a well known nineteenth century English novel, Jane Eyre. But as we follow the essence of what is happening to the central figure in each of these stories, we begin to see clearly what this structure of the Rags to Riches plot is really about.

The story of Aladdin and his Enchanted Lamp supposedly comes from the famous collection of Middle Eastern tales The Thousand and One Nights dating back to the eight century. The story begins with Aladdin as an unruly little good-for-nothing orphan living alone with his mother in a great city. His father is dead and nothing can be done to control him. But one day a mysterious ‘Sorcerer’appears, claiming to be the dead father’s long lost brother. Aladdin’s new uncle makes a great show of taking a fatherly interest in the boy and leads the young hero out of the city to a remote spot in the shadow of a great mountain. Here a mysterious hole appears in the ground. The Sorcerer gives Aladdin a magic ring to protect him in case of trouble, and the boy is sent down into the underground cave where he finds three rooms containing a fabulous treasure, jewels and finely worked gold and silver, shining in the darkness.

But Aladidin has been instructed on no account to touch any of this. He must venture right to the back of the caves, where in a niche he will see an unprepossessing – looking old lamp. This he must bring back to the surface. When he does so, the Sorcerer turns out to be a wicked trickster. He asks Aladdin to hand the lamp up to him, but when the boy refuses, a rock closes over the entrance and the hero finds himself trapped. After three days of imprisonment in the darkness, he is just about to give up all hope when, in the nick of time, he inadvertently rubs the ring. A genie appears, who has the power to free him. Aladdin returns home, where he eventually discovers the much greater powers of the genie of the lamp. Thanks to the genie’s help, he and his mother are now able to live in comfort for some years, while Aladdin, now in his teens, is quite transformed from the feckless child he was at the start of the story, spending time in earnest conversation with travellers from afar, learning about the world.

Such is the first part of the story, which shows the hero, with the aid of newly discovered and mysterious powers, being turned from an unformed and unruly child into a serious young man on the verge of adult life.

The second stage of the story shows Aladdin falling in love, from a distance, with the most beautiful woman in the city, the Princess Badr – al – Budr, the daughter of the city’s ruler. He hardly dares think he could ever be fortunate enough to win her, and indeed for a long time it seems certain that she will marry someone else – the arrogant son of the king’s chief vizier. But eventually, with the aid of the genie of the lamp, Aladdin succeeds against all the odds in outwitting his dark rival and wins the Princess’s hand. He is tranformed by the genie into a splendid and wealthy young man, whose qualities, including his good-hearted generosity, win universal admiration. The wedding takes place; the genie constructs for Aladdin’s a palace even more magnificent than the king’s own; and, as general in charge of the king’s army, he wins a great victory over the country’s enemies. He has become a national hero.

Outwardly, by this point in the story, the young man seems to have the world at his feet. He has gone out onto the stage of the world, he has won the hand in marriage of the woman he has come to desire more than anything else, he is the most admired man in the kingdom. All might seem set for a happy, if somewhat straightforward ending to his story. But the storyteller is careful to emphasise just how much Aladdin’s success is outward. He owes everything to the genies. And for the first time there is an ominous hint of impending trouble when Aladdin boasts to his father – in – law about the magnificence of his palace. He is getting carried away by the success that has come to him too easily, and we realise that a great deal more has to happen before his story can be properly and completely resolved.

Indeed it is now that the ‘central crisis’ arrives. While Aladdin is away from the city hunting, his attention all turned to the outside world, the shadowy Sorcerer creeps back into the city in disguise, offering ‘new lamps for old’. The Princess falls for the trick and gives away the old lamp which has been the source of all her husband’s success. In the twinkling of an eye, the Sorcerer has spirited Princess and palace away to darkest Africa. Aladdin returns to the city to find his world in ruins. Not only has he lost everything that was most dear to him, but the king is in a towering rage, threathening that unless Aladdin can return everything to where it was within forty days he will be put to death.

Faced with this unprecedented crisis, not knowing where to begin, Aladdin wanders out into the desert in suicidal despair. Resigning himself to death, he inadvertently rubs the ring, still on his finger and the lesser genie appears. Aladdin appeals to him for help, and the genie says he can transport Aladdin to the place in Africa where the Princess and the palace have been taken. But beyond that he cannot help, because the powers of the genie of the lamp are too strong. From then on, it will be to Aladdin alone.

This highly significant moment marks the beginning of the second half of the story. Just when all seems lost, Aladdin is rescued; but only on the crucial condtion that, from now on, he must, in some entirely new way, learn to rely on himself and bring his own powers into play.

The new phase begins with Aladdin being carried to Africa, where he finds the Princess guarded day and night in the Palace by the dark powers of the Sorcerer. Disguising himself as a beggar (returning to the humble state in which he first begun) he enters the Palace and manages to reach the Princess, whom he supplies with a drug which she is to administer to the Sorcerer. When the Sorcerer is fallen into a state of unconsciousness, Aladdin breaks in and kills him. The monster is overcome. With the aid of the lamp, the hero then joyfully returns the Princess, himself and the palace back to China where they all belong.

Again this might seem to have all the makings of a happy ending but Aladdin now has to face a last testing ordeal, more nearly deadly than anything he has been through before, which provides the real climax to the story.

There arrives in the city the Sorcerer’s brother, bent on revenge. The dark power represented by the Sorcerer has still not been finally overthrown. Originally we saw him, eager to obtain the lamp, in the role of Predator. We then saw him defending his ill-gotten gains in Africa, as Holdfast. We now see him, transmuted as his brother but otherwise identical as Avenger.

The new Sorcerer secretly kills a famous ‘Holy Woman’of the city and, putting on her disguise, inveigles himself into the Princess’confidence. Everyon is taken in, even Aladdin, who, at the false Holy Woman’s suggestion, asks the genie of the lamp for the one thing necessary to make the palace perfect: the egg of the roc, a fabulous bird. The genie flies into a rage, saying that this is the one thing in the world it is not in his power to provide, because the roc is his mother. There is no way he can help Aladdin, apart from revealing to him that the Holy Woman is the Sorcerer in disguise. Aladdin realises the terrible danger they are all in, and that he is now completely on his own. Only by his own wits and courage can he overcome the dark power which has been arraigned against him since the beginning of the story. In a final climactic confrontation, he manages to outwit and kill the Sorcerer. Only when the dark power has thus been overthrown forever, does the awed and grateful Princess finally recognise his true worth (I confess I have never done justice to our love). They are at last truly and fully united, the king eventually dies, and Aladdin succeeds to the kingdom.

We can now see what the story was really about: the journey of a human being from unformed childhood to a final state of complete personal maturity. In the first half we see Aladdin, as he grows up from boyhood to adulthood, discovering that he has immense powers at his command, which bring him a dazzling marriage and glorious outward success on the stage of the world. But in no sense is he yet fully developed and mature; and this is symbolised in the way he has owed everything to the genies. He becomes forgetful of this and begins to behave hubristically, showing how immature he still is. Then the great crisis erupts and he loses everything, falling into total despair. We realise that, to become a true hero, he must cease to rely unthinkingly on these mysterious powers. He must go back to the beginning again and learn consciously how to stand on his own feet, and to become master of his own fate, his own character. Only when he has tus grown fully in inner stature and become completely his own man can the dark power which in one way or another has dogged him throughout the story be finally seen through and thrown off. Only now is he liberated to become completely united with his ‘other half’; the Princess, symbolising the state of personal wholeness he has reached: and only now is he truly fitted to succeed to rule wisely and justly over the kingdom. He has reached the end of his journey.

Rags to Riches in Jane Eyre

Let us now compare this fully – developed version of the Rags to Riches plot with our second, outwardly very different example, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847).

The story of Jane Eyre begins with the heroine as an unruly and miserable little orphan living with ther mother’s sister, Aunt Reed. Nothing can be done to control Jane when she is in one of her rages and one day the fearsome pillar of evangelical rectitude Mr Brocklehurst appears, making a show of only wanting to serve Jane’s best interests, to take her off to the orphanage at Lowood. Her introduction to this strange new world is a terrifying ordeal, but when Jane has come through it she eventually settles down to several years of steady progress, blossoming into a serious – minded and accomplished girl in her late teens. This corresponds to the first phase of Aladdin’s story, as it shows Jane being transformed from an unruly child into a serious young woman on the verge of adult life.

The second part of her story shows her going out into the wider world in a a new way, when she takes up her first employment at the great house of Thornfield, as governess to the daughter of the rich and mysterious Mr Rochester. She conceives a deep but seemingly hopeless love for Rochester. She can hardly dare think she would ever be fortunate enough to marry him. Indeed for a long time it seems certain that he will marry someone else, a well – born, arrogant neighbour Blanche Ingram. But eventually, to Jane’s astonishment, Rochester declares his love for his ‘plain little governess’ and asks her to marry him. It might seem an unthinkable happy ending was imminent, except that there are now abundant ominous signs that, behind the scenes, all is not well. The truth is that, even as preparations are going ahead for the wedding and Rochester is buying fine clothes to deck out his bride, she is inwardly not ready for this over-hasty transformation in her life and status. She is still an immature, undeveloped girl, who knows little of the dark side of life and the world: and then, even as she approaches the altar to be married, the central crisis of the story erupts.

A voice calls out from the back of the church that the wedding cannot take place because Rochester is already married. It turns out that for years he has been concealing his crazed first wife in an upstairs room at Thornfield Hall. Jane’s seemingly glorious new world is in ruins. In despair she runs away from Thornfield, to wander distractedly over the bleak, inhospitable moors. After three days, cold, weak and starving, she falls down on a cottage doorstep to die – when, in the nick of time, she is rescued by the seemingly kindly clergyman St John Rivers. Under the care of River’s sisters, Jane gradually recovers her strength and we then see a very significant new phase in her story. We see Jane setting up house on her own, opening a successful little school, and for the first time in her life learning to stand on her own feet, developing an inner strength and independence of spirit  she has never known before: until, as a mark of her newly – won autonomy, she learns that she has mysteriously inherited a modest fortune, making her outwardly as well as inwardly independent.

But even now, like Aladdin when through his own efforts he has been able to recover the lamp and return home from Africa,  Jane has to face one last terrifying ordeal, more nearly deadly than anything she has had to contend with before. The ordeal, more nearly deadly than anything she has had to contend with before. The iron-willed, evangelical and hypocritical St John Rivers –  a ‘false Holy Man’ – uses all his powers to force her to marry him, and to accompany  him as a missionary to India, which Jane knows would certainly be fatal to her health. Although she tries to resist, she feels her powers of resistance slipping away and is on the verge on succumbing, when she hears a distant, mysterious voice calling her name, as if from half across the world. It is the voice of Rochester. An extraordinary new strength wells up in her (at last, as she puts it, ‘my powers were in play’).  She flees the house in the middle of the night and rushes across the countryside to Thornfield, where she finds that the house has recently burned down. The shadowy first Mrs Rochester has died in the fire. Her dark rival has gone. Jane finds Rochester, alone and blind, in the middle of the forest. She lovingly nurses him back to health and sight. They are at last married and completely united. They end up presiding over their little kingdom and, as nearly as a novel will allow, living ‘happily ever after’.

What we thus see in Jane Eyre is a fundamental structure to the story strikingly similar to that of Aladdin: the process whereby a young central figure emerges step by step from an initial state of dependent, unformed childhood to a final state of complete self-realisation and wholeness. Obviously one of the most significant features of this type of story is the way it divides into two ‘halves’, punctuated by the ‘central crisis’. In the first half we see the hero or heroine emerging from childhood to a state where they may seem outwardly successful, except that they are by no means yet fully mature. They then encounter a crisis which leads them on to the harder task of becoming much more fully developed and self reliant. This leads up to the ordeal which provides the story’s climax where they have a final confrontation with the dark figures and powers who, in one way or another, have overshadowed them through the story. Only when they have come through this test are they finally liberated to enjoy the state of wholeness and fulfilment which marks the conclusion of the tale.

The Dark Version: Le Rouge et Le Noir

Once we are familiar with the essential outlines of this type of story we can recognise a variation on the theme which may be called the ‘dark’ version of the Rags to Riches plot. This is the sort of tale which shows a hero or heroine who attempts to follow the general pattern of the climb from rags to riches, but in some way fails to arrive at its fully rewarding conclusion.

Le Rouge et Le Noir introduces us to a little hero of humble origins living in an obscure provincial town in France in the years after the fall of Napoleon. Julien Sorel, a clever boy who enjoys reading books, is scorned by his practical, down-to-earth father and older brothers (we hear nothing of his mother, who appears to be absent). In this sense he starts as a litlle dreamer, his head apparently in the clouds, who is scorned and rejected by his unimaginative family.

But Sorel is not like the traditional folk tale hero. He is profoundly ambitious. His dreams are of winning earthly glory, like his hero Napoleon, and in general his attitude towards the rest of the world is one of contempt. As he nears adult life, he goes out from home in a first, limited way, by having an affair with an older married woman in the town where they live, but eventually he contemptuously rejects her. He then goes off to a seminary for prospective priests, but only because he has calculated that the Church is the best stepping stone for a poor boy to further his worldy ambitions. Again this attitude towards his fellow students is one of heartless scorn.

Eventually Sorel travels to the centre of all his ambitions, the great city of Paris, where he wins the post of private secretary to the magnificent Marquis de la Mole, the most powerful man in France. He unscrupulously worms his way into the heart of his employer’s beautiful daughter Mathilde (whom he enjoys humiliating sexually) and seems on the verge of marrying her and succeeding to the ‘kingdom’ of immense power and riches. But at the last moment disaster strikes. The unhappy mistress he had discarded years before comes back into his life, obsessed with her desire for revenge. In a desperate bid to hold onto his new prospects, he attempts to murder her – and ends up, not at the altar with his ‘Princess’, but disgraced an on the guillotine.

Obviously there is a huge difference between the heartless, self – seeking Sorel and the essentially good-hearted heroes and heroines we have been looking at (who are so specifically contrasted with the self-seeking dark figures who are their main antagonists and rivals). When Sorel comes into any kind of opposition to others in his story, it is they who become victims of his egotism rather than the other way around. He himself is indeed a kind of ‘monster’. Yet, outwardly, the ultimate goal he is seeking is remarkably similar to that central symbolic goal we see in other stories. What he aspires to is union with the ‘beloved other’ and succession to a position of great power: except that he is after these things only as a means to egotistical gratification, as expressions of his desire for power over others. And in the end his drive for that goal is not just frustrated; it brings about his complete destruction.

We shall later see that the Rags to Riches plot is by no means the only type of story which can give rise to ‘dark’ versions like this. Yet what is significant is how these unfold to their self-destructive endings by precisely the same rules which govern the way in which the ‘light’ versions proceed to their happy endings. In coming to understand just how subtly and consistently this principle operates all through storytelling we shall uncover one of the most important secrets stories have to offer.

Rags to Riches Summing Up

A second way in which a story naturally takes shape in the human imagination is that which shows how some young, unrecognized hero or heroine is eventually lifted out of obscurity, poverty and misery to a state of great splendor and happiness. But their upward progress is unlikely to be a continuous unbroken climb, and most Rags to Riches stories, except the very simplest versions, may well unfold through a recognizable series of stages like this:

1.  Initial wretchedness at home and the Call to Adventure. We are first introduced to the young hero or heroine in their original lowly and unhappy state, usually at home. The most obvious reason for their misery is that they are overshadowed by malevolent ‘dark’ figures around them, who scorn or maltreat them. This phase ends when something happens to call and send them out into a wider world.
2. Out into the world, initial success; Although this new phase may be  marked by new ordeals, the hero or heroine are here rewarded with their first, limited success, and may have some prevision of their eventual glorious destiny. They may make a first encounter with their ‘Princess’ or ‘Prince’ and may even outstrip dark rivals, but only in some incomplete fashion, and it is made clear that they are not yet ready for their final state of complete fulfillment.
3. The central crisis: Everything suddenly goes wrong. The shadows cast by the dark figures return. Hero or heroine are separated from that which has become more important to them than anything in the world, and they are overwhelmed with despair. Because of the earlier lift in their fortunes, and because they are so powerless, this is the worst moment in the story.
4.  Independence and the final ordeal: As they emerge from the crisis, we gradually come to see the hero or heroine in a new light. Although still unfulfilled, they are discovering in themselves a new independent strength. As this develops it must at last be put to a final test, again usually involving a battle with some powerful dark figure who stands, as a dark rival, between them and their goal; and this forms the climax to the whole story. Only when this has been successfully resolved and the shadow over their lives wholly removed, are they at last liberated to move to the final stage.
5. Final union, completion and fulfillment:  Their reward is usually a state of complete, loving union with the ‘Princess’ or ‘Prince’. They may also finally succeed to some kind of ‘kingdom’, the nature of which is not spelled out but which from their mature and developed state, implies a domain over which they will rule wisely and well. The story thus resolves on an image which signifies a perfect state of wholeness, lasting indefinitely into the future (‘they lived happily ever after’)

As in the Overcoming the Monster plot, we see that, at its deepest level, the Rags to Riches story unfolds through alternating phases of constriction and expansion. We begin with the hero or heroine weighed down by the contempt and even persecution to which they are exposed in the opening scenes. This is followed by the sense of a gradual opening out and lifting of their hopes as they go out into the world and meet with their modest early successes. But this is abruptly ended by the shock of a central crisis, imposing a new sense of constriction. Again there is a gradual opening out, as they develop a deeper maturity, until this is put to a climactic test, when the sense of constriction is at its most severe. Only then can we see the final act of liberation which enables them to emerge triumphant at the end of the story, having won the prize which gives them a sense of complete fulfillment and a hold on life which will continue indefinitely into the future.

The Quest

In the distant land of Mordor, says Gandalf, the old wizard, there is a mighty volcanic mountain. Your task, he tells Frodo, the young hero, is to journey to that far-off place, carrying a priceless ring, and cast into the Cracks of Doom.

When Squire Trelawney and Dr Livesey look at the parchment map the young hero Jim Hawkins has found in a dead man’s chest, they see that it reveals the place on a far – off desert island where a fabulous pirate treasure is buried. They at once agree that they must sail in search of it.

When Odysseus embarks with his men after the sack of Troy, his only desire is to return home to his far-off island kingdom of Ithaca and his beloved wife Penelope.

No type of story is more instantly recognisable to us than a Quest. Far away, we learn, there is some priceless goal, worth any effort to achieve: a treasure, a promised land; something of infinite value. From the moment the hero learns of this prize, the need to set out on the long hazardous journey to reach it becomes the most important thing to him in the world. Whatever perils and diversions lie in the wait on the way, the story is shaped by that one overriding imperative; and the story remains unresolved until the objective has been finally, triumphantly secured.

Some of the most celebrated stories in the world are quests: Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid,  Dante’s Divine Comedy, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The theme has inspired myths, legends, fairy tales and stories of all kinds, right up to such popular modern examples as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,  Richard Adam’s Watership Down or Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.

On the face of it, stories based on the plot of the Quest could hardly seem more disparate. Consider, for example, the variety of goals the hero is seeking. It may be some fabulous buried treasure, as in Stevenson’s Treasure Island or Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines.

It may be some other, rather more mysterious priceless object, such as the Golden Fleece or the Holy Grail sought by King Arthur’s knights or the most sacred treasure in Jewish tradition, the Arik of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It may be ‘home’ as in Odysseus’s wanderings after the Trojan War. It may be some new home, as was sought by Aenas, or by the Jews in their exodus from Egypt towards the ‘promised land’.  It may be the secret of immortality, as was sought by Gilgamesh in his journey to the end of the world – or simply the distant ‘freedom’ dreamed-of by the escapers in so many Second World War prison-camp escape stories. It may be the Celestial City, Paradise itself as in Pilgrim’s Progress or the Divine Comedy.

Yet when we come to examine such tales more closely, we find that they reveal some startling similarities.

The Call to Adventure

We begin with the reason why the hero and his companions set out on their journey in the first place. The Quest usually begins on a note of the most urgent compulsion. For the hero to remain quietly ‘at home’ (or wherever he happens to be) has become impossible. Some fearful threat has arisen. The ‘times are out of joint’. Something has gone seriously and terrifyingly wrong.

The story of Aeneas begins amid the roaring flames, billowing smoke and crashing masonry of his beloved Troy, as it is being sacked by the Greeks. Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress has a nightmare vision in which he sees that the city he lives in ‘will be burned with fire from heaven’.

In the midst of this fear and suffering comes the Call. Amid the smoking ruins of Troy, the ghost of Aeneas’s lost wife Creusa looms up, ‘larger than life’, to tell him that across ‘a great waste of ocean’, in the Western land’ he will find a new home. Christian meets Evangelist, who points out a distant shining light and tells him that he must head for it. Moses has a terrifying vision of God in the Burning Bush, telling him that the Jews must flee Egypt and that they eventually will be brought up into ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’.

The Grail quest begins with the arrival of King Arthur’s court of a strange knight. He proves to be the only knight who can sit safely in the Siege Perilous, the ‘Seat of Danger’at the Round table.  And this seemingly miraculous arrival of the young hero Sir Galahad is seen as the signal for the long-promised quest for the Holy Grail, ‘to free our country from the enchantments and strange events which have troubled it so often and so long’. There is a terrible clap of thunder, the hall is lit by a ray of more than earthly light, and the knights are given a ethereal prevision of the Grail for which they are about to set off in search.

So subtly constructed is the Odyssey, with its flasbacks and shifts in the centre from which the narrative is related, that, as Homer arranges the story, we do not begin with Odysseus at all. The story begins with the terrible threat overhanging the kingdom of Ithaca from which its king Odysseus has been absent for many years. Amid the riots and debauches of the suitors for the hand of his queen Penelope (who has all but given up hope that Odysseus will ever return), the Call comes in a visit by the goddess Athene to his son Telemachus. She sends him forth to search for his lost father, almost as if young Telemachus is himself the hero of the quest. It is not until some considerable time later that we finally join up with the real quest motivating the poem: that of Odysseus seeking to return home, which had of course begun long before, like that of Aneas, in the smoking wreck of Troy.

Surrounded by this atmosphere of menace and constriction the Quest hero and his friends feel under intense compulsion to get away. Even  so, they may face every kind of discouragement and opposition before they can depart. Aeneas and his friends only escape from Troy by the skin of their teeth.  While the longest struggle of all is faced by the Jews in Egypt, who only escape the clutches of the tyrannical Phaoroah in Egypt after the land has been smitten with seven plagues. But at last, led on by visions of a goal which has become more precious and desirable to them than anything in the world, the hero and his companions set out.

The Hero’s Companions

We can say ‘the hero and his companions’ because a distinctive mark of the Quest is the extent to which, more than in any other kind of story, the hero is not alone in his adventures. The story does ultimately centre round the single figure of the hero. But we are also made aware of the presence and importance of the friends who accompany him.

In fact the relationship of the hero to his companions assumes one of four general forms.

Firstly, the hero’s companions may simply be a large number of undifferentiated appendages, few if any of whom we even know by name. Such are the twelve boatloads of men who set out from Troy with Odysseus, Aenas’s Trojans or the main body of the Jews who accompany Moses.

Secondly, the hero may have an alter-ego who has no real distinguishing mark except his fidelity. Frodo in the Lord of the Rings has the ‘faithful Sam Gamgee’ , Hamlet has his ‘faithful Horatio’.

Thirdly, the hero may have a subtler type of alter-ego whose role is to serve as a foil, displaying qualities the opposite of those shown by the hero. In the story of the Jewish exodus, for instance, Moses is shadowed in this way by his brother Aaron. Whenever Moses is being particularly faithful to his commission to lead the Jews into the Promised Land (as when he is up on Mount Sinai, receiving the ten commandments), Aaron is likely to be embodying infidelity and disloyalty (as in inciting the Jews to worship the Golden Calf). When the hero in the Epic of Gilgamesh sets out to slay the giant Humbaba, he takes with him his friend Enkidu; whenever Gilgamesh expresses courage and confidence, it is Enkidu who expresses the opposite emotions, fear and doubt. Equally, whenever the hero is in negative mode, it may be the alter – ego’s role to be positive.  This kind of relationship where the chief companion embodies compensatory qualities missing in the hero is of enormous importance in stories, and we shall come across many other examples: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Lear and the Fool, Don Giovanni and Leporello, to name a few.

Fourthly, in the most fully-differentiated form of the relationship between the Quest hero and his companions, the latter are each given distinct characteristics which complement each other, and add up as a whole. For in stance the group who set out on the Quest in King Solomon’s mines. Their leader and the story’s hero is Allan Quatermain; his companions are the ‘bull – lke’ Sir Henry Curtis, representing physical strength; the immaculate Captain Good, who represents rational calculation; while the intuitive principle is represented by their mysterious, regal Zulu companion, Umbopa, who seems to have more knowledge of the goal they are heading for than he lets on, for reasons which eventually emerge.

The Journey

The essential pattern of the journey in a Quest is always the same. The Hero and his companions go through a succession of terrible, often near-fatal ordeals, followed by periods of respite when they recoup their strength, receiving succour and guidance from friendly helpers to send them on their way. In other words, after the initial feeling of constriction which dominates the start of the story, we now experience the journey itself as a series of alternating phases of life – threatening constriction followed by life-giving release. We shall now consider each in turn: first, the nature of the ordeals; then that of the hero’s allies, who rescue him and help him towards his goal.

The first problem facing the hero and his companions is the nature of the terrain across which they have to make the most of their journey. Its essence is that it is wild, alien and unfriendly: a desert or wilderness (the Jews, Allan Quatermain) ; a forest (e.g. the Waste Forest’,  ‘vast and labyrinthine in its depths’ in which the Grail seekers  have most of their adventures); moorland or mountainous countryside; a countryside full of dangers from animals and men or the wild and treacherous sea.

Some of the perils they encounter therefore are simply those of the hostile terrain itself. Odysseus and Aeneas are caught in great storms of sea. The Jews and Allen Quatermain face terrible ordeals through lack of food and water, from which they are miraculously saved, in ‘thrilling escapes from death. But rather more specific obstacles than these stand between the hero and his goal, and these fall into four general categories.

The Trials

Firstly the hero and his companions are likely to encounter ‘monsters’. The episode in the Odyssey, for instance, in which Odysseus and his men are trapped in the cave of the man -eating, one-eye giant Polyphemus, and finally make their thrilling escape by blinding the Cyclops and concealing themselves under his sheep.

Aeneas and his men have a fearsome battle with the Harpies, loathsome beasts, half woman, half bird. The Argonauts also encounter the Harpies, are set on elsewhere by a race of six handed giants and, on the island of Babycos, one of them has to face in single – combat the dreaded King Amycus, who has previously challenged and killed every passer-by. Allan Quartermain and his friends have scarcely set out than they have to kill an enormous, deadly bull-elephant.

The Jews are threatened first by the pursuing armies of the Egyptians, then by the giant ‘sons of Anak’. Frodo and his companions are threatened with death by a whole range of monstrous opponents, from the mysterious ‘Black Riders’to the fearsome giant spider Shelob. While the Grail – seekers have on various occasions to fight tremendous battles in the forest with mysterious ‘Black Knights’, who are usually holding captive some beautiful maiden.

Temptations

The second specific peril the Quest hero has to face is rather more deceptive and treacherous: the ‘Temptation’. This often but not always involves some beautiful and captivating woman. The essence of the Temptation is that it holds out the promise of some physical gratification. It may be sexually arousing. It may offer rich food and intoxicating wines. It may just offer the hero a time of ease and pleasure, in contrast to the hard and austere nature of the task he has been set. In fact to surrender to a Temptation may be as unambiguously deadly as confrontation with a Monster. But often the danger the hero runs is simply that he will be seduced and lulled into forgetting the great task he has undertaken, and will abandon his Quest under some beguiling spell. The most complete picture of the various forms the Temptation may take is given in the Odyssey.

1. the beautiful but deadly Sirens who, like the Lorelei of German legend, lure sailors to their doom by their bewitching sonds. Their only aim is to kill.
2. the beautiful enchantress Circe, who imprisons all visitors to her island by turning them magically into animals (symbolising the way they have surrendered to their ‘animal’ appetites). But she does not kill them.
3. Calypso, another beautiful enchantress, who falls in love with Odysseus and so captivates him that he stays seven years in her cave. But, although restive, he stays voluntarily.
4. the simple, enervating captivation of the Land of the Lotus Eaters, which saps all will in an atmosphere of relaxed self indulgence. This traps many of Odysseus’s men until they are forcibly dragged back to their ships.

For Aenas, the chief temptation is of the Calypso type: his love affair with Dido, the widowed queen of Carthage, which is brought to an abrupt end when the messenger of the gods, Mercury, is sent by Jupiter to ask the hero ‘what you can possibly gain by living at wasteful leisure in African lands’ and to order him peremptorily back on his quest. Much the same temptatioin ensnares the Jews when they are lured into committing ‘whoredom with the daughters of Moab’, and the Argonauts when they arrive on the island of Lemnos to find that the women have killed all their menfolk and are avid for new lovers. It is Heracles who on this occasion strides angrily round the island with his club, sternly recalling Jason’s men to their duty.

For the knights of the Grail, sworn to chastity, temptation is firmly of the Siren type. When Sir Percival loses his horse, he meets ‘a timid maiden’in the forest, who offers him another ‘huge and black’, which carries him off uncontrollably for ‘three days or more’. Coming to a black river, burning with fire, Percival crosses himself, whereupon the horse throws him: and he wakes up trapped, foodless, on a precipitous island in the middle of the sea. In the heat of the day a handsome ship approaches, and sitting in it, under an awning, is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She erects a shady tent on the shore and invites Percival to an esquisite meal, with the most potent wine he has ever drunk: and then implores him to make love to her, saying ‘you have not hungered to possess me half as much as I have wanted you, for you are one of the knights I was most passionately set on having’. As they are about to climb together into a great bed, Percival catches sight of the cross on his sword-hilt; he crosses himself, the tent vanishes in a puff of foul-smelling smoke and the ship hurtles away at unnatural speed across the ocean, leaving a wake of fire rising from storm-tossed waves.

Of course the Temptation has much in common with the Monster, except that the latter threatens the hero by direct confrontation, while the former seeks to lure him to his doom by guile and seduction. The Sirens are only Predators in another guise. While the enchantress who seek to imprison travellers by their spells, or the arts of love, are another version of Holdfast. Nevertheless, if they are mastered or overruled in some way, these Temptresses may completely change their nature, or rahter their relationship to the hero. From being malign, destructive and a hindrance, they can become the most benign of allies. When Odysseus is given the magic herb by Hermes which enables him to withstand Circe’s spells, he can persuade her to release all her victims from their enchantment. And though he stays with her, feasting and making love for another year, she in the end releases him with all sorts of aid and vital guidance for his journey.  Similarly Calypso, at the behest of the gods, sends him on his way with every kind of equipment and good advice. The Temptresses have in fact been transformed into that other kind of crucially important figure the hero meets on his journey, the ‘helper’ whom we shall be looking at shortly.

Deadly Opposites

A third familiar type of ordeal is the need for the hero and his companions to travel an exact and perilous path between two great opposing dangers. For the Argonauts these are the mighty ‘clashing rocks’, the Symplegades, between which they have to sail at exactly the right moment to avoid being crushed to death. For Odysseus the ‘deadly opposites’ are the great whirlpool Charybdis and the sixheaded monster, the Scylla which stand on each side of a narrow gulf. To avoid the first Odysseus steers his ship too near Scylla, who seizes six of his men; later he returns on his own and this time has a ‘thrilling escape’ from Charybdis.

Lancelot in the Grail Quest has to pass between two fierce lions. For the Jews, the journey between the ‘opposites’ is represented by the occasion when the Red Sea rolls back like a great ‘wall untothem, on their right hand and on their left’, leaving a dry passage for them to cross over safely; while, when the armies of Phaoroah pursue them, the ‘opposites’ show their deadly nature by rushing together again, like the Symplegades, engulfing ‘the chariots and the horsemen and all the host’. And there is no moment more hazardous for Allan Quatermain and his little party as that when, foodless and almost freezing to death, they have to cross the narrow, snowy pass exactly between two great symmetrical mountains, the Breasts of Sheba, which is the only way through from the desert to the lost land of Solomon which is their goal.

The Journey in the Underworld

A final, rather different kind of ordeal which the Quest hero may have to undergo before arriving at his goals is a visit to the underworld, inhabited by the spirits of the dead. In some cases, this is simply a horrific experience, in other instances however, the journey through the underworld is not just a harrowing ordeal; it serves a deeper purpose, enabling the hero to contemplate the fate of those who have lived before, and also to consult them on matters vital to his future.

When Odysseus is guided by Circe to the gate of the netherworld which lies beyond the River of Fear and the City of Perpetual Mist, on the very edge of the world, he meets the long-dead seer Teiresias, who gives him the advice which will enable him, alone of all his men, to reach his goal; predicting for the hero exactly how the rest of his journey and his life will unfold. When Aeneas finally arrives on the shores of Italy, his first duty is to pay a visit to the maiden-priestess, the Cumaean Sibyl. Beside an echoing cavern in the mountainside, the Sibyl summons up the god of the oracle within:

‘suddenly …. her hair fell in disarray…. her bursting heart was wild and sad, She appeared taller and spoke in no mortal tones’.

The prophetess gives him careful instructions as to how he can descend in to the underworld (Aeneas first has to search ‘the endless forest’, with the aid of two doves, for the ‘golden bough’, which is protected in the dark of the forest by a little circle of light). They eventually make their descent, witnessing every kind of monster and horror, and the shades of the danmed enduring eternal punishment. Finally they come of the Land of Joy and the Fortunate Woods, where they find the wise old Anchises who, like Teiresias, reveals to Aeneas the nature of the ordeals he still has to face, his future life and the glorious prospects for his descendants when the new city of Rome has been founded. With this advice and guarantee of his eventual success, Aeneas is at last ready for the final stages of his Quest.

The Helpers

In addition to all the negative figures the hero and his companions meet on the journey, they also, as we have seen, encounter some difficult figures, the ‘helpers’who give them positive assistance, ranging from periods of respite to crucial guidance. And among these two very important figures predominate, who are to be met with in countless guises, not just in Quest stories but throughout literature.

We have already begun to meet them in the characters of the old seers Teiresias and Anchises on the one hand, and that of the Sibylline priestess on the other. These are the figures of a benevolent, usually wise old man and a beautiful young (though often mysteriously ageless) woman.

At the most basic level, the old man and the young woman may simply provide hospitality, rest, food, nursing care and other material assistance, as Odysseus receives from the kindly King Alcinous and his daughter, the Princess nausicaa, when he is washed up exhausted on their island, after being shipwrecked. A similar pair appear to help Allan Quatermain and his friends when they arrive in the lost land of Solomon: the old man INfadoo who warns them of many dangers and the beautiful Foulata.

In fact the ‘old man’ and the ‘young woman’ are of ever greater significance to the hero the nearer they come to being invested with supernatural powers. Their role is not so much to intervene in the action as to act as guides and advisers, drawing on supernatural wisdom and prescience. Perhaps the supreme example of such a pair of guides in literature are the venerable sage Virgil and beautiful Beatrice who lead Dante on his journey up to Paradise in the Divine Comedy.

In the stories we are considering here, the supreme example of a ‘wise old man’must be the mysterious figure who from start to finish guides the Jews on their hazardous journey to the promised land,  the ‘Ancient of Days’, Jahweh himself. Not only does he appear to Moses at crucial moments of the story to reprimand, advise and warn him, but he gives many ‘signs’ to the Jews that they are on the right path, such as the miraculous ‘pillar of fire’ which leads them on through the trackless wilderness. It is no accident that in all attempts which have been made by artists or film-makers to personify this figure (as in paintings showing the handing down of the tablets of stone to Moses on Sinai), he is always represented as an immensely patriarchal, bearded, wise old man.

The outstanding example of a young but ageless feminine figure is she who assists Odysseus, the ‘flashing – eyed goddess of wisdom’ Athene, ‘tall, beautiful and accomplished’, who watches over and guides her protege through every peril, and fights for his cause in the counsels of the gods against the hero’s chief opponent, the vengeful Poseidon (a similar though less intimate role is played for Aneneas by Venus, the goddess of love).

In the Quest for the Grail, the part of the ‘wise old man’ is played by the succession of hermits and holy men, whose chief role is to interpret to the heroes the meaning of the great tests and ordeals they have just undergone, and to give warnings for the future. Similarly, at various points in the story, mysterious young women of unblemished virtue appear to guide the heroes on their way – particularly important being the beautiful maiden who at last appears to summon the three supreme heroes, Galahad, Percival and Bors, onto the ship which will take them over the sea to begin the closing stages of the Quest.

In modern storytelling there is no more memorable an example of these archetypal figures than the two who play such a crucial role in guiding Frodo on his mighty quest in The Lord of the Rings, the all seeing old wizard Gandalf and his ally, the beautiful, ethereal, visionary queen Galadriel.

The Life Renewing Goal

Thus does the great Quest come to an end, and then we see perhaps the most surprising thing of all about this type of story. The heroes of all these very dissimilar tales have in fact arrived, by remarkably similar stages, at a remarkably similar goal. Odysseus has regained his Queen and his kingdom. Aeneas has won his Princess and his Kingdom. The Grail heroes carry their great treasure, the golden Grail to the city of Sarras where Galahad becomes king, succeeding an evil tyrant, and is then received into the kingdom of heaven. The Jews have won and established their new kingdom.  Allan Quatermain and his friends, having established Umbopa as the rightful king over the lost and now found land of Solomon, in place of an evil tyrant, return home with their fabulous treasure.

The real point about the ending of all these stories is that in essence it is so familiar. The real goal of the Quest emerges as remarkably similar to that happy ending we have seen in our previous types of story: the final coming together of hero and heroine, man and woman, and the succession to, or establishing of a kingdom. In each case it is this, in part or whole, which enables the Quest to end on an image of completion. And in each case what this also conveys to us is the sense that life, which in the opening stages of the story seemed so threatened, has in some profound sense been renewed. Odysseus has redeemed and brought his kingdom back to life, after the long, sterile yeas of the suitor’s tyranny. Aeneas’s city of Troy is dead, but on the Tiber it lives again, as new Rome, and will do so far into the glorious future. As the Jews toiled across the dead wilderness there was no more regular promise of the new life that was to come than Moses’ repeated striking of ‘living waters’out of the rock and from the years of harsh slavery in Egypt, where their sons, the promise of new life, had routinely been murdered, they are at last set free in the lush land ‘flowing with milk and honey’, where life abounds and is assured for the future.

And so on, with the Grail Quest, King Solomon’s Mines. In each case the story ends on a great renewal of life, centered on a new secure base, guaranteed into the future. And we can see at last (although it was by no means clear while the story was still unfolding) that this was what the Quest had really been about all along.

The Final Ordeals

At last the heroes of our Quest stories come to the edge of the great goal towards which, through so many perils and ordeals, they have been journeying so long. Odysseus at last reaches his island of Ithaca. Aeneas reaches Italy where is to make his new home. After forty years in the wilderness, the Jews at last cross over the river Jordan and arrive in ‘the promised land’.

We now discover one of the most surprising things about the Quest plot. Most people, if one talks about a ‘quest’ will say ‘Oh yes, a story about a journey’ (the very word ‘quest’ from the latin queare, to seek, after all means a ‘search’). But in fact the journey in a Quest only makes up half the story.

It has taken Odysseus twelve books of the Odyssey to get back to Ithaca: but there are still twelve books to go before the story is finally over. Aeneas has reached Italy by the sixth book of the Aeneid: but the poem has twelve books in all.  In almost all the quests we have been looking at, the journey turns out to have been only the first part of the tale. The second part, which begins when the hero is actually within sight of his goal, sees him having to face a final great ordeal, or series of ordeals, which may take as long to describe as everything which has gone before. It is this final struggle which is necessary for the her to lay hold of his prize and to secure it.

The entire second half of the Odyssey, for instance, describes what follow when Odysseus arrives incognito back on his island, to find his kingdom in near – total disarray, overshadowed by the arrogance, greed and dissipation of the infesting army of suitor. We see him travel across the island to arrive at his palace, disguised as a beggar, treated by the suitors like dirt. His queen Penelope has finally despaired of ever seeing him again, and decreed that she will marry anyone who can bend Odysseus’s might bow and shoot an arrow through a row of axe-heads. The suitors all try and fail miserably. Finally Odysseus reveals himself in all his kingly majesty (in a way we have not seen at any time before in the story). He seizes the bow, passes the test with ease (‘the test which only the true her can pass’) and he and his son Telemachus then turn on the suitors and masacre them. Thus is he finally reunited with his loving Penelope and thus does he triumphantly reclaim his kingdom.

No sooner has Aeneas returned from his visit to the underworld in the Aeneid than the Trojans recognise that they have in fact at last arrived at the very place, the mouth of the River Tiber, where the gods intend they should settle. And at first all seems set for a quick and happy ending to the story. They are warmly welcomed by the local ing Latinius, because prophecy has long foretold that strangers would arrive, bringing great honour to his land: and that their leader would marry his daughter, the beautiful Princess Lavinia, who has been vainly wooed by every prince in Italy, above all by the great Turnus, king of the nearby Rutulians.

But when the Princess is promised to Aeneas, black jealousy seized Turnus’s heart: and gradually the storm clouds gather for Aeneas’s last and most terrible ordeal. The entire second half of the poem is taken up with describing how the tribes gather from all over the surrounding countryside, to hurl the Trojan interlopers back into the sea; the mustering of two great armies; the first skirmishes; a tremendous battle, which the Trojans only survive by the skin of their teeth and finally the titanic single combat between Aeneas and his ‘dark rival’; which at first it seems the hero will lose. But it ends at last, with his protective goddess Venus hovering over him, in his total victory.

Halfway through the story of the Holy Grail, when it is clear that only three knights, Galahad, Percival and Bors, are worthy to undertake the final stages of the Quest there is a kind of complete scene shift to mark the second part of the story from the first. We leave ‘the Waste Forest’ and travel with the three heroes across the sea, in a miraculous ship steered by a beautiful maiden. When the heroes disembark, they face their last great series of ordeals, including the bloodiest battle of the story, the capture of a grim castle in which, as usual, a Princess has been imprisoned. All this prepares them for the mystical climax when they arrive at another mysterious castle, to see the Holy Grail itself borne in by angesl, with a vision of Christ’s presence hovering above them.

When Allan Quatermain and his friends finally cross over the great mountain barrier, they have similarly reached the halfway point of their story. They have at last left behind the torturing heat of the desert, and they find themselves looking down on the breathtakingly beautiful, lush countryside of Solomon’s lost kingdom, ringed by blue mountains. They are greeted by the natives as gods, and led along a great, ancient highway to the capital, where they find that the country is under the evil sway of the tyrranical King Twala, and his hideous old henchwoman, the witch Gagool, hundreds of years old.

They discover that their mysteriously regal companion on the journey Umbopa, is in fact the true king of his land, returning to claim his throne from the usurper Twala; and again, like other heroes, they have to face three ordeals. In the first they fall into Twala’s power, while attempting to rescue the beautiful Foulata, a local girl who has become attached to them. By cunning use of the almanac predicting a lunar eclipse, they terrify Twala’s followers and make a thrilling escape from death’. Second is the great battle between the followers of Twala and those of Umbopa, which culminates in the tyrant’s death. Thirdly, the climax to the whole story is their journey with Gagool into the series of vast, mysterious caves in the heart of the mountains, which turns into a combination of ‘visit to the underworld’, ‘overcoming the monster’, ‘liberating the treasure from the dark enclosing space’ and ‘thrilling escape from death’ all in one. In one cavern they find the petrified corpses of the kings of the land, sitting round a stone table. In the last they come across the legendary treasure of Solomon, the richest hoard of diamonds the world has ever known, shining in the darkness. At this point Gagool, the ‘guardian of the treasure’ creeps back ‘like a snake’ and ‘with a look of fearful malevolence’ swings shut the great stone door – but in the process crushing herself to death. The heroes are trapped in the eternal darkness and prepare to die. Only in the nick of time, like Aladinn trapped in his treasure cave, do they miraculously find a way out: threading their way, like Theseus, through the labyrinth of secret passages which lead them at last up and out into the cool, fresh air of the mountainside.

