‘THE DIVERTING HISTORY OF JOHN GILPIN, showing how he went further than he intended and came safely home again.’
Title page of William Cowper’s poem
‘You know, coming home and finding things all right, though not quite the same.’
Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
‘I approached the very gates of death and set foot on Proserpine’s threshold, yet was permitted to return ... at midnight I saw the sun shining as if it were noon; I entered the presence of the gods of the underworld.’
Apuleius, The Golden Ass
What do the stories of Alice in Wonderland or Goldilocks and the Three Bears have in common with H. G. Wells’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 plot we may call the 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 this 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 this 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 upon 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, they 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 escape’, 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 prisoner 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 jaws 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.
Similarly, little Goldilocks ventures out from home into the forbidden world of the great forest, where she eventually comes to the mysterious house belonging to the three bears. Again the initial excitement of exploring the empty house, with its steaming porridge bowls and inviting beds, gives way to a sense of growing menace as the bears return. As they begin to suspect her presence, the sense of threat comes nearer and nearer until finally they discover the little heroine asleep upstairs: at which moment Goldilocks wakes up, makes a ‘thrilling escape’ by jumping out of the window, and runs back to the safety of her mother and home.
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.
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 form 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.1 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 comes to terms 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 (not, as is popularly mis-recalled, that of Man Friday). 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 finally, 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 theme of the castaway or castaways cut off from civilisation so seized the European imagination that Defoe’s novel was to find imitators in many countries (in Germany such tales were known as ‘Robinsonismus’); and the desert island genre continued into the twentieth century, in examples ranging from J. M. Barrie’s comedy The Admirable Crichton (1902), about an upper-class family and their servants wrecked on an island in the South Seas, to William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954). This is a model example of the Voyage and Return plot, with its description of a group of young, upper-middle-class English schoolboys marooned on a desert island by a plane crash. After an initial period of reasonably well-behaved excitement they gradually degenerate into bloodthirsty savages until, just as the nightmare has reached its murderous climax, they are plucked back to the normal world when they are miraculously rescued by the Royal Navy.
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’s Travels (although this too had its precursors, such as Thomas More’s account in 1513 of the visit of the mariner Ralph Hythloday to the imaginary country of Utopia). 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 he is rescued by a passing ship.
The eighteenth century, with its voyages of discovery to the southern hemisphere, made a particularly notable contribution to the literature of Voyage and Return stories, another haunting example being Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797). The greybearded old sailor-hero tells of how, many years before, he had gone on an initially exhilarating voyage into the unexplored southern ocean (‘we were the first that ever burst into that silent sea’), and how the greatest marvel they found there was the huge, beautiful white albatross which followed their ship. But then, in a reckless moment, the mariner had shot the albatross, at which a terrible curse had fallen over the voyage. The ship is becalmed, amid terrifying visions of sea monsters. Finally a spectral vision of another ship approaches, containing Death and her mate. The mariner see his shipmates all die, one by one, of hunger and thirst. Then, just when all seems lost, the mariner is looking down at a mass of sea-snakes crawling around the ship. He is so moved by the sight of the only living creatures left apart from himself that he croaks out a blessing on them. The ship returns to ghostly life, and a mysterious wind springs up, carrying it back within sight of home: at which point it sinks, leaving the mariner to be carried to shore, half-dead, but repentant of his crime.2
By the nineteenth century, 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. Samuel Butler’s imaginary country of Erewhon (1872) was situated on the far side of an unexplored range of mountains in New Zealand. In the twentieth century, Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) was set on a strange plateau in the Amazonian jungle, isolated from the rest of the ‘normal’ world by a geological freak which had preserved it as a wonderland still inhabited by dinosaurs and primitive cavemen. In Scott Fitzgerald’s The Diamond as Big as The Ritz (1922), the young hero made his journey into a remote, closely guarded valley in the Rocky Mountains (‘the only five square miles of land in the country which has never been surveyed’), where his host lived on top of a diamond so big that it made him ‘the richest man that ever lived’. James Hilton in Lost Horizon (1933) set his imaginary paradise of Shangri-La, where no one grew old, in a remote, sealed-off valley in the Himalayas.
