‘T’will vex thy soul to hear of what I shall speak;
For I must talk of murders, rapes and massacres,
Acts of black night, abominable deeds ...’
Aaron, Titus Andronicus, v.1
‘Ne coram populo, pueros Medea trucidet’ (‘Medea must not kill her children in sight of the audience’).
Horace, Ars Poetica
‘The trouble with the modern world is that it has sex on the brain, which is the wrong place to have it.’
Malcolm Muggeridge, various times in late 1960s
‘We have fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare.’
W. B. Yeats, The Stare’s Nest by my Window (1922)
Unquestionably the most striking feature of Western storytelling in the closing decades of the twentieth century was the unprecedented way in which it became dominated by the imagery of sex and violence. In one sense, of course, sex and violence had been the stuff of storytelling back into the mists of history. Adultery, seduction, promiscuity, acts of rape had been a prominent feature of myths all over the world, from those of ancient Greece to those portrayed on the Hindu temples of India. The stories of Homer and the Old Testament were as full of death and destruction as the corpse-laden stages of Elizabethan England. Not even the twentieth century could offer much competition for the catalogue of horrors conjured up by the most chilling of Shakespeare’s plays, Titus Andronicus. These range from the episode describing how the hero’s daughter Lavinia is raped, has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, to the later scene where Titus cuts the throats of the perpetrators of these deeds, so that their blood runs out into a basin held by Lavinia between her stumps, before he invites their unsuspecting mother to a dinner party to be served with the bodies of her sons baked into a pie.
But even in this unusually lurid example of pre-twentieth-century sensationalism, the single most shocking incident, the premeditated rape and mutilation of an innocent young girl, does not take place in front of the audience. In conformity with an age-old code, this would have been categorised as ‘obscene’, literally something which must take place, from the Latin ‘ob scena’, ‘off stage’. As Horace put it in his Art of Poetry, the idea of Medea butchering her children or Atreus cooking a dish of human flesh is so offensive to the moral sense that, although such things can be described by a narrator, they must not be put on public show. A similar taboo, until the twentieth century, generally applied to performances of the sexual act, or exhibitions of female nudity (apart from those depicted as ‘ideals of the female form’ by serious artists). Socially regarded as ‘below the line’, such things were confined to brothels or bawdy shows, where their purpose was quite clear. They were regarded as ‘pornography’, from the Greek word porne, ‘a prostitute’: images designed specifically for the purpose of arousing sexual desire.
What was new about what happened to storytelling in the later decades of the twentieth century was that it was precisely these physical images of sex and violence which emerged into full view. In plays and novels, above all in its display on cinema and television screens, all that subterranean realm of imagery previously hidden away as ‘obscene’ now came to be regarded as acceptable. Of course, this was only part of a much more general shift in social attitudes. The new freedom with which sexually arousing imagery could be put on public show was by no means confined only to stories. It could be seen in newspapers and advertising, in the nature of women’s fashions, in millions of pornographic magazines. But the real reason why all this came about was that it was an entirely natural consequence of that seismic shift which had been taking place in the Western psyche for two centuries, whereby to an unprecedented degree the ego had been losing contact with the deeper archetypal framework of the Self. Inevitably, as stories came increasingly to be spun out of the fantasy level of the mind, centred on the ego, this was where they would one day end up. How and why this should have come about is the theme of this chapter.
In 1749 an English government official, John Cleland, wrote a short novel entitled The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill. In the style of the early novels of the time, the story is presented in the form of letters from a young woman, describing how she had come up to London from the country at the age of 15, hoping to make her fortune. She finds lodgings in what turns out to be a high-class brothel, where on her first night she is introduced to lesbian sex by one of the prostitutes. She is then allowed, as a voyeuse, to watch the act of sex between a man and a woman, which prompts Fanny herself to masturbate. After an embarrassing encounter with a lecherous old client too incontinent to complete his business with her, she finally loses her virginity to a handsome young man, Charles. There has been such a long build-up of anticipation to this moment that, when it finally arrives and she can fully experience the sensations it brings for the first time, it is like the high point of the story. Indeed, so taken with her is Charles, as she with him, that he sets her up in a flat as his mistress. But he then vanishes abroad, leaving her bereft and miserable, without any means of support.
Forced to make her own way in the world, she moves in with a middle-aged lawyer, although their relationship comes to end when she spies on him seducing another young country girl and takes her revenge by seducing his young protégé. She then joins the staff of another high-class brothel, where she and her fellow-inmates all enjoy performing with rich young clients in front of each other. When one client is persuaded to pay a particularly high price on being told she is a virgin, she is proud of how she manages to fake the loss of her virginity. Eventually she takes up with a rich elderly bachelor, who rewrites his will to leave her all his fortune and promptly dies, leaving her at the age of 19 a rich woman. Finally, staying in an inn on her way back home to show off her newfound wealth to her family, she runs into her long-lost love Charles, who falls on her with quickly gratified pleasure. We then gather they have got married, had children and are living happily ever after.
In outline this is a classic Rags to Riches story, complete with ‘central crisis’ and archetypal happy ending. What makes it quite different from any other story we have looked at in this book is that its real purpose is to simply to provide a framework for endless physical descriptions of the sexual act. Each one portrays in detail what it is happening, with the same mechanical descriptions of the man bringing out his ‘magnficent machine’ or ‘weapon’, inserting it into the woman’s ‘delicate slit’, surrounded with its ‘soft down’ of pubic hair, until in each case both parties come to a mechnically perfect mutual climax. The novel is simply a series of erotic daydreams by its author, designed to stimulate similar sexual excitement in the mind of his reader. Although described through the eyes of a woman, it is of course an entirely male fantasy. The purpose of setting it in the framework of a story in which the woman enjoys almost every minute of her sexual transactions as much as the men who are paying her, and in which she ends up rich and respectable, married to the man she loves, is to make these onanistic male daydreams seem more acceptable to the readers, in that the object and vehicle of their desires, Fanny, is portrayed as happily complicit with their own fantasies. Not only does she never really suffer as a result of making herself available to them. She so thrives on it that she can finally be seen enjoying all the outward show of an archetypal happy ending. In this sense, it is a perfect illustration of a story conceived on the sentimental, wishful-thinking level of the mind, in that a book imagined so obviously through the author’s own fantasy-self, centred entirely on the ego, can nevertheless end on the image of his pasteboard heroine attaining the state of the fully-developed Self, without having to show her as possessing any of the archetypal qualities necessary to achieve it.
Fanny Hill was so obviously written as pornography that it was soon banned, and was to remain suppressed in Britain for more than 200 years. A similar fate was to befall an altogether darker tale written 40 years later, in a Paris prison, by a 47-year old French aristocrat who had narrowly escaped capital punishment for attempting to poison four Marseilles prostitutes with aphrodisiac drugs. The Marquis de Sade had spent most of his adult life on the run, either from the authorities or from enraged fathers, for his callous, violent and perverted treatment of a long succession of women. Having finally had his death sentence for the incident in Marseilles commuted to an indefinite term in prison, he was in the Bastille when, in two weeks in 1787, he dashed off a short novel entitled The Misfortunes of Virtue, later revised as Justine.
The story begins almost like a folk tale, when the death of their parents leaves two teenage girls, Juliette and Justine, orphaned and penniless. The two could not be more contrasted. Juliette, the worldly one, at once embarks on a life of prostitution. After she has been sold to clients as a virgin 80 times, she happily submits to ‘criminal refinements, loathsome pleasures, secret, filthy debauches, bizarre tastes, humiliating fancies’, all to serve her ruthless desire for worldly advancement. Having ruined three lovers, she marries and murders another to win his title and his fortune. As a rich widow, she plays the role of a fashionable Parisian hostess, while continuing her secret life as an expensive courtesan. She murders two more men for their money and has a string of abortions to keep her figure, until she finally so takes the fancy of one rich 50-year old lover that he takes her on as his wife in all but name. They are just on their way to visit an estate he has bought her in the country when, stopping overnight at an inn, they see a beautiful but poorly dressed girl stepping out of a coach, her hands tied and under police guard. They are so struck by her appearance that they invite her in to explain how she came to be in such a sorry plight.
The girl, who passes under the name of ‘Sophie’, unfolds a tale of unremitting horror. Having been orphaned in her teens, devout and upright in every way, she had been determined to find honest employment, however lowly. Her first prospective employer, a seemingly respectable man, had offered her a place in his house so long as she was prepared to sleep with highly-placed churchmen. Having turned this down in horror, she is then taken on by an old miser to perform the most menial household tasks, while being treated appallingly, until he orders her to commit a robbery on the man living in the flat above him. When she refuses, the miser hides a diamond in her mattress and summons the police to arrest her for stealing it. She is sentenced to death, and only avoids hanging in the nick of time when a fellow-prisoner, Dubois, an older woman similarly facing execution, sets fire to the prison, allowing them both to escape into a forest. Here Dubois, a hardened criminal, introduces Sophie to her four villainous male accomplices. She offers the innocent young girl a choice. Either she persists in her foolish, doomed desire to live a virtuous life, or she joins the gang. The four drunken ruffians decide to rape Sophie, but fall to blows over who should be first, giving her the chance to make a second escape in the darkness. After sleeping in the under-growth, she is awakened by the sound of two men nearby, and secretly watches in revulsion while they engage in homosexual intercourse. Of course they then see her, and one, a brutal and vicious young Marquis, threatens to flog her before hanging her from a tree. He eventually relents and takes her home to the chateau where he lives with his mother, a still beautiful Marquise.
