‘Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight.’
Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
We end this second part of the book by looking again at the plot of Tragedy. Of the seven plots we looked at in Part One, one stood very obviously as the odd man out. Six lead naturally to a happy ending. Only Tragedy seems to stand at the opposite pole of storytelling, as it brings its central figure to a lonely, violent death. But when we return to it in the context of all that has emerged in recent chapters, we can see what is really going on in a Tragedy in a rather different light.
What is it that brings the hero or heroine of a Tragedy so inexorably to catastrophe? The first people consciously to ask this question were the ancient Greeks; and they had no doubt that all the great tragic figures in their mythology had something profoundly in common. They called it hubris, which we usually interpret as a form of overweaning pride, a reckless arrogance. But the literal derivation of hubris was from the word hyper, meaning ‘over’. It meant a ‘stepping over the bounds’, a defiance of the cosmic order, that state of perfect balance which ultimately holds the universe together (characterised in the motto ‘nothing in excess’, written up over the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the most sacred spot in the Greek world). By the rule of that same balance, anything which disturbed it would eventually meet with a violent shock as the state of balance and order was restored. The inevitable consequence of hubris was nemesis, from the root nemein, to ‘allot a due portion’, the same root from which sprang nomos, ‘law’. Literally, nemesis was the ‘due portion’ required to restore the equilibrium of the cosmic order when it had been unbalanced by an act of hubris.
But the Greeks went further than this in providing a general answer to the question of why the tragic hero must come to ultimate disaster. As Aristotle put it in a famous passage in the Poetics, there was a specific reason why the heroes and heroines of tragedy – Prometheus, Oedipus, Medea, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra – should fall prey to hubris in the first place. The essence of a tragic hero or heroine, said Aristotle, is that they must not be shown as wholly good or bad, but that they must be shown as being brought from ‘prosperity to misery’ through some ‘fatal flaw’. And the Greek word for this was hamartia, which means literally ‘missing the mark’, as an arrow fails to reach its target. The fatal flaw in the tragic hero or heroine is that deficiency in their character or awareness which prevents them from ‘reaching the goal’.1
In other words, the very nature of the ‘fatal flaw’ in these central figures of tragedy is that it is something which renders them unable to ‘succeed’, a word we use in two senses. The first means simply ‘to be successful’, as in reaching a goal of any kind. But we also use the word more precisely in the sense of people succeeding to their parents, succeeding to an inheritance, one generation following or succeeding to another. And through stories we can see how originally our two uses of the word were one. Those who truly ‘succeed’ in life are those who succeed in both senses: they reach the central goal of life which is true maturity, as they develop to the point where they can play their proper role in the succession of one generation to another.
The essence of the tragic hero or heroine, in short, is that they are held back by some fatal flaw or weakness from reaching that state of perfect balance which is presented by stories as the supreme goal of human existence. They are doomed to fall short of the goal because in some way they are stuck in a state of incompleteness or immaturity.
A simple example of this is seen in the myth of Icarus. We see Daedalus, in his light aspect as the ideal wise Father, telling his son that in order to hold onto life he must keep in a state of perfect balance. He must keep precisely between the opposites, by flying neither too high nor too low, because either will lead to disaster. But the immature boy is carried away by his egotism into imbalance and one-sidedness. Puffed up by his power to fly, he falls into the state of hubris, the cosmic pride which is the essence of egocentricity. Hubris defies the supreme law of balance and proportion which governs everything in the universe, and the inter-relatedness of all its parts. Blinded by the limitations of ego-consciousness to the sustaining framework of the laws of nature, out of harmony with the totality of which he is a part, Icarus recklessly flies up too near the sun, his wings fall off, and he plunges back into the sea of unconsciousness and death. In every sense he is ‘the boy hero who cannot grow up’.
The story of Icarus might thus be regarded as a pure distillation of the spirit of Tragedy. But usually, of course, the events of Tragedy are set in a more social context. Indeed we see them rooted in precisely that same web of basic human relationships with which we are now familiar, in the archetypal family drama. The moment has come to see how the patterns of Tragedy relate directly to the central drama we have seen emerging in the last few chapters.
To understand the essence of what is happening in Tragedy we must recall the two great principles of the Self which guide a light hero to the ultimate goal. He must show himself as perfectly balanced. Firstly he must be strong, in the positive masculine sense which gives him sovereignty over himself and proper authority over others. It is this which enables him at last to succeed to the ‘kingdom’. Secondly he must be open to the feminine: that which connects him with the world outside him and with feeling for others. It is this which enables him at last to be fully united with the heroine. It is the balance between these things which allows him ultimately to reach the goal.