The Quest:  Summing Up

A third way in which stories naturally shape themselves in the human imagination centres on the pull of the hero towards some distant, all- important goal. However much he becomes drawn into particular episodes along the way, we always now that these are mere subordinate to his overriding purpose, and that until that goal has been reached and properly secured, the story annot be satisfactorily resolved. The basic Quest story unfolds through a series of stages like this:

1. The Call: Life in some ‘City of Destruction’has become oppressive and intolerable, and the hero recognises that he can only rectify matters by making a long, difficult journey. He is given supernatural or visionary diretion as to the distant, life-renewing goal he must aim for.
2. The Journey: The Hero and his companions set out across hostile terrain, encountering a series of life-threatening ordeals. These include horrific monsters to be overcome; temptations to be resisted; and, probably the need to travel between two equally deadly ‘opposites’. These each end with a ‘thrilling escape’ and the ordeals alternate with periods of respite, when the hero and his companions receive hospitality, help or advice, often from ‘wise old men’ or ‘beautiful young women’. During this stage the hero may also have to make a ‘journey through the underworld’ where he temporarily transcends the separating power of death and comes into helpful contact with spirits from the past, who give him guidance as to how to reach his goal.
3. Arrival and Frustration: The hero arrives within sight of his goal. But he is far from having reached the end of his story, because now, on the edge of the goal he sees a new and terrible series of obstacles looming up between him and his prize, which have to be overcome before it can be fully and completely secured.
4. The final Ordeals: The hero has to undergo a last series of test to prove that he is truly worthy of the prize. This culminates in a last great battle or ordeal which may be the most threatening of all.
5. The Goal. After a last ‘thrilling escape from death’ the kingdom, the Princess or the life- transforming treasure are finally won: with the assurance of renewed life stretching indefinitely into the future.

We have so far illustrated the Quest story by looking at some of the best known and most profound examples in the world.  Another light and entertaining tale rather less obviously shaped by the Quest is Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). The story’s suspense hangs entirely on whether the hero, Phineas Fogg, can reach his distant goal in time to win a hefty bet. The fact that the goal of his Quest happens to be to arrive back exactly where he started is in this sense immaterial. Naturally much of the book consists of his journey, complete with ordeals and thrilling escapes, the most dramatic of which is in India where, with the aid of his servant and ‘faithful companion’ Passepartout, Fogg literally liberates a Princess, Aouda, the beautiful young widow of an Indian prince, just as she is about to be consumed by the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre. The three travel onwards, shadowed by the detective Fix, who wants to arrest Fogg for having master-minded a huge robbery at the Bank of England. They arrive back in England just in time, when disaster strikes. Within sight of his goal, Fogg faces three unexpected ordeals. First he is arrested by Fix and imprisoned. In the nick of time it is discovered that he is perfectly innocent: but he has now missed the last train which could carry him back to London in time to win his bet. He hires a ‘special’ train, but it is held up on the way and arrives in London minutes too late. It seems all is lost, and next morning Fogg begins to make preparations for suicide. Then Passepartout happens to hear someone mention the date. Of course! By going round the world from west to east they had gained a day; and they now have just ten minutes for Fogg to get to his club to claim victory. The hero makes it with three minutes to spare. He has won his ‘treasure’: although as the author is careful to emphasize the real treasure he has gained from his journey is the ‘Princess’. Just when all seemed lost, they had finally declared their ‘sacred love’ for each other, and can now get married.

The Rhythm

Although the Quest is such a distinctive type of story, it obviously has features in common with the two types of plot we looked at earlier, not least in terms of its basic structure. We saw how, at their deepest level, both Overcoming the Monster and Rags to Riches stories unfold by a kind of three-fold rhythm. They begin on a note of constriction, followed, when the hero or heroine respond to the ‘Call’, by a phase of expansion, as spirits and hopes are lifted. This leads eventually to a more serious constriction, leading to a phase when the hero or heroine are gradually being brought to a state of readiness for the final decisive confrontation with the dark forces which have so long oppressed them. When this arrives, providing the climax to the story, constriction reaches its height. Then comes the reversal, the triumphant liberation which paves the way to the happy ending.

We see the same fundamental rhythm at work in the structure of the Quest. There is the initial feeling of constriction which persuades the hero and his companions that they must leave. We then have a sense of enlargement as they set out into the world on their journey: although this contains within it lesser alternations of constriction and release, as each ordeal is followed by respite. We then come to the more serious constriction as the hero comes within sight of his goal, and has to face the final ordeals. Gradually the story works up to its climax, when he is pitted in a a last decisive battle against the dark forces which have stood between him and his goal all along. At last we share his liberation from all opposition, as the darkness is overthrown, the goal secured and the story ends on the image of life gloriously renewed.

All the plots we have looked at so far share this same essential structure. Something else they have in common is that the dominant figures opposed to their heroes and heroines – the monsters, tyrants, witches, wicked stepmothers and rivals, from whose malevolence the sense of threat and constriction mainly emanates – are invariably dark figures; while the heroes and heroines themselves display qualities which put them unmistakably on the side of ‘light’. They may in the earlier stages of the story show certain weaknesses and inadequacies. But the whole underlying purpose of the action is to show us the hero or heroine maturing to the state where they are finally ready for that decisive confrontation with the archetypal power of darkness which can bring their complete liberation.

Nevertheless, just as we earlier saw a ‘dark’ variation on the Rags to Riches story, so there are ‘dark’ versions of the Quest. Perhaps the most obvious example in all literature is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). The central figure, Captain Ahab sets out on his obsessive quest across the oceans of the world to find the almost supernatural great white whale. Ahab looks on Moby Dick, as other quest heroes look on the Holy Grail, as a prize of infinite value, worth any effort or sacrifice to seek out. Certainly the mysterious, numinous whale is an archetypal symbol for the essence of life. But there is nothing life enhancing or light about the spirit in which Ahab pursues his goal. His only desire is to destroy it. He is not on the side of life but opposed to it. This is why the voyage which makes up his quest is so strained and sinister fraught with omens of disaster. And when he does finally find the whale, it is of course Ahab himself who is slain. The reasons for this we shall explore more fully later on. But once again, by those inexorable rules which govern the way in which stories unfold, all the clues as to why Ahab’s quest an only end in disaster are there in this very sombre tale.

Voyage and Return

What do the stories of Alice in Wonderland have in common with H.G. Well’s The Time Machine and a great deal of other science fiction? What has Beatrix Potter’s little nursery tale of Peter Rabbit in common with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; or Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with the parable of the Prodigal Son; or the Greek myth of Orpheus’s journey to the underworld with the film Gone with the Wind?

There is a second plot based on a journey quite different from the Quest. It has inspired such an extraordinary range of stories that it might seem impossible that most of them could have anything in common – apart from the fact that they include some of the most haunting and mysterious tales in the world. This is the story plot we may call Voyage and Return.

The essence of the Voyage and Return story is that its hero or heroine (or the central group of characters) travel out of their familiar, everyday ‘normal’ surroundings into another world completely cut off from the first, where everything seems disconcertingly abnormal. At first the strangeness of the new world , with its freaks and marvels, may seem diverting, even exhilarating, if also highly perplexing. But gradually a shadow intrudes. The hero or heroine feels increasingly threatened, even trapped; until eventually (usually by way of a ‘thrilling escape’) they are released from the abnormal world, and can return to the safety of the familiar world where they began.

There are two obvious categories of story where the Voyage and Return plot is particularly familiar. The first is that type stretching back to the dawn of storytelling which describes a journey to some land or island beyond the confines of the known or civilised world. The other describes a journey to some more obviously imaginary and magical realm closer to home.

It is generally through stories of the second type that most of us first become acquainted with the Voyage and Return theme because, from C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, it provides the basis for some of our best loved stories of childhood.

Two classic instances are Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, Through the Looking Glass and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Bored and drowsy on a hot summer’s day a little Victorian girl suddenly finds herself transported underground into a totally strange ‘wonderland’. Several times she finds herself altering in size. She meets a bewildering succession of animals and other creations, behaving like human beings but talking to her in riddles. Everything in this surreal dreamworld is like a parody or distortion of something familiar. But just as this dream seems finally to be turning into a death threatening nightmare, with the Queen of Hearts in the courtroom scene angrily shouting ‘off with her head’ and all the cards rising up into the air and ‘flying down on  her’. Alice is jerked back to the reality of her familiar world by waking up, as if from a dream.

Almost identical in outline is the plot of that perennially popular Hollywood fairy tale, The Wizard of Oz (1939), Young Dorothy, who is staying with her uncle and aunt on their farm in Kansas is upset when her dog Toto is taken off by Miss Gulch for chasing the rich, bad tempered old spinster’s cat. Toto manages to run back home but, terrified she will lose him again, Dorothy takes him off into the countryside, dreaming of escape into some far- off land ‘over the rainbow’. On their way home, the are suddenly swept into the sky by a swirling tornado and find themselves falling abruptly down into the magical technicolor land of Oz, like Alice falling down her hole into Wonderland. Here Dorothy is greeted by a bewildering succession of characters, including the little Munchkins and the Good Witch Glinda, but provokes the deadly hostility of the Wicked Witch, the equivalent of Alice’s Queen of Hearts (and a reincarnation of Miss Gulch). Dorothy escapes down the Yellow Brick Road to seek the help of the mysterious Wizard of Oz in getting home. On the way she is joined by three allies, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, but eventually the Wicked Witch traps them all in her castle. Just when the nightmare is at its height, Dorothy in desperation throws a bucket of magic water over the witch, causing her to vanish. After their ‘thrilling escae’, they return to the Wizard, who turns out to be a fraud. But the Good Witch uses her magic to enable Dorothy to return home to Kansas, where she wakes up in bed as if emerging from a dream.

Another familiar childhood example of such a journey into an imaginary world is Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), the story of how the children of the Darling family fly off from their familiar nursery in the middle of the night, led by the little boy who cannot grow up, to the Never Never Land,  a strange childhood dream realm inhabited by fairies, Red Indians, talking birds and pirates. Again the mood of their adventure is initially one of exhilaration. But increasingly it is shadowed by their awareness of the menacing presence of the pirate chief Captain Hook, a typical ‘monster’ figure, with his hook in place of a hand. Eventually the story works up to a nightmare climax, when Hook and his men take the children prisioner on board their ship and threaten to kill them. There is a final ‘thrilling escape’ when Peter Pan arrives in the nick of time and forces the monstrous Hook to jump overboard into the jawas of the crocodile, and the children return safely home to their nursery at home with their parents.

Some of the very earliest stories a child can grasp are simple versions of the Voyage and Return plot (long, for instance, before they can really appreciate the relative complexities of the Rags to Riches story with its ‘Princes’, ‘Princesses’ and ‘transformation scenes’.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit tells of the little rabbit who ventures out of the familiar world of the burrow and the wood which are his home, into the forbidden world of Mr McGregor’s kitchen garden. At first the new world is exhilarating. But gradually the mood changes. First Peter feels sick with overeating. Then he turns a corner and sees the terrifying Mr McGregor, who pursues him. The nightmarish chase continues until Peter thinks he is irrevocably trapped in the garden. But at last, by jumping up on a wheelbarrow, he sees the gate leading back to safety. He makes a heroic dash, with McGregor in hot pursuit, and in a ‘thrilling escape’just manages to scramble out of the garden and back to the familiar safe world of home and mother.

But of course the Voyage and Return theme has shaped stories a good deal more complex than these simple versions of childhood. Here we move on to the second category in which such stories are most immediately familiar to us, those which involve a journey to some undiscovered realm beyond the confines of the known world.

The Castaway Story

We can find versions of this form of the Voyage and Return plot at almost every step along the history of storytelling. There were well-known Greek, Roman, Norse and mediaeval versions. There is even a strong Voyage and Return element in the closing episode of the earliest story ever recorded, the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the hero’s journey to the far off and mysterious land of Utnapishtim (although this is also a from of Quest, since he is seeking the secret of immortality). But this kind of tale became noticeably more evident in Western literature after the Renaissance, during the age of the great European voyages of discovery to every corner of the globe: and this was particularly true from the eighteenth century onwards.

Again these stories fall generally into two main types: those where the hero is marooned on some more or less deserted island; and those where the land he visits is the home of some strange people or civilisation.

In the early eighteenth century, two of the most famous of such stories were published, within a few years of each other: one in each category.

The first, in 1719, was that paradigm of all ‘desert island’ stories, Robinson Crusoe. The plot of Defoe’s novel follows the now familiar pattern. As a young sailor whose ship is wrecked, the hero suddenly finds himself all alone on a seemingly deserted tropical island. The first half of the story, after Crusoe has recovered from the initial shock is dominated by his growing confidence as he omes to term with his plight and with the simple wonders of his unfamiliar new world (e.g. discovering his ability to grow corn and bake bread). Then a shadow intrudes, when he sees the imprint of a strange human foot. As Crusoe realises that he may not be alone on the island, he begins to experience a sense of threat, which grows progressively more acute as he finds that his little kingdom is in fact regularly visited by bands of cannibals to pursue their horrid practices. The second half of the story is dominated by the measures Crusoe takes to protect himself; by his gradual recruitment of a little army of runaways (Friday being the first); and finaly as the climax of the tale, by leading his followers into a successful battle against the mutinous sailors on a Portugese ship which has anchored offshore. This culminates in his joyful release, when the grateful captain takes him off the island and back to civilisation.

The other of these two categories of Voyage and Return stories, that which describes the hero’s visit to some strange, unknown civilisation, found one of its most notable expressions just seven years after Robinson Crusoe with the publication in 1726 of Swift’s Gulliver Travels. The travels of Lemuel Gulliver are made up of no fewer than four voyages, each to a separate land of freaks and marvels: the most famous of course being those to Lilliput and Brobdignag. Both episodes follow a classic Voyage and Return pattern with the hero finding his initial sense of wonder turning to frustration as he realises that he is trapped. In Lilliput the tiny inhabitants finally turn against him when he helpfully puts out a fire in the king’s palace by urinating on it. Gulliver is threatened with blinding and death, and only manages to escape in the nick of time, first to the neighbouring kingdom of Blefescu, then back to Europe. From Brobdignag, where Gulliver becomes the tiny plaything of giants, his escape is even more dramatic when his ‘travelling box’ in which his captors carry him about, is picked up by a monstrous eagle and dropped into the sea, from where his is rescued by a passing ship.

By the nineteenth centure, as fewer and fewer places on the earth’s surface remained unexplored, authors were having to push further and further afield to find terrestrial settings with the necessary remoteness for Voyage and Return stories. But some authors had taken imaginative steps to surmount the shrinking availability of such settings on the face of the globe. Jules Verne set one of his most famous Voyage and Return adventures in an imaginary underworld deep below the earth’s surface (Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864) and another, a few years later, below the surface of the sea (20.000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1872). H.G. Wells found a still more dramatic solution in The Time Machine (1895) taking his hero out of the familiar world in terms not of geography but of time. The Time Traveller invents a machine wich transports him 800.000 years into the future, where he discovers the little, child-like Eloi, living in palaces in a seemingly paradial landscape full of strange, exotic flowers and fruits. But then the familiar shadow intrudes. He gradually becomes aware that there is another semi – human race inhabiting this world, the sinister Morlocks who live underground, hating the light and coming up at night to prey on the defenceless Eloi for their food. The story winds to a familiar nightmare climax when the hero is chased and nearly caught by a gang of these horrible night-creatures, only managing in the nick of time to scramble back onto his machine, to return to the safe Victorian world he had left.

In the twentieth century, of course, countless authors were to venture still further along the path pioneered by Verne and Wells, setting their heroes travelling not just in time, but more frequently to other planets and still more remote parts of the universe. In fact a major factor contributing to the emerge of ‘science fiction’ was simply the need of storytellers in an over – explored world to find alternative or unfamiliar worlds in which to set Voyage and Return stories. For the essence of this plot is its central figure’s confrontation with the unknown, that which seems abnormal precisely because it is in such contrast to and so cut off from the familiar world he or she naturally inhabits.

The Social Voyage and Return

We have so far looked at Voyage and Return stories almost entirely in terms of those where the hero or heroine makes some kind of physical journey into an unfamiliar world.

There are other, less obvious versions of the this plot where the journey is of a rather different kind: as where, for instance, it takes its central figure into an unfamiliar social milieu. An author particularly drawn to this type of plot was Evelyn Waugh, several of whose best-know novels are shaped by the Voyage and Return theme.

In Brideshead Revisited (1945) a fairly ordinary middle-class Oxford undergraduate, Charles Ryder, finds himself abruptly plucked out of his humdrum routine into an exotic upper-class world, this time that of Lord Sebastian Flyte and his family’s great house Brideshead. Ryder’s initial exhilaration at being introduced to this romantic other-world is gradually overshadowed as Sebastian slides into incurable alcoholism; only to be revived by a second ‘dream stage’ when Charles embarks on a love affair with Sebastian’s sister Julia. This in turn becomes shadowed as Julia’s father, the Earl Marchmain dies and Julia refuses to go ahead with her planned marriage to Charles. Thus rejected, the hero leaves the ‘faery world’ of Brideshead forever – until, in totally different circumstances, he unexpectedly finds himself back at the house as an army officer in World War II, and recalls his Voyage and Return experience in a prolonged flashback. Such a ‘remembrance of times past’, prompted by the activation of memory and conveyed through some kind of flashback, is not unfamiliar as the framework for a Voyage and Return story.

A Voyage and Return story set in an alien social milieu of a different kind was the film ‘The Third Man’ (1948) scripted by Graham Greene. The hero Holley Martins, a writer of Westerns, travels to the half-ruined city of Vienna during the post-war Allied ccupation, to track down his old school friend Harry Lime. He is shocked to discover that his old friend had just been killed and buried in mysterious circumstances. But the more he tries to uncover what happened from the bizarre assemblage of people he meets in Vienna, ranging from Lime’s seedy, mysterious friends and his enigmatic former mistress Anna to the laconic British military police officer Calloway, the more puzzled Martins becomes, He is here in a common predicament of the Voyage and Return hero, feeling he has been caught up in some strange, unreal dream world where everyone knows more than he does. The dream then begins to turn to nightmare when it turns out that Lime had not only been on the run from the authorities, for running a particularly nasty racket in deadly watered-down penicillin, but that he is still mysteriously alive. Eventually Martins makes contact with Lime and, when they talk on the great fairground wheel, is shocked by the cynical heartlessness with which Harry justifies his criminal activities Martins has also fallen in love with Lime’s erstwhile mistress, the enigmatic Anna and is drawn by Calloway into a plot to trap his old friend on behalf of the authorities. The story winds to its nightmare climax in the chase through the half-lit tunnels of the Vienna sewers, which Martins firing the last fatal shot as his friend’s fingers clutch for fresh air and life through the grille of a manhole cover. As Lime’s body is at last genuinely buried the story ends, with the implication that, after such a horrific experience, Martins will now return to his normal, humdrum existence, although we no mere see this at the end than at the beginning. The story is framed simply by his entrance to and exit from the alien world.

We must look rather more closely at what all these Voyage and Return stories have in common. For behind the extraordinary variety of their outward subject matter, they are all in a way describing the same shattering experience.

Three Questions

To see this plot in deeper perspective, we must consider three questions. First, how do the heroes or heroines of these stories get into this ‘other world’ where their adventures take place? Second, what is the real nature of this ‘other world’? Thirdly, what is really happening to them as they pass through it? How does it affect them?

It is instructive to contrast the mood of the opening of a Voyage and Return story with that at the start of the other type of story based on a journey, the Quest. The Quest is altogether a more serious and purposeful affair. The hero of the Quest realizes he has to go on his journey. He is drawn by an overwhelming sense of compulsion. He knows there is a specific goal he has to head for.

The heroes of the Voyage and Return story have no such sense of direction. It is true that in some instances, such as Candide, The Time Machine, The Lost World, the hero is consciously looking for something when he sets out, and we may call this a ‘Quest element’ in such stories. But much more often the point is that the adventure these heroes and heroines stumble into is totally unexpected. In some instances quite literally they fall into it. It is something which just happens to them.

At the same time however, they are very much in a state of mind which lays them open for such a thing to happen. They may just be bored and drownsy, like Alice, who falls asleep and is carried away into her Wonderland by a dream. They may be rather more actively craving for some diversion like Dorothy dreaming of ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ in The Wizard of Oz, or Wendy and the Darling children in Peter Pan. They may have exposed themselves to the risk that something dramatic and untoward may befall them simply because of their naivety, the restricted nature of their lives and their awareness, like Waugh’s Pennyfeather. Wittingly or unwittingly, what they have in common is that they are psychologically wide open for some shattering new experience to invade their lives and take them over.

One of the fullest pictures of the state of mind which allows a Voyage and Return hero to get into this strange predicament is that given in the opening pages of Robinson Crusoe. These describe how the young Crusoe was brought up by his father on the advie that if he wanted to live a full and happy life, he should head neither for the upper classes nor the lower, but should aim for a scure ‘middle station’ in life, between the opposites. He should settle down, have  sense of purpose not become an aimless drifter, wandering about the world hoping that something would turn op. The realization that he ignored this advice by going off to sea plays a large part in Crusoe’s subsequent introspection, after his shipwreck Even on his first voyage, he is nearly drowned in a terrible storm, and sees himself as the Prodigal Son, risking destruction by having recklessly ignored his father’s kindly admonitions. Like all Voyage and Return heroes, he has laid himself open to the chance of falling into some extraordinary, unforeseen adventure; and eventually he does.

The first indication that something very unexpected is happening in a Voyage and Return story lies in the dramatic nature of the hero or heroine’s entry into the ‘other world’. The event which precipitates them into the abnormal world is often shocking and violent. It may be a shipwreck, as in Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels; or a plane crash as in Lord of he Flies. The heroines of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz both have the sensation of falling into their ‘other world’ with a bump. Well’s time traveller, when he sets off into the future, has the sensation of being on a switchback, and when he finally stops his machine, it topples over, propelling him into the ‘other world’ in his own version of a shipwreck. Wendy and company also find their flight into the Never Never Land a bit like a switchback ride, and are greeted when the land by the deafening explosion of a pirate gun.

Even when the heroes or heroines do not land in their ‘other world’ quite so literally with a bang, it is always clear that something very queer is happening to them. They may simply sense that the reality of their familiar world is disconcertingly dissolving into something else, as when Alice finds herself passing through the mirror into the Looking Glass world beyond.

Of course it is hardly surprising that the experience of passing over from one world to another is disconcerting, because the very definition of the ‘other world’ is that it is totally strange and unfamiliar – and that the hero or heroine is trapped in it. Irrevocably cut off from the familiar world they have left, they now have to puzzle out the strange nature of this new world into which they have stumbled.

When we say the ‘other world’ is abnormal, what precisely do we mean? Our sense of normality, even of what is real, is to an enormous extent of course governed by what is familiar to us. We make sense of the world through a whole framework of largely unconscious assumptions of what is normal, based on everything we are used to – socially, culturally, morally, geographically and physically, in terms of scale, space and time. Such things play a central part in giving us our sense of outward identity in the world, telling us who we are. And the whole point of the Voyage and Return story is that, in some important respect, it takes the hero or heroine out of that framework of the familiar. It takes away some crucial defining point for their sense of reality and identity, which is why so many of their adventures are experienced as a kind of disconcerting and unreal dream.

One way or another these stories work every conceivable permutation on their heroes’ and heroines’ sense of what is normal, even in terms of the most basic assumptions we make about our identity as human beings. Both Alice and Gulliver, for instance, find their normal perspective on the world distorted by experiencing grotesque alterations in their relative size: Alice because she herself grows magically taller and shorter, Gulliver because he finds the people around him are either abnormally tiny or abnormally huge. Similarly the time traveller experiences a suspension of our normal co-ordinates of time. Robinson Crusoe and the other heroes of ‘desert island’ versions of the plot lose their co-ordinates of identity in yet another way, finding themselves snatched out of the familiar constraints and framework of society into a world where all normal social assumptions are turned topsy-turvy.

Equally shattering in this ‘other world’ is the confrontation with those who already inhabit it, and who live by such different values; which is why much of the hero’s and heroine’s time may be spent in trying to puzzle out the riddles posed by how they live and what they say: as when Alice is baffled by the quite literal riddles and nonsense talked by almost everyone in her two ‘other worlds’ or the agnostic Charles Ryder by the Flyte family’s all-pervasive and seemingly illogical Roman Catholicism.

The ‘other world’ may initially seem to be full of beguiling promise. As Alice explored the hole she had plunged into, she caught her first glimpse of the wonderland she was about to enter when:

“she came across a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door … she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains”.

As Charles Rider set off to his first lunch invitation from the glamorously eccentric Lord Sebastian, he went:

“full of curiosity and the faint unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened one an enclosed and enchanted garden which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that great city”

But sooner or later the experience of being in the alien world becomes less and less pleasant. Our heroes and heroines never really become engaged with the alien surroundings in which they find themselves. They continue to experience everything in a kind of dream-like, semi-detached way. The ‘other world’is never wholly real to them – even though the experience of being there may eventually seem to threaten their very survival. And it is here we come to the most important questions of all about any Voyage and Return story. To what extent, when they finally emerge from their encounter with the ‘other world’, has it left any lasting mark on them? How has the experience changed them?

Two Distinct Categories

Quite regardless of what outward form they take, Voyage and Return stories really fall into two distinct categories. There are those where the hero or heroine is transformed by the encounter with the mysterious ‘other world, and there are those where they are not.

Firmly of the later type are the two adventures of Alice, ‘Such a curious dream’ remarks Alice, as she wakes up from her visit to Wonderland, and this is all it turns out to have been: just an incomprehensible dream, which she can look back on as no more than a memorably bizarre experience. Exactly the same are the visits of Dorothy to Oz and of the Darling children to Never Never Land.

On the other hand are all of those stories where the central figure is affected by the experience of having been in the ‘other world’. The degree to which they are affected varies considerably. In some instances, the chief effect is simply that the hero has been given a terrible shock, which leaves him shaken and in a rather more reflective state of mind. When Peter Rabbit returns home from his nightmare adventure in Mr McGregor’s garden he is exhausted, and has to be put to bed: but whether he is truly repentant of his folly – i.e. whether he has really learned anything from the experience and is not just a naughty child who might well do it all over again tomorrow – is not altogether clear.

There are other versions of the Voyage and Return story where the hero’s transformation, as it progressively unfolds becomes the real underlying theme of the whole story.  The cumulative purpose of the satire in Gulliver’s Travels, for instance, as Gulliver makes his four successive journeys to Lilliput, Brobdignag, Laputa and the land of the Houyhnhnms, is to show the hero the real state of the supposedly civilized human beings he had left behind in a kind of Caliban’s mirror, revealing their true nature as ‘the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl on the surface of the earth’.  By the time he reaches the land of the Houyhnhnms, the wise, gentle, saintly horses who rule over the horrible disorderly Yahoos (human beings seen in their ‘true light’) Gulliver has conceived an almost total distaste for humanity. When he finally reaches home fo the last time, he has been so profoundly changed that he finds the very presence of humans abhorrent, and desires only the company of horses.

A rather more positive personal transformation is the fundamental theme of Robinson Crusoe. At the beginning we see the hero as a thoughtless young man, rejecting the sage advice of his father and bent only on adventure. Shocked to the core of his being by the ordeal he has to face when he finds himself cast away alone on the island, Crusoe eventually experiences feelings of profound repentance for his former frivolity. He comes to a belief in God who, despite the awful plight he finds himself in, has yet      provided him with so many blessings, not least in sparing his life and providing him with so many vital necessities of life salvaged from the wreck. We see Crusoe gradually learning to become master of his little kingdom and of himself; so by the time, in teh second half of the story, he has to face the new ordeal of discovering that his island is the resort of a tribe of fearsome cannibals, his character has become strong enough to cope with it. By the end he is king over the island, a true leader over his little band of followers; and when he returns to England, the success of his inner transformation is outwardly symbolized by the discovery that an investment in land made long before has now matured. He is a prosperous man, able to settle down at last in that secure ‘middle station’in life recommended by his father all those years before.

What Voyage and Return Really is About

We can now see more clearly just what the Voyage and Return story is really about.

If we consider those examples where the hero is changed by his experiences in the ‘other world’, we see that, by definition, he has begun the story in a state of limited awareness. It is this which has plunged him into a realm of existence he had never previously imagined, an experience which leads to a nightmare threatening him with annihilation. But as a result he has learned something of fundamental importance. He has moved from ignorance to knowledge. He has reached a new and much deeper understanding of the world, and this has led to a complete change in his attitude to life.

Robinson Crusoe begins as a feckless young man, wnadering the world, ignoring this father’s sage advice and literally ‘all at sea’. The shock of finding himself on a desert island gradually leads to a complete change in his view of the world. He learns to take responsibility for his own destiny. He becomes master of his little kingdom: to the point where, at the end, he can lead his little army of followers to victory, in the batlle with the mutineers which forms the climax of the story He has become a mature, self-reliant, ‘kingly’ figure, exercising just authority over everyone on the island.

We see in the characters of Voyage and Return plots that they have begun as selfish, not really recognising anything in the world outside themselves. In this state they exhibit very much the same blind egocentricity which in earlier plots we saw characterising those dark figures who were opposed to the hero or heroine. Here it is the hero himself who is initially presented as far from light; and it is precisely this which plunges him into the adventure which threatens to destroy him. But in the end he is saved, because his eyes have been opened and he has one through some fundamental change of heart. He has made the switch from dark to light. The real victory of such Voyage and Return heroes is not over the forces of darkness outside them. It is over the same dark forces within themselves.

In this respect, of course, this plot is rather different from the three types of story we have looked at earlier. And equally it does not share their general tendency to culminate in a final triumphant union of the hero with his  ‘Priness’. The complete happy ending of the Voyage and Return story is simply that the hero returns to his familiar world transformed. He has become a new man. By discovering a new, much deeper centre to his personality, he has ‘seen the light’. And this in itself, the story suggests is enough to guarantee that he will ‘live happily ever after’.

But even though the Voyage and Return story does not end on that familiar concluding image of hero and heroine united in love, this is not to say that, during their dreamlike experience of the other world, relations with some figure of the opposite sex may not play an important part. Indeed such a relationship often marks the only real  personal contact or point of engagement they have with the elusive other world. Yet, significantly, this is much more consistently true of those stories where the central figure returns again to the ‘real world’without having been transformed, and without having won anything positive from the adventure. If he or she does form such a relationship in the other world, and it may seemo f the highest importance to them, when they make their escape back to reality again, it has to be abandoned. When the hero returns, the girl is left behind.

In The Third Man Holly Martin’s only real point of engagement with another person in the unreal, nightmarish world of Harry Lime’s Vienna is his friendship with the beautiful, enigmatic actress Anna, with whom he falls in love. But one of the most memorable scenes in the film comes right at the end, after Lime’s funeral. Martins waits for Anna as she walks towards him down a long avenue in the wintry cemetery. Finally she reaches hiim and passes by without a look, leaving him to make his departure from Vienna friendless and alone.

A similarly hard – to – disguise – bleak ending concludes another, even more famous 20th century story shaped by the Voyage and Return plot, Gone with the Wind, the novel by Margaret Mitchell which in 1939 became one of the most successful films ever made. We meet the heroine Scarlett O’Hara as a beautiful adolescent girl in the ‘normal ‘world of her upbringing, the ante-bellum slave-owning Southern aristocracy and her home in her family’s great house Tara. Like everyone else around Tara, she is then plunged into the ‘abnormal’ world of the American Civil War when, amid violence, deprivation and defeat, all familiar values and asssumptions are turned upside down. Scarlett’s story is centred on her love for two men, the weak, effeminate Ashley Wilkes and the ‘over-masculine’ Rhett Butler. As the shadows lengthen over her world, she finally embarks on a stormy marriage to Rhett and they produce a daughter.  But the child dies in a riding accident. Scarlett miscarries a second pregnancy, and Rhett, having lost all love for her (I don’t give a damn’) abandons her for the last time. Scarlett returns to her half-ruined family mansion at Tara, where the story began, and forlornly wonders how she can win Rhett back. Anything is possible, she tries to persuade herself, ending the story on her brave declaration ‘Tomorrow is another day’. Her words seem to indicate that she is once again looking forward. But in fact, she is really only loking back, to what she has lost forever. The truth is that, for all her wishful thinking, poor Scarlett is at last ‘childless, loveless’ and alone.

Voyage and Return: Summing Up

What all these examples demonstrate is that, just as much in the Voyage and Return story as in the other types of plot we have looked at, the relations between the central figure and some feminine or masculine ‘other half’ may give us the essential key to what is going on in the story: except that here, where the central figure is the plaything of events beyond his or her control, what we see revealed by that relationship is likely to be some fundamental inadequacy in the central figure which is never rectified.  In the earlier types of story, nothing more completely confirms the hero or heroine’s worthiness to achieve a complete happy ending than the liberation of the ‘other half’ from the grip of darkness. But here the other half remains in the darkness of the ‘other world’. And even though the hero or heroine themselves emerge from that other world, if their other half remains behind, the story ends on an unresolved, downbeat note which no amount of brave talk about tomorrow being another day can disguise. They have been through the tremendous experience of their confrontation with the mystifiying, unknown realm, which has shaken them to the foundations of their previous identity. Yet they have emerged essentially untransformed, having learned or gained nothing And what we have learned about them is that their understanding of the world is really no greater at the end of the story than it was at the beginning. They have been put to some very fundamental test – and they have failed.

A fourth way in which a story may take shape in the human imagination shows the hero or heroine being abruptly transported out of their ‘normal’world in to an abnormal world and eventually back to where they began. The pattern of such a story is likely to unfold like this:

1. Anticipation Stage and ‘fall’ into the other world: when we first meet the hero, heroine or central figures, they are likely to be in some state which lays them open to a shattering new experience. Their consciousness is in somoe way restricted. They may just be young and naive, with only limited experience of the world. They may be more actively curious and looking for something unexpected to happen to them. They may be bored, or drowsy, or reckless. But for whatever reason, they find themselves suddenly precipitated out their familiar, limited existence, into a strange world, unlike anything they have experienced before.
2. Initial fascination or Dream Stage: at first their exploration of this disconcerting new world may be exhilarating, because it is so puzzling and unfamiliar. But it is never a place in which they can feel at home.
3. Frustration Stage: Gradually the mood of the adventure changes to one of frustration, difficulty and oppression. A shadow begins to intrude, which becomes increasingly alarming.
4. Nightmare Stage: The shadow becomes so dominating that it seems to pose a serious threat to the hero’s or heroine’s survival.
5. Thrilling Escape and return: Just when the threat closing in on the hero and heroine becomes too much to bear, they make their escape from the other world, back to where they started. At this point the real question posed by the whole adventure is: how far have they learned or gained anything from their experience? Have they been fundamentally changed, or was it all ‘just a dream’?

Again in the Voyage and Return story we see a parallel to that underlying structure we observed in the earlier plots. The story begins with the hero or heroine in that limited or incomplete state which leads to the initial sense of constriction as they are plunged into their adventure. This is followed, as they explore the new world they find themselves in, by a sense of expansion and widening horizons. But then, as the shadow approaches, there is a new sense of constriction. This eventually leads us up to the story’s climax, where the sense of constriction is at its most acute; and here at last, if the story is to come to a full happy ending, we see the hero going through a life changing reversal.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are those rare examples of the Voyage and Return story in its darkest, most negative form, where the hero remains trapped in the other world, never coming back at all. Much more common, however, is the lesser dark form of the story where the hero or heroine do emerge again, but having learned nothing and often having left behind in the other world some figure of the opposite sex who has become important to them. The complete happy ending is reserved for those stories, like Robinson Crusoe, where the hero has been fundamentally changed by his experience: from that limited, self centred potentially dark figure we saw at the beginning to the mature, fulfilled, light figure he has become by the end. And here, for the first time, we have seen a type of story which, to reach a fully resolved ending, requires its central figure to go through such an inner switch from darkness to light. We are now about to move on to another type of plot where this transformation is so central that the story cannot exist without it. Here we move firmly back into the realm of the complete happy ending as we have seen it in earlier plots, with a hero and heroine joyfully united; providing some of the most sunlit and glorious conclusions to stories in all literature.

Comedy

Figaro is planning to marry Susanna, but first he has to win the approval of his employer, the Count Almaviva, who has his eye on Susanna himself, much to the chagrin of his wife the Countess, who is adored by the young Cherubino, who is in turn loved by Barbarina. Just to make things even more straightforward, it also seems that Figaro is already contracted to marry the elderly Marcellina – until it is discovered that she is his long-lost mother.

As soon as we are presented with a situation like this we know we are faced with a type of story unlike any other and one which must be numbered high among the more improbable concoctions of the human imagination.  Confronted by the kind of confusion which prevails at the beginning of The Marriage of Figaro, we may not be entirely surprised if this made still more complicated by such further familiar sources of misunderstanding as:

• characters donning disguises or swapping identities;
• men dressing up as women, or vice versa;
• secret assignations when the ‘wrong person’ turns up;
• scenes in which characters are hastily concealed in cupboards or behind furniture, only for their presence to be inevitably and embarrassingly discovered.

Indeed we know that the general chaos of misunderstanding is likely only to get worse, until the knot the characters have tied themselves and each other up into seems almost unbearable. But finally, and to universal relief, everyone and everything will get miraculously sorted out, bringing a deliriously happy ending.

In fact Comedy is a very specific kind of story. It is not simply any story which is funny. Some very funny stories have quite different kinds of plot. Indeed, as we shall see, a story may follow the plot of comedy without it being intented to be funny at all. But just what it is that shapes the plot of Comedy, that provides the common factor between say,  a Marx Brothers film and a play by Shakespeare, an american musical and a novel by Jane Austen, a Mozart opera requires a little careful unravelling. In fact it leads us to one of the most rewarding puzzles literature has to offer.

Shakespeare

The first thing which may strike us when we look at the early comedies of Shakespeare after those of the classical world is how much richer and more complex their stories have become. We can see this particularly vividly in what was probably his first comedy, The Comedy of Errors, because we can contrast it directly with Plautus’s Menaechmi, on which it was based. But what a transformation has been wrought in the original simple tale. Whereas Plautus concentrated on just a single thread of misunderstanding, culminating in the one reunion of the long-separated brothers, Shakespeare’s version enriches this with such a tapestry of subsidiary themes and sub-plots that by the end he can present us with a positive cascade of additiona  unions and reunions.

Ephesian Antipholus, the brother whos marital quarrel has lasted throughout the play is reconciled with his wife. His twin, Syracusan Antipholus, has fallen in love with his wife’s sister: so the play can end on the full resounding note of an impending wedding. Also reunited are the brother’s two servants, another pair of identical twins who had been separated by the same shipwreck which parted their masters. In addition to all this the two Antipholuses are reunited not only with their long-lost father (whose life at the start of the play had been threatened and is now spared) but also with their equally long-lost mother, who makes a dramatic reappearance at the play’s climax. Woven together at the end we thus see no less than seven different, deeply emotional unions or reunions, involving a group of people who had all previously been separated or divided from one another. The sense of a kind of cosmic gathering together of those who had been sundered and isolated could hardly be more complete.

It was really in his other early comedies, however, that Shakespeare began to explore that added dimension which was to extend the range of the plot in a way the classical world had not dreamed of.

In classical Comedy there had only been one central pair of lovers in a a story, and their initial ‘pairing off’ had already taken place before the story opened. We begin, in short with a pair of already established lovers and the chief problem of the story is to surmount some obstacle which has arisen – an unrelenting father or a quarrel – to the confirming of their union.

In plays like The Taming of the Shrew and Love’s Labours Lost, however, we see something very significant happening. We no longer begin with a pair of established lovers. The focus has moved backwards, as it were, to an earlier stage of the process: to the wooing which brings the lovers together in the first place. At the start of the first of these two plays we meet the ill-tempered shrew Katharina who thinks no man good enough for her: and the story tells of how the hero, the imperturbable Petruchio, sets out to break her willfulness, first to make her accept him as lover and then to soften and tame her into a dutiful bride. In the second we see no fewer than four handsome young men, who have vowed to have nothing to do with women, being softened into breaking their vow when by chance they run into four attractive young women who, after an initial show of reluctance finally accept them.

The main action of the story has thus shifted to the pairing off process itself; and in his two remaining early comedies Shakespeare takes this a crucial stage further. At least in The Taming of the Shrew and Love Labour’s Lost we are never in real doubt, once the action has begun, which young man is eventually going to end up with which young woman. But in The Two Gentlemen of Verona a further twist enters the plot We begin with a pair of seemingly established lovers, Proteus and Julia; while Proteus’s friend Valentine goes off to Milan and falls in love with the Duke’s daughter Silvia. But then Proteus himself comes to Milan and also falls in love with Silvia. Thus both young men are now in love with the same young woman. Possessed by his new infatuation, Proteus then becomes a dark figure and proceeds doubly to betray his friend, by revealing to Silvia’s father Valentine’s plan to elope with her. Valentine is banished, leaving Proteus free to continue his wooing of the reluctant Silvia The situation becomes still more complicated when Proteus’s original love Julia arrives in Milan, disguised as a boy, and becomes his page. Silvia flees to join the man she really loves, Valentine, but is captured by robbers – and rescued by Proteus. Valentine is just about to concede Proteus the right to marry her when Julia speaks up in her true identity, reproaching Proteus for his l ack of fidelity. This finally breaks the dark spell which has bewitched Proteus. He ‘comes to himself’, makes up his quarrel with Valentine, and the lovers can at last pair off properly and happily: Proteus with Julia, Valentine with Silvia.

If we have the sense that, in some important respect, Comedy is here at last coming into its own in a form in which we have known it ever since this is underlined by the last of Shakespeare’s early comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where we see the same kind of tangle handled with the effortless ease which showed him arriving at his full maturity as a storyteller.

When the story opens we meet two young men and two young women in a state of intense misery and confusion. The two young men, Lysander and Demetrius, are both in love with the same young woman, Hermia. Hermia loves Lysander and wishes to marry him, but her ‘unrelenting’ father Egeus wants her to marry Demetrius. Her friend Helena, on the other hand, loves Demetrius but is not loved in return. The foursome then enters the mysterious ‘wood near Athens’, where the fairy king Oberon and his mercurial agent Puck get to work sorting things out. But the first result of their enchantments is only to make things worse. By bungling his magic, Puck not only manages to persuade Demetrius to transfer his affections to Helena, but Lysander as well. This leaves Hermia loved by no one, and Helena convinced that all three must be playing a trick on her. Everyone is now at odds with everyone else. All that is required for a happy resolution, however, is for Puck to arrange that Lysander to switch his love back to Hermia. This leaves Demetrius loving Helena, who now accepts that his affection is genuine. The two couples, at last properly paired off, can emerge from the forest to join Duke Theseus and Hippolyta in the joyful prospect of a triple wedding.

What is new about this sort of dizzying merry-go-round is that so much of the story may now be taken up not just with how the lovers can be brought together, but in sorting out the even more basic question of who should end up with whom.  In other words, compared with the simple formulae of the classical world, which were solely concerned with the pitfalls which may await lovers after they have established their love, Comedy has now opened up to include all the possibilities for confusion which may arise before their final pairing off. On the one hand this may simply consist of the uncertainties attending the initial wooing of two lovers, as they first come terms with their love and learn to accept each other. On the other it may also include all the vastly greater complications which can arise when love proves inconstant or one-sided, such as when one’s person’s love for another is initially unrequited; or when a lover begins by loving one person, then switches to another (and not infrequently back again); or when two men are in love with the same woman; or two women with the same man. What has happened, in fact, is that the range of Comedy has been extended, not just by Shakespeare but in Renaissance literature generally, to include virtually every combination and permutation possible in the human experience of love. Its potential for confusion has, in effect, been made complete. As a result we can begin to see more clearly than ever before the true nature of the Comedy plot.

Comedy:  a first summary

What we are looking at when confronted by a fully developed Comedy is not unlike a jigsaw puzzle. By the time a jigsaw is complete, it seems obvious that there is only one way it could have ended up, with each piece in its proper place and fitting perfectly together with all the others. But it has not looked so obvious at an earlier stage when alle the pieces were still muddled up and separate from each other, and when the significance of the fragment of picture on each piece was still unclear. What has had to be established is the precise nature of each piece: both what it stands for in itself and how it fits together with all the others, as part of a gradually emerging whole. In Comedy, the key to bringing this to light is the process of ‘recognition’.  And we can now see how the ‘recognition’ in a fully developed comedy may involve inter-related ingredients, all working together.

The first is that any characters who have become dark because they are imprisoned in some hard, divisive, unloving state – anger, greed, jealousy, shrewdness, disloyalty, self – righteousness or whatever – must be softened and liberated by some act of self – recognition and a change of heart. They must in effect become a ‘new’ or different person (‘come to themselves’) and if they do not change in this way, the only alternative, as we shall shortly see, is that they shall at least be shown up and paid out, by punishment or general derision, so they can no longer cause harm to others.

Secondly it may be necessary for the identity of one or more characters to be revealed in a more literal sense. They are discovered to be someone other than had been supposed.

Thirdly, where relevant, the characters must discover who they are meant to pair off with their true ‘other half’, since until this is established they seem lost and incomplete. Recognition of their ‘other half’ thus becomes an essential part of discovering their own complete identity.

