‘The activities of our age are uncertain and multifarious. No single literary, artistic or philosophic tendency predominates. There is a babel of notions and conflicting theories. But in the midst of this general confusion, it is possible to recognise one curious and significant melody, repeated in different keys and by different instruments in every one of the subsidiary babels. It is the tune of our modern Romanticism.’
Aldous Huxley, The New Romanticism (1931)
‘Never was any age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling than our own ... the radio and the film are mere counterfeit emotion all the time, the current press and literature the same. People wallow in emotion, counterfeit emotion. They lap it up, they live in it and on it ... and at times they seem to get on very well with it all. And then, more and more, they break down. They go to pieces.’
D. H. Lawrence, Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1929)
A key to understanding the enormous change which has come over storytelling in the past 200 years is to recall that an essential feature of all the archetypal plots is how they show the central figure of the story being inwardly transformed. The stories of Odysseus and Perseus, Aladdin and Jane Eyre, Raskolnikov and Peer Gynt, all tell us how they develop the balance of inner qualities required to bring them to Self-realisation. At root this is what our capacity to imagine stories is about: to show how the inner state of any story’s hero or heroine is such that it can either bring them to a happy ending or carry them down to destruction.
In the last chapter we began to explore what happens when a split opens up between a storyteller’s ego and his unconscious, that hidden level of the psyche containing the archetypal structures which give stories their shape and meaning. One of the most significant consequences, as the ego takes over, is that all the internal symbolism through which the archetypes operate becomes projected outwards, onto the external world. We no longer see the hero or heroine going through the inner transformation which is the real theme of the archetypal pattern. Their transformation is all in their outward circumstances. In this respect, the story has become subtly detached from its archetypal roots. And this disintegration shows itself in three main ways.
The first is the one we have just been looking at: the full ‘dark version’, where a storyteller presents us with a hero trying to act out the archetypal pattern which leads to a happy ending but unable to do so because he is egocentric and dark. Because there is no inner transformation to give him the balance of qualities required to reach the complete happy ending, the logic of storytelling dictates that, like Julien Sorel or Captain Ahab, he must ultimately bring about his own destruction.
The second form such a story can take is ‘the lesser dark version’. This is where a dark or inadequate hero or heroine may seem outwardly to reach their goal; but, again, because they have not gone through the necessary transformation, there is a final twist to the tale which shows us they have not really achieved it. Either they end in some kind of frustration or defeat; or we are in some other way made aware that the story has not been properly resolved.
There is a third form such a story can take, not always so obvious, which has played a hugely important role in the storytelling of the past 200 years: not least through that medium which so dominated twentieth-century popular storytelling, the cinema. This is ‘the sentimental version’. Superficially, the story may seem to go through the archetypal pattern, complete with a happy ending. But because it has all been presented in outward terms, without any inner transformation, the story has been emptied of its deeper archetypal meaning. What remains is just a sentimental shell: form without content. Furthermore, whenever we examine such a story in detail, we invariably find that something has gone subtly awry with its plot. In this way it reveals just how it has become detached from the underlying archetype.
In this chapter and those which follow, we draw on a wide range of novels, films, plays and operas to see how each of these aberrations from the fundamental archetypes works.
A particularly obvious candidate for dark or sentimental interpretations is the plot of the Rags to Riches story, because this so easily lends itself to ego-based fantasies, which can give both storyteller and audience the pleasure of identifying with a hero or heroine who emerges from the crowd to win success and acclaim.
The most extreme way in which this plot can turn dark, as we saw in The Scarlet and the Black, is where the storyteller presents a dark hero who lacks those essential inner qualities; who attempts to climb from Rags to Riches in defiance of the archetypal rules, and is therefore finally destroyed. The heartless Julien Sorel is as two-dimensional as a character in a strip cartoon. In no way does he go through any internal transformation. We only see him egotistically seeking to compete with, impress or dominate every other character in the story. He is precisely the same pasteboard figure at the end as he was at the beginning. The story’s only real psychological interest is the extent to which its hero was a fantasy projection of the emotionally immature author himself.
An example of the ‘lesser dark version’ of the plot is Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel Ami (1885). A penniless but good-looking young French ex-army officer, Georges Duroy, is strolling through Paris with ‘the authentic air of the bold bad hero of romance’, wondering how he can afford his next meal. He runs into a former fellow-officer Forestier, who has a well-paid job with a newspaper, La Vie Francaise, and says he will help Duroy to become a journalist. They visit the Folies Bergere, where Duroy goes off to spend the night with an attractive prostitute, Rachel. She is so taken by his looks that she is not concerned by his lack of money. He is taken on by the newspaper to write a series of articles, but finds himself incapable of putting anything together until Forestier’s clever wife writes the first article for him. At dinner with the couple he meets Mme de Marelle, an attractive married woman with whom he begins an affair, while still continuing to see Rachel. Although we are given little idea of how learns to write, he becomes established as a journalist, specialising in gossip and politics, while Mme de Marelle rents an apartment where they can carry on their affair. Her young daughter Laurine is taken by Duroy and nicknames him ‘Bel Ami’.