But what happens if a hero remains centred not in the Self but on the ego? Firstly, his masculine strength, instead of being turned inward to give him control over himself and his appetites, is turned outward. It becomes merely an egocentric desire to win power, to assert himself over others. Secondly, his inner feminine, that which connects him to others, instead of expressing itself in selfless, unbounded love, turns into the selfish, exclusive love of passion or erotic desire. The egocentric hero is still driven by the urge to reach a goal: indeed this is the very definition of the tragic hero, as he finds the Focus for his dark desires. And when we look at the nature of his goal we see how it invariably corresponds in an outward way to that of the hero who is centred in the Self. He may wish to win power, to rule over a ‘kingdom’, like Macbeth or Richard III. He may feel the overwhelming urge to be united with an obsessively desired ‘other half’, like Humbert Humbert or Don Giovanni. But because he wants to achieve his goal for egocentric reasons the jigsaw no longer fits together.
This is what Tragedy is really about. It shows us the hero or heroine trying to achieve the goal but in the wrong way. Because of that ‘fatal flaw’ they are unable to succeed. In fact Tragedy shows us everything we have become familiar with in the type of story which comes to a happy ending, but in an inverted form. The light hero is drawn up to his ultimate goal and finally liberated, by a balance between light masculine and light feminine. The dark hero is possessed and drawn downwards by the dark masculine and the dark feminine. Instead of seeing the world whole, the right way up, he is drawn into seeing it upside down, by that dark inversion which turns light into dark and dark into light: so that the people he is most obviously turned against are the very people who represent those values of the Self which he should be realising in himself. What we see in Tragedy, in short, is an exact reversal of the pattern which leads to wholeness. And if we recall the essential moves the light hero has to make to bring him to the Self, we can see how the plot of Tragedy shows each of them in a negative form.
The light hero is confronted by one or more of a series of dark figures, the ‘shadow family’, whom he must resist or overcome in order to emerge fully and wholly into the light. He must escape the clutches of the Dark Mother, representing the ‘dark feminine’; he must overcome the Dark Father, representing the ‘dark masculine’; he may then have to overcome each of these challenges again, in the shape of the Dark Rival and the Dark Other Half – until finally, having confronted each test in the right way, he can reach the supreme goal. He can be fully united with his ‘light other half’, the anima, and succeed to the kingdom.
In Tragedy we see a complete inversion of this scenario. When the tragic hero is confronted by the ‘dark feminine’ (or by the Tempter, who represents the ‘dark feminine’ in masculine guise), he does not resist: he succumbs, and falls fatally under its emasculating spell. If his masculine strength does emerge, it can only be in the inferior form of the ‘dark masculine’, compelling him to the loveless pursuit of power and domination over others. And as we saw earlier, there is then a familiar set of light figures who are most likely to be the tragic hero’s chief victims on his downward course:
(1) first there is the Good Old Man, whom we can now see as the ‘light Father’ or ‘good King’, representing mature and positive masculine authority: the very thing the hero should be realising in himself;
(2) then there is the ‘light Rival’ or ‘light Alter-Ego’, who corresponds to the hero in some way, as in terms of age, status or situation, but who is positive where the hero is negative, and thus his ‘light Opposite’;
(3) above all there is the Innocent Young Girl, his ‘Good Angel’ or ‘light Other Half’, representing the supreme value of the ‘light feminine’: except that in Tragedy she is not sufficiently powerful or well-developed to sway the hero and turn him back towards the light. She is the figure whom we shall see, where the hero himself is not fully developed, as the ‘inadequate’ or ‘infantile anima ’.
Nothing more tellingly reflects the course of the tragic hero’s inward spiritual disintegration than the way, when he is confronted by any of these light figures, or each of them in turn, he either kills or brutally rejects them. Each time he does so, he is in effect killing or rejecting that aspect of himself. Thus does he remain locked into the basic situation of the weak, immature hero, bewitched by the dark feminine, who cannot grow up. He turns on one component of his psychic kingdom after another, extinguishing the light, until the darkness finally kills his soul and he plunges to destruction.
As we saw earlier, Comedy is in a sense the most comprehensive of the ‘light’ plots because it can be used to encompass all or any of the various strands in the complex process whereby the archetypal family drama is brought to its proper light conclusion. Similarly Tragedy encompasses such a varied range of stories because it can reflect in so many different ways the same complex process in reverse, each individual story giving its own emphasis to different aspects of the same basic overall pattern. This is why Comedy and Tragedy have occupied such a special place in storytelling, because of all the plots they are the most all-encompassing in their ability to present the light and dark aspects of the archetypal drama.
The time has come to look again at some of the very different stories shaped by the plot of Tragedy we considered earlier, to see how these principles work in practice.
