‘All these clever people are so stupid, I have no one to talk to. I am so lonely, always so lonely, no one belongs to me, and ... who I am, what I exist for, nobody knows.’
Charlotta, in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard
‘One does not know, and one will never know; one searches desperately among the unsubstantial fragments of a dream ... a life hagridden by people who have no connection with one, full of lapses of memory, gaps, vain anxieties, a life as illusory as a dream.’
Marcel Proust, The Captive, À La Recherche du Temps Perdu
‘Where I am I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
‘Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let’s go.
(They do not move).
CURTAIN.’
Samuel Beckett, end of Waiting for Godot
‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but no matter. Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further ... so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’
Scott Fitzgerald, end of The Great Gatsby
In this chapter and the next we shall be looking at two of the most significant things which happened to the nature of stories in the twentieth century. Each of these in its own way expressed a natural consequence of that profound psychological shift which had been taking place in storytelling since the dawn of Romanticism.
One, which will be the theme of the next chapter, was how, particularly in the century’s closing decades, films, plays and novels became so obsessively preoccupied with images of sex and violence. But before we come to that we must first consider another development in modern storytelling which, although less blatant, was equally revealing. This was the way in which the works of so many twentieth-century playwrights, novelists and film-makers seemed to express the sense of having arrived at a kind of cosmic and spiritual dead end.
There was no more celebrated instance of this kind of story than a play which was first staged in a tiny theatre in Paris midway through the century, and again to even greater acclaim in London two years later: a drama so unusual that it was immediately recognised as something quite new in the history of storytelling. This was not least because Waiting for Godot (1953) had virtually no story. Two tramps are waiting by the side of a road for the promised arrival of a mysterious character called Godot. Eventually two more men arrive, one driving the other in front of him like an animal. After a series of exchanges, the newcomers then move on. A second act more or less echoes the first. At the end the two tramps are still waiting in vain for the elusive Godot, who never appears.
But to see how that change which had come over stories in the nineteenth century was eventually to lead to the limbo world of Samuel Beckett, we must first go back to the work of a dramatist who had been writing half a century earlier.
Just when Thomas Hardy was nearing the end of his career as a novelist in England, a young doctor at the other end of Europe was embarking on a sequence of plays which, psychologically, were to take storytelling into a new phase of its evolution. What we see in each of the five major plays written by Anton Chekhov between 1887 and his early death from tuberculosis in 1904 is a little group of people, somewhere in provincial Russia, who are going nowhere. They are trapped in a peculiar web of frustration and futility. Almost all his characters are defined by their yearning for something which does not exist. If they are young, they are dreaming of an imaginary future where life will somehow be better. By the time they are middle-aged or old, they are harking back to something they have lost: love, life, the enthusiasms and energy of youth. Away from this cycle of false hope souring into disillusionment and despair there is little else. And each time we then see them drifting towards a final shocking event which brings home just how hopeless and empty their lives have become.
The first of the sequence, Ivanov (1887), centres on a middle-aged landowner in the depths of what we would call a mid-life crisis. He has frittered away all his talents, energy, hopes and money. He is bored and irritated by all around him, but hates himself just as much, for being constantly ‘bad-tempered, rude and petty-minded’. He did once love his wife Anna. She recalls how, when they first met, his ‘eyes used to glow like burning coals when he talked with passion’. But no longer. Now, when he learns she is ill with TB, the news leaves him cold. As the young doctor Lvov bluntly tells him, he has been reduced to a state of nothing but ‘heartless egotism’.
The action begins when Ivanov pays a visit to his neighbours, where their young daughter Sasha declares that she loves him, precisely because he seems such a lost soul. It is her mission to redeem him. They kiss and are seen by Ivanov’s horrified wife, Anna. Back home, the self-hating Ivanov tells Lvov ‘at 26 we are all heroes, we undertake anything, we can do anything; but at 30 we are tired already, and good for nothing’. When Sasha comes over to visit Ivanov, Anna accuses him of lying. He vindictively hits back by telling her she is going to die, and is immediately filled with remorse: ‘how wicked I am’. In the final act, a year later, we learn that Anna has indeed died, and the guests are arriving for Ivanov’s wedding to Sasha. No one is happy about what is about to happen, not least Sasha and Ivanov themselves. He finally tells her the wedding is off, and shoots himself.
What Chekhov introduces us to in Ivanov, veiled in that peculiar, sweet melancholy lit with flashes of mordant humour which hangs over his plays, is a little world not quite like anything seen in storytelling before. No one is presented as particularly dark: not even the heartless but self-despising Ivanov (although Chekhov’s plays always feature one dominant personality, like Ivanov or Liuba in The Cherry Orchard, whose egotism casts a shadow over everyone else). But at the same time none of the other characters is particularly light either. All are essentially trapped in the same moral twilight. Each is isolated and shut off from everyone else, because they are all to a greater or lesser extent bound up in their own individual form of egotism. No longer is there any hint of that other dimension we have previously seen as so fundamental to the great archetypal stories: that life-giving force which can ultimately weld a story together by bringing light, recognition, transformation and wholeness. The values of the Self have all but vanished below the horizon. And without them, all that can happen – as we began to see developing in later Hardy – is that a story’s characters are doomed to drift slowly downwards, like water draining away down a plughole, until finally may come that shocking event which shows the bath is empty. At least this gives the story the semblance of having come to a conclusion. But nothing has really been resolved or understood.
In Chekhov’s next variation on the theme, The Seagull (1896), the dominant personality is Arkadina, the fading middle-aged actress, dreaming of the days when she was winning applause on the stage of the local provincial centre, Kharkhov. Behind theatrical shows of caring for others, she is wholly egocentric. Now she has come out to the family’s country estate, accompanied by the successful but empty middle-aged writer Trigorin, where her son Trepliov has planned to put on a play in the garden, with Nina, the daughter of a neighbour. The nature of his dramatic fragment is telling. It conjures up a vision of the world 200,000 years into the future, when all the myriad forms of life on earth have become subsumed into a single World-Soul, opposed by the only other creature surviving in the universe, the Devil. Although presented as a kind of parody avant-garde play, this haunting image of a mysterious totality symbolising the spiritual unity of all life, and played by the innocent young Nina, is in fact the nearest thing to an evocation of the Self anywhere in Chekhov. But of course it is only an immature dream, set in some impossibly remote future. And such pretentious fantasy is all far too boring and ‘decadent’ for the uncomprehending mother, provoking her to sarcastic interventions so crushing to the poor young author that he brings proceedings to an abrupt end.
Once the son’s inability to escape the suffocating grip of the ‘Dark Mother’ is established as the central problem, events then again gradually spiral down to a violent conclusion. In the wake of his humiliation over the play, Nina, who says she has been drawn to the household ‘like a seagull’, loses interest in young Trepliov and gravitates instead to the famous writer Trigorin. Trepliov, deeply hurt, shoots a seagull and presents it to her. The heartless Trigorin, cocooned in his self-important persona as a great writer, jots down notes for a story which he tells her is about ‘a young girl like you’ who is ‘happy and free as a seagull. But a man chances to come along, sees her, and having nothing better to do, destroys her, just like this seagull here.’ Nina’s crush on Trigorin develops to the point where she refers him to a line in one of his own books: ‘if you ever need my life, come and take it’. Trepliov and his mother have a row, in which he expresses utter contempt for everything she and Trigorin in their false ‘above the line’ world stand for. As the two of them prepare to leave, Trigorin and Nina privately exchange a long passionate embrace.
In the final act, two years later, we see Trepliov recounting how Nina had followed Trigorin to the city. They had an affair, she had given birth to a child which died, Trigorin abandoned her and she had become an unsuccessful actress. Then Arkadina and Trigorin arrive at the house. Trigorin is patronisingly complimentary about a story Trepliov has had published in a magazine. When the great man presents him with a copy, he finds Trigorin has cut the pages of a story written by himself but has obviously not even read Trepliov’s contribution, the pages of which are still uncut. Nina turns up, and tearfully recalls to Trepliov their lost youth and those happy, innocent days when they were putting on their play. As Arkadina, Trigorin and others are heard approaching from outside the room, Trepliov quietly leaves and, when they have all come in, there is a shot offstage. The crushed and humiliated boy has committed suicide. So ends what Chekhov described as ‘a comedy in four acts’, although anything further removed from the archetype of Comedy would be hard to imagine.
