‘Don Giovanni ... is the most ambiguous of hero-villains. The pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love, which had once seemed so simple and life-giving, have become complex and destructive; and his refusal to repent, which makes him heroic, belongs to another phase of civilisation.’
Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (1967)
As with the other plots it might seem a contradiction in terms that Tragedy could be viewed through the eyes of the ego, since the whole purpose of this archetype is to show what happens when a hero or heroine gives way to the ego-centred part of themselves. We see them going through the inexorable pattern which leads to their destruction. But when we see this pattern portrayed by storytellers like Shakespeare or Tolstoy, we see it presented objectively, viewed from the detached standpoint of the Self. We may look on Lear or Anna Karenina with pity, as they are drawn down to their doom. But we are in no doubt that they have been deceived by the ego into a web of their own weaving; that what we are looking at is the essential process whereby any such rebellion against the whole must unfold, until hubris is followed by nemesis and the state of balance has been restored.
One obvious consequence when the ego takes over this type of story is that it is no longer seen like this, from the viewpoint of the wider whole. We see the doomed central figure presented, not as the author of his or her own misfortunes, but as a heroic victim, caught up in the toils of a malevolent fate.
One early sign of the approaching age of Romanticism in the eighteenth century was the so-called Sturm und Drang movement of the early 1770s, and in particular the extraordinary reception given to the first novel by the 25-year old Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). The young hero paints an idyllic picture of the little town in which he is living, in which one summer day arrives the most wonderful, beautiful girl he has ever seen. Charlotte is a paragon of all the feminine virtues, strong-minded, sensitive, loving, soulful: a perfect personification of the anima, with whom Werther at once falls madly in love. Furthermore, she seems to like him, and their friendship soon becomes very close. But this Dream Stage then gives way to the first hint of a Frustration Stage, when Werther learns that Lotte is engaged to another man. Even when her decent but dull Albert arrives, however, it initially seems the three of them can still get on very happily together. But eventually, despite Lotte’s continued apparent pleasure in Werther’s company, she and Albert are married. At last her new husband begins to show impatience at Werther’s continued presence. The hero feels his ‘angel’ slipping away from him. He begins to fall apart.
‘Ill humour and listlessness became more and more deeply rooted in Werther’s soul until finally they took possession of his entire personality ... his anxiety destroyed all the remaining forces of his intellect, his liveliness, his wit.’
He is into the Nightmare Stage. At last, on a winter’s night, he has a final emotional interview with his beloved. He reads out to her at enormous length his translation of the sentimental songs of Ossian, showers her with passionate kisses and storms off into the night. At midnight, using pistols borrowed from Albert, he shoots himself.
The outward form of this story corresponds exactly to the five-stage pattern of the tragic archetype. But we are not expected to view Werther objectively as a foolish, immature young man, in the grip of an adolescent infatuation he has not the self-awareness or self-control to resist. Since we see much of the story through his own eyes, as its narrator, we are invited to identify with him as a romantic hero, so idealistic that he is prepared to sacrifice life itself for his noble dream of love. Certainly this was how Goethe’s story was received when it first appeared, as all over Europe young admirers rushed to copy Werther in donning blue frock coats and yellow waistcoats, or buy perfumes bearing Werther’s name. Indeed some were so carried away by the story’s self-glorifying sentimentality that it even inspired a rash of sympathetic suicides.
Fifteen years later when Mozart and da Ponte created Don Giovanni (1789), subtitled Il Dissoluto Punito, this also centred on a hero bringing about his own destruction in the pursuit of love, but in a very different way. Giovanni’s offence was not besottedly to project his anima onto just one woman, as representing the ‘eternal feminine’. It was the ruthlessly indiscriminate way he degraded his anima by projecting it onto an endless succession of women. But despite Kenneth Clark’s bid to promote him as another precursor to the age of Romanticism, in ‘his refusal to repent, which made him heroic’, we have no sense at the end of Don Giovanni that we are meant to sympathise with him. When he has been carried down by the Commendatore to the flames of hell, the blazing out of Mozart’s joyful closing sextet proclaims the delight of those who remain that such a monster of egotism has been removed from the earth. They are celebrating a victory for light over darkness, life over death. In this respect Don Giovanni belongs not, as Clark had it, to the new ‘phase of civilisation’ that was coming to birth, but uncompromisingly to a much older and more deeply-rooted view.