Since, by definition, all tragic heroes suffer from a fatal weakness, there are not all that many tragedies which show us a hero who, at least outwardly, seems initially to be strong in masculine terms, a successful leader of men, happy in the exercise of authority. An obvious example of such a hero is Macbeth.
At the beginning of the play we see Macbeth as a victorious general, apparently a strong man at one with the world. Behind this manly facade, however, all is not as it seems. Even before Macbeth appears, we have already seen, lying in wait for him in the darkness, the three ‘black and midnight hags’, with their occult powers and knowledge, personifications of the inner ‘dark feminine’ which is to be his downfall. From their dark, inferior realm ‘beyond the light’, they catch Macbeth on his hidden weak spot, arousing his ambitions and his ego. At this stage the upper world kingdom, under the rule of Duncan and his loyal general Macbeth, is still light. The darkness is all in the inferior realm. Indeed at first Macbeth is disposed to dismiss the witches’ prophecy that he might one day be king himself. It is as though a tempting thought had floated up from his unconscious, only to be pushed away by his conscious mind as too improbable to be taken seriously. But then, almost casually, in a letter to his wife, Macbeth passes the infection on: and through her the poison of the dark feminine returns to tempt him much more strongly, sapping his manly will and sense of propriety. Gradually he succumbs to the temptation, although not without a struggle. Even on the verge of the fatal act, the killing of the ‘good King’ Duncan, Macbeth is still wrestling with his soul. But once the awful deed is done, he is immediately drawn, like many another tragic hero, into further crimes in an attempt to cover up the first – beginning with the murder of the sleeping grooms. As an outwardly strong man now inwardly in the grip of the dark feminine, Macbeth is already turning into a ‘dark King’ or Tyrant.
At this point the dark power has passed into dominance on the upper level, taking the kingdom into its grip; and the potential light forces – Duncan’s sons Malcolm and Donalbain fleeing into exile into England – are beginning to be polarised into the inferior or shadow realm. Gradually Banquo emerges from the growing darkness as Macbeth’s ‘light Rival’: his fellow general whose descendants, the witches promised, would one day occupy the throne instead of Macbeth. As Banquo’s suspicion grows, Macbeth lashes out and kills his ‘light Alter-Ego’. The result is that the most powerful figure still remaining in the kingdom, Macduff, abandons Macbeth and flees to join Malcolm in England, as Macbeth’s new, much more menacing ‘light Rival’ or ‘light Opposite’. The hero’s only response is to lash out in even greater desperation by ordering the killing of Lady Macduff and her children.
Macbeth has now committed three major crimes. First, as Predator, he has killed the ‘good King’. Second, as Holdfast, to secure his position, he has killed the ‘light Rival’. Thirdly, as Avenger, he has killed the ‘light feminine’ and the Child. We now see how, as the trigger to final transformation, the Rule of Three can work downwards as well as upwards. Having killed off all the chief light components of his kingdom on the upper level – or driven them into the inferior realm as exiles – Macbeth’s third dark act precipitates him into the Nightmare Stage. Firstly he has to watch powerless as his ‘other half’, Lady Macbeth, disintegrates through madness to ‘dusty death’. Secondly, now irretrievably cut off from the Self, he himself moves into a twilight where he sees the universe and life as utterly meaningless, ‘signifying nothing’. Lastly the forces of light – led by the now-towering figure of Macduff, and the son-king Malcolm who is destined to succeed – re-emerge into the upper realm, by invading Scotland and closing in to extinguish Macbeth’s life forever.
The story of Faustus is that of the most brilliant man of his age who gained a great reputation for learning until the moment when:
‘swol’n with cunning, of a self conceit,
his waxen wings did mount above his reach,
and melting, heaven conspir’d his overthrow.’
The super-intellectual Faustus is not physically powerful or a leader of men, like Macbeth. In manly terms he is essentially weak. Such strength as he has is all in the mind. But, cut off from his fellow men by his life of abstract speculation and disputation, the desire creeps up on Faustus for limitless power and knowledge, so that ‘all things that move between the quiet poles shall be at my command’. What he dreams of, in compensation for his weakness, are the two aspects of the masculine value, power and knowledge. But he desires them only to gratify his ego and to assert himself against the world. There is no sign in Faustus of the rooting feminine that might connect him with other people or with the reality of the world outside himself. And where the light feminine is lacking, only the vacuum of the dark feminine remains. Through this void the Tempter Mephistopheles enters to offer him the treacherous bargain, a fantasy of omnipotence and omniscience in return for his soul. No sooner has the battle between the ‘Good Angel’ and the ‘Evil Angel’ for the hero’s soul been lost, than it begins to become clear that the powers Faustus has been given are nothing more than empty illusions, such as being allowed to play silly irreverent tricks on the Pope, who as the ‘Holy Father’ is symbolically an aspect of the Self.