In Uncle Vanya (1899) the dominant figure is Serebriakov, a distinguished art-historian, who has returned to live on his country estate in his retirement with his second wife Yeliena. But the central character is his brother-in-law by his first marriage, Voinitsky (‘Vanya’) who has for years worked tirelessly to run the estate while Serebriakov lived away in the city. Vanya has cheerfully sacrificed his life under the impresssion that his late sister’s husband was a respected scholar, even a genius. But now Serebriakov has come back home, Vanya belatedly realises the man he has given his life for is a fraud, a nonentity who knows nothing about art: ‘not a word of his writings will survive him’. Among those in the shadows cast by Serebriakov’s egotism is the young local doctor Astrov, who despairs at the way, thanks to the stupidity and laziness of the Russian people, their beautiful land is going to rack and ruin (‘The Russian forests are literally groaning under the axe, the homes of animals and birds are being laid waste, the rivers are getting shallow and drying up, the wonderful scenery is disappearing for ever.’). Yeliena notes that Sonia, her husband’s daughter by his first marriage and Vanya’s niece, is falling for Astrov. But when she tactfully tries to suggest a proposal, Astrov embarrassingly proclaims his love for Yeliena herself. Serebriakov then suddenly shocks everyone by announcing that he intends to sell the estate which Vanya has devoted his life to building up, even though it is Sonia’s inheritance from her mother. This revelation of Serebriakov’s mindless selfishness (even he himself recognises he is ‘an egotist, a despot. But haven’t I the right to be selfish in my old age? I love success. I like being a well-known figure’) is finally too much for Vanya. He pours out his contempt for Serebriakov and tries to shoot him. But, for the first time, the act of violence is not the end of the story. A final act shows everything apparently back to normal, as Serebriakov and Yeliena prepare to leave the estate. When they are gone, all that is left is for young Sonia, left alone with her uncle, to conjure up a vision of how, after they have worked thanklessly and without rest for many more years, they will finally arrive in heaven:
‘we shall hear the angels, we shall see all the heavens covered with stars like diamonds, we shall see all earthly evil, all our suffering swept away by the grace which will fill the whole world, and our life will become peaceful, gentle and sweet as a caress. I believe it. I believe it ... we shall rest ... we shall rest!’
But of course Chekhov is only mocking Sonia’s self-deluding religiosity. What he is really conveying about human existence is that, behind such sentimental make-believe, there is nothing left but that black and empty void.
The one thing everyone remembers about the heroines of The Three Sisters (1901) is that the three girls, trapped in a dreary provincial town where their father had been commander of the military garrison until his death a year earlier, are perpetually dreaming of the day when they might return to Moscow. As so often in stories, the great city teeming with life and significance (Paris in so many French novels, New York in American stories, London in Dickens or Tom Jones or Dick Whittington) is an externally projected symbol of the Self: the ‘centre’ to which little provincial heroes and heroines aspire as the place where they will ‘find themselves’. It is no accident that all Chekhov’s plays are set in the provinces. The remoteness of their characters from the ‘centre’ is an external reflection of the fact that none have any inner centre. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the symbolic role played by Moscow in The Three Sisters. As Olga, the schoolmistress, puts it to her sisters at the play’s beginning: ‘if only we could go back to Moscow’. They are obsessed with the thought of that distant place where they imagine they might at last find life, love, meaning, purpose: everything they are deprived of in this suffocating little corner of nowhere.
The draining away of their hopes is symbolised in the decay of their brother Andre whom they have imagined to be so talented that, if only they could reach Moscow, he would surely be made a professor. But after he marries the boorish, insufferable Natasha she becomes the play’s dominant figure, taking over the household like a monstrous cuckoo. She treats the family’s old nurse Anfisa like dirt. She pushes Olga out of her bedroom, to make a nursery for the baby Bobik she dotes on with such mawkish sentimentality; then drives her from the house altogether. Meanwhile her pitiful husband, running up gambling debts, falls to pieces.
The only palliative for the girls’ misery is the presence of the officers from the garrison, filling the house with their genial chatter. Masha, though married to a dull schoolmaster, falls for the equally unhappily married Vershinin, the new garrison commander, given to rambling on about how, in the distant future, ‘life will be different. It will be happy’. Irena eventually agrees to marry Baron Toozenbach, as a way out of her misery. Then comes the order that the soldiers are to leave town. On the eve of their departure, Toozenbach fights a duel and is killed. Irena and Masha have each lost the only man who had given them hope. Echoing the general despair, the doctor asks rhetorically ‘What does it matter? Nothing matters.’ To which Olga replies, in the closing words of the play, ‘if only we knew. If only we knew!’
In his final ‘comedy’ The Cherry Orchard (1904), written just before his early death, the dominant figure is the ageing Liuba Ranyevskaia, returning to her Russian estate after five years away in France. She has run up a mountain of debt living carelessly abroad with a drunken lover, her feckless brother and her daughter, and returns to find reality staring her in the face. Lopakhin, the former estate serf who has become a successful businessman, tells her the only hope of paying off her debts is to sell the once-magnificent cherry orchard in front of the house, to build a mass of summer villas for newly-prosperous city dwellers. The canny nouveau riche Lopakhin is the most positive character in Chekhov, because at least he is focused on becoming rich, according to the hard, down-to-earth commercial reality which is shaping Russia’s future. Liuba, with her empty, wasted life, represents the past whose day is over. Despite all Lopakhin’s friendly efforts to get her to face reality, she simply cannot do so. How could she possibly agree to the felling of the beautiful cherry orchard; the pulling down of the old house in which she grew up, with all its bittersweet memories? Surrounded by her family and dependents, she is lost in a dream world. Even after the auction, when the house and the whole estate are sold, inevitably to Lopakhin, she is still completely insulated from reality; until the moment when it is time for them all to leave the doomed house for the last time, and the play ends on the sound of an axe being taken to the cherry trees.
What is new about this world conjured up by Chekhov is that for the first time we get a real preview of what was to lie at the end of that road which storytelling had begun to take in the dawn of Romanticism.
Certainly a central clue to the peculiar, stifling, trapped air which surrounds almost all the unhappy people in his plays is that none are ever strong enough to take control of their own lives (as a friend of mine once impatiently remarked ‘if those girls really wanted to go to Moscow why didn’t they just go down to the railway station and buy tickets?’). None of them ever look inwards, to know and change themselves. There is no growth in Chekhov’s characters, except that of foolish dreams and decay. No one even begins to embark on that voyage of internal discovery which leads to transformation. We merely see weak, static figures, creatures of circumstances, without self-knowledge, doomed to the eternal round of youthful energy and optimism pinned on false, external goals, slowly souring into non-comprehending exhaustion and futility. It all echoes the view of human existence Chekhov expressed in a comment to Gorky: ‘the Russian is a strange creature ... in his youth he fills himself greedily with anything he comes across, and after 30 years nothing remains but a kind of grey rubbish’. In the end, since there is no hope of maturity or wholeness, the only escape lies either in some despairing act of violence, or in fantasising about some distant future state, whether in this world or the next, where ‘life will be different. It will be happy.’ Human beings, as Chekhov portrays them, are little more than wraiths chasing shadows, hoping for a dawn which never comes.
In itself, however, this was not the first time a storyteller had given expression to such a bleak view of human nature. Nowhere is that sense of nihilistic futility which runs through Chekhov’s plays more eloquently summed up than in one of the most familiar soliloquies in literature:
‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day;
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.’
Macbeth’s words might seem a perfect mirror to the world of Chekhov. But the point is that Shakespeare sets this despairing view in a very specific psychological context. He puts it into the mouth of the blackest of his tragic heroes, at a precise moment in his downward course. The reason why Macbeth sees the world like this is that he is at just the point in the Nightmare Stage of his Tragedy where all the self-defeating futility of his tragic adventure is finally being brought home to him. He has long since cut himself off from the Self. He has become totally isolated in his own egotism. And now external reality is finally crashing in on him, he can see nothing more than the end of the road to which egocentricity must eventually lead: a world devoid of meaning.
What Shakespeare was saying was that this is how the world must eventually look to someone who has inwardly lost contact with anything outside his own ego. The human psyche is so constituted, as he recognised with all the intuitive understanding of a great artist, that for anyone who views human existence from this shrunken perspective it will eventually come to seem exactly as Macbeth saw it: wearisome, unreal and utterly pointless, ‘signifying nothing’. But, of course, no one knew better than Shakespeare that this represents only one, very limited aspect of human experience. It is possible to view life from a quite different, much deeper perspective. Only then does it take on colour and meaning, revealing its true patterns and purposes.
In Chekhov, however, beneath the apparently beguiling surface of his plays, he concentrates on that particular limited perspective to the exclusion of almost everything else. The little world he presents is one of people who may not be so obviously dark as Macbeth, but who still only really exist in terms of their ego. And the significance of this, at the start of the twentieth century, was that it reflected the onset of a further shift in that psychological ‘centre of gravity’ which, over the next 100 years, was to find expression in some of the best-known stories of the age.
Not long after Chekhov’s death, a doctor’s son in his mid-30s retired from the world and took to his bed in a cork-lined room in Paris, to begin writing what was eventually to become the longest story ever published. Nearly a hundred years later, the 3,300-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu were to be widely described as ‘the greatest novel of the twentieth century’.