Over the next half-century, however, all this was to change. As the age of Romanticism arrived in earnest, and storytelling became increasingly engulfed in the kind of sentimentalism foreshadowed by Young Werther, this was particularly reflected in two ways. The first was that, for the first time in the history of storytelling, it became fashionable for stories to have dark, tragic endings without any redeeming sense that the forces of life had triumphed. The other was the number of stories which ended in the violent death of an innocent heroine. We are here firmly into the pattern first heralded by Richardson’s Clarissa as early as 1748. We see how, in the heyday of Romanticism, storytelling became conspicuously dominated by the haunting figure of ‘the persecuted maiden’: the poor, misunderstood, cruelly mistreated anima. And nowhere was this more vividly expressed than through that form of storytelling in which the nineteenth-century imagination was so notably prolific: the opera.
In general, one of the more marked changes which came over opera as it moved into the age of Romanticism was the way in which, in all senses, it darkened. The predominant form in late-eighteenth-century opera had been comedy. Now it became tragedy. The balance swung from the happy endings and brilliantly lit daylight scenes so often associated with Mozart or Rossini (of course there were exceptions) to the gloomy stages, night scenes and catastrophic endings we associate with Verdi or Wagner. We pass from the sunlit blue skies under which the heroines wish their boyfriends calm seas and a tranquil voyage in Cosi Fan Tutte to the rocky midnight gorge where we see ‘the tempestuous, eerie and headlong “Ride to Hell”’ in the Damnation of Faust, or the world-ending apocalypse of Gotterdammerung. We move musically from the clear, open, uncomplicated harmonies of the classical age to the swirling, hectic, heart-tugging emotionalism and complex chromaticism of the great Romantics. But just as revealing as any of this was the startling change which came over their operas’ plots.
One of the first notable tragic operas to centre on the plight of ‘the persecuted maiden’ was Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), loosely based on a novel by that leading Romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott. But when we look at its plot we see something very significant has happened. It is not like that of a conventional Tragedy at all. With its stratagems, confusions and misunderstandings, it is much more like the plot of Comedy: but comedy which has gone hideously and tragically wrong.
The heroine’s brother Lord Enrico is at once established as the central dark figure. Not only has he wrongfully usurped the estates of the light hero, Edgardo, with whose family his own has a long-standing feud; he is also under suspicion of treason against the king. He conceives as the only hope of reviving his fortunes a scheme to marry his sister Lucia to another powerful lord, Arturo. But Lucia has already established a secret love with Edgardo, with whom she exchanges rings and vows of eternal fidelity. When Edgardo leaves for France, Enrico forges a letter to make her think Edgardo has fallen in love with someone else. Devastated by this, and to save her brother from death for treason, Lucia nobly agrees to marry Arturo. The wedding ceremony takes place. But no sooner has Lucia signed the marriage contract, than Edgardo bursts in to protest, crying for vengeance. In despair at her brother’s treachery, Lucia hands back her ring to Edgardo, who flings it down, cursing all her family, and storms out. Not long afterwards, while the wedding celebrations are still continuing, word comes from off-stage that Lucia has lost her reason and killed her husband. She then enters for her famous ‘mad scene’, in which she goes through an imaginary wedding ceremony with Edgardo. Unaware of this, Edgardo goes to the tombs of his ancestors, wishing he could join them because he has nothing left to live for. He then learns that Lucia has lost her wits and is dying. A bell tolls for her death and, promising her spirit that nothing can part them, he stabs himself.
As in Othello or Romeo and Juliet, this is Comedy without the saving grace of recognition’. Trapped by wicked deceit into their fatal misunderstandings, the innocent lovers are torn apart and die despairing lonely deaths without ever knowing the truth. But, unlike in the Shakespearian versions, there is no redeeming note at the end; whereby we might at least see the dark author of their misfortunes, like Iago, being taken off for punishment; or, as by the death of Romeo and Juliet, the feuding families being reconciled and harmonious order restored. Out of this black ending there is no victory for light. Only the dark inversion has triumphed. And thus, in a fundamental sense, the story remains unresolved.
When we move on to the operas of Verdi, we see this strange perversion of the plot of Comedy developed still further. A long succession of similarly black tales are based on misunderstandings, confusions of identity, disguises: all those devices familiarly used in Comedy to obscure the identities of characters from each other and themselves. But here the light of ‘recognition’ never breaks in on the twilight (or not until it is too late). And again and again these stories end in the heart-rending death of their heroine, although sometimes their hero and sometimes both. A typical instance of how relentlessly the tricks of misunderstanding or obscured identity could be piled on another to bring these stories to their melodramatic conclusions is the plot of Rigoletto (1851), based on a story by Victor Hugo, which so impressed Verdi that he called it ‘the greatest subject, and perhaps the greatest drama of modern times’.
Immediately established as the central dark figure of the story is the Duke of Mantua, Tyrant and libertine, the epitome of the ‘dark masculine’ (as defined by the cruel exercise of power and the indiscriminate pursuit of sexual gratification). Set against him as the hero is Rigoletto, his court jester, who by dark inversion is made a hunchback. At first Rigoletto is infected with his master’s darkness, addressing cruel, derisive remarks, first to the unhappy husband of a young woman whom the Duke is planning to seduce; then to the unhappy father of a girl the Duke has already dishonoured, who pronounces a curse on him.