But already other authors had taken still more 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 which transports him 800,000 years into the future, where he discovers the little, child-like Eloi, living in palaces in a seemingly paradisal 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 emergence 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.
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 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-known novels are shaped by the Voyage and Return theme. A fairly conventional example, not dissimilar to those we have already looked at in that it involves a physical journey into another country, is Scoop (1938) (which also has a Rags to Riches element, in showing how its obscure little hero, a shy writer of nature notes, finally pulls off an amazing journalistic scoop and becomes a national hero).
Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), however, was an example of what may be called a purely ‘social’ Voyage and Return story. Paul Pennyfeather, a dull, ordinary undergraduate, suddenly finds himself ejected from his cosy, humdrum existence when he is helplessly caught up in the consequences of an upper-class brawl and sent down from Oxford. He first finds himself among the semi-grotesques of the seedy private school of Llanabba, and is then swept up into the even stranger and more exotic world of Margot Best-Chetwynde, a fabulously rich upper-class ‘older woman’ who somewhat implausibly decides she wants to marry him. Like Alice or the Time Traveller or many other central figures in Voyage and Return stories, Pennyfeather is caught up in events largely beyond his control – a bewildering dream which eventually turns to nightmare when he is convicted of having, quite unwittingly, been an agent in Mrs Best-Chetwynde’s international ‘white slave’ ring. He is sent to prison, whence he is rescued by his now ex-fiancée to undergo an operation which gives him a new identity. He ends up returning to Oxford under a different name, to sink back into exactly the kind of dull, anonymous student existence from which he had been plucked at the start of the story.
In some ways a similar, though much more developed version of this story came twenty years later in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). Again 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 Two, 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. The analogy between a journey into the past and one into another country is even made explicit in the opening lines of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953): ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’. This serves to preface the aged narrator’s recollection of the social Voyage and Return he had made 60 years before when, as a little middle-class schoolboy from a not very prosperous home, he had gone to stay with a rich, upper-class schoolfriend on his family’s estate in Norfolk during a long, hot summer holiday. The boy Leo had found his initial shy exhilaration at being introduced to such a strange, grand, grown-up world increasingly shadowed as he becomes helplessly involved as a go-between in the secret affair between the daughter of the house, Marian, and her handsome, lower-class lover living in a humble cottage a mile away. The story had wound to a nightmarish climax when, as the heatwave broke in an immense thunderstorm, Marian’s fearsome mother discovered the hapless lovers in an outhouse, in flagrante delicto. The semi-disgraced little hero had been abruptly packed off home, expelled from this wonderland for ever (until, 60 years later, he returns to meet Marian, now an old woman who, after the scandal, had never married).
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 occupation, to track down his old school friend Harry Lime. He is shocked to discover that his old friend has 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, with 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 more 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 finally consider one more form of the Voyage and Return story, where the degree of the hero’s translation into an unfamiliar realm might seem even more extreme than in the geographical or social journeys we have looked at so far. This is the kind of story where the hero temporarily undergoes a complete change of outward identity, while remaining himself behind his new persona. A well-known example was F. Anstey’s Victorian novel Vice Versa (1882), in which a father and his schoolboy son magically switch outward identities, with potentially catastrophic results in each case. But long before this such a form had already been used rather more seriously in one of the most profound of all Voyage and Return stories, in which the hero finds himself turned into an animal.
