1. Another episode in Proust’s own life presented only obliquely is the year he spent in the army. But this is reflected through another significant character in the novel, Robert Saint-Loup, the dashing, confident young aristocrat, popular with women, who serves as an army officer, and who cuts the kind of manly figure the masculine part of Proust might have liked to be (his name echoing the pet name Proust was given by his mother). In this sense, like Swann, Saint-Loup represents his (and the narrator’s) ‘split-off’ manhood, although eventually we see him too entering the sexual twilight zone, first in his love affair with the prostitute ‘Rachel When From The Lord’, and finally when he also becomes at least in part homosexual.

2. Part of the reason for the emergence of science fiction (which of course has virtually no connection with science fact) is precisely that it has enabled storytellers of the past century to imagine stories of mythical dimension. Not only, since H. G. Wells’s Martians in The War of the Worlds, has this allowed for the creation of ‘monsters’ just as monstrous as any in the myths of the ancient world. It also, in tales like Star Wars, enables storytellers to create alternative realms, peopled by kings, ‘dark lords’, princesses, knights, goblins, giants and all the archetypal paraphernalia of myth and legend, without seeming to be self-consciously archaic, because such stories are set in ‘the future’. In the same way, by calling on the ‘magic’ of science, it can also, of course, provide heroes with the modern equivalents of those ‘magic’ weapons used by Perseus and Co. in the myths and legends of yore.

3. In archetypal terms, E.T. carries clear echoes of the ‘Christ myth’ (see Chapter 33). Like Jesus, E.T. is a supernaturally intelligent hero who comes to earth from ‘somewhere else’, performs a series of miracles and builds up a small group of devoted followers. He becomes increasingly at odds with the earthly ‘ruling power’, which eventually traps him and puts him to death. He is miraculously resurrected and remains for a short further time with his followers, before he leads them out into a lonely place to watch him ascending back into the heaven whence he came.