One cannot see Proust’s mountain of words in proper perspective without recognising the extent to which it reflected his own obsessively self-absorbed personality and the story of his own life. He was born in Paris, in the middle of the Prussian siege of 1870, into a typical haut-bourgeois French family. His imposing, bearded father was a distinguished pillar of the French medical establishment. But young Marcel’s closest relationship, shaping his personality more than anything else, was that with his doting Jewish mother, who called him ‘mon petit loup’; and the peculiar degree to which this affected his character was notably illustrated, when he was seven, by what his biographer George Painter called ‘the most important event in Proust’s life’.
This took place on an evening when his parents were out in the garden, entertaining a guest, and his mother failed to come up to her son’s bedroom to give him his usual goodnight kiss. The anguished child watched the grown-ups from his window, could not sleep, and pleaded in vain with a family servant to call his mother upstairs. Eventually he leaned out and called ‘ma petite maman, I want you for a second’. When she entered the room, he broke into a fit of hysterical weeping, which he was to remember for the rest of his life as a sobbing inside him which had ‘never ceased’: the moment when he pleaded for his mother’s love and she had not come. Two years later he terrified his father with the first of the asthmatic attacks which again were to haunt him for the rest of his life; and which Painter was to link with his hysterical weeping fits as unconscious pleas for ‘his father’s pity and his mother’s love’. The fact was that Proust had already become the victim of a particularly acute ‘mother-complex’: a sickly, spoiled, hypochondriac little boy who, even when he was briefly separated from his mother at the age of 16, fell into such melodramatic sobbing that his great-uncle contemptuously dismissed it as ‘sheer egotism’.
As a teenager, although he sometimes amused his schoolfriends with his clever remarks, he irritated them even more by his embarrassing attempts to curry favour and win their approval. As one, Daniel Halevy, put it:
‘there was something about him we found unpleasant. His kindnesses and tender attentions seemed mere mannerisms and poses, and we took occasion to tell him so to his face. Poor, unhappy boy, we were beastly to him.’
But one or two of his well-connected schoolfriends, including the orphaned son of the composer Bizet, were to prove useful to him as an entrée to Parisian high society. And at the age of 18, as a young dandy with a drooping moustache, a gift for flattery and some wit, young Monsieur Proust began to be invited to fashionable salons and the grand dinner parties of the intensely snobbish and decadent French aristocracy. In his mid-teens he had developed a crush on Marie de Bernardaky, a teenage girl he had met playing in the Champs Elysées. But now his transient passions for the opposite sex, which remained almost wholly in his own mind, were largely inspired, as Painter describes it, by women 20 years older than himself: either respectably married or ‘unattainable high class cocottes’ like Laura Hayman, who called him ‘my little porcelain psychologist’. When, aged 19, he volunteered for a year in the army, he enjoyed what Painter described as ‘the discipline and love of comrades which to certain neurotics are so welcome’. But he and his mother still wrote to each other every day.
By the age of 22 Proust was thus a classic case of the ‘boy hero who cannot grow up’, imprisoned in the shadow of the ‘Dark Mother’, abnormally stunted on both the masculine and feminine sides of his personality, and thus typically driven to projecting the search for his ‘other half’ onto ‘mother-substitutes’, older women of strong personality. Indeed he now took a familiar final step in this psychological progression when, under the spell of a new friendship with the flamboyantly camp Count Robert de Montesquiou, he entered the homosexual demimonde he was later to describe as ‘Sodom and Gomorrah, the Cities of the Plain’. He formed liaisons with young men like the musician Reynaldo Hahn and the novelist Alphonse Daudet’s son Lucien, who called him ‘little Monsieur Proust’. It was a twilight world in which the longing for love and to be liked constantly foundered in jealousy and mistrust. Still supported financially entirely by his indulgent father, Proust gave lavish and pretentious dinner parties, or took his friends out to restaurants where he would order for them only the most expensive dishes or fruits out of season. The bemused Dr Proust would in turn give way to occasional outbursts of impatience at his son’s affectations, as when a friend told Marcel ‘your father always tells everybody there’s nothing whatever the matter with you. He says your asthma’s pure hypochondria.’ To the composer Debussy, Proust was ‘long-winded, precious and a bit of an old woman’. But still at the centre of Marcel’s life was his suffocatingly close tie to his mother, with whom he spent a famous holiday in Venice, accompanied by his friend Reynaldo Hahn. Then his father died, and this was followed not long afterwards by the death of his mother. It was the most traumatic experience of Proust’s life. Although, with her departure, he for the first time felt free to find his sexual partners among young men from the working-class, the moment was nearing when, in 1907, he began more and more to withdraw from society, sleeping away the hours of daylight only to spend his nights obsessively scribbling away at his life’s work: the novel in seven volumes which he was not to complete until just before his death in 1922.
Seen through the eyes of its author-narrator, who only twice in a million-and-a-half words gives away that his name is ‘Marcel’, Remembrance of Times Past took the development of storytelling centred on the ego into a new dimension. The opening chapter, ‘Overture’, is based on Proust’s memories of the scenes of his own childhood, introducing his parents, his grandmother and the family servant Francoise, whose earthy, female common sense is to remain such a supportive background presence through most of the book. We then we come to an elaborated version of the ‘goodnight kiss’ episode, when the narrator has to wait in agony all through the evening for his mother to come upstairs, because their usual goodnight rituals have been interrupted by the arrival of his parents’ dinner guest, Monsieur Swann, their mysterious neighbour in the little town of Combray. When she finally comes up to his room, she reads to him, then agrees to spend the rest of the night sleeping in an adjoining bed. All this, laying the emotional foundation for what is to come, takes 18 pages to describe. The ‘overture’ ends with the often-quoted episode years later in his adulthood, when his mother offers him a cup of tea and a little scallop-shaped madeleine cake. He bites into it and is overcome with a strange joy, as the taste conjures up a flood of memories of his happy, long-lost childhood. On this note of ‘once upon a time’ the story proper can begin.
The central key to the immense narrative, with its huge cast of recurring characters, lies in three particular episodes, each describing a love affair. The first, in the volume entitled ‘Swann’s Way’ and set at a time before the main narrative begins, describes how Charles Swann, the part-Jewish social outsider whose mysterious connections to powerful and fashionable people seem also to make him very much an ‘insider’, falls in love with Odette de Crecy. Everything about their prolonged love affair is presented in a kind of enigmatic twilight. The two characters are observed almost wholly from the outside. We know remarkably little about them. When Swann first meets Odette at a salon, he does not think she is his type. He then falls in love, and woos her. After the episode where he rearranges some orchids, ‘cattleyas’, on her dress (this detail was originally inspired by Proust seeing the Countess Greffuhle, the leading Parisian society beauty of the 1890s, festooned in these orchids at some grand occasion), it is suggested that the couple for the first time make love. But Swann then finds her becoming strangely elusive. Has she another lover (Forcheville)? Can he really trust her? Has he not caught her out in telling lies about where she has been, and whom she has been with? Is she in fact a cocotte, taking many lovers? Enmired in this growing morass of suspicion and distrust, Swann begins to wonder whether he really loves Odette after all. After wavering in one direction, then another, he finally decides that he doesn’t. She is not for him. He never wishes to see her again. We then astonishingly discover, many pages later and for reasons which are never explained, that Swann and Odette did eventually get married after all, and now have a young daughter, Gilberte.
What is interesting is that this is the one really substantial episode in the book not centred on the narrator himself and seen through his eyes. But in significant respects it is like a precursor to the book’s other two main love affairs, each of which do involve the narrator, and in each of which we see him, like Swann, perpetually tortured by uncertainties. During Swann’s wooing of Odette she slips away from him as a classic ‘elusive anima’ figure, just as the narrator’s own two girlfriends are to do later. The difference is that Swann’s love affair does ultimately, albeit for reasons unexplained, reach a happy conclusion, when we see that he and Odette have married. It is as if, in creating the character of Swann, Proust was somehow imagining the elusive masculine part of himself eventually achieving a successful union with a woman. Certainly Swann is certainly a stronger, more masculine figure than the narrator ever manages to be, despite the merry dance his elusive anima leads him during their courtship. But when in the next volume, ‘Within a Budding Grove’, Proust moves on to imagine ‘Marcel’ himself falling in love with members of the opposite sex, there can be no such happy resolution.
The narrator’s first love, whom he sees playing in the Champs Elysées when he is a teenager, is a lively girl with reddish hair whom he discovers is Gilberte Swann. He develops a powerful teenage crush on her, much as Proust had done for her original, Marie Bernardaky. He tries to join her street games as often as he can, hoping against hope that she will like him (much as Proust had done with his teenage schoolfriends). Gradually they develop a closer friendship and the young narrator becomes a regular visitor to her grand home, where Gilberte’s parents receive the polite young boy kindly, imagining he might be a good influence on their daughter. But, in terms of love, the relationship is wholly one-sided, existing entirely in the narrator’s mind. He is tortured by Gilberte’s casual treatment of him, as he waits for letters which never come and rarely finds her at home when he calls (significantly he seems to spend more time with her mother Odette than with Gilberte herself). He tries to convince himself that he must forget her, his infatuation eventually fades and she drops out of his life (although years later they become friends and talk about the now long-distant past).