Lucius, the hero of the neo-Platonic allegory The Golden Ass, written by the Roman North African author Apuleius in the second century AD, is a young man obsessed with sex and the occult. He goes on a journey to Thessaly, home of the black arts, where he finds lodgings in the house of a well-known sorceress and embarks on a heady affair with her beautiful slave girl Fotis. But Lucius also has a voyeuristic craving to spy secretly on her mistress, and to do this he asks Fotis to turn him by magic into a bird. The spell goes horribly wrong. She turns him by mistake into an ass, which is almost immediately stolen by a gang of robbers. It seems Lucius is now trapped in his new persona with no hope of escape. After a series of frightening adventures he is sold to a circus owner, who prepares to put him on public show making love to a human murderess. Lucius finds this prospect more horrifying than anything he has yet had to face, not least because he suspects that, as the spectacle reaches its climax, the circus owner will release onto the stage a wild beast to tear both him and the woman to pieces (‘I was not only appalled at the disgraceful part I was to play. I was in terror of death’). In the nick of time, he manages to run away. Lying exhausted on a beach after his ‘thrilling escape’, he awakens in moonlight to see a shining vision of the goddess Isis rising from the sea, ‘with so lovely a face the gods themselves would have fallen down in adoration of it’. She tells him she is ‘Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements ... sovereign of all things spiritual ... the single manifestation of all the gods and goddesses there are’. On her instructions, he attends a great religious ceremony in her honour, and feels his ass’s body melting away. He has become human again. As a result of his miraculous deliverance he remains a devoted follower of the cult of Isis, and the rest of the story (which we shall consider later in more detail) shows him being initiated into its deepest mysteries.
But first 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.
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 realises 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 Rasselas, 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 be just be bored and drowsy, like Alice, who falls asleep and is carried away into her Wonderland by a dream. They may be rather more actively craving some diversion, like Lucius in The Golden Ass, or 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 Candide, or Holley Martins, or 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 his 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 advice 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 secure ‘middle station’ in life, between the opposites. He should settle down, have a sense of purpose: not become an aimless drifter, wandering about the world hoping that something would turn up. The realisation 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, The Tempest, The Admirable Crichton; or a plane crash, as in The Lord of the 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. Candide is literally propelled into his ‘other world’ by a violent kick on the backside, when he has been caught kissing the beautiful Cunegonde. The obscure little undergraduate Pennyfeather suddenly finds himself being debagged by a lot of drunken upper-class rowdies. Charles Ryder’s introduction to his ‘other world’ begins when, on a similar occasion, Lord Sebastian Flyte suddenly leans through his ground-floor window and is violently sick into his room. Wells’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 they 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; or the horrified Lucius feels his arms growing hairy, and perceives he is changing into a donkey; or the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe push their way through a cupboard full of fur coats and find themselves emerging from the back into the snow-covered forest of Narnia.
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 (the hero of another Wells Voyage and Return adventure, The New Accelerator, finds his normal experience of time distorted in another way, when a new drug speeds up all the workings of his mind and body by thousands of times, so that he sees everything and everyone else around him frozen grotesquely still). Lucius has his whole centre of normal perspective on the world knocked for six by suddenly having to experience it in the body of an ass. 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 (e.g., The Admirable Crichton, where the natural leader of the group wrecked on the island turns out to be the upper-class family’s resourceful butler, who gradually assumes the role of ‘king’ over all his fellow-castaways.
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 or 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 Ryder set off to his first lunch invitation from the glamorously eccentric Lord Sebastian, he went:
‘full of curiosity and the faint unrecognised apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on 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 question 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?
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 latter 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. Equally, the point about Waugh’s two heroes Pennyfeather and Boot, in Decline and Fall and Scoop, is that they end up returning quite unaffected to the limited and obscure station in life where they began. So unaffected is the time traveller by his journey into the future (although he returns physically exhausted) that, no sooner has he recounted his bizarre experience to his friends, than he is off again on another journey. But this time he never returns. Such a ‘Voyage without Return’ can only be described as a ‘dark’ version of the Voyage and Return story; although, in this case, since we never discover what happened to him on his final journey through time, there is no story.3
On the other hand are all 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 his experience and is not just a naughty child who might well do it all over again tomorrow – is not altogether clear. Both Candide and Rasselas emerge from their adventures considerably chastened by what they have learned about the follies of mankind in general. The Ancient Mariner has been so shocked by the consequences of his own folly, in shooting the albatross, that he is marked for life. While few stories where a hero returns home repenting of his own folly have been more familiar over the centuries than the parable of the Prodigal Son from St Luke’s Gospel. The younger of two brothers, after demanding his share of their inheritance from his father, travels into ‘a far country’ where he ‘wasted his substance with riotous living’. Following the Voyage and Return pattern, his dream then turns to nightmare. After he has lost all his money, a great famine arises. He is on the verge of starving to death. But in the nick of time, he manages to crawl back home, prepared to throw himself on his father’s mercy, begging to be allowed to perform the most menial tasks in return for enough to eat. So unconditional is the father’s love that, on seeing his son approaching, he joyfully welcomes him home with honour.
