‘Where, I wondered with increasing dismay, had all the stories gone? Why this decay of the great and meaningful orchestration of the story that had occurred everywhere in the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries?’
Laurens van der Post, Testament to the Bushman
What about Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind ? Or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot? Or Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye ? Or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? Or Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories?
At this stage it would be easy to point to any number of individual stories which, in terms of the archetypal structures we have been looking at, it might seem difficult to place. But the vast majority of such stories date from the last two hundred years. We must now, in the third part of the book, look at one of the oddest and most revealing developments in the evolution of storytelling.
We cannot reach a proper understanding of how and why stories form as they do in the human mind without appreciating the way in which, around two centuries ago, something very unusual began to happen to storytelling in the Western world. In its early stages (although the first signs of what was to come had appeared even earlier, way back into the eighteenth century), it was directly related to that great convulsion in the European spirit which we associate with the rise of Romanticism and with such historic events as the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon. This psychic upheaval was reflected in philosophy, music, painting and all the arts. But nowhere was its true nature revealed more tellingly than in a profoundly significant change which began to emerge at that time in the way writers conceived stories; and which has continued to have the most far-reaching effect on the way stories have been told in our modern world ever since.
So far we have been looking at how stories present to us what amounts to a kind of basic ground-map of human nature and behaviour, governed by an absolutely consistent set of rules and values. These values, like the archetypal structures which shape stories, are programmed into our unconscious in a way we cannot modify or control. The essential message implicit in that programming is that the central goal of any human life is to achieve the state of perfect balance which we recognise as maturity; and how the central enemy in reaching that goal is our capacity to be held back by the deforming and ultimately self-destructive power of egocentricity.
For a storyteller to imagine a story which fully expresses this central theme implies that he or she is entirely in psychological harmony with those unconscious archetypal rules and structures which shape stories. Up to now we have been so focused on deciphering the meaning of this symbolic language that we have treated almost all the stories we have looked at in much the same way; as if all storytellers are similarly in tune with the basic archetypal process which gives rise to stories. But here and there, in exploring the structures of one plot after another, we have come across examples of stories which in some way did not realise the full purpose and content of their underlying archetypal pattern. For instance, we saw Rags to Riches stories where the hero was frustrated in trying to reach the full happy ending. We saw Voyage and Return stories which remained strangely empty: where the hero or heroine emerged from their journey into the unfamiliar world unchanged, having learned nothing. We saw comedies which were little more than burlesques of the archetypal message of the Comedy plot, playing with its outward form but without any deeper meaning.
What we are about to look at, in examining what has happened to storytelling over the past two centuries, is how, in countless modern stories, a fundamental shift has taken place in the psychological ‘centre of gravity’ from which they have been told. They have become detached from their underlying archetypal purpose. Instead of being fully integrated with the objective values embodied in the archetypal structure, such stories have taken on a fragmented, subjective character, becoming more like personal dreams or fantasies. Yet what is remarkable, as we shall see, is that in every case the story shows us precisely where this element of disintegration has crept in. And most remarkable of all is the way, even where a story falls short of realising its full archetypal form and purpose, the unconscious laws of storytelling still continue to dictate how it will unfold. It is this which makes the change which has come over storytelling in the modern world so crucial to a proper understanding of how our faculty for imagining stories works; and it is this which forms the theme of the next part of the book.
To see what happened we may begin by looking at four well-known novels dating from the first half of the nineteenth century.
One of the most famous of the novels produced by the rise of Romanticism was Stendhal’s The Scarlet and the Black (1830). When we first meet the young hero, Julien Sorel, he is on the verge of adult life, living at home with his father and brothers in an obscure French provincial town, far from the distant, glamorous centre of France’s national life, Paris. Working in the family timber yard, Sorel is scorned and even physically ill-treated by his practical, unimaginative family, not least for his reading of books.
It might seem like the opening of one of those Rags to Riches folk tales which show the persecuted young hero marked out from the rest of his family by the fact that he is a good-hearted little dreamer. But we soon learn that Sorel is not like this at all. Far from being kindly, he is consumed by malevolence (‘he hated both his brothers and his father’). He is hugely ambitious and obsessed by Napoleon. He originally dreamed of joining the army, but when a splendid new church is built in the town, with ornate marble columns, he realises that in these peaceful times the Church is a better road to power and position than soldiering. ‘All at once Julien stopped talking about Napoleon. He announced his plan of becoming a priest.’ And immediately he is revelling in ‘dreams of one day being introduced to beautiful Parisian women, whose attention he would manage to attract by some remarkable feat or other’. All his ambitions are centred on distant Paris, recalling the way in which the far-off city so often appears in stories, drawing the hero towards it as a symbol of the Self.
Already, in the early pages, we have seen how Sorel’s fantasies centre round those three familiar aspects of the central goal – winning power and position, union with the opposite sex and the idea of ultimate ‘Self-realisation’ – but only seen through the dark, inverting glass of his all-consuming egotism. We also note that, unlike the fairy-tale hero who has usually lost a father, Sorel is without a mother. There is no feminine influence in his life at all.
Nevertheless, like some fairy-tale hero who is equipped with ‘charms’ or ‘magic weapons’ to enable him to escape any danger, Sorel is also given two attributes which enable him to triumph in any social test: the first is his striking good looks, the second his phenomenal memory, which allows him to learn whole books by heart with ease.
His story unfolds, like so many, through three main stages. The first begins when he learns by heart the Latin New Testament and a book on the Papacy (‘he believed one as little as the other’). Armed with this trick, he takes his first step into the world outside his home by becoming tutor to the children of the mayor of the town, M. Renal. He at once wins the admiration of all by reciting chunks of the New Testament, a trick he shortly repeats at a dinner of local notables. He also, with his ‘almost girlish good looks’, wins the heart of the mayor’s wife Mme Renal, and they begin an affair.