But we now see the other side of Rigoletto, as he secretly comes at night to visit his beloved daughter Gilda, the anima, who is not allowed to know her father’s name or position. Before she joyfully greets him, he curses the fate which has placed him in the power of the tyrannical Duke, whom he detests. When her father departs, the Duke himself arrives, in disguise, to woo Gilda, who had caught his fancy when he saw her in church. He pretends he is a poor student, and she falls in love with him. When he in turn leaves, his hateful courtiers arrive at the house to kidnap her, imagining she is Rigoletto’s secret mistress. Rigoletto returns and, by pretending they have come to kidnap someone in the next house, the woman the Duke had earlier been planning to seduce, they blindfold the jester and persuade him to help them. He thus unwittingly assists in the kidnapping of his own daughter, whom they drag back to the Duke’s palace. When Rigoletto enters the house to find her gone, he is heartbroken, remembering the curse. He heads for the palace, where the Duke has been overjoyed to see her, and she explains to her father that she and the Duke are in love. His only thought is that he must somehow murder the Duke and flee with her from Mantua.
He waits for an opportunity to revenge himself on the Duke, and at the same time to expose to his daughter her lover’s true nature. The two of them watch through a crack in the wall of a derelict inn, while the Duke, again in disguise, first sings the famous aria ‘La donna e mobile’ (‘womankind is fickle’), then receives Maddalena, the sister of the Duke’s resident paid assassin Sparafucile. Rigoletto tells Gilda to go home and put on a male disguise, so that when he has finished with the Duke, they can escape together to Verona. Sparafucile is unaware of the disguised Duke’s true identity, and Rigoletto bribes the assassin to kill him, saying he will come back at midnight to collect the body. Maddalena begs her brother not to kill her handsome young wooer, but Sparafucile only agrees so long as a substitute victim can be found before midnight, to provide him with a corpse. This turns out, of course, to be Gilda, when she returns at the height of a great storm, disguised as a man. Sparafucile stabs her and places her body in a sack which, when Rigoletto returns as midnight strikes, is presented to him. Rigoletto drags his prize to a nearby riverbank, triumphantly imagining he is about to get rid of the hated Tyrant forever, when he hears the Duke’s mocking voice singing ‘La donna e mobile’. In horror Rigoletto opens the sack and discovers his daughter who, with her dying breath, declares that she still loves the Duke. Recalling again the fatal curse, the jester collapses over her body.
Everything about this story is deliberately made so dark that it contains no element of redemption at all. The anima has been slain. The ‘dark masculine’ is triumphant. The dissolute remains unpunished. Every misunderstanding and disguise, instead of helping ultimately to lead to the revelation of the truth, as it would in Comedy, is used simply to push the plot further downwards towards its black conclusion.
We see similarly convoluted plots in one Verdi opera after another, usually ending likewise in the violent or painful death of the hapless heroine. In La Traviata (‘The Frail One’, 1853), when the consumptive heroine Violetta seems to reject her beloved Alfredo, he has no idea she has done this only to pave the way selflessly for his sister’s happiness; but when, after further misunderstandings, they are finally reunited, this is only to provide a cue for her to expire from her dreadful disease. La Forza del Destino (1862) begins with the hero Alvaro deciding to elope with his beloved Leonore, because her ‘unrelenting father’ will not consent to the match. But, by mistake, Alvaro kills the father, launching her brother Don Carlos on a lifelong Quest for vengeance. After being separated on their flight and going through many adventures, the hero ends up as a monk, the heroine as an anchorite living alone in a remote hermitage. Finally the ‘Dark Rival’ Carlos tracks down Alvaro and tries to kill him in a wild, rocky landscape, but is mortally wounded in return. The hero calls for help at a nearby hermitage where he is astonished to find Leonore. She hurries to aid her dying brother who manages to stab her, so that no sooner has she been reunited with her lover than she is dying in his arms.
At the end of Il Trovatore (1853) the heroine Leonora takes poison, thinking that, by surrendering to the advances of the evil Count, she has at least bought the release of her beloved Manrico. Entering the dungeon where he is imprisoned, she dies in his arms. But then the Count orders Manrico’s execution, only to find too late that he has murdered his own brother. At the end of The Sicilian Vespers (1855), when the hero dies with his father, resisting their enemies, the heroine, not to be left alone, stabs herself. At the end of Aida (1871), when the hero Radames is buried alive in a dungeon, he welcomes death, because he thinks at least his beloved Aida has escaped their deadly enemies; but at the last minute she slips into the prison to die in his arms. It was perhaps not surprising that Verdi should eventually have been drawn to produce his own version of that original dark comedy-turned-tragedy, Otello (1887), where the hero suffocates the heroine before plunging a dagger into his own heart.