Madame de Bressac stands out as one of the few people in the story who is not portrayed as cruel, treacherous and utterly egocentric. She listens to Sophie’s awful story, treats her kindly and takes her on as a companion. But this is only to set up the next sequence of horrors, when the utterly debauched young Marquis orders Sophie to poison his mother, to get hold of her money. Although Sophie betrays the plot to her benefactress, the Marquis still manages to murder his mother by other means. He then takes his revenge on Sophie by taking her to the tree where he had earlier threatened to hang her and flogging her within an inch of her life, before leaving her for dead. She crawls to the home of a doctor, who takes her in and heals her wounds. But even he is strangely cold and rough in his manner, and she eventually discovers he has imprisoned a 12-year old girl in his cellar, on whom he plans to carry out a horribly painful and ultimately fatal series of medical experiments. Sophie releases her and the girl runs away. But the doctor and his accomplice revenge themselves on Sophie by cutting off two of her toes, pulling out two of her teeth, branding her with a red-iron iron which imprints her skin with the mark of a convicted prostitute and casting her penniless out into the countryside.
Then follows the longest and most bizarre episode of the whole story. Desperate for somewhere to rest, Sophie is directed to a lonely monastery where she is told there is a small community of particularly holy monks. Arriving at sundown, to the sound of the angelus bell, she is welcomed in, profoundly grateful to have found such a haven from all her nightmarish ordeals. The kindly abbot Father Raphael hears her confession, establishing that there is no one in the world who knows she is there. He then leads her to a room where she sees three middle-aged monks, three beautiful teenage girls and an equally beautiful 30-year old woman all in an advanced state of undress. At inordinate length, we hear how Sophie’s own clothes are removed and she is placed in the middle of the room, for the four monks to subject her to every kind of sexual indignity, culminating in Father Raphael himself, a relative of the Pope, exercising his rank by violently removing her virginity. Leaving Sophie moaning with pain and humiliation, the monks then turn their attention to the other girls, before returning to put Sophie through the sexual nightmare again. Finally she is entrusted to the older woman, Omphale, and they are marched off to be locked in for the night.
Sophie discovers, largely from the kindly Omphale, that she has landed up in the worst hell imaginable. The four monks are complete sexual and violent monsters, who treat the girls they have trapped into their prison, all beautiful and from respectable families, simply as objects to gratify their unwearying lust and cruelty. This has been going on for years. From time to time a girl vanishes, almost certainly murdered, to be replaced by others. The author revels for page after page in describing his totally improbable fantasies, of men supposedly capable of indulging in every kind of depravity and violent perversion for days and nights on end. Except for an incident where the monks dress up one girl as the Virgin Mary in order to rape her, and then celebrate Communion using her naked body as an altar, he does not describe these perversions in any detail, but conveys them simply by innuendo and suggestion, with epithets such as ‘filthy’, ‘lascivious’, ‘lecherous’, ‘foul’, ‘impure’. But eventually he faces the problem of how to extricate his heroine from this absurdly over-wrought fantasy prison, in order to save her for yet more horrors. Finally, after Omphale has disappeared to her death, de Sade resorts to a kind of ‘with one mighty bound Jack was free’ solution. Father Raphael is promoted by the Pope to become head of the Order of St Francis and, when a new abbot arrives, he decides to let all the girls go free, so long as they promise not to tell anyone what has been going on.
In fact, with this episode, de Sade has reached the climax of his fantasy, but remorselessly his narrative continues. Sophie is released with a tiny amount of money, and is almost immediately robbed of it by an old woman whom she tries to help on the road. She goes to bind the wounds of an injured man, who takes her off to his chateau on the edge of a beetling precipice, miles from anywhere. Here she finds she is again a prisoner, stripped naked, having to turn a wheel with other naked women for 12 hours a day, to assist her captor in his task of forging money on a huge scale. Inevitably when his beautiful prisoners are in their cells at night, he rapes them with great violence, letting them know that when they are finally broken by their forced labour and starvation, their bodies will be thrown into a pit. When he goes off to spend his ill-gotten fortune in Venice, the police arrive, to set all the women free.
Sophie again meets the female criminal Dubois, who tries to involve her in stealing a rich man’s money. When the honest Sophie warns him what is afoot, the man wants to reward her by proposing marriage, but Dubois manages to poison him. Finally, staying in another inn which catches fire, Sophie bravely tries to rescue a woman’s baby from the flames, but stumbles and drops the child to its death, whereupon she is accused by the mother of murder and of having started the fire in the first place. It is for these crimes that Sophie is now being taken for trial under police guard, when she arrives at the hotel to pour out her story to Juliette and her lover. And of course the penny finally drops that her name is not really ‘Sophie’, but Justine, and that she is Juliette’s long-lost sister.
Now blissfully reunited, the two sisters go off to the chateau bought for Juliette by her lover, where they all live happily together until the summer’s day when a great storm brews up and a terrified Juliette asks her sister to close the windows. As Justine is wrestling with one window in the wind, a mighty bolt of lightning flashes from the sky and she is hurled lifeless into the middle of the room. Naturally the author is keen to describe how ‘the bolt had entered by her right breast, had blasted her thorax and come out again through her mouth, so disfiguring her face that she was hideous to look at’. He has degraded his heroine for the last time. There are no more indignities left for his fantasy-self to heap on her.
These two examples provide a perfect case-study of how the fantasy-self creates stories, as this moves towards its extremes. By the law of the ‘dark inversion’, the ego takes the archetypal values programmed into the unconscious Self and turns them on their head. The defining feature of Justine is that, in two-dimensional fashion, she represents the essence of what is the highest value in storytelling, the ‘light feminine’. She is physically beautiful, pure-minded, good-hearted, spiritually devout. She is the anima, the heart and soul of mankind. She is Penelope, Andromeda, Dante’s Beatrice, Shakespeare’s Perdita, Beethoven’s Leonora, Cinderella. She is the ‘Princess’ whom only the true hero can win, when he has shown himself fit to be united with her because he is himself potentially whole. Yet the whole thrust of de Sade’s fantasy is to show this shining symbolic figure being defiled and violated in every way he can imagine, by a series of male and female monsters who in every case end up, he is careful to emphasise, prospering from their villainy. Father Raphael is promoted to one of the highest posts in the Church. The forger enjoys his ill-gotten gains in Venice. The homosexual matricidal Marquis inherits two vast fortunes. The sadistic medical man is appointed doctor to the King of Sweden. Dubois escapes with the money she has stolen. Even Juliette, after her long career as a murderous whore, ends up rich and happy in her pseudo-marriage (although, at the end, it is wholly inconsistent with everything else we know of her character that she should show such compassion and joy in rediscovering her lost sister).
Only the virtuous Justine has to be shown facing endless reverses, betrayals and sufferings, each time precisely because she is virtuous. It is because either she has thrown herself on someone else’s mercy or has selflessly tried to help them. Such is the central purpose of de Sade’s story, to show virtue defeated and villainy rewarded: to enjoy the thrill which comes from seeing the anima degraded and humiliated, through that combination of sex and violence which are the supreme expressions of the human ego when it has broken free from any external restraint. Such are the two most extreme forms of egocentricity through which one human being can relate with another. The ultimate purpose of fantasy is to experience the mental sensation which derives from imagining the assertion of that egocentricity. And the key to understanding how this works is to see how its real driving force is the urge to defy the Self. The Self-defying ego finds its gratification precisely through creating imagery which shows the values of the Self being violated.
We see this clearly illustrated in the nature of those aspects of sexual behaviour from which fantasy derives its thrills. A crucial component in how stories portray the archetype of the Self is the way they resolve on the image of an ideal state of permanent loving union between hero and heroine. As the convention has it, ‘they got married and lived happily ever after’. This is why, when the ego sets out to violate the Self, it can only derive its thrills from fantasising about anything but the fulfilled married state. Just as the point about the ‘monster’ in storytelling is that it can be portrayed as anything but a whole, ideal human being, the same applies when the ego sets out to fantasise about sexual relations. If we look at the imagery such stories feed on, we see how it can be centred on every conceivable aberration from the state of happily married love. It can derive its excitements from extra-marital sex, promiscuity, nymphomania, orgies, fetishism, prostitution, masturbation, homosexuality, lesbianism, sex with children, sex with animals, perversions of all kinds; and the more the sexually-driven ego strains after that sense of lasting resolution it cannot attain, the more likely it is to coalesce with the urge to violence, as it finds expression in sadism, masochism, rape, even murder. The one state from which impersonal fantasy cannot derive gratification is in imagining that state of humdrum ‘normality’ in which the vast majority of the adult human race has always existed: a secure, unquestioned, lasting marriage.
It is indeed the essence of ego-based fantasies that they feed on images which are unresolved and incomplete. It is the very fact that its images cannot lead to resolution which gives them their power to tease and tantalise and to make them seem more significant than they are. This hugely important aspect of the way the human brain works was recognised by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he wrote how:
‘in the night, imagining some fear,
how easy is a bush supposed a bear.’
Because, in the darkness, the brain cannot get enough information to see the bush clearly, it is teased into exaggerating the significance of what it sees, building it up in imagination as a threatening monster. This is the phenomenon we may call a ‘nyktomorph’, a ‘night shape’: an image which, because the brain cannot resolve it, becomes invested with far greater power than if it could be clearly seen and understood. And to understand how fantasy works, one must appreciate that it is precisely because it feeds on these nyktomorphic images which cannot reach resolution that it comes to exercise such an obsessive hold over the human mind.
Yet in storytelling the underlying archetypal structures are so constituted that they must always work towards that concluding image which shows us everything in a story being satisfactorily resolved. The mark of a well-constructed story is that every detail in it is contributing in some way towards that final resolution. And this can only come about if the story finally resolves in some image of the Self. Either a light hero and heroine are seen united in perfect love; or a dark hero is brought to destruction, so that light can re-emerge and wholeness be restored. By definition, therefore, where the purpose of the story is to defy the Self, this point can never be reached. The story can only be made up of a series of episodes, each based on building up a sense of anticipation which is spun out as long as possible, finally culminating in some shocking or titillating image which cannot lead to resolution. The only way such a story can ‘develop’ is by progressively stepping up the degree of violation, so that each episode concludes in an image more sensational than the last.