Finally and in general, wherever there is division, separation or loss, it shall be repaired. Families shall be reunited, lost objects found, usurped kingdoms reestablished. Whatever is out of place or sick must be restored.

The ‘change from ignorance to knowledge’ thus becomes in each case a transition from division to wholeness, from darkness to light, and we can set out the ‘before’and ‘after’ states of the four ingredients in Comedy like this:

Dark

One or more characters are trapped in a dark state which throws its shadow over others

The identity or true nature of one or more characters is hidden or unclear.

Lovers are still in a state of uncertainty: e.g. they are separated by a misunderstanding or are still in the process of pairing off

Families are divided and things are ‘not as they should be’

Light

They either go through a change of heart or are exposed and punished

Their true identities or nature are revealed

Each lover is united with his or her ‘other half’

Families are reunited and everything is restored to its proper place

In other words, for love and reconciliation to triumph, it must be discovered who all the characters really are and how they fit harmoniously together. The confusion which precedes this ‘recognition’ can thus be seen as a kind of twilight, marked by the fact that people are insufficiently aware of each other’s and their own true identity: which is why such a conspicious feature of Comedy is the obscuring of identities, not just through ignorance of birth, but through the whole repertoire of such devices as disguises, impersonations and characters being mistaken for each other.

The one thing of which we can be certain in a Comedy is that the happy ending cannot be reached until everyone has emerged into the full light of day, all disguises are thrown off and the characters no longer seem to be anything other than what they are.

The Obscure Heroine

In what are often called the ‘Middle Comedies’ –  The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing – we are introduced to a group of characters, including a central pair of lovers who meet shortly after the story’s opening.  To begin with things go reasonably well, seeming to promise hope for the future. But then a threatening shadow intrudes: and at the heart of the story a particular opposition opens up between two of the characters. At one pole there is the play’s chief dark figure, hard, bitter and vengeful; at the other is the heroine, who spends some crucial part of the story, particularly when the dark powers are most in the ascendant, in disguise: hidden, as it were, from complete view. Thus obscured, the loving heroine becomes the chief touchstone of the story, in one of two ways. Either from behind her disguise, she plays an active and dominant role in bringing about the play’s resolution, in which case she is disguised as a man (Portia as the lawyer Dr Bellario) ; or she is cast in a more passive role as the story’s chief victim, passing into eclipse like Hero in Much Ado, when she is first taken for dead and then reappears at the end disguised as her cousin.

The dark figure in these Middle Comedies is not one of the central characters but, as it were, an outsider or third party, whose egocentric and vengeful ill-humour throws the lovers into shadow. The supreme example of this is the embittered usurer Shylock; and it is notable that when he is finally put to rout by Portia, Shylock does not go through a change of heart. As is his nature, he remains unrelenting. He cannot therefore be admitted to the general rejoicing at the end, and thus becomes the first example we have seen in Comedy of what may be called the ‘unreconciled dark figure’, who ends the story a broken object of derision: a kind of scapegoat or embodiment of all the negative, self-seeking qualities over which the ending of Comedy represents the victory.

Moliere’s Comedy

The fundamental situation of Moliere’s play Tartuffe is that we are presented with an impasse: on the one side stands the unyielding head of the household, in the grip of his dark obsession; on the other, cast under a shadow by his stern refusal to let them marry, are the young couple, representing life, hope and the way forward.

The third ingredient is that, in each instance, a key part in breaking up the log jam, allowing the lovers to come together and life to flow again, is played by the paterfamilias’s servants, the young couple themselves and even his wife. In other words a conspiracy is formed against his life-denying rule by all those around him who he would regard as inferior, junior or subordinate.  In Tartuffe it is Elmire, the wronged wife (aided and abetted by maidservant and young lovers) who stages the crucial assignation which exposes to her besotted husband Orgon what a vicious hypocrite Tartuffe really is (and when he is hauled off for punishment at the end Tartuffe represents as complete an instance of the ‘unreconciled dark figure’ as Shylock).

The Marriage of Figaro

If one had to choose one story to illustrate almost every point about Comedy which has emerged in this chapter, it might be The Marriage of Figaro. Indeed it is a story almost impossible to summarise briefly, precisely because it weaves so many familiar elements in the plot together.  Yet what often passes on the stage as an almost impenetrable thicket of concealments, misunderstandings, stratagems, impersonations and disguises, succeeding each other in bewildering array, and only made acceptable by the continous flow of some of Mozart’s finest music, turns out to be one of the most perfectly constructed of all comedies, each character and episode interacting on all the others until, finally, everything is in place to turn disastrous confusion into a miraculously happy ending.

The fundamental situation presented by ‘The Marriage of Figaro is one familiar from many earlier comedies, not least those of Moliere. We see a household dominated by a ‘dark paterfamilias’ the Count Almaviva, who is blinded by an egocentric obsession: in this case his heartless compulsive philandering. In the shadows cast by his selfishness and ill-temper are his wife the unhappy Countess, and a pair of young lovers, who are planning to get married, Figaro and Susanna. And if this were a conventional working out of the theme we should expect to see the story ending with the Count, as its chief dark figure, going through a change of heart, thus bringing him back together with his wronged wife and simultaneously paving the way for the union of the young lovers.

But Figaro presents us with a number of twists to the unusual formula which lend a peculiar ambiguity to the relationships in the story giving it unusual psychological force.

For a start there is the ambiguity of the young lovers relationship to the couple at the head of the household. In a conventional comedy one of them would have been the child of the Count and Countess.  Here they are not related to the Count and Countess at all, and it is implied that the may all be of similar age (although this is ambiguous). This means that, although Figaro and Susanna are servants and socially inferior, they are, in human termsn, on much more of a level with the Count and Countess. Secondly, there is the mysterious and shadowy role played in the story by the two lesser couples: on the one hand the elderly Dr Bartolo and Marcellina; on the other the young Cherubino and Barbarina as a second, lesser pair of young lovers. Thirdly there is the curious way in which the unfolding action emphasises that the ultimate point of the story is not to bring Figaro and Susanna together, which happens some time before the end: but to bring the Count back into repentant and loving union with his Countess. It is the Count whose dark state poses the overwhelming problem of the story, casting a blight over everyone else, throwing his household into chaos. Until that is resolved, not even the union of the lovers can bring a truly  happy ending.

When the story opens all seems sunny and normal, as Figaro and Susanna are busily engaged on mundane details of their forthcoming nuptials. But even the fact that they are both preoccupied with different things (he measuring the room for a bed, she dreaming of her hat) is a small subconscious sign that people in this world we have entered are shut off from one another; and gradually we learn that beyond the sunlit foreground a double shadow is looming over the happy pair. First Susanna reveals that the Count has amorous designs on her, which throws Figaro into a jealous rage against the Count. Then Figaro himself confesses that he has recklessly allowed himself to get into the position where, in return for an unpaid debt, he is contracted to marry the elderly Marcellina. In other words, he has passed into a curiously oblique echo of the classical Oedipal situation where a young man finds his way forward to a mature and independent relationship with his feminine ‘other half’ barred by the double obstacle of antagonism to a male rival, representing threatening masculine authority, and an equally retarding tie to a powerful older woman.

But the action of the first act is in fact dominated by another character altogether, the young page Cherubino: and as soon becomes apparant his role in the story is essentially symbolic. With his name resonant of a little boy god of love, Cherubino’s only obvious characteristic is his insatiable, adolescent desire for love. He is like a personification of the restless love-urge, immature, unchanneled, egocentric (and therefore without any content of real love), which is precisely the problem, which, in a much darker form, afllicts the Count and is the central problem of the whole story. The point of Cherubino’s prominence in the first act (which afterwards diminishes considerably) is that he rattles about the household like a little inferior shadow of the Count’s own weakness, drawing attention to it: which is precisely why the Count cannot stand him. And the chief effect of the first of the opera’s three episodes of multiple misunderstanding (as characters hide behind the furniture, overhearing what they are not meant to hear) is to bring the Count’s hatred for Cherubino to a head. First the count learns that Cherubino loves the Countess (which is what the Count himself ought to be doing). Then he thinks erroneously that Cherubino also loves Susanna (which is what the Count would like to be doing). We even learn that the Count has designs on Cherubino’s own girl friend Barbarina. Having worked himself up all round into a jealous fury, the Count tries to put an end to Cherubino’s days of philandering altogether by packing him off to be a soldier, little realising that by getting rid of his ‘little shadow’ he will do nothing to solve the real problem of the household which lies in himself.

If the point of the first act is to lay bare in a peculiarly subtle way the hidden source of everyone’s troubles, the second opens with the beginning of an elaborate attempt to do something about it. For the first time we meet the Countess, and see the desperate state of misery to which she has been reduced by the Count’s heartlessness. She is the ultimate helpless victim, consigned to the shadows by the state of darkness which has possessed him. Now with the aid of the much more ‘active’ Susanna and Figaro she is at last beginning to hath a plot to trap the Count and expose him. This is just the sort of line-up we recognise from Moliere: the dark and obsessed head of the household, representing a sick ‘ruling order’ being opposed by an ‘inferior’ alliance between wife, servants and lovers.

The chief effect of the opera’s second episode of multiple misunderstanding (with characters now hiding in cupboards and jumping out of windows) is, like that of the first, simply to get the Count into a greater state of angry confusion than ever. He is still looking for anyone other than himself to blame for the fact that everything seems to be going wrong. Only now his rage focuses on Figaro. For all sorts of dark and twisted reasons he determines to use his authority to thwart Figaro’s plans to marry Susanna: and he thus passes obliguely into the familiar position of the ‘unrelenting parent’, bent on standing in the way of young love.

Act Three sees Figaro’s problems coming to a head. It seems that there is nothing he can do to prevent the elderly Marcellina claiming her right to marry him – now with the full support of the Count. Confusion and darkness seem about to win their ultimate victory:  when suddenly, to everyone’s astonishment, it is revealed by way of a birthmark that Figaro is in fact the long-lost son of Marcellina and Dr Bartolo. He has just been on the verge of being drawn into marriage with his own mother. This dramatic revelation of Figaro’s true identity (totally improbable in any sense but that of psychological symbolism) has such a stunning effect on everyone that it completely pulls the rug from under the Count’s feet. We are confronted with that potent image familiar from the end of so many comedies where suddenly everything comes right: a long-separated family is miraculously brought together; long hidden identities are suddenly brought to light; the young lovers are finally free to get married; and preparations are made for Figaro’s wedding to Susanna at once.

At this point, however, even while the wedding celebrations are in full swing, we are forcibly reminded of how far the story’s title is misleading as to what it is ultimately about. The marriage of Figaro, at the end of Act Three, is by no means the end of the drama. The real problem overshadowing the whole story has yet to be brought to its head, and such is the theme of the fourth and concluding act.

For a third time the chief characters are plunged into a series of multiple misunderstandings, this time at night amid the shadowy surroundings of the garden as the two leading ladies, the Countess and Susanna, disguised as each other, now take the final initiative in leading the Count a merry dance (so clearly is the focus now on the unshakeable feminine alliance between Susanna and the Countess that they even briefly fool Figaro as well). The Count is led into the final hypocrisy of a jealous attack on Figaro for supposedly making love to the Countess, when in fact Figaro is making love to his own wife and it is the Count who thinks he is making love to Figaro’s. On this climax, bringing the Count’s hypocrisy to its reductio ad absurdum, the doubly wronged Countess can step from the shadows to bring home to him the full horror of the situation he has got into. We at last see the appalled Count going through the profound transformation we have been waiting for throughout the story. He has at last been forced to confront the truth about himself and his own behavior. He recognizes what a heartless monster of hypocrisy he has become, and pleads with his faithful loving wife for forgiveness. At last everyone in the story can properly pair off, and the four joyful couples sing out the moral of the tale:

‘Let us all learn the lesson, forget and forgive, Whoever contented and happy would live’

and how, after this tempestuous day (the story’s subtitle is ‘The Day of Madness’) they are going ‘to the sound of music to revel all night’.

Comedy: The Plot Disguised

More than with any of the other basic plots, it may be tempting to see Comedy as a type of story arrived at by conscious contrivance. Compared with the great primeval shapes of, say, the Quest or Overcoming the Monster story, with their misty origins in myth and legend, there seems to be something artificial about Comedy.  It begs two hugely important questions. The first is: why did this particular kind of story establish itself so strongly, over such a long period, as one of the central threads in the literature of the Western civilization? It must have expressed something much deeper than can be accounted for just by the force of convention.

The second question arises when we look at what happened when the Comedy plot, more than ever before began to move off the stage How did it eventually come to give rise to stories which seemed to owe little, if anything, to the tradition established by writers for the theater?

When the first recognizable modern novels began to appear in the eighteenth century it was perhaps hardly surprising that Comedy should have been one of the plots to which their authors were most obviously drawn. For half a century comedies had been the most prominent type of stories of the stages of England and France. One of the pioneers of the novel, Henry Fielding, had written many comedies for the London stage, including translations of Moliere. And in the most successful of his novels, Tom Jones (1749) we see how easily the traditional conventions of stage Comedy could be adapted to the new form.

The theme of the novel is that of a young hero, a ‘foundling’ born in mysterious circumstances, who is searching for his true identity in the world. Throughout the story he is shadowed by the chief dark figure of the tale; his adoptive brother Blifil, who apparently rejoices in every worldy advantage that Tom does not enjoy. Blifil seems on the upper world surface to be the respectable, well-behaved, successful one of the pair, legitimate and dutiful, while the high spirited, illegitimate Tom, kind-hearted but constantly misunderstood, seems doomed to poverty and disgrace.

Almost as in a stage Comedy the action of the novel is divided into three main ‘acts’. In the first, set in the countryside of Somerset, we see Tom and Blifil both setting hearts on marrying the lovely heroine, Sophia Western. Secretly she loves Tom, but the parents on both sides are determined that she should marry Blifil and the ‘act’ ends with Tom, thanks to blifil’s unscrupulous machinations being driven from home to find his own way in the world.

The second ‘act’ shows Tom wandering aimlessly across the countryside and becoming involved in an inn at Upton-on-Severn in that central episode of multiple misunderstanding which is so reminiscent of the conventions of stage Comedy. He meets with a ‘Temptress’ and goes to bed with her. At just that moment, Sophia, who has been pursuing him, arrives to discover what he is up to, which turns her violently against him. Then her father also arrives and imagines Tom must be in bed with Sophia. This creates the greatest possible degree of misunderstanding all around, and the chief consequence of this ‘act’ is to set the hero and heroine at odds, thanks to Tom’s moment of weakness: which means he is going to have to do a great del more to prove himself truly worthy of her before any happy ending can be reached.

In the third and final act all the main characters converge separately on London, where the denouement will eventually take place. We begin with Tom living in obscure, ‘inferior’ circumstances and through various acts of kindness and courage, working his way back to the position where he can once again plausibly confront Sophia and seek a reconciliation. But just as this seems on the cards he is caught out in a second act of weakness with a ‘Temptress’, the imperious and treacherous Lady Bellaston (whom he first woos at a masked ball imagining that she is Sophia in disguise). This lands him in what seems a fatal catastrophe. Thanks to Lady Bellaston’s scheming he ends up in prison. Here he is told that the first ‘Temptress’ he made love to at Upton was in fact his own mother. He seems doomed to remain in the inferior underworld forever. Meanwhile in the upper world, arrangements are being made for Sophia’s marriage to Blifil. Then comes the dizzying series of revelations which comprise the ‘recognition. Tom discovers his true identity, as Blifil’s elder brother Blifil’s real nature as an unscrupulous villain and hypocrite is finally exposed. Sophia recognizes Tom’s true worth and that, for all his moments of weakness,  he has never ceased to love her. Their wedding is arranged, to universal rejoicing, while Blifil, as ‘unreconciled dark figure’, meets his come-uppance off stage.

Quite apart from Coleridge’s oft-quoted claim that Fielding’s novel had one of the most perfect plots ever planned it is worth summarizing Tom Jones in this way because it shows how little new there was to the treatment of Comedy when it moved off the stage into the pages of the novel. We see all the familiar devices: characters in disguise, ‘unrelenting parents’; assignations where the heroine is confused with another woman; the discovery of someone’s true identity as a crucial part of the ‘recognition’. We see an unusually thorough working out of the contrast between an ‘upper world’ based on false values and the ‘inferior’ world where true worth is preparing for the moment when it can finally be revealed and brought up into the light: except that here it is the hero rather than the heroine who spends most of the story ‘obscured’ and Tom also has to work hard to prove his worth. Unlike the conventional ‘wronged heroine’ he is by no means wholly innocent.

We also see in Tom Jones how the novel was able to present the events leading to this final emergence into the light as a more gradual process, taking place over a long period of time, corresponding more nearly to the processes of growth and development in human life. Fifty years later came another major step in the evolution of Comedy into a plot for the novel. Here, in an episode almost unique in the history of Comedy we are given a rare glimpse of this plot – for all its overtones of artifice – springing directly from the circumstances of ‘real life’, showing how closely it could express the inmost patterns of an author’s own psychology.

The Plot Disguised: War and Peace

By the mid-19th century the Comedy plot had become so well established in its new incarnation that it crops up in novels all over the place. But in some of the most familiar examples Comedy has by now travelled so far from its theatrical origins and become so successfully disguised in its new role that we might not even notice that the same archetypal plot is shaping the story.

Among all the dozens of characters in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1868) we meet in the opening characters we meet in the opening chapters are four young people, all on the verge of embarking on the wider stage of the world. First there is the huge, awkward, introverted Pierre. Then, in the Rostov family, there are young Nikolai, extravertedly looking forward to his career in the army, and his lively younger sister Natasha. Finally there is the shy, spiritual Maria, living at home in the country with her old father,  the retired general Prince Bolkonsky. These are the main heroes and heroines of the story; altogether we must include Maria’s brother, the rather older Prince Andrew, already married and out on the stage of the world as a fast rising young officer.

There is no doubt who occupies the role of chief dark figure in the story. The self-created Emperor Napoleon looms up like a distant cloud on the horizon in the opening line of the book. His insatiable ambition casts an ever-growing shadow over everyone, first coming to a head in the great confrontation between the Russians and the French in Austria in 1805; but finally with the invasion of 1812, bursting right into the heart of Russia and the lives of all the main characters.

Across all this vast canvas and tumult of great events, what binds the whole narrative together is the working out of the destinies of the central four figures, with Prince Andrew, through every kind of misunderstanding, uncertainty and switch of love. We follow Pierre through the death of his father, his disastrous marriage to the temptress Helene Kuragin, his long and painful inner journey to discover ‘the meaning of life’. We follow Nikolai through his adolescent love for little Sonia, and his character forming adventures as an army officer. We see little Natasha blossoming into an adult, ‘active’ heroine, falling in love with Prince Andrew after the death of his wife, getting engaged to him and then falling into the disastrous folly of her infatuation with the unscrupulous fortune-hunter Anatole Kuragin. We have earlier seen the Princess Maria rejecting a cynical offer of marriage from the same dark figure, before sinking into a long ‘passive’ eclipse under the shadow of her tyrannical old father, imagining she will always remain a spinster.

Then comes Borodino and Napoleon’s occupation of burning Moscow, the moment when darkness seems complete and all the characters are huled about, willy-nilly, in the book’s climactic episode of confusion. Pierre, who has already begun to sense a growing love for Natasha, is plunged into an inferior realm, firstly through his wandering about occupied Moscow in humble disguise, then through his hardships on the long march westward as a prisoner of war, daily expecting death, although it is in these depths that he meets the old peasant Platon whose wisdom transforms his life. Nikolai, in the chaos of the retreat to Moscow, meets and gives assistance to Princess Maria, before plunging into the further chaos of the ensuing battles. Natasha in the chaos of the Rostov’s flight from Moscow is reconciled with the dying Prince Andrew; and then begins to realise that she loves Pierre. Princess Maria, after her eventful meeting with Nikolai, begins to emerge from the shadow of her tyrannical old father, and realises that she loves Nikolai.

Finally the much greater shadow which has fallen over all them begins to lift, when Napoleon orders the retreat from Moscow. With gathering pace, the chief dark figure of the story, with his battered legions, is bundled towards ignominious expulsion from the stage. As the light returns to Russia, the book moves towards a conclusion which, through most of its course, would have seemed totally improbable. Pierre and Natasha are reunited, declare their love and marry. Nikolai and Maria meet again, discover their love for each other, and also marry. Two unlikely couples have been brought together in a way which could not have happened without the vicissitudes and painful self-discoveries forced on them by the chaos, the suffering and uprooting of the war. And in their two joyful unions we see a microcosm of the greater fate of Russia itself, having come through the colossal crisis which had enabled her people to discover their inmost sense of national identity and now emerging into peace with a triumphant sense of life renewed.

But of course War and Peace does not end there. In Tolstoy’s Epilogue we are carried forward a few years to be given a glimpse of the family life of the two couples after their marriage. Earlier authors of novels based on the Comedy plot, such as Fielding and Jane Austen, were able to remain within the archetypal framework and to end their stories quite happily on the great symbolic image of the wedding. But Tolstoy was so preoccupied with the realistic and historical element in his story that he could not resist wanting to see what happened next, explored the strains and disagreements which would inevitably be part of that aftermath, he was in danger of dissipating the impact of that final image of unity and life renewed, by allowing his story to peter out on an unresolved image of new disunity and uncertainty.

This was merely one instance of the problems which were beginning to surround the Comedy plot in the mid-nineteenth century as it moved away from it original forms of expression. It was not that the plot was changing its structure; simply that it was being put to purposes which were threatening to detach it from it archetypal foundations. And this was leading to a new phase in the history of the plot which has, in the past century or so, drastically altered its role in Western storytelling.

The 20th Century Comedy

If the core of seriousness had already begun to drop out of Comedy, what happened in the twentieth century – when the plot continued to enjoy enormous popularity in many different forms – was that Comedy tended to develop almost into two different types of story. On one hand were those expressions of the plot where the love interest took precedence, often without particular humour. On the other were those which concentrated on the humor or as we say the ‘comic’ element, with the love interest either relegated to a subordinate place, or eliminated altogether.

Stories of the first kind, where the love interest predominates, became particularly popular in that home of sentimentality, Hollywood. An early example, featuring the leading heartthrob of the silent screen Rudolph Valentino, was the Sheikh (1921), based on a novel published in England two years earlier by Edith Hull, the wife of a Derbyshire pig farmer. The English heroine is shown falling into an ‘inferior realm’ when she visits an Arab festival in disguise and is captured by an Arab sheikh (played by Valentino). She secretly begins to fall in love with her captor, but is then captured by a genuinely ‘dark’ figure, a villainous bandit chief. She is rescued by her gallant sheikh and all is resolved when he turns out to be really a European nobleman in disguise, adopted by Arabs when his parents had been killed in the desert. His true identity revealed, showing him not be racially ‘inferior’ after all, the loving couple can happily return to the ‘upper world’of Europe to be married.

The love aspect of Comedy also came to the fore in that twentieth-century successor to the tradition of ‘light opera’, the American stage and film musical. Rogers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific (1949), for instance, was an almost entirely straight and sentimental love story. The heroine, an American naval nurse, arrives during the Second World War on a Pacific island, where she falls in love with a French planter. But he has had two children by a Polynesian woman, now dead; and because of this supposedly ‘inferior’ racial link, the heroine is reluctant to marry him. But thanks to his intimate knowledge of the islands, the planter is now recruited by the US Army to play a key part in a military operation. When he is smuggled onto a Japanese-occupied island to spy on enemy military movements, he is revealed to be a brave hero. The heroine at last sees him in his true light as a real man, no longer ‘inferior’ and the story ends with assuming the role of mother to his half-Polynesian children as the couple look forward to their marriage.

Playing it for Laughs

When we use the term ‘comedy’ in the modern world we usually mean no more than something we are intended to find funny. It might seem odd to have taken so long to get round to what is about Comedy which makes us laugh, because of course provoking an audience to laughter has always been inseparable from Comedy.  Only in comparatively recent times has this ‘comic’ element emerged as something which can be looked on as wholly separate, in its own right.

The essence of Comedy has lain in exposing as ridiculous the state of self-delusion which which affects human beings who have become isolated from those around them by their egocentricity. This is essentially what our human capacity for seeing something as funny is about. The chief function of humor is that it provides us with a more or less harmless way to defuse the social strains created by egotism. This is why comedy of any kind almost invariably centres on people who are in some way taking themselves too seriously, giving the rest of us the chance to see how foolish this makes them look.

Nothing seems funnier to us than the sight of someone imagining that he has the world around him organised and under control, when in fact we can see that is nothing of the kind. This was why silent film audiences in the 1920s found it funny to see Oliver Hardy, the earnest fat man in a bowler hat, trying to work out with his hapless partner Stan Laurel how to move a grand piano down a flight of steps, only to see it constantly slipping out of their grasp.

This was why British television audiences in the 1970s laughed at the sight of Basil Fawlty, played by John Cleese in the series Fawlty Towers, desperately trying to preserve his persona as a coolly efficient hotel proprietor and to persuade his guests that everything is in perfect order, while behind the scenes it is only too obvious that all his establishment’s arrangements are sliding into chaos.

Indeed, beneath the surface of these modern comedies which are primarily intended just to make us laugh, it is strikingly how far they are still shaped by those basic situations and rules of the Comedy plot going back thousands of years, as when Laurel and Hardy based one of their best-known films ‘Our Relations’ on the plot of a comedy written in Rome in the third century BC. The only real difference lies in  the extent to which the emphasis is placed on the ‘comic’ element at the expense of the rest of the underlying story.

Comedy in “Singin’ in the Rain”

Of course not all twentieth century Comedy reflected this split between the romantic and comic elements in the plot.  There continued to be many comedies where the two components were still woven together, as in Stanley Donen’s musical ‘Singing in the Rain (1952). Set in Hollywood in 1927, when silent movies were giving way to the ‘talkies’, the story centres on two silent stars, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen).

Lina, the chief dark figure of the story is a shallow, self-centred monster, so deluded by the dream-world of Hollywood that she believes the romantic relationship they act out on the screen is meant to carry over into real life. But Don meets and falls in love with a young, serious actress, Kathy (Debbie Reynolds). The hinge of the plot comes when the studio decides it haas to put its two romantic stars into a talking picture. Lina’s grating voice inability to sing and painful Bronx accent threaten disaster until Don’s song-and-dance partner Cosmo Brown has the clever idea of using Kathy to dub Lina’s voice on screen. It is the hero’s joyous response to this proposal which prompts Kelly’s famous tap dance to the title song, which has become probably the best known sequence in the history of the cinema.

Thanks to Kathy’s voice, the first ‘Lockwood-Lamont musical’is a triumph, and the crafty Lina tries to blackmail the studio into keeping Kathy on anonymously in the shadows, as her secret ‘screen voice’. But when she recklessly appears to sing before a packed live theatre audience she is in danger of being exposed, until Cosmo places Kathy behind a curtain to supply Lina’s singing voice. The audience is fooled until, at a crucial moment, the curtain is drawn to reveal what is really going on. The humiliated Lina flees the stage as ‘unreconciled dark figure’. Kathy the ‘obscured heroine’ emerges from the shadows as the real story. And the story ends with hero and heroine in loving embrace, in front of a billboard advertising their first film together.

Comedy in “Some Like it Hot”

Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play two dance musicians in the Chicago of the 1920s who unwittingly find themselves witnessing the St Valentine’s Day massacre, in which the members of a criminal gang are machine gunned by their rivals. Realising that the murder gang will ruthlessly track them down to eliminate them the pair disguise themselves as female dance musicians, Daphne and Josephine, and join an all-girl band heading for Florida.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=some+like+it+hot+trailer

Here Curtis disguises himself back again as a man, posing as a millionaire in order to woo the prettiest of the girl musicians (Marilyn Monroe). Lemmon is in turn wooed in his female guise by a genuine but aged millionaire, Osgood E. Fielding III, who is so enamoured that, as the film ends, he proposes marriage.

Trying one excuse after another to explain how this is totally out of the question, Lemon finally pulls off his wig to reveal that he is a man. Even this does not deter the doting suitor, who merely replies ‘wll, nobody’s perfect’.

Later in this seminar we shall consider just why the Comedy plot would have come to be so widely burlusqued in this way. But in view of all these highly unprobable marriages and unions at the end of modern comedies, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the only way in which the twentieth century could be claimed to have extended the range of the traditional Comedy plot was in the type of story where the hero and heroine have not only been married before the story opens, but also divorced. The interest of the plot then lies in seeing how they are eventually brought together again to remarry.

The earliest instance of such a story, regarded in its time as highly daring, was Noel Coward’s play, Private Lives (1933). The heroine goes off on honeymoon with her second husband, only to find that the next room in their hotel is occupied by her first husband, on honeymoon with his new wife. Plunged into this embarassing situation, the heroine and her first husband gradually discover that they still love each other rather than their new partners, and by the end they are reunited.

Another instance of this twist to the plot was The Philadelphia Story (1940), originally written as a romantic comedy for Hollywood and later adapted to make the even better-known film musical High Society (1956). We meet the heroine Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn/Grace Kelly), a rich, beautiful and frigid society girl, in her family’s grand house. Having been divorced from her first husband, Dexter Haven, she is making preaparations for her wedding the following day to the new man in her life, a socially ambitious nouveau riche. When the relaxed and genial Dexter (Cary Grant/Bing Crosby) then strolls in to remind her teasingly of the happy romantic times when they were still in love, this begings to sow painful doubts in her mind. He tells her the only reason she has accepted her new fiancé is that he treats her like a goddess on a pedestal, and that her desire to be worshipped is her great weakness. At a lavish eve of wedding ball, Tracy gets drunk and recklessly wanders off to enjoy an amorous liaison with a handsome, raffish newspaperman (James Stewart/Frank Sinatra) who has been sent to cover the event for a vulgar gossip sheet. This descent into an ‘inferior realm’ thaws her out of her icy frigidity, and liberates her into becoming a different woman, with the result that she and her stuffy fiancé have a flaming row. With a crowd of fashionable guests already assembled for the wedding and the organ ready to strike up ‘Here comes the bride’, she decides to call the wedding off. She is nervously standing at the door, wondering how to explain it to the guests, when Dexter materialises at her shoulder, having recognized that the goddess has stepped from her pedestal and become the warmer, softer, feminine girl he always knew she had it in her to be. He whispers to her what she is to say and, as the dutifully repeats his words to the guests, she suddenly realises that she is announcing that there is to be a wedding after all, and that she is about to remarry her first husband. Deliriously happy she walks up the aisle, recognising that it is him she has really loved all along.

However novel this situation may seem, it is really only a contemporary version of that theme which has run through Comedy since the time of Menander: the lovers who are separated by a misunderstanding, and may even temporarily go off with other parties, but are eventually reconciled.

Only towards the end of the twentieth century, however, did modern Comedy finally manage to turn the outward conventions of the time-honoured plot completely on their head. The hero of the film ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral 1994) played by Hugh Grant, is one of a group of young friends who, one after another, get married (or in one case, die). After the first wedding, he has a one night affair with another guest, an American girl, but she returns to America. Eventually as the sequence of weddings unfolds, the hero becomes so desperate at seeing all his friends married off that he proposes to another member of the group who is similarly on the shelf. As the guests all gather in church for what it seems will be the final wedding of the story, the hero sees in the congregation the American girl he has never been able to get out of his mind. The bride is already standing at the altar when the hero and his American friend manage to escape from the church and run off together into the rain. Declaring undying love for each other, they agree their love is so real that it would be a mistake for them ever to get married.

After more than 2000 years of comedies in which the climax was the moment when the hero and heroine could at least head off to their wedding, here was one which might have seemed the complete inversion: a story made up of a whole succession of weddings, but in which the resolution finally came with hero and heroine agreeing, as ultimate proof that their love was real, that they should not get married. However, it was only the outward form which had been stood on its head. The story still ended, after all their separations, misunderstandings and pairing off with the wrong partners, with hero and heroine coming together in recognition of their loving union. For all its seeming reversal of convention, the underlying power of the Comedy plot still brought the story to its irresistible archetypal conclusion.

Comedy: Summing-up

Comedy cannot be summarised in quite the same way as the other basic plots because the very nature of the plot requires it to cover such a range of variations. But the essence of the story is always that: 

1. We see a little world in which people have passed under a shadow of confusion, uncertainty and frustation, and are shut off from one another;
2. The confusion gets worse until the pressure of darkness is at its most acute and everyone is in a nightmarish tangle;
3. finally, with the coming to light of things not previously recognised, perceptions are dramatically changed. The shadows are dispelled, the situation is miraculously transformed and the little world is brought together in a state of joyful union. 

The key to Comedy is thus the transition between two general states. The first which persists through most of the story is a kind of twilight in which nothing is seen clearly; where people’s true nature or identity may be obscured; and where there may be uncertainty as to who should end up with whom. The chief cause of the twilight is usually some central dark figure, who is in some way acting blindly and heartlessly. It is his (or her) egocentricity which is throwing everyone else into the shadows and setting people at odds with one another. And nothing symbolises this state of division more powerfully than that it is keeping apart the hero and heroine of the story. The second state arrives with the ‘recognition’ and ‘unknotting’ when, at the climax of the story, the dark figure is in some way caught out, and all is at last seen clearly. Everyone’s true nature and identity is revealed; everyone recognises who is his or her proper ‘other half’ and the story ends, with darkness and division at an end, on the image of a great coming together. What was dark is now light. What was divided is now whole. And nothing symbolises this more completely than the union of hero and heroine. 

During the first, twilit period, the world presented by the story is usually divided in some way into an ‘upper realm’, where the story’s chief source of darkness holds sway, and a ‘lower realm’ in the shadows. It is ‘below the line’, in the ‘inferior realm’ that the seeds of life and truth, the potential for love and the ability to see whole are to be found: obscured from the dominant ‘upper realm’ until they are ready to be brought up into the light, to bring both halves of the world together. 

Within the context of this general pattern, the great majority of stories shpaed by the Comedy plot fall into two main types. 

The first is where the chief source of darkness throwing a shadow over the preceedings is some character other than the hero (e.g. an unrelenting father or a ‘dark rival’) who dominates everyone else in a way which creates unhappiness and confusion and is opposed to the flow of life. In such a story the chief victims consigned to the shadows are likely to be the h ero and heroine; and they can only be raised up into the light and brought together when the dark figure either has his eyes opened and goes through a change of heart, or is exposed and pushed off the stage. 

The second is where the chief dark figure is the hero himself. I tis then the wronged heroine, standing for true feeling and the ability to see whole, who is most obviously in the shadows. Here, to reach the happy ending, it is necessary for the hero to go through a change of heart and  ‘come to himself’. As he is liberated, so also is the heroine, so they can emerge together into the light. In those rare examples where the heroine is the dark figure, it is her own repressed inner feminity, which is obscured. It is this which the loving hero perceives and brings out, so that she likewise goes through the change of heart necessary to bring about the happy ending. 

There is a third type of Comedy where there is no obvious dark figure in the usual sense,, and where the source of confusion is simply a general state of misunderstanding which has everyone in its grip (e.g. the Comedy of Errors, a Midsummer Night’s Dream, Guys and Dolls, Four Weddings and a Funeral). But here the resolution can still only be reached when the redeeming truth is won from the shadows. And here we see more clearly than ever how the real preoccupation of Comedy is consciousness: what people are aware of. The real cause of confusion and conflict is always that the characters are not fully conscious of the truth, either about other people or about themselves; and while they are in this limited state of awareness they remain shut off from one another. What dispels the confusion is that their awareness is finally opened out so that they can see everything and everyone, including themselves, straight and whole. It is this which enables them to feel properly and to discover how they can all realte to each other in a state of unity and love: because they have at last ‘seen the light’. 

We can now look at the plot of Comedy in the context of the other types of story we considered earlier. 

Like the other plots, it conjures up a world in which the threatening power of darkness is, through most of the story, in some way or another dominant. As in the others, this pressure is likely to reach its height just before the end, in the story’s climax. As in the others, there then follows the reversal, the miraculous liberation, so that the story can end on an image of wholeness and completion. 

In the first three plots, Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches and the Quest, we saw an essentially light hero or heroine, overshadowed by dark figures, moving towards the moment when the darkness is overthrown and they can at last emerge completely into the light. In the most fully developed examples of the Voyage and Return story, we saw a hero who begins by displaying some of the characteristics of a dark figure himself, but who is eventually liberated from the dark forces closing round him in the ‘other’ world by the fact that he has switched to become a light figure. 

In Comedy we see both patterns at work. Sometimes, in the earlier types of story, the hero and the heroine are essentially light but overshadowed by some other dominant dark figure, who has to make the switch to light so that hero and heroine can be united. Sometimes, as in those Voyage and Return examples, the hero himself is dark and it is his switch to light which is necessary to pave the way to the happy ending. In either form, Comedy differs from the earlier types of story, where the dark figures opposed to the hero and heroine went through no change of heart but were simply cleared out of the way at the end by being discomfited or overthrown (although even in Comedy some vestige of this remains in those examples where the ‘unreconciled dark figure’ is caught out and pushed off the stage).  Only in Comedy is it the general tendency for all the characters to be brought to light and reconciled, to produce the story’s closing image of a little world wholly united. 

Even so, what all the types of story we have looked at so far have in common is that they show the power of darkness itself having to be vanguished as the precondition of the hero or heroine being able to enjoy a happy ending. What we are now about to consider for the first time is what happens in stories when the central figure becomes dark and does not go through a change of heart, but remains dark right to the end. This produces a kind of story which in some respects is quite unlike any of those we have previously looked at. Except that ultimately, as we shall see, the fundamental rules which govern its unfolding are entirely consistent with those which govern the structure of the other plots. 

In surveying the earlier plots we ended by looking briefly at the ‘dark’ versions of each type of story: examples where the underlying patterns fails to work out to its proper, happy conclusion. In the case of Comedy it might seem a contradiction in terms that there could be a ‘dark’ version, in that if ‘recognition’ and a change of heart fail to take place as the precondition of a happy ending, the story can scarcely be regarded as a Comedy. How then would we describe such a tale? 

Let us consider a familiar example. We see a hero who falls in love with a beautiful heroine. She loves him and despite strong initial oppostion from her father, who regards him as ‘inferior’, they get married. But the hero unwittingly gives offence to a jealous, embittered third party, who becomes the chief dark figure of the story. The dark figure determines to get his revenge, and begins to drop hints to the hero that his young wife is being unfaithful to him. The villain hatches a dark plot, involving a lost handkerchief, supposedly given by the heroine to her lover. The hero is taken in and becomes deranged with rage. If this were a Comedy, when confusion and misunderstanding have reached their height, this is where the process of ‘recognition’ would begin to clear things up. The true explanation of the lost handkerchief would come to light. The dark figure would be exposed for the villain he is. The hero would recognise he had dreadfully wronged his wife, and would be filled with contrititon. Finally her and heroine would be reconciled, and all would end happily. As we all know, however, the story does not end like that, precisely because there is no ‘recognition’. Othello is not a comedy, and it leads us to the next plot. 

Tragedy : The Five Stages

‘For that – for that – I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the world I would give my soul for that!’  Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

‘He felt that all his powers, hitherto dissipated and scattered, were now concentrated and directed with terrible energy toward one blissful aim’ Vronsky in Anna Karenina 

‘From that moment her whole existence was nothing but a maze of lies Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary 

‘Have mercy, Jesu! Soft! I did but dream.  O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!  The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight. Cold tearful drops do stand upon my trembling flesh …. All several sins, all us’d in each degree.  Throng to the bar, crying all ‘Guilty! Guilty!.  I shall despair. There is no creature loves me’ Richard III (on the eve of his death) 

So shall you hear.  Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts;  Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause;  And in this upshot, purposes mistook.  Fall’it on the inventor’s heads’  Hamlet Act v. Sc.ii

Sooner or later, in any attempt to explore the deeper patterns which shape storytelling, we are brought up against one central, overwhelming fact. This is the way in which, through all the millions of stories thrown up by the human imagination, just two endings have far outweighed all others. In fact we might almost say that for a story to resolve in a way which really seems final and complete, it can only do so in one of two ways. Either it ends with a man and a woman united in love. Or it ends in death. 

On the face of it, this might not seem particularly odd. Nothing in human life, after all, might be considered more final than death. What could be more natural than that our imaginations should conjure up stories which conclude with their hero or heroine reaching old age and death? 

But the point is that the number of stories which end like this, with their hero or heroine passing peacefully away in the fullness of years, is not very great. When we talk of a story ending in a death we do not usually mean that kind of death at all. We mean a death that is violent, premature, a death that is ‘unnatural’. In other words, we mean a death which shows that something has gone hideously or not, as we say, tragically wrong. 

Of course the huge mass of stories which end in violent death do not by any means all have the same underlying shape. It is possible to arrive at such an ending by any of a number of routes. For a start, as we have seen from our glimpses of the ‘dark’ versions of other plots – the dark Rags to Riches story, the dark Quest and so on – it is possible for other basic types of story to lead up to such a conclusion, when we might talk of them having a ‘tragic ending’. And even when we turn to that great family of stories which have for thousands of years been more specifically described as ‘tragedies’, we find considerable variety in their underlying shape and moral emphasis. Even more than with Comedy, we are venturing here into an area of storytelling which cannot be delineated in just one simple formula. 

Nevertheless, all through the history of storytelling, we find one particular type of story which is shaped by a pattern so persistent and so distinctive as to make it unmistakable. This can be illustrated by five well-known examples, composed in a wide variety of cultural circumstances and for greatly differing purposes: the Greek myth of Icarus; the German legend of Faust; Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Stevenson’s nineteenth-century horror story, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; and a modern novel, Nabokov’s Lolita. 

The story of Icarus tells of how he and his father, the inventor Daedalus, are enabled to escape from the island of Crete by means of feathered wings. Before they set out his father gives him an impassioned warning to fly neither too high, lest the heat of the sun melt the wax holding the wings together, nor too low, lest they fall into the sea. They set off, and for a while all goes well – until eventually the temptation to ignore his father’s advice to keep between the opposites proves too much for Icarus. He wishes to soar up higher and higher, towards the sun. His initial exhilaration turns first to anxiety, as the wax begins to melt, then to panic. The wings are giving way, Icarus can no longer keep up, and he plunges headlong to his death in the sea below. 

The learned scholar Faust, eager for ‘forbidden knowledge’ and the mastery of occult powers, sells his soul to the devil. At first he is given glimpses of all sorts of marvels and wonders, and wins a great reputation. But gradually the insubstantiality of the visions he can conjure up begins to pall. Worse, Faust (in Marlowe’s dramatisation Dr Faustus) senses that the time is drawing near when he must pay the price – until, amid mounting horror, he sees the moment arrive when he is carried down to hell by demons, to face everlasting punishment. 

Macbeth, the victorious and ambitious general, is told by the withches of all sorts of honours which will come to him, including the improbable promise that he will one day be king of Scotland. When their lesser prophecies begin to come true, Macbeth is drawn by the temptation to make them complete, by murdering the reigning king Duncan and so succeeding him. At first all seems to go well, and Macbeth becomes king, but he is not secure in his new state. First suspicion mounts around him, leading him to commit further crimes in a desperate effort to make his position safe. Then outright opposition gathers; until Macbeth is surrounded by his advancing enemies and killed. 

Dr. Jekyll, the outwardly respectable medical man with a dubious secret life, discovers a potion which will enable him to split into two personalities, one his normal ‘light’ self, the other the dark and deformed Mr Hyde. At first it is exhilarating to be able to escape at night into his Hyde-self, indulging in all sorts of nameless wickedness, then to return safely to his Jekyll self by day. Bur gradually the Hyde-personality begins to take over, committing a succession of crimes, culminating in a particularly horrible murder. Jekyll has already found he is increasingly unable to control the switches between his light and dark personalities. Now he finds himself trapped forever in his alter-ego state, and on the run from police, his friends, everyone. In a state of total despair he kills himself. 

Humbert Humbert, the outwardly respectable scholar, has long nurtured a secret passion for very young girls. One day, when he is looking for lodgings, his obsession finds its ultimate focus when he sees sprawled on a suburban lawn the ‘nymphet’ of his dreams, Lolita. He takes a room in the house and marries Lolita ś widowed mother, in order to be near the object of his ‘dark’ desires. The mother then discovers the secret diaries to which he has confided his obsession: she runs out of the house, distracted with horror, and is killed by a passing car. Humbert thus becomes Lolita’s guardian, and he and his compliant ward then embark on a wild, dreamlike journey around America, enjoying forbidden sexual pleasure in a succession of motel rooms. 

