‘When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away... for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face.’
I Corinthians, 13
We end this survey of the principles necessary to guide a story to a completely happy ending by looking at five well-known stories which illustrate everything this second part of the book has been about. We have not examined any of these stories in detail before, because none is shaped exclusively by just one of the basic plots we looked at in the first part of the book. But between them they show how an understanding of the underlying principles which shape stories takes us onto a deeper level altogether – where the particular significance of the plot-form guiding the action dissolves into the essence of that central drama which lies at the heart of storytelling.
On the face of it, these five stories could scarcely seem more disparate: a Slav folk-tale, Prince Ivan and the Firebird; a mediaeval English legend, Robin Hood; a modern pseudo-epic adventure story, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; Shakespeare’s last and most mysterious play, The Tempest; and Mozart’s last comic opera, The Magic Flute. But in the light of our theme in recent chapters, we can now see how each of these tales is shaped around the same essential drama. Each shows a kingdom or a world, having fallen under the shadow of the dark power, which is sick or in disarray. Each then shows an as-yet unfulfilled hero gradually moving through the shadows towards the point where, after a long and painful struggle, he can finally overthrow the dark power and step out into the light. As he does so, he redeems the kingdom. All these stories therefore culminate in that cosmic happy ending which shows a world divided and in shadow being brought to wholeness, round a hero who has reached the ultimate ‘centre’ of complete maturity.
The only thing which varies as we move through this sequence of stories is the emphasis in the way this central drama is presented. In The Firebird the focus is on the hero’s lonely struggle towards self-realisation. In the legend of Robin Hood the emphasis is more general, on the redeeming of the kingdom. In The Lord of the Rings it is on both: on the hero’s long and painful journey, but also on the cosmic implications of his eventual success in completing his task (except that, as we shall see, in order to show this fully, something very significant happens to the ‘hero’ as the story develops). In The Tempest we see the hero, as he redeems the kingdom, at last becoming a complete Wise Old Man. Finally, in The Magic Flute, we see a story which sums up everything which this part of the book has been about: a plot which, by a dazzlingly original trick of construction, manages to set out the inner workings of the archetypal family drama with an ingenuity which makes it unique in storytelling.
It would be impossible to categorise the folk tale of Prince Ivan and the Firebird under any one of our original seven basic plots because it combines elements of all of them.1 But the overall story which results perfectly exemplifies that central underlying theme to storytelling which has been emerging in the past few chapters. It tells of how a young hero matures until he is ready to succeed his father.
A certain king had a very beautiful garden. At its centre was a very rare tree, which every day bore a single fruit, a perfect golden apple. But every night the apple mysteriously vanished and one day the king called his three sons and told them that whichever could catch the thief would be given half the kingdom. The two older sons each watched in turn, but each fell asleep and when asked to explain the disappearance of the apple the following morning said that it had disappeared by itself. The third and youngest son, Ivan, was the only one who remained awake. At midnight he saw a golden bird fly down to steal the apple. He tried to seize it but it flew off, leaving just one golden feather in his hand – which proved to glow with such a light that it illumined the whole of the king’s palace. The king was overjoyed with this treasure, which his courtiers told him must have come from the legendary Firebird. But the bird never returned and the king began so to long for a sight of it himself that he fell sick with grief. He called his sons to him again and said that whichever of them could find and bring him the Firebird would be rewarded with half the kingdom.
The initial situation the story presents us with thus sets up a polarity. On one hand there is the ageing King/Father who is losing his powers and whose kingdom has passed into shadow. On the other is the mysterious, elusive Firebird as a symbol of that which alone can restore it to wholeness again: the Self. To realise it is the task which now passes to the younger generation.
The three boys set out into the world, taking three different paths, and shortly after they have separated each is confronted by the same test. A little vixen emerges from the forest and – in a motif found in many folk tales – asks each of the princes for a share of his food. The two older sons shoot at the fox with their bows and it vanishes. Ivan willingly hands over half his food, and the vixen says she will reward him by helping him find the Firebird.
We have now, by the double-negative form of the Rule of Three, learned two important things about Ivan, in contrast to his older brothers. Firstly he keeps his eyes open: he is aware. When watching in the garden he did not fall asleep. Secondly, unlike his brothers, he is goodhearted. He is not blinded by egotism. In other words, he is open to the ‘feminine’ value. The result is that he wins a mysterious ally, a feminine ‘helpful animal’ who, like Dick Whittington’s cat or Aladdin’s genies, is going to prove crucial to the unfolding of his story.
The vixen leads Ivan to a mysterious remote castle made of bronze, where the Firebird lives in a room with two cages, one golden, the other of wood. The fox tells Ivan that he must go into the castle alone, and that whatever he does, he must put the Firebird into the wooden cage and not that of gold. Of course whenever such a prohibition is issued in a story (as when Peter Rabbit is told not to go into Mr McGregor’s garden, or Bluebeard orders his wife not to go into a certain room in his castle, or Adam and Eve are told in Genesis not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge) we know it will be disobeyed. Otherwise there can be no story. Inevitably Ivan considers the Firebird too beautiful to be placed in the humble wooden cage. But no sooner has he placed it in that made of gold than guards rush in to take him before the owner of the castle, a fearsome and angry king. When Ivan explains that he was not trying to steal the Firebird on his own account but only to restore his father’s health, the king says he will give him the Firebird; but only on condition that Ivan obtains for him in exchange another great treasure, the Horse with the Golden Mane.