Such is the ‘fantasy spiral’: the need constantly to ‘up the dose’, as with certain types of drug, simply in order to sustain the sense of gratification. In the words of Yeats quoted above ‘we have fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare’. Each time the fantasy achieves a mini-climax which cannot lead to resolution, it requires something stronger to achieve the next. As in the tragic ‘fantasy cycle’, the story’s mood thus constantly swings between anticipation and frustration, on an ascending curve. Nevertheless it is notable how, in each of the stories we have been looking at, the ultimate charge of shock is reserved for the moment when heroine finally loses her virginity. In each book, to maintain the sense of anticipation, the moment when this takes place is delayed as long as possible (as it was, even more so, in the novel which appeared the year before Fanny Hill, Richardson’s Clarissa). In the case of Justine, it is particularly significant that this act of violation is carried out by four ‘holy’ monks, representing that symbol of wholeness, the Church, so that the sense of Self-violation is redoubled (just as it is in the incident where the monks are shown raping a girl dressed as the Virgin Mary, before using her bleeding, naked body as a Communion altar). But from this point on in each of the stories, it is hard for the author to sustain the sense of shock, because he has played his trump card. All that is left is to go on repeating more of the same formula, now subject to diminishing returns in terms of its power to shock or thrill, until the moment when the author has to bring his narrative to a conclusion. In Fanny Hill, he simply tacks on a sentimental cardboard replica of the archetypal happy ending, which has no connection with the rest of the story. In The Misfortunes of Virtue, de Sade produces the only remaining trick he has up his sleeve, in arranging for his hapless heroine to be destroyed, almost literally out of the blue, by as shockingly disfiguring a form of death as he could think of.
Indeed no aspect of this cult of sensation is more revealing than the way it engenders in the ego the illusion that, in escaping from the archetypal constraints of the Self, it can achieve an ever greater state of liberation. In reality, by the law of the ‘dark inversion’, the very opposite is the case. The further the ego attempts to ‘push back the frontiers’, the more it becomes boxed into an ever more constricting prison of cliches and stereotypes. To this the plodding, mechanical narratives of Cleland and de Sade have already borne witness. In the rest of this chapter we shall see to just what a limited little wasteland this fantasy of liberation eventually leads.
At the time they were written, in terms of the general landscape of storytelling these two obscure eighteenth-century novels (and others of the time) were no more than faint earth tremors, heralding a subterranean build-up of energies which were only to erupt above the surface far in the distant future. Both books were almost immediately suppressed after they were written. In July 1789, two years after writing The Misfortunes of Virtue, de Sade was transferred from prison to the insane asylum at Charenton, where he was eventually to produce an even more lurid version of his tale under the title of Justine. Just a week after his move, the Paris mob broke into the Bastille to liberate its remaining prisoners, the event which more than any other marked the onset of the French Revolution.
Europe was plunging into that quarter of a century of upheaval and war which coincided with the dawn of the age of Romanticism. And running through almost every kind of storytelling over the century which followed, as we have seen, was that endless succession of betrayed, imprisoned, violated, dead or dying heroines, summed up by Mario Praz as the image of ‘the persecuted maiden’: Gretchen, seduced by the hero and brought to a miserable death in Goethe’s Faust; Lucia di Lamermoor, hideously betrayed by her family, driven mad and eventually to her death; the innocent Gilda, unwittingly murdered and thrown into a sack by her father Rigoletto; Dickens’s Nancy, battered to death by Bill Sykes; Tess, seduced and driven mad by her double-betrayal, ending up on the scaffold; Madame Butterfly, committing suicide in despair at her heartless abandonment. This constantly recurring image may have been the unconscious reflection of a newly industrialised civilisation losing touch with the anima and its roots in the Self. But at least in physical terms these depictions of the violated feminine were presented in an outwardly decorous fashion, designed to tug at the public’s heartstrings on a sentimental level without showing anything too explicit. Through the long nineteenth-century heyday of respectable, bourgeois morality, the crude physical details of sex and violence were kept as firmly out of view as those apocryphal piano legs.
Then at the start of the twentieth century, coinciding with a further surge of technological innovation – wireless, motor cars, aeroplanes, skyscrapers – there were signs of a very different age beginning to dawn. It was the time when Freud, then Jung were beginning to reveal how much our conscious life is merely a fragile, superficial construct, at the mercy of immense mysterious forces hidden from view in the unconscious layers of the mind beneath. In all directions, artistically, socially, politically, established forms and structures were suddenly coming to be seen as a prison to the imagination, as constraints to be thrown off. In painting this showed in the tortured Cubist images of Picasso and Braque; in music in the electric energies of Stravinsky, the atonalism of Schoenberg, the syncopated beat of ragtime and jazz; in poetry in the free form of early Eliot. And nowhere did this new mood find more radical expression than in a long novel being written by an Irishman in Trieste, Zurich and Paris over the seven years between 1914 and 1921, just when Eliot was writing The Waste Land and Proust in Paris was completing À La Recherche du Temps Perdu.
James Joyce intended his Ulysses to be read as a modern echo of Homer’s Odyssey. In reality the contrast between the two stories could scarcely be more profound. As the Quest story beyond compare, the Odyssey is entirely shaped by the one overwhelming imperative: that its hero should finally come home, to dispel the terrible shadow which has fallen over his kingdom, to put the forces of darkness to rout and to liberate his faithful Penelope. All of which requires him to become a complete man, finally revealed in his full kingly state. Every detail of the story takes its place in working towards that conclusion, until we are presented with one of the finest pictures in storytelling of a hero developing and maturing to the point where he can achieve the state of Self-realisation.
It would have been hard for Joyce to conceive a story more opposed to this in every respect than his meandering 930-page account of how his little hero Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged, unhappily married, unsuccessful advertising salesman, spends a summer’s day drifting aimlessly round the city of Dublin, attending a funeral, swapping trivialities with acquaintances, idly reading newspapers and advertising slogans, having lunch, going for an evening walk on the beach where he masturbates, visiting a brothel and finally returning home, to urinate in the garden with his friend Stephen Daedalus, before tucking up in a foetal position at the end of his wife Molly’s bed where he had that afternoon been cuckolded.
Everything about Bloom’s day spells defeat, failure, lack of purpose, the trivialised world of the rootless ego divorced from love or any sense of meaning. He is a man frozen in immaturity, incapable of development. And nowhere is this more vividly underlined than at the end of the novel, which becomes a completely inverted caricature of the conclusion of the Odyssey. Odysseus’s story comes to its final resolution in the moment when, having returned home and slain the suitors, he and his wife fall into the gold-inlaid bed he had carved years earlier from a single olive tree, to commingle in perfect love, before turning to ‘the fresh delights of talk’, as they happily wile away much of the rest of the night recalling all that has happened to them since they were last together. Whereas the beaten, exhausted Bloom, after resignedly noting the imprint left on the mattress by his wife’s lover earlier in the day, crawls into his corner of the marital bed, to sink, in the pose of an unborn child, into solitary sleep, leaving the unhappy Molly to muse forlornly through the 50-page internal stream of consciousness on which the story ends, fantasising about her past lovers and culminating, as she nostalgically masturbates, in a final climactic shout of ‘Yes’.
What Ulysses illustrates, as vividly as any story, is how once the feminine components of the overall psychic equation go missing, the values of heart and soul, all that is left are their masculine counterparts, the physical world of the body and the ordering function of the human mind. Few stories have been more self-consciously ‘ordered’ than Ulysses, with its eighteen ‘sections’, each written in its own style or ‘technique’, with its own related colour, symbol, organ of the body and supposed correspondence to some episode in the Odyssey. As Joyce put in a letter, ‘every hour, every organ, every art’ is thus ‘connected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole’. He explains how Molly’s final monologue, consisting of eight enormous, rambling, unpunctuated sentences, supposedly corresponds to the four ‘cardinal points’ of womanhood, these ‘being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt’. But compared with the organic complexity of the Odyssey, in which each tiny detail grows out of the living whole (e.g., the way those twelve axeheads through which the hero shoots his bow fleeting reflect his twelve ordeals earlier in the story), the structuring of Ulysses is like a parody of the ordering principle of the human brain, when it lacks that ‘feminine’ power of intuition which can bring it alive and connect it up to meaning. Its endless irresolutions make up a fine example of what D. H. Lawrence called, in a different context, ‘masturbating consciousness’. And the sense this gives us of a mind churning away out of contact with meaning is equally reflected in the way the consciousness of the characters wanders on through the book, full of disjointed snippets of knowledge, silly puns, compulsive word-play, bits of quotations, empty lists and pseudo-intellectual speculations. As Joyce again put it in a letter:
‘my head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up ‘most everywhere. The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different points of view ... that and the nature of the legend chosen would be enough to upset anyone’s mental balance.’
All this helps to present Joyce’s characters as each lost and isolated in their own little ego-world, without understanding. And if this were all there is to Ulysses, the book might more appropriately have been discussed in our last chapter. Its characters are just as surely ‘going nowhere’ as those in Chekhov (Bloom’s ‘day’, 16 June 1904, was set, as it happens, just two weeks before Chekhov died); and it is not irrelevant that, in his later years, Joyce employed Samuel Beckett as his secretary. The inconsequential badinage of the two tramps in Waiting For Godot clearly echoes the style of Ulysses. In his admiration for Joyce, Beckett simply carried this over onto the stage. But what prompted both the US and British authorities to seize copies of the book when it was published in 1922 by the appropriately titled Egoist Press, so that for some decades it could not be openly published in unexpurgated form, was not its spiritual nihilism. It was its obsessive concern with the human body and physical functions, above all its references to the physicality of sex.