The whole story is presented as a kind of wish-fulfilment fantasy, seen through Duroy’s eyes, in which he enjoys effortless success, both with women (invariably more than one at the same time) and in his new profession, without ever really providing any plausible evidence of why he achieves either. Eventually he is summoned to the south of France to attend Forestier’s premature death-bed. No sooner has his friend expired than Duroy proposes to Mme Forestier. They are married and work together as a journalistic team, Duroy changing his name to the grander Du Roy, while he resumes his affair with Mme de Marelle. He then sets his sights on the middle-aged wife of his editor, Walter. No sooner has he finally overcome her resistance, rendering her besotted with love for him, than he tires of her infantile devotion and begins to fancy her teenage daughter Suzanne, while at the same time continuing his affair with Mme de Marelle. A new French government comes to power, closely linked to La Vie Francaise, which gives Walter and his newspaper enormous new political influence and importance. In a desperate bid to regain Du Roy’s affection, Mme Walter reveals to him a secret Government plan to take over Morocco, out of which her husband and members of the Government are scheming to make a vast fortune by insider dealing.
Mme Forestier is then herself left a large legacy by a man who turns out to have been her long-established lover. Du Roy insists that, to prevent scandal, it should be announced that the money was left to them both, making him a franc millionaire. But this is nothing to the immense fortune made by his editor Walter from his financial coup on the Morocco affair, who has now bought himself a palatial mansion in the heart of Paris. Discovering that the Foreign Minister is now his wife’s lover, Du Roy conceives his final coup. He arranges for the Commissioner of Police to catch his wife and her lover in the act of adultery, so he can divorce her; thus leaving him free to woo Suzanne, as heiress to one of the richest men in France. He uses the knowledge of how her father had come by his fortune to ensure his agreement to the match, to the horror of Suzanne’s mother. As the climax approaches, ‘Bel Ami’ seems to have won every worldly prize life has to offer. M. Walter makes him editor-in-chief of La Vie Francaise, which Walter’s wealth has now made the leading newspaper in France. He is rich. He is ennobled as the Baron Du Roy. And the story culminates in a spectacular wedding in the most fashionable church in Paris, attended by the cream of Parisian society. But at this very moment, having imagined that the ‘Man-God’ Christ himself ‘was descending to earth to consecrate’ his triumph and how it might only be a matter of time before he became President of the French Republic, Du Roy’s inmost thoughts are only of one person in that vast congregation, with whom he has enjoyed a pregnant exchange of glances. Before his eyes, as he walks down the aisle into the brilliant sunlight, ‘there floated the image of Mme de Marelle’, looking into the mirror as she always did before getting out of the bed where they made love. It would not be long before he saw that sight again.
The story is a complete outward projection of the Rags to Riches archetype. In worldly terms, Duroy has won the hand of his ‘Princess’ and succeeded to the ‘kingdom’. He has achieved all the external trappings of Self-realisation, seemingly sanctified by all the solemnities of religion itself. But, as in The Scarlet and the Black, this has all been presented in only the most relentlessly superficial fashion, centred on a wholly self-centred, unscrupulous cardboard hero to whom every prize – women, money, position, fashionable acclaim – falls with the relentless, mechanical ease of a wish-fulfilment daydream; although admittedly in a world in which everyone else is shown to be as self-centred and amoral as himself. There is not the slightest pretence that Duroy has grown up into a mature man. Inwardly he remains wholly unchanged, the ‘boy hero who cannot grow up’, caught between ‘Mother’, represented by the succession of adoring married women who are his mistresses, and the infantile anima figures of the child Laurine and his eventual bride Suzanne. As the daughter of the richest and most powerful man in France, Suzanne is almost a carbon copy of Sorel’s Mathilde; except that here the outward show of the happy ending is complete, as the wedding finally takes place, while ‘Mother’, the married mistress, is still waiting faithfully in the shadows. But this leaves us in no doubt that the archetypal resolution of the story is only a hollow sham. We have not really arrived at a happy ending at all.
A similar example of the ‘lesser dark version’ of the Rags to Riches plot was Budd Schulberg’s Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run. This centres on the dizzying upward climb, first in the world of New York gossip journalism, then in Hollywood, of the ruthlessly ego-driven Sammy Glick (although, unlike Stendhal and de Maupassant, Schulberg did not identify with his hero but with his story’s narrator, a fellow writer who observes Glick’s remorseless rise with wry dismay). Like Bel Ami, this outwardly echoes the fairy-tale pattern, not least in its climax where the hero again appears to have married the beautiful ‘Princess’ and ‘succeeded to the kingdom’. When a New York multi-millionaire buys the Worldwide Studios where Glick works, the hero schemes to ensure that he is appointed all-powerful head of the studio, overthrowing the kindly father-figure who had previously been his champion and protector; and the story concludes with the spectacular Hollywood wedding in which Glick marries the new owner’s ‘aristocratic’ daughter. But there is no way, with such a dark hero, this could be the end of the story. Finally comes the twist to the tale, where in the middle of the party to celebrate the wedding, Glick goes upstairs in his mansion to find his equally cold-hearted, self-centred bride enjoying sex with a stupid but handsome young film star. Unabashed, she tells him the marriage was just a mutually-advantageous social arrangement. Temporarily, Glick’s fantasy world is in ruins. But as the book ends, he has already retreated behind the armour of his all-consuming egocentricity, ‘running’ as hard as ever. As in Bel Ami, we realise the cardboard hero has not inwardly changed at all. In no way is the story finally resolved.
A ‘lesser dark version’ which even more overtly alluded to the symbolism of the fairy tale was that British best-seller of the late 1950s, John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957). Joe Lampton, an orphaned young man, arrives to seek his fortune in a big Yorkshire town. He is as two-dimensional and egocentric as ‘Bel Ami’ and Sammy Glick, although without their talents for self-advancement. He soon spots from afar the ‘Princess’ who represents all his ambition requires, Susan, the pretty, silly young daughter of a rich local businessman. At first she seems quite out of reach, and he muses:
‘Susan was a princess and I was the equivalent of a swineherd. I was, you might say, acting out the equivalent of a fairy story. The trouble was that there were more difficult obstacles than dragons and enchanters to be overcome, and I could see no sign of a fairy godmother.’