An affair with a married woman, an older woman, or in this case both, is always a danger sign in a story. It invariably shows us that the hero is caught in a tie to ‘Mother’, in a state of arrested inner development: and in Sorel’s case it echoes the fact that he has no real ‘Mother’ in the story at all. Mme Renal fills this gap. But of course their affair cannot lead to any ‘happy ending’, and when it begins to attract embarrassing attention, Sorel heartlessly throws her over.
He now moves onto the second stage of his climb up the social ladder, as he leaves town for a seminary in the provincial capital, Besancon. ‘So here’s this hell on earth from which I’ll never be able to get out’ is Sorel’s greeting to the seminary: ‘according to the rules of conduct he had drawn up for himself, he looked on his three hundred and twenty fellow students as enemies’. The young man is now more egocentric and heartless than ever, seeing his contemporaries only in terms of rivalry and domination. Eventually Sorel wangles an invitation to dinner with the bishop, a worldly prince of the Church, visiting from Paris. Inevitably he wheels on his party trick, by reciting lengthy passages from Horace. The bishop is impressed, and shortly afterwards Sorel obtains an opening beyond his wildest dreams, to travel to Paris to become secretary to ‘the most powerful man in France’, the fabulously rich Marquis de la Mole.
The third stage begins with the gauche young provincial arriving in Paris, and making one or two silly social gaffes amid his magnificent new surroundings. But naturally he soon redeems himself by impressing everyone at dinner with a recital of Horace. He has already been struck by the beauty of the daughter of the house, Mathilde, ‘a young woman with the palest golden hair and a shapely figure’. The Marquis, as a kindly ‘Father’, entrusts him with ever more important and confidential business. He is admitted to the ranks of the most fashionable young men in Paris (there are even whispers that he is ‘the natural son of a duke’). Above all, he wins the adoration of Mathilde who, needless to say, has herself now become ‘the most admired young woman in Paris’. But the manner in which Sorel wins her love is portrayed only in terms of egocentric domination and subjection: ‘you are my master’, she tells him, ‘reign over me forever, punish your slave severely whenever she seeks to rebel’. She becomes pregnant and the couple decide to elope; but the Marquis relents and agrees to settle on them a huge income. It seems all is set for a sickly and pasteboard ‘happy ending’, with Sorel united to his ‘infantile anima’ and destined to ‘succeed to the kingdom’ as the chosen heir to the Marquis’s empire. Then suddenly, out of Sorel’s past, disaster strikes. Mme Renal, his discarded mistress, writes a letter to the Marquis, blackening Sorel’s character unmercifully. Enraged and frustrated, Sorel returns to his home town and attempts to shoot the vengeful ‘Dark Mother’, Mme Renal, in church. Inevitably he is arrested and sent to the guillotine. The story ends with an extraordinary funeral ceremony, celebrated by 20 priests in a cave high up in the mountains, ‘lit by countless candles’. A sorrowing Mathilde buries Sorel’s severed head. Three days later Mme Renal dies of grief.
The first thing which may strike us about this story is the extent to which, despite its ending, it is not like a conventional Tragedy. In its outward form it is much more like a Rags to Riches story which only switches abruptly to Tragedy in its closing scenes. Right from the start, Sorel is thoroughly ego-centred. He does not show any of the qualities necessary to bring the hero to a happy ending. He is a completely two-dimensional character, defined almost solely by his ruthless ambition. The only reason we are ever shown for his success is the mechanical party trick of his memory, which is wheeled on again and again to manoeuvre him up every step of the ladder (highly implausibly, since within a very short time his fellow dinner-party guests would surely have found these vainglorious recitals infinitely wearisome). Not for a moment is there any sign of that gradual inner transformation which marks out a proper Rags to Riches hero. Yet equally we do not see him going through the dark inner transformation of a truly tragic figure either. For nine-tenths of the story we see this cardboard creation going through all the outward motions of a successful climb from Rags to Riches: until suddenly the whole thing falls apart and, like Icarus, he plunges to destruction.
What we may then also observe is the remarkable fact that Stendhal himself did not see his hero in this dark and negative fashion at all. He took the germ of his story from the court reports of a celebrated real-life tragedy in the France of the 1820s. A humble blacksmith’s son had left home to become tutor to a wealthy middle-class family, and had gone on to a seminary to become a priest. His previous employer’s wife had then written a vindictive letter to the head of the seminary, as a result of which he had been expelled. He tried to take his revenge by shooting her at Mass, and had been sent to the guillotine. Many people at the time, including Stendhal, saw the young man as the unfortunate victim of social hypocrisy and a rigid class system, driven into the position of an outcast only because of his lowly social origins.
Far from seeing his hero as a monster of egotism, in fact, Stendhal viewed him with the utmost sympathy. He saw him as the new, post-Napoleonic hero of humble birth, defying an oppressive class structure to battle his way upwards, in a world in which there were only the strong and the weak, and in which everyone was, fundamentally, equally egotistical. A fervent admirer of Napoleon, Stendhal did not see egotism in itself as anything to be ashamed of. He proudly called one of his volumes of autobiography Souvenirs d’Egotisme. He admiringly hailed Chateaubriand as ‘le roi des egotistes’. And when he came to create his favourite hero, Sorel, he told people ‘Julien is myself’. Nor did this identification apply only to Sorel’s outward social ambitions. Consciously or unconsciously, there was also a close correspondence between Sorel and his creator in terms of their inner state, as expressed in their attitudes to the opposite sex. Stendhal fantasised endlessly about his ‘conquests’ of women, in a way which is reflected in Sorel’s sadomasochistic ‘conquest’ and humiliation of Mathilde. But in real life, his love affairs were usually short-lived and embarrassing, and the key to his inadequacy was reflected in his saying that he felt towards his mother, who had died when he was only a boy, ‘like a lover’.