What must strike us about these stories is what concoctions of artifice they are; how unrelated to any genuine outward or inward reality; how wilfully their familiar archetypal imagery is manipulated to play on the emotions of their audience, with its effect reinforced at every point by music of memorably emotive power. They provide a perfect definition of what is meant by sentimentality in its most sensational guise: using an outward show of much of the most basic symbolism programmed into the human imagination to trigger off the desired emotional response. Yet most revealing of all is how nothing more effectively achieves such a response than the spectacle of a beautiful, virtuous heroine, the embodiment of the feminine value, the anima and soul of mankind, being oppressed, imprisoned, degraded and finally put violently to death.
Another mid-nineteenth-century opera composer who expressed this darkness in a very different way, was Richard Wagner, Verdi’s almost exact contemporary. The single most ambitious achievement of nineteenth-century opera was the four-part Ring cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, that extraordinary creation inspired by Norse and Teutonic myths, which Wagner nevertheless transmuted through the force of his fantasy into something entirely his own.
The prologue, setting the underlying theme of the story, is Das Rheingold. In the mysterious, half-lit world below the waters of the Rhine, the unconscious, the three Rhinemaidens sing of the glowing golden treasure, consciousness. Whoever can make a ring from the gold will be master of the world, but to possess it must forego love. The dwarfish Alberich agrees and seizes the gold. As in that later pseudo-mythic epic Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the ring, which gives its bearer untold power without love, is the power of the ego. But, despite the claim that the holder of the ring will exercise such power, it is notable that not one of those who possess it in the drama which follows seems able to use it to any effect whatever. Its power is all an illusion: its symbolism strangely empty.
We then see Wotan, the king of the gods, with his wife Fricka, gazing in wonder at the new home of the gods, Valhalla, but knowing that a terrible price must be paid to the giants, Fafner and Fasolt, who built it. The giants must be given Freya, the goddess of eternal youth. Wotan tricks the ring from Alberich and persuades the giants to accept it and the gold instead. So great is the greed the ring inspires, they immediately fight over it. Fafner kills Fasolt and disappears to brood over his accursed treasure. The story proper can now begin. At the start of Die Valkure, the first of the three main dramas, we learn that Wotan still dreams of getting the ring back, although it plays no part in the action which follows. This begins when we see Wotan’s son Siegmund, on the run from his enemies, taking refuge in the hut of Hunding and his wife Sieglinde. She and Siegmund drug Hunding into unconsciousness with a potion and run away together. When Hunding awakes, determined to pursue Siegmund and kill him, Wotan orders the battle-maiden Brunnhilde, one of the Valkyries, to protect Siegmund, but Hunding manages to kill him. Wotan then kills Hunding. Brunnhilde tells Sieglinde to escape into the forest, and Wotan punishes her by decreeing that she is no longer a goddess, but must fall into a trance surrounded by a ring of fire. She can only be woken by a hero fearless enough to penetrate the flames.
At the start of Siegfried, the second drama, we learn that Sieglinde has died giving birth to the hero, Siegfried, who is without fear. Siegfried grows up and slays Fafner, now transformed into a monstrous dragon, thus winning the ring and also the knowledge that he must rescue Brunnhilde. Because he is fearless, Siegfried can penetrate the flames. He wakes Brunnhilde with a kiss and they joyfully declare their love. Much of this central episode, the victory of the hero over the monster, thus winning the treasure and union with the anima, is taken directly from the story of Sigurd slaying the dragon Fafnir and winning Brynhild in the Norse Volsunga Saga.
At the start of Gotterdammerung, the third and final drama, the three Norns, daughters of the earth goddess, spin the golden rope which binds together knowledge of past, present and future in an unbroken whole, as typifies the unreflective world of instinct. But when human consciousness emerges, that instinctive continuum is broken, as happens now when the Norns’ rope becomes tangled and snaps. Siegfried cannot rest in happy union with his anima, but must go back into the world in search of new adventures, leaving the ring with Brunnhilde as a token of his love.
