‘Before us was a great excavation, not very recent, for the sides had fallen in and grass had sprouted on the bottom ... all was clear ... the cache had been found and rifled: the seven hundred thousand pounds were gone!’
R. L. Stevenson, Treasure Island
‘When the Supreme Value and the Supreme Negation are both outside, the soul is void.’
C. G. Jung
Continuing our survey of what happens to the archetypal plots when they are appropriated by the ego, this chapter looks at dark and sentimental versions of the Quest, Voyage and Return and Comedy.
The fundamental archetype of the Quest, as in the Odyssey, shows us the journey of its hero towards a distant goal which, when it is reached, turns out to symbolise his Self-realisation. The inversion of this, as in Moby Dick, shows us a dark hero whose life-journey is dedicated to destroying an outward projection of the Self, bringing about his own self-destruction.
Such a truly dark form is very rare in storytelling. But we can see the essence of the Quest archetype in a number of well-known stories which are shaped around a dark hero’s obsessive drive to reach some distant, all-important goal; but which then turns out to be the destruction of some figure symbolising wholeness and ‘light’.
A powerful example was that early modern novel Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). Few books have caused more of a stir in the history of literature than this immensely long story, originally published in eight huge instalments, providing an early premonition of the earthquake which, over the century following, was about to shake Western storytelling to its foundations.
The story centres on the obsessive desire of its dashing libertine hero, Lovelace, to seduce the beautiful, virtuous, strong-minded heroine Clarissa. When she is locked away by her family for refusing the man they want her to marry, Lovelace rescues her and carries her off to London. But this only places her in his power, so he is free to lay siege to her virtue by every trick and device he can think of. Withstanding all his assaults, she remains a model of the idealised anima, the soul of chaste and sovereign femininity; until, after many hundreds of pages, Lovelace finally manages to drug and rape her. This leaves her so devastated that she begins to lose her reason. She finally escapes, to endure more horrors such as being thrown into prison, but is rescued by Belfort, who represents Lovelace’s ‘light Alter-Ego’. Under his care, she recovers her sanity but continues to decline physically, until at last, having made her peace with the world and with God, she dies. This tragic conclusion, showing a virtuous heroine gratuitously destroyed, aroused such horror when the novel was first appearing in successive instalments that readers all over Europe rushed to protest, imploring Richardson to provide a happier ending. But the deed was done. And, after her death, Lovelace is finally paid out for his crime when he is killed in a duel by Clarissa’s cousin.
Since it is not concerned with an outward, physical journey, it may seem odd to suggest that Clarissa is shaped by the archetype of the Quest. But, on an inward level, this is what the story is about. As in a more conventional Quest, the suspense which sustains our interest in the story lies all in that one overriding question: will the hero reach that central goal to which everything else in his life has become subordinated? To overcome Clarissa’s resistance and take her virginity has become his one all-consuming aim. Yet we are in no doubt that his purpose is entirely dark. As with Ahab, we know the hero is possessed by the desire to commit a deed which symbolically has become the ultimate cosmic crime: the violation of the anima, the destruction of the Self. The story’s whole intention is to present the heroine as the hero’s absolute antithesis: the shining and selfless ‘light feminine’ being first besieged, then finally destroyed by the utterly ruthless egocentricity of the ‘dark masculine’.
In this respect we cannot escape the ambiguity of Richardson’s own position as the story’s creator. Although he built up Clarissa as an idealised personification of the feminine, he did so only in order to fantasise his hero attempting in every way to degrade and defile her; placing her in a brothel, physically assaulting her, raping her, consigning her to prison, finally imagining her death. In this sense, Clarissa became a prototype for what Mario Praz called in The Romantic Agony ‘the persecuted maiden’ who, from the late-eighteenth century onwards, was to become such a conspicuous feature of plays, operas and novels in the age of Romanticism: the beautiful, virtuous heroine whose chief role in the fantasies of so many authors was to be portrayed as imprisoned, persecuted, ill-treated or murdered; or just wasting away through consumption to a tragically early death, as in La Traviata, La Dame Aux Camellias or La Boheme.
Once we recognise the significance of this figure as symbolising the anima, the personification of the soul, what an insight this conveys of what was beginning to happen, spiritually, morally and psychologically, to the culture for which the image of the ‘persecuted maiden’ was to become such a central emblematic figure. Less than fifty years after Richardson created Clarissa, the Marquis de Sade wrote his openly pornographic novel Justine; the Misfortunes of Virtue. And here the unremitting succession of physical cruelties and sexual degradations which its author could enjoy imagining being inflicted on his helpless heroine until she finally met a gratuitously violent death was even more obviously beginning to take storytelling in the Western world towards a wholly new phase of its development.