In all these respects, The Scarlet and the Black represented something almost entirely new in storytelling. Whereas earlier storytellers down the ages had imagined their stories in accordance with the values of the Self, here was an author quite consciously creating a hero to defy those values. Sorel was a projection of Stendhal’s own egocentricity, as he identified with his hero’s rivalry with all the world, and with his effortless climb up the social and sexual ladder.
Yet in the end this rise from humble obscurity to social success turns inexorably to tragedy, just as it had done in the real life version which originally drew Stendhal as the inspiration for his novel. And it does so precisely in accordance with those underlying rules which ultimately dictate how any story shall unfold. Like any other storyteller, he followed the inner logic of the story, as it developed in his imagination: with the result that, at the very moment when, on the conscious ‘upper level’ of the story the hero seems finally within reach of his goal, of union with the pasteboard infantile anima-figure, and succession to the ‘kingdom’ of great wealth and position, out from the ‘inferior realm’ emerges the vengeful ‘Dark Mother’ to snatch it all away. At the end we see the extraordinary ceremony of the 20 priests blessing Sorel’s corpse in the candelit cave, the ‘womb unconscious’ from which he could never escape. Mathilde is left with the severed head, the only part of Sorel which the anima could ever get hold hold of, his head or imagination. Only when he is buried does the ‘Dark Mother’, Mme Renal, relinquish her fatal grip. Psychologically, and to this extent unconsciously, it was the story of the weak, vain, ‘mother-fixated’ Stendhal himself.
In other words, we see two very significant things having taken place in this story. The first is that a storyteller, for reasons directly reflecting his own psychology, has himself become subject to what we saw earlier as ‘the dark inversion’, siding with his egocentric hero against the values of the Self. His story has become an ego-centred fantasy, akin to a prolonged daydream. But the second is that we still see the hero, by those implacable rules, eventually bringing about his own destruction. The values of the Self remain triumphant, because by the logic of that unconscious power in the human mind which governs the shaping of stories, they cannot be successfully defied. If an author sets out to tell his story round a dark, egocentric hero, there is no way the plot can unfold to a fully-resolved happy ending. Sooner or later those hidden rules will come into play to ensure that the hero cannot realise his goal.
Four years after Stendhal’s book appeared, Balzac published the first of his series of novels La Comedie Humaine, portraying life in contemporary France,
Père Goriot (1834) focuses on the rise to fame and fortune of a poor law student, Eugene de Rastignac. Just as in The Scarlet and the Black, the story is in some ways reminiscent of a Rags to Riches fairy tale. The ambitious young hero arrives from the provinces in Paris, like Dick Whittington arriving in London, without a penny to his name. The only card in his hand is his distant kinship to ‘one of the queens of fashionable Paris’, the immensely grand Vicomtesse de Beauseant. This powerful lady becomes in effect de Rastignac’s ‘fairy godmother’, and determines to use her influence to launch him on a dazzling social career. She first arranges for him to meet a certain rich Countess. But this is no fairy tale ‘Princess’ whom it is intended de Rastignac should marry. The Countess is married already. The aim is simply that he should win social advancement by becoming her lover. When this proposed affair comes to nothing, thanks to a social gaffe by de Rastignac, the ‘fairy godmother’ propels him in the direction of the Countess’s sister, an equally rich Baroness. This time the ruse is more successful, not least because de Rastignac has discovered the guilty secret of both the sisters’ wealth. They are being privily supported by their old father Goriot, a little retired vermicelli manufacturer, who just happens to live in de Rastignac’s humble lodgings; and whom de Rastignac just happens one day to see through the keyhole, melting down the last of the family silver (like some fairy-tale gnome in the forest) to provide his daughters with more funds. Goriot and the Baroness combine to set up de Rastignac in a lavish apartment. Having moved in,
‘Eugene, completely overcome, lay back on the sofa, unable to utter a word or make sense yet of the way in which the magic wand had been waved yet again for this final transformation scene.’
But, again, the fairy-tale happy ending is not to be. Suddenly disaster strikes. The financial affairs of both sisters crash in ruins. Old Goriot himself dies. His heartless, snobbish daughters do not even deign to come to his funeral. De Rastignac, his promised fortune snatched away from him, climbs the hill above Paris, looks down contemptuously on ‘the splendid world he had wished to gain’ and says, in bitter defiance, ‘It’s war between us now’.
Despite its explicit echoes of a Rags to Riches fairy tale, this bleak, two-dimensional story could scarcely be further from the timeless, almost metaphysical realm of the folk tale, where riches, ‘Princesses’ and transformation scenes stand for something altogether more symbolic and psychologically profound than just the amassing of hard cash and a succession of sexual conquests. As de Rastignac climbs his way ruthlessly up the social ladder, there are no signs of any inner transformation, any development towards wholeness and maturity: merely the acquisition of new and sharper weapons in the war of social self-aggrandisement, and the general hardening of a once relatively innocent heart. What we again see here is an author defying the archetypal rules by trying to imagine a wholly egocentric, pasteboard hero going through the pattern of an ascent from Rags to Riches without any of the essential qualities which could allow him to reach a successful resolution: with the result that the story ends on that chilling final image when de Rastignac issues his angry challenge to the ‘hostile’ city of Paris, symbolising the totality of the Self. In bidding defiance to the city, Balzac’s hero is merely reflecting that most ominous psychic split of all: where, far from the conscious ego ending up in harmony with the deeper ‘centre’, the two are left seemingly irretrievably at odds.
As with Stendhal in The Scarlet and the Black, Balzac was drawn to the general theme of the Rags to Riches plot, but in way which had become completely detached from its original deeper archetypal purpose. The traditional Rags to Riches story, as we have seen it in folklore, in Aladdin, in Jane Eyre, in David Copperfield, was the expression of a pattern coded into the human unconscious which, when made conscious in the form of a story, gives us an idealised symbolic picture of a human being travelling the full road of psychological development, from immaturity to integrated maturity.