We then see the hatching of the greed-inspired plot which is to bring the story to its devastating conclusion, as Alberich’s son Hagen schemes with his half-brother Gunter to win back the ring. Again by means of a drug, they trick Siegfried into unconsciousness. He forgets Brunnhilde and falls in love with Gunter’s sister Gutrune. In the original Norse version, this fatal potion was supplied by their witch-like mother Grimhild: thus making it much more explicit that the hero loses touch with his anima because he has passed under the spell of the Dark Mother. Now bound by brotherhood to Gunter, Siegfried agrees to disguise himself as Gunter and to woo Brunnhilde on his behalf. Since only he can penetrate the flames, he is able to bring her to the hall where they are all assembled, where she sees Siegfried, now wearing her ring, about to marry Gutrune. Swearing vengeance at him for his betrayal, she now herself becomes the ‘dark feminine’, plotting with Hagen to murder Siegfried. As he dies, he remembers who Brunnhilde is and what she means to him. Hagen then kills Gunter as they fight for possession of the ring. Brunnhilde rides her horse into Siegfried’s funeral pyre, the flames blaze up, the Rhine overflows, the Rhinemaidens seize the ring and vanish back into the swirling waters. Hagen, desperately trying to grab the ring, is drawn down into the depths after them. As the world dissolves into the opposites of fire and water, we see the apocalypse stretching up to Valhalla itself, as Wotan and his fellow gods are engulfed by the flames. The twilight of the gods darkens into eternal night.
So final and so all-embracing does this triumph of the power of darkness appear to be that it is fascinating to see how insistently those under Wagner’s spell have sought to discern in it some positive, life-giving element: an indication that, even in this world-consuming apocalypse, the forces of light have still somehow won the day. Particular attention is paid to the music which hovers above the final orgy of death and destruction, the so-called ‘redemption motif’, although Wagner himself described this motif as ‘the glorification of Brunnhilde’. The implication is that Brunnhilde’s self-immolation in Siegfried’s funeral pyre, to be reunited with her hero, by symbolising the power of eternal love, somehow redeems all that has happened. It was even suggested by the late Professor Robert Donington, whose Wagner’s ‘Ring’ and Its Symbols: The Music and the Myth interpreted the operas from a Jungian viewpoint, that the ‘redemption motif’ should be called the ‘transformation motif’; implying that, since the destruction of an old order of consciousness is part of the transformation necessary to allow a new one to emerge, we should regard the ending of the story as pregnant with hope.
The fact remains there is not the slightest evidence for this in the way Wagner presents his story. It is salutary in this respect to go back to the Norse mythology from which he drew his inspiration. In the original version, the climax comes in the world-ending catastrophe of Ragnarok, when the earth is swallowed up in an apocalyptic vision of destruction, along with all that is beneath it and above it, including the gods in Valhalla. But it has long been foreshadowed that, once the old order has been destroyed, a new, unimaginably better world will emerge: centred on the figure of the perfect hero Baldur who, like Siegfried, has been killed by treachery, but who must die in order that he may be resurrected to rule over the new world.
In Wagner’s version, there is none of this. All we see is the story of how, once the treacherous, heartless power of egotism comes into the world, symbolised by the ring, everyone is corrupted by it. We see nothing but an endless vicious cycle of greed, rivalry, deceit, trickery and murder, until ultimately the self-destructive power of egotism destroys first the hero, then the anima, finally the entire world: leaving behind only an empty darkness. Beyond egotism, from the ego’s point of view, there is nothing. Only that archetypal awareness buried deep in our unconscious that, even as the dark power in a story brings about its own destruction, the light must always re-emerge, leads people to want to imagine that they see a glimmer of light in the ending to the strange, dark story of the Ring of the Nibelungen. It is not there.
In 1875, the year before Wagner finally brought the central work of his life, on which he had worked for more than a quarter of a century, to its first performance at Bayreuth, an outwardly rather more conventional opera had its premiere in Paris. We earlier looked at Bizet’s Carmen as a perfect example of a story shaped by the five-stage archetypal pattern of Tragedy. Although the weak little hero José is in love with an infantile anima-figure, Micaela, he becomes infatuated with the Temptress, Carmen. Throwing off his soldier’s uniform, as a symbol of losing his outward manhood, he rejects his loving anima and passes completely under the emasculating spell of the Dark Mother. There then looms up the bullfighter Escamillo, the shadow of the masculinity he will never realise; and finally, in futile, self-destructive rage, he lashes out at the Dark Mother, who symbolises his impotent immaturity. As in Rigoletto or the Ring cycle, there is very little sign of any redeeming victory for light.
It is interesting to look at this story in the context of Bizet’s own psychology. He was another of those nineteenth-century artists, like Stendhal, with a mother complex, who therefore had serious difficulty both with his own inner feminine and with his masculinity. He wanted, as Robert Donington tells us, to live next door to his mother, yet have ‘his mistresses come and go in spite of her, almost as it would seem by proxy for her’. In his severe attacks of angina pectoris, he had visions of his mother laying her hand on his chest, when ‘the agony would increase. I would suffocate, and it seemed to me that her hand, weighing on me so heavily, was the true cause of my suffering.’ Bizet was liable to ungovernable rages, and once in Venice when he received a letter from his mother addressed from hospital, he fell into such acute anxiety that, at the mere sight of the letter unopened, he ‘attacked a gondolier as if to strangle him.’