This second episode is virtually a repeat of the first. The vixen leads Ivan to another remote castle, this time of silver, where again Ivan disobeys her prohibition and is brought before the castle’s fearsome owner. Again he explains that he was not stealing on his own behalf, and he is told he can have the horse if he brings back to its owner a third great treasure, the Golden Princess from a faraway golden castle beside the sea.
So comprehensively structured round the Rule of Three is The Firebird that, when the vixen leads Ivan to the golden castle, his third great test turns out itself to consist of three more tests. The owner of the castle is the terrible ‘Queen of the Sea’ and she has three beautiful daughters, the third and youngest of whom is the Golden Princess. Now at last Ivan has learned from his previous experiences to do exactly as the vixen advises him, and this enables him to pass the first test by identifying the youngest daughter, as the one who is most plainly dressed. Once again here we see the familiar principle that whatever represents the Self, like Aladdin’s plain old lamp in a cave of glittering jewels, is often the thing which least obviously catches the eye, because its value lies within and is not external. This turns out to be really the crux of the whole story, for although the enraged Queen imposes two further tasks on Ivan, each harder than the last, he passes both because the Princess is now secretly helping him. Finally in the nick of time he and the Princess manage to escape the avenging Dark Mother, and Ivan is only sad because he now loves the Princess more than anything in the world and cannot bear the thought of exchanging her for the Horse with the Golden Mane. But again the vixen comes to his aid, as the story unravels back the way it came. By magically disguising herself first as the Princess, then as the Horse, the little fox eventually helps Ivan to get away from the two Dark Kings with all three ‘treasures’ intact, and he can begin the final stages of his journey home.
Then, just as all seems on the verge of resolution, there intrudes the ‘central crisis’. Ivan is about to emerge from the forest within sight of home when he makes a fatal mistake. Just like Odysseus when he is first about to reach Ithaca with the help of the wind-god Aeolus, he feels weary and falls asleep. At a crucial moment he has lost consciousness. His brothers come upon him in the forest, see his prizes and, as Dark Rivals, decide to steal them. They cut Ivan into a thousand pieces, leaving him in the forest, and bring the treasures home, thinking that one of them will marry the Princess and that they will share the kingdom. But when they arrive the Firebird does not sing, the Horse hangs its head and will not eat, and the Princess pines away. Their father, the king, believing his youngest son must be dead, falls sicker with grief than ever.
The purpose of the ‘central crisis’ is always to emphasise how the final stages of the maturing process are different from what came earlier. The hero’s lapse into unconsciousness has seemed fatal. From now on he must develop his consciousness more fully than ever, as he learns to depend on his own powers. In fact, the little vixen does again come to the rescue, for the last time. After a complex episode which involves enlisting the help of another helpful animal, a raven, to fly to the distant sea to bring back the waters of life and death, the vixen puts the hero back together again and restores him to life. But, having told Ivan to go to his father’s castle disguised as a humble stable boy, she disappears from the story, leaving him at last completely on his own. The climax of the story is approaching in a way which may remind us of the closing stages of the Odyssey, when Odysseus secretly approaches his palace disguised in beggar’s rags. When Ivan arrives he finds the whole castle under a terrible shadow. All is sick and out of sorts. But thanks to his return everything gradually comes together again. First the Horse recognises the new ‘stable boy’ and begins to eat. The king hears of this miracle and sends for the stable boy to see whether he can do the same for the Firebird. It too recognises him and begins to sing. Finally the stable boy is brought before the Princess, She also recognises him with joy. The king is astonished until Ivan throws off his disguise and reveals his true identity. The heartless treachery of the two Rivals is exposed and they are beheaded. The king is restored to health. Ivan and his Princess are married and succeed to half the kingdom (a common motif in folk tales, to show that the hero is ready to inherit); and when the king eventually dies, they succeed to the whole and ‘govern the kingdom wisely and well for the rest of their lives’.
Behind its fairy-tale symbolism, the essence of what The Firebird is describing is, of course, entirely familiar. As the story of a young man’s growing up, we see how he can only do this by showing a balance of qualities, masculine and feminine. All the way through his journey it is as though he comes to a succession of doors, each of which must be opened in the right way. Initially he makes mistakes, but is saved by the fact that he is ultimately acting not for himself but in some greater, selfless cause. Eventually he learns to control his impulses and to trust his instincts, and it is this degree of self-mastery which, in his crucial encounter with the Dark Mother/Queen, wins him his unshakeable alliance with the anima/ Princess. Nevertheless he still, at the critical moment when he is within sight of the goal, makes his worst mistake through a lack of awareness, and again it is only the ‘helpful animal’ of instinct which saves him. But he is now finally on his own. As he reaches the climax of the story he has to prove himself by relying on his own qualities; and on the fact that his previous heroism and good-heartedness have won him the total loyalty of his three mysterious ‘allies’ waiting for him in the castle. For the last time the Rule of Three operates in the last three ‘tests’. Ivan himself is the ‘fourth’ who brings his three allies to life. As in many other stories, we see a ‘three’ becoming a ‘four’ at the end, to symbolise the final emergence of a perfect totality. The hero is revealed at last in his true identity, is united with his ‘other half’ and can succeed to his father, to rule wisely over the kingdom he has redeemed.