Much more substantial, in that it lasts on and off through 2000 pages of the novel, is the love which begins when the narrator, now a young man, takes a holiday with his grandmother and the faithful Francoise in the seaside resort of Balbec. He one day sees a lively band of girls playing games on the esplanade. His eye is particularly caught by one tomboyish, dark-haired girl pushing a bicycle, whom he cannot get out of his mind, and to whom he is eventually introduced as Albertine Simonet. As he gradually gets to know her and the other girls, his friendship with Albertine is soon sufficiently established for her to invite him alone up to her bedroom when she has to spend a night in the Grand Hotel where he is staying. By now besotted, he tries to kiss her, only to see her, to his horror, angrily sounding a bell to summon help. Again he has been cruelly rejected.
Most of the next 650 pages, in the volume entitled ‘The Guermantes Way’, are based on the time when, after leaving school, Proust was received as a young outsider into the world of the French upper class. As we are led interminably through their Parisian dinner parties and receptions, two impressions predominate. One is of the claustrophobic snobbery of this aristocracy which, cut off from any genuine social role, has become utterly decadent, obsessed with ‘birth’, titles and family histories stretching back centuries into the past, like that of the Guermantes themselves, “fourteen times connected to the French royal family”. The other is of the unremitting triviality and self-regarding tedium of their conversations, so that when we are finally treated, at great length, to an example of the ‘legendary Guermantes wit’, a joke admiringly repeated round the fashionable salons of Faubourg St Germain for weeks, it is merely the awful pun by which the Duchesse de Guermantes describes someone as a ‘teaser Augustus’. Yet this world of all-consuming egotism, where nothing seems to exist beyond the social masks of its inhabitants, Proust lovingly describes through his narrator as a magical realm, because it is the world into which he himself had been welcomed, and which had flattered his ego by treating him as someone interesting and of unusual talent. In the midst of all this heady social success, Albertine unexpectedly comes back into his life. She arrives one afternoon when he is in bed, complaisantly submits to his caresses and they make love.
By the time even the narrator is beginning to weary of the vapidity of this closed aristocratic world, the book’s mood begins to change and darken. There is the strange interview with Baron de Charlus, the older man who seems to have taken the young narrator under his wing as a protégé, but then subjects him one night to an extraordinary petulant, threatening, snobbish tirade which reveals a new, much darker side to his character. This is a prelude to the scene where the narrator discovers that de Charlus is a homosexual (when he overhears him having sex with Jupien), and to the tortuous, opaque passage which opens the next volume, ‘The Cities of the Plain’, describing those who are condemned to live in the shadowy underworld of Sodom and Gomorrah: male and female homosexuals. Proust is here referring obliquely to the time when he himself had entered the twilight world of the homosexual demi-monde; and this now colours much of the rest of the novel, as in the scene where we see de Charlus, Morel and the Prince de Guermantes in a brothel – even though in the foreground the narrator’s own sexual proclivities are presented almost entirely in terms of his tortured relationship with the sexually ambiguous Albertine.1 We never really know very much about Albertine. She is a shadowy, cardboard figure, seen entirely through the narrator’s eyes. She represents all the difficulty Proust had in realising his own inner anima: except that in real life he ended up projecting it onto men; whereas Albertine, for decorum’s sake, remains outwardly, if at times ambivalently, feminine. Although his relationship with her finally becomes more or less established, he is afflicted by perpetual uncertainty. Can he trust her? Is she lying to him? Is she really a secret lesbian, engaging in affairs with other women? Should he marry her? After twitching one way, then another, like Swann before him, he eventually decides that this would be madness. But almost immediately he decides that he does love Albertine after all, after ‘kissing her, as I used to kiss my mother at Combray, to calm my anguish’. We finally see the real heart of his problem. He has just told his mother that he is definitely not going to marry Albertine. But next day, after hearing him crying in the night, his mother comes into his room and says ‘remember your Mamma is going away today and couldn’t bear to leave her big pet in such a state’. He takes his mother’s head in his arms, still weeping, and says ‘I know how unhappy I’m going to make you’. But he has been thinking it over all night, and ‘I absolutely must ... I absolutely must marry Albertine’.
The next volume, ‘The Captive’, centres on the period where Albertine is living in the narrator’s flat in Paris, both being looked after by the faithful Francoise (as usual, Marcel is wholly dependent on others for all the practical necessities of life). Again the narrator’s love for Albertine switches on and off, punctuated by fits of jealousy and the constantly recurring suspicion that she has been lying to him and secretly engaging in lesbian affairs. So cocooned is he in his own self-centredness that, in wondering whether marriage to Albertine might not spoil his life, ‘by making me assume the too arduous task of devoting myself to another person’, he even suggests that it is ‘physical desire which alone makes us take an interest in the existence and character of another person’. All we see of their love play is that it is fairly infantile; and Albertine gives the narrator no greater pleasure than the ‘soothing power’ of her presence every evening by his side,
‘the like of which I had not experienced since the evenings at Combray long ago when my mother, stooping over my bed, brought me repose in a kiss.’
Nevertheless, as time drags by, it becomes clear their affair is going nowhere, and that our weak, neurotic hero will never be decisive enough to propose marriage. Finally, after a petulant scene when he has yet again interrogated Albertine about her supposed lesbian affairs, he decides to break off their relations forever. He returns to the flat to be told by Francoise ‘Mlle Albertine est disparue’. She has already packed her bags and left. He is distracted. The ‘captive’ anima has become ‘The Fugitive’, the title of the next volume. He sends his friend Saint-Loup out into the countryside in an attempt to find her. Eventually word comes that Albertine has been killed in a riding accident. The anima is dead.
From his initial shock and grief, the narrator then retreats back into total self-absorption, as moves through what are described as his ‘three stages on the road to indifference’ about her death. The third of these appropriately is Proust’s reconstruction of his visit to Venice with his mother and his friend Reynaldo. In the novel, while he and his mother are there, he receives a telegram from Albertine, appearing to tell him that she is still alive. But this gives him ‘no joy’. Happily back in the company of his beloved mother, he chillingly reflects that ‘the self’ in him which loved Albertine is dead, and there is thus no reason for him to be moved, although subsequently it turns out he has misread the telegram. It had not been from Albertine at all. She really is dead.
In ‘Time Regained’, the final volume, years have gone by and France is in the middle of the First World War. Saint-Loup has married Gilberte; but even this does not provide at least some faint echo of a happy ending, since he too had then started to have affairs, first with other women, then with men. Even this shadow of the narrator’s masculinity has finally been sucked down into the twilit sexual underworld, where we glimpse the now ageing, pro-German Baron de Charlus being thrashed for sexual pleasure by a soldier in a dubious hotel, from which the narrator has just seen Saint-Loup emerge. But at least Saint-Loup’s manhood survives sufficiently for him to die as an officer at the front. Everyone else the narrator has known, like the Duc de Guermantes, is growing old and decrepit. He has another ‘madeleine-like’ flash of happy memories of the past, set off by the uneven paving stones in the courtyard of the Guermantes’ house, musing that ‘the true paradises are the paradises one has lost’. As he feels time running out, and death approaching, he realises at last that the true purpose of his life is that he must become a writer and put it all down on paper. He must rememember everything that has happened to him since his far-off distant childhood; every person he has known; every minute detail, however trivial: for this ‘was my life, it was in fact me’.
Thus ends the greatest monument to human egotism in the history of storytelling: a book so preoccupied with the ego-life of its author that it is not so much a story as a case study: the self-portrait of a man so frozen in immaturity by the unresolved tie to ‘Mother’ that he is incapable of making any contact with the deeper Self. Because he cannot make any genuine connection with anyone else, or see anything of significance outside the unfolding of his own life, it becomes a story which cannot have any resolution: which can go nowhere except back to its own beginning, like the mythical ouroboros, the snake which ends up eating its own tail.
The most obvious thing which happens when storytelling moves exclusively into the world of the ego is that stories no longer centre round the archetypal opposition between darkness and light. The characters thus appear in a kind of twilight, cut off from one another, living on dreams which can lead only to disillusionment. Above all, they cannot go through any real inner transformation. And because they cannot develop those personal qualities which will bring them to wholeness, it is impossible for such stories to come to a full archetypal conclusion. Where there is no real light or dark, the story cannot culminate in a climactic confrontation between them. But this does not eliminate the need of any story for an ending. What happens therefore is that the storyteller falls back on a ‘pseudo-ending’: some device which appears to round off the story, even though in reality nothing has been resolved. And these ‘pseudo-endings’ take three main forms (sometimes seen in combination).
(1) As we saw in Chekhov, the story may end in some shocking act of violence, erupting more or less from nowhere. At least, by bringing home the emptiness of the characters’ lives, this appears to give the story a dramatic conclusion, even though nothing has really been resolved.