Almost immediately, however, a ‘fairy godmother’ (or at any rate a ‘Mother’) comes into Lampton’s life, in the shape of Alice Aisgill, a warm-hearted, married older woman. She begins to ‘transform’ him, although of course only externally, by smoothing away some of his social gaucheries and teaching him to use hair cream; and soon he is taking his ‘Princess’ out to social occasions, while the affair with ‘Mother’ continues in the background:
‘I was taking Susan not as Susan but as a Grade A lovely and the daughter of a factory owner, as the means to obtaining the Aladdin’s cave of my ambitions.’
In fact Susan is a classic instance of the kind of infantile anima figure who might be fantasised into existence by someone suffering from ‘Mother-dominated’ emotional immaturity. She begins to respond to the advances of her ‘Joekins’ (reminiscent of the infantile Dora Spenlow’s pet-name ‘Doady’ for David Copperfield), but throws him over when she discovers that he is still tied to Alice (‘Mother’). Joe and Alice travel down to Dorset for four days of love-making (‘that night and the nights that followed I learned all about a woman’s body and my own’), ending with Joe’s sickly declaration ‘I do love you Alice. I’ll love you till the day I die. You’re my wife now. There’ll never be anyone else.’
On their return to Yorkshire, Joe at once wins Susan back and makes her pregnant. Her father offers to find his now prospective son-in-law a highly paid new job:
‘I was a Prince Charming – every obstacle had been magically smoothed from my path.’
‘Prince Charming’ tells ‘Mother’ what has happened, and that their affair is over. She gets drunk, runs her car off the road and is crushed to an unrecognisable pulp. Truly in such fantasies has the world of the fairy tale been turned in our time inside out.
When we talk of ‘sentimentality’, we mean the false version of something real; the counterfeit of something which can inspire proper human emotions. Sentimentality plays with our emotions. When we see a sentimental film or hear a sentimental song, our heartstrings may be tugged. We may be moved to tears. As Noel Coward said ‘extraordinary how potent cheap music is’. But we may also be aware that our emotional responses are only being outwardly manipulated, in a way which does not correspond to any genuine personal reality.
The essence of sentimentality is that it arises from the capacity of the human ego to appropriate the values and properties of the Self. It is thus egotism in disguise, pretending to identify with something higher and beyond Self. If one of the most obvious attributes of the Self is selfless feeling, sentimentality is the outward show of such feeling without its reality. This is why we particularly associate it with such expressions of emotion as the romantic love between a man and a woman; love between parents and children; sympathetic feelings for the plight of other people in general; the love of country; of nature; of God. All these are naturally functions of the deeper, ego-transcending Self. But they can all be sentimentalised when the ego seeks to enjoy such feelings without letting go of itself.
In one sense all the dark, ego-centred versions of stories we have already looked at are sentimental, compared with stories which are fully integrated with the underlying archetypes. Hence the two-dimensional nature of all the characters who appear in them. But at least in the ‘dark’ versions it becomes obvious something has gone seriously adrift, and that the story cannot achieve its proper archetypal ending. What we must now look at are those stories where the ego manages to appropriate almost the entire outward form of the archetype, while emptying it of its inner significance; although even here, as we shall see, the result always somehow indicates that something has gone awry.
Nowhere in our time has been more obviously the home of Rags to Riches stories than the ‘dream factory’ of Hollywood: either in its real life role of transforming Norma Jean Mortensons and Archie Kerrs into Marilyn Monroes and Cary Grants, poor, anonymous little boys and girls into ‘Princesses’ and ‘Princes’; or in the multitude of fictional versions which over the past century have poured out onto the screens and into the fantasies of the world. Every conceivable permutation has been worked on this theme, not least in that host of films which showed some unrecognised genius winning his way at last to fame and recognition.
An example we looked earlier was The Benny Goodman Story (1956), recreating the early career of the 1930s swing bandleader. Outwardly this story followed the exact pattern of the Rags to Riches archetype, right up to the happy ending, with the hero winning the hand of the beautiful ‘Princess’ and succeeding to the ‘kingdom’, as he wins a standing ovation in Carnegie Hall, the supreme citadel of American musical respectability where no mere jazz musician had ever been allowed to play before. But when we look more carefully, we see how the hero’s success is all presented in external terms. We see no inner development in his character. The story is no more than a wish-fulfilment fantasy, originally centred on a small boy whose only real defining characteristic is his exceptional musical talent, rather like Julien Sorel’s capacity to remember chunks of Horace, and his all-consuming will to succeed. Because the hero is a pleasant-enough cardboard figure, there is nothing obviously dark and inimical about him. It is therefore acceptable that he should eventually win through to worldly gratification and acclaim. But it is telling that the ultimate mark of his success is when the heroine’s rich elderly parents are seen tapping their feet to his music and joining in the cheers in Carnegie Hall. Really he is still just the small boy who wants approval from the ‘grown ups’. He has not matured to become fully grown-up himself, a king over his own inner kingdom, which is what the Rags to Riches archetype is about. In psychological terms, like all those other Hollywood versions of the Rags to Riches story showing the disregarded young artist who eventually draws the attention of the world to recognise what a clever fellow he is, The Benny Goodman Story arranges the facts of history to make no more than a pleasantly self-indulgent fantasy.