The legend of Robin Hood again presents us with the picture of a kingdom – twelfth-century England – which has fallen under a terrible shadow. The true, just ruler of the kingdom, Richard, has disappeared abroad. In his absence his rule has been usurped by his wicked brother John, both weak and tyrannical. Power in the kingdom is no longer being exercised in a just or orderly fashion, and a symptom of this is the way the Norman barons abuse their position, behaving arbitrarily and heartlessly. Our attention focuses on one corner of the kingdom where one local Norman lord, the Sheriff of Nottingham, has become a particularly noxious Tyrant, and where the ordinary people, the Saxons, are reduced to fear and misery under his cruel sway.
But in the shadows cast by this dark figure – more precisely in the shadowy world of the great forest of Sherwood – a little community has gathered round the hero of the story. Robin Hood, half-Norman, half-Saxon (thus representing both parts of the divided kingdom), is the dispossessed orphan son of a great noble, the Earl of Huntingdon. Having lost his father in childhood, he has grown up to be confronted with the Dark Father/Tyrant figure of the Sheriff of Nottingham as his particular ‘dark opposite’. And he has now gathered round him a group of followers in the forest who represent a kind of ‘inferior kingdom’, under the rule of their shadowy ‘king’ Robin and his ‘queen’ Maid Marian. With their differentiation of skills and personalities, Little John, Will Scarlett, Friar Tuck and the rest add up to a kind of balanced community, an image of potential wholeness. But nothing about them is out in the open or properly resolved. They are outlaws, who can only show themselves to the outer world in disguise. Robin himself is having to live under an assumed name, disguising his true noble identity. We learn how he fell in love with Marian at an early stage in the story aud how they were almost married; but how, on the steps of the altar, their wedding was interrupted by the dark power, so that they are not yet properly and fully united (hence the fact that she is still a ‘Maid’). Yet we are in no doubt that Robin and his followers are figures of light. Robin is an outstanding leader, wholly a man; yet at one with his inner feminine, exercising his strength selflessly on behalf of the poor and oppressed. His loving Marian, with her skill as an archer, is a perfect anima-figure, both entirely feminine and yet with the inner strength of the masculine. In other words, Hood’s ‘inferior kingdom’ in the shadow-realm of the forest represents all the potential for wholeness and light which the upper-world kingdom in disarray so obviously lacks.
After many adventures which show Robin and his men gradually building up their power and determination in the shadow realm, the outlaw kingdom finally breaks out into the upper world and overthrows the Sheriff’s tyranny; at just the moment when the true king, Richard the Lionheart, returns from abroad to seize back his throne from his usurping brother. Robin and his men throw off their disguises, emerge into the light and are greeted with honour by their King. Robin himself can at last assume his true upper-world identity as Earl of Huntingdon and can be properly married at last to his Marian. Everything in the kingdom is back where it should be. Merrie England has been restored to itself.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, Peter Jackson’s imaginative three-part screen version of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings established itself as one of the most popular films ever made. One reason why we have not looked in detail before at this huge novel, originally conceived by Tolkien for his young son in the years around the Second World War, is that it is another instance of a story which is not shaped by a single basic plot but which contains elements of all seven woven together.
Tolkien’s story begins in the cosy, safe world of ‘the Shire’ – in many ways like an idealised rural England of the pre-machine age, with the innocence of childhood – where there live some little near-human creatures called hobbits. But the Shire is only, as it were, the brightly-lit foreground. Beyond it, chiefly to the east and south, stretches a vast, mysterious world from where a great shadow has lately been emerging.2 The ‘Dark Lord’, Sauron the Great, has taken up his abode again in the ‘Dark Tower’, in the far-off land of Mordor (with its echoes of mort, death). The shadow eventually lengthens as far as the Shire and the little hobbit-hero of the story, Frodo, receives the Call to a great Quest. There is a ring, of enormous magical power, but of ambivalent value: its power can be used both for good and ill, but mostly for ill. There is nothing in the world Sauron wishes to lay his hands on more, because it will make his power complete:
‘One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.’
Frodo’s task, laid on him by the old wizard Gandalf, who comes from the mysterious world beyond the Shire, is to make a long and perilous journey to the heart of distant Mordor, where he must throw the ring into a bottomless cleft in a great volcano, Mount Doom.
Such is the goal of Frodo’s quest, and the greater part of the story is taken up with his journey across the hazardous terrain to Mordor. This follows the usual Quest pattern. Frodo sets out with three hobbit companions, Merry, Pippin and his gardener, the faithful Sam Gamgee; and even before they have left the Shire, shadowed by the menacing ‘Black Riders’, they have already entered on that familiar Quest sequence of terrifying ordeals alternating with periods of respite and succour. They find allies to accompany them on the journey, until the ‘Company’ is nine strong, including representatives of all the races which inhabit the world of ‘Middle Earth’, an elf, a dwarf and two men, one of them the tall, mysterious ‘Strider’. They have to confront an amazing array of enemies and deadly monsters. They have many ‘thrilling escapes from death’. They meet with ‘helpers’, like the ‘Good King’ Elrond and Galadriel, the ‘Lady of Lorien’, ‘tall and white and fair’, ‘above all the jewels that lie beneath the earth’. They are also guided at crucial points by Gandalf, who even, for one stretch of the journey, becomes part of the Company, although he then plunges over an underground precipice to seeming destruction, locked in a death-grip with a particularly terrible monster, the Balrog (like Sherlock Holmes plunging with Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls). Eventually, like Holmes, Gandalf returns, in ghostly elusive form as the ‘White Rider’, to watch over the remainder of the Quest and even, at times, to intervene in the action.