(2) As we saw in Proust, the story may become circular, with its ending referring back in some way to its beginning. The hope is that simply by retracing the events which have led up to this concluding moment, this may in itself give a semblance of meaning to all that has happened, even though again nothing has really been resolved. Another example is the film Brief Encounter. This begins just after the breaking off of a love affair which had ended up going nowhere. But this is then recalled in flashback, eventually leading back to the scene of non-communication between husband and wife which has been the story’s starting point.
(3) A third type of ‘pseudo-ending’ can be seen where a storyteller deliberately tries to make a virtue of the fact that nothing has been resolved. The story ends with one or more of the characters moving on into the future, but going nowhere. But because this is presented as a kind of ‘moral’ to the tale, it purports to give an air of significance to all that has happened.
A story which combines the first two of these ‘pseudo-endings’ is the play written by Luigi Pirandello in the year before Proust died, Six Characters in search of an Author (1921). Actors are in a theatre, preparing to rehearse a play (by Pirandello), when six strangers enter – two older adults, a young man and woman, two children – introducing themselves as the characters in a play who are looking for an author to tell their story. It emerges that they are a father, whose wife has left him and their son to live with another man, with whom she has had three more children. After many years the mother has returned with her children to the city where she previously lived, and has sent her eldest daughter to work in a dress shop, to provide them with money. In reality the shop is the front for a brothel, to which the father comes one day looking for sex. He tries to seduce his own stepdaughter, but in the nick of time is interrupted by the mother, who screams out who he is.
These six characters in fact represent the archetypal family: Father, Mother, Son and Daughter, completed by two versions of the Child, boy and girl, representing the future. But they are divided off from one another by every kind of resentment and unhappiness. Father and mother hate each other. The original son resents his mother for abandoning him. The daughter resents having had to support her family in this degrading way, and in particular her stepfather for the episode where he tried to seduce her. While all this is explained, the two youngest children remain silent.
The ‘characters’ have no other existence than this wretched drama they have all lived through. Frozen in their appointed roles, incapable of developing, they try to explain what has happened to the play’s director and his uncomprehending ‘actors’. When the actors clumsily try to recreate the seduction scene, the characters protest they have got it all wrong. The director then asks them to repeat it in a new setting, the garden of the father’s house, where suddenly it seems the ‘characters’ are beginning to break out of their roles. The mother tries to ingratiate herself with the son she had abandoned. He runs away from her to a fountain, where he sees the younger daughter has drowned herself. The younger son then shoots himself. At this shocking irruption of violence, the director no longer knows whether he is watching make-believe or reality, and calls the rehearsal to an end.
Through most of the play it has seemed as if the characters, trapped in their ego-roles, are doomed just to go on re-enacting their story in circular fashion for ever. The only hope of release from this treadmill is for something unexpected and violent to happen, as at the end of a Chekhov play. The two characters who have seemed the most helpless victims of all this misery, and who have remained mute, take the only way out. In reality, of course, nothing has been resolved. But at least, as in Chekhov, the play has been given the semblance of a significant ending.
We see a similar combination of endings in a book published four years later, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). As the novel concludes, the narrator is musing on the life of Jay Gatsby, the mysterious multi-millionaire who has recently been murdered. He recalls how Gatsby had emerged from obscure beginnings in the American Middle West, and had come east to build up a great fortune, to live in a fine house and to host fabulous parties. For years Gatsby had pursued the vision of Daisy, the beautiful girl he had lost as a young man. But finally he had caught up with her, living nearby and unhappily married to a husband who was having an affair with the wife of a garage mechanic. Just as it seemed the two might at last be brought happily together, Daisy, driving Gatsby’s car, had unavoidably run over and killed her husband’s mistress. Daisy’s husband had then identified Gatsby to the dead woman’s husband as the car’s owner. The cuckolded husband, thinking Gatsby was his wife’s lover, had gone to Gatsby’s house and shot him in his swimming pool, before committing suicide. As the story ends, the narrator looks back over Gatsby’s life, and how it had all been the vain pursuit of a dream. Beginning thousands of miles away in his humble childhood home, he had worked up to all the splendour of his wealth (albeit achieved by what turned out to be very dubious methods), his fine house, his famous parties (even though he had scarcely known most of his guests, and none had turned up for his funeral). And when he had met Daisy again, his lost anima, the ultimate goal of his dream must finally ‘have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it’. Then, in one sudden violent moment, it had all been over. Gatsby had not realised that his dream ‘was already behind him’, because he had
‘believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning ... so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’
Those closing words might have seemed like an echo of the conclusion of Proust’s novel, written just four years before.
The third form of ‘pseudo-ending’, that which tries to make a positive virtue out of the fact that nothing at the end of the story has been resolved, can be seen in Fitzgerald’s longest novel, Tender is the Night (1934). This was written when Fitzgerald was in his late thirties. The heady days of his early fame were behind him. The ‘Jazz Age’ to which he had given its name was over. Inwardly wearying of the hectic, rootless life success as a writer had brought him, and of the strain of his marriage to the unstable Zelda, he was taking to drink. His new hero, Dr Dick Diver, is a highly promising young psychiatrist, who has studied in Vienna and Zurich and has a great future before him. His greatest individual success as a doctor has been in restoring Nicole, the beautiful, but mentally unstable daughter of a Chicago millionaire, to apparent health. Under the unwitting influence of Nicole’s older sister Baby, Dick is lured into marrying Nicole, and initially the marriage appears to be a success. This is the ‘dream stage’ of the story, when they are living in the south of France with their two children. Then Rosemary, a new young Hollywood movie star, enters their life and tries to seduce Dick. At first it seems out of the question that the happily married hero will give way. But gradually, as his resolve begins to weaken, Nicole simultaneously begins to show returning signs of her old schizophrenia. For the sake of her sister, Baby puts up the money for Dick to set up a psychiatric clinic. This places him more than ever in a state of financial dependence on his wife’s family, which emasculates him. Now in the ‘frustration stage’, he begins to fall apart. He has a brief, unsatisfactory affair with Rosemary. He takes to drink, leading to awkward incidents, one of which forces him to resign from the clinic. This only drives him to drink even more, pushing him into the ‘nightmare stage’. He and Nicole are now miserable together. He has become a social embarrassment, and she views him with increasing contempt. Conscious that there is now another, more obviously masculine man who is attracted to her, she feels a new confidence, and tells Dick he has made a failure of his life. She finally feels liberated, both from the doctor who had once helped to cure her and from their marriage. Nicole goes off to marry her new admirer, and the last we hear of Dick is that the once brilliantly promising young psychiatrist has returned to America, drifting from town to town as a humdrum general practitioner. He has lost everything: both his manhood and his anima. Nicole, happily cocooned in her new ego-life, sentimentally consoles herself that he must be merely waiting for some call at last to fulfil his great talents. The truth, as we know, is that Dr Diver is going nowhere. Six years later his creator was dead, from excessive drinking, at the age of 44.
In his novel L’Etranger (1938), translated as The Outsider, Albert Camus carried the idea of the egocentric hero totally split off from the Self to its logical conclusion. Not of course that Camus himself would have described it like this. What inspired him was the idea of a hero who becomes admirable because he finds the centre of his identity solely within himself. He has been liberated from any sense of obligation to anyone or anything outside him.
Meursault is a young man in Algeria who has just received news of the death of his mother in an old people’s home. In accordance with convention, he takes time off work to go to the funeral, but when he arrives at the home he shows little interest. He smokes in the room where the coffin is lying; gets irritated when some of her friends begin to cry; and when they process to the cemetery in scorching sun, he is much more worried about the heat than his mother’s death. He then catches the bus home and looks forward to a long sleep. The next day on the beach he meets Marie, a girl to whom he is sexually attracted. He suggests they should go to the cinema that evening and she is surprised to hear it is only a day since he lost his mother. After the film, a comedy, she stays the night, but leaves early the next morning. The following weekend they spend another night together, and when Marie asks him whether he loves her, he replies ‘No’. She later asks him whether he would marry her, to which he says that he will if she wants it, but that he still does not love her. Shortly afterwards, Meursault is on the beach with Marie and two friends, Raymond and Masson, who have been in a fight with some Arabs. Later Raymond goes looking for the Arabs, and Meursault persuades him to hand over a gun he is carrying. One Arab comes at them with a knife, which gleams in the sun, dazzling Meursault, who impulsively shoots him. Afer a pause, he then fires four more shots into the Arab’s body.
Arrested for murder, Meursault is given a lawyer, although he says this will not be necessary. When the lawyer tries to persuade him to plead in mitigation that he has been upset by his mother’s death, he dismisses the suggestion, but feels too lazy to explain why. The magistrate produces a crucifix and invites Meursault to repent of his crime, so that God will forgive him. Meursault finds such an idea contemptible. He does not believe in God. He is not sorry for his crime, just annoyed about it. Over the next 11 months, while waiting for his trial, he enjoys sparring with the magistrate, who calls him ‘Monsieur Antichrist’, and gradually gets used to prison life, even to being deprived of cigarettes and sex (Marie visits him once, but tells him she will not be allowed to come again, because they are not married).