Not all Hollywood’s fondly-imagined fairy tales adhere quite so closely to the archetypal pattern, not least in real life. For there is nothing more dangerous than to try to act out externally the patterns of the archetypes, which can only yield their true significance when taken inwardly, as the symbols of inner psychic growth. This is why, behind its fairy-tale facade, Hollywood, as a town where the persona rules supreme, has to this day proved such a graveyard for those who pass unconsciously into the grip of projected archetypes, leaving that trail of divorces, alcoholism, nervous breakdowns and even murders with which it has long been synonymous.
Even Hollywood’s fictional fairy tales can often be seen on closer examination to betray the dark side of the psychic disorder bound to rage in a town and an industry so remorselessly dedicated to the self-deceiving world of the ego. A revealing instance was that Charlie Chaplin silent-screen classic of the 1920s, The Gold Rush. The first part of the story shows Charlie and two fellow prospectors, Black Larsen and Big Jim, out in the wilderness, where Jim has discovered an enormous lode of gold (‘the treasure in the cave’). After experiencing blizzards and starvation, Charlie’s two companions begin to fight. Larsen hits Jim over the head with a spade and is then killed by an avalanche. Jim disappears, having lost his memory and forgotten the whereabouts of his gold mine. Charlie, left alone, goes down into the nearby town, where he meets and falls in love with Georgia, the little dance-hall hostess, who only dances with him to spite her drunken and bullying lover. Charlie, imagining that she likes him, invites her back to his cabin with her friends for a New Year’s Eve celebration dinner. They do not turn up.
So far, in light of its inner symbolism, any analyst who heard such a story recounted as a dream by one of his patients might fear his subject was heading for nervous breakdown. Clearly this is an extreme case of arrested development. Both the girl (an infantile anima figure) and the buried treasure (potential personality growth) are ‘lost’. This is coupled with the death of one companion and the disappearance of the other (a severe case of violent repression of important elements in the psyche!).
In the second part of the story Big Jim returns, looking for Charlie as the one person who can help him retrace his steps back to the lost gold. When, by lucky chance, they find it, he rewards Charlie with a share and they both become millionaires. But Charlie is still miserable because he has lost the girl he loves. In other words, he has been able to compensate for his inability to relate to the anima by becoming successful in the world and building up an impressive outward persona. But in no way has he developed inwardly, he is still as immature as he was at the beginning of the story and his fundamental inadequacy still nags at him.
In part three Charlie, now rich through no effort of his own, is embarking on a ship back to civilisation, happily showing off as he poses for photographers in his old tramp’s clothes. Suddenly he falls over a rail into the ship’s lower depths, where it just happens that little Georgia is travelling steerage. Seeing him in his old rags, she imagines he is a stowaway on the run and offers to look after him. In other words, he has regressed into the unconscious, where he finds his infantile anima projection who will love him as he really is, in his undeveloped, immature state. The story concludes on the hope that the two little sexless ‘babes in the wood’ can get married and live happily ever after: i.e., in the wishful thinking that they can remain happy frozen in their infantile state forever. Analysed in this light, it is not really a very happy little tale at all; and anyone who wished to understand Chaplin’s inner life need look no further than his film scripts for plenty of clues.
A friend of Chaplin, the journalist Alistair Cooke, in his book Six Men (1977), observed that Chaplin was:
‘extremely attractive to women and instantly susceptible to them, to two types more than most: the femme fatale and the child woman. The gamut is represented at its polar opposites by Pola Negri ... and his first wife, Mildred Harris. Time and again he found himself involved with lusty, earthy women. But the ones he sought were nubile adolescents. He married three of them, Mildred Harris at 16, when he was 29; Lita Grey at 17, when he was 35; Oona O’Neill at 18, when he was 55. I state this as an interesting but probably inexplicable phenomenon.’
Far from being ‘inexplicable’, the pattern is in fact only too familiar among men who fail to achieve the full transition of their ‘inner feminine’ between ‘Mother’ and a mature anima; and who thus remain caught in uneasy fluctuation between the two, equally frustrating poles of the ‘earthy femme fatale’ (Mother) and the ‘child woman’ (inadequately developed anima). Few men, however, have had more extensive or public opportunities to display this basic symptom of arrested development than Chaplin.
No brief summary of Hollywood’s innumerable variants on sentimentalising the Rags to Riches plot would be complete without a mention of that immensely popular 1960s musical My Fair Lady. Based on Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, it is revealing to note where the two versions differ.
From the heroine’s point of view, both stories unfold in many ways like a fairy tale. A dirty, coarsely-spoken little flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, used to being treated like garbage, meets a mysterious older person with apparently supernatural powers (his astonishing knowledge of phonetics, which enables him in the opening scene to place everyone in the Covent Garden crowd to within a few streets of where they live, just by the way they speak). This strange ‘Sorcerer’ figure, Professor Higgins, offers, for a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering, to transform Eliza into a ‘Princess’. She arrives at his house in Wimpole Street, where she undergoes a rite of initiation (being given a hot bath to wash away all the grime which symbolises her ragamuffin outward persona). She is dressed up in fine clothes, and as the first stage of the story ends, the long business of transformation has begun, with Eliza learning from Higgins how to talk like a lady.