But gradually the two fall to quarrelling and, as they settle in a little town where Lolita returns to her schooling, a mood of terrible frustration sets in. Humbert becomes dimly aware of another man hovering around, a playwright called Quilty, who seems to threaten his possession of Lolita like a kind of shadowy alter-ego. To get away, Humbert takes Lolita off on a second journey across America, this time more like a nightmare than a dream, as it seems increasingly obvious that the mysterious Quilty is following them; until one day Lolita disappears, kidnapped by Quilty. After some years of lonely misery Humbert eventually discovers what happened to them both. Lolita grown up and married to someone else, no longer bears any relation to the little girl in his illicit fantasies. In a state of horror and distraction Humbert vengefully tracks down Quilty, the alter-ego who robbed him of his dream, and murders him in cold-blood. He is arrested and, after learning that Lolita has died in childbirth, himself dies in prison on the verge of his execution. 

Each of these stories shows a hero being tempted or impelled into a course of action which is in some way dark or forbidden. For a time, as the hero embarks on a course, he enjoys almost unbelievable, dreamlike success. But somehow it is in the nature of the course he is pursuing that he cannot achieve satisfaction. His mood is increasingly chequered by a sense of frustration. As he stil l pursues his dram, vainly trying to make his position secure, he begins to feel more and more threatened – things have got out of control. The original dream has soured into a nightmare where everything is going more and more wrong. This eventually culminates in the hero’s violent destruction. 

In fact we can set out the general stages through which the pattern unfolds like this:

1. Anticipation Stage: the hero is in some way incomplete or unfulfilled and his thoughts are turned towards the future in hope of some unusual gratification. Some object of desire or course of action presents itself, and his energies have found a focus.
2. Dream Stage: he becomes in some way committed to his course of action (e.g. Faust signing his pact with the devil, Humbert causing the death of Lolita’s mother which enables him to enter on his affair) and for a while things go almost improbably well for the hero. He is winning the gratification he dreamed of, and seems to be ‘getting away with it’. 
3. Frustration Stage: almost imperceptibly things begin to go wrong. The hero cannot find a point of rest. He begins to experience a sense of frustration, and in order to secure his position may feel compelled to further ‘dark acts’ which lock him into his course of action even more irrevocably. A ‘shadow figure’ may appear at this point, seeming in some obscure way to threaten him.
4. Nightmare Stage: things are now slipping seriously out of the hero’s control. He has a mounting sense of threat and despair. Forces of opposition and fate are closing in on him. 
5. Destruction or death wish Stage: either by the forces he has aroused against him, or by some final act of violence which precipitates his own death (e.g. murder or suicide), the hero is destroyed. 

If we look again at the familiar example of Macbeth, we can see how these five stages correspond exactly to the five acts into which Shakespeare divides the drama:

1. Act One (Anticipation Stage) shows the triumphant generals Macbeth and Banquo returning from winning a great victory. They meet the three ‘dark sisters’ who prophesy to Macbeth that he will hold three great titles, Glamis, Cawdor and King. This fires his ambition and when he hears that a grateful King Duncan has already rewarded him with the first two titles, he writes to his wife to tell her about the witches’ prediction that he would one day hold the third as well. She eggs him on to make the prediction complete, and they find their ‘focus’ in the conspiracy to murder Duncan. 
2. Act Two (Dream Stage) shows Macbeth committing the ‘dark deed’ and subsequently killing the two grooms to cover up his crime. Initially things could not go better for the hero. Duncan’s two sons flee to England, arousing suspicion that they had somehow been implicated in the crime, and Macbeth is chosen to be king. 
3. Act Three (Frustration Stage) opens with Banquo soliloquising. ‘Thou hast it all now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, as the weird women promised and I fear, thou playst most foully for it’. The first inklings of suspicion are arising. Macbeth in turn is distrustful of Banquo because of the witches’ prediction that it would be his descendants, not Macbeth’s, who would sit on the throne of Scotland. He arranges for Banquo’s murder. Macbeth expresses his growing frustration in such phrases as ‘we have scotch’d the snake, not killed it, and this is heigtened when the murderers report that they have killed Banquo, but that his son Fleance escaped. At dinner that night Macbeth is confronted with Banquo’s accusing ghost, and the act ends with the news that Macbeth’s last supporters among the great Scottish lords, Macduff, has fled to England to join Duncan’s sons. 
4. Act Four (Nightmare Stage) opens with Macbeth’s second, much more fearful visit to the witches, who give him three increasingly enigmatic warnings : that he should beware Macduff; that he will only be overthrown by ‘man not of woman born’; and that this can only happen when ‘Birnam wood as come to Dunsinane’.  Now in a state of mounting terror, Macbeth lashes out at the man who seems most to threaten him, the fled Macduff, by arranging for his wife and children to be brutally murdered. The second part of the act shows the horror with which this news is greeted by the exiles in England, and the coming together of an army to invade Scotland and overthrow the tyrant whose villainy is now clear for all to see. 
5. Act Five (Destruction Stage) shows the nightmare closing in around Macbeth and deepening to its climax: with Lady Macbeth’s guilty sleepwalking scene (‘unnatural deeds do bring unnatural troubles’) the approach of the avenging army to Macbeth’s lair at Dunsinane; Lady Macbeth’s death; and finally the battle, when Macbeth learns that Macduff was ‘not of woman born’ just before Macduff slays him. The pattern is complete.

The pattern we have been looking at here is so fundamental to the understanding of stories that its implications will be with us for the rest of this journey. It is not just the starting point for exploring all that complex family of stories we think of under the general heading of Tragedy, because it presents the tragic theme in its blackest and most basic form. It also, as we shall eventually see, provides one of the best starting points for exploring the profound link between the patterns which shape stories and those which shape events in what we call ‘real life’. 

Indeed, so important is it that we should become completely familiar with the workings of this tragic cycle that we shall shortly look in rather more detail at further half-dozen examples; and these have been chosen, in addition to those already touched on, to build up a fuller picture of the range of basic situations from which a Tragedy can unfold. 

We shall then, at the end of this chapter, take a look at the most obvious way in which storytellers may sometimes vary the emphasis of their presentation of the basic tragic theme: by concentrating only on the closing stages and beginning at the point, halfway through the complete cycle, where the mood of frustration is coming to be uppermost. 

Finally, we shall be in a position, in the two stages of the journey that follow, to draw on all these and other examples to look at the essence of Tragedy in a deeper and more general way. What is really happening to the hero or heroine of a tragedy as they get drawn into their fatal course of action? Why does it seem to leed so inexorably to disaster? And what is it which distinguishes this type of story from all the others we have looked at, where the fundamental impulse is to lead the hero or heroine to a happy ending? 

The Picture of Dorian Gray

A story which expresses the basic plot of Tragedy with almost allegorical simplicity, like a kind of ‘black fairy tale’ is Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). We meet the hero, a languid and exceptionally beautiful young man, at just the moment when his artist friend Basil Hallward is completing a portrait of him. At this point the ‘dark’ figure of Lord Henry Wootton enters, and tempts the hero with two thoughts. The first is how wonderful it would be if Dorian Gray could always remain looking as young and beautiful as he does in the picture, while his portrait took on the ravages of the years instead. The second is how wonderful it would be to live a life of total physical self-indulgence, recognising that the most intense spiritual experiences in life come through the senses. 

This is the moment of Temptation, or Focus. The young hero becomes possessed by these two related thoughts, and by the excitement of his ‘dangerous’ new friendship with Lord Henry. He takes his portrait home, and immeditately plunges into the Dream Stage of his adventure by falling rapturously in love with a beautiful young actress, Sibyl Vane, whom he goes to see playing Shakespeare every night. He proposes to Sibyl, she accepts and the following night she gives a thoroughly flat and wooden performance. She explains to Dorian that she had only been able to put her heart into acting because it was a subsitute for  real life, but now he has come into her life, her motivation as an actress has gone. Dorian is horrified and angrily tells her that he had only loved her for her brilliant persona on stage. He walks out on her, and she commits suicide. For the first time he notices a slight change in the portrait which he keeps at home: a new, cruel twist to the mouth. He hides the portrait away, but otherwise experiences no remorse for what has happened. 

In a sense the Dream Stage of the story continues for a long time. Dorian throws himself into a relentless round of sensual gratification, sometimes aided and abetted by his friend Lord Henry, and seems able to indulge himself wherever his fancy leads him. But gradually we are made aware that a dark aura of scandal is surrounding his name. A growing succession of young men and women are being destroyed, even committing suicide, because of their association with him. We learn of his increasingly morbid fascination with historical tales about sexual excess, murder and insanity (there were moments where he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful) and although after many years he still looks outwardly as young and beautiful as on the day he was painted by Hallward, the portrait locked away in his house shows more and more signs of terrible corruption. 

The Frustration Stage is setting in, and eventually someone – Hallward himself – has the courage to confront Dorian with the shocking stories which are circulating about him. Gray reacts with cold rage and cold-bloodedly murders Hallward (like Macbeth’s murder of Banquo, a new ‘dark act’ committed in an attempt to secure his position). An increasingly nightmarish atmosphere now shrouds the tale, as Gray blackmails a friend into dissolving Hallward’s body in acid, fills the house with orchids to disguise the stench and heads off to the  opium dens of east London (dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new). Here, in the fume-filled shadows, he is threatened with a revolver by Sibyl Vane’s sailor brother, who has returned from years in Australia, bent on revenge. 

Gray manages to extricate himself from this nightmare scene but is haunted by the mysterious figure of Jim Vane. Staying at a country house, he glimpses Vane peering through the conservatory windows and faints, and although Vane is accidentally killed the next day by a shooting party, Gray’s thoughts are now in a ceaseless turmoil of horror and  ‘wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood’ before he had embarked on corrupting and destroying so many people’s lives. A new life! That was what he wanted … he would never again tempt innocence. He would be good. 

So he muses, alone one night in his house, and decides to take another look at his portrait, which he finds not only looking ‘more loathsome, if possible than before, but shining with newly-spilt blood. If only he could kill this monstrous life soul, he thinks, he could be at peace. He takes up the knife with which he stabbed Hallward, to slash the picture. There is a tremendous crash and a cry, and his servants rush upstairs to find

 ‘hanging on the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man … with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage. It was not until they had examined the rings that they recognised who it was’

Carmen

Our next example is the story of Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875) based on a novel by Prosper Merimée. When we meet the hero Don José, a corporal in the army, he is in love with a shy young girl, Micaela, and she with him. All might seem well, but our sense that something is about to disturb their happiness is aroused by the entry of the beautiful and imposing Carmen, a classic Temptress. She tries to flirt with José, at first in vain. She stalks off, but not before she has thrown down a blood-red flower at his feet. Wavering for a moment, he picks it up and places it next to his heart. Micaela returns and José seems freed from Carmen’s spell. A short time later, however, he is sent to restore order after a fight. Carmen has been involved and he has to arrest her. Once again she directs all her seductive charm at him, and this time he falls completely (Carmen you have bewitched me) Temptation has won. The Focus has been found.

Plunging recklessly into the Dream Stage, José allows Carmen to escape and follows her to a tavern, where they ecstatically declare their love for one another. José gets involved in a fight over Carmen with one of his officers, and to avoid punishment for insubordination he deserts the army and flees to join Carmen and a gang of bandits in the mountains. No sooner has this dark act committed José irrevocably to his course than frustration sets in. The fickle Carmen begins to lose interest in José and transfers her admiration to the handsome bullfighter Escamillo. The unhappy José feels increasingly trapped. He cannot now return to his former life, despite a pitiful attempt by young Micaela to win him back. He is still infatuated with Carmen, although it is becoming obvious to everyone except himself that he has lost her. 

The nightmarish nature of his plight is now brought home to him when José meets Escamillo coming up the mountainside. Not recognising him, the bullfighter recounts how Carmen used to love a soldier but that it is all over. José lashes out at his rival and the two have to be pulled apart by the bandits. The triumphant Escamillo invites them all to a bullfight, in which he will be the hero of the hour. 

All that is left to unfold is the final stage. The ‘pale and haggard’ José, his eyes ‘hollow’ and ‘glowing with a dangerous light’ arrives at the bullfight to confront Carmen, who scornfully rejects him and tells him she now loves Escamillo. In the last paroxysm of desperation, José stabs her to death – thus ensuring his own immediate arrest and presumably execution. 

Bonnie and Clyde

Our third example is the film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) based like many fictional tragedies on an episode from ‘real life’ in this instance the story of two notorious young American ‘gangsters’ of the 1930’s. 

1. Anticipation Stage: the young hero Clyde arrives at a house in a little Texan town to make an amateurish attempt to steal a car. Through a windom of the house he sees the heroine Bonnie, naked. She sees him, apparently doing something wild and daring, and their curiosity mutually aroused, they get together at a nearby drugstore where Bonnie dares Clyde to commit a real, grown-up robbery. This is the moment of Temptation and Focus. 
2. Dream Stage. Clyde successfully holds up a grocery store, Bonnie is impressed and they drive off together. They begin to rob banks with seemingly dreamlike impunity; they recruit a third member to their gang, C.W. Moss and the exhilarating series of robberies continues. But then they shoot a policeman dead after a bank hold-up, a ‘dark act’ which places them, as murderers, in a new, more serious league.
3. Frustration Stage. A series of incidents creates a mood of deepening frustration. They capture a policeman who has been trailing them, insult him and let him go, in such a way that he is left swearing revenge. It transpires that Clyde is physically unable to make love to Bonnie: he works out his frustration through his obsession with guns. They hi-jack a couple’s car, ask the man casually what he does for a living and he replies that he is an undertaker. Bonnie reacts hysterically, taking this as a terrible omen. The mood is becoming steadily darker and more threatening. 
4. Nightmare Stage. There is a brief unreal interlude when the doomed couple fantasise in familiar fashion (cf. Dorian Gray) of escaping back to the days of innocence, before all their troubles began. They take Bonnie’s mother for a picnic and Clyde talks about their settling down near her, to live a quiet life. But they remember they are now the most wanted criminals in the state, and have no alternative but to keep running. The nightmare deepens as they are spotted by the police and have to fight two gun battles, in which two members of the gang (now grown to five) are killed or injured. 
5. Destruction Stage: as the police close in, the remaining trio, Bonnie, Clyde and C.W. Moss, take refuge with Moss’s father. The atmosphere between them all is now fraught and quarrelsome. Eventually, in return for a promise of leniency to his son, the father betrays Bonnie and Clyde, who are tricked into their third and final confrontation with the police. Helpless and trapped, they are bloodily gunned down.

Jules et Jim 

Our fourth example is another well known film of the 1960’s, Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962). 

1. Anticipation Stage: Jules and Jim, two high-spirited young men in pre-First World War Paris are full of nervous energy but lack direction, until a friend, Albert, shows them some lantern slides, including one of  a female statue recently dug up on the Adriatic. A silent film-type caption tells us that they had never seen such a calm, tranquil smile’as that which appears on the statue, but that if they saw it again they would follow it. It is the beginning of a Focus for their fantasy state, and when three strange girls shortly afterwards turn up for dinner they see that the third, Catherine, has exacly the smile of the statue. She is a bewitching madcap, given to impulsive pranks and the two heroes are captivated. The Focus is complete. 
2. Dream Stage.  Catherine moves in to live with Jules, but the three become otherwise inseparable, enjoying a mad time all over Bohemian Paris. The sense of being drawn into a reckless, exhilirating dream is heightened when the three go off to the South of France together for the summer. After a long search they found the house of their dreams says a caption. Here they play childish games together in the sun, Catherine always leading, I think we are lost children’ she says, and a caption tells us ‘she is an apparition’. They return to Paris, where Jules and Catherine decide to get married. 
3. Frustration Stage: gradually the mood of the story darkens. The First World War approaches and the three are separated because Jules, as an Austrian, has to return with his wife Catherine to the other side of the great European divide created by the war. When hostilities are over, Jim travels to be reunited with his friends, who are living in a lonely chalet in the mountains with a little daughter, and finds all is not well with the marriage. They are all awkward together, talking in platitudes punctuated by silences; Catherine sleeping alone (we lead a monastic life) and the mood is darkened still further by the surrounding gloomy forests and mist-shrouded lakes and mountains. Their old friend Albert reappears in rather sinister, enigmatic fashion, living nearby (is he having an affair with Catherine). The sense that they may all be caught in some impending vortex is conveyed by the introduction of the film’s theme song Le Tourbillon, ‘the Whirlpool’. Jim finds he is slipping hopelessly into love with Catherine himself. Jules allows him to move into the chalet, though not without a warning: watch out. 
4. Nightmare Stage: as the three of them return to France the action of the film becomes more and more fragmented, as if they are all sleepwalking through some baffling nightmare, with many premonitory references to death. Catherine, becoming ever more withdrawn and enigmatic, with manic outbursts of fey gaiety, shuttles between the two men (with Albert making a last ominous, mysterious appearance). Jim makes a last desperate bid to escape from the vortex by returning to his old girl friend Gilberte, telling Catherine that he wants to marry and have children. 
5. Destruction Stage: Catherine, with a strangely purposeful air, summons both Jules and Jim for a drive in the country in her little car. They stop at an inn for lunch. She calls Jim to her car, and deliberately drives it over a broken bridge into the river. Both are drowned, leaving a sadly uncomprehending Jules to superintend the burning of their coffins to ashes. 

Anna Karenina

For two final examples of Tragedy in its full five-stage form we may consider the stories of two of the most haunting tragic heroines in literature, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.  

The thousand-odd pages of Anna Karenina really tell two stories, interwoven but completely contrasting: that of Levin and that of Anna herself, each shaped by a quite different plot. We shall concentrate here entirely on the story of Anna.

When we meet Anna she is one of the most beautiful women in St Petersburg, married for some years to a senior and highly-esteemed government official. But living in the shadow of her husband’s dry, intellectual high-mindedness, and preoccupation with his work, the passionate Anna feels a void in her life and heart. On a visit to Moscow, she briefly meets on her arrival at the railway station a handsome young cavalry officer, Count Alexei Vronsky. At a grand ball, they run into each other again, and both begin to be swept off their feet by violent mutual attraction. When they meet a third time back in St Petersburg, Vronsky feels that all h is powers, hitherto dissipated and scatterd have now become directed with terrible energy towards one blissful aim. When Anna arrives home from their next encounter 

her face shone with a vivid glow, but it was not a joyous glow – it resembled the terrible glow of a conflagration on a dark night. 

Their mutual passion and sense of anticipation mount until at last they perform the irrevocable act which binds them together:

That which for nearly a year had been Vronsky’s sole, exclusive desire, supplanting all his former desires, but which for Anna had been an impossible, dreadful, but all the more bewitching dream of happiness, had come to pass. 

Firmly into the Dream Stage they continue to meet more or less secretly,  in a series of passionate encounters. But already others, including the increasingly chilly, unhappy Karenin, have some suspicion of what is going on. Tongues begin to wag ‘waiting for the scandal to break’ and the premonition of some ultimate disaster is heightened by an emotionally fraught incident at the race when Vronsky, leading in a steeplechase on his beautiful English mare Frou-Frou, makes a stupid error, forcing his horse to stumble so that she has to be destroyed: 

For the first time in his life he experienced the worst kind of misfortune – one that was irretrievable, and caused by his own fault’.

Both Anna and Vronsky have the same terrible dream of a peasant with a rough beard, small and dreadful, fumbling in a sack and muttering to himself in French about battering and iron: and gradually the story is drawn up to its first great climax. Anna has become pregnant and she is delivered of a baby girl she falls desperately ill of puerperal fever. Thinking she is about to die, in her delirium she tells her husband how she has felt divied into two people. 

I am still the same… but there is another in me as well, and I am afraid of her. It was she who fell in love with that other one, and I wished to hate you, but could not forget her who was before. That other is not I. Now I am the real one, all of me.

The dying Anna and Karenin appear to be reconciled. Vronsky stumbles off in despair and attempts to shoot himself. It might seem that the story was, however messily, approaching a conclusion. But at a deeper level, too much is still unresolved. Anna and Vronsky separately recover. Anna’s old fatal yearnings return. She succumbs and leaves her husband forever, to throw in her lot irrevocably with Vronsky. 

At this turning point in the story, Tolstoy opens Book Two with the biblical quotation ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay Vronsky and the now- totally compromised Anna flee from Russia for Italy:

During this, the first period of her freedom and rapid recovery, Anna felt unpardonably happy and full of the joy of life….

It might all seem like a New Dream Stage, after the nightmare of her illness. But when, at the book’s ending we look back over the whole story, we can see how this central period of turmoil in fact marks the Frustration Stage of the affair. Anna’s abortive reconciliation with Karenin is her last attempt to erase all that had happened. Her running awary with Vronsky is the final ‘dark act’ which commits her to her ultimate fate. 

Indeed even when they are newly arrived in Italy, Vronsky, who has now thrown up his career for his passion: 

soon felt that the realisation of his loning gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. that realisation showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes. 

Vronsky begins to feel bored and aimless, and after a while they return to Russia. Anna almost imperceptibly begins to feel her lover withdrawing from her and becomes increasingly obsessed with the little son Seryosha she has had to leave behind. She is refused permission to see him, but manages to snatch a brief meting with him by penetrating Karenin’s house in disguise. As we are told that, upon her son ‘all Anna’s unsatisfied capacity for loving was satisfied’, it is a heartrending glimpse of all she has lost. She then throws all her energies into a protracted battle to get Karenin to grant her a divorce, so that she can marry Vronsky: a last pitiful attempt to make her now rapidly crumbling position secure. All ends in failure. Vronsky is becoming more and more openly cold towards her. She becomes prey to all sorts of jealous imaginings about his relations with other women. They fall to endless quarrelling. Feeling increasingly lost and desperate, Anna for the first time contemplates suicide. She again has her nightmare about the little old peasant, who seems to be doing something terrible to her with iron. After a final trivial misunderstanding with Vronsky, Anna drives across Moscow, her mind whirling with inconsequential thoughts. Almost without being aware of what she is doing, she arrives at the station where she and Vronsky first met, and on a sudden impulse throws herself under the wheels of an oncoming train:

a little peasant muttering something was working at the rails. The candle, by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up with a brighter light than before, lit up for her all that had before been dark, flickered, began to grow dim and went out for ever. 

Madame Bovary

In terms of the pattern we are looking at, one of the things which may strike us about Madame Bovary is how far we are into the story before the heroine finally becomes committed to the course of infidelity which ultimately destroys her. In Anna Karenina the heroine’s inner restlessness which lays her open to her grand passion is deftly stated and she is already embarked on the heady early stages of the fatal affair with Vronsky within a short while of the story’s opening. In Madame Bovary, however, the long-drawn out Anticipation Stage lasts for nearly half the book. This is not least because so much of Flaubert’s intention is to show how Emma’s fatal craving for excitement and romance builds up over a long period in her head, fuelled by her reading of romantic fiction, before she is finally drawn to act it out in real life. 

To set the stage we first have to see the young Emma married to the limited and unambitious country doctor Charles Bovary: as incomplete an answer to her inward craving for passion as Karenin was for Anna. When the first pleasure of finding herself married wears off, the warning signs of distant danger begin to gather, as Flaubert puts it, like tiny rivulets gathering almost imperceptibly to make an eventually irrestible torrent: 

Emma tried hard to discover what, precisely, it was in life that was denoted by the words joy, passion, intoxication, which had always looked so fine in books.

There is the excitement of the invitation to the local great house, when Emma is swept off her feet by the brief chance to mingle with such fasionable, titled people: the bright mysterious ‘other world’ which is beckoning her on. As months, even years go by, we are told that the void in her heart remained, that deep down in her heart she was waiting and waiting for something to happen. But even when thanks to her restlessness, Charles and Emma make the quite unnecessary move to Yonville, and she finds herself strangely exhilarated by her conversations with the young law student Leon, nothing is outwardly committed. Her dreams and desires are still only in her head. It is only when Leon leaves for Rouen and Emma meets the attractive, womanising local farmer Rodolphe that the dark anticipatory nervous energy seething within her at last finds its FOcus. The two embark on a passionate secret affair. Emma has committed the irrevocable act which is to launch her on her fatal course. 

The Dream Stage lasts as long as the secret affair with Rodolphe:

Have you carefully weighed the consequences of your intended action? Have you realised the awful abyss to which I was dragging you, poor angel? No, …you were going on, confident and heedless, imagining that all would be well, trusting in the future. 

Her lover is not going to elope with her. He had never thought of her as anything but a conveniently married mistress. Their ‘grand affair of the heart’ had only been in her head, a gifment of her fantasy. Emma is so shocked that for several months she lies seriously ill; at the end of which her husband makes a last pathetic attempt to re-establish their marriage by taking her off on a brief holiday to Rouen. It is as doomed as the fragile reconciliation between Karenin and his wife at a similar stage in their story. For it is here, at the theatre, that Emma once again meets Leon. The concluding part of the story opens, like Book Two of Anna Karenina (vengeance is mine) on a note of dire foreboding. 

To begin with, as when Anna and Vronsky flee to Italy, there is a last hectic echo of the Dream Stage, as Emma and Leon embark on their physical affair in the most dramatic and reckless way possible, driving round and round the daylit streets of Rouen in a darkened fiacre. Emma begins to find excuses, such as the imaginary course of piano lessons, to visit Rouen more and more often. She begins to borrow money recklessly from the unscrupulous M. Lheureux. Like Anna, with her recurrent nightmare of the little bearded peasant, Emma becomes haunted on her visits to Rouen by the sight of the hideous beggar (in the place where his eyelids should have been, two gaping cavities all filled with blood) whose wailing cries go sheer down into the depths of her soul like a whirlwind in a chasm. She is very nearly caught out by Charles in her ‘cover story’ about the piano lessons and adds one deceit to another (from that moment her whole existence was a maze of lies). She becomes more and more enmeshed in her tangle of debt to M. Lheureux.  Even her relations with Leon become increasingly fraught and quarrelsome, as every day saw her calling for madder music and stronger wine. Like so many tragic heroes and heroines, she dreams that she might escape back to happier, more innocent times, before the net began closing in. But the Nightmare Stage is inexplorable nearing its climax:

She was now always depressed, everywhere and about everything. Everything and everyone, herself included was intolerable to her’.

Finally M. Lheureux forecloses, getting judgment for a sum of money that will involve selling everything she and Charles possess. Distractedly she runs to anyone she can think of to borrow from, ending up with Rodolphe. When he turns her away, she heads for the cupboard where the pharmacist keeps his poisons and takes a huge dosis of arsenic. She has a final nightmare vision of the beggar from Rouen

Thinking she saw the hideous features of the wretched being, rising up to strike terror to her soul, on the very threshold of eternal night.

and dies in agony. Sometime later the bankrupt Charles, ruined and turned into a wraith by her death, also dies.

Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra

On this sombre note we may conclude this introductory survey of stories which present the five-stage cycle of Tragedy in its entirety and move on to those – including some of the best known tragic stories in the world – which concentrate only on the concluding phases of the cycle, picking it up, as it were, halfway through. The initial stages are already over before the story, as we see it, opens, and can only be reconstructed by means of flashback and sympathetic imagination. 

We can see the difference between these two types of Tragedy clearly illustrated when we compare two of the tragedies of Shakespeare, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The first of these is of the type with which we are already familiar, portraying the complete five stage pattern. In this sense Julius Caesar is essentially the tragedy of Brutus. It is he, the noblest Roman of them all, who has to be persuaded, as the conspirators gather together in the Anticipation Stage, to join the plot to kill Caesar. It is in Brutus’s soul that we see the battle of temptation acted out, in Act II scene i, when the other conspirators, led by the chief Tempter Cassius, call on him at night. When he finally succumbs, the Focus has been found and the Dream Stage follows including the ‘dark act’ of the assassination itself, with Brutus as the conspirator who strikes the last fatal blow, and the heady aftermath, when it seems that the people of Rome are prepared to welcome Caesar’s murder as the overthrow of an over-ambitious tyrant. But then the Frustration Stage begins, when the eloquence of Mark Antony presents a very different view of Caesar, as the people’s friend. The crowd begins to turn against the conspirators. They are forced to flee from Rome and we see the triumvirate of Antony, Octavius and Lepidus assuming full authority, gathering their forces to avenge Caesar’s death. The Nightmare Stage shows the conspirators on the run and beginning to fall out among themselves, with Brutus pursued by Caesar’s ghost; and this culminates in Phillippi in their total overthrow, first with the death of Cassius and finally Brutus’s suicide. 

In Antony and Cleopatra, we see the emphasis of the story falling quite differently. The essence of the situation is that the great soldier Antony has been caught between two poles: on the one hand his duty, this manly responsibilities as one of the triumvirs of Rome; at the other, his pleasure, his all consuming infatuation with the Queen of Egypt. The basic question of the play, posed from its opening lines (nay, but this dotage of our genera’s overflows the measure… the triple pillar of the world transform’d into a strumpet’s fool) is: which pole will win?

The point is that we pick up the story of Antony’s fatal love for Cleopatra halfway through. He has already embarked on the cycle of self-destruction which is to bring him down long before our story opens. Indeed we can reconstruct the moment when he was caught, the moment of Focus, when in one of the play’s most memorable speeches, Enobarbus recalls the occasion when the stern hero first set eyes on the voluptuous Temptress, on his arrival in Egypt.

the barge she sat in like a burnish’d throne burned on the water

From there the Dream Stage follows, as Antony plunges into his affair with Cleopatra and begins to forget his soldierly responsibilities in endless nights of carousing. But eventually a series of threats to the security of Rome, such as that posed by the rebellious young Pompey, serve to remind Antony of his duty. An element of frustration has appeared, and it is only at this point, when Antony is being called back to his ‘proper Roman self’ that the play begins.

In terms of the complete five-stage cycle of Tragedy, in short, the play picks up the story at the Frustration Stage. The first two acts show the hero – rather like Anna Karenina at a similar stage in her story, when she attempts a last reconcillation with ther husband – making a final effort to return to his Roman self, by going back to Rome to join Octavius and Lepidus in dealing with Pompey. To emphasise his dertermination to break with the past and make a fresh start, Antony even marries Octavius’s sister. But, just as the unresolved lure of Vronsky had proved too much for Anna, the fatal lure of Cleopatra is too strong. Antony returns to Egypt, throwing him into final opposition to Octavius. There follows the battle of Actium, the beginning of the Nightmare Stage, when just as Antony thinks victory is in his grasp, Cleopatra leads her ships into headlong retreat giving the day to Octavius. Octavius pursues Antony to Egypt and there is a second battle, in which again Antony sees victory torn from his grasp by the flight of Cleopatra’s forces. Thirdly Antony falls out with Cleopatra, berating her for her treachery. She sends him word that she has killed herself, and in despair he commits suicide. Finally, when she sees what she has brought about by her foolish ‘feminine’ wiles, Cleopatra commits suicide herself. 

Don Giovanni

Another familiar tragic story we pick up at the Frustration Stage is that of Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, derived via the version by Moliere from the original Don Juan play the Burlador de Sevilla, by the pseudonymous Tirso de Molina.  Don Giovanni’s reckless career as an insatiable and heartless seducer has obviously begun long before the story opens. Indeed, when Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello recites a catalogue of his master’s conquests (including the ‘1003’ in Spain alone) it is clear just how long the ream Stage of the adventure, when the hero was ‘getting away with it’ must have lasted. But as the opera begins, Don Giovanni is for the first time beginning to ran into serious trouble. He is embarking on a sequence of events which will first drive him into a mounting frenzy of frustration and ultimately destroy him. In the opening scene we see his latest attempted conquest, Donna Anna (who is engaged to Don Ottavio) struggling to get away from him. Her father, the Commendatore, intervenes and Don Giovanni kills him. The fatal dark act which is going to be his downfall. From then on the whole story shows the hero getting enmenshed in an ever-tightening web of frustration, as he is driven on by his fatal weakness and only succeeds in arousing around him an ever-growing army of opponents. He attempts to seduce a woman in disguise, only to find to their mutual horror that she is one of his former conquests, Donna Elvira, whom he had cruelly thrown aside. He attempts to seduce the pretty young peasant girl Zerlina, and not only is frustrated by the intervention of Donna Elvira but also arouses the vengeful wrath of Zerlina’s betrothed, Masetto. He now has on his trail both Masetto and Donna Anna’s betrothed, Don Ottavio. He even falls out for a time with the only person who has hitherto always remained faithful to him, Leporello. Don Giovanni makes a last desperate attempt to seduce Donna Elvira’s maid and is again frustrated. Everyone is now set against him, in a typical Nightmare Stage pursuit. And it is at this moment that, having fled into a graveyard, Don Giovanni finds himself confronted with the grim statue of the Commendatore, who seems, as in some nightmarish hallucination, to be adressing him. Mockingly he invites the statue to dinner and is horrified to hear it accept. Finally when he is sitting down to his supper table, the statue enters. After a terrifying exchange, the fires of hell blaze up in the darkness and the ghostly statue of his victim carries Don Giovanni off to his doom. 

The Devils

We end this part of the journey by looking at a story which presents a subtle variation on the basic shape of the tragic plot, not least because it mixes together both the forms of the plot we have been looking at: Dostoyevsky’s great prophetic novel on the social and spiritual disintegration of late-nineteenth century, pre-Revolutionary Russia, The Devils (or the Possessed). For a long time – nearly 400 pages of a 700 page book – it is not entirely clear what plot is shaping the narrative, or even whether the book has a clearly defined plot at all. But when the plot does finally emerge we see that one reason why this novel is in some ways so puzzling is that it is made up of two quite distinct but interwoven tragedies which eventually converge. The first is a collective tragedy, drawing in a large group of people, and this has a very long Anticipation Stage which occupies the greater part of the book. The other is the personal tragedy of the character who becomes the story’s dark hero, Nikolai Stavrogin – and this has already been through its initial stages before the opening of the story, as Dostoyevsky unfolds it. 

The early chapters of the novel, as we are introduced to the life of a provincial Russian town, are in fact dominated by two middle-aged characters, the rich indulgent widow Mrs Stavrogin and her weak, vain hanger-on Mr Verkhovensky, who likes to flatter himself that he is feared by the government in distant St Petersburg as a ‘dangerous liberal’ But eventually we come to see these two primarily in their role as mother and father to the other two leading characters of the book, who return to the town after some years in the capital: Mrs Stavrogin’s son Nikolai and Mr Verkhovensky’s son Peter. The handsome Nikolai is a mysterious, romantic figure who returns with something of a scandalous reputation for having lived strangely and dissolutely, Outwardly he seems grave and well-mannered, but he shocks polite society in the town by one or two apparently inexplicable lapses, such as biting the ear of the provincial governor. His friend and admirer Peter Verkhovensky has apparently been associated with a secret society of revolutionaries. 

Even after their return, life in the town continues for a long town to flow fairly placidly onwards, like a great river. But then odd little incidents occur, as if the surface is being disturbed by eddies, warning of the approach of some mighty cataract. A strange, crippled girl, Maria Lebyatkin arrives, and it seems she may be married to Nikolai Stavrogin. A psychopathic criminal Fedka turns up in the town, and shortly afterwards everyone is scandalised by the theft of precious stones from a much prized icon in the church. One night Fedka waylays Stavrogin and offers to murder his embarrassing wife for money, a suggestion Nikolai angrily dismisses.  Finally there is a meeting of 15 people of loosely-assorted progressive or revolutionary views, organised by Peter Verkhovensky and attended by Stavrogin; and the outlines of the plot at last begin to emerge. We gather that Verkhovensky has a wild dream of unleashing chaos in the town as a preliminary to revolution. He is somehow inspired by a vision of Stavrogin as the charismatic figure of destiny who will then emerge as leader; but Stavrogin will apparently have none of this and has already turned angrily on Verkhovensky, accusin him of wishing to arrange for the murder of his wife Maria and of another revolutionary Shatov, suspected of being a police spy, as a way to cement the revolutionaires’ determination. What we are seeing, well over halfway through the book, is the culmination of a subtly sketched Anticipation Stage, where a whole mass of disparate dreams and vague fantasies about chaos, violence and some future revolution are at last being given their Focus round some specific plan. 

But our attention is then abruptly switched to the much more personal tragedy which has already been unfolding for a long time in the life of Nikolai Stavrogin himself. He visits a wise old monk, Father Tikhon and presents him with a written confession of a hideous episode which had taken place when he was living in St Petersburg. Finding himself alone one day in his lodgings with the daughter of the house, a 12 year old girl called Matryosha, he had on a sudden depraved impulse violently raped her. The girl had been reduced to such a state of shock that she had sat in a catatonic trance, only able to mutter ‘I have killed God’ and had eventually hanged herself. Stavrogin had found himself morally quite numb about the episode, but from then on had begun to act more and more strangely. For no apparent reason he had gone through a ceremony of marriage with the crippled and mentally defective Maria Lebyatkin. Hen had then abandoned her and travelled abroad for three years, where he had entered on an affair with Lisa Drozdove, a girl from the same town, and for a while contemplated bigamously marrying her, although he had then abruptly ended the affair (Lisa is now back home, and we have already met her as a friend of Mrs Stavrogin’s) Eventually Nikolai had returned to their home town himself, where his strange behaviour now has some explanation. He has become plagued by hallucinations, often seeming to sense near him

some evil creature, mocking and rational, which took on a variety of personalities and characters, but which he knew was always the same creature.

and which he supposes to be the Devil. He has finally, in a desperate bid to free himself of his curse (or at least to come clean about it) had 300 copies printed of his  Confession’ which he is planning to distribute through the town. But at the end of their interview, Father Tikhon merely warns Stavrogin that he probably feel driven to commit some new and still more heinous crime to avoid publication of the confession. He has sensed that, like many tragic heroes wriggling on the hook in the Frustration Stage, Stavrogin may now be tempted into some new dark act, in a last effort at a cover up. 

All is now set up for the concluding chatpers of the novel which are as packed with incident as the earlier chapters seem uneventful. There are signs, such as the protest march of workers at the local factory, that some strange spirit of disorder is loose in the town which no one seems able to control. Everything comes to a climax at an absurd literary festival, organised by various local notables, with not so much planned as simply the breaking of the storm which has been brewing up throughout the preceding 500 pages of the book. The festival disintegrates into chaos. A great fire breaks out in part of the  town and, in a house where the fire appears to have been started, the bodies of Maria and her brother are found. They have been murdered by Fedka, the convict, in circumstances not altogether clear. What is clear, as the spirit of disorder takes charge in the town, is that Nikolai Stavrogin watches as if in a trance a horrifying sequence of events which he has no direct part in, but which in some terrible way he has inspired and made possible (as he admits about the first killings, I didn’t kill them – I was against the killing, but I knew they were going to be killed and I didn’t stop the killers).   Other deaths follow in chaotic profusion. Lisa, the other girl wronged by Stavrogin but who still loves him, is almost casually murdered by an angry mob. The convict Fedka is found murdered outside the town. Old Mr Verkhovensky makes a last pitiful attempt to run away from Mrs Stavrogin’s suffocating lutches and dies on the journey. The growing nightmare finds a final focus round Peter Verkhovensky’s organising of the cold-blood killing of the unhappy Shatov by a group of would-be ‘revolutionaries’, which unleashes among those responsible a holocaust of remorse, confessions and suicide. At last Nikolai Stavrogin can take no more and hangs himself. 

The overwhelming impression of the Devils – clearly intended from Dostoyevsky’s opening quotation of the biblical story of the Gadarene swine – is of a whole group of people becoming possessed, for all sorts of disparate reasons, by a collective fantasy of violent ‘revolutionary action’. For a long time they are merely swept along in a statue of vague anticipation, talking and dreaming of the blood and chaos which is going to be unleashed on some day in the distant future. But finally the day arrives and it is nog long before the Dream Stage of iniitial chaos spins rapidly out of control, until some of them are carried over the edge into a deadly vortex of destruction and self-destruction. Such in a sense, is the greater Tragedy described by the book; and it was this which made the novel historically prophetic. But the greater Trageday could not have taken place in the way it did without the much more personal and intense tragedy of Stavrogin, beginning with the rape and suicide of little Matryosha in St Petersburg. Without Stavrogin, the chief instigator of the collective Tragedy, Peter Verkhovensky would not have had his inspiration, his imagined leader. Verkhovensky would not have had his excuse to plot the murder of the crippled Maria, the event which more than any other eventually turns the town into a bloodbath, if it had not been for Stavrogin’s reckless folly in marrying her. Stavrogin would not have got into the state where he was tempted into the quixotic and heartless gesture of marrying Maria if it had not been for the horrible preceding episode of Maytrosha’s death. Stavrogin could not have commited his crime against Matryosha, if he had not already lost his moral centre. And neither he nor Peter Verkhovensky would have lost their moral bearings and been reduced to the state where the ‘devils’ could so easily have possessed them in the first place, so Dostoyevsky’s thread runs, without the initial weakness of their parents: Mrs Stavrogin’s  spoiling indulgence of her beloved Nilolai and Mr Verkhovensky’s self-deluding fantasies about being a ‘dangerous liberal’; which is why these two are placed in such a prominent position at the beginning of the story. 

The Devils is one of the blackest of all literary portrayals of the spirit of Tragedy entering the ascendant, taking over men’s hearts and minds and prompting them to unleash a torrent of death and destruction which eventually sweeps them away. In fact, it provides an appropriate cue for us at last to stand back to look at this kind of story in more general terms: to examine what it is in the inner logic of storytelling which decrees that such disparate figures as Faust and Macbeth, Humbert Humbert and Dorian Gray, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary Don Giovanni and Nikolai Stavrogin, should all ultimately be trapped in the same black vortex and be carried down to the same violent end. So fundamental is this question to the whole of storytelling (and to the relationship of stories to what we call ‘real life’) that it may be reserved for a separate chapter of our journey. 

Tragedy: The Divided Self 

Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar

I have not slept.

Between the first acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is

Like a phantasma or a hideous dream;

The Genius and the mortal instruments

Are then in council; and the state of man,

Like to a litlle kingdom, suffers then 

The nature of an insurrection.   

Brutus, Julius Caesar

One of the more illuminating ways to look at the pattern of Tragedy is to contrast it with the types of plot we discussed earlier. 

In some respects the position of the hero or heroine at the beginning of a Tragedy is not dissimilar to that of the hero or heroine at the opening of, say, a Quest or a Rags to Riches story. We first meet them in some situation which does not give ease or satisfaction, which cries out for change. Then something happens which points the way forward. They receive some kind of ‘Call’ which leads them out of their dissatisfying state into the adventure which is going to transform their lives.

The great difference between Tragedy and other kinds of story begins with the nature of the summons which draws them into that adventure. When the hero of an Overcoming the Monster story or a Quest receives the ‘Call’ – however hazardous the course it opens out to him – we are in no doubt it is right for him to answer it. When the hero or heroine of Tragedy reaches the same point we are uneasy. We are aware that the ‘Call’ is not of the same nature; which is why it may more aptly be described as the ‘Temptation’. 

This is because of the peculiar way in which the summons to action is directed at one particular aspect of the hero’s or heroine’s personality. We have already become aware that there is one part of them, one desire, one appetite, which is nagging at them to the point where the urge to gratify it is building up into an overwhelming obsession. This may be an appetite for power, as in the case of Macbeth or Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, who dreams of winning power, honour and omnipotence such as no man has ever enjoyed before. It may be a hunger for sexual excitement or romantic passion, as with Humbert Humbert, or those two wives frustrated by their tedious, inadequate husbands, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary. It may be a longing for sensation rather vaguer and harder to define, as in the examples of Dorian Gray or Bonnie and Clyde, committing bank robberies for ‘kicks’, where elements of sexual desire and the desire for power of others are mixed together. 

But in every instance we are aware that what their obsession is drawing them into is something which violates and defies some prohibition or law or convention or duty or commitment or standard of normality. They are being tempted into stepping outside the bounds which circumscribe them. Icarus wishes to defy the balance of the natural laws which govern his flight. Doctor Faustus wishes to step outside the bounds of conventional knowledge. Dr Jekyll and Dorian Gray wish to step outside the bounds of morality. Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary wish to step outside the bounds of their marriages. In every case, the tragic hero or heroine has come to sense the circumstances in which we originally discover them – Macbeth, Bonnie and Clyde, Humbert Humbert, Don José – as in some way irksome, restricting, tedious, inadequate. 

And it is this sense of constriction from which the Temptation – whether it originates within themselves or is personified in the figure of a Tempter or Temptress who lures them on – seems to offer the promise of almost unimaginably exhilarating release. 

This leads on to a second difference between the pattern of Tragedy and that of other kinds of story. When the hero of a Quest or an Overcoming the Monster story receives the ‘Call’, not only are we in no doubht that they should answer it: we know that they will have to commit themselves to their adventure totally, body, mind, heart and soul; and they usually leave no one else in any doubt as to their intentions. We are given the impression of someone compeletely and openly dedicated to the course he is embarking on. 