Another story similarly shaped by a hidden version of the Quest archetype was Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (1979, filmed 1984). The narrator, the eighteenth-century Viennese composer Salieri, describes his growing obsession with his contemporary and more successful rival, the young Mozart, whose music is so inspired that it seems to come straight from God. So dark does his obsession become that Salieri conceives it as the supreme purpose of his life to destroy Mozart. At the moment when he settles on his goal, he snatches down from the wall an image of the crucified Christ and hurls it into the fire. Eventually he reaches the goal of his quest when he succeeds in harrying Mozart to an early death. Salieri then loses his reason, and recalls the story in a lunatic asylum.
A startling feature of this story, particularly in its film version, was the contrast between the care lavished to ensure that every detail of its setting might seem historically plausible and the way it portrayed its central character, Mozart himself. The film was shot in Prague, as the most unspoiled baroque city in Europe. It was even emphasised that a magnificent chandelier shown in several scenes was the very one owned by Mozart’s Salzburg patron, the Archbishop Colloredo, lovingly restored and lit with thousands of candles for the first time since the eighteenth century. Yet in the midst of all this riot of historical verisimilitude appeared the central figure, Mozart, shockingly presented as a giggling and ridiculous little dirty-minded grotesque. Here any pretence at historical accuracy was chucked out of the window. This bizarre creation bore not the slightest resemblance to the complex and fundamentally very serious real-life Mozart who emerges from his letters or descriptions by contemporaries. It was as if it was not only Salieri who was setting out on his Quest to destroy Mozart but the author himself: turning the composer into this embarrassing travesty to gratify some obscure purpose of his own psyche.
To support such a distortion of the facts, Shaffer cited a few mildly scatological passages from letters Mozart had written to his girl cousin when in his early twenties. But, ignoring almost everything else we know about the composer, these fragments had then been blown up to represent the whole man. Inevitably this raises the question: why? The explanation offered was that the play was trying to show how an artist and his work can be seen as wholly separate. There was no connection between the nobility of the music and the ignoble personality of its composer. He was merely, Salieri explained, the unworthy channel for art which derived from some quite separate source.
But this hardly explained the need to debase Mozart in a way which so defied historical reality. Was it any accident that this dark story was conceived in an age which, while recognising the divine perfection of Mozart’s music, had nevertheless travelled so far from the fundamental values it represented that it was now totally at odds with them? So long as the music could be treated as quite separate from the culture and the values which had given rise to it, it could still be marvelled at. But this made it all the more important to contrast the music with everything which had originally inspired it. Thus, instead of recognising the human Mozart as all of a piece with music which is one of the supreme expressions in history of the values of the Self, the story sought to degrade him into an infantile caricature. By doing dirt on Mozart, it was unconsciously violating the Self. Such, as was symbolised in Salieri’s God-defying act of hurling the crucifix into the fire, was the purpose of portraying his demonic quest to destroy the composer of some of the most sublimely ego-transcending music ever written: resulting in a story which, in its own way, carried echoes of the darkness of Moby Dick.
Three very different examples of dark quests in modern popular storytelling were the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal (1971) and the post-war Ealing film comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).
Raiders of the Lost Ark, set in a pastiche version of the 1930s, full of period clothes, cars and aeroplanes, centres on a race between its archaeologist hero Indiana Jones and a rival team of Nazi archaeologists to find the long-lost Ark of the Covenant, the holiest treasure of the Jewish people because it contained historic evidence of their unique contact with God (and is therefore a symbol of the Self). After adventures set in several continents, Jones finally discovers the treasure hidden in an ancient snake-infested underground chamber in Egypt. But the Nazis steal it from him and take it to an Aegean island where, before returning to Germany to present it to Hitler, they open the mysterious box to check its contents. Because their Quest to possess this image of the Self has been driven by dark motives, the act of opening it unleashes dark supernatural forces which destroy them.
The Day of the Jackal features the obsessive quest of an English mercenary to assassinate the French President de Gaulle in 1963. As a revered ruler and father of his people, de Gaulle is also a kingly symbol of the Self. Most of the story is taken up with how the dark hero moves relentlessly through the shadows towards his goal, pursued by a French policeman, until he has the President in his sights and is ready to fire the fatal shot. In the nick of time, the light hero who has been tracking him bursts into the room and kills him.