What was happening in these ‘Romantic’ versions of the Rags to Riches theme was that this pattern was being appropriated by the storyteller’s ego. Instead of being held internally, as an expression of inward psychic events, it was being projected onto the outside world, to express the desire of the ego for external gratification. The Rags to Riches story was thus becoming not so much a reflection of the hero or heroine’s inner growth towards eventual integration, but simply the vehicle for ego-centred fantasies or daydreams. As Somerset Maugham said of Balzac, whom he admired as the only novelist to whom he could ‘without hesitation ascribe genius’:
‘from the beginning his aim had been to live in splendour, to have a fine house with a host of servants, carriages and horses, a string of mistresses and a rich wife.’
When, in Père Goriot and later novels, Balzac fondly imagines his heroes rising ever more gloriously in Parisian society, it was precisely that aim which, in his fantasy, he was pursuing: by dreaming, through the social triumphs of de Rastignac and others, his succession of ‘fantasy selves’, of winning all those social and sexual gratifications his ego desired.
But for all the significance of this shift of the source in the psyche from which stories were told, it did not mean that the old archetypal forms would now just fade away. Indeed the human mind is so constituted that no storyteller can escape from the archetypes, however hard he or she may try. They are still the basic coding of the human psyche, the only forms around which stories can be told. They can no more be escaped from than storytellers can escape from the greatest archetype of all, the hidden totality of the Self, the ultimate form which embraces all the others. However far we try, through the ego, to bury, ignore or defy the Self, it cannot be cheated in its remorseless, objective insistence on the deepest, unchanging truths about the way we and the world work (as opposed to the ways in which, through the wishful thinking of the ego, we might like it to work).
If the Self is denied, it will always try, in some form or other, to pass back to the ego the message as to where the disorder has arisen and how it can be rectified; as we see demonstrated nowhere more vividly than in stories. And for an illustration of this one needs look no further than to the curious fate of the Rags to Riches story, once this profound shift in the moral and psychological centre of storytelling had begun to take place. In the dawn of the Romantic era, as storytellers began to pass into the grip of the ‘dark inversion’, so they found it increasingly difficult to write stories with happy, all-reconciling endings. But this was not only reflected in stories inspired by the Rags to Riches theme. It began to appear in stories of all kinds.
We now look at what happened when the same dark inversion took over the archetypal theme of the Overcoming the Monster plot.
Some years earlier, in the summer of 1816, one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of storytelling had taken place on the shores of Lake Geneva. It resulted from the first meeting between the two most rebellious spirits of English Romanticism: Percy Bysshe Shelley, accompanied by his mistress Mary Godwin and her half-sister Claire, and Lord Byron, accompanied by his young hanger-on Dr William Polidori. Over a wet fortnight at the end of June, this oddly assorted group of young people, already riven by all kinds of psychic stress, talked themselves, with the aid of a German book of horror stories, Fantasmagoria, into a state of collective near-hysteria. It was agreed that each of them should produce a ghost story. Mary Godwin had a hideous dream, coloured by some of the topics they had all been discussing, like the bringing of corpses back to life. And she finally produced, from the inspiration of her nightmare, a book not only more widely known today than any single work by either of the two famous poets themselves, but in psychological terms one of the most significant of all the products of the European Romantic movement.
The story of Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus tells how its hero had been born into a respectable, happy family in Geneva. The main figures in his life had been his kindly father; his loving mother; his little brother William; his close boyhood friend Clerval; and his cousin Elizabeth, beautiful and adored; ‘a creature who seemed to shed radiance from her looks, and whose form and motion were lighter than the chamois of the hills’; and whom, as they grew up, it was assumed Frankenstein would one day marry. Here we see the hero happily surrounded with light (albeit entirely two-dimensional) characters: Father, Mother, Child, faithful Alter-Ego, and finally, the anima.
The action of the tale begins when Frankenstein is about to go out into the world, as a young student at the University of Ingoldstadt. On the eve of his departure, as an omen, his mother and Elizabeth, the two representatives of the feminine in his life, both fall desperately ill. His mother dies, but Elizabeth eventually recovers. At the university he falls under the spell of various occult treatises, and becomes possessed by a Faust-like longing to ‘penetrate the secrets of nature’. ‘The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally afforded by my favourite authors, the fulfilment of which I most eagerly sought’. Having found his ‘Focus’, the hero shuts himself away for months during a glorious summer, to work on his shadowy task: ‘who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay’. At last, from the remains of corpses stolen from charnel houses in the hours of darkness, he completes his ‘creation’, in the hideously deformed shape of a man. Appalled by what he has done, he instantly takes refuge in unconsciousness by falling asleep. But this is:
‘disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingoldstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.’
He wakes from this nightmare to see ‘the miserable monster whom I had created’ standing by the bed, grinning, trying to utter inarticulate sounds and stretching out a hand in friendship. Frankenstein is horrified, rushes out into the street and, when he returns next morning, the monster is gone.
Here is an opening unlike any before it in the history of storytelling. We see the hero first in a happy, innocent ‘upper world’, surrounded by his light family; then isolating himself as he plunges down into the dark ‘inferior realm’ where he himself brings to birth a monster. At the moment where the monster is about to come to life, his nightmare betrays the true nature of what is happening, as he sees his anima Elizabeth, his hope of future wholeness and life, dissolving into the horror of the ‘Dark Mother’, with whom he is locked in a deathly embrace. But then something even more revealing happens. When he first sees the monster, it smiles and puts out a friendly hand to him. Here is a complete inversion of the usual relationship between hero and monster: here it is the hero who has become dark and isolated, in his dream of winning power and occult knowledge; while the monster, wishing only for friendship and fellow-feeling, represents, in his hideous, inferior form, the Self. Frankenstein rejects the monster, which disappears. The next day there unexpectedly appears in Ingoldstadt his cheerful boyhood friend Clerval, full of news of Frankenstein’s home and family, a picture of kindly normality: he now represents the hero’s innocent ‘light Alter-Ego’, the Self the hero might have been had he not been tempted into his dark and secret course.