When the trial begins, Meursault is surprised by how many people have turned up. He listens with a sense of bored detachment to the final summing up by the prosecutor, who makes much of his heartlessness over his mother’s death and portrays him as a soulless monster. His own lawyer is unimpressive, and Meursault finds the trial depressingly pointless, wishing he could go to sleep. The jury finds him guilty, and sentences him to the guillotine. Waiting in the condemned cell, he three times refuses to talk to the chaplain, explaining that there is no point, since he does not believe in God or any life after death. When the chaplain persists, Meursault becomes angry, saying that it is not an afterlife he wants, but one where he could remember his present one. He says it is the chaplain himself who is dead inside, waiting for his non-existent afterlife. He, Meursault, is the one who has been right all along, living his own life in his own way. No one else’s life, death or love is of any concern to him. He falls asleep and wakes up to hear sirens announcing that his execution is imminent. He thinks of his mother, and that no one had any right to cry over her. He feels comfort in the indifference of the world, although he finally hopes that a crowd of people who hate him might turn up to watch him face the guillotine, because then he would feel less alone.
Apart from this final flicker of weakness, Meursault remains cocooned in his egocentric defiance to the end. He has never deliberately set out to do anything wicked, like, say, Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. But throughout the story he has shown himself to be totally dead to any normal human feelings, whether towards his mother and his girlfriend, or to the fellow human being he has casually killed without a trace of remorse. He can see nothing outside his own existence as having any significance. In another context, Meursault would have been diagnosed as a psychopath. Yet so far had the ‘dark inversion’ which had been taking place since the dawn of Romanticism now gone, that he could be presented to the world as a hero: to be admired precisely because he seemed to be a man ‘liberated’ from all moral, social or religious constraints. Sooner or later, in this process of ‘dark inversion’, it was logical that a storyteller would one day come up with such a hero. But in terms of how storytelling reflects what happens when the split between ego and Self becomes irretrievable, the process still had one more very significant step to take.
Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, are standing by a roadside in front of a leafless tree, engaging in inconsequential chatter. We later learn that they have been together, ‘blathering’ like this, for 50 years. Suddenly, after they have been discussing Estragon’s difficulty in pulling off his boot, in which his friend refuses to help him, Vladimir refers, seemingly apropos of nothing, to the thief crucified alongside Jesus who was saved. ‘Suppose we repented’ he says. ‘Repented what?’ replies Estragon. ‘Oh’, says Vladimir, ‘we wouldn’t have to go into the details’. He then wonders aloud why only one of the four gospels mentions the thief who was saved, while another says that ‘both of them abused him’. ‘Abused who?’ asks the bored and baffled Estragon. ‘The Saviour’ comes the reply. ‘Why?’ ‘Because he wouldn’t save them’. ‘From hell?’ ‘Imbecile! From death’ retorts Vladimir. These Christian references, drawn from Beckett’s upbringing by his domineering and ‘profoundly religious’ Irish-Protestant mother, from whom he spent much of his life trying to escape, serve as prelude to what is to be the central thread of the story. Estragon suggests they should move on. ‘We can’t’ says Vladimir emphatically. ‘Why not?’ ‘We’re waiting for Godot.’
We are thus introduced to what is really the only significant element of plot in the play. The two tramps, stripped of any social context, are simply two dis-embodied human egos. But the one thing which defines them, it becomes clear, is that they are waiting for the arrival of this mysterious ‘Godot’. They know nothing about who, what or where he might be. But gradually we become aware that they look on him as someone of almost cosmic importance. They cannot do anything or go anywhere until they encounter him. If only Godot comes, everything will be different. His arrival is the one thing which could give meaning and purpose to their otherwise empty and hopeless existence.
Eventually diversion arrives in the shape of two more characters, Pozzo driving his servant Lucky in front of him like an animal, on a lead. Their relationship is like a caricature of Lenin’s famous question about human society, ‘Who? Whom?’ Pozzo is the ‘above the line’ figure who can sit down, picnicking on chicken and a bottle of wine, enjoying a smoke, while treating his wretched, silent, ‘below the line’ companion like dirt. But then the ‘below the line’ servant suddenly bursts into a startling flood of pseudo-profound gobbledygook about
‘a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension Who from their heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell ...’
and so forth for several minutes, before relapsing into silence. No sooner have the newcomers departed than a boy arrives. He has brought a message from Godot. His master will not be coming today but will definitely come tomorrow. The two tramps discuss hanging themselves from the tree, then Estragon suggests they should move on. ‘Yes, let’s go’ agrees Vladimir, but they do not move. So ends the first act.
The second act, set at the same time and place the following day, is much the same. Pozzo and Lucky eventually return, more briefly, because Pozzo is now blind and Lucky dumb. The boy comes back to say that Godot will not be coming today after all, but will be coming tomorrow. They ask him about his master: ‘has he a beard?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Fair ... or black?’ ‘I think it’s white, sir’ replies the boy, at which Vladimir expostulates ‘Christ have mercy on us!’ When the boy disappears, the two tramps again discuss hanging themselves from the tree, which now has a few leaves. ‘I can’t go on like this’ says Estragon. ‘We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow’ says Vladimir, adding, after a pause, ‘unless Godot comes.’ ‘And if he comes?’ asks Estragon. ‘We’ll be saved’, says Vladimir. Again, as at the end of the first act, they agree to go, and again they do not move. So ends the play.
What makes Waiting for Godot exceptional is how, in one particular respect, it characterised the end of that psychological road which storytelling had been travelling since the dawn of Romanticism more profoundly than any other story. Here were two trapped, lost figures, symbolising the inmost essence of human existence when it is reduced to nothing more than the ego. So meaningless has life become that they might as well end it in suicide. Nevertheless, the play’s power lies in their awareness that there could be something else. If only they could find whatever it that is symbolised by this mysterious Godot, their world could be transformed. They would be saved.
By definition, neither Beckett nor his characters know anything specific about this elusive missing dimension which could give meaning to their lives. Such fragmentary hints as we are given dress it up in the symbolism associated with religion. Godot’s very name, of course, carries the echo of ‘God’; and his messenger, the boy-Child, describes him as having a white beard, evoking the Wise Old Man image associated with God to which Lucky explicitly refers in his mad monologue. But everything we hear about this shadowy figure indicates that he represents that archetype which had for so long been dropping ever further out of sight in western storytelling, the transforming power of the Self. The peculiar power of Waiting for Godot lies in how it expresses the moment when that process finally hits rock bottom. On a conscious level, we are presented with all the rootless emptiness of life when viewed just through the ego. But so far has its life-giving complement, the Self, now been driven into the unconscious that at last, in shadowy, mysterious form, it reappears; even if only as an off-stage presence with which the characters are doomed never to make contact. One of the central laws governing human psychology is that, whenever any powerful component of the psyche is not integrated, it does not just vanish. It remains buried in the unconscious, ready to re-emerge in some shadowy ‘inferior’ form; and this is just as true of the most important archetype of them all, that representing human wholeness, as it is of any other. The special contribution of Waiting for Godot, which gave it its unique place in twentieth-century storytelling, was precisely that it evoked this missing Self more hauntingly than any other story of the age.
Never again was Beckett’s work to refer to the lost Self in this way. From now on his plays merely expressed the emptiness of existence seen through the eyes of the ego, in ever sparser, more concentrated form. As an admirer of Proust, he produced the monologue Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), in which a shabby old man forlornly tries to recapture the intensity of his earlier life by listening to recordings of his younger self. Happy Days (1961) shows an old woman buried up to her waist in a mound, obsessed with the contents of her handbag. Come and Go (1966) features three female characters in a text of only 121 words. Breath (1969), thirty seconds long, consists only of ‘a pile of rubbish, a breath and a cry’. And his final offering, Not I (1973), is no more than a ‘brief, fragmented, disembodied monologue delivered by an actor of indeterminate sex of whom only the “Mouth” is illuminated’.
In all this we might inescapably have the sense that the tradition of storytelling, which through myths and legends, plays and novels, had for thousands of years provided mankind with its richest single store of meaning, was at last being sucked down into a black hole of nothingness. Indeed, no one expressed this sense of having reached some final void of meaning more eloquently than Beckett himself, in his famous observation:
‘we have nothing to say, except that we have nothing to say.’
It was not only in literature that we can see a similar dead end being reached. In twentieth-century art, as the figurative image had begun to dissolve into pure abstractionism, a similar process had finally led by 1950, just three years before the appearance of Waiting for Godot, to a painting which was no more than a black canvas. In words remarkably evocative of Beckett’s own, its creator, the American abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt, wrote:
‘An artist ... has always nothing to say and he must say that over and over again.’
In 1952, just when Beckett was writing his most famous play, much the same dead end was reached in music, when the American composer John Cage produced his famous work ‘4.33’, consisting solely of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.