By the beginning of the next act, the first stage of Eliza’s outward transformation is complete. She is now ready to go out into the world, where in Shaw’s version she undergoes the archetypal three tests: a visit to Professor Higgins’s mother’s ‘at home’ (where she is taken for a lady); an embassy ball (where she is taken for a Princess); and finally a Buckingham Palace garden party. In My Fair Lady these tests are reduced to two: Mrs Higgins receives her guests at Ascot races, and this is followed by the embassy ball. Eliza passes the tests triumphantly, but, like Cinderella, each time she has to return home, if not to rags at least to the domineering presence of Higgins, who continues to treat her coldly as a cross between her pitiful little former self and a mere scientific experiment.
In other words, as usual in the second stage of the Rags to Riches story, a split has opened up between the heroine’s triumphant new outer Self, her persona, and her real, deeper self, which is in danger of being repressed altogether. But we have already caught a glimpse of her embryonic ‘other half’, the ‘Prince’ who loves her for herself, in the somewhat improbable guise of Freddie Eynsford-Hill, the upper-middle-class young man who, as a guest of Mrs Higgins, has been bowled over by Eliza’s spirited charms.
The central crisis of the story arrives when, after her last triumphant test, Eliza finally explodes in rage at Higgins’s condescending treatment of her and, after giving him a piece of her mind, storms out of the house. All might seem lost, except that she falls into the arms of the waiting and doting Freddie. They wander round London at night, until she is ready for her final confrontation with Higgins, again under the eye of his mother. At last Eliza has discovered who she really is. Like the moment when, as Jane Eyre finally breaks loose from St John Rivers and exclaims ‘at last my powers were in play’, it seems Eliza is finally ready to throw off her ‘Sorcerer’s’ tyranny and come to full Self-realisation.
At this point the two versions diverge. In My Fair Lady, the story ends with Higgins finally recognising, after she has fled the house, how much Eliza has come to mean to him. She, equally missing him, steals back into the house and finds him sadly listening to her recorded voice. There is a hopelessly unresolved, sentimental ending where it is conveyed that she will come back to live with him, but in a relationship left wholly vague and unspecified. Companion? Housekeeper? Daughter? Wife? We never know.
In Shaw’s version, the ending is very different. Eliza, having finally declared her independence of Higgins, goes off with Freddie to get married. As Shaw explains in his Epilogue to Pygmalion, they then live more or less happily ever after. This may be at least the semblance of a fairy-tale ending for Eliza. But what if we look at it through the eyes of Higgins, who was, after all, a much more likely point of identification for the play’s author? Shaw’s name for the play was not Galatea, the ivory statue who was turned into a woman in the original myth, but Pygmalion, the name of her creator. Higgins, like Shaw when he wrote the play, is a man in early middle age. The Professor’s ‘supernatural powers’ are no more magical in their way than the gift for words which had made the mocking, iconoclastic Mr Shaw the most successful playwright of his day. And Shaw’s inmost problem, like that of many men, was with his unresolved tie to his mother and therefore to his own anima, that elusive central component in the male psyche which in Shaw’s case was never fully realised. This gave him endless trouble in his intimate relations with the opposite sex; not least in his embarrassingly public infatuation with Mrs Patrick Campbell, the commanding actress who played Eliza when Pygmalion was first staged in 1914, an affair which began in the wake of his mother’s death when he was in his late 50s.1
This inability to relate securely to his inner feminine held Shaw back from ever being able to relate properly with the life-giving internal realm of the spirit; indeed from ever fully growing up and becoming a ‘whole’ man. At root Shaw remained emotionally and spiritually retarded, a ‘boy hero who cannot grow up’, a rebellious puer aeternus, at odds with both the masculine and feminine parts of himself. And the repercussions of this were reflected in his political views, not least in his foolish ‘love affair’ with Stalin’s Russia, which he liked to portray as an idealised heaven-on-earth, a projected symbol of the Self, ruled by its benign Father-figure, just when the Soviet tyranny was at its murderous height. In Pygmalion, just as Eliza has developed to the point where she is capable of becoming an impressive woman in her own right, Higgins is quite unable to recognise it. The real reason is betrayed in his earlier remark to his mother: ‘oh, I can’t be bothered with women. My idea of a lovable woman is someone as much like you as possible.’ Just as the anima which could lead to wholeness emerges, the suffocating embrace of ‘Mother’ intervenes; the age-old beguiling obstacle which stands in the way of a man who cannot go out into the world and become fully a man. Like a spoiled little boy, Higgins is thus left alone with Mother, oblivious to the end of how callously and selfishly he has behaved. A story which may seem, at first sight, to be a touching and rather funny fairy tale, complete with happy ending, turns out to have a rather darker side altogether.
It is revealing to see what the split between a storyteller’s ego and the unconscious does to the plot of Overcoming the Monster, because in its archetypal form this is so directly focused on the battle against the power of the human ego. The hero challenges the monster of egotism in the name of the values of the Self. So what happens when this archetype is taken over by the ego itself?
In its darkest form we saw this in Frankenstein and Moby Dick, where the roles of hero and monster are reversed. At the beginning the hero himself appears as the story’s chief dark figure, while the monster appears as ‘light’, representing in an inferior form the unrealised value of the Self which the hero will never achieve. As the hero darkens further, so does the monster: to the point where, as the hero is finally destroyed by the shadow of his own egotism, the monster disappears.
An example of the ‘lesser dark version’ of this plot, in its own way almost as revealing about the psychological one-sidedness of modern civilisation, was that Hollywood classic from the early days of sound-pictures, King Kong (1933). An American film director Carl Denham is working on an immensely important and secret new project. He has hired a ship in New York and is desperate to find a young girl to act as his star. Spotting a penniless but beautiful blonde, Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), stealing an apple from a stall, he intervenes to save her from arrest and brings her onto the ship, to the disgust of its all-male crew. Only one young officer, the hero Jack Denholm, overcomes his initial aversion to her femininity and falls in love with her.