Finally Faustus conceives his supreme desire to make love to the most beautiful woman who ever lived, Helen of Troy. She appears and he dreams that she is his immortal ‘other half’, his anima – ‘Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss’. But when he does kiss her – ‘her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies’. The most famous lines of the play, ‘was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burn’t the topless towers of Ilium’, have already warned us that Helen is no light figure but the terrible Temptress, luring men on to war and destruction. And no sooner is their brief, empty love-making over (with a ‘wise old man’ coming on to pronounce Faustus’s doom) than the hero is plunged firmly into the Nightmare Stage, when he realises that all is now irretrievably lost. He is about to pay the price of eternal punishment in hell.
The extraordinary fame of the Jekyll and Hyde story rests on the unforgettably vivid way in which it exemplifies another general characteristic of the tragic hero, which is the split between the respectable, seemingly light persona he turns to the outer world and the hidden ‘lower self’ representing the deformed state of humanity when it is centred not on the Self but on the ego. All tragic heroes and heroines display some version of such a split, but in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde it becomes the central theme of the story. The point about Mr Hyde is that we are not told a great deal about his particular sins: he is merely portrayed as a monstrous, totally egocentric creature who knows no bounds, feels no scruples, whose sole motivation is the gratification of the ego in flouting all the values of the Self. Hyde is a personification of the ‘ego self’ or ‘fantasy self’, the essence of the untrammelled ego when it is split off from the Self and turned against the light.
Initially, so long as the respectable Dr Jekyll retains his power to switch back whenever he wishes into his outer or upper world persona, Hyde only emerges in secret, at night, hidden away from the world in the inferior realm. But the more Jekyll gives way to his fantasy self, again like any tragic hero, the more it begins to take over his whole personality, threatening to emerge into the outer world. As Jekyll enters the Frustration Stage, he makes a last desperate bid to escape from his fantasy self by putting the drug under lock and key and trying to remain in his Jekyll-self. But, as when Anna Karenina at a similar stage in the tragic cycle tries to give up Vronsky and return to her husband, the poison has already entered too deeply into Jekyll’s system. He eventually weakens, succumbs to the drug for a last irrevocable time and returns to his Hyde-self. ‘My devil had long been caged, he came out roaring.’
This leads to the central incident of the whole story, first described by a young maid who had been sitting one evening looking out of her window. ‘Never had she felt more at peace with all men or thought more kindly of the world’. She sees coming down the street ‘an aged and beautiful gentleman with white hair’, whom we later learn is a venerable and respected MP Sir Danvers Carew. We see here, in the juxtaposition of the Innocent Young Girl and the Good Old Man, an embryonic constellation of the Wise Old Man and the Anima, twin symbols of the Self which is about to elude Jekyll forever. To her horror the girl sees the deformed creature Hyde emerge from the shadows and bludgeon the old man savagely to death. This murder is the final dark act. From then on Jekyll finds that he has completely lost control; he slips more and more helplessly into his Hyde-self until, at the moment when he realises that Hyde has taken over completely, he commits suicide.
Humbert Humbert (with double echoes of ‘humbug’) is another version of the divided hero, split between the outwardly respectable persona of the scholarly academic and the hidden fantasy self driven by his erotic, daydreaming obsession with pre-pubescent little girls. Lolita is one of the most celebrated instances in literature of the ‘infantile anima’, an underdeveloped or in some way inadequate ‘other half’ whose presence always shows that the hero is not fully a man and has an unresolved tie to the Mother.
Sure enough, no sooner has Humbert set eyes on Lolita, the supreme goal of all his dark daydreams, than two things follow. Firstly, in pursuit of his obsession, he marries her mother, who turns out to be the Dark Mother, an empty, silly, suffocating woman who, thanks to Humbert’s callousness, is quickly and violently got out of the way. He has only married her as a front to his real goal; and, secondly, now that the way is clear, we see that Lolita herself is not an innocent young girl but a raging Temptress. Like all characters driven by an obsession, Humbert is fundamentally weak. All dark characters in stories are defined by some sort of obsession. This always shows that the hero is not fully a man, in control of himself, that some component of his personality, ego-centred but driven by an autonomous will of his own, is leading him by the nose, ruling his life. Equally, however often it is gratified, no obsession can ever reach a satisfactory resolution, because it is at odds with the framework of reality and the Self. Humbert’s obsession with Lolita cannot possibly come to a lasting resolution. He cannot marry her because she is under-age and his stepdaughter; and even if she did one day come of age, she would have lost her charms for him.