Of course the separation of the ego from the Self was to be expressed in twentieth-century storytelling in more ways than this. The most blatant of these will be the subject of the next chapter. But it was not only in ‘serious literature’, such as the works of Chekhov and Proust, Camus and Beckett, that stories reflected this tendency for their characters and the story itself to end up ‘going nowhere’. It also emerged strongly, though perhaps less obviously, in popular storytelling. And we shall end this chapter by looking at three of the most successful Hollywood films of the late-twentieth century.
Much of the appeal of Steven Spielberg, as the most successful popular storyteller of the late twentieth century, lay in the spectacular manner in which his films exploited some of the great archetypal themes of storytelling, such as the Quest, the overcoming of monsters and the hunt for buried treasure.
His first science-fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) opens with the discovery in the American desert, in the middle of a mighty sandstorm, of seven World War Two fighter planes, which had mysteriously disappeared with their pilots in 1945. There is no sign of the pilots, but what puzzles their finders is that the aircraft are as good as new, without a trace of rust. Even the oil in their engines is still fresh.
One night shortly afterwards, much of America is amazed by extraordinary displays of lights in the sky, and the appearance of dozens of ‘unidentified flying objects’. Our attention is then focused on three people: the hero, an electrical repairman, who lives with his familiy in Indiana; the heroine, a divorced artist; and a child, her young son. There is an eerie scene when the house occupied by the heroine and her son is illuminated by unearthly light, and all the toys in his bedroom begin moving about by themselves. Obviously some more than natural power is at work. Household machines begin to shake, but quite harmlessly and without breaking. The little boy walks out of the house towards the source of the unearthly light, smiling, and disappears.
The following day, quite independently, the hero and the heroine both begin obessively trying to make models and pictures of a strangely shaped mountain. They behave in other odd ways, as if they are possessed by some power beyond themselves, as when he starts throwing rubbish which should be outside his house in through the windows. Then, still independently, they both see on a television newscast, a picture of the mountain they have become obsessed by. It is called Devil’s Peak, in Wyoming, and it seems from the news report that something very odd is going on there.
Both know at once that they must set out for Devil’s Peak as the most important thing in their lives. The story thus becomes a Quest, and along their journey to the distant goal they meet and join forces. When they get there, the way has been barred by the US Government with fences and guards, but for some reason they are allowed in, to the foot of the precipitous mountain, where, as night falls, they witness an astonishing spectacle. A gigantic, obviously extra-terrestrial machine, round and glowing with light, glides in over the mountain and lands – on a special airstrip which it seems has been prepared by the US Government. In some way never explained, there seems to be contact between the government and the beings behind this awesome display of interplanetary technology.
The hero and heroine then approach the colossal craft and see, coming out of it, first her son, then the seven pilots of the planes which had disappeared a generation before. Like their aircraft, it is evident that they are not a day older than when they vanished. They have returned from their experience completely unchanged. Then, out of the unearthly light emanating from the spaceship, come the extra-terrestrial beings themselves, like little, smiling human foetuses. They smile to the scientist from the US Government, as if to indicate that they know him. The hero then steps forward and goes off into the spaceship alone, leaving the heroine and the child behind. Forlornly they set off on their journey home, and the story ends.
This curiously unresolved story includes a number of features which may strike us as particularly odd and revealing. In the opening scenes, our expectation is built up that some tremendously important, world-changing event is about to take place. There are miraculous signs – the untouched aircraft found in the desert, the lights in the heavens – which seem to indicate that some stupendous supernatural power is at work. At first we do not know whether it is hostile or friendly, dark or light, although the way the little boy goes off happily into the unearthly light seems to suggest it is benign.
At the point where the hero and heroine separately become possessed by the compulsion to set off on their quest, all our ancient instincts in following stories tell us that they are about to undergo some great, life-transforming experience, an encounter with this colossal but benign and therefore life-renewing power, which has chosen to intervene in worldly affairs and has singled them out for a unique destiny. This is underlined by the fact that the goal of their quest is a mountain, which so often in the storytelling of the world is a symbol of the Self.
But already there are warnings that the story may turn out to deliver less than it promises, not least the mountain’s name, Devil’s Peak. When they arrive, they find the mountain surrounded by barriers to others, ordinary mortals, but they are let through by some special dispensation, as if to underline their special destiny (‘the test which only the true hero or heroine can pass’). The sense of some impending great act of transformation is brought to a climax by the arrival of the huge spaceship: the great, round, glowing object in the heavens, which again is a classic symbol of the Self in all its awesome power. But then the warning signs that all is not going to turn out like this come thick and fast.
The pilots emerge from the spaceship, after their unearthly adventure, completely unchanged (right at the start of the film, the unchanged state of the aircraft had in fact been the first warning sign). The extra-terrestrial beings emerge, not as superhuman, god-like figures, but looking like unborn human children. Most significant of all, the hero steps up into the spaceship alone, parted from the heroine, who presumably had been as much called to the Quest as himself. Unfulfilled, the anima-figure goes off home, accompanied by that other great symbol of Rebirth, the Child; so that the hero ends up separated from both the two chief redeeming figures in storytelling. We no longer have the slightest indication that, when he steps up into that spacecraft, anything of real significance will happen to him, any more than it has done to the pilots.
In other words, the story has harped on about all the most profound archetypal symbolism of redemption and transformation; yet, because it has been divorced from its inner meaning, nothing really happens at all, apart from a lot of playing with the cinematic tricks of illusion. If there is one lesson above all we learn from stories it is the central symbolic significance of the hero and the heroine being brought together in complete union at the story’s end. If for any reason a hero and heroine do not end up together, this always tells us that something has gone seriously amiss. And the film’s title is tellingly ironic in that none of its main characters, least of all the hero and heroine, in fact have a ‘close encounter’ with anyone. Apart from mother and son, everyone remains split off from everyone else.
The second supreme lesson of stories, when they are rooted in the archetypes, is that they are about personal transformation. This is what all the basic plots are about: the inner change in the hero or heroine as they are led from one state to another. When the Roman poet Ovid wrote his book the Metamorphoses about myths which showed their central figure being in some fundamental way transformed, or ‘metamorphosed’, he had to include almost every important story in the Graeco-Roman mythology, because every one of them shows its hero or heroine being changed from one thing to another. Yet in Close Encounters no one is changed at all; and the fundamental reason for this is unwittingly reflected in that curious episode when the hero feels compelled to throw all the rubbish which is outside his house in through the windows. It is as if the power which possesses him is trying to tell him that everything which is ‘outside’ should be ‘inside’. This is precisely what has gone astray, not just with this film but with so many other stories of our time. They project outwardly, on a fantasy level, all sorts of things which can only beome real and life-giving when taken symbolically, on an inward level. But this is precisely what happens when the imagining of stories becomes centred on the ego, rather than rooted in that level of the unconscious where the archetypal patterns of storytelling are trying to lead us up to wholeness and connect us with our inmost Self.
The defining characteristic of the comic strip hero Superman, of course, which made him one of the great icons of twentieth-century popular culture, is that he is two people in one. In his outward persona, as Clark Kent, he could not be more ordinary, the epitome of Everyman. But he can then be transformed into his other Self, when we see him as the complete archetypal hero: supernaturally strong, but with his strength made lifegiving, because it is dedicated to saving the helpless, battling for the community and righting the world’s wrongs. The secret of his appeal is precisely that he seemingly embodies the most fundamental archetype of all: that in each human being the outward, limited, egopersona is hiding the potential for the true, inner Self within. But when Hollywood translated Superman onto the cinema screen in 1978, we see how sadly the archetype disintegrated.
The opening of the story is mythic in its symbolism.2 On the planet Krypton, the old order is dying. An imposing, almost god-like Wise Old Man in flowing robes (played by Marlon Brando) warns his elderly and unheeding fellow-members of the ruling council that the end is nigh, and that their world will soon explode. It is that familiar situation we see so often at the start of a story, where the ruling order is decaying and doomed, and the only hope of redemption lies in the emergence of a new young hero. The Wise Old Man and his wife send their infant son to the distant planet Earth, where he is adopted by human parents living on a Middle American farmstead. There is the unmistakable archetypal echo of ‘God’ sending his son down to earth, to an ordinary humble family, to grow up and save mankind.
Outwardly the young lad seems just like any ordinary American boy. But when, as a teenager, he has his first embarrassing encounter with a girl, he feels the need to show off, and runs home faster than a car or train. His earthly ‘father’, just before dying, tells him he must have been sent to earth ‘for a purpose’. Hearing voices in the night, he is drawn to the barn, where sees a magical rod of crystal glowing in the darkness of a hole in the ground. It is a sign of his awakening destiny as a man, and he goes off, after a touching farewell to ‘Mom’, on a long journey to the North Pole, where in caves of ice he meets a vision of his real Father, to undergo an initiation rite into manhood.
In fact, he emerges less confident and manly than before, as Clark Kent, the gauche newspaperman in the great city of Metropolis. He is particularly ill-at-ease with Lois, the girl reporter to whom he is attracted. But when Lois gets trapped on top of a skyscraper, in a helicopter which is just about to topple into the street, we see him for the first time transformed into Superman. He swoops up to snatch her from death, in a feat which leaves everyone in the city stunned. Who is this amazing ‘Superman’? Lois interviews him in his Superman role and they float around in the clouds, exchanging gooey sentimental platitudes.