He must unconsciously have recognised this central problem of his own identity when he chose Merimée’s story to provide the basis for his last and most famous opera. When it finally went into production, at the Paris Comedie Francaise, Bizet entered a psychosomatic crisis. Three months later, the singer playing Carmen, at the scene where her death is foretold in the cards, was filled with such foreboding that she fainted in the wings. Next day came the news that the composer had died that same evening, at the age of 36.
A composer whose operas continued those of Verdi in reflecting the obsession of nineteenth-century storytellers with the tortured, persecuted anima was Puccini. At the end of Manon Lescaut (1893), the heroine dies on a vast, desolate plain, singing of how she is ‘alone, lost and abandoned’. At the end of La Boheme (1896), Mimi dies painfully of consumption in the garret where she had once enjoyed the greatest happiness of her short life. In Tosca (1900), the heroine, having heard the groans of her lover being tortured in the next room on the orders of the Tyrant Scarpia, desperately tries to save him by betraying their friend. When Scarpia then deceitfully offers to spare her lover’s life if she will submit to his sexual advances, she agrees, only to stab the villain when he tries to embrace her. Having committed this fatal act, at least she imagines she has managed to save her lover. But she then sees this was only a trick played on her and that he has been executed. Finally, as a policeman bursts in to arrest her, Tosca flings herself out of the window to her death, vengefully proclaiming that she and the Tyrant must now meet before God.
But there are few stories in which the plot is more poignantly centred on the persecution of the loving anima than Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (1904). When the American officer Lieutenant Pinkerton arranges to marry the pretty little 15-year old Japanese girl Cio-Cio-San, Butterfly, he is warned he must not treat his new wife too lightly. But he just cynically drinks to the day when he can eventually marry ‘a real American girl’. After their wedding, Butterfly is cursed and abandoned by her family for marrying a foreigner of another religion. Her beloved husband must now be her entire life, and Act One ends with her submitting joyfully to his embraces.
Act Two opens three years later when she has given birth to a son, but is now waiting anxiously with her faithful maid Suzuki for her husband to return after a long absence. Her only dream is the day when he will come back, and at last his ship is sighted coming into the harbour. She excitedly fills the house with flowers, puts on her wedding dress and prepares to welcome him. All night she waits, but he never arrives; until the following morning when he enters the house, having left the American wife he has married hidden in the garden. Butterfly is resting, after her sleepless night, and he tells Suzuki he has only come to take away his son. When Butterfly awakens and sees the strange woman in the garden, she soon puzzles out what is happening. She tells Pinkerton he may come to fetch his son in half an hour. She takes up the knife with which her father had committed suicide on the orders of the Mikado. Her little boy runs in and she says goodbye to him, binding his eyes and giving him an American flag to hold. She goes behind a screen, the knife clatters to the floor and, as Pinkerton enters, she dies.
The whole unconscious purpose of this story is to exploit the audience’s archetypal emotional response to the heart-tugging spectacle of the loving anima being rejected in the most humiliating fashion by the heartless egocentric ‘dark masculine’. Yet, when this offence against the light has been remorselessly pressed to its dark conclusion, there is no redeeming element. At least Tosca was able to take the Tyrant Scarpia with her before she died. Here light is extinguished and only darkness remains, having seemingly won the day. Seeing the archetypal pattern thus turned inside out, we may sense this is scarcely a complete resolution to the story. But, so slight and uninteresting is the cardboard cut-out figure of Pinkerton, it does not even seem to matter what might happen to him subsequently. The story’s only real purpose has been to play the degradation of its central figure for maximum sentimental effect. Once we have seen the image of the faithful, tortured anima committing suicide, the lemon has been squeezed. What remains is really of no interest or significance whatever.
Returning in a sense to where this chapter began, a final obvious fashion in which Tragedy can both turn dark and be sentimentalised is where we see its hero, or central figures, acting out the archetypal self-destructive pattern, but in a way which invites us to see them somehow as attractive and glamorous, as they rebel in the name of vitality, excitement and freedom against a stuffy and oppressive social order.
In The Portrait of Dorian Grey, we may objectively be left in no doubt that the hero must in fact be a very dark character indeed, as he embarks on his life of debauchery and nameless wickedness. But at the same time we cannot avoid the impression that we are intended to see this beautiful, decadent young man as a glamorous hero; and it is no accident that the fundamental philosophy by which he lives, seeing life as a work of art achieved through gratifying the senses, was one with which his creator Oscar Wilde himself sympathised, delighting as he shocked the bourgeois proprieties of late Victorian society by doing so. When the beautiful young hero finally kills himself, turning instantly into the ravaged and bloated monster of his portrait, there is something deeply narcissistic about this; as if the real tragedy of the story is not all the cruelty and degradation he has inflicted on other people, but simply the way he has suddenly lost those beautiful, epicene good looks.