We thus see how the treacherous, bewitching, egotistical little Lolita represents in the most frustrating possible way all the possible aspects of the dark feminine. She is simultaneously:
(a) the ‘infantile anima’;
(b) the Temptress;
(c) in the background she is related to the Dark Mother;
(d) she is even that very rare figure in stories, the Dark Child, a child who promises not the hope of new life but only the frustration and denial of the forces of life.
As Humbert’s obsession grows, so, heightening his frustration in a vicious spiral, does Lolita begin to slip away from him. She thus becomes in addition:
(e) the ‘elusive anima’.
Finally the only other figure of importance in the story begins to come mysteriously into view, Quilty, the Dark Rival, in the grip of exactly the same obsession as Humbert himself. The shadowy, menacing Quilty is a projection of Humbert’s own fantasy self. And when, eventually driven mad by jealous loathing, Humbert tracks down and kills his Rival in a long drawn out frenzy of cold violence, he is in effect killing himself. He is arrested and shortly afterwards dies in prison of a heart attack.
In these four stories we have seen the range of goals the weak, tragic hero is after in his state of fantasy:
(1) for Macbeth and Faustus the emphasis is on their desire for power over others: the dark inversion of the masculine urge to sovereignty;
(2) for Humbert, as it later becomes for Faustus, it is on the urge for erotic sexual union with the ‘other half’, a desire for possession: the dark inversion of the urge to union with the feminine which is the essence of selfless love;
(3) for Dr Jekyll, through his fantasy self Hyde, it is more generally characterised as an unbounded desire for egocentric gratification at the expense of everything and everyone in the world outside him. This is the dark inversion of the drive to realisation of the Self, which stands for the opposite, a state of conscious loving unity with all the world.
We shall now look again, briefly, at the other stories in Chapter 8, to see how each reflects in its own way these basic rules of the dark inversion.
The Picture of Dorian Gray shows us the split between the outward persona of a beautiful, completely egotistical young man who wishes never to grow older (i.e., never to grow up) and his hidden fantasy self, represented by the portrait. The cue for the weak, vain young hero to succumb to his fantasy is provided by the Tempter Lord Henry and, like his shadowy Mephistopheles, the hero thus becomes an amalgam of dark feminine and dark masculine, the complete opposite of a light, whole man.
As with Hyde, most of Gray’s sins as he embarks on a life of sensual debauchery are only hinted at, although all, it is implied, involve a heartless and destructive flouting of loving human relationships. But three episodes in particular are described more explicitly. The first centres on the inadequate anima-figure of Sibyl Vane, the actress with whom Gray becomes infatuated. Gray loves her only as a fantasy figure, for the image she creates on stage in the role of various ‘active’ Shakespearean heroines, Rosalind, Portia, Beatrice; when she tries to show him the reality of herself he coldly rejects her, and she commits suicide. The second step in his downward course brought clearly into view is the attempt by his honourable older friend, Basil Hallward, a light Father-figure, to confront Gray with the horror of what he is becoming. Gray murders him in particularly gruesome and deliberate fashion. The last figure to emerge, on the edge of Gray’s consciousness, is the ‘light Rival’, Jim Vane, the brother who truly loved Sibyl (although he has now turned dark and shadowy in his desire for vengeance). Vane is mysteriously shot at a country house, where Gray is basking flirtatiously in the admiration of an older woman, his hostess the Duchess of Monmouth, who alone seems fundamentally unworried by Gray’s horrible misdeeds and cruel reputation. He has, in effect, killed off the anima, the Father and the light Alter-Ego: the only relationship he really enjoys, as the little boy hero who does not want to grow up, is with a doting, inwardly heartless, powerful older woman, the Dark Mother. Finally, in the Nightmare Stage of self-pity, Gray turns in rage on the hideously ravaged portrait and stabs it, like Humbert murdering his fantasy self. As with Humbert and Dr Jekyll, the hero’s fantasy self is now all that is left of him, and in killing it Gray has killed himself.
The next three examples we looked at were all straightforward stories of weak and inadequate young heroes being destroyed by a Temptress.
In Carmen we initially see the hero as a soldier, happily in love with his innocent Micaela. But behind his soldierly exterior Don José is no real man, and she is only an inadequate little anima-figure. It does not take long for the real problem to be exposed when the imposing figure of the Temptress/Dark Mother Carmen sweeps the weak little hero off his feet into blind infatuation. Under her bewitching spell Don José is soon cut off from the upper, masculine world, as he becomes a deserter from the army and sinks down into the treacherous, intoxicating inferior realm of taverns, gypsies and bandit gangs. Here there looms up the figure of Escamillo, the toreador, representing the masculinity which Don José never had, who supplants him as a Rival in the Temptress/Dark Mother’s affections. Having for the last time rejected his infantile anima, Micaela, Don José sinks into the final stages of impotent nightmare, weak, self-pitying, totally alone. In a last desperate bid to free himself he lashes out and kills the Dark Mother who has destroyed him, but in doing so he has in effect killed himself.