When the heroes or heroines of Tragedy are faced with the Temptation it is a different matter. In many instances we see them struggling or wavering before they succumb, a sign that they are initially by no means single minded about giving way. Faustus wrestles with himself before signing his pact with the Devil, as he hears the arguments of the ‘Evil Angel’ Urging him on and the ‘Good Angel ‘trying to call him back. Macbeth falters at the sight of the dagger in his hand, until Lady Macbeth as his ‘evil angel’ pushes him onward. Brutus wavers through the cause of the stormy, ill-omened night before Caesar’s muder, until the ‘evil angel’.  Cassius finally persuades him. Don José is torn between his ‘good angel’ Micaela and his ‘evil angel’ Carmen. 

In each instance it is as if part of them is reluctant to commit the irrevocable act which another part of them has come to desire: as if, right from the start, the tragic hero or heroine is a ‘divided self’, one part of their personality striving against another. 

A second way in which many heroes or heroines of Tragedy may be seen as ‘divided’ is in the need to keep their ‘dark’ impulses and actions hidden from the world behind a ‘light’ or respectable front. The main reason why Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has become one of the most celebrated stories of the English-speaking world is precisely because it crystallises this familiar motif so vividly, by making the central characteristic of the story the splitting of the hero into two quite distinct personalities, the respectable, law abiding Jekyll and his secret ‘shadow-self’ the deformed and totally amoral ‘night creature’ Hyde. In The Picture of Dorian Gray the split is personified in the contract between the hero’s perennially youthful beauty, unmarked by his crimes and moral excesses, and the portrait hidden away which carried the full burden of the moral and physical degeneration marking Gray’s downward path. Professor Humbert, the great-grandson of two Dorset clergymen, for a long time manages to keep his secret obsession with little girls hidden behind the front of the respectable academic. He leads a ‘double life’, ust as in their different ways, and for varying amounts of time, do the murderer Macbeth and the adulterous Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary. 

In general we may speak of a split between the ‘light’ and ‘dark’ sides of all these characters: and it is , of course, their ‘dark’ side, initially hidden from the world, which is worked up into a state of anticipatory obsession by the Temptation. But sooner or later they succumb. The ‘dark’ energy finds its Focus. Macbeth screws up his determination to kill Duncan, Don José succumbs to the charmes of Carmen, Anna Karenina succumbs to the charms of Vronsky, Humbert seduces the willing Lolita, Faustus seals his pact with Mephistopheles: they have passed the point of no return. And the first consequence is a flood of nervous excitement, marking their entry into a new stage. As Dr Jekyll puts it, when he first manages to effet the switch into his Hyde-self.

I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bounds of obligation.

The bounds have been overstepped. Suddenly all seems possible. We are aware that our hero or heroine has left the comparative safety and security of the situation in which they began, like a boat launched out from the shore onto the unknown currents of a fast flowing river. And to begin with it is fiercely exhalirating to be whirled along in this manner. But where is it going to lead them?

One of the most sifnificant facts about stories, as we know, is their drive to work towards an ending: an ending which will give us the sense that everything set in train during the story has been resolved. In almost any story we see the hero or heroine leaving their initial state for a period of still greater uncertainty, when all seems more than ever unresolved. But where the story has a happy ending, we eventually see them arrive at a state where they can come to rest, on new and much more secure foundations. If a central part has been played in the story by some great threat or shadow, that shadow will have been resolved, usually in a gernal spirit of reconciliation. We have a profound sense that things are at least, in every way, complete. And symbolising that completion, at the heart of most happy endings, there is the spectacle of a hero and heroine united in love, with the future ahead of them. 

The whole point of Tragedy, of course, is that it is not like that. It is somehow in the nature of the course the hero or heroine has embarked on that they are not going to reach that happy and secure point of rest. They may imagine that, if oly they can reach such and such place they will be secure. Indeed a large part of their time is often spent striving towards just such a fondly imagined goal. But the trouble is that the ground keeps on giving way under their feet. From the moment they succumb to the Temptation and imagine that they are about to start enjoying their rewards, nothing turns out quite as they expected. Indeed, if we look closely at the unfolding of any of the tragedies we have been considering, we can see how the mood of the central figure is continually swinging between anticipation and frustration throughout the story. Nothing for the hero or heroine bent on a tragic course can even quite resolve. And for this there are two closely related reasons. 

The first is that, when they embark on their course, there is always something which they overlook. It is not for nothing that we apply the word ‘reckless’ to the mood in which they set out: they have their attention fixed so obsessively on one point, one object of desire, that they do not pay heed to other factors in the overall context in which they are operating which may therefore produce consequences which their restricted vision fails to foresee. When Icarus ascends upwards in his heady flight towards the sun he shuts his mind to the physical laws governing his flight. When Don José succumbs to his infatuation for Carmen, he has become blinded to the possibility that she may eventually switch her affections to someone else just as casually as she switches them to him. When Macbeth carries out the murder of DUncan his only conscious thought is that he is removing the one obstacle between himself and his heart’s desire, the kingship. It does not enter his mind that his crime might one day be found out. 

In fact we see the heroes and heroines of Tragedy becoming more and more ensnared in their predicament, precisely like the hero of one of those ‘Stickfast’ tales in folklore where, with every attempt to get free (like Macbeth murdering the suspicious Banquo) he only gets a little more trapped: except that when Brer Rabbit gets stuck to the Tar Baby he is falling into a trap laid for him by someone else, whereas the heroes and heroines of Tragedy are becoming ensnared by some obsessive desire which springs ultimately from themselves. In this respect it is no accident that we so often, in relation to the central figures of Tragedy, see reference to the words ‘dream’ and ‘fantasy’. We naturally use such words to describe the state of mind of someone who has in some way lost touch with the reality of the world around him. And this precisely what is happening to the hero and heroine of a Tragedy. They are being drawn into a kind of fantasy or dream-state, in which their obsession with gratifying one desire or appetite overrules their capacity for wider judgement. Having entered into such a state of illusion, they slide further and further into it. Having made one false move, they are led into another and another in an increasingly desperate bid to shore up or retrieve their position. They are set more and more at odds with the reality of the world around them – until finally it begins to close in on them, demanding a reckoning. 

Nowhere do we see this inexorable process more clearly reflected – and this is the second reason why the course followed by the hero or heroine of Tragedy cannot reach a satisfactory resolutioin – than in the evolving nature of their relations with the other people around them in the story. 

At the beginning of a full five-stage Tragedy, the central figure is always part of a community, a network of relationships, linked to other people by ties of loyalty, friendship, family or marriage. And one of the most important things which happens to such heroes and heroines as they embark on their tragic course that they begin to break those bonds of loyalty, friendship and love (even if, initially they may form other alliances). It is the very essence of Tragedy that the hero or heroine should become, step by step, separated from other people. Often they separate themselves in the most obvious, violent and final way possible, by causing other people’s deaths. And here we must particularly not the kind of people around the hero or heroine who are most likely to die in a Tragedy.

In tragedies centred on a hero, we may single out four types of victim who are particularly likely to suffer as a result of the hero’s reckless course. Two of these are male, two female – and we may describe them as:

The Good Old Man

The Rival or ‘Shadow’

The Innocent Young Girl

The Temptress

The Good Old Man

There is a figure older than the hero, who in some way represents kingly or fatherly authority. Examples are Duncan, killed by Macbeth; Julius Caesar, killed by Brutus; the Commendatore, killed by Don Giovanni.

The Rival or ‘Shadow’

This is a figure in some way on a level with the hero (e.g. by age, rank or some other similarity) who comes to stand as a kind of ‘opposite’ and threat to him. An obvious example is Banquo, Macbeth’s comrade in arms and fellow-general, who is promised that his descendants will succeed where Macbeth fails and who is the first to see through his old friend’s crimes. Another instance is Jim Vane, the young brother of the actress Sibyl Vane, who is driven by a pure love for his wronged sister, just as Dorian Gray’s love for her is impure. A third is Quilty, the lover who steals Lolita off Humbert Humbert. He stands as a threatening ‘shadow’ to the hero in the opposite way, precisely because he is so similar to Humbert, sharing his obsession, which is why Humbert feels eventually driven to murder him. 

Even more significant than the hero’s relations with these male figures are those between him and the chief feminine figures in the story: particularly when we bear in mind how important it is to a fully resolved happy ending that the hero should eventually be brought together with a heroine as his  óther half’ perfect, loving union. 

The chief feminine figures in Tragedy also ten to polarise into two distinct types:

The Innocent Young Girl

On the one hand, most poignant of all the hero’s victims because she is so defenceless against his hard-hearted egotism, there is the innocent young girl. She stands in relation to the hero as ‘good angel’, but is inadequate to sway him. Sooner or later the hero brutally rejects her. And there is no moment in Tragedy more pregnant with the horror of what is happening to the hero on his downward path than when the fate of such a girl is decided: as when Matryosha, after being raped by Stavrogin, sits in her trance muttering ‘I have killed God’, before committing suicide. Sibyl Vane, rejected by Dorian Gray, does likewise. When little Micaela is finally rejected by Don José and creeps away into the shadows, we know he is doomed. The whole tragedy of Othello is contained precisely in the way that he blindly turns on the ‘good angel’ of his life, his ‘other half’ Desdemona, and stabs her to death.

The Temptress

The other type of heroine in Tragedy is quite different, in that she is herself a ‘dark figure’, leading the hero on Even so the Temptress almost invariably ends up dying a violent death, usually at much the same time as the hero. Bonnie, having drawn Clyde into his life of violent crime, is shot down with him in the closing moments of the story.  Cleopatra, having lured Antony away from his manly ‘Roman self’ and played a crucial part in dragging him down to miltary humiliation, commits suicide shortly after he does. The most terrible symptom of the nightmare closing in on Macbeth is the onset of his wife’s insanity, leading to her mysterious death shortly before his own. 

At least these ‘dark’ heroines remain fatihful to the man they have drawn down to destruction. In other versions of the theme the Temptress slips away from the hero in the closing stages, and nothing contributes more to his mounting sense of frustration than the fact that the woman for whom he has staked all proves ultimately elusive. Humbert loses Lolita. Carmen’s abondonment of Don José drives him to final distraction. Catherine, the ‘apparition’ who bewitches Jules and Jim, ends up by slipping away from one and dragging the other down to his doom. And nowhere is this motif of the ‘elusive feminine’ presented more subtly than in Doctor Faustus where, as the last, supreme demonstration of his devil-given powers, the hero is permitted to conjure up the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, Helen of Troy. Faustus steps forward to seize and kiss her. She turns out to be just another insubstantial vision, and vanishes. At last he knows all is lost. In every instance the hero finds himself unable to reach the fulfilment he craves, where he can achieve complete and lasting union with his desired ‘other half’. Either she drags him down to share his destruction, or she skips away from him like a will o’ the wisp. The same is true, in reverse, of tragedies centred on a  heroine. 

Both Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary leave the dull, inadequate security of their marriages for men who set them on fire with a fantasy of romantic passion. In each case they cannot reach the new security they dream of, where they can at last achieve the sense of total union with another man. In each case they begin to flounder and struggle: part of them still wishing to push onward, part now longing to get back to the dull security they so recklessly abandoned. In Anna Karenina there is that superb description of the ‘divided self’ when, at the height of the Frustration Stage Anna tells her husband:

‘there is another in me…. I am afraid of her. It was she who fell in love with the other me… that other is not I’

But it is the dark ‘other self’ which eventually wins, leading Anna to reject Karenin for the last time and to throw in her lot irrevocably with Vronsky. No sooner has she done so that her lover begins to slip away, a will o’ the wisp, leaving her to disintegrate towards that terrible final moment when, all alone, she flings herself beneath the wheels of the advancing train. 

The point about the heroes and heroines of Tragedy is that they end up utterly alone (even if, occasionally, like Bonnie and Clyde, hero and heroine die together), completely cut off from the rest of society. They have been drawn by some part of themselves into a course of action which is fundamentally selfish, putting some egocentric desire above every other consideration, isolating them both from reality and from other people. Initially, in the Dream Stage, they succeed in imposing their will on the world and the people around them. They have broken the rules and seem to be getting away with it, because they have seized the initiative and because other people are not yet fully aware of what they are up to. 

But gradually the truth of what they are doing begins to dawn on others. Those around them begin to constellate in opposition. The hero or heroine having first set themselves against others we now see the rest of society gradually setting itself against them. 

Finally, having torn and trampled the network of relationships originally surrounding them into shreds, the hero or heroine is left alone. Whereas in other types of story the tendency is for a general gathering together at the end, round the central union of the hero and the heroine, in Tragedy exactly the reverse happens. The hero and heroine are divided in every way: split within themselves, split from their ‘other self’, split from the rest of society, which has gathered together only to encompass their destruction. Entirely isolated, all that is left is that their life should be violently extinguished. 

In this image of an incomplete, egocentric figure who meets a lonely and violent end, we may recognise the essential characteristics of another deeply familiar figure from stories, whom we have already met in quite another context. We begin the next chapter by exploring some of the striking parallels which emerge between the hero or heroine of Tragedy and that figure we previously encountered, from a very different standpoint, as the Monster.  

Tragedy: The Hero as Monster

‘I that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up…

Have no delight to pass away the time.

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun.

And descant on mine own deformity.

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, 

To entertain these fair, well spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain.   

Richard III

When we hear these words spoken at the beginning of a story by a twisted hunchback, exculting in his physical and moral deformity, we have little difficulty in recognising him at once as a ‘monster’. In deed Richard of Gloster, as portrayed by Shakespeare, is one of the most explicityly monstrous figures in all storytelling. 

Since we are following the story, as it were, through his eyes, Richard III is a Tragedy. We see him, bheind the ‘light’ mask of charm he wears to the world, plotting his way ruthlessly to the throne, over a mounting pile of corpses. In familiar tragic manner we see his mounting ambition and treachery casting an ever-longer shadow of fear and suspicion – until at last positive opposition to him begins to constellate round the figure of Henry Earl of Richmond. 

But at this point, when we see Richmond landing in England, determined to seek out and destroy the ‘wretched, bloody and usurping boar’who ‘lives even now at the centre of this isle’, it is as if we are being given a glimplse of another plot altogether. Henry is just like the brave young hero of an Overcoming the Monster story, setting out to confront and overthrow a towering figure of evil. On the eve of the battle of Bosworth we return to see events through Richard’s eyes, the monster cornered at last, finally into the NIghtmare Stage: a ‘divided self’ as he sees the fearful procession of this victim’s ghosts. Stricken by ‘coward conscience’, he recognises how his foul crimes have left him all alone. The next day Richmond confronts Richard and kills him, exulting ‘the day is ours, the bloody dog is slain’.  Like many other monster-slayers, Richmond then succeeds to the kingdom and wins the hand of his chosen queen, the ‘true’ Elizabeth. 

In other words, we see here how these two plots – Tragedy and Overcoming the Monster – may often be looking at the same basic pattern of events from two quite different points of view. If we were to look at the story of David and Goliath from Goliath’s point of view, it would seem like the end of a Tragedy. Conversely, what we are seeing in a certain kind of Tragedy, is the process whereby a human being may be transformed into a ‘monster’. We are being shown how a ‘monster’ comes into being in the first place. The story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the story of how a seemingly respectable doctor is transformed, step by set, into a hideous, deformed monster, Hyde. The story of Macbeth shows how a successful soldier, admired by everyone is gradually transformed into the monster of the later stages of the play, with Macduff cast in the role of monster-slayer – even down to Macduff’s last words to Macbeth, as they exit fighting: 

‘We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are

painted upon a pole, and underwrit

Here you may see the tyrant’

Humbert Humbert, as he discloses his perverse love for little girls and the amoral heartlessness of his behaviour towards Lolita’s mother, gradually reveals himself as the monster who can end up by committing the appalling coldblooded murder of Quilty. The portrait in The Picture of Dorian Gray pitilessly reflects the gradual corruption of a beautiful young man into a monster ‘hideous, wrinkled and loathsome’ to behold. And if we recall the three chief modes of behaviour we saw earlier as typical of the ‘Monster’ in storytelling – the Monster as Predator, as Holdfast and as Avenger – we can see how closely this may correspond to the behaviour of the tragic hero, as he goes through the stages of his rise and fall. When we first meet Macbeth or Humbert Humbert, we see them turning into Predators, determined to get hold of some prize; the kingship, Lolita. We ten see them, having won the object of their desire, determined Holdfast-like to hang on to it. Finally we see their possession challenged, when they lash out blindly in the role of Avenger: Macbeth ordering the killing of Macdduff’s household, Humbert killing Quilty.

But at this point we must recognise, of course, that by no means all the heroes and heroines of Tragedy are such complete ‘monsters’. It is hard to see Icarus, for instance, as anything more than a foolish boy, who harms no one but himself. Brutus, who killed Caesar not to gratify his own ambition but because he finally accepted that Caesar’s ambition has become a threat to the public good, would hardly have been given by his opponents the epitaph ‘the noblest Roman of them all’ if they had seen him as a monster. Even Antony himself scarcely became a monster, although his actions must have led to the deaths of thousands. He was brought to his destruction as a ‘divided self’ by weakness and by a foolish love, rather than by that excess of ruthlessness inseparable from a true monster. 

In fact we can now begin to look at Tragedy from a rather different perspective. So far we have been looking at it essentially in terms of the outlines of the plot. Now we must take into account the gradations which exist within the framework of that plot, according to the extent to which the hero or heroine is primairily the malevolent author of other people’s sufferings or is just a victim of his or her own folly. Earlier, in a different context, we distinguished between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ characters. Here we employ much the same distinction and it is obviously the more ‘active’, agressive tragic heroes – Macbeth, Richard III, Dorian Gray, Mr Hyde – who most completetly correspond to the conditon of the ‘monster’.

On the other hand, those who are least monstrous fall into two groups. The first includes those heroes and heroines who, although egocentric, are most ‘passive’ and obviously victims, like Jules and Jim who seem simply unmanly and impotent as they are drawn down to destruction by the increasingly mad Catherine (it is she who becomes the monster, the chief dark figure of the story). The pitiful Don José is little more than a passive victim of Carmen’s wiles, until the closing scene where he is turned into a raging monster by his despreate frustration at losing her. Even Faustus is much more a victim than an ‘active’hero, because it is always Mephistopheles who is pulling the strings and making a fool of him, and he does no serious or obvious harm to anyone else. 

The other category includes those heroes whose motivation is tinged by consideration for something higher and nobler than just their own personal gratification. Few of the examples we have looked at so far might seem to fall under such a heading, with the exception of Brutus: though even he, after a revealing inner moral struggle, puts his hand to the cold-blooded murder of one of his oldest friends, at the instigation of two others, the  ‘envious’ Casca and the ‘lean and hungery’ Cassius, whose motivation may not be so obviously high-minded.

But here, as we consider the possibility of tragedies where there may be some redeeming feature to the hero,, we are beginning to move on to another level of the plot altogether. 

Tragedies of redemption and fulfilment

The essence of Tragedy as we have seen it so far is that it shows a hero or heroine who commits some great offence and is then drawn down, step by step, into paying the price. We are never in much doubt in such stories as to where the balance lies between darkness and light. At the outset, the hero or heroine may be made up of both light and dark qualities. But their dark side prevails, and as they remain set on their disastrous course with serious deviation or change of course, they tend to become darker and darker, while the light in the story constellates more and more outside them: first and most poignantly in their innocent victims; finally, triumphantly, in those who gather in opposition to overthrow them. This is why some tragedies, such as Macbeth or Richard III, can even end on a not of solemn rejoicing. The great life-denying monster who has increasingly cast his shadow on all around has at last been overthrown. Life can begin to flow again. Ultimately the destruction of the dark hero has been a victory for light. 

But we are about to look at some familiar examples of Tragedy where the balance between darkness and light falls rather differently. FIrst we are going to look at two stories which begin in familiar tragic manner, but where the hero does not just plunge blindly on towards destruction. As the story progresses he begins to go through a real change of heart. Instead of becoming darker and darker as he gets further locked into egocentricity ,he begins to turn into a light figure, even though it is not enough ultimately to save him from destruction. Next we shall look at another story which begins with the hero showing a fatal weakness: but here it is not so much a change of heart which alters the tone of the ending as his recovery of manly strength, which enables him to turn his death into a glorious victory. Then we shall look at a great Tragedy where the hero eventually manages to purge himself of the darkness which has infected him, and is released. Finally we shall look at two stories right at the other end of the spectrum from those in which the hero is a monster, the centre of darkness. These are tragedies where, by a complete inversion of the usual pattern, the hero or the hero and heroine are almost wholly lilght throughout the story, and where the darkness which finally engulfs them springs entirely from society outside them. 

Each of these stories presents the tragic theme with a slightly different emphasis. Between them they may serve to extend this introductiory survey of Tragedy to include more or less the full range of basis variations of which this extraordinarily important plot is capable. 

King Lear

At the start of King Lear we are left in no doubt that the hero is about to make potentially tragic error, His wishes to divest himself of the cares and responsibilities of kingship, while still wishing to enjoy the honours and privileges which attach to being a king. He plans to dive his kingdom between his three daughters, and puts them to a test by asking them how much they love him. But when Goneril and Reagan make flowery, empty protestations of their love, it is obvious that he is allowing himself to be deceived. When Cordelia, the youngest, makes a plain little declaration that she loves him no more and no less than is right and proper, he can no longer recognise the truth at all. He angrily rejects her, his ‘good angel’; she goes off into exile with the equally honest Kent, and the seeds of Tragedy are sown. 

Although it is Lear’s judgement which has been darkened, and which has led him into acting heartlessly and rejecting true love, it is already evident that he is primarily a victim of his own weakness rather than an active monster. The real sources of darkness in the story, the monsters unleashed by his weakness, are his heartless, false daughters Goneril and Reagan who inherit the power in his kingdom; while as a shadow to the drama of filial treachery which is about to unfold we see also the aging Gloucester being likewise fooled by the ‘sweet words’ of his villainous bastard son Edmund, as he rejects his loving and true son Edgar. 

The Dream Stage of Lear’s fantasy, while he can imagine that he still enjoys the honour of a king and the love of his two dark daughters, does not last long. Soon Frustration sets in, as Goneril and Reagan begin to treat their father with increasing contempt, until they reject him altogether. 

The Nightmare Stage begins, with the poor, weak old man wandering through a stormy night on the desolate heath, acccompanied only by the Fool and by the loyal Kent, who has returned from exile to serve his king in disguise. From now on the conflict between love and treachery, light and dark, carries the play into reaches of complexity such as rarely touched on by the more straightforward type of Tragedy. Firstly, as a premonition of what is to come, we see the drama of Gloucester who, after rejecting his true son Edgar, rejoins the forces of light by ministering to the helpless Lear, for which he has his eyes torn out by the dark sisters. Now as helpless as Lear, he is rescued by his rejected but still loving son Edgar, who comes to him in siguise and cures him of his desire to commit suicide. Then, similarly the rejected but still loving Cordelia arrives from France to rescue her father and nurse him back to sanity, in such a way that for the first time in the story Lear begins to see the truth and to recognise and feel real love. 

Finally there is a battle, in which the forces of darkness seem to be victorious, with Lear and Cordelia taken prisoner. But almost at once the forces of darkness fall out amongst themselves. The three chief dark figures, Reagan, Goneril and Edmund, having been drawn down into the vortex of their own multiple treachery, all destroy each other. Unfortunately, as a last legacy of the evil that has possessed them, they have left the order by which Cordelia is hanged. The supreme, shing symbol of pure and selfless love, the ‘good angel’ of the entire story, has been put to death – and Lear dies broken-hearted. We end this bleakest of all Shakespeare’s plays with the sense that, although love had begun its work to win some degree of redemption from the general catastrophe, it was not enough. The forces of darkness unleashed by Lear’s initial act of heartless folly had proved too powerful. And although they themselves had ultimately brought about their own destruction, by the end they have extinguished ‘light’ with them, leaving only its shing memory behind. 

Samson

For twenty years Samson has been a judge over Israel. We know three things about him. The first is that he possesses superhuman strength, which is particularly important since his people are locked in continual conflict with their deadly rivals, the Philistines. The second is that he has long hair, in wich somehow the secret of his strength resides; if it is ever cut, he will become a s weak as any ordinary mortal. The third is that he already has another weakness, for women. 

One day he goes out to sleep with a prostitute, and while he is with her he is nearly trapped by the Philistines. Only his superhuman strength enables him to escape. But it is a warning of what is to come. Next he falls in love with another woman Delilah, and this time the Philistines are more cunning. THey realise that it is no good tackling him on his superior function; his physical strength: they must go behind it, to his weakness, and they bribe Delilah to use her loving wiles to wheedle out of him the secret of where his strength lies. Three times she tries, and each time he brushes her aside with a misleading answer. But when she persists, throwing everything in her final attempt by the age-old device of pleading ‘How can you say you love me when you won’t tell me the truth?, he finally and fatally weakens. He reveals his secret, she waits until he is asleep and has his hair shaven. When he wakes up, it is too late. He has fallen into the hands of the Philistines and is too weak too free himself. 

From this Frustration Stage, Samson is quickly thrust into the Nightmare Stage, when the Philistines put out his eyes, bind him ‘with fetters of brass’ and ‘he did grind in the prison house’. But what the Philistines forget is that, while he is in prison, Samson’s hair will grow again. 

They throw a great feast, to celebrate their capture of their deadly enemy. Three thousand Philistines gather in a great building, and when they are drunk they call for Samson to be brought in so they can mock him. He asks the boy who is leading him to guide his hand to the pillars of the building, so he can lean on them. Then, calling on his God, and with a final superhuman heave of his now recovered strength, Samson pulls the whole building down, killing everyone in it: ‘so that the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life’. It is his greatest victory.

There are important issues raised by this tale to which we shall have to return because they have implications central to the nature of storytelling and the different psychological levels on which the basis stories can be told. As the story is presented to us, for instance, the Philistines are cast as wholly dark, unredeemedly evil; although they doubtless behaved little differently from the way the Isrelites themselves would have done if they had caught the champion and strongman of the Philistines (e.g. the portrayal of Goliath). In this respect Samson’s victory over ‘evil’ can only be seen in partial terms: we can hardly see it as a great life renewing act, an absolute victory for life over death. 

Romeo and Juliet

The story of Romeo and Juliet unfolds precisely through the five stages of the tragic cycle. But the great difference between this and all the other tragedies at which we have looked lies in where we see the fundamental split or division which contains the seeds of catastrophe. It is not so much Romeo or Juliet themselves who present us with the spectacle of a ‘divided self’. The split lies in the great feud dividing their two families. The desire of the hero or heroine is not to promote conflict but to escape from it. In other words, the fault which sets them at odds with those around them lies not in themselves but outside them. 

As the play opens we are at once aware of how deep and combustible is the rift between the Montagues and the Capulets by the casual suddenness with which a brawl between members of the two households breaks out in a Verona street. We are then drawn into the Anticipation Stage as we learn how Romeo is already detached from the conflict by lovesickness. He is actually hoping to gatecrash the Capulet’s ball to catch sight of the girl he loves, Rosaline. At the same time the young daughter of the Capulets, Juliet, is being told by her mother that she must bend her thoughts towards marriage, with a young man, called Paris. We might almost be in the opening stages of a Comedy, with both hero and heroine headed for the wrong partners. But then, at the ball, they meet, and at once fall in love. They have found their Focus. The height of the Dream Stage quickly follows when they declare their love for each other (the ‘Balcony scene’) and secretly get married under the auspices of the wise old Friar Laurence. 

The Frustration Stage begins when the shadow of the great feud intrudes on their love. The Hot-tempered young Capulet Tybalt comes looking for Romeo, furious at how he had gatecrashed the ball in disguise. Full of the spirit of love, Romeo has no wish to fight; but when Tybalt kills his friend Mercutio, Romeo is at last infected by the darkness and is drawn into killing Tybalt in reply. It is this dark act which precipitates the fatal conclusion. The frustration of the lovers quickly worsens as Romeo is banished and Juliet’s father (in the guise of ‘unrelenting father’) prepares to marry her off to Paris (not knowing, of course, that she is already married). 

The Nightmare Stage begins, as Juliet desperately tries to escape from the approaching threat of the false marriage. Friar Laurence masterminds the plan whereby she takes a drug which makes it seem that she is dead. She is taken to the family tomb, with the intention that Romeo will come secretly at night and carry her off. And if this were Comedy, with Juliet merely in eclipse, like thos other heroines who feign death, Hermione in A Winter’s Tale and Hero in Much Ado, such might be the happy denouement. But here there is to be no ‘recognition’. The course of deception, once embarked on, leads only to the wrong people being deceived, and misunderstanding becomes fatal. Romeo is led to believe that Juliet is truly dead and commits suicide by her side. She wakes to find that he is dead and follows suit. They achieve their final union only in death. 

If this were all there was to the story, we should feel that it had come to a very bleak conclusion indeed, with the forces of darkness triumphant. But of course, what happens is that the two families, when they learn of the catastrophe, are so appalled that they go collectively through a profound change of heart. Reconciled in utual grief, they call off their ancient feud .We see how, in their terrible deaths, Romeo and Juliet have redeemed the divided world of Verona, enabling the story to end on an image of wholeness restored and life renewed. 

At least Romeo and Juliet could not have been drawn down to their catastrophe unless Romeo himself had eventually been infected by the darkness surrounding them, in his killing of Tybalt. But finally we come to a story where the hero is not infected by the darkness surrounding him at all. We have come, in short, right to the other end of the tragic spectrum from those stories which show the hero as a monster, to the point where he is completely a centre of light. Yet, interestingly, this is precisely the reverse of how he at first appears. 

The Snow Goose

The hero of Paul Gallico’s little tale The Snow Goose, written in England in 1940 during the darkest days of the Second World War is Philip Rhayader, a painter, who lives all alone in an abandoned lighthouse on the Essex marshes. 

To the inhabitants of the nearby community, this mysterious solitary figure seems to be a monster. Rhyader is a hunchback, his left arm is ‘crippled, thin and bent at the wrist, like the claw of a bird’. But we soon learn that in reality, despite his ‘mis-shapen body and dark visage’, Rhayader is as far from being a monster as it is possible to be. In every other sense he is a whole man, a superb sailor, strong and at the same time gentle, full of love for ‘man, the animal kingdom and all nature’. He lives alone in the  marshes because he is at home with the birds and the sea, which form the subject of his ‘luminous’ canvases. 

In other words, as he is revealed to us, Rhayader is all light and the darkness in the story is all outside him, initially in his neighbours who regard the solitary hunchback out on the marshes with suspicion, hostility and fear.

But one day one of these neighbours comes to him, a frightened little girl carrying an injured snow goose she has found. He knows at once how to look after the bird, which he calles ‘The Lost Princess’ and the girl Frith comes regularly to visit him, to see how the bird is getting on.  Eventually the snow goose, fully recovered, flies away. Frith’s visits stop and Rhayader ‘learned all over again the meaning of the world ‘loneliness’.  The child and  the ‘Princess’ have become intertwined together, profoundly important to him. 

The following year, to Rhayader’s amazement and joy, the ‘Princess’ returns. He leaves a message for Frith, who resumes her visits until the bird again flies off for the summer – and this pattern continues for several years, with Rhayadar enjoying alternations of happiness and loneliness, each time Frith and the great bird come back into his life for a while and then disappear again. 

Then three things happen, more or less simultaneously. First, Rhayader realises that Frith is nog longer just a wild little girl: she has grown up into a young woman. Second the snow goose does not fly away as usual, but had obviously decided to stay at the lighthouse ‘the Lost Princess is no more. This is her home now – of her own free will’ Both Rhayader and Frith are aware of a tumult of new feelings, involving each other, which neither dares speak of. But thirdly, the darkness and conflict of the world outside suddenly intrude on them in a new and much more violent way.

It is 1940, the time of Dunkirk. Rhayader, the sailor, decides that he must answer the call for the ‘little boats’ to help in the evacuation, and sails off with the snow goose flying over him,  like a guardian angel, straight into the nightmare of the Dunkirk beaches. Amid this deafening hell of smoke, gunfire, exploding bombs and death, he performs astonishing feats of heroism, rescuing hundreds of men, until finally he is machine-gunned. His boat is spotted drifting through the smoke and chaos, his body slumped over the tiller, with the great bird still watching over him – until the boat is blown to pieces by a mine. But for all who have encountered him in that hell, he has become an almost legendary, supernatural figure. For days, Frith waits looking out for him, until the ‘Princess’ returns to circle round her, as if to tell her that Rhayader is not coming back. A few weeks later a stray German bomber blasts the lighthouse out of existence. 

Obviously there is something profoundly positive even about this very bleak ending. We began by seeing Rhayader rejected and taken by everyone around him to be a ‘monster’, even though the fault lay only in themselves. By his selfless and heroic end, we finally see his true nature revealed to the world in such a way that he becomes a redeemer, he and his bird a vision of ‘light’ amid the terrible surrounding darkness. It is a story which triumphantly turns the usual theme of Tragedy inside out. 

One of the subtler clues to the meaning of the tragic pattern lies in the origins of the word ‘tragedy’ itself, coming as it does from the Greek ‘goat’.  It is derived from the ancient ritual practice of the ‘scapegoat’, whereby a goat or some other creature could be sacrificed to restore health to the community. The animal (or human) scapegoat was regarded as symbolically carrying the sins of the tribe; with the idea that, in its death, those sins were purged and the tribe brought back to wholeness. The pattern this re-enacted was precisely that we see at the end of a tragedy, where a whole community has been cast into shadow by the darkness emanating from the central figure. The removal of that source of darkness brings the community back into the light. 

We have come a long way since we first began to explore this strange pattern in storytelling which shows how human beings may get caught up in a course of action which leads eventually to their violent and unnatural death. We have been through some of the darkest stories in the world. We have seen people, possessed by some egocentric fantasy of love or power, gradually separating themselves from everyone around them, more and more submerged in the darkness which springs from their own split, disordered psyches, until finally the violent rejection they have shown to others turns in on themselves and with others around them, so that light ls again breaking in on their darkness. 

So far, because we have been looking at Tragedy, we have only seen this return to the light able to perate partially, ultimately insufficient to prevail against the forces of darkness which have been unleashed, and which eventually sweep the hero or heroine away. But there are, of course, stories which show that climb upward from darkness reaching its ultimate triumphant conclusion, where the hero or heroine can re-emerge into the light altogether. This leads us to the next and last of the basic plots. 

Rebirth 

Early in our lives we come across a type of story not quite like any other. In the form in which we first encounter it, in the stories of childhood, it usually centres round the familiar fairytale cast of young heroes and heroines, princes and  princesses, who have fallen foul of dark enchanters, wicked witches or evil stepmothers. But this is not a conventional Rags to Riches or Overcoming the Monster story. It contains a crucial ingredient which marks it out from either. 

In the folk tale Sleeping Beauty, a king and queen have a baby daughter. They invite seven fairies to the little Princess’s christening, and six in turn bestow great blessings on her – beauty, grace, goodness of heart, and so on. But before the last can speak an old malevolent fairy bursts in, furious at not having been invited, and lays a deadly curse on the child: that she shall prick her finger and die before she grows up. The seventh good fairy can only commute this to a sentence of a hundred years of sleep, with the promise that eventually the Princess will be liberated. 

The second stage shows the little girl growing up, endowed with all the light gifts laid on her at her christening – while her parents do all they can to protect her by ordering that every needle in the kingdom shall be destroyed. But eventually the day arrives when the heroine is about to enter on her adult state. She wanders into a remote and overlooked corner of her father’s castle, where she discovers a mysterious old woman at a spinning wheel. Blind to the danger she is running, she asks to try the wheel. The dark prophecy is borne out, the heroine pricks her finger and swoons into unconsciousness. The rest of the castle’s inhabitants follow suit, and a hedge of impenetrable thorns springs up to seal them from the outside world. We are thus presented with one of the most haunting images in storytelling of the state of living death: the flow of life frozen in suspension.

The third stage does not unfold until decades later. Many would-be heroes have tried to penetrate to the enchanted castle without success. Only when the right moment and the perfect hero arrives can the liberation take place. At last a prince from another land chances to pass the castle, makes his way effortlessly through the hedge of thorns, finds the Princess in her remote prison and wakes her with a kiss. The whole community of the castle – from servants, guards and animals up to the king and queen – stirs back into life. The Prince and the Princess he has ‘won back from the dead’ are married. 

Sleeping Beauty is based on the type of plot we may call ‘Rebirth’.  A hero or heroine falls under a dark spell which eventually traps them in some wintry state, akin to living death: physical or spiritual imprisonment, sleep, sickness or some other form of enchantment. For a long time they languish in this frozen condition. Then a miraculous act of redemption takes place, focused on a particular figure who helps to liberate the hero or heroine from imprisonment. From the depths of darkness they are brought up into glorious light. 

Another familiar version of this theme is Snow White. Again a king and queen have a baby daughter. Again, shortly after her birth, a terrible shadow falls over her when the little Princess’ loving mother dies, and is replaced by the vain and heartless stepmother, the chief dark figure of the story. Her overriding obsession is to get rid of Snow White, as the challenge to her own supremacy as the chief feminine figure in the kingdom, and she orders that Snow White should be taken out into the forest and killed. Only in the nick of time is the heroine given a partial reprieve, when the huntsman who has been ordered to kill her merely abandons her. 

The second stage begins when she finds her way to the mysterious cottage inhabited by the seven dwarfs, who spend their ddays digging out treasure from caves deep in the mountains and here Snow White settles down happily to a new life as ‘little mother’ to the dwarfs. But eventually the dark shadow from the outer world again falls over her, when the wicked stepmother discovers Snow White’s remote place of concealment and comes three times in disguise to offer her poisoned gifts. Each time in trusting ignorance Snow White succumbs to the temptation (like Sleeping Beauty, her naivety and limited awareness make her an unwitting party to her downfall) and each time she sinks into the state of living death. On the first two occasions the dwarfs are able to bring her back to life, but on the third – when Snow White chokes on the poisoned apple – their powers are no longer sufficient to save her. They assume she is dead and place her on  a mountaintop in a glass coffin. 

Just as in Sleeping Beauty, the third and final stage of the story takes place only when many years have elapsed, when a prince arrives from a far-off land, sees the heroine i nher state of suspended animation and falls in love with her. He orders that she should be taken down the mountain. As she is carried down, the apple is dislodged. Snow White awakens from her living death, falls in love with the perfect hero who has released her and they are married.

In each of these stories we see the heroine first falling under the shadow of the dark power when she is very young. For a while it still seems to be comfortably remote, although we are aware of it unresolved and menacing in the background. Then there is a mounting sense of threat as the dark power approaches, until finally it emerges in full force, freezing the heroine in its deadly grip. Only after a long time, when it seems that the dark power has completely triumphed, does the reversal take place: when the heroine is miraculously redeemed from her imprisonment by the life-giving power of love.

Hero redeemed by heroine

Such is one version of the plot of Rebirth. But at much the same time that we first encounter these two fairy tales, we may come across another two familiar stories which present the theme of Rebirth in another way. We still see the heroine as the central figure. Everything still hinges on a final liberation by the power of love from a state of living death. But here is the hero who is the central imprisoned figure of the story, trapped by dark enchantment, and it is the heroine who eventually liberates him. As the story unfolds, however, she herself falls into a state of imprisonment, trapped by the hero when he is under the dark spell – so that we finally see each being liberated from the grip of the dark power by the other. 

In the Frog Prince, a young Princess is out playing one day with her most precious possession, a golden ball, when it rolls away and sinks into a deep pool. She is in great distress, not knowing how to get it back, when a frog hops up and offers to recover it – on condition that she will take him home and allow him to share her food and her bed. She lightly gives her promise, the ball is recovered and the Princess goes happily off home, forgetting all about her promise to the frog. Eventually there is a knock at the palace door, the Princess opens it and is horrified to see the frog, come to claim his part of the bargain. In terror, the Princess slams the door, but when her father the king hears what has happened he sternly insists that she must fulfil her promise. With a sense of loathing she allows the repulsive little creature to eat from her plate, and even to share her bed – and when he disappears the next morning, she hopes she has seen the last of him. But her nighmare is not over. The frog returns, to share her bed for three nights; and only on the third morning does she wake up to find that he has turned into his true self as a handsome Prince. He explains that he had been placed under an evil spell by an enchantress, and turned into a frog; with the condition that he could only be released if he could persuade a Princess to let him share her bed for three nights. The Princess looks at the Prince she has unwittingly redeemed with almost disbelieving joy and love, and he takes her home to be married. 

A second familiar folk tale which expresses this same basic outline with rather greater subtlety is Beauty and the Beast; and here it is more explicitly emphasised that the heroine actually has to show love for the hero before he can be released from his outwardly repulsive and dark state (although in The Frog Prince the Princess’s sharing of her bed is obviously symbolicaly related).

We begin with the familiar situation of a father and three daughters. As in Cinderella and many other stories, the point is to contrast two of the children, vain, proud and hard-hearted, with the third, Beauty, who is not only outwardly attractive but also good-hearted and loving. The father goes on a journey and loses his way one night in a forest. He is drawn to a mysterious, empty castle, where he finds every kind of comfort and hospitality, although he never seens anyone until he is about to leave – when he is set upon by a terrifying monster, in semi-human shape. The Beast only allows him to leave on condition that he sends back his youngest daughter to live at the castle. Beauty comes to the castle, full of dread, and although she is splendidly looked after and even comes to like the friendly and kindly Beast, she cannot possibly accept his proposal that she should marry him. She feels terribly trapped; but eventually the Beast allows her to return home for a while to tend her father who has fallen sick, and she breaks her promise to come back. Then, in a dream, she sees the Beast dying of grief. She rushes contritely back to the castle, just in time to find him lying in the darkness in the garden, apparently dead. She is so overcome by the love which has been secretly growing in her that she flings herself down to embrace him. He stirs back to life and says that he only wanted to see her once more: he can die now happy. She says that he must not die, she cannot live without him. At these words, the dark castle is suddenly filled with light, music plays and she sees standing before her a handsome Prince – who tells her that he had been turned into a monster by a wicked enchantress, and that he could only win his release if a beautiful virgin would freely consent to marry him. Beauty and the Beast have redeemed each other by the power of her love – although obviously he had only been a monster in outward form. Inwardly his true self had been there all along, waiting for the right woman to bring about the moment when all his outward deformatioins would fall away and he could at last emerge in his perfect, princely state, united with her forever. 

The Snow Queen

In all these examples of the Rebirth story based on folk tales and familiar from childhood, ,the central imprisoned figures have only become trapped in the state of living death through the agency of some dark figure outside them. But eventually we come across another children’s story which takes the pattern of this plot a stage further. In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen we see a hero who initially passes under the spell of darkness through the action of an enchanter. But the consequence is that he becomes not just otwardly but inwardly infected by the power of darkness himself. It is this which draws him in turn into the power of another dark figure, the Snow Queen, and it is she who imprisons him in the state of living death. 

The story begins with a prologue, which tells how a wicked Magician once constructed a most curious mirror. Everything good and beautiful, when reflected in it, shrank up almost to nothing, whilst those things which were ugly and useless were magnified and made to appear ten times worse than before. The Magician’s followers carried the distorting mirro up into the sky, where it fell from their grasp and shattered into millions of tiny fragments. Splinters of the mirror fell to earth all over the world. Some entered people’s eyes, which caused them to view everything the wrong way. Others entered people’s hearts, which was even worse, for the heart became cold and hard, like a lump of ice. 

The story proper begins when we meet a little boy Kay and a little girl Gerda who live next door to each other in a big city. They play together and love each other. Both are innocent and sweet-natured. But one day, towards the end of summer, Kay feels shooting pains in his eye and heart. They have been entered by splinters of the magic mirro. The pain fades, but Kay’s character begins to change. He begins to see the roses outside their windows as ugly and tears them down. He scorns Gerda’s tears, and starts to imitate people cruelly behind their backs. He now likes ‘rational’ games, such as looking at snowflakes through a magnifying glass, to delight in their cold, hard, crystalline perfection. 

Winter has come and one day Kay takes his little sledge out into the square where he sees a large and handsome sledge passing by, driven by a mysterious figure all dressed in white. He attaches his own sledge behind the larger one, hoping for a ride, and finds himmself being whirled along faster and faster through the streets, and eventually out into the snow-covered countryside. By now he is very frightened, but he cannot shake his sledge loose. He tries to say a prayer, but can only remember the multiplication table. At last they stop, miles from home, and the mysterious figure reveals herself as the Snow Queen. Kay sees her as beautiful: ‘a more ntelligent, more lovely countenance he could not image. As they resume their journey, now flying over forests, lakes and seas, Kay sits beside her, his head filled with figures and statistics, until he falls asleep. 