Halfway through the journey, the Company is divided – and from now on the book itself splits, rather unmanageably, into two almost separate stories. One of these centres on Frodo the Ring-Bearer himself, with his faithful Sam, as they battle on alone across increasingly wild and menacing country towards the dark mountains which surround Mordor.3 Here, in the pattern of the Quest, they face their worst ordeals on the edge of the goal. They confront the fearful monster Shelob in a labyrinth of caves. Frodo is taken prisoner by the horrible Orcs, and is only released by Sam with the aid of ‘magic weapons’, the sword Sting and the ring itself which, among its other powers, can confer invisibility on its wearer, like Perseus’s helmet. Through all this second part of the journey they have been shadowed by the treacherous, ‘inferior’ little monster Gollum, the weak and pathetic ‘dark masculine’ having to act through the sly, pleading, self-pitiful manner of the ‘dark feminine’, in his obsessive desire to get hold of the ring. The third and last of their final ordeals comes when Frodo and Sam finally drag themselves up the slopes of the volcano to the Cracks of Doom. Gollum launches a last crazed assault, biting the ring off Frodo’s finger but immediately plunging with it to his death in the bottomless pit. The goal has been achieved. As Gandalf puts it ‘the Ring-bearer has fulfilled his Quest’.
But The Lord of the Rings is not just a Quest story. It is also an immense version of the Overcoming the Monster plot. Although the story teems with monsters and ‘dark figures’ of every description, Black Riders, the Barrowight, the Balrog, the dark wizard Saruman with his Orcs, Shelob and many others, they are all in the end agents of the supreme monster at the heart of it all: Sauron the Dark Lord of Mordor (his name, contrary to its pronunciation in the film-version, echoing ‘Saurian’, lizard-like, the ultimate prehistoric monster). He is portrayed as the ultimate source of everything that is menacing and deadly. Although we never see him directly, except as a great watching eye, he lies behind all the terrible things which happen in the story, all the threats, all the conspiracies. He is a supreme evocation of Evil. Seated in his Dark Tower, he is more than anything conjured up in imagery of darkness. Everything about him is dark, shadowy and powerful. He is Death. And the whole purpose of Frodo’s Quest is to overthrow his power.
The nearer Frodo gets to Mordor, the more he feels himself being drawn under Sauron’s spell through the ring, which is somehow intimately connected with Sauron. The ‘Dark Lord’s’ powers are on the move, threatening the whole world with destruction. It is into Sauron’s power that Frodo is falling when, as he feels himself being lulled and pulled from his purpose by the ring, he allows himself to be captured by the Orcs. But finally, when the ring disappears with Gollum into the Cracks of Doom, an incredible upheaval takes place throughout the world. It is clear that a cosmic victory has been won. The shadows recede. The black clouds lift. The forces of darkness are overthrown in all directions. Again, as Gandalf puts it, ‘the realm of Sauron is ended’. The monster has been overcome.
In this respect, however, we can also look on The Lord of the Rings as a mighty Rebirth story. The impression given throughout the story is of a world slipping further and further into the eternal winter of some deadly imprisonment. By his victory, Frodo has redeemed it. Spring returns. Life has been renewed. As they sing in Gondor at the news, ‘the tree that was withered shall be renewed, and he shall plant it in the high places, and the City shall be blessed. Sing all ye people!’
It is also a Voyage and Return story. We see Frodo and Sam, in a state of limited consciousness, setting out from their familiar little world into a much vaster, completely unfamiliar ‘other world’ which they do not really begin to understand. Although continually baffling, it is at first quite exhilarating; but the underlying shape of the story is of an ever-growing shadow threatening them, culminating in the nightmare of their journey across Mordor itself, surrounded by nameless horrors on all sides, until finally, on the topmost Crack of Doom, comes the ultimate ‘thrilling escape’. At which point Frodo and Sam can return with relief to the safe, familiar world of the Shire.
As, like other Voyage and Return heroes, they come back transformed, we can also see in the change that has come over Frodo and Sam, now called ‘Sam the Wise’, a version of the Rags to Riches story. The essence of this plot is that an outwardly unremarkable little figure, treated as of little account by those around him, should eventually reveal a much deeper and more extraordinary self within. This is precisely what has happened to Frodo and his companion. Initially they are very ordinary little characters. But as the story progresses they reveal undreamed-of depths of courage, ingenuity and steadfastness, until by the end they have been transfigured into great heroes.
By its nature The Lord of the Rings cannot be centrally a Tragedy. But certainly we see the basic plot of Tragedy unfolding in the fate of one character, the ‘dark wizard’ Saruman, Gandalf’s alter-ego, who had once been endowed with great magical powers for good but then perverted by the influence of Sauron. As the story develops we see this immensely powerful figure becoming more and more frustrated, until, in the nightmare of his master Sauron’s overthrow, he journeys to the Shire to make a last pitiful bid, as Avenger, to create havoc. Here he is finally turned on and killed by his sly companion Wormtongue, who in the nick of time has made the switch from ‘dark’ to ‘light’.
Thus six of the seven great themes we looked at earlier can all be seen unfolding simultaneously in the main plot of The Lord of the Rings. But we may then note two odd things about the story.