As the frustrated Bloom wanders round Dublin, his mind constantly harps on sex. Few passages in the book are unwittingly so comical to a modern reader as the extracts from the supposedly pornographic novel he picks up on a bookstall, which by later standards seem so tame (with supposedly provocative references to a woman’s embonpoint). Equally startling to later eyes are the mentions of ladies’ underwear. References to ‘drawers’ and ‘stays’ might have seemed daringly titilla-tory in Joyce’s day, but today such lumpish terms are merely a reminder of just how complete was the repression of such matters to the consciousness of a post-Victorian world. But what is more revealing than anything is the nature of the two sexual episodes which are described in any detail. One is the extraordinary scene as dusk is coming on in the evening, where a young woman, Gerty, and her friends are on the beach, watching a fireworks display. The solitary Bloom, still in his black suit from the funeral, comes up behind Gerty, who becomes aware he is watching her. She deliberately leans over to show him more and more of her thighs, exciting him to the point where he ejaculates in unison with the climax of the firework show. As she walks away, it is clear she has taken pleasure from arousing him in this manner. It is also clear that she is lame.
The second physical episode, forming the climax to the whole book, is that which comes right at the end of Molly’s monologue, when she has been remembering, firstly, her lovemaking with Bloom on Ben Howth when they had first met, and then the passion of her first-ever teenage sexual encounter at the top of the Rock in her native Gibraltar. The two memories, interspersed with romantic images of the sun and the monkeys, the tropical vegetation and Moorish white walls of the Mediterranean, excite her too into stimulating herself, so that the book can end on her orgasmic cry of ‘Yes’. Two acts of solitary sex, by husband and wife, totally isolated from each other in their unhappiness and frustration. The contrast to the ending of the Odyssey, depicting a mature husband and wife in perfect loving union on every level, body, mind, heart and soul, could not be more complete. Yet what we are seeing is an exact reflection of what happens when human consciousness becomes restricted to no more than the ego, and the complexities of human love are reduced to no more than the physicality of the sexual drive. This finds its ultimate expression simply in the physical release of masturbation, stimulated by fantasy images in the mind. Once the sense of the Self and a living connection with the world outside the ego is lost, such is the sterile dead end to which the whole process must inexorably lead.1
Five years after Joyce completed Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence began writing in Tuscany the book which was eventually to make him one of the best-known novelists of the twentieth century. Published in 1928, and almost immediately suppressed in both Britain and America, Lady Chatterley’s Lover approached what Lawrence called ‘the problem of sex’ in a way totally different from Joyce. Whereas in Ulysses, the sexual act is presented as furtive and solitary, in Lady Chatterley the descriptions of the happy coupling of a man and a woman take centre stage. Indeed, scarcely has the novel begun than two things about it become obvious. As we first meet the heroine, Lady Chatterley, ‘a ruddy, country-looking girl’ with ‘big, wondering eyes’, and her husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, with his ‘ruddy, healthy-looking face’ and ‘pale-blue, challenging, bright eyes’, it is clear from Lawrence’s novelettish tone that this is to be a story conceived on a highly sentimental plane. What is also soon evident is that it is to be a kind of moralistic tract, to argue for a very particular view of the role sex can play in human life. We hear how, when as teenagers, Constance Chatterley and her sister had first experienced ‘this sex business’ at the hands of German student lovers in Dresden before the war, they felt that men ‘insisted on this sex thing like dogs’. For the girls, ‘the sex thing had a thrill of its own too; a queer, vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion’. But ‘women had always known there was something better, something higher’. To put over how much Connie has still to learn about ‘this sex business’ is the real purpose of the novel.
The role of Clifford Chatterley in the story is to stand as a kind of cardboard amalgam of everything about the modern world and contemporary England that Lawrence wishes to attack, as oppressive, effete and opposed to life. Living in his ancestral home, Wragby Hall, near the coal-mining village with its squalid, brutalised inhabitants which provides his wealth, Sir Clifford represents the privilege and arrogance of the upper classes. He is a capitalist living off the degrading work of others. Paralysed by the wartime injury which confines him to a wheelchair, he is cut off from the physical world. And in his self-centred, unreal way, he lives almost entirely through his mind, writing precious, pseudo-intellectual novels. Trapped in a bloodless marriage to this monster, his young wife Connie, now in her late twenties, feels her youth and spirit fading away, with nothing left to live for. Then Lawrence brings her together with Mellors, the gamekeeper, who stands for everything Sir Clifford is not. He comes from a working-class background, although, as evidence of his manly qualities, he had during the war been made an officer. Bruised by a disastrous marriage, he is a solitary, independent figure, who likes to live apart from society in the natural world of the woods. Above all, he is supremely physical, which is why, before long, he and Connie are falling into each other’s arms, to make the mad passionate love which is what the novel is really all about.
What Lawrence wants to show is how the physical act of sex between a man and a woman is the highest, deepest, most life-enhancing experience humanity can know. As he describes the couplings of Constance and Mellors in ever more graphic detail, he wishes to emphasise that this level of sexual intimacy is something which only a minority of people can ever hope to achieve. On p. 140 (Penguin edition), they for the first time enjoy mutual orgasm:
‘She turned and looked at him. “We came off together that time”, he said.
She did not answer.
“It’s good when it’s like that. Most folks live their lives through and they never know it”, he said, speaking rather dreamily ...
“Don’t people often come off together?” she asked with naïve curiosity.
“A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them.”’
By p. 180, she is enjoying an orgasm far greater than anything she could have imagined possible:
‘She quivered again at the potent inexorable entry inside her, so strange and terrible ... she dared let go everything, and be gone in the flood. And it seemed it was like the sea, nothing but dark waves raising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass. Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far-travelling billows, and ever, at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder, from the centre of soft plunging, as the plunger went deeper and deeper, touching lower, and she was deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed, the heavier the billows of her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her, and closer and closer plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further rolled the waves of herself away from herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasm was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation was upon her, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.’
The trouble with this stuff, in terms of telling a story, lies in the fact that it cannot lead anywhere. What has brought Lady Chatterley and Mellors together, as Lawrence emphasises, is their sexuality. Theirs is not really a love story, it is a sex story. The part has subsumed the whole. Their relationship is defined by almost nothing else. As social beings they are kept firmly apart, not least by Mellors’s insistence on constantly breaking into broad Derbyshire dialect, even though, as an educated former army officer, he is perfectly capable of speaking, when he chooses to, in what is known as ‘standard English’. For a while it is possible to sustain the story’s momentum by describing further variations on their lovemaking, as when the pair run naked out into the woods in the rain, and Mellors possesses his mistress from behind.2 The sense of ‘upping the ante’ is maintained by increasing use of that limited selection of ‘shocking’ four-letter words for which the novel was eventually to become famous (‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, shit’, ‘piss’, ‘arse’). The exchanges between the two degenerate more and more into sentimental game-playing, as when they give each other’s sexual organs the names of ‘John Thomas’ and ‘Lady Jane’, while decorating them with wild flowers.
In story terms, however, the problem is that they are social beings, living in a social context. It is one thing to portray them happily lost in their private little ego-world in the woods, enjoying sex. But the demand of any story is that it must develop, to work towards a climax and resolution. And here Lawrence becomes caught up in the conflict between the urge of his fantasy-self to see his hero and heroine heading off for an archetypal happy ending, and those deeper archetypal rules of storytelling which dictate that, because of the way it has been defined, their relationship cannot end that way. Most importantly, both Connie and Mellors are married to other people. And as Lawrence tries to manipulate his plot towards the point where they may be free to come as fully together in the outside world as in the privacy of the bed, the creaking of his stage machinery becomes deafening. Connie is made pregnant by Mellors, then goes off to Venice to provide cover for her story to her husband that the father is someone else. Meanwhile Mellors’s harridan wife returns to claim him, creating a scandal about him carrying on with other women which leads to him being fired from his job. The plot spirals into ever more forced improbabilities, above all the wonderfully awful scene in London where Mellors meets Constance’s father Sir Malcolm Reid, to win him over to their marriage:
‘Sir Malcolm lit a cigar and said, heartily: “Well, young man, and what about my daughter?”
The grin flickered on Mellors’s face. “Well, Sir, and what about her?”
“You’ve got a baby in her all right.” “I have that honour!” grinned Mellors.
“Honour, by God!” Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd.
“Honour! How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what?”
“Good!”
“I’ll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip of the old block, what! I never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself ... you warmed her up, oh, you warmed her up, I can see that. My blood in her! You set fire to her haystack, all right. Ha-ha-ha! I was jolly glad of it, I can tell you. She needed it ... ha-ha-ha! A game keeper, eh, my boy! Bloody good poacher, if you ask me. Ha-ha! ....”’
Lawrence finally manages to disentangle Constance from the outraged Sir Clifford, who has now sunk into an infantile mother-and-son relationship with an older female servant, Mrs Bolton. She goes to live with her father in Scotland, waiting for the baby and for her divorce. Mellors meanwhile takes a job as a farm labourer, dreaming that he and Constance might one day be able to set up home together on a small farm of their own. The story concludes with a long letter from him to Constance, bemoaning the doomed state of modern civilisation, obsessed with money, cut off from the deeper rhythms of life, and describing how he is hanging onto the memory of that ‘little Pentecost flame’ they had ‘fucked into being’ between them. The closing words, ‘John Thomas says good night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart’, reflect the wistful mood of sentimentality which is all Lawrence can muster to provide his tale with an ending. Nothing has really been resolved. The story has simply fallen apart, into vague wishful thinking. In trying to evangelise for his belief that physical sexuality between a man and a woman can stand for the totality of love, Lawrence has sought to defy the archetypes. As always, the archetypes have won.