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 civilised 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 for the last time, he has been so profoundly changed that he finds the very presence of humans abohorrent, and desires only the company of horses.
A rather more positive personal transformation is the fundamental theme of that near-contemporary novel, Robinson Crusoe. At the beginnining we see the hero as a thoughtless young man, rejecting the sage advice of his father and bent only on adventure (although even now the precedent of the Prodigal Son comes to his mind). 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 that by the time, in the 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 symbolised 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.
A similar prolonged personal transformation is the theme of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. We first meet the hero as a happy-go-lucky young man whose only interests are sexual adventure and a vague curiosity about the ‘occult’. Shocked to the core of his being by finding himself suddenly a hairy, inarticulate ass, and consequently getting an extremely painful, ass’s-eye-view of the darker side of human nature, Lucius slowly changes his whole perspective on the world. The degree to which he has inwardly changed is at last brought dramatically into the open when he is threatened with having to make love to a woman. He is profoundly disgusted by the thought of having to do something which would earlier have been his sole desire. He is finally ‘ready’ for his transformation back into a human being, but one very different from the Lucius who began the story. He sees his extraordinary vision of the goddess Isis, who calls him to a spiritual life. He is initiated into her mysteries (as Apuleius himself had been) and prepares to devote himself to her service for the rest of his days. We thus see the whole purpose of the work as having been to show a man who begins in a limited, purely sensual state of consciousness being lifted up through a series of ordeals to a much higher state of awareness, where his blind, illusory, self-destructive obsession with material appetites has given way to spiritual illumination.
The crucial episode in Lucius’s final initiation is an experience so profound and mysterious that he can only refer to it in the sentences quoted at the head of this chapter. But this clearly hints at some kind of further Voyage and Return episode, a visionary ‘journey to the underworld’, where he has received the last extraordinary illumination which leaves him, by the end of the story, so changed:
‘I approached the very gates of death and set foot on Proserpine’s threshold ... at midnight I saw the sun shining as if it were noon; I entered the presence of the gods of the underworld and the overworld, and I worshipped them.’
Such journeys to the underworld, or some ‘land of the dead’, are not uncommon in the world’s literature (e.g., the episodes where Odysseus and Aeneas make their visits to Hades), and invariably they reflect many of the elements of a Voyage and Return story, such as the difficulty of communicating with the ghostly inhabitants and the topsy-turvy strangeness of everything (‘at midnight I saw the sun shining as if it were noon’). A particularly haunting example is the Norse tale recorded by the twelfth-century Dane Saxo Grammaticus, of the journey made by King Gorm and the great hero Thorkill to ‘the land of the non-dead’, presided over by the terrible giant Geirrod, beyond the edge of the world in a land ‘where the snows never melt and eternal night prevails’. To begin with all goes well with their journey, but gradually threats close in from all sides until they finally come to a huge, ghostly city, seemingly built of vapour and thronged by phantoms and grotesques. After a series of terrifying adventures they make a ‘thrilling escape’ and, miraculously, reach home, having lost all but 20 of their original 300 companions. At this point King Gorm ‘sought not further adventures in distant lands beyond the perilous seas’, but ‘lived at peace after his sore travail, engaged in meditations regarding the mysteries of life and death’. Like Lucius, he had been deeply shaken – and transformed.
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, wandering the world, ignoring his father’s sage advice and literally ‘all at sea’. The shock of finding himself on the 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 battle 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.
Lucius in The Golden Ass begins as a feckless, self-centred young man whose only interests are promiscuous sexual gratification and the pseudo-spiritual titillations of the occult. He ends as a mature, disciplined, spiritually-illumined figure, dedicating his life to the goddess personifying selfless love and wisdom who has been his saviour and the inspiration of his enlightenment.