In that typical cult film of the early 1960s, Jules et Jim, we are not expected to view the obsession of the two young heroes with the fey, beguiling Temptress who leads them on to destruction as simply a sign of their weakness and immaturity; as showing how they lack either masculine strength of character or feminine understanding. The film’s whole appeal was that the two good-looking young men were seen as glamorous and attractive, unshackled by bourgeois convention, losing themselves in a heady, wild, romantic adventure of precisely the kind the 1960s liked to fantasise about. And when the dark anima finally drives Jim off the bridge to their deaths, leaving Jules to stare bewilderedly at their ashes, we are meant to share his incomprehension; thinking how sad that malign fate should have brought such a terrible end to such a beautiful, if confusing dream.
In that typical cult film of the later 1960s, Bonnie and Clyde, we are not expected to view the young hero and heroine who egg each other on into a life of crime ‘for kicks’ as being led by their immaturity into something horrifyingly destructive and evil. We are invited to see their driving around the sunlit roads of America in vintage cars, occasionally stopping to rob a bank or blast off at someone who has got in their way, as another typical, wild, exhilarating, sixties-style adventure. When we finally see their car and bodies being riddled with bullets in dream-like slow motion, we are meant to think how sad that such daring defiance of humdrum normality in the name of freedom should have had to come to such a depressing end.
The point of what happens when the archetype of Tragedy is taken over by the human ego is not that it ceases to be tragic. It is that the balance of the story becomes inverted. Instead of presenting an objective portrayal of how the imbalance of egotism ultimately works to bring about its own destruction so that cosmic balance can be restored, the story now has no interest in seeing how the wider whole is restored. We do not see, as at the end of a tragedy like Macbeth, that solemn mood of celebration as the world returns to peace and normality after the terrible irruption of darkness has been purged. Its concern is solely internal, with what is going on inside the tragic pattern itself. Which is why, at the end of a romantic tragedy like Young Werther or Bonnie and Clyde, or the Ring cycle, or a Verdi or Puccini opera when we have seen the anima brought to her cataclysmic end, there is nothing left but a very lonely and silent darkness. Because, outside the world of the ego which has shaped such a tale, there is nothing else.
Again it might seem a contradiction that the ego could take over the plot of Rebirth, since this is concerned with showing how its central figure moves from being centred on the ego to the deeper centre of the Self. The only example we shall look at here manages to present the Rebirth theme in both dark and sentimental guise at the same time.
By the time Ian Fleming came in 1963 to write his last completed James Bond novel, You Only Live Twice, the books he had been turning out every year for a decade had already made him rich. When his stories began to be adapted for the screen, with Dr No (1962) and From Russia With Love (1963), they were about to make Bond one of the most famous fictional characters of the twentieth century. But in some ways Fleming was by now deeply weary of the fantasy-hero who had dominated his daydreams since adolescence. Churning out yet another Bond adventure each year had become a kind of addictive slavery. He had developed a kind of love-hate identification with his creation which, in the eyes of those who knew him well, had become seriously unhealthy. Indeed, for reasons not unrelated to the resulting strain, he was now physically ill, with the disease which was soon to kill him.
You Only Live Twice is darker than any of the Bond stories which preceded it. For a start, we learn that, before the story opens, the relentlessly promiscuous hero had finally got married; only to see his wife murdered the day after their wedding, by the super-villain who had already emerged in two earlier stories as Bond’s greatest shadowy antagonist of all. Blofeld, head of the sinister terrorist organisation SPECTRE, is like a supreme enemy to all mankind. After his wife’s death, Bond had gone to pieces: drunk, unreliable, his health failing. But now he is summoned by ‘M’, head of the secret service, to a last great adventure.
On the far side of the world, in Japan, a mysterious figure has appeared, calling himself ‘Dr Shatterhand’. He lives in a huge, remote, impregnable castle, and has surrounded himself with a ‘Garden of Death’, full of volcanic pools and every kind of poisonous and deadly plant, snake, insect and fish. Bond sets out for Japan, where he goes through a long period of briefing and preparation from his old friend Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service. He learns that Shatterhand is ‘a collector of death’, and that people are being attracted from all over the world to commit suicide in his gardens. He is described as ‘an eccentric of the most devilish nature ... a monster ... a fiend in human form ... either a great madman or a great criminal’.