For more than 30 years unexpurgated versions of these books written in the 1920s remained firmly out of public view. Officially banned on both sides of the Atlantic, like the earlier novels by Cleland and de Sade, they were available only in illicit editions from semi-undergound publishers like the Olympia and Grove Presses, based in Paris and New York. Not only did the law prohibit the publication of such material. Society in general still continued publicly to accept the moral values on which these laws were based. In nothing were those standards more clearly reflected, for instance, than in the Hayes Code, the system of self-censorship voluntarily adopted by the cinema industry in Hollywood, which laid down precise rules as to what could or could not be shown on a movie screen, right down to the maximum number of seconds an actor and actress could be seen making physical contact in a kiss.
Then, in the 1950s, all those strict taboos against the too overt display of sexual imagery, which to a greater or lesser extent had survived through thousands of years, quite suddenly began to crumble. Fuelled by the onset of a material prosperity like nothing known before in history, based on a wave of new technological advances, an immense shift was beginning to take place in the collective psyche of the Western world. This found expression in the emergence around 1955–1958 of the obsessively fashion-conscious new ‘youth culture’, with its new forms of popular music based on the beat of rock ’n roll, its acceptance of drugs and greater sexual promiscuity, and a rejection of anything identified with the despised ‘square’ world of their elders. It was heavily reinforced by the presence of powerful new forms of imagery, above all through the suddenly ubiquitous television screen. All this helped create in people’s heads a sense that they were entering an entirely new age, in which conventions of thinking and behaviour associated with the past could now be thrown aside as constricting and irrelevant. And nowhere did this heady sense of freedom find more obvious expression than in all those areas of life governed by the rules of what came to be known as ‘traditional morality’.
In Britain in 1959, in keeping with the spirit of the times, a Labour politician, Roy Jenkins, passed through Parliament a new law, the Obscene Publications Act. Its intention was to liberalise censorship on books which could be seen as serious ‘literature’, while continuing to allow that of publications which could be regarded as mere ‘pornography’. It was of course impossible to draft any legal definition to distinguish precisely between what was ‘art’ and what was ‘filth’. And it was this Act which in Britain was to prove the watershed, when in 1960 Penguin Books chose to try out the new law by publishing the first general unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Lady Chatterley seemed the ideal candidate for such a test case (indeed a full version had already been published in America, for similar reasons, the previous year), because Lawrence so clearly intended his book to be considered not as pornography, which he despised, but as a serious work of art. What followed was a battle between two fundamentally opposed mindsets which was to be repeated many times over the years ahead. On one side were the ‘progressives’, claiming that Lawrence’s novel was one of the greatest works of literature of the twentieth century. A prize catch among their witnesses was the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, who famously claimed in court that Lawrence had portrayed the sex act as a kind of ‘holy communion’. On the other were the ‘reactionaries’, led by their QC, Mervyn Griffiths-Jones, who equally famously asked the jury whether this was really a book they would wish their ‘wives or servants to read’.
The delighted howls of scorn this remark aroused from the progressives reflected what had now become a significant psychological feature of their battle to ‘push back the frontiers’ of what was socially permissible. The progressives actually needed such self-caricaturing expressions of disapproval from the ‘reactionary’ elements in society, because it helped confirm their conviction that they were involved in a heroic crusade. They needed to be able to deride these reactionaries as ‘anti-life’, narrow-minded, hidebound, sexually-repressed, as ‘prigs’, ‘Puritans’ and ‘prudes’ whose only concern was to restrict other people’s freedom, because this was vital to building up their sense of the moral righteousness of their cause.
But what was the real nature of this ‘freedom’ for which they imagined they were fighting? Their own view was that, by thrusting aside the old moral conventions, they were moving forwards into a boundless new world in which anything might now be possible. Yet the reality was very different. What they did not realise was that this new realm they were entering would be very much subject to laws and constraints of its own, one of which was the compulsion constantly to push the bounds of what was permissible a little further. The highest terms of praise for a new novel, play or film were that it was ‘exciting’, ‘shocking’, ‘daring’, ‘disturbing’ or ‘sickening’, in that it stripped away some further layer of what was considered socially acceptable. But each time the ‘frontiers’ were pushed back, it would be necessary next time to heighten the dose, to sustain the sense of novelty on which the spiral depended.
The legal battle over Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not about the story itself. Almost the whole of Lawrence’s novel had in fact been freely on sale for many years before 1960; just as Nabokov’s Lolita, on the face of it a much more ‘shocking’ story, in that it centred on the sexual relationship of a middle-aged paedophile with a 12-year old girl, had been published uncensored ever since 1955. The only thing ‘new’ about the version of Lady Chatterley on which Penguin Books won its historic court case was that it included the more graphic details of some of the sex scenes; and, more specifically, that it included those publicly taboo (though privately long-familiar) four-letter words. It was these the jury agreed it should now be permissible, under Jenkins’s Act, to put into print. So great was the novelty of this that, although one or two newspapers self-consciously printed the ‘F’ word in reporting on the trial, it was to be quite some time before public use of these words passed into anything like general currency, either in print or on stage or screen. But in essence the floodgates had been opened. Over the years to come, this was to transform the character of storytelling more dramatically than anything in its history.
What happened next can be summed up simply by describing some of the films, plays and novels which in the years that followed came to stand out as particular landmarks, because each in turn was hailed as taking stories a further ‘liberating’ step into areas of sex and violence hitherto considered forbidden. As we look at these stories, we see a certain pattern emerging.
One of the first landmarks, released in the year Lady Chatterley was published in Britain, was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Shot, unlike his other recent films, in stark black-and-white, this took mainstream Hollywood movie-making into a dimension of personal violence and sexual voyeurism it had never entered before. Based indirectly on the real-life story of a serial killer, it focused on a pretty young heroine, Marion, who is first seen, in sexy underwear, engaged in an unhappy lunchtime sexual liaison with a married man. In a hopeless bid to lure him into marrying her, she steals a large sum of money from her employer and drives aimlessly off into the middle of nowhere. On the run from the police, she ends up taking a room at a lonely motel, where she is the only guest. She learns that Norman Bates, the creepy young man who owns it, stuffs birds for a hobby and lives with his mad mother in a sinister, dark old house behind the motel (she hears the two of them arguing).
When Marion retires to her cabin to undress to her underwear, we see him spying on her through a hole in the wall. Having decided that next day she will return the stolen money, which is hidden in newspaper, she enters the shower naked. A half-glimpsed grey-haired woman sneaks into the room and, while the shower is running, we then see, to the accompaniment of nerve-jangling music to remind us that this is entertainment, Marion being stabbed fourteen times, sometimes through the shower curtain, sometimes in close-up, sometimes in slow motion, in the most shocking and protracted murder sequence Hollywood had ever shown. When she finally sinks dead to the floor, her blood spiralling down the plughole, Norman comes in to clean up, bundles her body (and the money) into the boot of her car and pushes it into a nearby swamp where it sinks from sight.
A week after Marion has vanished, her sister Lila hires a private detective to find her. He comes to the motel, finds Bates suspiciously evasive, goes away to report what he has discovered, then returns hoping to interview Bates’s mysterious mother in the old house. He is climbing the stairs when he is sprung on by a crazed, knife-wielding old woman who repeatedly stabs him to death, in a prolonged murder scene almost bloodier and more violent than the first.
When the detective fails to ring them back, Lila and Marion’s lover Sam set out to find what happened to him at the motel. They are particularly disturbed to learn from a local policeman that there is no Mrs Bates. She and her lover had been found dead in suspicious circumstances 10 years earlier. They find suspicious clues that Marion must have stayed in ‘Cabin 1’. While Sam holds Bates in conversation, Lila explores the spooky old house, and finally in the cellar finds the old woman sitting in a chair. When she turns Mrs Bates round, Lila sees that she is a mummified corpse. At this moment another old woman appears in the doorway, ready to stab the now terrified Lila with a knife, but is grabbed from behind by Sam and turns out to be Norman in a wig and female clothing. After Bates has been taken to a prison cell and interrogated, a psychiatrist explains how he was a mother’s boy so psychotic that it was he who had killed his mother and her lover 10 years before in a jealous rage. He had then dug up and mummified his mother’s body and continued to live with her: sometimes as himself, the neurotic son, sometimes taking on the personality of his lost mother. It was in his fantasy-self, disguised as his mother, that he had committed a whole sequence of murders, culminating in those of Marion and the detective. The film ends with Marion’s car, her body and the money being recovered from the swamp.
What was new about Psycho was its obsessional focusing on the physical details of the two murders. Hitchcock spent two weeks shooting the scene in which the heroine is stabbed in the shower. This is the centrepiece of the film, just as the moment of the heroine’s ultimate orgasm had been the centrepiece of Lady Chatterley. The gradual working-up of suspense towards this physical image of a naked young woman being brutally murdered provided the story with its shocking highlight, just as in those eighteenth-century novels its equivalent had been the gradual working up to the image of the heroine finally losing her virginity. In a sense the story has become just a frame for these moments of maximum sensation. And although in the end we see Bates in a prison cell, this is scarcely the cathartic destruction of the psychopathic monster which the underlying archetype demands. The interest here lies merely in squeezing a last drop of sensation out of the explanation as to how and why he committed his awful crimes. His subsequent fate is of no concern.