The black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets opens with its hero Louis Mazzini in a condemned cell in Edwardian London, writing out the story of his life on the morning when he is due to be hanged. He describes how he grew up in genteel poverty in South London alone with his mother, a Duke’s daughter, callously thrown out by her family for having eloped with an Italian singer, who had died of a heart attack at his son’s birth. She brings him up to be aware that he is twelfth in line of succession to the current Duke of Chalfont, head of the D’Ascoyne family. As a young man Louis is turned down by ‘the captivating Sibylla’, a little Temptress, in favour of a Mr Holland, whom she thinks socially superior. When his mother is killed in an accident, he is inspired to wreak vengeance on the family by embarking on a systematic plan to murder in turn each of the 12 remaining members of the D’Ascoyne family who stand between him and the dukedom, the goal of his Quest. As he ingeniously arranges one death after another, he meanwhile conducts an adulterous affair with Sibylla, although, as he nears his goal, he also proposes marriage to Edith, the high-minded widow of one of his victims. Sibylla’s now-bankrupt husband then commits suicide, freeing Sibylla to marry the hero herself.
No sooner has Louis reached his goal by murdering the Duke, thus succeeding to a great castle, vast estates and almost kingly social position (all the outward trappings of attaining to the Self), than everything begins to fall apart. He is arrested on the charge of murdering Sibylla’s husband, the one crime he has not committed. Thanks to her perjured evidence, his fellow-members of the House of Lords find him guilty and he is sentenced to death, although Edith marries him to proclaim her faith in his innocence. The night before his execution, Sibylla, who has guessed the truth of his crimes, gives him an ultimatum. She will show the authorities a note proving that her husband committed suicide, if Louis promises to murder Edith and marry her instead. ‘Poor Edith’ he replies. Next morning, in the nick of time, he is reprieved. As he leaves the prison he sees the two women each waiting for him in a separate carriage. As he hesitates over which of them to go to, a reporter asks him whether he would consider publishing his memoirs. With a shock of horror he recalls that he has left behind in his cell the incriminating document in which he has set out precisely how he committed all his genuine murders. On this teasing note, the story remains in every way unresolved. Louis is a classic ‘boy hero who cannot grow up’, trapped by the dark feminine, his anima split between two powerful women, both formerly married and thus evoking the ‘Dark Mother’. This has set him fatally at odds with the world of ‘Father’, which now threatens his death.
An early example of the ‘lesser dark version’ of this type of story was one of the most celebrated quests of all: that of the children of Israel as they journeyed out of bondage in Egypt to seek the distant promised land. As recorded in Genesis, this tale has been retold times without number as one of the most inspiring adventures in history, with its miraculous happy ending when the tribes of Israel finally arrive safely in the ‘land flowing with milk and honey’. When we look at the story more closely it is not so simple. From its honoured place in Judaeo-Christian legend, we might imagine that when the Israelites enter the land promised by God it is lying there empty and waiting for them. But, as we learn from the final speech made before his death by their leader Moses (Deuteronomy 7), the future land of Israel is already home to many tribes. In the first part of his speech, Moses recalls the commandments handed down by God on Mount Sinai, including ‘thou shalt not kill’, ‘thou shalt not steal’, ‘thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods’. But he then dramatically changes tack, telling his followers that when they arrive in the promised land they will find it full of the tribes who already live there: they are to kill them, steal their goods and ‘show them no mercy’. Those seeming moral absolutes handed down on Sinai are not absolute at all. They apply only within the ‘in group’ of the children of Israel themselves. When it comes to outsiders, no such rules apply. They must be treated absolutely ruthlessly; because on them the Jews have projected the shadow of their own collective egotism.
Sure enough, when they arrive near their goal, they face, like many another group of Quest heroes, a succession of tremendous battles, beginning with the siege of Jericho and ending in the ‘Battle of the Thirty-One Kings’. At last they establish their sovereignty. But this is no complete happy ending, as the archetype dictates. There is no sign that the children of Israel are going to live happily ever after in their new kingdom. The whole of the rest of their history is to be dominated by other nations and peoples challenging their occupation of that land, beginning with the Philistines and ending with the Roman expulsion of the Jews in the second century AD which was to lead to their diaspora, or scattering, all over the the known world. In the twentieth century, of course, this tragic story was to be acted out all over again, with the reoccupation of Palestine by the Jews of the diaspora, leading first to an uneasy cohabitation with the Palestinians who already lived there and finally, with the setting up of the state of Israel, to their forcible dispossession and suppression.