The ship crosses half the world to arrive in dense fog at a mysterious, unknown island, which has a small peninsula inhabited by a primitive people, cut off by a massive, ancient stone wall from the dark, jungle-clad interior. The white men see painted tribesmen working themselves into a frenzy, to the throbbing of drums, while a small girl is garlanded with flowers to be offered up through a mighty gate in the wall as ‘the bride of Kong’. The tribesmen see the blonde white woman as a more appropriate sacrifice, and come by night to the ship to kidnap her. She is dragged through the gate and tied between two pillars, where she is terrified to see bearing down on her the mysterious denizen of the island’s interior, a monstrous ape the size of a house. But instead of eating her, Kong carries her gently off into the jungle: a first sign that something unusual is happening to the normal archetypal pattern.
Everything we have seen up to this point reflects the way Denham and his all-male crew represent the ego-consciousness of modern American civilisation, cut off from the instinctive world of nature. In the metal prison of the ship, surrounded with their weapons and camera equipment, they represent all the limitations of one-sided masculinity. When they arrive at the island its geography symbolises what is happening. The small, inhabited peninsula of consciousness is cut off by a mighty barrier from the dark interior of the unconscious, inhabited by the natural forces of instinct which, because they are repressed, seem shadowy and menacing. And now the feminine value, the anima, has passed into that unconscious realm, into the clutches of the shadow of the dark masculine from which she will have to be rescued if there is to be any happy resolution.
Back on the ship, the crew discover she is missing and, led by the hero, the only man among them open to the feminine value, a group of them set off in pursuit. By the Rule of Three, they are attacked in turn by three monsters, first two dinosaurs, then King Kong himself. Twelve men are killed, leaving only the hero alive. We and the hero, who has arrived at the spot where Kong is guarding the heroine, then see her being threatened by prehistoric monsters, again three in number: a tyrannosaur, a huge snake and a pterodactyl. Each time she is saved, after a mighty struggle, by Kong. After the second battle, high on a rocky mountain ledge, he holds her in his huge hand, removing strips of her gauze-like clothing, looking at her tenderly, even playfully. Despite seemingly being an archetypal monster in every other way, he reveals that he is open to the femininity the heroine represents. Thus, by shadowy inversion, he reflects precisely the unrealised value the one-sidedly masculine crew-members lack.
The one exception is the hero who, as Kong fights off the third monstrous attack, rescues the heroine and together they make a ‘thrilling escape’, by abseiling down a sheer cliff into the sea. Kong comes storming in pursuit of the woman he loves, bursts through the gates into the tribal village (unconscious elements irrupting into consciousness) and smashes up the houses while crunching several tribesmen in his jaws. He is finally knocked unconscious by the white men’s gas bombs, enabling him to be taken prisoner.
The scene then switches to New York, where ‘King Kong’ is to be put on show in a Broadway theatre, as the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’. In some ways this provides an echo of another film, 50 years later, in which Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee, the integrated ‘natural’ man from the Australian outback, is also brought to New York, the supreme symbol of modern American civilisation, to highlight by contrast everything its effete, unnatural inhabitants have lost by being cut off from their instinctive roots. A fashionable crowd flocks into the theatre to see Denham unveil his prize. As Kong, imprisoned in steel chains, sees the photographers’ flashlights popping round his beloved heroine, who is due to marry the hero the following day, he angrily bursts his shackles, storms out into the darkened streets of New York and runs amok, while vast, anonymous crowds flee before him in panic.
Having smashed an elevated train to pieces, and eaten more people, Kong finally climbs half way up the wall of a hotel where, through a lighted window, he sees the prize he is looking for, the anima. Seizing her, he climbs to the top of the highest tower in New York, the Empire State Building, which had only just been completed when the film was made as the supreme emblem of the hubris unleashed in America by the 1920s’s boom (which, as Scott Fitzgerald noted in his essay The Jazz Age, crashed into depression just when New Yorkers could climb that tallest tower in the world and see on the distant horizon open countryside, showing that their city did not comprise the entire world after all). Then America’s ego-consciouness hits back, when five aircraft are sent up to kill Kong, who has gently placed the heroine on a ledge at the very top of the tower. Again and again these anonymous little representatives of modern man, his pride inflated by the power of his technology, zoom down on the helpless monster with machine-guns blazing until, as he sways, mortally wounded, he reaches down to the heroine in a last gesture of tender farewell. He then topples down to become a lifeless heap in the street below, surrounded by the usual goggling crowd.
The hero emerges at the top of the tower to embrace the heroine saved from the monster’s clutches, so that the story can end on that familiar archetypal image of man and woman united in love, with the monster/shadow finally overcome. Except that here we are left with a profound sense that we have not seen the proper archetypal ending at all. In his touching love for the anima, the monster was by no means wholly a monster; in some respects less so than those little modern men, trapped in their limited ego-consciousness, whose strength was all projected outward through their machines, while their sense of the feminine was non-existent. At the end of the story, the ‘King’ is dead. Despite the ritual coming together of the pasteboard central couple, there is no other King to take his place.