Outwardly Frankenstein’s life, under the ministrations of Clerval, returns to normal. All seems well. But beneath the surface, he has made his fatal surrender to the powers of darkness. From that first crucial act of rejection of the monster’s friendly overture, everything else in his life is to follow. Unknown to Frankenstein, the monster has retired secretly into the mountains, where by eavesdropping on peasants he first learns how to speak, then manages to read the great books of mankind. He is determined to become a full, proper human being, imbued with the most noble and benevolent feelings towards all mankind. But when he finally dares to confront some human beings, they recoil from him in revulsion. Crushed by this second act of rejection, the monster is now fired with terrible feelings of vengeance against his creator. He comes down from the mountains, tracks down Frankenstein’s little brother, William, and kills him. Frankenstein, fully aware of who must have committed the murder, heartlessly watches while the boy’s loving nursemaid is tried and executed for the crime. The Child and the Innocent Young Girl have become the first victims.
Frankenstein then has a long interview with the monster, who explains that his only desire is to live virtuously without harming anyone. He asks his creator to fashion a female ‘monster’ as a companion for him, with whom he can disappear to some remote region of the world and never trouble Frankenstein again. The hero agrees, and retires to a cottage in the Orkneys where he sets to work. He has almost completed the monster’s ‘other half’ when he sees the monster peering in at him through a window. At the thought of his two creations getting together to reproduce, and to people the world with monsters, he panics and destroys his handiwork.
The monster is heartbroken, and by the Rule of Three this third rejection, Frankenstein’s final dark act, seals the hero’s fate. First the monster murders Clerval, the light Alter-Ego. Then, when Frankenstein has married his beautiful, calm, loving Elizabeth, the monster murders her too, on their wedding night. Finally Frankenstein’s father dies of grief. The hero has now been responsible, through his shadow, for the deaths of the Child, the Innocent Young Girl, the Alter-Ego, the Good Old Man/Father and, above all, his own ‘other half’, his anima. All the light aspects of himself have been killed off. All along, Frankenstein had been the only truly dark figure in the story: although, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, the monster has become more and more evil as a reflection of the ever greater darkness engulfing the hero. Like Gray, Frankenstein at last in desperation determines to free himself from his hated shadow forever. In a nightmare chase, he pursues the monster half across the world, up into the frozen Arctic wastes – but there it is the monster which turns on him and destroys him, before vanishing forever across the ice.
The most obvious thing which may strike us about this nightmarish tale is how it takes the familiar, age-old pattern of the Overcoming the Monster plot and turns it in every conceivable way upside down. It begins with a hero who is dark and a monster who is light; and ends with the hero being overcome by the monster, rather than the other way around. The question which then arises is: how did such an extraordinarily dark, inverted story come into the mind of a young girl who had never written anything before in her life? A good deal of the answer, as various commentators have observed, lies in the personality of the man who was by far the most dominating presence in Mary Godwin’s life, Shelley himself.
Not only did a great many of the scenes and details in Frankenstein spring directly from Mary’s life with Shelley since they had first eloped together two years earlier. He himself took a profound interest in the story, making clear, when he reviewed it anonymously after its publication in 1817, how much he identified with the monster, as a hapless victim of circumstances whose wish only to live benevolently and at one with mankind had so continually been thwarted by persecution and rejection. ‘Too often in society’, as Shelley put it, such a cruel fate is meted out to ‘those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments’.
Certainly by this time in his life Shelley had found himself violently at odds with society in every possible way. On the masculine side of his personality, there had been the terrible battles with his father, the stiff, conventional baronet, and with authority-figures of every kind, from those running his university to government agents. With his dreams of revolution, overthrowing the established order, and his horror at the notion of a cruel, patriarchal God, Shelley seemed at war with the world of ‘Father’ in all its aspects. But in terms of his relations with the feminine, his chaotic love-life showed him equally at sea. Having eloped with his first wife Harriet, and then found it necessary to be involved emotionally with two women at the same time, he cast them both off and repeated the pattern, by eloping with Mary herself and her half-sister Claire (although by the time the story was written Claire was also flinging herself at Byron, by whom she immediately became pregnant).
Shelley may have consciously identified himself with the poor, rejected, would-be benevolent monster in Frankenstein: but from the outside it seems that he was much more like Frankenstein himself, possessed by a demonic, blind egotism which, as the years went by, plunged his own life and that of those around him ever further into chaos and nightmare. Only a few months after the episode in Switzerland, the deaths began: with the suicides, first of Mary’s sister Fanny, with whom Shelley had had a brief affair, then of his abandoned and distracted wife Harriet. Two years later his little son by Mary, their beloved William, died at the age of four. Other deaths of those close to him followed, in an almost uncanny echo of the deaths of everyone around Frankenstein in the story: until finally came that fateful summer in Italy in 1821.
After weeks of manic-depression, shot through with fearful death-laden dreams, thoughts of suicide (and Mary’s miscarriage of another child), Shelley recklessly took out his boat, the Don Juan, into the teeth of a violent Mediterranean storm, under full sail. The ‘Modern Prometheus’, the ‘boy hero who could never grow up’, had defiantly invited his own destruction, along with that of his two companions. Reading Richard Holmes’s comprehensive account of those last years and weeks of his life in Shelley: The Pursuit, one may reflect that few people in history can have turned themselves into their own ‘monster’ more poignantly, more dramatically and more unwittingly than Shelley himself. In this sense his wife’s nightmare story in 1816 was like a horrendous premonition of what was already happening to the man she loved; and of how their life together would, only five years later, come to its awful climax.