When, in the original story, the children of Israel arrived at their goal, this could not symbolise a genuine triumph for the values of the Self, because they had collectively projected the archetype out onto the external world, as an expression of that collective ego which must always carry its shadow. Thus the story could never reach a complete and final happy ending. There would always remain that shadow, from which those elements of the whole which had been repressed would continually emerge to haunt them: exactly as was again to be the case in the twentieth century.
A much more domestic example of projecting the Quest archetype out onto the external world can be seen in George Orwell’s novel Coming Up For Air (1939). The hero, George Bowling, feels himself trapped in middle age, a loveless marriage, a humdrum job with an insurance firm, a little house in an anonymous London suburb and a life which has become wholly meaningless. He might say, like Dante at the beginning of The Divine Comedy, ‘midway on the journey of this life, I came to a place where the way was lost’; and like Dante he sets out on a quest to reach paradise. Except that in ‘Fatty’ Bowling’s spiritually shrunken world, the heaven he seeks is a distant memory from his childhood in a small country town. As a small boy obsessed with fishing, he had once, all alone, penetrated a dark wood in the grounds of a large house outside the town, where he had come across a secret, deep, dark pool, surrounded by trees. Gleaming in its depths were huge, ancient golden carp, the biggest fish he had ever seen. Now, half a lifetime later, he decides he will escape all the oppressions of his empty life by setting out on a Quest, back to the world of his childhood, to fish for those numinous carp in their mysterious pool. It is a classic external projection of the symbolism of the Self.
George journeys to the town, which he finds swollen almost out of recognition by modern development. The surrounding fields he remembered from his boyhood have disappeared under rows of identical little houses and factories. His childhood home is now an unwelcoming tea shop. He glimpses the pretty girl he had loved in his youth, his lost anima, now aged into a shapeless hag. He finally reaches the country house, now a lunatic asylum, and walks on through the trees, nearing his ultimate goal. But suddenly he emerges into a housing estate. Much of the wood has been felled. When he asks after the secret pool, he is told by a resident he must be thinking of that hole over there which, long since emptied of water or fish, is filled with tin cans and all the rubbish of twentieth century civilisation. He has sought the outward symbol of the Self, only to find it an empty hole, crammed with the detritus of human egotism. He returns home to his nagging wife, defeated and broken.
The destructive onward march of the twentieth century across the English countryside also hangs like a dark shadow over one of the most haunting and successful of recent Quest stories, Watership Down (1972). On the face of it, this modern epic is an almost perfect recreation of the Quest archetype, as its heroes set out on their long hazardous journey, reach their goal, marry their ‘Princesses’ and see the survival of their ‘kingdom’ secured for the future. One of the book’s most appealing qualities is the way it transforms a stretch of familiar, all-too domesticated Home Counties countryside into a vast, seemingly mythic realm, comparable with that wild, mysterious terrain familiar from many an older Quest journey. It takes a feat of imagination to translate contemporary rural England, with its broiler farms, barbed wire fences and motorways, back into such a faery-realm of romance and high adventure; creating the most successful pseudo-mythic landscape since the imaginary world conjured up by Tolkien.
But it could only do this by turning its heroes into little rabbits, whose worst enemies, with their cars, guns and traps, are the human race itself. The very reason the rabbits must set out on their Quest is that the warren where they live is about to be gassed and bulldozed, to make way for yet another human housing estate. And it is precisely because the heroes are animals and not human beings that they can be invested with purely human qualities. With James Bond, Star Wars and most latter-day adventure stories, set in a prison of space rockets, aeroplanes, fast cars and electronics, the modern epic hero has been all but dehumanised, turned by his technology into little more than an automaton. With the rabbits of Watership Down, we are firmly back in a pre-mechanical world, where Hazel and his friends can only survive by their direct exercise of primary, innate human qualities. But the very fact that, to conjure up such a human story, according to the age-old pattern of the Quest, the author had in effect to escape from our modern technologically-shaped world altogether, says much about the underlying message of the book. It was trying to preserve the essence of the archetype in a world where in human terms, it was implied, humanity’s remorseless collective egotism had rendered this all but impossible. For all its virtues, the story was little more than an escapist and rather melancholy dream.