If the sentimental version of any archetypal story shows us its outline, complete with happy ending, but drained of its deeper significance, the Overcoming the Monster plot certainly lends itself to such treatment as much as any other. There are countless modern stories where we see ‘goodies’ setting out to challenge ‘baddies’ in the name of the community, humanity and life. When they have overcome this personification of all that is dark in human nature, it might seem as if the age-old archetype was being fully acted out. But when we examine these stories more closely we can see how something very significant has happened since this plot first centred on such great mythic prototypes as Gilgamesh or David, Perseus or Beowulf. The key is to recall how the archetype is not just concerned with the outward act of saving the community from the monster. It is also the personal story of the hero himself, showing how he develops inwardly through his struggle with the monster until we see him emerging to full Self-realisation, usually symbolised by his union with the anima and his succession to rule over a ‘kingdom’.
One obvious way in which the story can fall short of its archetype is in all those ‘monster’ stories where the hero does not actually overcome the monster but where he simply makes a ‘thrilling escape from death’: The Pit and the Pendulum, La Peste, Inferno, Jurassic Park and many others. The point about such stories is that they are just playing sentimentally with the outward form of the archetype: the sensation to be derived from identifying with a hero who faces the mounting threat of death but finally makes a miraculous escape through no particular effort of his own. George Clouzot’s film La Salaire du Peur (The Wages of Death, 1952) was a classic example of this type of story, where three truck drivers must take their lorries packed with highly dangerous nitro-glycerine across miles of precipitous unmade mountain roads. Inevitably two explode, leaving the hero, by the Rule of Three, to make it to safety in the nick of time. But though he may have shown admirable courage, he is scarcely a hero who has been through the full character-forming ordeal of confronting and slaying a living monster. In a sense, he has experienced his ordeal passively, just sticking doggedly to his task, trusting to luck until he comes through.
Another obvious way in which this story can become detached from its full archetypal form is where the monster is no longer presented as an abstract of all that is dark in human nature, but where its characteristics are projected outwardly onto some rival social or national group. There are elements of this, as we saw, even in the Bible, where Goliath, the champion of the Philistines, is invested through Jewish eyes with all the archetypal character of the monster. Samson, the Jewish strong man, on the other hand, is presented as a national hero; although, by the Philistines, he might have been viewed in much the same light as was Goliath by the Jews.
We see a similar tendency in those countless fictional versions of the Overcoming the Monster plot inspired by World War Two, where the Germans are invested with all the archetypal characteristics of the monster. This does not mean that Hitler and the Nazis did not in reality display such characteristics. But when this vast historical struggle came to be turned into fictional entertainment, as in The Guns of Navarone or The Battle of the Bulge, it was inevitable that these should be dominated by the outwardly projected battle with the ‘monster’. We see the heroes of such stories as light, because they are shown behaving heroically, bravely, honourably and selflessly; and because their opponents are generally shown with all the dark and negative qualities displayed by dark figures in stories down the ages. But in acting out the outward pattern of the Overcoming the Monster story, the inward aspect of the original archetype, as the story of a hero’s personal maturing to Self-realisation, has virtually disappeared.
An element of this outward projection remained in that series of tales which, first appearing in the early years of the Cold War, were to provide popular storytelling in the second half of the twentieth century with its most celebrated ‘monster slayer’. The success of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, and the films they subsequently inspired, lay precisely in the extent to which they managed to create a hero who, while wholly contemporary, nevertheless seemed to act out the archetypal role of the monster slayers of yore down to the tiniest outward detail. Even though his antagonists fitted the projections of the Cold War era, in that their conspiratorial schemes threatened the survival of Britain, America or ‘the West’, Fleming still managed to lift them onto a more timeless plane, by creating a succession of villains as cosmically evil as any monsters of myth.
But one feature of Fleming’s stories so striking that in the film versions it was turned into self-parody is their endings. In almost every instance, when the climactic battle has been brought to its triumphant conclusion, Bond sinks into the arms of the beautiful heroine whom he has liberated from the monster’s clutches. It might seem like the perfect archetypal conclusion, the image of hero and anima coming together in joyful union. Except that in every story it is, of course, a different woman, each given a flip, throwaway, double-entendre-type name such as Pussy Galore, Honeychile Rider, Tiffany Case. Such disposable images of womanhood, viewed only as fantasy objects of male erotic desire, can scarcely be taken as standing for ‘the eternal feminine’. We may also then note that there is no sign of Bond having attained rule over any kind of a ‘kingdom’. Indeed there has been no sign of his inwardly developing and maturing through the story at all. He is exactly the same cardboard figure he has been all along, through story after story; programmed like an automaton with exactly the same set of outward characteristics and responses, like wanting to seduce every pretty woman in sight, while demanding that his vodka-martinis be ‘shaken not stirred’.
So obviously is Bond just a two-dimensional fantasy projection that we might wonder how and why Fleming came to conceive his hero in the first place. Considerable light was shed on this by the biography of Fleming published after his death by John Pearson. We learn how as a young man, obsessed with fast cars and chasing pretty girls, he first imagined the figure who was to become Bond in his daydreams before World War Two, during which he served for several years in Naval Intelligence. It was this projection of his fantasy-self whom he developed into the hero of Casino Royale, the first Bond novel published in 1953. Fleming relished being paid for imagining how his fantasy-self could enjoy all the egocentric gratifications he could have wished for: driving his sports cars; living the secret life of an intelligence agent; enjoying effortless sexual success with an endless stream of adoring women; outwitting and killing his opponents. Yet all this seemed somehow morally justified by the fact that he was doing it in the name of a higher cause: fighting for his country; battling for ‘our side’ against wicked villains plotting the downfall of Western civilisation. The values of the Self could thus be called in to sanctify what was essentially just ego-centred self-indulgence.