We now meet the story’s Monster-figure, a super-criminal who lives in a luxurious lair beneath the city, plotting an immense and diabolical crime. He plans to redirect two nuclear rockets to land on California, one targeted on the San Andreas fault, intended to trigger off such an earthquake that the coastal strip of the state will collapse into the sea. Having bought up much of the land to the east of the fault, he will then be fabulously rich. While Lois is away in the desert, investigating his secret land purchases, Superman falls into the super-villain’s clutches, and is only rescued from death in the nick of time by the villain’s girlfriend, Eva, who is attracted to him. After his ‘thrilling escape’ he zooms off, too late to stop one of the rockets exploding, setting off huge earthquakes. By a superhuman feat he manages to stop the San Andreas fault splitting apart, but he cannot stop Lois being engulfed and crushed to death. And at this point the archetypal symbolism of the story finally goes completely haywire.
Superman has at least saved most of the ‘kingdom’, but he has not overcome the ‘shadow’ and the anima is dead. In this sense the ‘shadow’ has won. But Superman then uses his supernatural powers to save Lois, as his new subsidiary anima-figure, only to realise to his horror that he has done the one thing he has been forbidden to do by his Father. By saving Lois from destruction, he has ‘interfered in human history’. In shame he spirals off up into space, and the film ends on an image of him whizzing round the Earth spinning far below. Even in superficial terms, none of this makes sense. Why should saving Lois constitute interference in human history, any more than Superman’s other feats? What had he been sent to earth for in the first place, except to interfere in history? And what sort of an ending is it that, having lost one anima-figure and saved another, he cannot then be united with Lois but must hurtle off into space to behave like the Flying Dutchman?
The key, of course, lies in the fact that, despite his outward guise as Superman, the hero has never been properly a man at all. He is just a two-dimensional fantasy figure, spun out of infantile make-believe. He is unable to relate in any grown-up way to the feminine, either in his gauche Clark Kent persona or in his make-believe Superman-role: which is why it is entirely logical that he should end up losing his anima to the ‘shadow’, even though he then saves a second anima-figure with whom he does not end up united. In terms of archetypal symbolism, such a hopeless lack of resolution makes it entirely logical that the story should end on the image of this little ‘boy hero who cannot grow up’ spiralling in futile circles round the Earth, because this is precisely what he has become: a split-off ego circling impotently round the Self; an image of the wholeness with which he no longer has any hope of making contact. It perfectly symbolises all that has been wrong with the story.
Even in the Hollywood dream factory, there are of course times when a story makes rather deeper contact with the underlying archetypes. And it may be illuminating to end this section by looking at one such example, by way of contrast, even though this was still a story primarily conceived on no more than a sentimental level. Certainly it was a remarkable achievement to turn a hideous little monster with a wide, bulbous head, huge eyes, a long neck and leathery skin into one of the most lovable characters in modern popular storytelling. But when we consider what the central figure of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982) really represents, his appeal becomes wholly comprehensible.
The film opens at night with an extra-terrestrial spaceship landing in a Californian forest to study earthly plant-life. Its crew’s researches are interrupted by a pack of government scientists and officials, seen menacingly in black silhouette, and the aliens rush back to their spacecraft to escape. But one of them is left behind.
We then meet the hero of the story, 10-year old Elliott, at his home in a nearby town, being excluded from a game played by his older brother and three friends. When they trick him into going outside, he throws a ball into the garage and is startled when it is thrown back at him. Back inside, the sense of Elliott’s isolation from his family only deepens when, unwittingly, he lets on to his mother that their father, who has recently left home, has gone to Mexico with his new girlfriend. This makes his mother cry, and his elder brother furious at him for being so tactless. Elliott is a boy seemingly without a friend in the world, but he is about to find one.
That night, sleeping outside, Elliott is disturbed by scuffling noises, turns on his torch and for the first time sees the extraordinary little extra-terrestrial visitor. At first he is terrified, but the creature moves gently forward to touch him with its elongated fingers. Far from being threatening it is offering friendship, rather like Frankenstein’s monster when it wakes him from sleep. But, unlike Frankenstein, Elliott reciprocates, protectively leading the ‘alien’ into the house to hide him in his bedroom. The two begin trying to communicate, with the alien quick to copy everything Elliott does. Next day, Elliott lets his brother and younger sister into the secret, swearing them to secrecy, so they are now a conspiracy of three, led by the formerly excluded Elliott. And they soon discover between them that his new alien friend commands miraculous and life-giving powers.
The biggest surprise is that the alien seems to have established an extraordinary telepathic sympathy with Elliott, so that when the boy is at school, and the alien gets drunk on beer from the fridge back home, Elliott feels drunk at his desk. While this and further telepathically-induced actions are landing Elliott in trouble with the school authorities and his mother, his young sister is teaching the alien to speak. Having returned home in disgrace, Elliott is soon teaching his alter-ego to repeat his new name, ‘E.T.’, an echo of Elliott’s own name. They then learn that E.T. above all wants to contact his far-off planetary home, as he repeats his plaintive new phrase ‘E.T., phone home’.
One reason for this is that E.T. is beginning to sicken, from his exposure to life on Earth. He uses his super-intelligence to build a radio-telephone, and after a Hallowe’en party he and Elliott take it into the forest to use it, with E.T. demonstrating his power to make Elliott’s bicycle rise magically into the night sky. But when the boy fails to return home, his mother calls the authorities, and we now move into the ‘nightmare stage’ of the story. First, E.T. seems to be dying. Then menacingly impersonal, space-suited officials and scientists move in to capture him. Finally, he and Elliott are laid out side by side, wired up to a battery of life-support and monitoring devices, not just to study the fast-sinking E.T. himself but the symbiosis between them, which is making the grieving Elliott almost as ill as his friend.
Alone among all the grown-ups who are portrayed in such a threatening, unfeeling way through the story, there is one scientist, Keys, who shows real warmth and understanding. And when E.T. dies, and his body is placed on ice in a sealed container, Keys suggests that Elliott, who, now the symbiosis is broken, suddenly feels much better, might like to be alone with him, before E.T. is taken away to be dissected. Elliott looks in through the inspection-window of the container, and sees from his glowing ‘heart light’ that his friend has miraculously returned to life. He recruits help from his brother and, when the container is being taken away, they hi-jack the van, with older brother driving while Elliott releases E.T. from his frozen coffin. They are joined by more young friends with bicycles and head off into the forest in a dramatic ‘chase sequence’, as they are hotly pursued by a horde of police and officials. When their path is blocked by a police barrier, they are saved when, thanks to E.T.’s magic powers, their bicycles simply fly up over it. They arrive at the clearing where the spaceship is just descending to take E.T. back home. There is a touching farewell scene, when E.T. says goodbye to his friends. And these now include not just Elliott, his brother and sister and the other children, but also two grown-ups: Elliott’s mother and the friendly scientist Keys, standing beside her. The spacecraft then soars away, leaving a rainbow across the sky.
What makes this story different from any other we have looked at in this chapter is that, as it unfolds, we see a genuine process of transformation taking place. The young hero begins, alone and excluded, in a family under the shadow of his father having selfishly abandoned them all. When this weird alien creature arrives, all normal responses dictate that he should be rejected as a terrifying threat. But when the ‘monster’ behaves in a friendly fashion, and Elliott responds likewise, it is like one of those moments in a folk tale when a little hero gives food to the animal or ‘the little man’ he meets in the forest. In establishing that the hero has a kind heart this brings him an ally who is to be the key to his salvation. Indeed we soon see that E.T. is precisely the ‘Alter-Ego’ Elliott needs to discover himself and to develop a new, deeper sense of his own identity. Everything E.T. does is life-giving and benign and, in this sense, he is more than just Elliott’s Alter-Ego: he represents the integrating power of the Self. Thanks to his influence, Elliott finds new strengths in himself and becomes a leader. His divided family gradually knits together, until finally, when E.T. departs, not only are they all united in their love of him: Elliott’s mother is now fully integrated with this unifying process, with a new man by her side, the one grown-up in the story who has not behaved like an officious automaton and has shown true human understanding. Whether or not he will become the new ‘light’ father to replace the ‘dark’ father who has departed, we cannot know. But what is certain is that Elliott and his family have all been changed for the better by this lovable embodiment of the Self which has come into their midst and now vanished again.3
Thus, even though this may only be another example of Hollywood sentimentality, with the ego borrowing the values of the Self, Spielberg’s film at least comes to much more of a genuine resolution than Close Encounters or Superman. In archetypal terms, indeed, it provides a more substantial ending than the plays of Chekhov, Proust, Beckett or any other story in this chapter. Because their pseudo-endings, going nowhere, are all that stories spun from the ego alone can ever hope to achieve.