Such is the power of this archetype that it has never ceased to exercise its hold over the imagination of modern storytellers; although usually it has been trivialised on a level far removed from its original underlying purpose. That typically mid-1960s film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1964) was a good example of such a tale, both dark and sentimental at the same time. A group of motorists in California are overtaken by a car being driving recklessly along a mountain road. It crashes over the edge and they reach the dying driver, a professional criminal, just in time to hear him reveal the whereabouts of a hoard of illicit money buried 200 miles away. At once they are all fired with greed for the money and, after failing to work out any way they can co-operate, they all speed off in deadly rivalry to see who can reach the treasure first. Unwittingly, their Quest is being observed by a local police chief, Captain Culpeper (Spencer Tracy), who has long been on the trail of the dead criminal and even more of his illicit gains. Despite running into every kind of obstacle on their journey, all parties arrive at the goal simultaneously, plus a few more who have heard the story on the way. No sooner have they dug up the treasure, still arguing to the last on how it should be divided, than Culpeper arrests them all for being in possession of stolen money. He then tricks them into driving away in one direction, while he disappears in the other with the ‘evidence’. Realising they have been duped, they turn round and pursue him, in an exact reversal of the earlier part of the story where he and his men had been pursuing them. They finally trap him on the fire escape of a tall building, while a vast crowd gathers below to watch the drama. As the pursuers catch up with him, the suitcase full of dollar bills bursts open and all the money showers down to the crowd below. Everyone involved in the Quest, including the policeman, has been motivated entirely by greed. They are now all paid out for their egocentricity, as the treasure they have been seeking literally dissipates into thin air.
More conventionally sentimental Quest stories include several examples we looked at earlier where, in each case, because they are simply external projections of the archetype, we find that something has gone askew with the story’s proper structure. One instance is Stevenson’s Treasure Island where, when the heroes finally reach the site of the buried treasure they have travelled across the world to find, they discover it is gone. The hole is empty. The treasure has already been dug up by Ben Gunn, the ‘natural man’ who, like Robinson Crusoe, has become ‘king’ of the island; although, as reward for their rescuing him, he shares it out among them.
In Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, the hero Phineas Fogg actually liberates the ‘Princess’, his anima-figure, half way through the journey, completely missing the archetypal point; although only at the end, when he has finally reached his goal, is he properly united with her. In Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, although it makes such powerful use of archetypal imagery, the disintegrated nature of the ending betrays the extent to which the story is just playing with the archetypes. The black (therefore, in story terms, ‘inferior’) hero, Umbopa, remains behind, having succeeded to his ‘kingdom’; while the three white heroes return home with their haul of gold and jewels, which is only a mere material treasure, nothing more profound.
In Babar and Father Christmas, the hero Babar successfully reaches the goal of his Quest by finding Father Christmas and bringing him back to Africa. But here the archetypes all get muddled up, because Babar is already the King and father of his people, so he can hardly succeed to the kingdom as reward for successfully concluding his Quest. Indeed, Father Christmas merely supplies an additional kindly father-figure to the equation, although he then disappears again, while promising to return. So slight and charming is this tale that it might seem churlish to quibble about its failure to match up precisely to the archetype. But the fact remains that, without that underlying archetype, the story would not strike the responsive chord in children that it does. In this sense it is only the sentimentalised version of a story which, in its proper role, serves a much more serious function in the human imagination altogether.
According to its full archetype, the Voyage and Return story begins with an incomplete or inadequate hero or heroine being taken out of their original state of limited consciousness and plunged into an unfamiliar realm representing a world of which they were previously unaware. It is through this confrontation with ‘unconscious elements’ that, like Robinson Crusoe or Lucius in The Golden Ass, they learn that which is necessary to make them whole. Their final return to the normal world, inwardly transformed, marks the happy ending of the story.
The most completely dark version of this pattern, as we saw, is in those rare stories where the hero enters the abnormal world and remains trapped, never returning. Kafka’s The Trial (1920) begins with its hero Joseph K. finding ‘one fine morning’ that ‘without having done anything wrong’, he has been arrested. He is at once plunged into a mysterious world where he knows he is under investigation for some shadowy and serious crime but is never told what it is. Outwardly, on the conscious level, he tries to continue living his normal life, as senior manager in a bank. But all the time he is aware that, on this mysterious unconscious level, the investigation by the mysterious ‘Court’ is continuing and that more and more people he knows or meets are somehow connected to it. Despite many knowing hints and innuendos, no one will tell him directly what is going on. Even when he visits an old bedridden lawyer who is meant to be his ‘Advocate’ in the case, nothing is ever properly explained. But here K. makes his only direct contact with anyone he encounters in the twilight world, the young maid Leni, who kisses, fondles and claims to love him; although he is later told she falls in love with any accused man who visits her employer. Finally, after an interview with a priest in a cathedral, still without any idea of what he is accused, K. receives a visit from two men who lead him out into the countryside, take out a butcher’s knife and stab him, ‘like a dog’, through the heart.