The scale and speed of the change which came over the nature of films and plays between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s was more dramatic than any in the history of storytelling. Within just a few years the sentimental, romantic Hollywood movies and respectable, ‘well-crafted’ plays of the post-war era were made to seem unimaginably innocent and old-fashioned, as the cinema and the theatre were taken over by a ‘new wave’ of stories altogether harder, more overtly sensational and more surreal in tone. Leading the field were some of the more ‘daring’ playwrights of the time, notably in England. In 1962, just when the first James Bond film, presenting its own sanitised version of sex and violence, was being launched in London’s Leicester Square, a series of new plays was staged at the nearby Arts Theatre. It opened with Johnny Speight’s The Knacker’s Yard, described by a critic of the time as showing the arrival at a squalid boarding house of ‘a mysterious and sinister figure’ called Ryder, whose nightly pleasure was
‘ritually slashing a series of voluptuous nude pin-ups with a razor on a little patriotic altar of Union Jacks. All of which, plus his large collection of handbags, seems to suggest that he must be the Jack-the-Ripper-like killer in the neighbourhood.’
Ryder ended up by gassing himself. Another play in the series, David Rudkin’s Afore Night Come, put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company, came to ‘a gruesomely compulsive climax involving a ritual murder beneath the poison-sprays of a pest-control helicopter’. A third, Fred Watson’s Infanticide in the House of Fred Ginger, ended in the gratuitous killing of a child.
Such avant-garde plays were only a small symptom of a much wider and deeper transformation which was now taking place all through Western society, nowhere more obviously than in Britain. This revolution in moral and social attitudes, reflecting what I have analysed elsewhere as a collective fantasy state, came to a head in the extraordinary events of the year 1963. It was a year characterised in Britain by a kind of endless hysteria, most obviously expressed in the explosion of nyktomorphic fantasy surrounding the supposed sex scandals associated with Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, and that generated around the emergence of the four Beatles as the ‘dream figures’ at the centre of the most hypnotically glamorous bubble in the history of show business. It was the year which culminated in what, in terms of its universal personal impact, was the most shockingly sensational event of post-war history, the assassination of that other supreme ‘dream figure’ of the time, President Kennedy. And this mood of hysteria helped drive the new English drama even further into its violent, sexually-obsessed and freakish fantasy world, as when a few months later the Royal Shakespeare Company staged an ‘experimental season’ dedicated to the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’. This took as its manifesto an excerpt from the book Le Theatre et Son Double, written in a lunatic asylum in 1938 by the French psychopath Antonin Artaud:
‘We need a theatre which wakes us up, nerves and heat ... in the anguished catastrophic society we live in, we feel an urgent need for a theatre which events do not exceed ... a transcendent experience of life is what the public is fundamentally seeking, through love, crime, drugs, war or insurrection.’
The playlets chosen to open the season included a sketch by Artaud himself, entitled ‘The Spurt of Blood’ (in which ‘colour, light and sound are used expressively’); and another in which an actress representing Christine Keeler performed a ‘strip-tease act of grotesque symbolism’ standing next to a bath, in what was meant to echo the image of Jacqueline Kennedy looking down into her murdered husband’s grave.
But the biggest sensation of the season was a full-length production by Peter Brook, one of its two co-directors, who had been responsible for the ‘Spurt of Blood’ sketch. Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade showed the crazed inmates of Charenton lunatic asylum re-enacting the assassination of the French revolutionary leader Marat, under the direction of their fellow inmate, the Marquis de Sade. This nightmare vision of a twilight world of violence, madness, sexual aggression and revolutionary hysteria, featuring the author of Justine as its hero, provoked uproar, led by various impresarios representing the commercial theatre, deploring how the London stage was being taken over by ‘filthy plays’. This set off an equally hysterical response from the ‘progressives’, led by the left-wing politician Michael Foot, who ostentatiously published a telegram:
‘I CAN SEE THERE IS A RALLY OF THE OLD FORCES TO STOP PEOPLE THINKING STOP BUT IT CAN’T BE DONE STOP IT HAS FAILED EVER SINCE THE SAME RIDICULOUS TRICK WAS PLAYED ON SOPHOCLES.’
One leading ‘progressive’ critic Penelope Gilliatt solemnly claimed the play ‘had the nerve to investigate the sort of violence that Shakespeare himself depicted’.3
Another theatrical sensation of 1964 was Entertaining Mr Sloane, a ‘black comedy’ written by Joe Orton, a defiant homosexual who had recently spent nine months in prison for obscenely defacing books from a public library. His ‘comedy’ showed a mysterious stranger, Mr Sloane, arriving as the new lodger in a house occupied by an unmarried woman in her 30s, her homosexual brother and their father. In the first act Sloane is seduced by the sister. In the next he seduces the brother. The father then identifies him as the man he had seen kicking a pornographer to death, at which Sloane kicks the father to death. The woman then discovers she is pregnant by Sloane, who makes it plain he can think of no fate worse than being tied for life to a woman. The story ends with the prospective mother sucking at a boiled sweet, in a regression to infantilism. Three years later, after writing more plays in similar vein, Orton himself was hacked to death with an axe by his homosexual lover, overcome by a fit of jealous rage.
On both sides of the Atlantic in 1964 the state tried to mount a last-ditch effort to halt the tide of sex and violence which now seemed to be engulfing storytelling in all directions. When publishers in London and America decided to exploit the new freedom of the times by disinterring Fanny Hill from its two centuries of suppressed obscurity, the authorities realised that, if ever they were going to persuade the courts to distinguish between ‘literature’ and ‘pornography’, this was the case to go for. Surely no bishops or professors of English literature would rush to defend what no one had ever pretended was anything other than an unashamedly ‘dirty book’? In London the magistrates were briefly persuaded by this argument, although their verdict was soon reversed. In America the case actually reached the Supreme Court, where in a historic judgment in 1965 the justices accepted that Fanny Hill had ‘literary merit’ and should no longer be censored.
A more contemporary novel which also briefly faced legal disapproval in 1964 was Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. This was excitedly hailed as another triumphant breakthrough in ‘pushing back the frontiers’, with its unrelievedly black picture of New York slum-life set during a strike in the early 1950s. The plot centres on Harry, a brutal union activist involved in the strike, who begins cheating on his wife with a drug-addict; Georgette, a transvestite homosexual; and a prostitute Tralala, who dreams of escaping from her hopeless day-to-day existence selling her body to men at the back of parking lots. Georgette ends up being crushed to death by a car. Harry, after the strike has come to its climax in a series of explosions when the strikers set fire to a fleet of trucks, is caught attempting to have sex with a young boy from the neighbourhood, and is kicked to death by a gang, who hang up his corpse on a billboard in a parody of the Crucifixion. Finally, as the story’s climax, Tralala is subjected to a prolonged and violent gang-rape, before the story ends with the lifting of the strike and the men returning to work.
In Britain the obsession with sexual abnormality and make-believe violence had become so fashionable by the summer of 1965 that the ‘daring’ new English drama, like the James Bond films, had played an important part in promoting London’s image as ‘the most swinging city in the world’. In June, to avoid the vestiges of censorship imposed by the Lord Chamberlain, the Royal Court turned itself into a theatre club to stage John Osborne’s play A Patriot for Me, the main set-piece of which was a lavish homosexual ‘drag’ ball, before the protagonist, a homosexual spy in decadent Hapsburg Vienna, ends up committing suicide. Centrepiece of the summer season at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron, directed by Peter Hall of the Royal Shakespeare Company, featuring an apocalyptic orgy scene and, in what was described as a particularly ‘camp’ gesture, the casting of four nude Soho strippers as the Four Virgins. At the Aldwych Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming portrayed a man presenting his new American wife to his father and four brothers, whereupon they take it in turns to have sex with her and plan to set her up as a prostitute. Another vogue film of the summer was Roman Polsanki’s Repulsion, depicting a young girl’s sex and violence obsessed nightmares. In October a young writer who had won the first commission from Britain’s new National Theatre (and also scripted the new Beatles film Help!) published a solemn article entitled ‘My boyhood life and work in the theatre and how I came to be obsessed with sex and violence’, including such lines as ‘my plays are about filth, filthily. There is a place for filth in the theatre. I’ve seen it, and lovely cami-knick filth it was.’
In the autumn of 1965, just when this fashionable nervous frenzy was reaching a peak, as in the hysteria which exploded in the first week of November over the appearance of the first mini-skirts, two more new plays aroused the greatest sensations of all. The first, because it was on television, was the BBC’s Up The Junction, an ostensibly ciné-vérité picture of life in working class south London, focusing on the seduction of a teenage girl on a bombsite, and her subsequent horrific back-street abortion. Even a critic normally keen for the BBC to show ‘daring’ dramas commented:
‘I suggest that at least part of the object ... was a wish, perhaps an unconscious one, to see just how far they could go in a television play with sex and cuss words.’
The other play, first performed on the same evening (November 3), was also ostensibly a picture of working-class life in south London; and again, to stage it, the Royal Court had to turn itself into a club. Edward Bond’s Saved began with a young couple entering the home where the girl, Pam, a notoriously promiscuous 23-year old, lives with her parents. Len has just picked her up and rather clumsily fails to have sex with her. But we then see him having become her boyfriend and moved in as her parents’ lodger.
We now meet, in a café, a gang of young men, one of whom, Pete, is about to attend the funeral of a boy who has been run over. After crude sex jokes, Pete boasts of how he had been responsible for the accident. Seeing the boy run out into the road, he deliberately accelerated his own vehicle to hit the boy, knocking him into the path of an oncoming truck. He did not admit this to the boy’s parents or the coroner, We then see that, although Len is still living in her parents’ home, Pam has now moved on to another boyfriend, Fred, having had a baby (father unknown, although she thinks it is probably Fred). The baby, throughout the scene, cries pitifully offstage while its mother takes no notice.
We then see Fred and Len fishing in a local park. Pam enters, wheeling a pram, and, after getting into an argument, walks off, followed by Len, abandoning her baby. This leads to the central episode of the play, when the gang of youths we have met earlier, including Pete, join Fred in the park, see the pram and begin pushing it at each other, ever more roughly. They then start to take an interest in the baby. One gives it a punch, followed by another, punching rather harder. They rub its face in its excreta. They flick lighted matches at it. Finally one youth chucks a stone into the pram. The others follow suit, in ever greater frenzy, until the baby is dead. Pam returns to wheel the pram home, not noticing what has happened.