The first, very unusually, is that it is a Quest explicitly not to win some great prize, but to get rid of something, to throw something away. The explanation of this lies in the nature of the ‘treasure’ which has to be thrown away, the ring. The whole point of the ring – as in that other pseudo-mythic story centred on the appeal of a magical ring which confers enormous power on anyone who possesses it, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen – is that, despite its immense value and magical properties, it is ultimately a very dangerous and dark object.4 Not only is it intimately connected with the ‘Dark Lord’ Sauron, but if he can get hold of it, the world is lost. It is in fact a symbol not of wholeness but of the ego, tempting anyone who possesses it to dreams of infinite power. No one realises this more clearly than those two great figures of ‘light’ in the story, Gandalf and Galadriel, the Wise Old Man and the Anima. Both are themselves momentarily tempted to possess the ring, although each has enough self-knowledge to recognise just how disastrous this would be. Frodo alone has been chosen to carry the ring, despite his frailty, because he is sufficiently awed by the solemn task which has been laid upon him not to fall prey to such temptation. And when the ring is finally returned to the depths of the earth whence it came, the world is restored to life and wholeness because the ego has at last merged back into union with the Self.5
The other odd thing about Frodo’s story is that when his Quest is concluded there is one supremely important element missing. There is no heroine, no ‘Princess’, no ‘other half’ to make him whole. This is part of the reason why he cannot ultimately seem a complete character, and why there is a strong sense of something missing about the story in general and his character in particular. He remains somehow unfulfilled, not fully developed, a hobbit rather than a man.
Nevertheless it would be surprising, where an author’s imagination has been so profoundly stirred by so much of the basic material out of which stories are spun, if this enormously important element were not present somewhere in the story, and of course it is. The story’s one hero of real majestic stature is the figure we first meet as the mysterious ‘Strider’, who then reveals himself, tall, strong and with ‘a keen, commanding’ light in his eyes, as ‘Aragorn, son of Arathorn’, descended from a long line of kings. Here is the one figure in the story of whom we can say that he is cast in truly heroic proportions, and so compelling did this become to Tolkien as the story unfolded in his imagination that he eventually separated Aragorn from his original hero Frodo, and found himself drawn into what amounted to a huge sub-plot, incidental to the main story, to allow him to follow the story of his new ‘hero’ to its proper conclusion.
It is this which accounts for the somewhat disconcerting way in which, at the point where Frodo and Sam begin their final approaches to Mordor, the book splits into two almost separate stories. For a long time, as the two of them set off in one direction and the remainder of the Company in another, it is not easy to hold the whole story together. We follow the immense drama which surrounds the capture of Merry and Pippin by the Orcs, the siege of Helm’s Deep, its rescue by Gandalf and the Riders of Rohan, the rescue of Merry and Pippin by Treebeard and his walking forest of Ents, followed by their flooding of Saruman’s grim city of Isengard round its dark tower. But the full significance of all this is not really clear, until at last a central new story-line emerges to run in parallel with the closing stages of Frodo’s Quest. When it does, we see it taking on a very familiar shape.
We are introduced to a kingdom in disarray, Gondor, with its capital Minas Tirith, ruled by a weak regent because its ‘true king’ is absent, and therefore unable to withstand for much longer the attacks of the dark power emanating from Mordor. But in the shadows beyond the city walls, salvation is approaching, in the shape of Aragorn and his allies. We have already seen Aragorn in an increasingly heroic light, from his part in the siege of Helm’s Deep. We now learn that this mysterious wanderer is in fact Gondor’s true king. In the nick of time he throws off his disguise, emerging like Odysseus in royal majesty. He saves his city and redeems his kingdom. Aragorn’s story then ends in his marriage to the beautiful Elvish Princess Arwen Evenstar.
In this sense, as the hero emerges from the twilight of disguise and obscured identity to his final glorious union with a heroine whose name indicates that she is all light, the book also contains elements of the seventh plot, Comedy. Yet the fact that Aragorn’s own drama unfolds in a sense off centre-stage, and that it is not he but the much more limited, child-like Frodo who is the central figure of the book, leaves us at the end with the sense that there is still something lacking and that, for all its splendours, The Lord of the Rings is not a fully integrated, grown-up story.
What is interesting, in the context of our present concerns, is that a story which was originally conceived to entertain a child, and therefore had a rather child-like hero, should eventually have aroused in its author’s unconscious all those deeper elements which are necessary to bring a story to the complete archetypal happy ending – showing a hero who has attained to complete maturity being united with his ‘Princess’ and succeeding to a kingdom. But this required the emergence of a new hero, equipped to become fully a man, because the original hero could never really develop into anything more than a child. Which is why, at the end of the book, Frodo departs for the Isles of the Blest across the western sea, still in the company of Gandalf: the father he could never himself become.
The examples we have so far looked at in this chapter all belong to the type of story we are likely to encounter in the earlier stages of life, where the hero or heroine are shown as pitted against dark forces centred outside them. Only later do we come more consistently to stories which present the drama from that other perspective which shows the hero or heroine having to contend with the same dark forces within themselves. In Peer Gynt, for instance – another story shaped by elements of all the seven basic plots – we saw how the dark figures the hero encounters at the beginning, the Dark King of the Trolls and the Temptress Woman in Green, are personifications of the dark powers which then come to possess the hero himself through almost the whole of the story. His real problem is to find that wider vision which will liberate him from his own monstrous and blind egotism, from the double grip of the ‘dark masculine’ and the ‘dark feminine’ which is separating him from the Self; until he is finally brought to that deeper state of consciousness, and the story can end on the image of Peer united with his anima Solveig, ‘light masculine’ and ‘light feminine’ in perfect balance.