What has caught people’s imagination about this story, popularising the term ‘Kafka-esque’ even among those who have never read his books, is the sense it conjures up of someone feeling totally alone in a wholly baffling world, where he feels increasingly threatened by guilt while never being given enough information to understand what is happening to him. In this sense K. is like the central figure of other Voyage and Return stories, such as Alice in Wonderland (who also ends up being mysteriously put on trial and found guilty). A similar echo of many Voyage and Return stories is the haunting presence of Leni, the elusive anima, as the only character in the unconscious world to whom the hero can relate. But, unlike these other stories, K. is doomed never to escape from his shadow world and ends up dying a premature death without ever knowing why.
In this respect it may not be irrelevant that Kafka wrote his story during the early stages of the consumption which, four years later, was to kill him. On one level, in this picture of a man threatened by a shadowy, inexorable process which ends in his death without apparent reason, we may see a personification of the shadowy, fatal disease which already had him in its grip. For a time Kafka had a peculiar horror of his physical body, which may account for the even darker version of a Voyage without Return conveyed in his short story Metamorphosis. This begins with the hero, Gregor, waking up one morning to find he has turned into a monstrous, repulsive insect. Since his parents and young sister wholly depend on his earnings as a hard-working commercial traveller, they cannot understand why he has not got up for work, and remains behind the locked door of his room. Eventually the door is opened, and everyone sees with horror what has happened. At first, only his sister, his anima-figure, is at all sympathetic. But as weeks go by and he remains trapped in his disgusting state, even she, like everyone else, turns against him, until he finally starves to death.
From these nightmarish visions, it may seem a far cry to that novel which enjoyed such cult status among students in the 1950s and 1960s, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951). The hero Holden Caulfield, in his late teens, is plunged into his other world when, after making a complete mess of his work and human relationships, he is sent home from from yet another smart, East Coast prep school, his fourth expulsion. Not daring to tell his parents what has happened, he heads for New York where he drifts through the city, meeting a succession of strangers, as in his brief embarrassing encounter with a young prostitute, and rather desperately trying to arrange dates with various girls he knows from school holidays. A parallel which emerges between Holden’s adventures and the world of Joseph K. is that he never makes real contact with any of the people he meets: the empty-headed girls in a bar; two earnest nuns; the sad little hooker; snobbish Sally Hayes, whom he takes to a Broadway play. Like a psychotic, he is constantly divided between his contempt for almost everyone else in the world as irritating, embarrassing, stupid ‘phoneys’; and then, as if trying to make up for it, wanting to throw in an extravagant reference to how much he likes them or misses them after all. Beneath his brash, cocky, dismissive persona, Holden becomes increasingly lost and desperate, until the only two people in the world he wants to see are his younger sister Phoebe, who lives with their parents in a smart, high-rise apartment, and Mr Antolini, the only teacher he has ever respected. As he nears the end of his tether, it is a faint evocation of that great archetypal duality, the Wise Old Man and the Anima. Late at night he calls on Antolini, who welcomes him in and, after giving him sage fatherly advice, puts him to bed. But Holden then wakes up to find Antolini stroking his head in an erotic fashion and flees in shocked horror. The next day, he meets young Phoebe, now the only person he loves and trusts in the world, his infantile anima, and after wandering about, they end at a funfair where, in the rain, he watches her going round and round on an old-fashioned carousel:
‘I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why but she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going round and round, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.’
It is a chilling final image: the anima, instead of being a central fixed point of light, just revolving in endless neurotic motion. From the brief epilogue, addressed from a psychiatric hospital a few months later, we gather Holden then had a prolonged nervous breakdown. From the moment of his expulsion into the ‘other world’ he had never managed to return to normality. Perhaps, like the novel’s reclusive author who, after writing two more books, shut himself away from the world for decades without producing another, he never would.