‘When, on the last day, they confront each other, which is the Monster? Moby Dick in his “gentle joyousness”, his “mighty mildness of repose”, or Ahab screaming his mad defiance? In complete contempt of the three-thousand-year-old pattern of myth, Melville permits the dragon-slayer to be slain, the dragon to escape alive; but it is hard to tell whether he really stands the legend on its head, allows evil to survive and heroism to perish. Only Ahab believes that the whale represents evil, and Ahab is both crazy and damned ... it is Ahab who must die, precisely because he has sought the death of the Other ...”.
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick: or The White Whale (1851) is a much weightier work of literature than any of the novels we have looked at previously in this chapter, which is what helps to make it one of the darkest stories ever written.
‘Call me Ishmael’. The explosive opening line sets the book’s dark tone by invoking the archetypical outcast from Genesis (XVI), ‘whose hand is against every man, and every man’s hand is against him’. But it eventually becomes apparent that the narrator Ishmael is not so much the story’s central figure as just a curiously passive observer. A rootless drifter through the cities of East Coast America, he has resolved to escape the depressing aimlessness of his existence by signing on for a long whaling voyage across the oceans of the world. In this respect, the book begins like a Voyage and Return story: an incomplete, inadequate hero is laying himself open to some shattering, life-transforming experience.
The story really divides into two quite separate parts. The first, unfolding through the opening chapters, takes place on land, when Ishmael travels up to New England to find a whaling ship. It is dominated by his encounter with Queequeg, the dark-skinned tattooed South Sea islander with his phallic idol and his collection of shrunken human heads. When the fearsome ‘savage’ first bursts in at night to share his bed, in the inn owned by a man called Coffin, Ishmael is terrified. But by the time they have talked at length, and spent the night with ‘Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner’ so ‘you had almost thought I had been his wife’, they are a ‘cosy, loving pair’.
In this bizarre opening we may see an echo of the oldest story in the world, the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the hero is not psychologically ready for his journey across the world to slay the monstrous Humbaba until he has met, fought with and finally learned to love the shadowy other half who is to be his companion on the journey: the ‘wild man’ Enkidu, who has lived among the animals in a state of nature. We also see an instance of that alliance between a white hero and a black or Indian companion which Leslie Fiedler identified as such a recurring theme in American literature (as in the friendship between Huckleberry Finn and the runaway black slave Jim). This duality almost invariably represents the coming together of two halves to make a potential whole. The ‘civilised’ white man, separated from nature, represents ‘ego-consciousness’, with all its limitations; his dark-skinned companion, closer to nature and the world of instinct, embodying the ‘feminine’ values of feeling and intuition, represents the ‘dark unconscious’ from which the hero has become split off. Both are necessary to achieve the whole. But in Moby Dick the new partnership of Ishmael and Queequeg is not a prelude to the process of Ishmael’s maturing to eventual Self-realisation, which might have provided the central theme of the story. For at the moment where they sign on as crew-members of the Pequod, Ishmael and Queequeg more or less fade into the background. This is where the the real theme of the story begins to take over.
Few novels are more overtly shot through with the ‘rule of three’ than Moby Dick, from the moment Ishmael chooses the three-masted Pequod, the third of ‘three ships up for three-year’s voyages’. The ship has three white men as mates, each with his ‘dusky’ harpooner: Tashtego the North American Indian, Dagoo the black American, Queequeg the Polynesian. The crew is so cosmopolitan, representing all the races of the world, that it is a microcosm of humanity. But its central figure is the one-legged, ‘monomaniac’ Tyrant, Captain Ahab. The overwhelming power of his dark obsession, from the moment when, with ‘three heavy-hearted cheers’ from its crew, the ship ‘blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic’, dominates the rest of the story.
We soon learn that the real shaping plot of the book is a combination of a Quest and Overcoming the Monster. When Ahab assembles his crew and nails to the mainmast a Spanish gold piece, he unfolds the real purpose of their journey: to track down and take vengeance on the ‘accursed white whale’ which years before had stove in three of Ahab’s whaleboats and ‘reaped away’ his leg ‘as a mower a blade of grass in the field’. The gold is to be the prize for he who first sights their goal. And when Ahab first tells them of Moby Dick, we are left in no doubt that this ‘treacherous’, hideously deformed creature, with its massive humped back, its misshapen jaw, three holes in its starboard fluke, is an archetypal monster. Calling up rum for the crew, Ahab summons the three mates with their harpooners and, in a parody of a religious ceremony, adjures them to a solemn oath:
‘now three to three ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices ... drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow – Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!’
We gradually learn that this ‘murderous monster against whom I and all the others had take our oaths of violence and revenge’ is far more than any mortal creature. Not only is it ‘a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity’, which has caused injury or death to countless mariners in almost every part of the seven seas; it has inspired such superstitious dread that there was an:
‘unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.’
Such an inversion of normality does this phantasmagoric creature represent that even its colour is a clue to its treacherous nature. As Ishmael recalls, ‘it was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me’; before holding forth on how the colour white, commonly associated with innocence, purity and light, can often be a mask to what is cruel, sinister and dark.
From here on, the narrative alternates between two themes in counterpoint. On the ‘upper level’ we follow the human drama of what is happening on the Pequod, as it continues across the ocean wastes in search of their elusive goal, driven by the demonic obsession of its captain; a journey fraught with every kind of omen and foreboding, like the moment when, as the boats are launched to chase their first whale, we see Ahab suddenly ‘surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air’. These are the mysterious additional crew he has smuggled on board to man his own whaleboat, led by the strangely sinister Fedallah, ‘tall and swart’, with ‘one white tooth evilly protruding’ from his ‘steel-like lips’.
But on a second ‘below the line’ level we gradually learn more about whales, these wondrous, mysterious creatures of the deeps inhabiting the ‘inferior realm’ below the surface, to whose death and destruction the whale hunters devote their lives. As we do so, the picture we are being given of whales subtly changes.