We are never told how Pam discovered her baby was dead, although we see Fred waiting to be tried with the others for the killing, and learn that Len had watched the murder hidden by trees and not intervened to stop it. We then see a scene in which Pam’s middle-aged mother is late for a meeting with a friend, but discovers one of her stockings is torn. Len helps to sew it together on her thigh and is so excited by this intimacy that, when she has gone out, he pulls out a handkerchief to masturbate. We then see another scene in the café, where Pam and others are waiting for the gang-members on their release from what seems to have been only a very brief spell of imprisonment. The climax comes with a screaming family row in Pam’s home, involving herself, her parents and Len, in which, as Len threatens her father Harry with a knife, Pam despairingly wails ‘all my friends gone. Baby’s gone. Nothing left but rows ... the baby’s dead. They’re all gone ... I can’t go on.’ Afterwards Harry comes up to Len’s room. They engage in trivial chat, as if to imply that they have made up their disagreement. Len muses that he may find somewhere else to live.
Even Penelope Gilliatt, a leading ‘progressive’ critic with the Observer, admitted she had found all this hard to stomach:
‘I spent a lot of the first act shaking with claustrophobia, and thinking I was going to be sick. The scene where a baby is pelted to death in a pram is nauseating. The swagger of the sex jokes is almost worse....’
In reply, Britain’s leading actor Sir Laurence Olivier, now director of the National Theatre, rushed to defend the play, with the claim that Bond ‘places his act of violence in the first half of the play, just as Shakespeare does in Julius Caesar’. There could have been no clearer measure of just how far contact had now been lost with the psychic roots of storytelling. Firstly Olivier could no longer see that, as a mere ‘act of violence’, there might be any distinction between the assassination of a supposed Tyrant (after the chief assassin has been shown wrestling with his conscience) and the mindless destruction of a baby by a group of young thugs, so demoralised they are scarcely aware of what they have done. Secondly Olivier seemed oblivious to the fact that, after Caesar’s murder, Shakespeare devoted the rest of his play to showing how, in accordance with the archetype, there has to be a counterbalancing ‘act of violence’, whereby the murderers pay the price with their own deaths.
Nothing, archetypally, was more chilling about Bond’s play than the fact that, after the baby’s murder, portrayed in such obsessional detail, so little interest is shown in what happens to its perpetrators, apart from their perfunctory prison sentence. Bond’s own comment on his play was that it was ‘almost irresponsibly optimistic’. Len, as its ‘chief character’, is ‘naturally good’. By creating in the end ‘the chance of a friendship with the father’, Bond wrote, Len turns what might have been ‘the tragic Oedipus pattern of the play’ into ‘what is formally a comedy’.4 Truly, in this landmark in the history of storytelling, was the ‘dark inversion’ complete.
In just five short years the great act of ‘liberation’ had been achieved. Niagara has been shot. Anything, it might have seemed, was now possible. But when we look at what this great leap forward actually led to, nothing is more striking about the brave new world storytelling had now entered than how remarkably limited in scope it turned out to be. When storytelling moves into this realm, as we have seen in this chapter, certain themes continually reappear: the sexual act; nudity; a small number of four-letter words, relating to bodily functions, either sexual or excretory; masturbation; homosexuality; sexual perversions; madness; drug-taking; acts of cruelty and violence; rape; cannibalism; finally violent murder or suicide. Why is it just to this very restricted range of images (often combined with the violation of religious symbols) that stories based on fantasy invariably return?
The starting point for an answer lies in the nature of that most centrally numinous figure in storytelling, the archetypal heroine, the anima, the ultimate prize the hero has to win. As an embodiment of the feminine she potentially stands for everything the opposite sex can represent to a man. Certainly this may begin with the fact that she is physically attractive. But the essence of her role in stories is to represent those ‘light feminine’ values, feeling for others and seeing whole, which are crucial to escaping from the confines of the ego and to establishing union with the Self. The hero who reaches the ultimate goal in storytelling is he who is worthy to win her, because he represents the ‘light masculine’, he is both strong and loving. Similarly the light heroine is outwardly feminine and inwardly strong. That is why the sight of a hero and heroine united in love at the end of a story has such power to move us, because unconsciously we recognise this complementary coming together on every level as the image of Self-realisation, complete human fulfilment.
Once stories become centred on nothing higher than the ego, this totality is shut off to them. The ego-transcending feminine values have gone missing. And when fantasy loses touch with the selfless components of love, all that is left to it is to reduce the relationship between men and women to just a physical level. Initially we may get stories like Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley which, in their very different ways, show this through the eyes of wish-fulfilment. They are centred on the image of the sexual act, which invariably works with mechanical perfection to the mutual gratification of both parties (as it also does, if less explicitly, in, say, a James Bond film). But in terms of constructing a story, there comes a point where simply to fantasise about the coupling of two people begins to tire. Because it has been cut off from the deeper unconscious purposes of storytelling, it cannot go anywhere.
It may seem easier to sustain the sense of excitement where the actual visual image of the feminine can be used to trigger off male sexual desire, as on a stage or a cinema screen. Men are instinctively programmed to respond to such stimuli, in a way which is ultimately quite impersonal. This is why, through most of human history, women have dressed in such a way as to reveal their faces, that part of them which most completely expresses their individuality, but to conceal the greater part of their bodies from view. Once ego becomes dominant, this creates a pressure for them to reveal more and more of their bodies, to provide stimulus to physical desire. For a long time after the arrival of the cinema, the gentilities were more or less preserved, except in those special circumstances where actresses were permitted to show their legs or cleavage, as in dance or beach sequences, or where they were playing recognisably louche, immoral characters. But when the great psychological watershed was passed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this inevitably resulted in a compulsion to push display of the female body nearer and nearer to a state of undress: first to underwear, then to half-glimpsed bare breasts, then to full-length nudity. And although, as with a strip-tease act, it may be easy to sustain a sense of arousal and expectation while this process is in its earlier stages, there must eventually come a point where literally all has been revealed. There is nowhere further to go.
So when the ego is denied the only road which can lead to proper fulfilment, where does it then turn? Essentially, as we have seen, it finds three forms of expression. First, when the ego is shut off from any proper loving connection with another person, as we saw in examples from Ulysses to Saved, the physical urge may simply retreat into the solitary sex of masturbation.5 Second, as we saw in that ‘camp’ element which became prominent in so many plays and novels of the 1960s, it finds increasing fascination in variations on the archetypal roles of the sexes, in homosexuality and transvestism: in men who have lost their masculinity and become effeminate, women who have lost their femininity and become possessed by their inner masculine. Finally, most conspicuously of all, the ego frustrated of fulfilment turns in desperation towards violence.
Of course, acts of physical violence have played a prominent part in storytelling since the dawn of time. But when it is shown within the archetypal framework, the exercise of violence is always subject to clear rules. If a dark figure is shown committing a violent act, the archetype dictates that there must always ultimately be a recompense. In the end, the monster, like Macbeth, must always be paid out for his crimes. When light figures resort to violence this is acceptable, because it is always made clear that they are doing so for selfless reasons, on behalf of others. Even when stories first venture onto the fantasy level, taking on a ‘sentimental’ form, these same rules still hold good. The scenes of violence in a James Bond film may in reality only be included for their sensation value, to excite the audience. But they are still sanctioned in the audience’s mind by the fact that Bond is a ‘light figure’, selflessly risking his life to challenge some monstrous dark figure, the ‘good guy’ acting to save the world from a megalomaniac super-criminal.
What happens when stories move still further into fantasy, losing contact with their underlying archetypal purpose altogether, is that this opposition between ‘light’ and ‘dark’ disappears. Everyone in the story is seen in a twilight. We may see men inflicting violence on each other because they are obviously cruel, vicious and dark. But since there are no ‘light’ characters to oppose them, such acts of violence become just sensational images for their own sake, designed to excite the audience’s horror or disgust.
Where this process becomes even more obviously extreme, however, is when violence becomes entangled with the sexual urge, and is shown being directed against a woman. This is where it at last becomes clear that the real unconscious drive of the process is to turn the archetype upside down, to show the figure who symbolises the highest value in storytelling, the anima (and thus the Self), being violated in the most shocking way possible. The value of de Sade’s story about Justine is that it illustrates this point so explicitly. Because he was writing in an age when heroines in stories were still generally depicted in their full symbolic anima-guise as shining, innocent souls of virtue, to conjure up such a heroine solely in order to show her being repeatedly violated was calculated to give his story the maximum shock-value. It was precisely for this reason that, for nearly two centuries, de Sade’s book was regarded as so obviously offensive to the moral sense that it remained buried from view; until society had so changed that the mainstream of storytelling was ready, as it were, to start catching up with him.
It was apt that the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 should have coincided almost exactly with the release of Psycho, and in particular the scene of a naked young woman being coldly stabbed to death for minutes on end. Hitchcock’s heroine was scarcely ‘a soul of virtue’ in the same way as Justine. But she still, in her vulnerability, symbolised the ‘eternal feminine’. Like Justine and countless other ‘persecuted heroines’ since de Sade’s time, Marion represented the defenceless anima being violated. And in the way Hitchcock showed it, lingering obsessively over the physical detail of her destruction, he achieved the complete inversion of that archetypal climax to so many of the great stories of the world where, in the nick of time, the hero arrives to save just such a defenceless heroine from destruction. Such is the image which more than any other in storytelling gives us that profound sense of relief and reassurance, that everything is going to turn out, after all, as it should. The fact that Hitchock’s film could take such relish in turning that image upside down was a foretaste of what a twilight world storytelling was now beginning to enter.