For a final example in this sequence we look at that curious little story produced by Evelyn Waugh in his middle age, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). We saw earlier how Waugh was particularly drawn to the Voyage and Return plot. To the outside world, one of the novelist’s more obvious characteristics, as someone who had escaped from his original middle-class suburban background onto the fringes of the world of the English upper classes, was the way he hid his personal insecurities behind an armour-plated persona, fabricated out of snobbery and a sentimentalised Roman Catholicism, combined with cantankerous impatience towards anyone who did not fit socially into his very limited world-view. The trouble with the persona is that it is only an outward mask: suppressed behind it, its owner’s true personality becomes increasingly lost. In Waugh’s case this was unconsciously reflected in the way both Decline and Fall and Brideshead Revisited showed a rather limited little middle-class hero finding himself drawn into a glamorous, upper-class ‘other world’ in which he is never wholly at ease or at home, and from which he is eventually rejected, sad and alone. But none of Waugh’s stories was more directly self-revelatory than that of Gilbert Pinfold: portrayed as, like its author when he wrote it, a successful novelist with social pretensions who, in his early fifties, suddenly finds his life empty, suffocating and meaningless.
Pinfold decides to take a cruise to Ceylon, but no sooner has he boarded the good ship Caliban (echoing ‘the shadow’) than he hears an almost continuous babble of sounds, irritating dance music and voices, which he imagines must be emerging from some shipboard internal communication system. As he identifies the voices, what they are saying seems more and more to be directed at him personally, in an accusatory fashion. Much of their abuse is on a crude, rather babyish level, reflecting the ethos of the public school-educated English upper-middle class, accusing him of being a Jew, an enemy agent, a homosexual, a drunk. But he is so convinced of the reality of his paranoid delusions that they make it impossible for him to relate rationally to his fellow-passengers or the crew who, although initially polite, eventually shun him as a sad eccentric. Eventually one voice stands out from the babble, that of a young woman called Margaret, with whom Pinfold imagines he is establishing a kind of relationship. He also learns she is called ‘Miss Angel’. She claims to love him, and in a particularly embarrassing scene they agree a midnight assignation, whereby she will come to his cabin to make love. But of course the elusive anima never appears, and eventually Pinfold abandons the ship and makes his way back to meet his wife in a London hotel, where the voices finally leave him. The last he hears is that of the anima, Miss Angel, repeating ‘I do love you Gilbert. I don’t exist but I do love ... Good-bye ... love ...’. He is then alone with his wife. He has made his Voyage and Return and comes back having understood nothing.
Three features in particular characterise all these examples of the dark Voyage and Return. In each case their hero, Joseph K., Gregor, Holden Caulfield and Pinfold, is almost wholly egocentric, trapped in his own limited awareness and lack of feeling for other people. In each case, when confronted by the challenge of the ‘other world’, this only heightens his isolation, in that he cannot properly communicate or establish a relationship with any of the people he meets there. But in each case, the one exception is the girl who represents the feminine: Leni, Gregor’s sister, Caulfield’s sister, Pinfold’s Miss Angel, She tantalises the hero as his elusive anima, representing precisely that central value which is missing in his life: the sense of connection; the feeling and understanding of the inner feminine which, if only he could get properly in touch with it, might enable him to become a full man. But this cannot be. The hero remains trapped in his egotistical prison. Whether he stays trapped forever in his other world, like Kafka’s heroes, or at least outwardly seems to return to where he started, like Pinfold, he has failed the challenge. Frozen in a state of arrested development, he is unable to grow up.
In this sense, these stories are typical of all those versions of the Voyage and Return plot we saw earlier, where the hero or heroine emerges from the other world basically unchanged. In some, the sentimental versions, like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz, the experience has been just like some strange dream. It has not touched their lives; they can carry on as if it never happened. In other examples, the lesser dark versions, like Le Grand Meaulnes, Gone with the Wind, Brideshead Revisited, the hero or heroine lose the ‘other half’ they have encountered in the other world, and face the rest of their life ‘childless, loveless and alone’. The whole purpose of this archetype is to show us a solitary individual being faced with the ultimate challenge. Confronted with the unknown world which symbolises the limitation of their ego-consciousness, are they ready, like Lucius, to go through that colossal transformation which will eventually enable them to reach Self-realisation, at one with their anima and with all the world? If not, they have failed the test and must remain trapped in the ego forever.
What happens when the ego takes over the archetype of Comedy? A truly dark version of this lightest of plots might seem a contradiction in terms. In fact such stories have played a much more important role in the development of storytelling over the past 200 years than might be supposed. The only reason why this is not generally appreciated is that, when Comedy turns truly dark, we no longer recognise it as Comedy. We saw earlier how Othello is a play which in plot terms shows many of the ingredients of a Comedy; although when there is no ‘recognition’, and the hero thus ends up smothering his anima and turning his dagger on himself, it becomes arguably the darkest play Shakespeare ever wrote. For similar reasons, we shall not be looking at some of the best-known examples of what happens to Comedy when it turns dark until the next chapter.