A highlight of the book, for instance, is the time when the crew find themselves caught up in and surrounded by a vast becalmed armada of whales, covering several square miles. On the outer rim, where they lower the whaleboats, the monsters are threshing about in panic and violent commotion. But when Queequeg harpoons a whale, it draws his and Ishmael’s boat ‘into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake’.
Here, in an ‘enchanted calm’, they have an almost mystical vision, as they see the mother whales and their young calves coming up so close to the boat that Queequeg is able to ‘pat their foreheads’.
‘But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers.’
As they watch in amazement at these mothers ‘quietly eying us’, while their off-spring gambolled around in the translucent waters,
‘some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep. And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments, yes, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight.’
It is a vision of peace, joy and innocence, all the more shocking because it is an almost unique glimpse of the world of the soft, loving feminine in this otherwise hard, dark, one-sidedly masculine story. So relentless is the masculine colouring of the book that it contains almost no female characters at all (apart from a busy-bodying ‘Quaker woman’ who tries to provide homely necessaries when they are still in port). Even the masculine-feminine balance in human relationships has to be squeezed into a solely masculine straitjacket, as in the almost overtly homosexual companionship between Ishmael and Queequeg, when they sleep in each other’s arms like a ‘cosy, loving’ married couple. Only when we catch a glimpse of the mother whales and their offspring do we see the ‘feminine’ presented openly and unambiguously, although even here it is only in the ‘inferior’ form of an animal world seen below the surface of the sea.
In fact we almost immediately have a rather different sight of the hidden life-giving values the whales represent when, by a trick, the crew of the Pequod manage to wrest the stinking, decaying corpse of a whale off a French boat, on the suspicion that, buried in its depths, may be ambergris, that substance so precious that is worth ‘a gold guinea an ounce’. Sure enough, suddenly, from the heart of this rotting mass, ‘there stole a faint stream of perfume’. Out come handfuls of sweet-smelling ambergris, all the more powerful for the contrast with the reek of putrescence which surrounds it.
Again we move on to the strange scene where, having captured and decapitated a sperm whale, and removed the ‘sperm’ from its head, ‘The Baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case’, we see Ishmael and others sitting on deck, rolling and squeezing the soft sperm in their hands, so transported by their ‘sweet and unctous duty’ that it is like another mystical vision:
‘As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among these soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed that uncontaminated aroma literally and truly like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it ... I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatever.’
But even this mystically joyous moment, when Ishmael imagines all the human race at one – ‘let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness’ – has been bought at the price of little Pip, the black cabin boy, losing his wits in terror during the chase of the whale which provided the sperm. The double-entendre of ‘sperm’ in itself carries homoerotic echoes. And we are soon back into that other harsh, bleak, pitiless man-centred world, preoccupied with death and destruction, chequered with foreboding, which dominates most of the narrative.
Much of the structure of the latter part of the story is built round the successive meetings with other whaling ships, each from a different nation, again conveying the sense that we are here meeting all the human race. Each is hailed by the increasingly mad Ahab in hope that it might have news of the whereabouts of Moby Dick. And each encounter in turn adds to the build-up towards the final climax. The American Jereboam had lost its first mate to Moby Dick, and its crew have been terrorised by a religious fanatic who warns of a similar death for Ahab. The English captain of the Samuel Enderby has lost an arm to Moby Dick, and shortly afterwards Queequeg falls seemingly mortally sick and orders his coffin to be made, before he miraculously recovers.
At last they emerge into ‘the great South Sea’. It is not unlike that moment in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, when ‘we were the first that ever burst into that silent sea’ (indeed there are profound symbolic echoes between the two stories, each centred on the image of killing a creature which stands for the majesty and perfection of nature). Ahab orders the blacksmith to forge a special harpoon, like the dark version of a ‘magic weapon’. Dipping it in the blood of the three harpooners, he dedicates it to the devil and to the destruction of the ‘White Fiend’ in a fearful inversion of Christian symbolism:
‘“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli” deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.’
The next afternoon four more whales are killed, one by Ahab. As, ‘floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky’, Ahab’s whale and the sun ‘died together’, ‘such a sweetness and such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air’ it almost seems as though the wind has carried ‘vesper hymns’ from some far-off Spanish convent, lost in a dark, green valley. Again, there is the identification of whales and the world of nature with Christian symbolism: everything Ahab and his crew are now so explicitly set to defy. That night the sinister Fedallah prophesies to Ahab that, before he dies, ‘two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands’; the other made from wood grown in America.
There is a terrifying midnight thunderstorm, when the Pequod is struck by such fearsome lightning that each of its ‘three tall masts’ are seen ‘burning like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar’. They encounter the Rachel, ‘weeping for her children’ as in the Bible, as its captain distractedly searches for the whaleboat lost to Moby Dick in which his 12-year old son had been among the crew. Ahab refuses the captain’s plea to help in the search, and as the Pequod ploughs on, it meets the Delight, carrying the ‘few splintered planks’ of its smashed whaleboat. ‘Hast seen the White Whale?’ calls Ahab. The captain points to the remains of his boat, in which five men had just been lost to Moby Dick. As the corpse of the last is thrown into the sea, the Pequod sails on, But the Delight’s captain duly notes the portent of ‘the strange lifebuoy’ at its stern, Queequeg’s coffin.
Thus does the great quest approach its climax, and in keeping with so many other Quest stories, this unfolds through three stages. But its prelude is the dawn of another perfect, peaceful day, when ‘the firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-prevading azure’; the ‘pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look’; while ‘hither and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds’ like the ‘gentle thoughts of the feminine air’ above ‘the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea’. In gender terms, never before in the story has the opposition of ‘light feminine’ and ‘dark masculine’ been made so explicit.