We then return to little Gerda, who is very unhappy at her friend’s disappearance. The winter goes by, spring comes, still he has not returned. Some say he must be dead, but Gerda cannot believe it and she sets out to look for him. We now pass into the familiar territory of a Quest, as she embarks on her long journey into distant lands, with alternating episodes of ordeal and respite. For a time she passes into the power of an enchantress herself, who like Odysseus’s Calypso tries to lull her into forgetfulness of her Quest. She meets helpers, a raven and a robbermaiden, who eventually sends her on the last part of her journey, on a reindeer. Then at last we see what has happened to Kay. Far to the north, in the land of everlasting cold, he is imprisoned in the vast ice palace of the Snow Queen. He sits most of the time all alone, doing ‘Chinese puzzles’ with splinters of ice. Kay could form the most curious and complete figures – this was the ice puzzle of reason – and in his eyes these figures were of the utmost imprtance… but there was one world he could never succeed in forming. It was ‘Eternity’. The Snow Queen had told him that if ever he can put that world together, he will become his own master and ‘I will give thee the whole world’. 

At last Gerda finds Kay, in the great empty hall of ice. As he sits, ‘cold, silent, motionless’ he does not recognise her. She is so overcome by love and pity that she embraces him with hot tears, which wash the splinter of mirror from her heart. He then weeps too, which floats the splinter from his eye. At last he can feel and see straight again. Gerda, my dear little Gerda he exclaims, as if waking from a long sleep, where have you been all this time? And where have I been? They are both so filled with joy that even the ice fragments around them dance, and form the word ‘Eternity’ by themselves. Gerda and Kay set out on their long return journey, the world around them becoming ever warmer and more spring-like as they travel south. At last they arrive back in their old familiar streets, and as they come home the only alteration they can find is in themselves, for they saw that they were now fully grown up. They gaze on each other happily, while all around them glowed warm, glorious Summer. 

From earlier stages of our journey through storytelling we have no difficulty in recognising what is happening to Kay in the course of this story. When the splinters of the mirror enter his eye and his heart, two things happen: he can no longer see straight and whole, and he can no longer feel for others. He becomes blind, heartless and egocentric. He has become ‘dark’ in exactly the same way in which we saw figures being possessed by darkness in earlier types of story, above all in Tragedy. And when Gerda finally finds her way to his lonely prison to liberate him, the transformation which takes place in him is precisely that which we saw in earlier types of story where a dark figure goes through a change of heart and becomes ‘light’. As the splinters are washed from Kay’s eye and heart, he regains both the powers he has lost: to see whole and to feel. He is once again able to love. He is restored to his true self. United with his ‘other half’ Gerda, he is complete. And, as the closing lines of the story make clear, he has fully grown up.

But still the darkness which possesses Kay is personified outwardly, in the two dominant dark figures of the story who are ultimately responsible for placing him under the dark spell and consigning him to the state of living death, the Magician and the Snow Queen. We now move on to three more stories based on the Rebirth plot, written for an adult audience, where the dark power is no longer personified outwardly at all, but is shown as springing only from within the hero. What consigns him to his prison is seen as something which has happened solely within his own personality. 

A Christmas Carol

When we first meet the hero of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, he is already in the state of living death. He does not yet recognise it as such, nor do we yet know how he got there – but things are central to the way the story then unfolds. 

It is Chrismas Eve. A freezing fog shrouds the City of London but nothing is colder or less full of seasonal goodwill than the heart of the moneylender Scrooge. We see him in three encounters which underline how he has become imprisoned in a grasping, ill-tempered meanness which sets him at odds with all the world. First he contemptuously rejects an invitation to Christmas dinner from his cheerful nephew. Then he rejects the invitation of two gentlemen to contribute to a charity to provide Christmas cheer for the poor. Thirdly, he turns on his clerk Bob Cratchit, refusing him more coal for his fire and all but threatening to clock his wages for the following day’s absence from the office. As Scrooge returns home that evening through the freezing streets, it is emphasised that it has become ‘foggier yet, and colder’ Piercing, searching, biting cold! Arriving at his meagrely furnished lodgings, he sees the door knocker assume the ghostly features – ‘livid …horrible’ – of his equally miserly former partner Jacob Marley, dead exactly seven years, Marley’s ghost then appears, dragging a huge chain, to warn Scrooge of the punishment which awaits those who live only for themselves, and that he is about to receive visits from three more apparitions. 

The first ghost of Christmas Past, ‘like a child, yet not so like a child as an old man’, leads Scrooge through a series of flashbacks to his early life. He recognises himself as a solitary little boy, then in later years surrounded by loving relatives and cheerful Christmas scenes, up to the point where, as a young man, he was finally abandoned by the pretty young woman he had become engaged to because she felt that she had been replaced in his heart by ‘an Idol’. What idol the young Scrooge had asked ‘A golden one’ replied the girl, as she left him forever. We are seeing how Scrooge had orginally been transformed from a pleasant young man into a cold, solitary monster, obsessed by money.

The second ghost, of Christmas Present, is a jolly giant, exuding plenty and good cheer. He shows Scrooge a series of visions of people enjoying all the sociable delights and generosity of spirit associated with Christmas. These festive groups include Scrooge’s nephew and Bob Cratchit, each surrounded by a happy, laughing family. Nothing moves Scrooge more than the sight of Cratchit’s little crippled son, Tiny Tim. In each case the only shadow over the merriment is cast by a mention of his own name. 

The third ghost, of Christmas To Come, a solemn, phantom, ,draped and hooded, coming like mist along the ground, shows Scrooge a sequence of mysterious, sinister visions in which it seems that someone has died. No one could care less about the passing of the dead man. It seems that he did not have a friend in the world. In a squalid hovel a group of grotesques are dividing his belongings, stolen around his freshly-cold corpse. Then Scrooge sees the Cratchit family again. Tiny Tim is dead. Finally he is shown a bleak little gravestone recording the name of the man who has died, unmourned and unloved. It is of course his own. Scrooge is so horrified at everything he has seen that he has gradually been goint through a transformation. He ends with a promise to the vanishing phantom that, if only he has the chance, he will utterly reform his life. 

Scrooge awakes from his nightmare, imagining that he has somehow slept through three nights. He is amazed to discover that it is still only the morning of Christmas Day. He thus has a chance to express his new found self in a tornado of generosity and goodwill to everyone he meets and knows. He arranges for a vast turkey to be sent round to Bob Cratchit, rushes to offer the charitable gentlemen a contribution so generous as to be almost embarrassing and finally breaks in on his astonished nephew and his family to join their celebrations. The following morning he amazes Cratchit by raising his salary, and from that day forth Ebenezer Scrooge becomes like a second father to Tiny Tim, ‘who did NOT die’ and ‘as good a friend, as good a master and as good a man as the old city knew’.  

Crime and Punishment

The action of A Christmas Carol centres almost entirely round the twofold process necessary to bring about Scrooge’s rebirth. The purpose of the succession of nightmarish apparitions is to open out his awareness, to allow him to see himself as others see him and to see the world from a new centre of perspective, and at the same time, as an inseparable part of this process, to awaken in him the ability to feel for others – just as Kay learned to see and to feel when the splinters of mirror were removed from his eye and his heart. And the central redeeming figure of the story who, more than anyone else, awakens his power to love is Tiny Tim, the son he never had, the Child. 

Another nineteenth-century novel which  presents the whole pattern of the Rebirth, from the moment when the hero first passes under the deadly spell of darkness through to his final liberation, is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The opening scenes, in which we meet the hero Rodion Raskolnikov as a poor young student in St Petersburg, are directly akin to the opening of Tragedy. In his hopeless, drifting life in the great city, surrounded by human wreckage like the drunken civil servant Marmeladov, whose daughter Sonia has been driven into prostitution, Raskolnikov becomes obsessed by the fantasy that if only he can commit some vast crime he will somehow have demonstrated his superiority to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings around him. Like Napoleon, he will have shown that he is not to be confined by the humdrum framework of morality appropriate to everyone else (as he says later ‘I wanted to see whether I could step over or not). 

He finds his Focus in the plan to murder an unattractive old woman who acts as the neighbourhood moneylender. For some time we see him going through an agonising inner struggle, very much a divided self as he contemplates the enormity of what part of him desires. On the one hand he has a dream of himself as a young boy, watching with horror as a drunken peasant clubs his horse to death: young Raskolnikov rushes in at the last moment to kiss the dying horse on the lips. On the other, he sees ‘signs’ that he is right to proceed, as when he happens to overhear a student in a restaurant arguing that it would not be immoral to kill some ‘stupid, senseless, worthless, wicked and decrepit old hag, who is of no use to anybody and who actively does harm to everybody  Even when Raskolnikov is making his final preparations ‘they all possessed one strange characteristic: the more final they became, the more absurd and horrible they at once appeared in his eyes’. But he steels himself. He visits the old woman in her flat and hacks her to death with a hatchet, only to discover that her friend Lisaveta is also there and, unplanned, he has to kill her too. 

Having committed his ‘dark act’ and managed to escape safely, leaving no clues, Raskolnikov does not, however, feel himself to be a great hero, liberated from the morality binding ordinary mortals. He finds himself more and more troubled. He is called to the police station about some quite different matter and hears talk of the murder of the two women. He faints. Everyone is now talking about the murders. Raskolnikov begins to see ‘signs’ that he is suspected, as when an unknown man comes up to him in the street and seems to call him ‘murderer’.  

An increasingly important part is now played in Raskolniviov’s life and thoughts by Sonia Marmeladov, the meek young prostitute who, although she has become degraded to support her drunken father, consumptive mother and the rest of the family, is deeply religious. Indeed the inner structure of Raskolnikov’s torment may now be charted through this alternating interviews with two figures, Sonia and a strangely authoritative, almost fatherly examining magistrate, Porfiry. In his first private conversation with Sonia, Raskolnikov for some reason asks her to read him the story of how Lazarus was brought back from the dead. He is then summoned by Porfiry for a routine interview as one of the old moneylender’s list of clients. The shrewd magistrate tells him that people who have committed such crimes will always eventually give themselves up, like moths coming to a candle. At his second meeting with Sonia, Raskolnikov confesses his crime. Pitying his terrible distress, she says she will never leave him. He then returns to Porfiry who says he knows that Raskolnikov has committed the crime and that he will eventually ‘decide to accept suffering’ by coming clean about it. 

As the nightmare of older people’s disordered lives closes in on him from all sides – the drunken Marmeladov has been run over and killed in the street, his wife is evicted from her rooms, goes mad and also dies, the admirer of Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya shoots himself – Raskolnikov can at last take no more. He goes into the police station, gives himself up and is sentenced to seven years hard work in a Siberian prison camp. 

Even now, as he begins his sentence, Raskolnivkov still has not faced up inwardly to the full extent of his guilt. But he is accompanied to Siberia by the faithful Sonia, who lives outside the camp, and becomes an almost saintly figure, a ‘little mother’, to his fellow prisoners. Finally Raskolnikov has a nightmare of the whole world being swept by a terrible disease, which gives all who are infected by it the conviction that they alone are right. Everyone is set against everyone else, until all are destroyed. It is the horrific vision of a world in which everyone has become like himself. Raskolnikov is moved to the core of his being, and when he next meets Sonia throws himself down to kiss her feet. She knows at last that he is beginning to come to himself and loves her. Later he picks up her little New Testament, from which she had read him about the story of Lazarus, the man returned from the dead, and one thought flashes through his mind, ‘is it possible that her convictions can be mine too, now?’

‘But that is the beginning of a new story, the story of the gradual rebirth of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his gradual passing from one world to another, of his acquantaince with a new and hitherto unknown reality….

Silas Marner

In A Christmas Carol the central redeeming figure, Tiny Tim, was a child. In Crime and Punishment it is a young girl, Sonia. In a third nineteenth – century novel, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, it is a combination of both. 

The central figure Silas Marner is a weaver who, for 15 years, has lived all alone in a solitary cottage near the country village of Raveloe. He had grown up far away in a great manufacturing town, where as a young man he had been member of an obscure religious sect, engaged to another, a girl called Sarah. But one day, almost as if he had passed under an evil spell, Marner had found himself falsely accused of stealing some money by a third member of the sect, who also had designs on Sarah. All Marner’s protestations of innocence had been in vain, he had been framed and found guilty, and his treacherous accuser, the real thief, had completely won the day and the hand of Sarah. Marner had fled the scene, to end up in his lonely cottage. 
Initially Marner and his new neighbours had got on reasonably well, but then they had begun to shun him, looking on the solitary weaver with fear and suspicion. He had turned in on himself, throwing himself wholly into his monotonous work and gradually his life had become taken over by an obsession, his love of the gold he received for his weaving, which he hoarded away in his cottage and counted every night. 

After many years of this embittered, miserly existence, Marner’s life suddenly becomes intertwined in dramatic fashion with that of another family in the parish. Squire Cass of Raveloe has two sons. The elder, Godfrey, is a weak man, enamoured of the eligible Nancy Lammeter, but unable to propose because he has already been secretly and foolishly married to a girl of humble origin in a nearby town. He has also fallen into the blackmailing clutches of his younger brother, Duncan, an unscrupulous ne’er do well. Led by a series of typically reckless and selfish errors into desperation for money, Duncan finds himself one foggy night outside Marner’s cottage. The door is open, the ‘old miser’ has gone out Duncan cannot resist the temptation to steal his hoard of gold, and then disappears. 

Silas returns and discovers his loss and it is as if he has been robbed of his life. As the first shock of what has happened fades, his neighbours begin to look more indulgently on him, as a poor hopeless creature, slightly crazed. He sinks into self pitiful brooding. The Christmas season comes, everybody else is busy celebrating, it begins to snow and Marner’s despair reaches its lowest point. 

On New Year’s Eve, a strange pathetic figure picks her way through the darkness and driving snow past Marner’s cottage. It is godfrey Cass’s rejected wife, clutching their baby daughter, with which she plans to confront her husband and his family in the middle of their festivitities. Weak and deranged by opium, she sinks down into the freezing snow to die. The little girl wanders off towards the light from the cottage door, finds it open and sinks down asleep in front of Marner’s fire. 

When he returns to the room it is some time before he notices the child and when he does, it is her golden curls shining in the firelight which catch his attention. As if in a hallucination, he imagines that it is his lost gold which has been returned to him. But he then discovers that it is a little girl and the sight of the innocently sleeping child stirs in him feelings he has not known in all the years since he came to Raveloe ‘old quiverings of tenderness, old quiverings of tenderness, old impressions of awe at the presentiment of some Power presiding over his life’.

Eventually the child’s mother is found dead, and to everyone’s astonishment Marner insists on keeping the little girl who had arrived so miraculously in his life. He has christened her Eppie, and we soon see what a transformation her coming has produced in him. ‘Unlike the gold which needed nothing and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude… Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine and living sounds and living movements. 

As the years go by and Eppie’s life unfolds, Marner’s soul, long stuefied in its cold, narrow prison, was unfolding too and trembling gradually into full consciousness. He becomes open, friendly and liked by all: the little child had come to link him once more with the whole world. After 16 years when Eppie has become an attractive young woman, a pond near their cottage is drained and Duncan Cass’s skeleton is found, with the bags containing Marner’s lost gold: all is explained, and all is restored to him. Eppie agrees to marry a suitable young man of the village, but only on condition that they can both remain living with her ‘beloved father’ in the cottage which since her arrival has become surrounded by a beautiful garden. The story ends with Eppie exclaiming to Silas Marner ‘I thinkn nobody could be happier than we are’. 

Each of these nineteenth-century novels desribes its hero going through what is essentially the same kind of inward drama. In each we see:

1.  a hero, who, as a young man, falls under the shadow of the dark power;
2. as the poison gets to work, it takes some time to get the upper hand and to show its full destructive effect
3. Eventually the darkness emerges in full force, plunging the hero into a state of total isolation
4. This culminates in a nightmare crisis which is the prelude to the final reversal;
5. The hero ‘wakes from his sleep’ and is liberated through the power of love.

In fact this form of the Rebirth story finally brings us back to the point where we left off at the end of our exploration of Tragedy. As in a tragedy, we are looking from the inside at what happens to someone when he becomes possessed by the dark part of himself. We see him passing into the grip of an egocentric obsession, which renders him both unable to feel for others outside himself and also bling to the reality of what is happening to him. As he sinks ever further into the darkness, however, he does not, like the tragic hero, just plunge on to final destruction. What marks out the Rebirth plot is the way we see the central figure eventually frozen in his dark and lonely state with seemingly no hope of escape. And it is here, as light stealing in on the darkness, that the vision appears which inspires the stirring back to life, centred on a particular redeeming figure: invariably where the story has a hero, a Young Woman or a Child. 

Again, as in The Snow Queen, what we thus see happening to the hero is that familiar process which we have already seen in other types of story where the hero makes a switch from darkness to light. He is being put in touch with some deeper part of his personality which he has not previously been aware of. Firstly, this opens his eyes, enabling him to see the world from a wholly new, non-selfish perspective; it allows him for the first time to see everything straight and whole. Secondly, it enables him for the first time really to feel selflessly. As he finally moves securely to his new centre of his personality, love wells up in him like an unstoppable force, giving him a sense of extraordinary liberation, of being linked with the whole world – and he experiences this as at last coming to his true, inmost self. 

Rebirth: summing up

We can now sum up this type of story in all the main forms which it can take. Behind them all is the same basic sequence:

1. A young hero or heroine falls under the shadow of the  dark power
2. for a while, all may seem to go reasonably well, the threat may even seem to have receded;
3. but eventually it approaches again in full force, until the hero or heroine is seen imprisoned in the state of living death
4. This continues for a long time, when it seems that the dark power has completely triumphed;
5. but finally comes the miraculous redemption; either, where the imprisoned figure is a heroien, by the hero, or, where it is the hero, by a Young Woman or a Child

The power of this type of story to move us lies in the contrast between the condition of the hero or heroine when we see them frozen in their isolated, imprisoned state and the moment when the liberation begins, as we see them being released from the dark power’s icy grip. Again and again we see the same rage of imagery being used to conjure up the former state, when the dark power is dominant:

coldness, hardness, immobility, constriction, sleep, darkness, sickness, decay, isolation, torment, despair, lack of love

Finally, prevailing against that state as spring follows winter, we see the exactly corresponding imagery of

warmth, softness, movement, liberation, awakening, light, health, growth, joining together, happiness, hope, love.

On every count it marks the move from one universal pole of existence to the other, from death to life: hence the reason why we see this mighty transformation as ‘rebirth’. But we can see this basic underlying drama presented in three different ways. 

Initially, corresponding to the kinds of story we come across early in life, we may see the innocent but undeveloped young hero or heroine falling under the shadow of the dark power as it is personified in a mysterious, malevolent figure outside them. Nevertheless it is their own immature state and limited awareness which renders them unable to withstand the dark power, drawing them inexorably into its grip; and only after a long time are they ready to be released. 

Eventually, corresponding to the kinds of story we are more familiar with in adult life, me may see the dark power represented much more directly as something springing entirely from within the hero or heroine’s own personality: they have been unable to withstand the evil spell cast over them by the dark part of themselves. 

In the middle, as a bridge between the two, we may see the kind of story where both of these things happen: where the dark power is initially personified in magical figures outside the hero, who place him under a spell: but where its effect is to turn him into a dark figure himself. 

Before we conclude this exploration fo the Rebirth story we shall look at one more example of each of these basic forms which the plot can assume. 

The Secret Garden

The first example is a story which, although written for children, reflects the more familiar adult version of the theme where hte imprisonment is shown as springing from within. In fact Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden does not show us only one central character who is imprisoned. As the action unfolds we recognise no fewer than three main characters who have each become trapped in quite separate imprisonments of their own. The cumulative power of the story lies in the way the gradual liberation of one, the heroine, sets off a kind of chain reaction whereby each in turn is liberated; until by the end everyone involved in the story has been caught up in the general rebirth. 

We first meet the story’s heroine, Mary Lennox, when she is a little girl living in India with her parents, in the Edwardian heyday of the British Empire. Mary is a sour-tempered, sickly, selfish child who has been given no love by her equally selfish parents. Almost the only people  she sees are the Indian servants, whom she treats badly. Then one day her parents and her nurse die in a plague, and Mary is sent half across the world to live in a remote mansion in Yorkshire, Misselthwaite Manor, which belongs to her uncle Archibald Craven. 

Here, in this great, mysterious house, with the bleak moors outside, ,Mary finds herself in a strange, shadowy kingdom which itself seems to have fallen under a dark spell. Gradually she tries to unravel some of the mysteries which shroud the house. Why is her crook-backed uncle Mr Craven always away, so lost in himself and so unhappy? Why is there a special part of the garden locked away behind high walls, where no one is allowed to go? More sinister still, what is that strange crying which Mary thinks she hears in some far-off part of the house at night, when the wind is whistling off the moors? 

A clue to these mysteries seems to lie in the terrible event which had fallen on the house 10 years earlier, when Mr Craven’s beautiful young wife had fallen to her death from a tree in that ‘secret garden’ which is why it is now locked away and why Mary’s uncle seems frozen in perpetual despair. But now even the staff of Misselthwaite Manor seem caught up in the same enchantment – the only one who ever smiles and behaves normally is Martha, the cheerful maid, who lives in a little cottage out on the moors, as one of a family of 12 children.

Although she is still a solitary, sour little girl, almost despite herself Mary begins to feel curiosity about all the unfamiliar things she sees in the gardens round the house, such as the friendly little robin who, like Martha, seems full of life and unaffected by the general air of gloom. In deed it is the robin and Martha who first introduce Mary to the magical thread which is eventually going to lead her out the labyrinth of misery which surrounds her. The robin digs up the rusty old key buried in a flower bed which leads Martha through an ivy-covered door into the secret garden. She finds it wild and overgrown but the most beautiful place she has ever seen. She feels the urge to grow things there, but does not know how to begin. Martha suggests that the best person to help would be her young brother, Dickon – and from the moment Mary sets eyes on the boy, it is clear that he stands for everything the gloomy house of death and its abandoned, neglected secret garden is not. Cheerful, direct, without a hint of selfishness or guile, he is like the spirit of nature itself, constantly surrounded by birds and animals as he roams the moors, charming foxes and squirrels and jackdaws with his pipe – and he can make flowers grow out of a brick wall. 

Dickon is delighted to help Mary clear the garden and to plant seeds. Winter is turning to spring, soon there are bulbs pushing up on every side in their secret garden, birds building nests. Mary is now bright-eyed, amazing the servants by her ravenous appetite, for the first time in her life fired by real enthusiasm – and it is this which prepares her for the test which confronts her when she at last, one night, tracks down the source of the mysterious sobbing. Hidden away in a secret room at the heart of the house, she finds a crippled, sickly boy, Colin, Mr Craven’s son. After Mary and his father, Colin is the third major prisoner of the story and in some ways in the worst plight of all. A self pitiful hypochondriac, who has spent most of his life in bed, fearing that he will shortly die, liable to fly into terrible rages, treating the servants like dirt, he is a little monster. But, buoyed up by  her newfound spirit, Mary will have none of this selfish behaviour. She tells him about her secret garden and Dickon, she infects him with some of their own enthusiasm and has to promise to bring Dickon up to Colin’s bedroom. From this moment one, the tendency of everything in the story is upward. As spring turns to summer, the secret garden becomes ever more full of life. Colin gets strong enough to make secret visits to the garden in a wheelchair with Dickon and Mary, and even ventures out of his chair to stand and walk: ‘I shall get wll. ANd I shall live for ever and ever and ever’. He creates for them all a  kind of ceremonial in reverence for the ‘magic’, the healing power of life and nature which is bursting out everywhere around them and which he can feel transforming him with every day that passes. Eventually one of the servants is so amazed by these mysterious events that she sends a telegram to Mr Craven, who is on one of his long, miserable wanderings in foreign lands, suggesting that he come home. He returns unannounced to hear laughter from behind the wall, in the garden where nobody is supposed to have entered since his wife’s death. As he opens the door, a tall healthy looking boy rushes past him: Mr Craven stares in astonishment – it is his son, whom he last saw as an incurable invalid. The story ends with father and son walking together straight, tall and happy, back to the house. The dark spell has at last been lifted. Everyone in the little kingdom of Misselthwaite has been redeemed and is at one with each other, with nature and with the boundless power of life which, thanks to Dickon, is now pouring invisibly through them all. 

Peer Gynt

For a final example of the Rebirth plot we return to the kind of story where, as in The Snow Queen, the hero falls under an evil spell cast by dark figures outside him, but with the result that he becomes a dark figure himself. He is completely possessed by darkness, both from without and within. In fact Ibsen’s semi allegorical Peer Gynt is not only the most complicated example of the Rebirth story we have looked at, but psychologically one of the most ambitiously complex stories ever written.

When we meet the hero, Peer Gynt, he is on the verge of adult life, 20 years old, and an incorrigable liar and romancer (in both senses, a fantasiser and a womaniser). He and his mother go off to a village wedding party, where Peer is jeered at by everyone, like the  hero of a Rags to Riches story – although in his case the scorn is justified, because he is a boastful teller of tales. A demure young girl Solveig enters with her family and Peer is at once smitten: ‘how lovely! I have never seen anyone like her, with her eyes on the groudn…. and the way she carried her prayer book wrapped in a kerchief.  But the incorrigble Peer still cannot resist trying to take the protesting bride off onto the mountainside and here, ,while she escapes from him, he meets a beautiful and mysterious Woman in Green. She takes him off into the subterranean palace of her father, ‘the Hall of the Mountain King’. Peer has in fact descended into the kingdom of the trolls, where he is told that ‘among us… black looks like white and ugly like fair’ (an echo of the magician’s mirror in The Snow Queen, or the  ‘dark sisters’ in Macbeth – ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’) The Troll King and his court try to turn Peer into a troll. One old courtier tells him ‘Outside among men, where the skies are bright, there’s a saying ‘Man, to thyself be true’. But here among the trolls the saying runs  ‘Troll, to thyself be – enough’. This is to be the theme of the whole story. 

Taking the view that one should fit in with the local ways, Peer agrees to undergo various rites which will turn him into a troll, but he finally baulks at an operation which will remove his clear sight forever. The younger trolls set on him, rahter like the moment in Alice in Wonderland when ALice is set on by the playing cards and he is only saved in the nick of time by the sound of distant church bells which scatter the trolls in disorder. Peer suddenly finds himself alone on the mountainside, and there follows a curious scene in which Peer has an exchange in the darkness with a mysterious voice. ‘Who are you’ asks Peer. Myself answers the voice, can you say as much? It is the shapeless Great Boyg, which tells Peer he has a long journey to go, and that he will have to go round about. Peer returns to the world of men. 

We next see him having built a hut in the forest and persuaded the lovely Solveig to abandon everything to come to live with him. All seems well: Peer says My royal princess. I have found her and won her. But then an aged troll woman enters, the Woman in Green grown old, leading Peer’s son, and she tells him that he will not be left alone to enjoy his love with Solveig. When you sit with that woman by the fire, when you’re loving and want to embrace, I shall sit beside you and ask for my share. When Peer angrily shouts at her ‘you nightmare from hell’, she replies that he has only been trapped by his own thoughts and desires. He realises that his royal palace has crashed to the ground. A wall has grown up round Solveig, his purest treasure and there is now no way which passes straight to her. As the Boyg foretold, he will have to go round about. If only he could truly repent, everything might be all right but there is no one in this savage forest to teach him how. He will have to leave Solveig. She promises that, however long it takes, she will wait for him. He goes off down the forest path, leaving her at the door of the hut, and after the death of his mother, sets off for the sea coast. 

When we see next Peer it is many years later. He has become middle aged and enormously rich. He is sitting with four guests in Morocco and, in the expansively self-indulgent manner of a milionaire asks them ‘what ought a man to be? Well, my short answer is Himself… a thing he cannot be when burdened with other people’s woes. He elaborates that the ‘self’ is a mass of  ‘fancies, cravings and desires’ in short ‘what stires inside my breast and makes me live my life as Me’. We learn that Gynt has made his millions in a fairly disreputable fashion, trading in slaves, arms, Bibles, anything that would make a profit, and has become toally self-righteous (indeed shortly afterwards, after his guests have disagreed with him, he is delighted to see their yacht sunk, by a thunderbolt). But he is still inwardly troubled by what it really means to be  one’s self. In the desert he observes some lizards: ‘they bask in the sun and suttle about with no worries at all. How well they obey the Creator’s behest, each fulfilling his own special immutable role. They are themselves through thick and thin: as they wer at his first order, Be! It is not long, however, before Gynt is dreaming of how he might flood the desert to produce a great new country, Gyntiana, which would bring him immortality (‘a holy war against Death: that grisly miser shall be forced to free the gold that he has hoarded’) In fact the next role he tries, in his search for self-fulfilment, is that of Prophet, in the course of which he has an affair with the dancer Anitra. She leaves him, and he decides to say ‘farewell to the pleasures of love’ and to pursue instead ‘the riddle of truth’. As one new interest leads hectically on to the next, he is finally taken on a visit to a lunatic asylum by his learned friend Begriffenfeldt, who observes that the inmates are all living for themselves. No one here sheds tears for anothers’s sorrows, no one considers any one else’s ideas, everyone here is ‘enclosed in a barrel of self’. The effect on Gynt of seeing a world in which everyone is in a kind of caricature of his own egocentric condition is like that of Raskolnikov’s nightmare at the end of Crime and Punishment. Surrounded by the gibbering lunatics in this ‘Empire of Self’, Gynt finally sinks down insensible. 

The final act begins with Gynt sailing back to Norway, determined to settle quietly on a farm, but still he cannot resist dreaming of building it up until it is like a castle. The ship is wrecked, Gynt is rescued, and wanders up into the mountains. He is now plunged in deep reflection, but can find nothing in himself to hang on to. Suddenly he is passing a hut, which he vaguely seems to remember, and hears a voice singing within. It is Solveig, singing of how she is still patiently waiting. He goes pale; there is one who remembered and one who forgot, one who squandered and one who saved. But there is no turning back. He realises that it was here, all those years before, that his empire was lost.

He is now mocked by phantoms of his unfulfilled life: ‘we are thoughts, you should have formed us,  we are songs you should have sung us, we are deeds, you should have performed us, we are tears that were never shed, otherwise we might have melted the ice spears which wound you. From far off Gynt hears the voice of his dead mother. The Devil has deluded you. 

Then the strange figure of the Button Moulder enters, who says that he  has been sent by his ‘Master’ to melt Gynt down. Gynt retorts that he will allow no such thing, it would be the end of his selfhood, an ‘affront to my innermost soul’. The Button Moulder tells him that he had no need to take on so  badly –  úp to now you never have been yourself’.  Gynt asks for the chance to find witnesses to prove that he has been himself. 

The first person he runs into is the Mountain King, who tells him that, on that day in the mountains all those year before, Peer had in fact become a troll, without knowing it. The motto I gave you – to thyself be enough – enabled you to go through the world as a man of some substance. Peer begins to realise with horror that he has lived as a troll, all along. The Button Moulder returns, asking for his witnesses, and Gynt, now in desperation playing for time, asks him whether he can first define what it means ‘to be one’s Self’. Being one’s Self comes the reply, means slaying one’s self – but that answer’s probably wasted on you. Gynt then has a nighmarish vision of the Devil, and emerges in a mood of horrified remorse: Do not be angry, O lovely earth, if to no purpose I trampled on your grass… how lavish is Nature, how men is the spirit. HE sees a group of churgoers singing a Whitsuntide hymn and shrinks away, imagining that he must be damned forever. It is very early in the morning, the world is still dark, and he sees a light shining in a hut up the mountainside. A woman is singing, and she comes out on her way to church: it is Solveig, now aged and nearly blind. She is full of joy at meeting Peer again, but he is now in total despair and tells her that there is a riddle; unless she alone can answer it, he is doomed to go down foerever to the shadow land. The riddle she must answer is where has Peer been since last we met. She answers, smiling, oh, your riddle is easy…he has been in my faith, my hope and my love. In other words, his true and inmost self had been with her all along, while he had lived in the world as a false self which was not himself at all. Oh purest of women exclaims Peer. They joyfully embrace, and the sun comes up filling the world with light.

The long, tortuous story of Peer Gynt’s eventual Rebirth from his lesser, egocentric troll-self into a deeper ‘true self’, centred in the love of his faithful Solveig, is an apt point at which to end this introductory exploration of the main patterns underlying storytelling, because in a way it brings our journey full circle.

There are clear parallels between Peer Gynt and all the other types of story we have looked at. In that it centres on the hero’s prolonged struggle with a monstrous figure who is the personification of egotism, it is like an Overcoming the Monster story, except for the obvious point that the only monster Peer has to overcome lies in himself.

Like a Rags to Riches story, it is based on a prolonged process of personal transformation. Like Peer Gynt, a Rags to Riches hero begins by seeming nothing very remarkable: indeed he often seems to the world contemptible. He ten glimplses some glorious and elevated condition which he longs to attain more than anything in the world and which even seems to come within his grasp: as when Peer Gynt settles down in th eforest with his ‘princess’. But suddenly this vision of possibility is snatched away, just as Gynt sees his ‘royal palace’ crashing to the ground when he loses his ‘purest treasure’ Solveig. After this ‘central crisis’ the hero of the Rags to Riches story then has to undergo a further long period of testing, before he is finally ready to achieve the sense of self-fulfilment he has longed for. After a last great ordeal he finally discovers the deeper self that has lain buried within him; and this is marked by his being brought together in lasting union with the other half who makes him complete.

Again we see how Peer’s adventures are shaped by the pattern of a Quest. From the moment of his encounter with the Great Boyg, we see him embarking on a long search for that elusive prize of his true self. Like the Quest hero he has to go through the worst series of ordeals on the edge of his goal. ANd his final reunion with Solveig may remind us of the moment when the most famous of all Quest heroes, Odysseus is at last reunited with the loving woman who for so long has waited in obscurity for his return, the faithful Penelope. Like Odysseus, Peer has ‘come home’.

But still there is missing that centrally important element which we did not come acros fully in stories until we reached the plot of Voyage and Return. It was here we first began to see that fundamental shift in the emphasis of the plot which makes the hero himself the chief dark figure of the story. It was in the profounder versions of the Voyage and Return story such as the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Golden Ass that we first saw a hero, essentially self-centred and limited in his awareness, being recklessly drawn into a series of adventures which ultimately threaten him with destruction. Only as death stares him in the face does he go through that change of heart which liberates him from his limited, egocentric state of awareness and from the strange threatening world in which it has trapped hiimm.

Peer Gynt certainly provides us with more than just echoes of such a Voyage and Return story. The hero begins in a state of limited self-awareness, which leads him to be plunged recklessly into the ‘abnormal world’ of the trolls. From here he makes a ‘thrilling escape’, in the nick of time, as h e tinks, from being turned into a troll himself. In fact, as he only learns later, the trolls’ dark magic has already done his work; with the result that he has to make the second, much longer Voyage and Return which begins when he abandons Solveig for far-off lands. Here, in this distant ‘other world’ the initial Dream Stage of his selfish, hard -hearted rise to great wealth turns first to frustration, then to the nightmare of his visit to the lunatic asylum. But even the second ‘thrilling escape’ of the shipwreck which lands him back in Norway only leads him to the final nightmare of his confrontations with the Button Moulder and the Devil, which force him at last to recognise what a monster he has become. He thinks there is no longer any part of him which remains uncorrupted, that he is now nothing but his hideous troll-self, a wrinkled and deflated balloon of egotism, deserving nothing but death. Only now does the reunion with Solveig finally teach him that all along there has been another quite different part of himself, identified with her as she remained in remote obscurity. He has come at last to that much deeper level of awareness which, as his other half emerges from her long eclipse, shows him discovering his true self.

The next plot we come to, Comedy, gave even greater prominence to the hero who becomes the chief dark figure of his own story; and who must be brought to recognition of things hidden before he can achieve the happy ending. In this light, the story of Peer Gynt is entirely familiar. As in so many comedies, we see the hero and heroine who meet in the opening scenes and fall in love; but are then torn apart by a terrible misunderstanding, rooted in the hero’s egotism. The heroine passes into eclipse, obscured in the shadows cast by his selfishness. Confusion continues to worsen until the impasse is finally resolved in the only way it can be by the ‘recognition’ which brings the hero to see the nature of his error and the true, superior value of the heroine, thus bringing him to himself.

The essence of Tragedy, of course, is that it focues on the process whereby the hero is transformed into the chief dark figure of the story more starkly than any other kind of plot. Indeed, as we saw, tragedy can provide us with a kind of mirror image of an Overcoming the Monster story, seen from the point of view of the hero who has been transformed into the monster. Certainly the opening scenes of Peer Gynt present us with a situation similar to the opening of a tragedy. The hero is clearly a ‘divided self’, part drawn upwards by his good angel Solveig, part drawn downwards by the troll Temptress and the tyrant Mountain King. The ‘dark’ side of Peer wins, he abandons his ‘good angel’ and is transformed into a monster of hard-hearted egotism. We only infer the long Dream Stage of his tragic course from the fact that he has risen to a position of enormous wealth and power. In fact, after a long gap in the story of his life, we pick it up again at the point where he is entering the Frustration Stage, as he begins to feel a sense of inadequacy and meaninglessness in his self-centred existence. He thrashes around more and more wildly for new realms to conquer, new roles to play: all of which ends in nightmare, despair and the threat of imminent destruction.

But then, because his story is not Tragedy, and because his ‘good angel’ is not one of the inadequate little rejected ‘Innocent Young Girls’ of so many tragedies but a strong, mature, and wise woman in her own right, Gynt is enabled at the last minute to rediscover his light self buried for so long beneath the outward monstrous shell of his egotism. He can move in the nick of time from the false centre of himself to his true centre. Like Raskolnikov redeemed by the love of Sonia, or Kay by Gerda, or the Beast by Beauty, he has been liberated to become himself. As he and Solveig embrace he is at last united with his missing ‘other half’ to make him whole.

Up to now we have been looking at the main plots underlying stories as much as possible in separate compartments. It is certainly true that, on one level, most stories are primarily shaped by one type of plot more than another; that each type of story serves its own special purpose and carries its own message. But the time has come to move on to a rather deeper level, where we look not so much at the peculiarities of each of the basic plot forms but at what they have in common. Here we see how they are all looking from different points of perspective at the same great basic drama.

The Dark Power: From Shadow into LIght

‘The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means’ – Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

So far in this journey we have really been doing two things.

On one level we have been looking at hundreds of different stories, including many of the best known tales in the world, seeing the remarkable extent to which these are formed around one or another of seven basic plots. What we have been exploring are seven of the central ways in which, when the human imagination conjures up a story, its contents naturally take shape. This does not mean, of course, that every story in the world falls neatly and exclusively into one of these categories. At this stage it would be easy to point to coyntless individual stories which in one way or another do not correspond precisely to one of these plots. Indeed a whole section of this journey will later be devoted to looking at such stories and whey they vary from the basic patterns. There are even a handful of other, more specialised plots – such as that behind ‘creation myths’ explaining how the world came into being, or the Mystery plot which underlies detective stories – which we haven’t touched on at all.

On another level, however, we have also through these past eleven stages of our journey been building up a picture of something much deeper and more general than just a catalogue of story-types. We have been gradually laying bare a hidden landscape of figures, situations and images which run through stories of all kinds, regardless of which type of plot may on a more superficial level be directing our interest in the story. We have seen such motifs as the thrilling escape from death, the overthrow or redemption of the dark figure, the final union or separation of hero and heroine, appearing again and again, in one plot after another. And however far we continue our exploration of stories we shall find that they always return in one way or another to these same basic patterns and images. What we have been uncovering, in short, is the essential core of the way stories are made, how they work and what they are about. In this sense the real value of examining the seven central plots is that, between them, they provide a comprehensive introduction to all the fundamental elements from which a story can be made up.

The significance of this can hardly be exaggerated. For what it means is that whenever any of us tries to create a story in our own imagination, we will find that there are the basic figures and situations around which it takes shape. We cannot get away from them because they are archetypes. They are the elemental images around which the whole of the storytelling impulse in mankind is centred. And the reason for this is that these underlying patterns and images are somehow imprinted unconsciously in our minds, so that we cannot conceive stories in any other way.

This why, when we are first introduced to stories in early childhood, we instinctively recognise what they are on about. The small child being told a story may be confronted with the images of all sorts of things which it has never seen in the real world, or which have never existed: bloodthirsty giants; animals which talk; dragons breathing fire. But the child can immediately accept and relate to such mythical beings, because the symbolic language in which stories are dressed up meets with an instinctual pattern of response which is already programmed into the child own’s unconscious.

We have virtually no idea how this miraculous process works in neurological terms. We cannot explain physically how it is that we are able to conjure up these images in our ‘minds’ eye. We cannot even locate precisely in which parts of our brain this hugely complex activity takes place. But what we can perceive is how, in the way these images present themselves to us, certain patterns persistently recur. The very fact that they do recur in this way means that, below the level of our conscious awareness, there is some shaping mechanism in the human psyche which not only assembles the images together into these patterns, but does so in a way which shows them unfolding according to entirely consistent rules. The only way we can uncover why evolution should have developed in us this capacity to imagine stories is to subject those patterns to systematic analysies: to decipher just what is the meaning of the symbolic language they embody, and what this can tell us about the real underlying purpose storytelling serves in our lives.

This is what we have begun to do in exploring the sequence of plots. And in doing so, we see how the central preoccupation of our need to conjure up the imaginary world of stories comes clearly into view.

The universal plot

The most important thing we recognise from looking at the hidden structures of the basic plots is the extent to which they all revolve round the same fundamental conflict. This is the central problem posed by that component in human nature which we have seen symbolically respresented in stories of all kinds as the ‘dark’ power. There is no better starting point from which to explore the underlying purpose of storytelling than to observe what is happening when a child is introduced to stories early in its life. If we watch carefully the types of story to which a child can first instinctively relate, we see how many of these tend to take shape round a remarkably similar pattern.

In its simplest form, some of these early nursery tales, such as Peter Rabbit, Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks and the Three Bears, show us a little hero or heroine who begins the story living at home with mother. They then go out into the mysterious outside world – Mr McGregor’s garden, a great forest – where they encounter a terrifying and threatening figure (in the case of Goldilocks, three acting as one). This threat comes inexorably closer until it seems that, as in a nightmare, they are trapped, facing death. But then, at the story’s climax, comes the ‘thrilling escape’ when they can run safely home to mother.

What all these stories are doing is to awaken the child’s mind to the same basic message. As it is introduced to the central figure of each story, it sees and identifies with a child like itself, who begins surrounded by the security of home, living with a loving, protective mother. It then sees this little hero or heroine venturing out alone into the great world, beyond the protective setting of home, where they encounter a terrifying presence, so hostile that it spells death. In symbolic fashion, the listening child is being introduced to the idea that, somewhere in this unfamiliar new world it has come into, there is a mysterious and deadly dark power, far more frightening than anything it has ever outwardly encountered in real life. But in the end, the reassuring message of the story runs, it is possible to escape from this fearsome enemy. With a mighty sense of relief, the child identifying with the story can thus imagine returning to the safest place it knows, back home with mother.

Such is the simplest version of the story, and it is no accident that we associate it with tales intended to be told to very young children. But we see then a development of the pattern, in stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Hansel and Gretel. Again the child is introduced to a hero or heroine living dependently at home. Again they venture out into the mysterious outside world, where they fall under the shadow of a terrifying figure, the giant, the witch. Again the story builds to a climax, where it seems they are about to be killed. But the significant thing the child now sees is that it is up to the hero or heroine themselves to overcome the dark power. They must actually slay the giant or witch by their own efforts. And their reward in doing so, the message runs, is not only escape from death, but that they win a fabulous treasure.

Even now, however, because they are still only tales intended for young children, their heroes and heroines still return at the end to the familiar security of home. Only with a third step in the unfolding pattern does the story add a further important ingredient to the general message. In tales such as the Three Little Pigs, we again begin with little heroes living at home with mother: three young brothers. Again, as they grow up, the heroes go out into the great world, where they encounter a terrifying dark figure: a fearsome troll guarding the bridge, a big bad wolf. Again, through courage and ingenuity, they themselves eventually manage to destroy this monstrous figure (even though, in the case of the little pigs, two are eaten). But we no longer see the victorious heroes having to retreat back home at the end of the story. The important thing now is that they can move forward rather than back. Having crossed the bridge, the goats can begin their new life feasting on the meadow of sweet grass up on the mountainside. The third little pig can live happily ever after in his home made of bricks, which has successfully withstood the wolf’s assaults because, unlike his brothers, he has built it soundly, out of strong, secure materials. Thanks to their victory over the dark power, they have now established a secure new home for themselves in the outside world, where they are free to live their own independent life.

Finally, we come to all those stories which show this pattern unfolding to its fullest state of development. In stories like Aladdin or Snow White, we again see the young heroine or hero going out into the world and being drawn into a struggle with the same dark power, which lasts through most of the story. Again they finally emerge triumphant. But their ultimate reward now takes a much more specific form, as we see them brought together in loving union with a beautiful Princess or handsome Prince, and in some way succeeding to rule over the kingdom.