In Bonnie and Clyde, the hero is a weak, sexually impotent young man lured by the heroine, a combination of Temptress and infantile anima, into his life of stealing, murder and guns as a substitute for his unrealised masculinity. The central episode of the story is when they capture a policeman, representing masculine authority, and dance round taunting him (like Faustus playing tricks on the ‘Holy Father’). As frustration turns to nightmare, there is a brief, sickly-sentimental episode when they go for a picnic with Bonnie’s mother – again the fantasy Mother-figure who will overlook all their naughty crimes and with whom they can dream of escaping back to the happy, irresponsible innocence of childhood where everything will be all right. But now the stern masculine world is closing in, as the police net tightens around them, representing the values of the Father against which they have been frozen in rebellion. Eventually they are betrayed by the Father-figure in their midst, the father of their accomplice C. W. Moss with whom they have taken refuge, and the police shoot them down.
The heroes of Jules et Jim are two feckless, charming, weak young men who cannot grow up, and who fall prey to the bewitching Temptress Catherine. Led on by her in the Dream Stage they like to imagine themselves as children, playing ‘at the white house in the country’, with the Dark Mother in Catherine concealed behind the facade of an ‘elusive anima’ who is always dancing on before them, always just out of reach. But slowly their world darkens – not least through the violent irruption of dark masculine values in the First World War – and they are gradually sucked down into nightmare, uncomprehending, never becoming manly or responsible or understanding anything. Jim makes a last pitiful attempt to break loose and to live a normal, grown-up life, with a wife and child – but the poison has entered too deep. Finally the dark anima drags him down into the whirlpool of destruction, leaving Jules all alone, staring still uncomprehendingly at their ashes.
In those two remarkably similar stories Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, we see the same tragic pattern from the heroine’s point of view. Each of these heroines is initially married to a man who is neither fully a man nor alive to the inner feminine. In each case, in the upper or outer world, the heroine is thus joined to an inadequate animus-figure, with the corollary that her own inner feminine is not brought alive and begins to turn dark. In each case the heroine then falls secretly for a fantasy animus-figure who seems to represent everything their husbands are not (the Dream Stage). Vronksy is seemingly both strong and sensitive. Emma’s fantasy-animus divides into, firstly, the masculine but insensitive Rodolphe, then the unmasculine but sensitive Leon. In each case, under the spell of the fantasy-animus, the heroine first loses contact with the respectable upper world, representing the outward masculine value of social order (Frustration Stage) and then is drawn down into the inferior realm where she begins to lose her reason, her mental order (Nightmare Stage). Increasingly each is haunted by the nightmare vision of a horrible little deformed male creature – the peasant and the beggar – representing the true state of her inner animus. In each case as the heroine, having irrevocably lost touch with her own inner feminine, horribly destroys herself, the deformed animus – symbolising her ‘fatal flaw’ – looms up over her final conscious moments before she plunges into unconsciousness forever.
We next looked at two stories, Antony and Cleopatra and Don Giovanni, which in terms of the tragic ‘fantasy cycle’ begin in the Frustration Stage, when the hero’s problem is at last completely obvious. In each of these stories, the root of the hero’s problem is the same – his inability to relate maturely to the feminine – but it expresses itself in precisely opposite ways.
In Antony, the successful general, we return to the image of a hero who, in masculine terms, seems fully developed. But as a tough soldier, living one-sidedly by masculine values, he has never fully realised or integrated his inner feminine; and by the law which dictates that we eventually fall foul of the dark version of that which has not been realised, Antony has been pulled over by his meeting with Cleopatra onto the opposite, undeveloped side of his psyche. We meet Antony when the two poles pulling him apart are at last fully and painfully evident. He is torn between his masculine ‘Roman self’ and the soft, emasculating embraces of the Temptress, the Dark Queen surrounded by her women and eunuchs, ruling maternally over the ‘inferior realm’ of Egypt. In the upper Roman world, as the play begins, the hero’s ‘other half’ is Octavia, his intended wife, the sister of his rival Octavius. But she is an inadequate anima because she is not feminine enough to draw Antony to her. This is not a marriage based on love but on the need to cement the social and political order (i.e., based on a masculine value). With her stern devotion to the male Roman virtues, Octavia is herself over-masculine – which is why Antony is drawn back to the soft, indulgent mother-world of Cleopatra. But once the die is cast, once he has irrevocably abandoned the inadequate Octavia and the masculine strength of Rome, we see Antony slipping more and more into the treacherous toils of the dark feminine, losing his soldierly masculine judgement and discipline, his capacity for firm leadership, his manly sovereignty both over himself and others, until finally he and the Dark Mother who has unmanned him are both destroyed.