In fact all archetypal stories – whether the darkness is shown as outside the central figure or within – are really preoccupied with the hero or heroine’s inner state. By the principle of the ‘unrealised value’, their battles with the external world are merely reflections of what is going on inside them, and we never see them satisfactorily overcoming the darkness outside them until they have eliminated the darkness within.
A story explicitly concerned to make precisely this point is that great seventeenth-century Spanish novel Don Quixote. The whole purpose of Cervantes’s tale is to show the foolishness of a man who projects onto the outside world the struggle which should be fought inside him. Don Quixote is a man in middle life who for years has been obsessed with chivalric romances, stories of knights engaged in derring-do to save damsels in distress (the equivalent of the James Bond stories of our own time), without understanding their inner meaning. Full of blind and silly egotism, he decides to become a knight himself. He dedicates himself to the ‘service’ of a local girl, La Dulcinea Tobosa, as an external projection of his anima, takes up a rusty lance, as a projection of his masculinity, and rides out into the world to challenge all the powers of evil that he can find. But of course these manifestations of the dark power are purely illusory, projections of his own fantasies, as when he attacks the windmills imagining them to be hostile giants.
It is only after he has wandered through the world for a long time as an absurdly self-deceiving idiot (as is only too apparent to almost everyone he meets) that he finally recognises the central truth which has been eluding him all along: that all the blindness and egotism which he has been projecting onto the ‘enemies’ outside him are in fact his own problem. In the closing pages of the book, he flings away the silly romances which have snared him into such a false perspective and repents of his idiocy. He has at last won true self-knowledge, he has come to ‘see whole’. And at this point, transformed from the foolish Don Quixote into ‘Don Alonso the Good’, he dies in old age, at peace with himself and all the world.
At the end of The Lord of the Rings Frodo disappears into the sunset, still led by the Wise Old Man he could never become himself. Don Quixote at least attains to the beginning of wisdom just before his death. One of the few stories in the world which concentrate on the process of a hero actually being transformed into a Wise Old Man, representing the most complete state of maturity and inner development a man can reach, is the last complete play written by Shakespeare.
In The Tempest we are again confronted by the image of a kingdom where something has gone horribly amiss, where the true ruler is absent and where power has been usurped by his weak, tyrannical brother: even though, in the play itself, we do not actually see this ‘upper world’ in disarray at all. In this, the most inward of all Shakespeare’s plays, we follow events entirely in the shadowy ‘inferior’ (or interior) realm, where, after many years, we see the forces of light at last constellating to put the world to rights.
The first image in the play, giving it the immediate feel of a Voyage and Return story, is of the group of characters from the sick ‘upper world’, the usurping Duke Antonio, his equally dark friend King Alonso and their followers, tumbling suddenly and violently into the ‘inferior realm’ as their ship is wrecked on Prospero’s island. Here wait the denizens of the lower world to put them through the ordeals which will transform them: above all Prospero himself, who was exiled by Antonio from his proper state as the true Duke of Milan. Now, after years of study and inward growth, Prospero has been almost completely transformed into a Wise Old Man; and with him we see his gentle daughter Miranda, a perfect, loving symbol of the anima. But even in Prospero’s shadow-kingdom all is not yet fully redeemed and brought to the light, as we see from the shambling, shadowy presence of Caliban, son of the Dark Mother and Witch Sycorax. Prospero himself still has to make the last moves which will bring him back to his full state of kingship in the upper world. He still, in contrast to the innocent, compassionate Miranda, has some anger against those who have wronged him. Equally, among the upper world figures who have now fallen into Prospero’s power, not all are wholly dark: they include two light figures, the Son-Hero Ferdinand, and the faithful old courtier Gonzalo, who had been responsible for saving Prospero and Miranda from death all those years before, and who himself observes the drama through sage eyes as a second Wise Old Man.
The first move in the great process of transformation which is now set in motion is the bringing together of the two representatives of the rising generation, Ferdinand and Miranda, a Prince and a Princess. In the instant burgeoning of pure, innocent love between them we see the first promise of hope and new life for the future. But before that can be realised, the whole complex of disordered relationships involving the older generation must be unknotted and brought into their proper life-giving state. The real problem which has to be sorted out is the chief source of the sickness and disorder, centred in the two dark kings, Antonio and Alonso. These, by the double-negative, are the ‘dark Opposites’ to the hero Prospero himself, symbolising all that holds him back from his own state of wholeness. And the key figure in the drama now becomes his servant Ariel.
Described by Prospero as ‘my tricksy spirit’, Ariel is the elusive, mischievous Trickster, whose archetypal role in stories is to stir up and bewilder people who are set in one mode of consciousness into another. Dancing round like a will-o’-the-wisp, using his magical powers, he convinces them that they are no longer sure of anything. He teases them out of their existing state of mind: firstly, into what seems like a state of madness, where nothing is any longer certain; but eventually into seeing the world straight and whole again.