The Ancient Mariner begins as a feckless young man, like Crusoe ‘all at sea’, who blindly and heartlessly shoots the albatross. The consequences of this crime against the great numinous symbol of life which has been accompanying the ship are that he sees death closing in from every side, until he is seemingly all alone, frozen in a state of living death. The only other living creatures visible are the ‘thousand, thousand creeping things’, the water snakes: and when, almost with his dying breath, he whispers a blessing on them, this proves the turning point. He has at last begun to move from his original centre of awareness, his limited little ego, to another, much deeper centre in himself, from which he can recognise his kinship with all life. From this moment, as the frozen, deathly world around him begins to stir to life again, he is saved.
What we thus see in all these characters is 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 gone through a fundamental change of heart. He has made the switch from dark to light. Such is the case with Crusoe, with Lucius, with the Ancient Mariner, with the Prodigal Son. 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 ‘Princess’. 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 seem of 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 Wells’s The Time Machine, for instance, the only identifiable personal contact the hero has with his other world of the distant future is his friendship with one of the Eloi, a pretty young girl called Weena, whom he rescues from drowning and who then slavishly follows him everywhere – until the final nightmare chase through the dark forest when she is snatched away by the shadowy Morlocks and presumably eaten. Similarly in The Third Man Holly Martins’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 him and passes by without a look, leaving him to make his departure from Vienna friendless and alone. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s only real personal engagement with the other world is his strangely intense friendship with Sebastian, later transmuted into his love for Sebastian’s sister, Lady Julia. And of course the final cue for his ‘expulsion’ from the world of Brideshead is Julia’s breaking off of their engagement. The only woman he has ever loved has to be left behind, and Ryder returns to his ‘normal’ world again to face the rest of his life, as he puts it, ‘childless, middle-aged and loveless’.
Such is the position of the hero of one of the most famous of all Voyage and Return stories, Orpheus, who, after his journey through the underworld, has to leave behind him forever his great love Eurydice. Having gone there to bring her back, he is told he can do so on one condition: that, as he returns to the upper world, he keeps looking forward and does not look back. At the last moment, just before he steps out into the daylight, he looks back to see if Eurydice is following him. Instead of coming back joyful, with his life immeasurably renewed, Orpheus thus returns from his journey loveless, alone and untransformed. And it is no accident that the other heroes who must leave behind the woman who has become important to them during their time in the other world emerge similarly untransformed.4
A story which might seem to offer something of a variation on this pattern is Alain Fournier’s novel Le Grand Meaulnes. Meaulnes, an uncouth teenage boy, disappears one night in the French countryside. When he returns a few days later, exhausted and shaken, he has had a very strange adventure. He had got lost and, looking for somewhere to spend the night, he had come across a house blazing with light. On entering, he found himself plunged into a strange, dreamlike scene of revelry, involving a crowd of gay young people and children, dressed in clothes of a bygone age. He and the daughter of the house, Yvonne, found themselves mutually attracted. But suddenly the party had come to an end, the young people disappeared, and Meaulnes found himself all alone at a country crossroads. Has it all been a dream? So far it is a typical Voyage and Return adventure. But then comes the twist. Meaulnes eventually runs across Yvonne again in the ‘real world’, and marries her. Almost immediately, however, he has to go away and returns to find that she has died, in childbirth. In other words, although he has eventually been united with the girl he met in the other world, he still loses her. Their surviving child is the only proof that she ever really existed. But even he is now being brought up by someone else. At the end of the story Meaulnes is thus left ‘childless, loveless’ and alone.
A similarly hard-to-disguise bleak ending concludes another, even more famous twentieth-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 assumptions 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 the 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, like Orpheus, she is really only looking 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.5
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 their ‘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 mystifying, 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 into 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 some 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 or heroine’s survival.
5. Thrilling Escape and return: Just when the threat closing in on the hero or 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, as in the stories by Kafka, 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 The Golden Ass or 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.