Antony’s problem is that, because he cannot fully realise his anima, he is drawn obsessively back to the Dark Mother. The story of Don Giovanni or Don Juan presents the most familiar paradigm in our culture of the hero who attempts to solve the same basic problem in the opposite way. Don Giovanni’s compulsion is to find endless fantasy anima-figures who exist only in his own mind, because as soon as he has conquered them sexually and his ego is gratified, he sees the reality (like Dorian Gray confronted by the off-stage reality of Sibyl Vane) and his fantasy evaporates. As in Antony and Cleopatra, the story of Don Giovanni begins at the moment when the hero has been through the long Dream Stage of his adventures, when he seemed to be getting away with it, and when he is at last unexpectedly brought up against the heart of his problem, in a way which will decide once and for all whether he can turn back towards the light or is headed irrevocably for destruction.
The opera’s opening scene shows Don Giovanni confronted by two figures, Father and Daughter: the honourable father-figure of the Commendatore, representing positive masculine authority; and Donna Anna, the pure and innocent anima. In each case his response is fatally negative. First he attempts to seize and possess the protesting anima by force. Then, when the father intervenes to protect her, the hero kills him. From then on we know that Don Giovanni is doomed. By the law of the ‘unrealised value’, he has killed off both the aspects of himself which he will never now realise. He will never become a mature, fully-developed man; he will never develop his inner feminine. He is a fatally immature man who can never grow up – and the rest of the story shows the inevitable disintegration that is the consequence.
By the Rule of Three he encounters three women in the story. Donna Anna, a straightforward, light anima-figure, he attempts to violate. Secondly he meets Donna Elvira, his rejected anima, who has turned in consequence into the dark feminine, the virago who is pursuing him across the world bent on vengeance. Thirdly there is the regression to fantasy-innocence, as he tries to seduce the pretty peasant girl Zerlina, a fetching little infantile anima. But increasingly the stern masculine world against which Don Giovanni is in rebellion, representing the manly values which he cannot make positive in himself, is closing in on him. Finally, in the graveyard, he is confronted by the statue of the Commendatore, the grim, cold, stone image of the Dark Father. Here we have travelled full circle from all those stories which begin by showing a little hero who is confronted by the Dark Father as the unrealised value of the fully-grown, strong man the hero will one day become. The Commendatore’s statue represents the shadowy version of the mature man Don Giovanni has failed to become; and he is dragged down by his unrealised value to hell.
Finally, in The Devils, we saw a story which embodies all these principles and adds one more, to make our picture of the pattern behind Tragedy complete. Dostoyevsky’s novel begins with the image of a Mother and a Father, both archetypally inadequate. Mrs Stavrogin, the rich powerful heiress, appears to be kindly and indulgent, but only so long as she gets her own way with all those who are dependent on her. In her shadow is the weak and pathetic old Mr Verkhovensky, her emasculated protegé, obsessively fantasising about his youth as a brave, rebellious liberal when he stood up against the masculine values of power and order represented by the Tsar and his government in St Petersburg. In other words, Mrs Stavrogin is the Dark Mother; Mr Verkhovensky is ‘the boy hero who cannot grow up’ as he decays into late middle age; and the story centres on the consequences for their two sons.
On one hand there is charming, enigmatic Nikolai Stavrogin, spoiled by his dominating mother, bereft of a father. He cannot grow up in one way: he is plagued by strange attacks of rebelliousness against the world of ‘Father’, as when he suddenly and inexplicably bites the ear of the town governor (like Faustus with the Pope). Worse, because he cannot become a true man and is still inwardly locked into his tie to Mother, he cannot properly realise his inner feminine – with the result that he first brutally violates the little infantile anima-figure of Matryosha, in such a way that she commits suicide, then marries the crippled Maria, representing his deformed anima, whose death will eventually precipitate the entire catastrophe in which the story ends.
On the other hand, locked into immaturity in another way, is Peter Verkhovensky. The dominant factor in shaping his personality is that he has not been given a proper model of strong, mature manhood by his weak, egocentric father. He has therefore become imprisoned in a kind of extreme parody of his father’s rebellious liberalism – in the fantasy of taking part in some great collective movement which will rise up and violently overthrow the Czar, the government, the entire ruling framework of power and order, all the symbols of the world of ‘Father’. But young Verkhovensky cannot see himself as the leader of this movement: that would require qualities of manly dominance which he does not possess. He sees himself as the ‘brains’ behind the movement, its organiser. He requires a front-man for his own lack of real masculinity; and this is the role in which he mentally casts the ‘mother’s boy’ Stavrogin who, at least in his eyes, has the kind of confidence, charm and charismatic personality required.