Such is Ariel’s role in The Tempest. First, by a bewildering display of tricks, visions and mysterious music, he drives the dark figures into a state of desperation. Then he confronts them with the reality of their terrible crime, the usurpation of Prospero, with the hint that such a crime must lead to death. ‘You among men being most unfit to live’ he tells them, ‘I have made you mad; and even with such-like valour, men hang and drown their proper selves’. In other words, the heart of their crime is that they have not been true to their proper selves; they have violated the Self. Finally, as the horror of what they have done begins to sink in on them, Prospero confronts them and this shock – for they thought he was dead – is enough for them to beg for mercy and forgiveness. At the point where Prospero does forgive them, he at last reaches wholeness, as he emerges in his true upper world identity to reassume sovereignty over his rightful kingdom. Gonzalo rubs in the message that the whole effect of the adventure had been to bring everyone back to their proper selves, after a time when ‘no man was his own’.
At last the young Son-Hero and Daughter-Heroine, Ferdinand and Miranda, can step to the centre of the stage, truly united, with the blessing of their fathers Alonso and Prospero. The royal road to the future is open and assured. And now that the real hero of the story, Prospero himself, has become whole, his kingdom fully redeemed, even the gross, drunken Caliban, the animal-man who has understood nothing (the very opposite of a Wise Old Man, and therefore Prospero’s other ‘dark opposite’ in the play) has been swept up in the general redemption and says ‘I will be wise hereafter and seek for grace’. Prospero ends alone in the middle of the stage, having completed his great spiritual work, which has all been ultimately concerned with the putting right of his own ‘inner kingdom’. He is utterly drained and left in a state of complete religious humility: ‘now my charms are all o’erthrown ... and my ending is despair, unless I be relieved by prayer’.
Thus in effect did Shakespeare conclude his own immense inner journey, reflected stage by stage through all the unfolding sequence of his plays. He could now retire from the world to end his days quietly in Stratford where he had begun. Like Prospero, he had reached his goal.
There is no more appropriate story to conclude this summing-up of the principles which guide stories to a happy ending than the magical opera which Mozart wrote in the closing months of his own life in 1791, to a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. No story in the world lays out the essence of the archetypal family drama more completely or economically than The Magic Flute.
The plot is dominated by four characters: a Father-figure, Lord Sarastro; a Mother-figure, the Queen of the Night; a Son-Hero, Tamino; and a Daughter-Heroine, Pamina. Dressed in symbolic terms, The Magic Flute portrays all the key stages of a man’s inner psychological development, from the moment of his birth, through his gradual enlightenment, to the point where he is at last consciously whole.
The opera begins with the young hero, Prince Tamino, being propelled violently onto the stage by a terrifying serpent. He falls helpless and unconscious to the ground. The serpent is killed by three ladies who look down at the boy adoringly and leave to tell their mistress, the Queen, of his arrival. Tamino then wakes up and finds himself in a wholly unfamiliar world. The first person he meets is the strange figure of the bird-catcher Papageno, covered in feathers. Tamino discloses that his father is a great king who rules over ‘many lands and peoples’. But all this now seems very far away, and he is baffled by Papageno who seems to know nothing of who his own parents are, or where he comes from; merely that he lives ‘by eating and drinking’ and that he obtains his food by catching birds and presenting them to the mysterious ruler of this country, the Queen of the Night, whom he has never seen but who rewards him by giving him all he needs.
What we have seen so far is Tamino, as Everyman, enacting his birth into the world. Initially unconscious, like any newborn baby, he is surrounded, like any baby at its birth, by the joyful female presence of those who have assured his safe arrival. He then emerges to consciousness to find, again like any baby, that this new world he has entered is dominated by nature and instinct. To personify this is the role of Papageno, who describes himself as ‘a child of nature’. Throughout the story he represents the unthinking, instinctive existence of someone very little different from the birds and animals, and who aspires to no higher state of consciousness or understanding. He simply depends on ‘the Queen’ to supply all his needs, as an animal depends instinctively on ‘Mother Nature’. But Tamino’s destiny is to be very different.
At this point the three ladies return to tell Tamino that their mysterious Queen is pleased with him and has a great task for him to perform. She has a beautiful daughter, the Princess Pamina. They show Tamino her picture, and he is at once smitten with love (‘O image, angel-like and fair, no mortal can with thee compare’). Then, with three rolls of thunder, the Queen herself appears and tells Tamino how her beloved daughter has been abducted by an ‘evil fiend’. Pamina has fallen into the clutches of the terrible Sarastro, and it is Tamino’s task to release her from this imprisonment. The Queen then vanishes, but her ladies present Tamino, to aid him in his task, with the magic flute, which has the power to transform human passions from dark to light (‘whene’er this power is asserted, all human passions are converted, the saddest man to smile will learn, the coldest heart with love will burn’).
So far the imposing figure of the mysterious, kindly Queen seems the most light figure in the story. As a loving Mother she is the chief representative of the feminine in Tamino’s life, and she has awoken his own inner feminine by sowing in his heart the desire for the anima-figure Pamina, whom he yearns for more than anything in the world. Like many young heroes, Tamino thus finds himself enjoying a good relationship with ‘Mother’ but aware that, to make him complete, he must one day be united with his own feminine ‘other half’; and that she languishes in the grim clutches of a tyrannical male. Thus does the Dark Father enter as the main shadow over Tamino’s future; and his only talisman in the great ordeal which lies ahead is the magic flute itself, as a symbol of the sovereign power of the Self to turn darkness into light.
Tamino sets off full of resolve to challenge the Tyrant in his lair and is separated from Papageno. We then for the first time see the lovely Pamina, and realise with horror that she is about to be brutally ravished by Sarastro’s servant, the shadowy Moor, Monostatos. In the nick of time she is saved by the intervention of Papageno, who tells her about Tamino and his love for her. Meanwhile Tamino himself approaches Sarastro’s dark temple and demands entry. ‘Is this Sarastro’s realm of terror?’ he demands at the door. He is told that it is a ‘temple of wisdom’, but does not believe it. He shouts that he hates Sarastro for ever, as ‘a tyrant and foe of men’.