Bond then sees a photograph of this shadowy monster and at once recognises him as his old enemy Blofeld, re-emerged in new guise (as we are told when Sauron reappears at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, ‘always after a defeat the Shadow takes another shape and grows again’). Bond travels across Japan towards the distant ‘dark’ fortress, its owner being built up all the time as someone who operates ‘on the scale of a Caligula, of a Nero, of a Hitler, of any other great enemy of mankind’. Bond sees himself as ‘David spurred on to kill his Goliath’, as ‘St George approaching the dragon’.
So far, the story is as complete an example of the Overcoming the Monster plot as Fleming ever wrote. But at this point a strange new element intrudes, which will eventually return to take over the final stages of the story. For a last period of preparation for his crowning ordeal, Bond is sent to a primitive Japanese fishing village, to be taken under the tutelage of two figures: a spiritually wise Shinto priest and a beautiful young girl, Kissy Suzuki, once improbably a Hollywood actress but who has now come back to her remote native village to live as a simple fisher-girl. Suddenly looming up in the middle of a James Bond story we see those great archetypal figures, the Wise Old Man and the Anima; enough in itself to warn us that something unusual is afoot. Bond lives austerely in the village, almost like a novice monk, going on diving expeditions with the girl to bring up valuable shells from the seabed. At last she leads him to a local shrine, to ask six ancient stone figures, the Guardians, for their blessing. The girl waves goodbye, and Bond sets off on the last stage of his journey, emerging from the sea to climb into the ‘Castle of Death’.
Hiding in the suicide garden, he witnesses the horrific deaths of several other visitors, being eaten alive by piranha fish or thrown by ‘Black Guards’ into bubbling volcanic pools. He enters the castle where, inevitably, he is captured and brought before the Monster himself for the ritual confrontation. Blofeld first makes sport with his victim, by having him tortured. Bond is placed on a stone seat which has been built on top of a geyser, and learns he has just 11 minutes left before it erupts with gigantic force to blow him away. He manages, as ‘with one mighty bound’, to break free, strangles Blofeld with his bare hands, closes down a valve to block off the top of the geyser and runs up onto the castle battlements, where a conveniently tethered helium balloon allows him to escape before the geyser erupts. How he has achieved all this in less than 11 minutes is a mystery. But as he floats out over the sea, there is a world-shattering explosion and he sees the ‘Castle of Death’ disintegrating in a vast fireball. Caught in the blast, his balloon falls into the sea and Bond feels himself sinking into warm water, ‘down towards peace, towards the rippling feathers of some childhood dream of softness and escape from pain’. We next read The Times obituary of ‘Commander James Bond’, reporting that he has ‘died on active service’. In the same book, not only has Fleming at last arranged for his hero to get married; he has also killed him off.
We then learn that our hero is not in fact dead at all. He has been rescued from the sea, inevitably by the loving Suzuki, his soul-carrying anima, and in a lonely cave behind the shrine of the Guardians she has tended him gently back to health. But Bond has completely lost any memory of his former life or identity. Under guidance from the Wise Old Man, Suzuki gives the hero a new name, Todo Todoroki. They happily begin a new, simple life together by the sea shore. It is an idyllic picture of a man completely reborn, having conquered Death, left his old life behind and at last found his inmost identity.
But of course Bond has not really discovered his identity. He may have acted out the external pattern of a rebirth, but he has not been through any inward transformation. He has merely covered up his old identity with an outward disguise. Like everything else about James Bond, it is just ‘some childhood dream of escape’. And sure enough, he eventually comes across a scrap of newspaper on which he can make out the word ‘Vladivostok’. He knows this somehow has deep significance for him; and when Suzuki tells him it is a place in Russia, he is sure that, if only he can get there, he will somehow learn who he truly is. The story ends with Bond setting off on a new journey across the sea to the Soviet Union. What Suzuki cannot tell him, because she does not know who he really is, is that when he arrives there he will fall into the hands of his real enemies, and that from this voyage there will be no return.
This death-wish laden fable was Fleming’s last completed book. Less than a year later, and only a month after the death of his dominating mother, he himself was dead, at the age of only 56. In light of the peculiar strains of his last years, associated with the fantasy-figure who, like Frankenstein’s monster, had taken over his life, he had become James Bond’s only real-life victim.
As we end this introductory résumé of some of the main ways in which so many stories have in the past 200 years taken on these dark and sentimental forms, the time has come to look from a fresh angle at the process which lay behind this fundamental change in the character of Western storytelling. One of its more conspicuous features, as we have seen (not least in our last example from Ian Fleming), was the way stories became more like personal dreams, reflecting the particular psychological inadequacies and imbalances of their creators. No storyteller provides a clearer illustration of this process than the novelist who forms the subject of our next chapter, Thomas Hardy.