There is another respect, however, in which Verkhovensky unconsciously compensates for his own individual lack of manhood. This is the way in which, as he conjures up in his fantasies that whole imaginary army of underdogs who are going to rise up with him to overthrow the world of ‘Father’, he projects his own ego into the collectivised ego of the group, ‘the movement’.
One of the most important features of the emergence of the Self in stories is the way in which, as the light hero achieves his state of wholeness, we see the entire community redeemed and brought to wholeness around him. Verkhovensky represents here what, in real life, can become the most destructive form of dark inversion of all: where that drive to communal totality itself appears in a dark inferior form, hijacked into the service of a collectivised ego. As Verkhovensky infects his little group of followers with his revolutionary vision, so all their individual egos are merged and given a dark energy by a negative inversion of the power of the Self. They imagine – or Verkhovensky imagines for them – that by destroying all the existing corrupt social order, they are going to bring Russia in some distant future back to a glorious state of wholeness, even if this requires appalling bloodshed and the deaths of millions along the way. In The Possessed this collective fantasy based on the ‘ego-Self confusion’ is portrayed only in local terms and when it is unleashed, spreading chaos and anarchy through the town, it soon winds to a hideous catastrophe, leaving ‘normality’ to re-emerge. But in history this dark inversion of the power of the Self was not to remain localised in just one corner of Russia. It was to possess the whole country. It was Dostoyevsky’s intuitive insight into the archetypal forces already at work beneath the surface of Russia’s disintegrating society more than half a century before 1917 which gave his novel such immense prophetic power.
We have now seen how the psychological root of all tragedy, the ‘fatal flaw’ in all tragic heroes and heroines, is ultimately the same. They are stuck at a certain stage in the unfolding of the archetypal drama, in such a way that they cannot move forward to the point of Self-realisation. All of them are in some way held back by the dark feminine, so that they cannot grow up. They cannot develop either the masculine or the feminine aspects of themselves completely. Some, like Macbeth or Antony, may seem to be developed on the masculine side, although when the test comes, their dark feminine drags down and destroys even the masculine strength they possess. In almost every other example we have looked at, the hero is more obviously weak from the start: a boy hero who cannot grow up. And the more the dark feminine asserts its hold over them, the more they are drawn into conflict with the world of ‘Father’, the masculine values of strength, discipline, firmness and self-control which they cannot develop in themselves, and which would be essential for them to achieve the full state of manhood.
What lies at the heart of Tragedy therefore is always the same problem; and again it confirms the way in which the positive development of the masculine and feminine values must go together. A hero cannot be fully a man, fully strong, unless he is also selfless, inwardly feminine. So closely interdependent are the two that if he is not light in both respects, he must inevitably become dark in both respects.
We see this just as clearly in the stories centred on a heroine, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. Just as the dark hero is always inwardly possessed by the dark feminine, so these heroines appear to be victims of the dark masculine, the dark animus. But the very fact that each is inwardly possessed by the dark masculine turns her outwardly into the dark feminine. Both Anna and Emma are beautiful women whose personalities are taken over by a raging, wild, reckless egocentricity which gradually cuts them off from all the world. The true feminine values, feeling for others and the ability to see whole, cannot by definition be egocentric. Both these heroines are thus cut off by the dark masculine from contact with the feminine within them, until everything in them is dark.
The pattern behind all the examples we have looked at in this chapter is so engrained in the human psyche that stories have been endlessly repeating it for thousands of years. And, as we have seen, there is nothing inconsistent between this pattern and those which shape the other kinds of story we have looked at, which show the hero or heroine finding their way at last to the state of wholeness which is the Self. The fundamental rules which govern each type of story are the same. In each case the cosmic values of the Self are always ultimately triumphant. The ego, in separating itself from the Self, must always end in frustration or destruction.
But does this imply that stories can only be told according to certain pre-ordained rules? Why should a storyteller only be able to imagine a story according to these ‘rules’? Why should the ‘values of the Self’ always be triumphant? What happens if a storyteller, consciously or unconsciously, is not himself in harmony with those particular values, and sets out to shape a story in a quite different way?
We must now bring into account one of the most remarkable elements of all in the way the human imagination gives birth to stories. In the third part of this book we come at last to the extraordinary change which has come over storytelling in the Western world in the last two hundred years.