We thus see them having completed perhaps the most fundamental transition in any human life. They have begun in the secure but dependent state of childhood. They have gone out into the great world, to face all sorts of ordeals and adventures. But they end up having established an entirely new secure base of their own, united to a loving partner and presiding over their own little kingdom. The transifition from childhood to maturity is complete. And the key to reaching this goal has been to emerge victorious from a series of battles with the dark power.

Indeed what we also come to recognise from such tales are those essential elements making up what Aristotle identified as the beginning, middle and ending of a story which, expressed in more sophisticated outward forms, remain central to our experience of storytelling for the rest of our lives.

Beginning

The beginning of almost any type of story shows us a hero or heroine who is in some way undeveloped, frustrated or incomplete. This establishing of their unhappy, immature or unfulfilled state sets up the tension needing to be resolved which provides the essence of the story

Middle

The middle of the story shows them sooner or later falling under the shadow of the dark power, the conflict with which constitutes the story’s main action. In the types of story we come to early in life this threatening presence is invariably personified as outside the central figure, although later we come to the type of story in which those same dark qualities are shown as lying in the hero or heroine themselves. Through most of the story we see its little world divided into an upper realm, where the dark power holds sway, and an inferior realm, where the forces of light remain in the shadows.

Ending

The end of the story provides its resolution. The action eventually builds to a climax, when the forces making for threat and confusion rise to their highest point of pressure on everyone involved, and this paves the way for the ‘reversal’ or ‘unknotting’ the moment when the dark power is overthrown.

The nature of the story’s ending then depends entirely on how its hero or heroine have aligned themselves to the dark power. If the central figure has remained or ended up in opposition to the dark power, we see that, in this final act of liberation, there is a prize of infinite value to be won: a treasure to be won from the darkness; a captive ‘Princess or ‘Prince to be freed from its clutches; a community to be redeemed from its shadows. We see that the hero or heroine have ended up fulfilled and complete, in a way which through most of the story would have seemed unthinkable. They have reached some central goal to their lives.

If, on the other hand, the hero or heroine have become irrevocably identified with the dark power, the story will end in their destruction. But even this comes about according to the same rules which govern stories with a happy ending. So much have the central figures of Tragedy become the chief source of darkness in their story that only when they are removed by death can the light again emerge from the shadows. For all those forced to live in that shadow, this in itself can end the story on the familiar note of liberation The wider community is restored to wholenes. Just as in a story which comes to a happy ending ,it is a victory for life.

Thus in any story which is completely resolved, the basic pattern remains the same. In the end, darkness is overcome and light wins the day. In fact what ultimately distinghuishes each of the basic plots is simply that each looks at this common theme from a different angle. Each lays emphasis on a particular aspect of that universal plot which lies behind them all.

The road to self realisation

The Overcoming the Monster story is in a sense the most basic of all the plots because it focuses attention on this conflict with the dark power to the exclusion of almost everything else. The word ‘monster’ comes from the latin monstrum, meaning ‘something put on show’, as in our word ‘demonstration’. It also came to mean a freak of nature, as in all those abnormal, deformed or just unfamiliar human beings or animals which in former times were put on show in fairgrounds, circuses or zoos. Whatever outward form it takes, the one thing the monster in stories can never be, as we have seen, is a whole perfect human being. It is by definition a representation of human imperfection, and in no respect more than the way it is wholly egocentric, prepared to sacrifice anyone and everything else in the world to its own intererests.

The essence of the monster, in short, is that, dressed up in symbolic form, it is a hugely magnified personification of the human capacity for egotism, which is invariably shown as immensely powerful, unfeeling for others but also in some crucial respect blind, lacking in understanding. Since this monster is invariably shown in a story as posing a deadly threat to a whole community of people, it is presented as a mortal enemy to the human race. As soon as we are made aware of the monster’s existence, we know the only way the story can reach a satisfactory resolution is that it must be destroyed. That is why it is so important that, when the hero emerges, we are never left in any doubt as to why he is set in complete opposition to the monster, the positive to everything in which the monster is negative. He is not egocentric. He is always battling on behalf of the wider community. He is thus shown as representing the forces of life against death.

Yet at the same time it is crucial that, as the action of the story unfolds, we should see the hero himself growing in stature. When he first appears it might seem unthinkable that he should be able to confront the monster’s awesome power. This is only reinforced when he finally confronts his opponent, even falling into his clutches. Towards the end, however, when the hero has worked out how to get the measure of his antagonist, we begin to see him in a new commanding light. Even James Bond invariably rises from his seemingly helpless position as the underdog who stumbles halfway through the story into the villain’s clutches, to the moment where he is finally able by some superhuman feat to turn the tables. This transformation is still more obvious in those deeper versions of the story, set over a longer period of the hero’s life, which, as the action unfolds, show him gradually emerging as an ever more masterful figure. Although we see young David, the disregarded little sheperd boy, winning the great victory over Goliath quite early in his story, we then see how this was merely a prelude to the transforming process which eventually qualifies him as the natural leader of his people, fit to succeed as a great king. We see Perseus gradually maturing from the young, untried boy who wishes to defend his mother’s honour against the tyrant Acrisius into the mighty hero who, having slain the Medusa, then achieves his final victory by saving the Princess from the clutches of the sea-monster. It is this personal transformation which has qualified him, like David, to succeed to the kingdom.

In this sense, the Overcoming the Monster story is about the process of working towards maturity. This is presented even more obviously in the Rags to Riches plot, where the hero or heroine’s personal transformation provides the central theme of the story. Much more often than in any other plot we are likely to meet the hero or heroine when they are still very young; so that what the story explicityly shows us is the pattern of someone growing up from childhood to maturity. So much does it concentrate our interest on their outward and inward development that from the moment we first see them in their initial lowly, disregarded state, we know the one thing essential to bringing the story to a satisfactory resolution will be to see them finally emerging from obscurity into the light, where their true hidden self will finally become obvious for everyone to see. Yet the key to this transformation sill lies in their struggle with the dark power, as we see symbolically represented even in those two very simple versions from early childhood. Dick Whittington and Puss in Boots. Here the crucial battle with the dark power is not even fought by the hero himself, but at arms length, by a helpful animal who has become this special ally. In each story it is the cat which achieves the victory over the powers of darkness. However it is the treasure won from this battle which is the key to the final reversal in the hero’s own fortunes, leading to his union with the ‘Princess’ and his emergence in his true light as someone of exceptional qualities, worthy to rule over a ‘kingdom’.

It is when we come to the fullest versions of the Rags to Riches story, such as Aladdin, Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, that we see most explicityly just how this plot is concerned with the process of developing from immaturity to maturity, and here the counterpoint between the hero or heroine’s struggle with the dark power and their own inner transformation is portrayed much more directly. Each begins at home, as a young, unformed child. Their transformation begins when the shadow of the dark power falls over them, with the arrival of the Sorcerer, Mr Brocklehurst or the Murdstones, and they are sent out into the world to begin that long series of tests around which their inner growth takes place. At first we see them making considerable progress, as they develop through their adolescene to the point where they are ready to go out into the world in a new way, as young adults, searching for the other half with whom to establish a permanent new centre to their lives. But just when it seems they might be about to achieve a happy ending, there intervenes that central crisis when the dark power reappears in even more fearsome guise, plunging them into the most desperate plight they face at any time in the story. The purpose of this, corresponding to that moment where the hero of an Overcoming the Onster story falls into his opponent’s clutches, is to emphasise just how exceptional are the qualities they will now have to display to reach their final goal. They must learn to become reliant on their own inner strengths, in a way they have never done before. Only as they achieve this do we see them maturing to the point where they are ready for the decisive confrontation which enables them to throw off the dark power’s grip forever. As they rescue their other half from the shadows, they have finally realised everything they had it in them to become. They have at last reached the central goal of their lives.

It is of course the idea of a human life as a journey towards the ultimate goal of wholeness and self-realisation which provides the focus for the plot of the Quest. Our expectation in a Quest story is centred on the sense that somewhere in the world there is a distant, all-transcending prize, worth every effort to reach. As the tale opens, the hero becomes aware that he is in some City of Destruction. where it will be fatal for him to remain. The only way to escape is to embark on the journey towards that far-off mysterious goal. In the first part, we see the hero and his companions making their journey, facing a succession of battles with the dark power. Even when their destination at last comes in sight, the hero finds he now faces a new set of challenges, so testing that to meet them will take up the entire second half of the story. It has been one thing to bring the prize into view. The ultimate test lies in knowing how to secure it. Yet when the hero does so, of course, we see how remarkably similar it is to that final goal reached by the hero or heroine in the earlier types of story. When Odysseus secretly advances in his humble beggar’s rags towards his final showdown with the monstrous suitors, he is like the hero of a Rags to Riches story and an Overcoming the Monster story rolled into one. At last he throws off his disguise to reveal himself in all his kingly majesty, as he seizes the bow to put the suitors to rout. Like Cinderella when she throws off her rags for her final glorious transformation, his true self is at last revealed. Just like Aladdin, Jane Eyre, Perseus and so many others, Odysseus liberates his ‘other half’ from the shadows and succeeds to his kingdom. It turns out that the true goal of the Quest was precisely the same kind of ending we saw in the earlier plots.

Thus all the first three plots are really looking at a very similar basic story except that each does so from its own distinctive angle. What we see symbolically represented as was embryonically foreshadowed in those simple little versions we first hear in childhood, as the idealised pattern of how any human being can travel on the long, journey of inner growth, finally emerging to a state of complete self-realisation. The underlying impulse behind the three types of story is the same.

The enemy within

Up to this point in the sequence of plots there is never any real doubt that the hero or heroine of the story stands in opposition to his external dark power which is presented as the main obstacle to them reaching their goal. When Cinderella is contrasted with her stepmother and ugly sisters, Jane Eyre with St John Rivers, Perseus with Medusa, David with Goliath, James Bond with Dr No, we never question for a moment that they stand for a different set of qualities to those which characterise their antagonists.

What do we see in the Quest, however, more than in the earlier types of story, are occasioins where the hero and his companions themselves display weaknesses, making foolish errors which threaten to prevent them reaching the goal. Indeed one reason why the hero of a Quest is more commonly than in other types of story given companions is precisely that this allows us to see them making fatal mistakes without the hero himself being killed. And these invariably arise from their own lack of awareness, their failure to recognise the full truth of their situation, with the result that they fall into the deadly clutches of the dark power.

Odysseus and his original twelve shiploads of companions make so many mistakes on their journey – invariably through some selfish act of folly, recklessness or greed – that by the time he arrives back in Ithaca only he himself is left alive. Christian and Faithful in Pilgrim’s Progress fail to recognise the true nature of Vanity Fair, with the result that Faithful is killed and Christian only narrowly escapes with his life. Aeneas for a long time all but abandons his great task of finding a new homeland when he is bewitched by his love for Dido, and eventually has to be sternly recalled to his quest by Jupiter, the king of the gods. The rabbits in Watership Down make a near-fatal mistake when they fail to recognise the true nature of the strange warren in which they consider settling down: it is only in the nick of time that they are saved by Fiver’s intuitive understanding that it is a place of death. Jason’s Argonauts, the children of Israel, many of the knights on the Grail Quest, are similarly led into catastrophic misjudgements on their journeys, always by some appeal to their egocentric appetites, some failure to see whole. And one of the most important elements in the transformation which allows the hero and those who survive eventually to succeed in a Quest is that they gradually learn from their mistakes, and arrive at a state where they no longer make them.

In general, therefore, although the earlier types of plot show the dark forces which stand between the hero or heroine and the goal as being centred essentially outside them, nevertheless the more they themselves show the weakness and limited awareness of immaturity, the more likely they are to fall prey to the dark power. And of course we are now moving toward those types of story where it is made much more obvious that the dark forces the hero or heroine are having to contend with in fact lie within themselves.

The maturing experience

As in the three earlier plots, the Voyage and Return story in its fullest expression is about the maturing process. But where it differs from the earlier plots lies in how it presents the transformation which the hero or heroine must go through if they are going to reach the goal. When we first meet them they are usually young and just on the verge of adult life, like Lucius in The Golden Ass, or Robinson Crusoe or the Ancient Mariner on the start of his fateful voyage. They are immature, feckless and self-centred, and this, directly or indirectly, is why they stumble in the first place into that new world which is so strange to them. They do not fully understand what they are doing or what is happening to them, which is why they become trapped in the shadow of the dark figures they meet in the other world, who eventually threaten them with destruction. What enables them eventually to escape from their thrall to the dark power is that they develop a wholly new understanding. They ‘see the light’ in a way which transforms their attitude; and it is this which eventually allows them to escape from the dark power and to return to the world where they began. But so changed have they been by their encounter with the unknown that their relationship to it is quite different. They have escaped from their original state of limited consciousness and learned to see whole. They have discovered who they are. They have grown up.

We even see all this embryonically reflected in the children’s tale of Peter Rabbit, who begins as a feckless, rebellious little child, which is what lands him in the appalling plight of being chased round the garden by Mr McGregor. Eventually in the familiar nightmare climax Peter finds himself completely trapped, without a clue as to what to do next. No one else can help him, he is completely on his own. But then he jumps up on a wheelbarrow from which, for the first time, he can see the whole garden. He has moved literally to a higher level of consciousness, which enables him to see whole. It is this which, by showing him how to reach the gate of the garden without having to pass Mr McGregor, allows him to escape with his life from what had seemed certain death; even if he then, because it is still a tale designed for very young children, returns home to mother.

The Voyage and Return plot thus shows us, much more obviously than any of the previous plots, a hero who, in order to reach the goal, has to go through a complete shift in his psychological centre. Initially ego-centred, with his lack of feeling for other people and his limited vision, he begins with the potential characteristics of a dark figure, and it is precisely this which places him under the shadow of those external dark figures who threaten to kil him. But he then goes through the change of centre which allows him to see whole, saving his life and bringing him back into life-giving contact with others. It is this movie from darkness to light which liberates him, and brings him to his happy ending.

Comedy

The Voyage and Return is the first plot in the sequence where this fundamental shift of psychological centre is brought out as of central importance. Even more obviously does this shift provide the key to the next plot in the sequence, Comedy.

Again, the underlying shape of the Comedy plot is familiar. We begin with a hero or heroine who are in some way frustrated or incomplete. Usually they are just on the threshold of adult life and looking forward to marriage. But the reason for their frustration is that the little world they inhabit is under the shadow of the dark power, which may be centred either in some dominant figure who has power over the hero or heroine, such as an ‘unrelenting parent’ opposed to their marriage, or in the hero himself (less often the heroine). The essence of Comedy is that it shows how, when one person becomes possessed by egotism, this can place everyone around them in its shadow. No other type of plot so consistently portrays the effect on a whole community of people – a household, a circle of friends, neighbouring families – when one dominant figure in that community falls into the grip of the dark power. As his (or her) blinkered egocentricity imposes a dark pressure on everyone else, this makes it impossible for anyone to be fully themselves. The flow of life is blocked.

This is why everyone in a Comedy may seem to be in a kind of twilight, in which nothing can be seen clearly or whole; in which people are obscured and cut off from one another by pretences, disguises and misunderstandings. This genral web of confusion works up to the nightmare climax, when everything seems more bewildering, oppressive and further from resolution than ever, threatening some final disaster. But suddenly comes the unknotting, the moment of recognition when everyone’s true nature and identity is at last revealed. The chief dark figure of the story ( if he is not merely exposed and bundled off the stage) goes through the fundamental psychological shift which brings him to himself. As he is liberated from his own dark prison, this is also breaks the grip of the darkness which has oppressed everyone else. The heroine, or her and heroine together, emerge from the shadows in which they have been obscured. Round their central loving union, the whole community is brought to unity and wholeness. Everyone has been freed to become his or her proper self. Amid universal celebration, the little world of the story has again been connected with life.

Tragedy

As we now see, the rules which dictate the outcome of Tragedy are no different from those which govern the unfolding of the other plots. Tragedy shows us what happens to a hero or heroine who have become possessed by the heartless, blind and egocentric part of their own personality, but cannot go through the inner transformation which could release them. As in the other plots, the story ends with the dark power being overthrown: except that here the hero or heroine have themselves become so completely identified with the darkness that it can only be eliminated by their own death.

In fact the actual shape of Tragedy bears many points of resemblance to that of the other types of story we have been looking at. We begin with a hero or heroine who is in some way sisatisfied, frustrated or incomplete. They then fall under the shadow of the dark power: except that this is not presented as something threatening to them but in the form of a Temptation, which arouses and gives dominance to the dark part of themselves. As in other types of story, the true nature of the dark power is not immediately apparant (the Dream Stage). But as the action unfolds, again as in other types of story, the real horror of the darkness finally comes clearly into view. Amid a mounting sense of threat, the story winds up to the familiar nightmare climax, that decisive confrontation between dark and light which culminates, as in the other plots, in the overthrow of the dark power and the final release which marks the ending of the story.

But because we are now seeing this familiar drama through the eyes of its chief dark figure, Tragedy focuses more intimately than the other plots on two things. First it shows us how someone is turned into a dark figure in the first place; and secondly we see just why the dark power eventually leads those who have passed under its spell to destruction. As we saw in Chapter Nine, The Divided Self, the tragic hero or heroine possessed by some fantasy of power or passion is trying to achieve something which cannot ultimately resolve into reality. Made heartless and blinded by the force of their egocentric obsession, they become more and more cut off from other people and from the reality of the world around them until they are so far at odds with the entire context of their existence (including their own deeper selves) that the bubble of make believe can no longer be sustained. And as we see happening to Othello or Dorian Gray, Stavrogin or Dr Jekyll, Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary, eventually the hero or heroine can tolerate the strain of this irresolution no longer. So disintegrated are they, inwardly and outwardly; so far has their original dream proved an illusion; so far off the rails has their blinkered vision taken them; so horrified has part of them become at what the dark component in their personality has led them to that, in self disgust, they turn their violence on themselves, bringing about their own destruction. Thus do we see at the heart of Tragedy how the dark power, in rebellion against the whole, in the end works to bring about its own destruction.

In other tragedies we see how the hero possessed by darkness provokes his own destruction at the hand of others. In the early stages, as in other types of story, the chief dark figure seems to be getting his own way, just as does the monster in the early stages of an Overcoming the Monster story. But increasingly this drives the light figures into the shadows cast by his darkness. And as the action unfolds we gradually see a crucial polarisation taking place. Above the line in the story is the dark figure, still dominant, but passing further and further into the grip of darkness and increasingly isolated. Meanwhile, in the shadows below the line, the forces of light are constellating in opposition to this unruly power which weighs so heavily on them all.

This is the kind of situation we see so often in other plots, as in Overcoming the Monster stories, or in many comedies, such as The Marriage of Figaro. Eventually this polarisation leads to the climax of the story, the decisive confontation. Just as in other plots, the power of darkness is finally overthrown, the shadows are lifted. And for those who have won the day and emerged into the light, this is a moment of victory. The irruption of darkness which had blighted all their lives had passed away. Peace and wholeness are restored. Life can begin to flow again. Even though this is a Tragedy, we recognise it as a situation very similar to that we see at the end of other types of story.

An obvious example of this type of tragedy is Macbeth. We see the hero drawn into the grip of the dark power. As he becomes more and more dark, in his ‘upper realm’, so an ever growing number of those around him fall victim to his blind and deadly egotism. But for each of the chief victims he kills. Duncan, Banquo, Macduff’s wife and children , there is another who escapes – Malcolm, Fleance, Macduff himself – and who flees the kingdom into England. Here, iin the ‘inferior realm’, beyond Macbeth’s limited field of awareness, the light forces concentrate their own power, until they are ready to invade the ‘upper realm’ and to close in on the monster for the climactic confrontation. When the reversal has taken place and the usurping tyrant has been overthrown, what we see is a kingdom restored to itself, under its rightful king. Indeed the play ends on a note of solemn rejoicing as they all head off to Scone for Malcolm’s coronation. Just as in other types of story, as the kingdom is restored to wholeness, the great prize has been wrestled from the grip of darkness. What essentially we are looking at, albeit from an unusual angle, is a version of the familiar happy ending.

Rebirth

It is appropriate that the story of Rebirth should conclude this sequence because, in its simipler forms, it links back so clearly to the types of plot which began it, where the dark power is presented as something wholly outside the central figure. In the fairy tale versions of Rebirth we come across in childhood the chief source of darkness in the story is personified in some mysterious older figure with magical powers, such as the malign witches who in Snow Wite or Sleeping Beauty place the heroine under an imprisoning spell. Later we come to those versions, like Crime and Punishment or Silas Marner, where the darkness is presented as centred within the hero or heroine’s own personality. And here, since they themselves have become dark, in order to be liberated they have to go through precisely that same psychic shift we see in Voyage and Return stories or Comedy (and even begin to see in some tragedies, like King Lear): the move from the restricted awareness centred on the ego to that deeper centre in the human personality which opens out their understanding and unites them with all the world.

Finally in the two Scandinavian versionis, The Snow Queen and Peer Gynt, we see both versions of the Rebirth story brought together. In each case the hero is placed under an imprisoning spell by the combination of two dark, older figures outside him, a wicked magician and a powerful witch. But in each case this has the effect of bringing out the dark side of the hero’s own personality, which is what gradually draws him into nightmarish isolation. At last in each case he is realeased from his prison by a shining personification of the ‘eternal feminine’, a woman both strong and loving, who is all light. This is what finally inspires the shift from the limited centre of his personality in which he has spent most of the story, to that deeper centre which he consciously recognises to be his ‘true self’. Thus it is that each hero can be shown ending his story in the warmth and light of a glorious summer’s day, joyously alive because he is united with the ‘other half’ who has at last both set him free and made himm whole.

The underlying shape of stories: summing up

We thus see that behind each of the seven central ways in which stories naturally form in the human imagination lies the same fundamental impulse.

Each begins by showing a hero or heroine in some way incomplete, who then encounters the dark power. Through most of th story the dark power remains dominant, casting a shadow in which all remains unresolved. But the essence of the action is that it shows us the light and dark forces in the story gradually constellating to produce a final decisive confrontation. As a result, in any story which reaches complete resolution (and of course, for reasons we shall explore later, there are many which do not), the ending shows us how the dark power can be overthrown, with the light ending triumphant. The only question is whether the central figure is identified with the light, in which case he or she ends up liberated and whole; or whether they have fallen irrevocably into the grip of darknemss, in which case they are destroyed. BZut, whatever the fate of the central figure, the real underlying purpose of the process has been to show us how, in the end, light overcomes the darkness. Such is the archetypal pattern around which our human urge to imagine stories is ultimately centred.

At its most basic level, the way we experience the unfolding of this pattern when we are following any story lies in the contrast between the moments when we sense the pressure of the dark power closing in on the central figure and those when we sense that pressure being relaxed. The pressure may be that of an actual threat to their life; or that of some other physical or spiritual imprisonment; or it may simply be the lack of any resolution to their situation, so that they feel lost and confused, cannot make sense of their surroundings and cannot see what to do next. The release comes when that pressure is lifted: when the threat to their life recedes; when they escape from imprisonment; when they can again see clearly the way forward. In fact the fundamental rhythm of any story is determined precisely by this alternation between phases of constriction and liberation. And there is a common pattern to these alternations which we have seen in every type of story we have looked at.

Again and again through our sequence of plots we noted how they unfold through a basic structure consisting of five stages. The names given to these stages did not in every instance coincide, because what is happening in them may vary according to the specific demands of each type of plot. But we can now see how, on another level, there is a basic structure underlying them all, which shows the essence of how any fully resolved story takes shape.

1. This begins with an initial phase when we are shown how the hero or heroine feel in some way constricted. This sets up the tension requiring resolution which leads into the action of the story
2. This is followed by a phase of opening out, as the hero or heroine sense that they are on the road to some new state or some far-off point of resolution
3. Eventually this leads to a more severe phase of constriction, where the strength of the dark power and the hero or heroine’s limitations in face of it both become more obvious
4. We then see a phase where, although the dark power is still dominant, the light elements in the story are preparing for the final confrontation. This eventually works up to the nightmare climax, when opposition between light and dark is at its most extreme and the pressure on everyone involved is at its greatest
5. This culminates in the moment of reversal and liberation, when the grip of the darkness is finally broken. The story thus ends on the sense of a final opening out into life, with everything at last resolved.

The essential pattern underlying all this, the pattern of any properly constructed story, is therefore that of a threefold, ebb-and-flow, in which the swings between the two poles become more pronounced until the climax is reached. The initial constriction and a first, limited opening out are followed by a new, more serious constriction. This is followed by a phase of preparation which culminates in the most acute constriction of all, the story’s climax. This leads to the final liberation, with the release of the prize.

At such a moment we recognise, again and again, something which lies at the very root of our lifelong experience of storytelling, in all its myriad forms and guises: the sense, at the ending of a story, that only with enormous difficulty and after a long and painful struggle, something of inestimable life-giving value has at last been worked forth from a dark, imprisoning matrix which held it fast.

When we see the essence of stories in this light we are left with three overriding questions, What is this thing of priceless value which has to be won from the shadows? What is it which cats those shadows and creates that imprisonment in the first place? And, just as important as either of these, what is it that is required for this liberation to be successfully achieved?

Such are the questions we look at in the next part of our journey. But before that we may pause, in an epilogue to Part One, to take an introductory look at an extraordinarily important element in storytelling which so far we have scarcely touched on.

The Rule of Three

(the role played in stories by numbers)

It is impossible to reach a proper understanding of the unconscious structures of storytelling without recognising the archetypal significance of certain numbers.

In the beginning, in almost any story, there is an all important one: the central figure of the story, the hero or heroine wit whom we identify.

Then, sooner or later, there arises a sense of division, of a splitting into two, as in the opposition between the story’s hero and its chief dark figure, or the opposition between ‘light and ‘dark’ generally: the conflict which creates most of the action of the story. But there is also that other very important ‘two’, the hero and the heroine, the central figure and that other half who can make them whole.

The most obvious number we cannot help noticing in stories, however, because it occurs so insistenly in the folk tales familiar from childhood, is ‘three’. Again and again we see how things appear in threes: how things have to happen three times; how the hero is given three wishes; how Cinderella goes to the ball three times; how the hero is given three wishes; how Cinderella goes to the ball three times; how the hero or the heroine is the third of three children.

Few childhood tales are built more conspicuously round the number three than Goldilocks and the Three Bears. When the little heroine arrives at the mysterious house in the forest, she sees three chairs round the table, and three bowls of porridge. When she tries each of the bowls in turn, one is too hot, one too cold, only the third is just right, and she eats it all up. When she tries the chairs, one is too hard, one too soft, only one just right, and when Goldilocks sits on it she breaks it. Lastly she goes upstairs and tries the three beds. It now seems quite natural that the first is wrong in one way, the second in another, only the third and smallest just right, and that it is here Goldilocks lies down and goes to sleep. Everything is now set for the alarming shadow to intrude, as the three bears return. At first they are still downstairs, comfortably distant, as we begin the threefold sequence all over again, with the three bears each discovering in turn that someone has been eating their porridge and sitting in their chairs. When Baby Bear finds his chair is broken, this builds up a sense of mounting apprehension. All the time the shadow is coming closer to the sleeping heroine, even more so when the bears come upstairs to examine the beds. For a third time we go through the sequence, Father Bear first, Mother Bear next, until finally Baby Bear looks at his bed and Goldilocks is still there! For the identifying child this is the fearful climax. And it is here, as we again reach the third in this cumulative sequence of threes, that the tension is at last released, as Goldilocks leaps through the window and scuttles off home.

A story rather more subtly built up around three is Little Red Riding Hood. When the heroine first encounters the wolf in the forest, he seems quite friendly. On his second appearance, we see him in his true dark colours, when he arrives at the house, he again initially seems benign, as he tries to pass himself off as the grandmother. in his third manifestation, when Red Riding Hood herself arrives at the house, he again initially seems benign, as he tries to pass himself off as the grandmother. But by another, more obvious process of three, the heroine expresses her mounting suspicion (what big ears you have got, what big eyes you have got, what big teeth you have got) until, on the third exchange, the wolf jumps out of bed in his true black identity, attempting to eat her: and again of course at this moment of climax, comes the thrilling escape when the woodcutter bursts in to kill the wolf with his axe.

All the childhood tales we looked at the beginning of this part of the journey are similarly built up around threes. In Jack and the Beanstalk this takes the form of the hero’s three visits to the giant’s castle, escaping with three golden treasures of ascending value: the gold (which is just itself), the goose which lays golden eggs (guaranteering an indefinite supply into the future), the golden harp (which is somehow best of all, because it plays wwonderful, inspiring music, touching the soul). And as usual it is the last int he sequence of three which leads to the climax, precipitating the reversal and the end of the story. The stories like The Three Little Pigs are each built up around two sequences of three. Each has three heroes, who each in turn must confront the dark figure. In the first, the goats are of ascending size, and it is important that the smallest and middle-sized goats each trick the troll into letting them past, until the biggest, allowing all three to proceed up the mountain to their happy ending. In the second tale, it is equally significant that the pigs build houses of ascending strength, so that the wolf can easily blow down the first, made of straw, and slightly less easily the second, made of wood, but is defeated by the third, because it is made of brick. It is this which precipitates the wolf’s destruction and, for the third pig, the happy ending.

The role of three in these old folk tales is so explicit that one cannot miss it. When we come to a more modern example, Pter Rabbit, this may not be quite so obvious. But, so unconsciously engrained is the archetype of three, we see it playing exactly the same role in building up tension towards the climax as in a folk story. When the hero finally comes face to face with Mr McGregor, he first runs away and gets caught in a net by the buttons of his coat. He is about to be caught when he wriggles out of his coat and makes his first ‘thrilling escape’. He is then pursued by Mr McGregor into a shed and hides in a watering can, but gives himself away by sneezing, thus having to make a second ‘thrilling escape’. Only when he feels finally trapped does he leap up onto the wheelbarrow, giving him the vision to see how to make his ‘thrilling escape’. ONce again it is the third which proves the charm, allowing him at last to run off home to his happy ending.

What we see in all these examples is how ‘three’ is the final trigger for something important to happen. Three in stories is the number of growth and transformation. Much as we say ‘Ready, steady, go’ to prepare and concentrate the runners at the start of a race, so the process of three conveys the steady build up to a moment of transformation which enables the hero or heroine to move on to the next stage. It conveys to us a sense that the miraculous developments which take place in stories do not just happen instantly and effortlessly; they require a steady accumulation of experience, concentration and effort, until everything is ready to allow the transformation to take place. And we see this rule of three expressed in four main ways:

1. the simple or cumulative three, where each thing is of much the same value, but al three have to be put together or succeed each other in sequence before the hero or heroine can move on, or come to their final transformation: e.g. Cinderella’s three visits to the ball, the three treasurecaves Aladdin has to go through before he discovers the lamp.
2. The progressive or ascending three, where each thing is of positive value but each a little more important or valuable than the last: e.g. the ascending value of Jack’s three treasures won from the giant (this idea is more explicitly expressed in those folk tales where the hero has to win three objects, made in turn of bronze, silver and gold). There is also the descending three, where each is of negative value, ,but similarly working up to a climax (e.g. Red Riding Hood’s three questions to the wold, leading to all the better to eat you with as the wolf reveals his true deadly character.
3. The contrasting or ‘double negative three’ where the first two are indequate or wrong (essentially in the same way) and only the third one works or succeeds. We see an element of this in the three little pigs, two of whom get eaten, although it is most commonly seen in folk tales where the hero or heroine is the third child, contrasted with two identical others, usually older, who are dark. Cinderella’s two ugly sisters are as alike as identical twins. They are merely to present a double negative to Cinderella’s positive, as do the heroine’s two sisters in Beauty and the Beast.
4. The final form of three, the one capable of the most sophisticated development is what may be called the dialectical three where, as we see reflected in Goldilocks, the first is wrong in one way, the second in another or opposite way and only the third, in the middle, is just right. This idea that the way forward lies in finding the exact middle path between opposities is of extraordinary importance in storytelling and, as we shall see, some of the ways in which it finds expression are of breathtaking subtlety.

So far in this introduction to the role of numbers in stories we have focused on those simple childhood tales where the ‘rule of three’ is obvious. But in earlier chaptrs we have already caught glimpses of how this rule plays the same function, rather less blatantly, in more sophisticated types of story. We saw how often in Quest stories, for instance, the hero has to face three final ordeals before he can secure his goal: as in the three tests imposed on Jason before he can win the Golden Fleece; or the three battles faced by Aeneas before he can marry the Princess and safely establish his new kingdom; or the three ordeals faced by Allan Quatermain and his friends in King Solomon’s Mines before they can overthrow the Tyrant Twala and the Witch Gagool to secure the treasure. IN King Lear, as in a folk tale, we see Cordelia as the third, light daughter, contrasted with the double negative of her two dark, scheming sisters. IN a Christmas Carol we see the character of Scrooge in his dark state initially defined by three acts of anti social heartlessness; these trigger off the three successive nightmares centred on the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future which eventually trigger off his rebirth; andt this is confirmed when, in his reborn, light self, he finally reverses each of the acts of rejection with which the story began.

ONce we become aware of the archetypal significance of three in storytelling, we can see it everywhere, expressed in all sorts of different ways, large and small. It is something so fundamental to the way the human imagination works, that it often appears in ways of which not even the storyteller may have been conscious. It seems, for instance, quite natural that when Aladdin gets trapped in the cave after retrieving the lamp, he should be stuck there for three days. It seems the right number to convey the process of him gradually losing all hope until, when the third day is up, he at last despairingly rubs the ring on his finger and is confronted by the genie who releases him. It seems equally natural that when Charlotte Bronte describes Jane Eyre running away across the moors after her aborted wedding, she should have shown her heroine wandering distractedly for three days until she finally becomes so desperate that she throws herself on a doorstep to die. Only then is she discovered by St John Rivers and taken in to be restored to life.

The real point of this emphasis on three is the way it conveys to us, by a kind of symbolic shorthand, just how tortuous and difficult is the process whereby the hero or heroine is working towards their ultimate goal; and how there is only one, correct way for them to thread the path which will eventually lead them to their prize.

Indeed one of the more obvious ways in which this can be presented is in all those stories where, to reach the goal, the hero or heroine has to pass precisely between two equally deathly opposites respresenting a double negative. We saw this in all those Quest stories where a passage between the opposites was one of the ordeals the hero and his companions have to undergo, from Jason’s Argo navigating between the clashing rocks to the ‘straight and narrow’ path to which Christian must keep to survive his perilous journey through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. In the version faced by Odysseus, when he has to sail exactly between Scylla and Charybdis, this emerges as more like a ‘dialectical three’, where each opposite poses a different threat, which is why Odysseus has to run the gauntlet twice. First he steers too near the monster Scylla, the second time too near the whirlpool Charybdis, so that he suffers the ill effects of both. But at least in the end he comes through; unlike Icarus who, ignoring his father’s instruction to keep to the middle position, errs too far in one wrong direction, by flying too high, with the result that he is plunged into the opposite direction and is destroyed. Another explicit echo of the ‘dialectical three’ is the instruction given by his father to Robinson Crusoe that he must pursue a ‘middle station in life’, not aspiring too high or sinking too low; which is where, after learning all the profound lessons his adventures have taught him, he finally reaches the happy ending of his story.

What all these different forms of the rule of three have in common is that they convey the gradual working out of a process, which will eventually lead to some kind of transformation. This can just as well be a transformation downwards as upwards. But most often we see it related to that essential theme of so many stories, the process of growth. It symbolises the slow process whereby the hero or heroine are striving towards some hugely important goal which, when it is finally achieved, we can see represents full maturity, the realisation of a state of fulfilment and wholeness. And this is why, as a story moves towards its ending, we are usually made aware of that which is needed for all the developments which we have seen taking place in the story to reach a state of completion: a word we use in two senses. Firstly it can mean that a process is complete, as when a sequence has unfolded to its conclusion. But secondly it can mean the putting together of all the component parts of something to make a complete whole.

A story which in very simple form presents this need to integrate all the parts in order to make a whole is a little tale from the Grimm brothers collection called the Three Languages. The hero is an apparently stupid boy who is sent off by his father for three successive years to be educated. After the first year he comes back having learned nothing but to understand what dogs are saying when they bark. In the second he learns nothing but the language of frogs. In the third he learns nothing but the language of birds. His father is enraged that the boy has so wasted his time. But together these skills have made a whole. The hero has learned the language of animals in all three elements, the dogs of land, the frogs of water, the birds of the air – and we recognise that somehow each of these skills will eventually have to be used in turn, to complete his transformation. Sure enough, after a while, the hero goes on a journey. His first skill enables him to win a great treasure, guarded by fierce dogs. The second enables him to interpret a prophecy by frogs that he will become the Pope, so he heads for the city of Rome, where he discovers the existing Pope has just died. The third as the the assembled cardinals are looking for a sign as to whom to choose to succeed, causes two snow-white doves to alight on the hero’s shoulder (making a three) and whisper into his ear the words of the Mass. The hero is chosen. He has developed and integrated three elements in himself to make a ‘whole’ and the result is that he becomes a ‘supreme ruler’.

‘Four’ The Number of completion

At an even deeper level, the whole of the way in which the human imagination unconsciously shapes a story is itself rooted in the ‘rule of three’ in that it follows that three-fold rhythm which provides stories with their most basic archetypal structure. Firstly, we see the central figure in some way constricted, but then enjoying a phase of limited enlargement. Secondly, we see the dark power closing in to impose a more severe sense of constriction (‘the central crisis’) which leads in turn to that gradual constellation of the light and dark elements in the story as they move towards their final showdown. Thirdly, in the story’s climax, we see the most acute phase of constriction of all, as the prelude to that reversal which leads to the overthrow of darkness and the liberation of light.

Thus is the rule of three, as the pattern of growth and transformation, built into the very foundations of the way we imagine stories. But the nearer we get to the moment of completion or wholeness at the end of a story, the more likely we are somehow to see the number four appearing. In Cinderella the heroine is three times transformed from her rags into her finery, as she goes to the ball. Each time she returns to her rags and ashes, until she has gone through a second process of three, whereby the two ugly sisters try on the slipper and fail and she succeeds. Then at last, as the story reaches its conclusion, we see her make the fourth and final transformation back into her fine clothes.

We see many similar examples of how some image of four emerges at the ending of stories. Hans Andersen’s little ugly duckling, after his transformation, joins the three ‘ kingly swans’ to make the fourth. At the end of The Three Musketeers, as the young outsider d’Artagnan finally emerges triumphant from his long battle with his monstrous opponent Lady de Winter, he is at last accepted by his closeknit trio of comrades as ‘the fourth musketeer’. In a winter’s tale and The Marriage of Figaro, we see the power of the Comedy ending reinforced by the bringing together not just of one couple but two, so that the stage can be dominated by four joyful figures, all at last at one with each other. In The Secret Garden the redeeming figure of Dickon triggers off three successive ‘rebirths’, those of Mary, Colin and finally Mr. Craven, so that the closing image of the story is of all four standing joyfully together in the garden.

Four in stories is the number of completion and perfection. Even during the earlier stages of the story, we often have a subconscious sense of the presence of four elements or figures which have not yet come together and revealed their potential, as when the hero of The Three Languages is waiting with his three skills for the moment of transformation. And in the next part of the seminar we shall see just how profoundly the number four as a symbol of totality provides the bedrock for the unconscious processes which create stories in the human imagination.

But of course the supreme symbol of completion in storytelling is the union of two people, hero and heroine, masculine and feminine, to make a whole: because they are seen as complementary in a more fundamental way than anything we know. Only when this has been achieved can hero and heroine together succeed to the kingdom: because the two have finally become one.

Such is the complete happy ending which lies at the heart of storytelling. What this really stands for is the theme of the next section of our book. And in exploring this we shall see how the hidden significance of numbers in stories opens up in a wholly new and dramatic way.

THE COMPLETE HAPPY ENDING

‘the treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern is life: it is himself’ C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation

PROLOGUE to PART TWO

One of the most popular Hollywood films of the mid-1980’s, Crocodile Dundee, began with tthe dramatic arrival by helicopter in the remote Australian outback of a young American woman journalist. Sue Charlton was everything a thrusting professional woman in the post-feminist age was meant to be: forceful, resourceful, self-possessed. In addition she was the daughter of her New York paper’s rich proprietor, and girl friend of its ambitious young editor, which in storytelling terms makes her the modern equivalent of a ‘king’s daughter’ being wooed by a ‘prince’.

The heroine has travelled to this tiny, dusty settlement in the back of beyond in the hope of interviewing a legendary local hunter, Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee. The first half of the story shows him taking her out into the bush, introducing her to all the dangers of the wild, from man-eating crocodiles to deadly snakes; and watching with wry amusement as her confident metropolitan persona crumbles when confronted with these fearsome monsters. She becomes a frail, helpless woman, looking for protection to this masterful hunter, with his teasing sense of humour. So completely does she fall under his spell that she decides to take him back to New York to show him life at the centre of modern urban civilisation. Here we meet her boyfriend, who treats Dundee with impatient disdain as some kind of primitive, ‘below the line’ freak. As the hero wanders through the city, the film contrasts his simple, unspoiled, good-hearted strength of character, as a ‘natural man’, with the unnatural state of the urban jungle around him, where perversion, violence and drug-taking rule, and where everyone seems morally and spiritually deformed. Such is the world represented by the heroine’s boyfriend. Finally, as a grand above the the line party is thrown to announce the couple’s engagement. Dundee cannot bear the thought of her marrying this pampered, vain monster who corresponds only to her outward career-girl persona. Next day he vanishes off into the city, disappearing down a subway. In a state of shocked ‘recognition’, the heroine heads off in despreate search for him, eventually descending into the ‘inferior realm’ of the subway station where he sees him at the far end of a platform jammed with people. In the closing scene, by way of verbal messages passed along the packed crowd, the two proclaim their love for each other. The crowd is drawn into the spirit of his remarkable declaration, bursting into rapturous applause as Dundee walks on people’s upturned hands to join her. As they finally come together it seems the whole world is at one with their joy.

In terms of its plot, Crocodile Dundee is a perfect example of Comedy – with the heroine seemingly doomed by her outward persona to marry the dark figure; until the recognition brings her to see, in the nick of time, that in her true feminine self she belongs with the true manly hero. Like countless stories before it, the film ends with its own modern version of the ancient fairy tale formula, ‘they got married and lived happily ever after’.

We so take it for granted that this should provide a perfectly satisfactory happy ending to a story that we scarcely pause to reflect on just how odd this should be. Obviously in real life we do not look on marriage as an ending, certainly not in the all-resolving way in which it is presented as the conclusion to so many stories. It is more a beginning, a landmark along the road to a new state of life which may bring not only rewards but also all sorts of new challenges and problems.

Yet the fact remains that in stories the image of a wedding, or at least the bringing together of a man and a woman in a state of loving union, is the most complete form of happy ending we know. Something deep within us recognises this image as the moment of supreme fulfilment, when everything is at last complete and whole, when all the uncertainties of the story are resolved, when all its shadows have been lifted, and where hero and heroine are at last at one with each other and with life.

What we are about to look at in this second part of our journey is what this great archetypal union really stands for, and why so many stories shape themselves towards this central concluding image. In fact what we are about to see is how, in order for the hero and the heroine to reach this goal, they must be shown as representing a specific set of qualities. Only then, when we have built up a picture of the conditions which must be met for a story to come to a complete happy ending, can we move on, in the third part of our journey, to see just why it is that so many stories should, in different ways, fail to reach such an all-resolving conclusion.

The first step towards this lies in focusing at last on a crucial element in storytelling which we have so far touched on only obliquely. Up to now we have concentrated on the structure of stories. What we must now look at in the same way are the characters who apppear in stories. Just as we have seen how much of the seemingly almost infinite variety of storytelling ultimately resolve down to just a handful of basic archetypal figures. As we see what each of these figures stands for, and the nature of their fundamental relationships to the hero or heroine, so we arrive at the central key to understanding what stories are really about.

The Dark Figures

It is no accident that many of the stories we particularly respond to in childhood are based on the Rags to Riches plot, because no other type of story so consistently follows the growing up of its central figure from childhood into adult life. We begin with a little hero or heroine who, in the early stages of the story, usually at home, is powerless, ill-treated and unhappy. The main reason for this is that they are cruelly overshadowed by heartless older figures who look down on them with contempt and hostility. David Copperfield is the little orphan who, after losing his real parents, has fallen into the clutches of Mr and Miss Murdstone, who become his tyrannical step-parents. Jane Eyre is the little orphan who, miserable in the guardianship of her dead mother’s sister and scorned by her young cousins, is sent off to the orphanage by the tyrannical pillar of rectitude Mr Brocklehurst. The little orphan Cinderella is tyrannised over by her wicked stepmother and ugly stepsisters. Joseph is despised and nearly killed by his older brothers. In fact, if we examine a whole range of Rags to Riches stories, we see how these overshadowing dark figures who surround the hero or heroine at the beginning of the story falls into three main categories:

1. The Dark Father

Firstly there is the older man who stands in some position of power or authority over the hero or heroine, usually in the place of a lost father: e.g. Copperfield’s stepfather Mr Murdstone; Jane Eyre’s Mr Brocklehurst; Aladdin’s Sorcerer, who pretends to be the long-lost brother of the hero’s dead father. This powerful tyrannical figure, representing strong male authority in its most heartless, egotistical guise is the Dark Father.