This leads into ‘The Chase – The First Day’, when the cry goes up ‘There she blows! A hump like a snowhill! It is Moby Dick!’ As the boats are launched, we finally catch our first glimpse of this fearsome, fabulous monster towards which all the story has been leading us – and what a shock it provides. Our first vision of the whale is one of inexpressible majesty and peace, as we see him sliding along, set in a ring of ‘finest, fleecy’ foam, attended by ‘hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea’. ‘A gentle joyousness – a mighty mildness of repose’ invests ‘the gliding whale’. Not Jove himself ‘did surpass the glorified White Whale, as he so divinely swam’. Far from being the fearful deformed monster we have been led to expect, Moby Dick is god-like: the image of a mighty creature at one with life and with nature; in perfect harmony with the great spirit that moves the universe; a complete symbol of the transcendent Self. And the total opposite to this is that dark, murderous embodiment of the human ego personified in the demonic madman now bent on his destruction.
Precisely because everything in Ahab’s world is now possessed by the dark inversion, once the struggle begins we now see only the other side of that life force which Moby Dick represents, the dark, destructive side of nature itself. On the first day, three boats are launched, Ahab’s in the lead, and the whale comes up underneath it, snapping it in two with his jaws. Ahab is thrown into the water, the others cling to the wreckage, until all are rescued. Next morning, in ‘The Chase – The Second Day’, Moby Dick is again sighted. Again three boats are launched and this time the three harpooners all land their darts in his side. The whale turns on them in fury, wrecking two boats and overturning the third, Ahab’s, so that his ivory pegleg is shattered. As they are again picked up by the Pequod, Fedallah has vanished, and it is thought he had been tugged under by Ahab’s own harpoon line.
In ‘The Chase – The Third Day’, the pursuit resumes in the afternoon, again with three boats, one captained by Ahab. As the enraged whale attacks and damages the two others, this reveals the body of Fedallah lashed to his side by the harpoon line, prompting Ahab to recognise this as the first hearse, ‘not made with mortal hands’, the dead man had prophesied. From the third boat Ahab hurls his harpoon, goading Moby Dick to roll against his boat, throwing three men overboard. Finally, maddened beyond endurance, the whale launches himself with full force against the Pequod itself, fatally crushing its hull. As the ship begins to sink, Ahab recognises it as ‘the second hearse’, made from wood grown in America. Ahab hurls another harpoon but, as the whale dashes forward, the rope catches him round the neck, plunging him into the depths. The Pequod sinks into a swirling vortex, carrying the rest of the crew with it, and ‘the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago’.
In a brief epilogue, we learn that Ishmael had been one of the three men from Ahab’s boat thrown overboard. As he swims in the water, up from the sinking ship floats Queequeg’s coffin, the ‘lifebuoy’ to which Ishmael can cling for survival. After a day and night floating on ‘a soft and dirge-like main’ he is rescued by the Rachel which, in her ‘search after her missing children, only found another orphan’. Ishmael is the lone survivor. Yet he is like the hero of one of those dreamlike Voyage and Return stories who emerge from what should have been a life-transforming experience having learned nothing, completely unchanged. He is still just an ‘orphan’: the solitary, unformed child he was when the story began.
When Melville completed Moby Dick, he famously wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne ‘I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as a lamb’. Without fully understanding how or why, he must have sensed that his imagination had become possessed by a story which tried to turn the archetypal foundations of storytelling on their heads. He had relished conceiving a tale in which the hero, Ahab, was all dark, setting out to destroy the ‘White Whale’ which was a symbol of all that is light; even though the hidden logic of the tale continued to insist this could only end in his hero’s destruction. Somewhere from his unconscious Melville knew he had written ‘a wicked book’, a story which attempted to defy all the cosmic order of things. But at the same time he felt ‘spotless as a lamb’. He did not wish to feel any remorse, because, like other Romantic writers of the age, he had the exhilarating sense he was venturing into wholly new, uncharted waters of the human spirit, where no storytellers had ever travelled before.
There are obvious parallels here between Moby Dick and Frankenstein. In both stories, although they are fundamentally shaped around the Overcoming the Monster plot, the hero, as an embodiment of dark, heartless, all-consuming egotism, is the true monster. In each case his ‘opposite’, as we originally see him, is presented, in an ‘inferior’ way, as light, an image of the Self. But eventually in each case, reflecting the hero’s own state of darkness, this shadowy antagonist does indeed turn, like the statue of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, into the monstrous embodiment of the ‘unrealised value’ who must destroy him.
It is no accident that each of these stories was written at a time, the first half of the nineteenth century, when a highly significant change was coming over the psychology of Western man. Already the tumultuous political and social upheavals at the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon had created the sense that some entirely new age was dawning for mankind. In the dramatic advance of scientific knowledge, of which the immense material changes being brought by the industrial revolution were only the most obvious outward sign, man had begun to step out of his natural frame in a way that had no precedent. His new technological power was giving him the sense that he now had the power physically to ‘conquer’ nature as never before. Unprecedented advances in scientific knowledge were giving him the sense he could conquer the mysteries of the universe intellectually. On all sides there was the exhilarating sense of stepping on to that escalator of ‘progress’ which was carrying the human race up out of the dark, primitive past into an ever more glorious future; and this reflected the most profound shift taking place in Western man’s psychological centre of gravity.
In fact, in taking this further giant step out of the natural frame from which he had sprung, there was an immense unconscious price to pay, in the severing of his new, seemingly all-powerful consciousness from that deeper level of his being which linked him instinctively with nature. In becoming emancipated from the constraints of nature as never before, he was also becoming in a new way alienated: not just from the natural world outside him but from the deeper levels of his own nature. It was in this process of separation, this splitting off of conscious from unconscious, that the fundamental psychic shift was taking place which was beginning to produce such an earthquake in the nature of storytelling. In the next few chapters we shall see how this has continued to shape the way stories are told right up to the present day.