If this suggests that in real life Fleming was something of a ‘boy hero who cannot grow up’, or puer aeternus, this was borne out by the unhappy story of his relations with the opposite sex. A succession of women could testify how he took them up and cast them off just as callously as Bond. To the end of his days he never matured into a whole, emotionally secure man. And in this sense it is noticeable how Bond always remained in a curiously ambivalent, immature relationship to authority in the stories, in particular to the all-powerful figure who ultimately ruled his life, the head of the Secret Service, ‘M’ (although, like a perpetual schoolboy, he was always prepared to cock a secret snook at ‘M’ behind his back). One might think ‘M’ was thus the Father-figure whom Fleming so lacked in his life, his father having died in the First World War when he was still a boy. But, considering the difficulty he had in relating maturely with women, nothing in Pearson’s biography was more illuminating than his account of the shadow cast over Fleming’s life by the dominating personality of his mother. And most interesting of all was the revelation that he always referred to his mother as ‘M’.
For a final example of the sentimentalisation of the Overcoming the Monster archetype, we may return to the science fiction film which exceeded even the Bond movies in popularity, George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977). We saw earlier how effectively this story seemed to touch such a deep chord with its audience, by finding contemporary imagery to express so much of the basic symbolism which had inspired myths and legends since stories began. What only later came to light was how deliberately and consciously this had been arrived at, when, in an episode almost unique in popular storytelling, Lucas drew on the knowledge of Joseph Campbell, the distinguished American writer on the symbolic role of the hero in world myth and folklore, in an effort to ensure that his story matched up as faithfully as possible to their archetypal patterns and imagery. From this he developed such important ingredients in the power of his story as the relationship between the aspiring hero, Luke Skywalker, and the ‘wise old man’ Obi-Wan Kenobi who, like Merlin to Arthur or Gandalf to Frodo, initiates his young pupil into the mystery of bringing himself into harmony with ‘the force’: the cosmic force of life itself, expressing the irresistible power of the Self to overcome the powers of darkness.
But however carefully Lucas tried to shape his script around these archetypal ground rules, there were certain crucial respects in which the resulting story betrayed the fact that, as a conscious construct, it had not got the pattern right. It was not based on a proper understanding of the underlying archetype. Particularly significant is what happens when the hero and his companions penetrate the dark labyrinth of the Death Star to rescue the heroine, Princess Leia. They succeed in freeing her, but in doing so they leave her captor, the monstrous Darth Vader, still alive and in control of his dark kingdom. This misses the very essence of what the archetypal symbolism is about. The anima can only properly be liberated at the moment when the monster is finally overcome. It is precisely because the shadow has been eliminated that she can finally emerge into the light. It is only by killing the suitors that Odysseus can liberate his anima Penelope; only when Perseus has defeated Poseidon’s sea-monster that he can be united with Andromeda; only when Aladdin has finally slain the Sorcerer that he can be fully united with his Princess.
An equally telling aberration appears right at the end of the film when, in the great hall of the Rebel Alliance, we see Luke Skywalker and his ally Han Solo walking up through a cheering crowd, to be decorated for their bravery in saving the universe by the Princess herself. Although in Lucas’s book version we are told that the hero only has eyes for the beautiful Princess as she looks down at him, what we see in the film version is not the cosmic union between man and woman we see at the heart of a true happy ending. It is not the moment when Odysseus and Penelope melt into each other’s arms; when Cinderella is finally at one with her Prince; when Leontes can finally once again embrace his Hermione. Luke cannot be united with his Princess, because he has not yet achieved full mature manhood. As he and Solo together come to the platform to be congratulated, they are more like boys walking up in front of their classmates to receive the approbation of their teacher, or even ‘Mother’.2
In two significant respects, the conclusion to the original film of Star Wars thus tells us much about the society which created it. The first is the way it ended on the image of two male heroes standing together side by side. It was D. H. Lawrence, in his Classic Studies in American Literature (1924), who first pointed out how many American stories, since Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), end not with the archetypal image of a man and a woman united in love but on two male figures, emotionally bonded in friendship by their adventures. Innumerable Hollywood films end on such an image: as we see, for instance, in Casablanca (1942) when, after the lovers have finally made their escape to safety, Humphrey Bogart leaves the airfield accompanied by his new friend and accomplice, the French police chief, to face a solitary and uncertain future in Vichy-ruled Morocco. Another famous example is The Magnificent Seven which ends with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen, the two rootless hired guns, riding over the horizon to a future similarly unknown.
Equally revealing is the way Star Wars ends on the image of the two heroes walking up together through a roomful of cheering people, This reflects how, in the prevailing ethos of the American way of life, the highest prize may be not to achieve individual maturity but simply to earn the approbation of the crowd, the collective, one’s own group, one’s fellow citizens. It is again remarkable how many Hollywood movies end, as in This Wonderful Life, on the image of the hero or heroes being acclaimed by a crowd of their fellow-Americans. This profoundly important aspect of the American character originated in the rootless insecurity of a society which carried so much unconscious emotional bruising from the way it was originally forged: from the rebellious desire to escape from the oppressively ‘grown-up’ old world of Europe, and from the psychological one-sidedness of the struggle to impose the white man’s will on that vast natural wilderness and on the original inhabitants who lived there. All this has engendered in American culture an endemic immaturity which we see reflected throughout its history, not just in the all-pervasive sentimentality of Broadway musicals and the celluloid dreams of Hollywood, but even in the stories of America’s most admired novelists: Melville and Henry James, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer and J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth and John Updike. It is this which helps to explain the remarkable fact that so few stories conceived in America over the past two centuries have ever managed to resolve in an unambiguous image of the fully mature, fully realised Self.