The most obvious fate of Comedy when, like the other plots, it became detached from its true archetypal foundations was what we saw happening in the plays and light operas of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the operettas of Johann Strauss and Lehar, in Gilbert and Sullivan, the plays of Wilde and Feydeau and many later examples, we see the outward form of the plot preserved but emptied of its deeper significance, so that Comedy becomes a mere burlesque of itself. In this sense, Die Fledermaus or The Importance of Being Earnest or The Merry Widow represent the sentimentalisation of Comedy, enjoying the superficial fun it can provide without bothering about its more serious message.
What also happened to Comedy, as we saw earlier, was that it split into two separate types of story. On one hand are those which so concentrate on its ‘comic’ element that this becomes an end in itself, producing stories which concentrate just on its potential to make us laugh. Here we have all that vast range of comic films, novels, plays and TV ‘situation comedies’, from the films of Laurel and Hardy to such popular British television series as Fawlty Towers, Yes, Minister, Dad’s Army, Till Death Do Us Part or Steptoe and Son, all of which are still essentially based on the humour to be derived from exposing the contrast between reality and the self-deluding pretensions of egotism.
Entertaining though such modern comedy may be, it has travelled a long way from the archetype’s original purpose, which is to show not just the puncturing of the illusions of the human ego, but also the liberating effect of the shift to that other, deeper centre in the psyche, the Self. This was why, after its beginnings in the Athens of Aristophanes, the Comedy plot became so centred on the bringing together of a man and a woman, hero and anima, heroine and animus, as the ultimate image of human wholeness. Similarly, nothing is more illuminating in Comedy than how it shows the effect of one person’s egotism on everyone else around. We see how the blind egotism of an Almaviva or Leontes throws a whole household or community into shadow, so that no one is free to relate properly to anyone else. Then, when recognition comes and the dominating source of egocentricity is removed, we see how the shadows lift and the whole community can emerge into the light.
It was all this which tended to get lost when the humorous element in Comedy became split off from its more serious foundations, although these too, as we saw, took on a life of their own by turning into stories of romantic love without much necessity for humour. Since this has produced many profound and important stories, not least the novels of Jane Austen or War and Peace, it can hardly be said in itself to have marked any fatal trivialisation of the plot; although even in War and Peace there are traces of sentimentality, notably in the somewhat implausible pairing-off of the two central couples. We also see in the book’s messily unresolved ending how Tolstoy was losing touch with the basic archetype.
But we still see many modern comedies where the two elements remain unified, even though, where the desire to make the audience laugh becomes too obviously predominant, as in the novels of Wodehouse or the films of the Marx Brothers, they may persist only in rather uneasy and unequal relationship, with the ‘love element’ retained only as a kind of appendix: an organ surviving beyond the point where anyone can remember what was its original purpose.
Equally we see comedies which manage to retain that original combination of light-hearted humour with romantic love, but where there is no sense at the end of any real access of self-awareness: that fundamental moment of ‘recognition’ in the true comic archetype where we feel the story’s centre of gravity finally moving from the claustrophobia of the ego to the liberation of the Self. In Four Weddings and a Funeral we see a group of middle-class young people stumbling through their lives in modern London in a fairly limited state of awareness; trying to work out who they should pair off with; attending each other’s weddings; getting drunk (although for once external reality breaks into their muddled haze when one of their number dies, and is revealed to have been a homosexual). We finally see the hero and heroine coming to the climactic moment of ‘recognition’, when they are in a crowded church for his wedding to someone else. In the most embarrassing circumstances they suddenly realise that they are meant for each other after all, with a love they imagine to be so special and unique that it transcends any need to go through the mere outward, social ritual of a wedding. We duly respond in our archetypally programmed way by finding this a touching conclusion. But we hardly have the sense that they have reached that transcendent state of cosmic, selfless union, bringing together a whole community in joy and loving reconciliation, which, at the end of a Shakespearian comedy, can send an audience out of the theatre feeling that they are walking on air and that all the world has been renewed. The hero and heroine of Four Weddings are still the same rather limited, egocentric couple they have been all along. In this sense the film provides yet another illustration of what happens when Comedy is taken over by the ego and turned into only a sentimental vestige of itself.
What we shall see in the next chapter, however, is what happens when the plot of Comedy is both sentimentalised and turns dark at the same time; when it becomes so far removed from its proper roots that we no longer recognise it as related to Comedy at all. Yet in this guise, as we shall see, it helped shape some of the most celebrated stories of our modern civilisation.