2. The Dark Mother

Secondly there is his female counterpart, the older woman who may stand in place of a lost mother: e.g. Copperfield’s Miss Murdstone; Jane Eyre’s Aunt Reed; Cinderella’s stepmother, who has replaced her real, loving mother. This similarly heartless and oppressive figure is the Dark Mother.

3. The Dark Architect

Thirdly there are the younger characters, of the same sex as the hero or heroine, and of roughly similar age and status, who also act as oppressors: e.g. Cinderella’s stepsisters, Joseph’s jealous brothers.

As the hero or heroine go out into the world, they may meet with more general scorn or persecution from society at large: e.g. the other animals who heap derision on the Ugly Duckling, or the bystanders who scorn the ragged, uncouth little flower seller Eliza Doolittle. But, as the story develops, the only other serious contender they are likely to encounter along the way is:

4. The Dark Other Half

This is a character of the opposite sex who seems to hold out the possibility of union with the hero or heroine, but is in fact self-seeking and treacherous, or in some other way inadequate: e.g. Potiphar’s wife, the Temptress who tries to seduce Joseph; Jane Eyre’s St John Rivers; Copperfield’s silly and infantile first wife Dora Spenlow.

All the main characters we see opposed to the hero or heroine of a Rags to Riches story thus fall into one of these four categories: Dark Father, Dark Mother, Dark Rival and Dark Other Half.

In the earlier stages of the story, particularly while the hero or heroine are still very young, the Dark Father or Dark Mother are likely to be dominant. As the central figure moves into adulthood, the emphasis is likely to shift more towards the Dark Other Half and the Dark Rivals, who are now seen more directly as competitors for the hero or heroine’s ultimate goal – as in the closing stages of Cinderella where, in the episode of the ‘slipper test’, we see her stepsisters hoping that it is they who will be chosen as the rightful ‘other half’ to the Prince. By the middle of the story indeed there may have emerged just one Dark Rival, posing such a particular threat that he or she comes to stand as a kind of Dark Alter-Ego to the central figure. An example is the emergence of Jane Eyre’s shadowy rival for the hand of Mr Rochester, his crazed and malevolent first wife. In Aladdin this shift of emphasis is expressed with particular subtlety in the hero’s changing relationship to the central dark figure who dogs him throughout the story. Initially, when Aladdin is still a young boy, the Sorcerer appears unmistakably as a Dark Father figure. But later, when the hero has grown up, and the Sorcerer reappears to snatch Aladdin’s Princess off to AFrica he has become a classic Dark Rival, or Dark Alter-Ego. Finally he reappears as an even more deadly Dark Rival, when he returns in disguise to try to kill Aladdin; and his death corresponds to the hero’s final emergence into the light and union with the Princess.

Measured against these dark figures, the hero or heroine themselves provide a complete contrast. They are not cruel, treacherous, vain or self-seeking. Their real problem, at the beginning of the story, as underdogs in the shadows, is simply that they are lost and do not know what to do. Initially they seem at the mercy of fate and of the dark figures who so cruelly dominate their lives. That is why, in so many Rags to Riches stories, the first step towards their being drawn towards some ultimate happy ending is that they find a mysterious ally; either a ‘helpful animal’ as when Dick Whittington finds his cat or Aladdin his genies; or a ‘light’ Father or Mother figure, as when Cinderella meets her fairy godmother or David Copperfield his kindly aunt Betsey Trotwood, who eventually adopts him. The first half of the story shows them, with the aid of their light allies, making considerable progress as they grow up outwardly and venture out on the stage of the world. They may even, by the halfway stage, seem within reach of a happy ending, either on the brink of marriage, like Jane Eyre, or married already, like Aladdin or David Copperfield.

But then comes the ‘central crisis’ when their world falls apart again. They lose all that is dear to them, and we see that inwardly they have not yet really matured at all. What the second half of the story shows is how they discover their own inner strengths, and learn to take charge of their own destiny. The final test invariably shows them confronting the dark power entirely on their own, relying on their own strength. Jane Eyre, as she reaches the climax of her potentially deadly struglle with the iron-willed St John Rivers, is inspired by inwardly hearing the mysterious voice of Rochester; but she feels at last that ‘my powers were in play’. Aladdin finally overcomes the Sorcerer’s brother entirely on his own, having been explicitly told by the genie that he can no longer expect any magical help. David Copperfield goes off alone for three years after the death of his wife Dora, initially miserable; but he emerges as a rich and famous writer, with his own position in the world, recognising at last with overwhelming certainty that he must track down his true angel Agnes (who for so long has been in the shadow of the monstrous Dark Rival Uriah Heep) to rescue her from the shadows and merry her.

What all these stories in fact show is that, in order to reach their goal, the central figure eventually has to demonstrate a particular balance of qualities. Initially these heroes and heroines are shown as open to the path which is to lead to their eventual self-realisation because they are good-natured. They are not blinded and isolated from the world by egocentricity. They are not, like the antagonistic figures around them, dark. But although this may win them the invaluable help of their light allies, it is not enough in itself to bring them to their final goal. Ultimately, as the other half of the equation, they have to prove themselves in two other respects. They have to learn to stand on their own feet, to demonstrate inner strength and will power, to become self-reliant. Secondly they have to develop understanding. They have to see clearly and precisely what it is they have to do. It is this combination of qualities, that they are selflessly loving, strong and have a clear vision of what they must do, which finally wins them complete union with their other half. And it is because they have become master or mistress of themselves, that we finally have the confidence when they succeed to rule over some kind of ‘kingdom’ that they will do it wisely, unselfishly and for the good of all.

Overcoming the MOnsters

In the Rags to Riches story, the dark figures are seen as relating to the hero or heroine in a very personal way, in the context of private and family life. IN keeping with the more mythical resonances of the Overcoming the Monster plot, the figures who here personify the dark power tend to assume much grander and more terrifying proportions altogether.

Nevertheless, a good many dark figures in such stories still appear in familiar guise:

1. The Dark Father- figure, or Tyrant: this may again be the older man who has in some way replaced the hero’s lost father: e.g. the Giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, who killed Jack’s father and usurped his inheritance; or Sir Ralph Nickleby, brother of the hero’s dead father in Nicholas Nickleby. ON the other hand, because of the wider ramifications of this kind of story, this figure may represent paternal or masculine authority in some more general way, as tyrannical king (e.g. Minos) or some other kind of ‘dark ruler’ (e.g. Squeers, the tyrannical headmaster; Gessler, the tyrannical Austrian governor in the legend of William Tell; the Sheriff of Nottingham in the story of Robin Hood)
2. The Dark Mother figure, or Witch: this is the treacherous, ruthless older woman who no longer just wants to repress the hero or heroine, as in Rags to Riches stories, but to kill them: e.g. the wicked stepmother who is transmuted into the witch in Hansel and Gretel. But again this category now runs wider to include all those powerful and deadly older women who feature in stories as ‘the female monster’ : e.g. the Gorgon Medusa; Oedipus’s Sphinx (literally the strangler), the witch who casts her murderous shadow over the kingdom of Thebes; Lady de Winter, the most powerful woman in France, who is D’Artagnan’s chief antagonist in The Three Musketeers; Rosa Klebb, the sadistic head of SMERSH in the James Bond story From Russia with Love.
3. The Dark Rivals; e.g. Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, who, as Sherlock Holmes’ only intellectual equal, is his Dark Alter-Ego; the outlaw gang who are rivals to Sheriff Kane’s authority over the town in High Noon. But so potentially cosmic is the nature of the ‘monster’ in stories based on this plot – when we think of such examples as the Minotaur, Humbaba, Grendel, Dracula, the super-villains of Bond stories, with their ambitions to hold the entire world to ransom – that he often appears simply as a kind of huge, inflated ‘dark opposite’ to the hero, a grotesque abstract of the dark power in its most extreme form. He is the very personification of egotism, in all its greedy, aggressive undisguised horror. He is twisted, treacherous, utterly malevolent. In his physical and moral deformation, and his curious combination of human and animal attributes, he is, as we saw, anything but a complete, whole human being. He may have a strangely ageless, supernatural aura, as if he represents some ancient transcendent power. Above all the monster represents death. He is not just out to imprison the hero but to kill him. He has probably killed many others before. He may spread his shadow over a whole community, a whole kingdom, even over the world. And in setting out to challenge such a stupendously powerful being, the hero is bidding to become truly exceptional, seeking to succeed where many others have failed.

Superficially we might thing all that is required for the hero to overcome this monstrous figure is sufficient courage and strength. Certainly the great monsterslayers of storytelling, from Perseus to Beowulf, from Siegried to James Bond, have never lacked for such manly qualities. But when we come to see how the conflict is actually presented by stories, there is rather more to it.

For a start we have to see the hero as light, in complete contrast to the darkness of his opponent. For this we have to see that he is acting not just to further his own interests but on behalf of others; in particular in the first half ot the story, this means on behalf of the wider community which the monster is threatening. Gilgamesh sets out to challenge Humbaba because the monster is casting a shadow over his kingdom of Uruk; David challenges Goliath because the giant is threatening his country, Israel; Theseus journeys over the sea to challenge the Minotaur and his master, the tyrant Minos, because they are threatening his father’s kingdom of Athens; Beowulf is called in from his own country because Grendel is threatening to destroy the kingdom of Heorot; Dracula is threatening to become master of England; James Bond’s villains are threatening England, the West, all mankind; Darth Vader, in Star Wars, is threatening to impose his tyranny over the entire universe.

Once we have established some idea of the terrifying threat the monster poses to the world, and the courage of the hero in setting out to challenge it, the main thing the action of the story requires is simply that the two protagonists should be brought closer to one another until they are ready for the final decisive confrontation. Either the hero is travelling towards the monster, or the monster is approaching him, until at last the hero has the centre of darkness fully in view; at which point the monster’s power seems so immense that it is hard to imagine how the hero in its shadow can possibly defeat it.

But as the story nears its climax, we may also become acutely aware that the monster is directly threatening another figure the story’s heroine. When Perseus sees the sea-monster, he sees that it is also bearing down on the Princess Andromeda, chained to her rock. St George rides into battle not just to save the town the dragon is threatening, but much more particularly the Princess tied to a stake. Dracula may be threatening England, but much more specifically he has set his sights on the hero’s financée Mina, and is within an ace of destroying her. Dr No may be threatening the security of the western world, but what matters more at the end of the story is that he has tied down the beautiful beach girl, Honeychile Rider, to be eaten alive by crabs. The central fact of which we are aware as Star Wars moves towards its climax is that Darth Vader, the would-be ‘dark ruler of the universe’ has imprisoned and is torturing the Princess Leia.

At such a moment, however little we may actually know about the heroine, we see her as a figure of extraordinary significance and numinosity. It is the most important thing in the world that she should be saved. In fact there are always three things we instinctively recognise in such a situation. On the one hand there is the hard, heartless, masculine strength of the monster. On the other, in total contrast, is the soft, vulnerable feminity of the heroine who is being threatened. The monster stands for strength without the balance of feeling, which means death. The heroine stands for feeling and life, but is without the strength to defend herself. But what we then see, as the hero comes between them to save her, is that he is a balance between the two. He is not only strong, fearless, utterly masculine. In responding to her helpless vulnerability he is inwardly open to the feminity which the heroine represents. The hero stands for strength transfigured and made life-giving by his capacity for selfless feeling. In balancing the opposities of masculine and feminine, the hero is potentially whole.

So much accounts for why we instinctively sense our support for the hero in his challenge to the monster. But it does not account for why he wins the battle: and here the reason is not usually that he is stronger than the monster. In purely physical terms, the monster may well be the stronger of the two, which is why he seems to have all the odds on his side. In straightforward hand-to-hand combat, Goliath would have beaten David any day. Perseus was probably puny compared to the sea-monster. Dracula had a whole array of magic powers at his command. The real secret of the hero’s ultimate superiority is that the monster has a blind spot. That is why, by the true hero, he can be outwitted: as Goliath was by David’s use from a safe distance of his slingstones; as the sea-monster was by Perseus’s use of the Gorgon’s head to turn him to stone; Dracula by the hero’s knowledge of the one thing which could kill him, a stake to the heart. Luke Skywalker can eliminate the Death Star because he knows of the one spot in all its immense structure where it is vulnerable. In all three Quatermass stories, most of the action centres on the hero gradually puzzling out the true nature of the mysterious monster he is up against, which eventually gives him the necessary clues as to how it can be overcome. What ultimately puts the hero in charge of the situation is that, by the climax of the story, he can in some crucial respect see more clearly than the monster, and knows precisely what he is doing.

Thus the combination of qualities which the hero requires to overcome the monster is exactly the same as that required by the hero or heroine of a Rags to Riches story. He has to show that is acting selflessly, in some cause outside himself. He has to show himself inwardly strong, determined, totally self-reliant. In the end, as the final key in the lock, he has to have superior understanding, a clear vision of what he has to do.

Of course there are also Overcoming the Monster stories where the heroine is not just a passive potential victim waiting to be rescued from the shadows by the hero, but where she herself plays a much more active part in saving him and assisting him to his victory.

When Theseus sets out for Crete to liberate his country from the deadly shadow cast by King Minos and his dreadful creature, the Minotaur, the tutelary deity hovering protectively over him is Aphrodite, the goddess of love. It might seem a detail strangely irrelevant to so ‘masculine’ a contest. But when Theseus arrives, the first person to see him is Minos’s daughter Ariadne, who falls in love with him. When he is led into the dark labyrinth to face the monster which lurks at its heart, it is Ariadne who secretly equips Theseus with the two ‘magic weapons’ which are to prove vital to his success: the sword with which he can slay the Minotaur, and the thread which will enable him to find the way out of the ‘pathless maze’. It is the Princess’s courage and strength of will which have enabled the hero to use properly his own masculine strength to win the victory. Where Theseus would otherwise have been reduced to impotence, it is the ‘active’ heroine who has given life to his strength and enabled him to see clearly his way out again into the light. Again we see a hero who, if he had not been open to the feminine, would not have succeeded in his immense task. It is Ariadne’s own balance of love with inner strength which enables her to supply what Theseus needs in his desperate plight, enabling him to rise to his fully manly stature, allowing him to charge of the situation and to see whole. Thus is he able to liberate his country, and on his return homme to succeed as its king.

We again see the heroine coming to the hero’s rescue in his desperate hour of need in the film High Noon. When word comes that the murderous Miller gang is approaching to take over the town, Sheriff Kane seems wholly alone. No one will stand with him to resist the dark power. Fearing the worst, he persuades his new bride to leave town. As the climactic battle begins, he seems at the outlaws’ mercy. But, just when all seems lost, a crucial shot rings out from an unexpected quarter. Inspired by the hero’s bravery and her love for him, the heroine has returned, to provide just the element of strength needed to turn the battle. Thanks to her courage, he can complete the routing of the monster, and between them they have saved the kingdom.

The Quest

In no other type of story is the hero faced by such a range and variety of dark figures as in the Quest. But again these fall into familiar categories:

1. The Tyrant, or Dark Father-figure. Odysseus’s chief opponent through most of his journey, after he blinded Polyphemus, is the giant’s grimly vengeful father Poseidon, the ‘dark lord of the sea’; Jason’s chief antagonist is the tyrant-king Aetes; other examples are the cruel, overbearing figure of Phaoraoh, who tries to keep the children of Israel imprisoned in Egypt; the evil King Twala, tyrant over the lost land of King Solomon’s mines; General Woundwort, the dark ruler over the hostile warren of Efrafa in Watership Down
2. The Witch or Dark Queen: Aenas’s chief opponent through most of his journey to Italy is the grimly vengeful Queen of Heaven Juno; another instance is Gagool, the ancient witch-guardian of the treasure in King Solomon’s Mines;
3. The Dark Rivals; these again become increasingly prominent as the hero nears his goal: e.g. the suitors clustered threateningly round Penelope; Turnus, the hero’s rival for the Princess and the kingdom in the Aeneid; the resident tribes who try to prevent the children of Israel from occupying the Promised Land.

When we come to the fourth category, however, we see a curious ambivalence emerging:

4. The Dark Other Half: this is a figure who, in her guise as the Temptress, plays a particularly prominent part in Quest stories. But when we are confronted by such examples as Circe and Calypso in the Odyssey, it is difficult to pin down whether they are to be regarded as the beautiful women they first appear to be, or as ageless witches in disguise, armed with supernatural powers to imprison the hero and to hold him back from pursuing his quest (Circe, for instance, is explicitly described as a witch). Similarly, when Aenas falls in love with Dido (at the instigation of his real enemy, the dark goddess Juno) she is not represented as a young Princess whom he would easily marry. She is a widowed Queen, a mature woman with the power to bewitch him by her love, to enfeeble him and make him forget what he should be doing, which is to proceed on his journey.

In other words, when we consider the dark feminine power which can hold back the hero of a story from his true purpose, we see a link beginning to emerge between the mature, beguiling Temptress as ‘Dark Other Half’ and the treacherous witch or Dark Mother figure. When we consider the dark masculine power standing more agressively in the hero’s path, we have already seen in Aladdin how the figure of the Dark Father can be transmuted into that of a Dark Rival. Similarly in Watership Down General Woundwort is not just a Tyrant and dark ruler: as leader of the rival warren he stands as an exact dark opposite and rival to the story’s hero Hazel. Behind their variety of outward guises, the dark figures are more closely connected than they at first appear.

And of course we also begin to see in the Quest, more explicitly than in the earlier types of story, occasions where the hero and his companions themselves make potentially fatal errors, putting them at the mercy of their dark antagonists – and these invariably result from a failure of their own awareness.

When Odysseus sets out with his men for home there is no doubt about his manly strength and cunning. As a soldier he has been one of the great heroes of the Trojan War. What does come into doubt as soon as the journey begins is their ability to see clearly the nature of all the dangers they encounter on the way, and whether they have the self-control and willpower which will enable them to resist those perils. The essence of the journey is how again and again they make foolish errors, falling into one trap after another. They fall for almost every temptation placed in their way. To begin with they are beguiled and intoxicated by the pleasures of Lotus – eating. They then meet their first really serious diaster by failing to recognise the true nature of the island and the cave where Polyphemus lives. When Aeolus gives them bags holding all the contrary winds which enable them, still early in the journey, to come back within sight of Ithaca, Odysseus drowses off, losing consciousness. His men, blinded by greed into thinking the bags contain treasure, open the, leading to the worst disaster of all, when they are blown onto the island of the cannibal giants of Laestrygonia, who eat eleven of the twelve shiploads. They are fooled by the treachery of Circe, who seems to offer them feasting and ease, but in fact only wants to imprison them as animals. They fail to steer a proper course between the deadly opposites of Scylla and Charybdis, suffering further losses to the monster Scylla.

Gradually, however, as the journey proceeds through one disaster and near disaster after another, Odysseus develops clearer vision and greater self-control. Already, by the time they reach the island of Laestrygonia, Odysseus has become canny enough to remain behind, while the crews of the other eleven ships are tricked into their doom. When they arrive next on Circe’s islan, he is again careful to send only half of his surviving men ahead, and it is this which allows him to win the help of the god Hermes in overcoming the Witch’s powers and liberating all her victims. Once the Witch Temptress has been mastered, she switches from dark to light to become an invaluable helper. And it is she who sends Odysseus on down to the underworld where the wise old man Teiresias gives him a vision of what still lies ahead of him and what he must do to finish the journey. He survives the enchantments of the Sirens by the forethought of having himself strapped to the mast, although he cannot then stop his men from disobeying his strict orders not to interfere with the cattle of the Sun, which leads to heir being struck by a thunderbolt. This leaves Odysseus at last all alone, to face yet another disaster when he steers this time too near the other opposite, the whirlpool Charybdis. At this point, literally all washed up, he is only too grateful to sink into the embraces of the beautiful Calypso for a seemingly interminable period of sensual ease and doing nothing, the longest episode of the entire journey. It takes Odysseus seven years to develop the strength and willpower to break loose from Calypso’s enchantments (with the aid of the king of the gods, Zeus). But again, once he has developed the manly resolve to free himself from this unreal, twilit existence in the witch’s cave, she switches to become a helper. After a last ordeal by shipwreck, he is washed up on the island of King Alcinous and his daughter, the Priness Nausicaa; and here he can tell the tale of all his adventures, as if he has returned to ‘the real world’. Finally he lands back in Ithaca to begin the second half of the story. He has at last become master of himself and is ready for his final great test.

Through all the slosing stages of the story, Odysseus can see – with the help of the goddess of wisdom Athene – exactly what he has to do, and is entirely in control of his actions. Outwardly, ‘above the line’, his kingdom is still triumphantly in the hands of the dark power, the loud -mouthed, swaggering, lecherous suitors, who infest his palace and press closer and closer round the increasingly despairing Penelope. But now, in the ‘inferior realm’, we see Odysseus, disguised as a humble beggar, moving inexcorably through the shadows across the island, towards the final confrontation with his Dark Rivals. Again we see the story coming to the familiar three-cornered climax: on one hand, the overbearing ‘masculine’ power of the suitors, greedy, proud, quarrelsome, drunken, cruel, using their power only to indulge and to assert themselves; on the other, the helpless Penelope, the vulnerable feminine imprisoned in the shadows. Finally into their midst comes Odysseus, now stronger than ever because he is a man completely in charge of himself, who knows exactly what he has to do to take charge of the situation. At the same time his strength is balanced by his openness to the feminine and the fact that he is acting in a cause far greater than just his own. At the climactic moment he reveals himself in his true kingly majesty, as the only man able to bend the mighty bow. He fires his first arow clean through the twelve axeheads, to symbolise the twelve ordeals he has surmounted: there is no longer anything between him and his goal. With contemptuous ease he puts the suitors to rout, dispelling the dark power forever. He liberates his other half fromt he shadows. At last he is whole and can assume his rightful sovereignty over the kingdom.

Such is the essence of the Quest story (although there is no more complete and profound version than the Odyssey). It shows a hero who is initally ‘all at sea’ and at the mercy of events being gradually tempered by his ordeals into learning how to direct and to discipline his strength single-mindedly towards one end. He must develop his awareness and become master of himself until nothing can stand in his way. But at the same time he must show that he is entirely light, by his inward openness to the feminine, so that he is using his strength in the service of life and of the whole. Only when he has finally reached this state of complete balance and become fully himself is he ready to be united with his ‘other half’ and to claim the ‘kingdom’. Thus does the Quest end at the same point as the earlier plots: because the fundamental impulse behind them all is the same.

Voyage and Return

When the hero or heroine of a Voyage and Return story fall into the mysterious ‘other realm’ they may well find themselves in a landscape peopled by a familiar range of dark figures:

1. The Dark Father figure or Tyrant; e.g. Mr McGregor, the terrifying denizen of the garden in Peter Rabbit, who has earlier killed and eaten the hero’s father; Captain Hook, the would-be tyrant over the island in Peter Pan;
2. The Dark Queen, Witch, or Dark Mother figure: this is the tyrannical female version; eg. the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland or the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass; the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz; Mrs Best-Chetwynde, the rich older woman who makes a plaything of Paul Pennyfeather, the hero of Decline and Fall;
3. The Dark Rivals; e.g. the cannibals and the mutineers whom Robinson Crusoe encounters as rivals to his soveriegnty of the island; the shadowy Morlocks who eventually capture the hero’s little friend Weena in Time Machine.

But the first thing we recognise about a Voyage and Return story, as we have seen, is how in the early stages, even more obviously than in the Quest, the emphasis is put on the limitations of the hero or heroine themselves. The essence of the deeper versions of this plot, such as Robinson Crusoe, The Golden Ass or the Ancient Mariner, is that we see a young man who falls into his horrific experience precisely because his awareness of the world is so severely limited. This is what puts him completely at the mercy of events, and why he suddenly finds himself plunged into the wholly strange ‘other world’. What then happens?

Robinson Crusoe, aimlessly drifting round the world, all at sea, is suddenly pulled up short by the catastrophe of finding himself shipwrecked. The first part of the story shows him gradually coming to terms with his new situation, both outwardly and inwardly. He slowly wins control over his immediate environment, and also develops a wholly new attitude to life, coming to view his position realistically, without self-pity, grateful for what he has, learning to see objectively and whole. The second part of the story begins when we see his new-found qualities being put to the test. He becomes aware that he is not alone on the island and that it is under a deadly shadow cast by the visiting cannibals. Because Crusoe has won understanding and mastery of himself, and feels protectively toward their helpless victims, he can now act as a strong potential leader, becoming in the shadows the centre of light opposition to the dark power which dominates the island. First he is joined by Friday whom Crusoe educates and trains to fight. Secondly, between them, they rout the cannibals, releasing more victims. Finally the ship which has been taken over by mutineers arrives, and Crusoe secretly reveals himself to the captain who accepts his complete authority. Crusoe masterminds the mutineer’s overthrow and steps from the shadows as at last undisputed ‘king’ of the island. He can now return home, a king over himself, to live happily and prosperously for the rest of his life.

Lucius, the hero of the Golden Ass, also begins as an egocentric young drifter, only interested in sexual self-indulgence and the occult – in other words, with a dark, inferior desire for ‘love’, which he sees only in terms of physical self-gratificatioin, and for ‘secret knowledge’, which he sees only as a way to win power for himself. It is precisely a combination of these two weaknesses which, by a catastrophic misjudgement, lands him in the horrific plight of being turned into an ass. He now finds himself entirely at the mercy of mindless, unfeeling human beings until, when he finally recoils from the degradation of having to perform the sexual act in a circus, knowing also that it will mean death, he is miraculously released by the mysterious goddess of wisdom Isis. Now his real transformation begins. Under the guidance of Isis and through intense self-discipline, he gradually comes to recognise the true meaning of selfless love and of that spiritual reality which is obscured to limited consciousness by physical appearances and appetites. His heart and his eyes are opened. His two original dark obsessions have each been transformed into their ‘light’ version. The story ends by showing him, as a devotee of Isis, a strong disciplined figure, at one with himself and with life.

When the Ancient Mariner, also a young man ‘all at sea’, casually shoots the great, friendly albatross which has been following the ship he has committed an appalling crime. He has used his strength blindly, unfeelingly, selfishly, to kill a perfect symbol of wholeness, something immense, beautiful, mysterious, self-contained, floating entirely at one with the world of nature. He sinks down into the living death of his unfeeling egocentricity, seeing all the world around him drained of life. He sees the spectral ship approaching containing the “Nightmare Life-in-Death, the terrible Dark Mother of final unconsciousness – until finally some deep impulse for life within him prompts him to croak out a blessing on the only other living creatures around him, the crawling water snakes. At last he is beginning to feel for life outside himself and to see whole beyond the confines of his own ego. Both within him and outside him, life begins to flow again. He is at one with its power and now master of his ghostly ship he is carried home.

Even the story of Peter Rabbit, as we saw, is that of a feckless and selfish little hero at the mercy of his idle curiosity and his physical appetites who, by eventually coming to a higher level of consciousness and managing to see whole, wins a measue of conscious control over his destiny and escapes from death to life. In other words, in its fully resolved versions, the Voyage and Return story story is still shaped by precisely the same fundamental impulse as the earlier plots – except that we are now seeing the hero much more clearly having to move from one centre of his personality to another.

The essence of all these Voyage and Return stories is that they show their hero having to move away fromt he pole of limited ego-consciousness, which puts him at the mercy of events he does not understand, towards that other pole which connects him up to the world outside himself and gives him the wider vision which is necessary for his liberation. This winning of a wider vision is seen to be a process of the most profound importance, essential not just to the hero’s survival in a limited, physical sense but, at least in the instances of Robinson Crusoe, Lucius and the Ancient Mariner, to his reaching an entirely new relationship with himself and the universe. The move from restricted ego-consciousness to the state of wider awareness means that he is at last, in some mysterious way, at one with life itself. And of course no type of story is more centrally dependent on the importance of this transition than Comedy: where coming to see whole is what the process of recognition is all about.

Seeing Whole

The Feminine and Masculine Values

One of the parallels between a story and a piece of music is that each is based on a sequence of mental images which we unconsciously anticipate will come eventually to a point of perfect resolution. A movement in a Beethoven symphony develops through a succession of irresolutions each of which is then partly resolved. ONly at the end does the pattern come to a full close, resolving all that has gone before.

For several months in 1984, millions of television viewers in Britain were held in suspense by a serialisation of Paul Scott’s Raj quartet of novels The Jewel in the Crown. For weeks the story presented them with a complex drama of life in British India during the Second World War, introducing a large cast of characters whose lives were interwoven, full of mysterious and half-explained incidents. But as the plot developed, the one thing which eventually held interest more than any other was the central web of relationships between three characters – the attractive heroine, Sarah Layton, and two young men. The first of these, Merrick, a powerful, resentful, bullying police officer who had set his mind on marrying Sarah was the chief dark figure of the story. The other was a handsome and strong but sensitive and reserved army officer, Guy Perron. The questioin to which viewers wanted an answer was: which of the two would win the heroine? Would the Dark Rival get his way? Or would the light hero and heroine somehow manage to recognise their love and get together? Only in the closing scenes of the three month long serialisation was the answer finally given, as Sarah and Guy at last came out into the open and declared their love. At this moment the whole of this enormously intricate drama, which had involved so many deaths and subplots, was resolved, in a way which seemed at last to make sense of almost everything that had previously happened in the story.

Again and again we have circled round the importance to stories of the elusive idea of being able to see whole which runs through storytelling at so many levels and in so many ways. In that central struggle between darkness and light, for instance, we have seen how it is an absolutely consistent feature of all monsters, villains, tragic heroes and other figures who embody the dark power that they are in some crucial respect limited in their awareness. They have a blind spot, they are obsessive; they live in a fantasy world of wishful thinking: and this distortion of their vision is inextricably linked to their egocentricity. What stories show us is how it is in the very nature of egotism that it can only see the world in a subjective, restrictive fashion. Wherever it holds sway it casts around it a shadow which also tends to obscure the vision of everyone else who is in that shadow.

Equally we have seen how it is an inseparable part of coming to the light that this should bring a clearer vision. When, at the end of a story, characters are lifted out of the shadows, this is because they have been lifted out of all that obscures their vision. Seeing whole does not mean they see and know everything. What it does mean is that they can see everyone and everything objectively, for what they really are. They have been liberated from the distortions of ego consciousness, onto a different level which gives them a clearer understanding.

On another level, this transition between a long period of constricted vision and finally coming to a new centre of perspective which gives an uninterrupted view in all directions relates directly to one of the most fundamental satisfactions we ourselves get from following a story. Few things hold our interest in a story more compulsively than the desire to arrive at that point at the end where everything will finally be explained. Gradually we have been drawn deeper and deeper into a tangled knot of obscurity and uncertainty, setting up a tension in our minds which cries out for resolution. We long to know how it is all going to turn out; whether the hero and the heroine will finally be united; what unexpected twist at the end will suddenly make everything come out right. In the earlier stages of a story all sorts of details may have been introduced which at the time seem puzzling, their significance not clear at the time. But if the story is properly constructed, by the time it reaches its conclusion the point and purpose of each will have been revealed. As in a piece of music, we have finally been lifted clear from the tangle of irresolution to the point where the pattern is complete; where we can see how everything in the end played its part in the whole. And no type of story illustrates this more subtly than Comedy, where the transition from baffling obscurity to a final phase of illumination when all is made clear is built into the very structure of the plot.

Comedy

Three things mark out Comedy from other types of story. The first is that more insistently than any other types of plot, Comedy is concerned not just with the individual fate of its central figure but with the network of relationships between a group of people. Initially we see these relationships all knotted up because something fundamental has gone wrong; at the end we see the unknotting where everyone has at last been brought into the right relationship with everyone else.

The second unique feature of Comedy is the extent to which except on those rare occasions where a dark figure remains unreconciled, it shows us all the characters in the story being brought at the end into the light. In this sense Comedy is the most idealised of the plots (although in this it overlaps with Rebirth) because it ends on a vision of a world entirely at one, from which no one is excluded.

The third distinguishing mark of Comedy is the emphasis it places on the fact that the fundamental reason why everyone is at odds through most of the story is that there is something very important that they do not know or cannot see; just as the miraculous coming together at the end results from the fact that something very important has been discovered. As Aristotle puts it, ‘recognition is the change from ignorance to knowledge’. And this recognition is precisely what allows everyone to come into a new and quite different set of relationships to one another. Because everyone can at last see clearly and whole, because they have at last discovered who they and each other really are, and who belong, they can also feel properly. Everyone has at last ‘seen the light’ and thus been liberated to their true, deeper selves; and for this reason everyone ends up happily integrated with everyone else in an image of complete individual and collective wholeness.

In other words, like an old ‘Before and After’ advertisement, Comedy shows us the contrast between two fundamental states of human nature. We are introduced to a little world – a household, a group of families, a city, a kingdom – which has fallen under the shadow of the dark power. The darkness may emanate primarily from the blind and heartless egotism of one dominant figure. But the result is that everyone is affected: everyone is stumbling about in a fog of frustration and confusion, divided off and obscured from one another, cut off from the flow of life. The fact that people cannot see clearly or whole and the fact that they cannot relate harmoniously to one another are seen as inextricably bound together as symptoms of the same fundamental condition.

But somewhere below the surface, hidden from the community’s prevailing state of consciousness, events are constellating towards the moment that the revealing truth can suddenly emerge from the shadows. The distorting pressure of egocentricity is removed, the darkness is dispelled, everyone can ‘see the light’; and every piece of the jigsaw falls naturally into place. The picture of unity is complete. The current of life can flow unimpeded.

Dark masculine, light feminine

As we have seen, most comedies fall into two groups: those where the chief dark figure of the story stands opposed to the hero and heroine, and to the flow of life in general; and those where the chief dark figure is the hero himself (much less often the heroine).

Of stories in the first category, again the great majority are those where the dark figure is a Dark Father or Tyrant; some powerful older man, usually the head of the household, who is in the grip of some blinding, deadening obsession which casts a shadow over everyone around him, and usually in particular over the young lovers whose union he is opposing. We have seen this familiar figure running all through the history of Comedy, from Aristophane’s Procleon to George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon, from the ‘unrelenting fathers’ of New Comedy to those of Moliere, from King Leontes and Count Almaviva to the worlds of Wodehouse and the Marx brothers.

Only rarely in Comedy do we see the Dark Mother figure, but where we do she usually plays much the same tyrannical role as the Dark Father, invariably in the name of upholding the ‘masculine’ proprieties and the social order: e.g. Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen’s unrelenting mother in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ or Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Darcy’s imperious, snobbish aunt who tries to prevent him marrying Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice.

A rather more frequent figure, particularly in later Comedy, is the Dark Rival for the heroine’s hand; e.g. Blifil in Tom Jones, Joseph Surface in ‘The School for Scandal’, Beckmesser in ‘Die Meistersinger Baron Oches in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ (although as an older man and a friend of the heroine’s father, he is also linked to the Dark Father).

We similarly see examples of the Dark Other Half. An obvious instance is Tom Jones’s would-be seducer Lady Bellaston, a mature, beguiling Temptress (although, as an older married woman, she again shows links to the ‘Dark Mother’). The novels of Jane Austen contain several examples, such as George Wickham, Henry Crawford, William Elliot: all false, unscrupulous triflers with the heroine’s affections. Another striking pair of examples appear in War and Peace: Anatole Kuragin, the adventurer who tries to abduct Natasha, and his sister Helene, ,the imposing, heartless temptress who marries, then abandons the rich and awkward (and motherless) Pierre. A more modern instance is the intolerable Lina Lamont in ‘Singin’ In the Rain.

With a handful of such exceptions, the dark figures in Comedy tend overwhelmingly to be male. They represent the hard, ,unfeeling, negative side of masculinity in such a way as to place the heroine, representing true feeling and the promise of life, firmly at the opposite pole and in the shadows. For life to triumph, it is the true value of the ‘feminine’ which has to be recognised and lifted up into the light, as was so often symbolised in the New Comedy of the Ancient World when the disregarded and scorned heroine of lowly status was finally discovered to be of high birth and therefore of great value after all. And ultimately this can only happen when the overshadowing dark figure – such as an unrelenting father – is either liberated from his egocentric prison by discovering a new centre of awareness and feeling within himself; or is exposed in his true colours and pushed off the stage.

In the type of Comedy where the hero himself is the chief dark figure, the same rules apply. Right back to Menander, we see the hero who has wronged the heroine and become divided from her by some misjudgement. Through an egocentric limitation on his awareness he has failed in some way to recognise the truth of the situation. He reacts in a hard, unfeeling manner rejecting the feminine’ – often in the name of ‘masculine’ propriety and upholding the moral order. And eventually he gets caught out. Either, like Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, he discovers that he has wronged the heroine by assuming that she has committed a crime when in fact she was innocent. Or, like Angelo in Measure for Measure, he is also exposed as a self-righteous hypocrite for having committed the same crime of which he has accused someone else.

Ultimately he can only be extricated from the trap he has made for himself by discovering that deeper centre of his personality which both brings him back in touch with true feeling and widens his perception so that he can see the world straight and whole again. And here we again see how the ‘feminine value’ which must be brought into play to redeem the situation represents both these things, inextricably intertwined; both true feeling for others and the wider awareness which permits true understanding, an appreciation of the totality of the situation and how everything is properly connected; whereas the ‘dark masculine’ represents precisely the opposite, a lack of true feeling and an inability to see things whole.

When we look at the handful of comedies which show the heroine herself as the chief dark figure, we see how the very reason she has become dark is that she is not in touch with the true feminine within herself, as we see in Katharina the ill-tempered, agressive virago in The Taming of the Shrew, or the bossy, interfering Emma Woodhouse, or the rich, spoiled Tracy Lord in High Society. Each has become imprisoned in a variation on essentially the same hard, egocentric state. They are neither alive to true feeling nor properly aware of the true situation around them (let alone how they look to everyone else). They are each in a state of self-deception. They need to be tamed, teased or thawed out into the soft, warm, alive state of feminity which is their true deeper self, buried under their tough, brittle exterior. Only at this point, when they become truly feminine, seeing the world straight (as with the heroine of Crocodile Dundee) can each recognise at last who is her ‘other half’.

Of course there are also those comedies, such as Guys and Dolls or Four Weddings and a Funeral, where there is no obviously dominant dark figure at all. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the darkness which engulfs all the characters is simply that of total confusion, based on the fact that no one can see things straight, although even here it is only the men who get confused. The two heroines remain models of firm, unswerving love. The true feminine is always a beacon of constancy.

The feminine value

What we thus see emerging is a fundamental polarity which is crucial to the structure of storytelling. At one pole is the power of darkness, centred on the ego, limited consciousness and an inability to see whole, making for confusion, division and ultimately death. At the other is the power of the feminine, centred on selfless feeling and the abilitity to see whole, making for connection, the healing of division and life. At the deepest level, it is around this opposition that the whole of the eternal conflict presented by stories resolves: and it is this which, in a sense, makes the light heroine the ultimate touchstone of storytelling. For it is she who above all and most directly embodies the feminine value. It is she who most often and most obviously has to be brought forth from the shadows in order for the complete happy ending to a story to be achieved. And this applies not just to those stories where a strong hero has to rescue a defenceless heroine, but just as much to those where an ‘active’ heroine has to emerge from the shadows to rescue a helpless hero, as in the myth of Theseus, Jane Eyre, High Noon, the Merchant of Venice, Fidelio.

But, as we have already explored in the previous chapter, in order for any story to reach that point where the heroine can emerge or be liberated from the shadows to produce the happy ending, there is another vital ingredient which is required to make the equation complete. And we see this brilliantly, if negatively illumined by the plot of Tragedy.

The Dark Inversion

For obvious reasons, Tragedy occupies a unique place among the basic plots, because in a sense it turns the essential pattern of the other main types of story upside down. All these other types of story have their ‘dark’ versions, which we shall return to. But Tragedy is the only basic plot which is primarily concerned with showing what happens when the hero or heroine cannot muster the positive qualities necessary to wrest the life-giving feminine value from the shadows, but become so identified with the dark power that they cannot escape from it. It thus shows the process of transformation taking place in, as it were, a negative form: the hero or heroine are led ever further downwards and into the dark imprisonment, rather than upwards and away from it. And one of the corollaries of this is that we see the landscape familiar from other types of story appearing strangely inverted.

As the light part of the tragic hero or heroine falls further and further under the shadow of the darkness which has taken root in them, and they slip into ever greater egocentricity and lack of feeling for others, we see how their judgement, their ability to see the world straight and whole, becomes increasingly clouded. In fact their vision becomes so distorted that they actually come to see everything at the reverse of its true value. The light values increasingly become a threat to them; light characters come to seem only as obstackles to their egocentric desires. As Macbeth’s Witches have it’fair is foul and foul is fair’; or as Albany puts it in King Lear, ‘wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile’. And one of the ways in which we see this inversion most strikingly exemplified is in the nature of the figures around the hero or the heroine whom they are most likely to see as hindrances on their path.

In an earlier part of this seminar we saw how there were certain figures who were most likely to become the victims of the tragic hero on his downward course. In fact we can now see how these correspond to the characters who, in other types of story are most likely to appear as dark figures: except that here, where the hero himself is dark, they appear as light. For instance, the first of the two male figures most likely to become the tragic hero’s victims we saw as ‘the Good Old Man’, a king or father-figure, like Duncan in Macbeth or the Commendatore in Don Giovanni. He is the light version of the Tyrant or Dark Father figure. Similarly, the tragic hero may turn on someone who comes to assume particular importance to him as his Rival, like Banquo – the hero’s honourable counterpart or light alter ego, who comes to haunt him as a reproach to his crimes.

But it is when we come to the feminine figures whom the hero is most likely to kill or injure that we see the tragic inversion in its most revealing light. Nothing can more tellingly betray the horror of the dark state a tragic hero is getting into than the moment when he kills or rejects the Innocent Young Girl, his ‘good angel’. When Othello kills Desdemona, when Lear sends Cordelia into exile, when Don José turns his back on Micaela, when Dorian Gray’s rejection of Sibyl Vane brings about her suicide, when Stavrogin’s violation of little Matryosha leads to her hanging herself, their ultimate fate is sealed. In violating or rejecting the feminine outside themselves, they have become catastrophically closed off to the feminine value within themselves, that which alone could allow them properly to feel and to see the world whole.

On the other hand, where the hero in other types of story must reject that other great female figure, the ‘Dark Other Half’, the Temptress, the tragic hero does the opposite. This is precisely where the seeds of so many tragedies are sown, as the hero succumbs to the bewitching embraces of the ‘dark’ feminine: as Antony is bewitched by Cleopatra, Don José is bewitched by Carmen, Macbeth is bewitched by Lady Macbeth, Jules and Jim are bewitched by Catherine, Clyde is bewitched by Bonnie. It is the ‘dark angel’ who wins in the battle for the tragic hero’s allegiance. And the result is not just that we see the hero losing touch with the true femine value within himself. He is no longer a fully masculine figure either. As we see in all these examples, he has become literally un-manned. And so we see it confirmed, by this somewhat roundabout, negative route, how in order for the hero to succeed he must not only be in touch with the true feminine value within himself: he must also be truly a man, strong, alert, fully sovereign over himself and his actions. It is a definition of the hero of Tragedy that he always in some essential way shows himself to be weak. He gives way, he surrenders the masculine part of himself to some unreal fantasy. He is thus deficient both on the feminine side of himself and on the masculine. And one of the supreme rules of the way that stories work is that ultimately these two must go inextricably together. It is impossible fully to develop and make positive the one, without fully developing the other. Where one is deficient, so are they both.

We see this reflected in those two great stories centred on a tragic heroine, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. It is obvious that the husbands of both Anna and Emma Bovary are unimaginative, unfeeling men who lack the inner feminine which could form a living bridge to the feminine in their wives. But equally they are not full men either. The work-obsessed bureaucrat and the failed provincial doctor are dried-up husks of undeveloped masculinity – and it is because they are inadequate on both the masculine and feminine sides that their unhappy, frustrated wives become prey to the ‘Dark Other Half’ who seems to promise all the fierce passion, mingling masculine strength and the feminine softness of love, which they lack in their marriages. But in each case the ‘dark other’ turns out to be an elusive phantom, spun largely out of the heroine’s own fantasies.