At this point the shadow of the ‘dark masculine’ over the story reaches its height. We have seen the heroine about to be violated by the ‘dark masculine’ Monostatos, who represents the dark side of ‘natural man’ just as Papageno represents his light aspect. Indeed, for the moment, it is the impulsive intervention of the instinctively good-hearted Papageno which saves her. But Pamina is still a prisoner of Monostatos’s far more terrible master Sarastro, and Tamino himself, as he stands at the temple gate, even believes that she must be already dead.
Now comes the dramatic reversal which gives this story its extraordinary psychological profundity. In musically one of the most moving moments of the opera, ‘mysterious voices’ from within the temple assure him that she is still alive. ‘She lives, she lives’ he exclaims in almost disbelieving relief; and the music conveys the sense of life flooding back into him. At his moment of greatest despair we can feel the life-giving anima stirring within him (much as, in Beethoven’s Fidelio, we see the despairing prisoner Florestan joyfully returning to life when, in the gloom of his dungeon, he disbelievingly senses the presence of his ‘angel Leonora’). Gradually the awe-inspiring air of the temple is beginning to sow doubts that Sarastro is quite the figure of total darkness he has been painted. Then, heralded by a solemn chorus in praise of his wisdom, we for the first time meet Sarastro himself. Pamina throws herself at his feet, begging for mercy and to be allowed to return to her mother; but Sarastro firmly explains he cannot release her, for her own good. If he had left her with her mother ‘what would become of truth and right?’ The Queen of the Night is ‘all too proud. By man your course must be decided. For by herself a woman steps beyond her sphere and is misguided.’
This is the crux of the story. What Sarastro is saying is that, to bring about true human wholeness, the instinctive feminine value on its own is not enough. It must be strengthened, disciplined, given a firm framework of rational understanding by the masculine value: this is the only way that true wisdom and higher consciousness can be reached. Up to now we have seen the feminine value uppermost, as Tamino is in the familiar position of closeness to the feminine value represented by the Mother and hostility to the masculine values represented by the Father. But now the balance has to be redressed. Tamino has to realise his full masculinity. He therefore now begins to see the masculine values represented by Sarastro as light, as Sarastro becomes the Father-figure and Wise Old Man guiding him to his goal. Meanwhile the Queen of the Night, representing the natural world of unconscious dependence on instinct, switches over to become the chief dark figure through the rest of the story; because she now stands for the infantile state of dependence which is the chief thing Tamino has to escape from if he is to reach real self-knowledge and autonomy. Such is the theme of the second and final act.
To emphasise this, Act Two is almost entirely dominated by the contrast between Tamino and Papageno. Sarastro has set them a series of tests to prove their steadfastness and self-control. On each occasion Tamino passes the test triumphantly, emerging as a true man. Papageno, on the other hand, representing the instinctive impulsiveness of nature, fails miserably. He has no self-discipline and therefore never comes to any real understanding or higher state of consciousness; even though he is eventually rewarded, in the way of nature, with a little feathered and good-natured ‘other half’, Papagena, just like himself. And their only joint thought, in the way of nature, is to reproduce and to bring into the world dozens of little Papagenos and Papagenas.6
But for Tamino a very different destiny is in store, because he represents man who has truly risen above the state of nature, to the very highest state a man can aspire to. As we see him refined by his series of ordeals into a strong, austere, self-disciplined figure, entirely true to the great ego-transcending cause to which he has dedicated himself, he is at last united with his Pamina. They go through the final ordeal, the opposites of fire and water, together, showing that they have transcended all opposites and achieved a state of total unity: not just on an instinctive level, like Papageno and Papagena, but in full conscious understanding of their union with the unseen mystery of creation itself. Tamino has at last attained to the full state of wisdom.
At this point, in a rocky landscape in the darkness, we see the dark forces of nature, the Queen of the Night now allied with Monostatos, preparing to make their last terrifying assault on the Temple of Wisdom. Amid the raging of a great storm we see them plunging to destruction. Out of the darkness Sarastro’s temple reappears as ‘the Temple of the Sun’ and he himself sings ‘the sun’s radiant glory has vanquished the night, the powers of darkness have yielded to light’. The magical notes of the flute have finally led us up to a perfect image of the consciously-realised Self.
Although it may be easy to be misled by the playful way The Magic Flute comes over almost like a pantomime, this is to miss the psychological subtlety with which the opera is constructed. Symbolically it finds a uniquely ingenious way to encompass both the light and dark aspects of ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ in the archetypal family drama, as it presents such a luminous account of a man travelling the full road of inner human development, from birth to complete maturity.
In this second part of the book we have concentrated on the central drama of storytelling as it unfolds to its most positive conclusion. But what of those countless stories which are exceptions to this pattern; where the outcome is nothing like so happy or so certain?
We must now turn to the other face of storytelling: to consider all those types of story which show the hero or the heroine in one way or another not managing to reach the central goal. Here we shall see that, far from being a different kind of story altogether, such stories are rooted in precisely the same central drama we have been looking at. Nothing is more revealing of the unconscious rules which govern the way stories take shape in the human imagination than their unfailing consistency.