Over the next few years, as the unconscious pursuit of sensation became ever more intense, we saw the nudity inevitably becoming ever more brazen, the violence ever more extreme. By the time of Last Exit to Brooklyn, it was no longer enough for the already degraded heroine to be raped once, by one man. It had to be a mass-rape, going on and on. We saw stories drifting ever more into a strange, dream/nightmare realm of fragmented imagery, often not even attempting to develop any proper sense of plot.6 We saw all the framework which defines ‘reality’ and ‘normality’ disintegrating into a dreamlike twilight where the fantasies of storytellers were drawn, by an entirely consistent internal logic, to explore literally anything that was ‘unreal’ or ‘abnormal’. We saw the difference between the sexes dissolving into a kind of epicene blur. And what above all governed all this seemingly free-play of fantasy was that it was unconsciously driven by only one urge: to defy the rules and values of the Self, and to push that defiance ever further towards its ultimate limits. But, in reality, the further the process travelled into those realms of imagined freedom, so the range of images and situations left for it to play with became ever more limited, repetitive and sterile. Until in 1965 this ended up with the most life-defying, Self-defying image of them all, that of a defenceless baby, the archetypal Child, the supreme image of life renewed, being put casually to death by four young men, so lost in unconsciousness they were not even aware of what they had done. At this point even some of the most determined champions of the new ‘freedom’ had a sense that they could take no more.
Once that psychological watershed had been passed, its consequences for storytelling were inevitably profound. The transformation which had taken place in moral, social and artistic attitudes in those few years between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s reflected a further decisive shift in the relationship between ego and Self which would find expression in stories in many different ways. But nothing was more obviously to characterise the films, plays and novels of the decades which followed than the hitherto unthinkable degree to which the imagery of ego-centred sex and violence had now become an established part of the landscape.
Certain stories would still stand out as landmarks because they managed to come up with some specially ‘shocking’ new variation on the basic formula. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), glamourising the life of two young criminals on the run, caught attention not least because of its brief glimpse at the beginning of the heroine standing naked at a window and the much longer sequence at the end showing both her and the hero being riddled with machine gun bullets, their bodies jumping about with the impact as their flesh and clothes became soaked in blood.
Four years later Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), based on a novel by Anthony Burgess, conjured up so glamorous an image of young men obsessed with sex and violence that the film inspired a rash of imitative crimes in real life, prompting its shaken director to withdraw it from circulation a year after its release. Set in a Britain of ‘the near future’, the story opens with the hero Alex and his gang of three teenagers, wearing uniforms which emphasise their sexual organs, sitting in a bar furnished with fibreglass figures of naked women in submissive poses, drinking drugged milk shakes served from the nipples of more naked female figures and preparing for an evening of their favourite entertainment, ‘a bit of the old ultra-violence’ and ‘a bit of the old in-out, in-out’ (rape). They first beat up an old tramp, then enter a derelict, abandoned opera house where a young woman is being raped by the members of another gang, with whom they have a stylised knife-fight. Interrupted by the police, they steal a sports car, drive out into the dark countryside and knock on the door of an ultra-modern house where an elderly writer lives with his younger wife. In grotesque, obscene masks, they push the old man to the floor, rhythmically kicking him to the lyric of ‘Singin’ In The Rain’, then tie up both their victims, vandalise the house and finally force the husband to watch the prolonged rape of his wife.
When Alex finally returns home to the dismal tower-block council flat where he lives with his bemused parents, we are treated to his hallucinogenic dreams, including one showing four crucified and bleeding Jesus-figures tap-dancing, another showing men leering at a woman in a white dress dropping through a trapdoor as she is hanged. Alex is visited by his middle-aged male social worker who warns him he risks being arrested by the police, before trying to pull Alex into a homosexual act. To produce a further frisson in violating the values of the Self, the film’s more lurid scenes are accompanied by classical music, particularly the ‘Ode To Joy’ final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, which is implausibly described as exciting Alex like nothing else. He picks up two little teenage nymphets, takes them back to his room to show off his hi-fi system and engages with them in a frenzied sexual orgy, to the sound of the William Tell overture. Alex’s gang are getting restive that he does not organise sufficiently lucrative robberies for them, so he leads them off to rob a health farm, run by a rich woman surrounded by gigantic works of pornographic art. Having seen them coming, she rings the police, but when the gang enters Alex bludgeons her to death with a giant sculpted phallus. Police cars arrive and, as the gang flee, one of them deliberately hits Alex in the face with a bottle so that he is caught by the police.
The second half of the film shows Alex in prison, where he is chosen as an ideal subject to test an experimental new rehabilitation technique. This is a drug-based form of aversion therapy which provides an excuse to show yet more filmed images of extreme violence, including the inevitable gang-rape; the idea being that, whenever Alex is tempted to commit sex and violence, the drugs will cause him to vomit in revulsion. When newsreel shots of Nazi violence are accompanied by Beethoven’s Ninth, this also inadvertently induces in him a horror of his favourite music. Finally, when it seems he is ‘cured’, he is returned to society as a kind of brainwashed zombie (‘a clockwork orange’) where he is subjected to a succession of beatings and humilations by his previous victims. These include the now crippled old writer, who plays Beethoven at him very loudly, prompting Alex to attempt suicide by jumping out of a window.
When he recovers in hospital, he finds the aversion therapy has worn off. But by now he has become famous as an example of the government’s new method for treating violent criminals. The film ends with him doing a deal whereby, in return for a well-paid job, he agrees that the government can use him for propaganda purposes, to show what a success its new policy has been. But of course nothing has been resolved since, behind his new persona, he is completely unchanged. He is still the psychopath he always was.7
This glossily-packaged commercial for sex and violence coincided in 1971 with Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, also set by a well-known American director in Britain. The hero David, played by Dustin Hoffman, is an American mathematician who has brought his mini-skirted young English wife Amy back home for a year’s sabbatical in a lonely farm house, set in a desolate, treeless Cornish landscape. An air of brooding menace centres on the primitive, dirty village nearby, dominated by Tom Venner, a drunken, bullying old patriarch, who holds court in the pub with his brutalised sons and has a would-be-sexy 14-year-old daughter, Janice.
The ineffectual David is so wrapped up in his life of the mind, as he chalks up equations on a blackboard, that his physically frustrated wife deliberately allows a gang of builders to see her standing naked in the hallway. She then arranges for David to be out of the house, so she can receive an old lover, who slaps her about before tearing off her clothes to penetrate her. She is enjoying this when they are interrupted at gunpoint by one of the builders, who takes over, turning adultery to rape. Little Janice meanwhile flaunts her sexuality in front of a mentally retarded young man in the village, disappears with him and ends up being strangled.
When the village idiot comes to the farmhouse pleading for sanctuary from her pursuing father and brothers, David agrees to protect him. This prompts the enraged Venner and his sons to storm vengefully up to the house, where Amy wants to hand the murderer over, But, faced with this crisis, her hitherto weak, over-cerebral husband suddenly discovers the physical side of his masculinity, hitherto so conspicuously lacking. As the attackers prepare to break into the house, he slaps his wife into submission and prepares to meet force with force. There is a long, extremely violent battle, which leaves the farmhouse strewn with corpses (the heroine herself finally shooting Venner, in an echo of High Noon, just as the old monster is about to kill her husband). The triumphant hero is last seen driving off smiling into a fog-shrouded landscape, to hand over the village idiot to the authorities. He has discovered his masculine strength.
In archetypal terms, this is the only interest of the story. Through most of the plot, the hero, lost in his intellectual calculations, is only the indecisive shadow of a man. Everyone else in the story is aggressively physical. The two female characters are sex-mad; the men brutal, violent and also sex-mad. Eventually the scales tip, the ineffectual wimp discovers his manhood and becomes as violent as any of them. This familiar wishful-thinking reversal (‘weak, humiliated guy gets his own back on his persecutors’) provides the excuse for a prolonged explosion of blood, violence and death, before the story concludes in a typical pseudo-ending with its hero disappearing into the fog. This of course leaves wholly unresolved the question of how he is going to explain to the police that he and his wife have just been responsible for shooting several people.
A film which aroused a stir the following year was Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), starring Marlon Brando as a middle-aged American expatriate living in a dingy quarter of Paris, full of prostitutes and drug-addicts, whose wife has recently committed suicide. He roams the streets and decides to inspect a vacant flat. Jeanne, a French girl barely out of her teens and waiting for her boyfriend to arrive on a train, decides on an impulse to look at the same flat. While she is wandering through the rooms, Brando looms out of the shadows. After sparring over who should get the flat, they are about to leave when they suddenly grab each other and snatch a fumbled act of sex against the wall. This launches a series of further meetings in the all-but empty apartment, each marked by acts of crude, impersonal, unloving copulation which become the main theme of the film. What gave it the frisson of novelty was the sight of two anonymous people, so cut off in their own egos that they never even get to know each other’s names, meeting merely to co-operate in the act of sex. An episode which generated a particular stir in 1972 was where Brando used butter to lubricate his entry into the girl’s anal passage. Eventually she wearies of participating in this loveless sexual game with an ageing, totally self-absorbed male and brings their meaningless relationship to an end.
If Last Tango ‘pushed back the frontiers’ in sexual terms, by showing sex for its own sake in the most dehumanised way possible, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) did the same for violence. This was loosely based on the same story of a real-life serial killer which had helped inspire Psycho. But the contrast between Hitchcock’s version and its successor showed just how far that rising spiral of sensationalism had travelled in just 14 years. A group of five aimless semi-hippies are led by one of them, Sally, to drive off in a van to a remote part of Texas, where in childhood she used to visit her grandfather. The party includes her crippled brother in a wheelchair. On the road an air of gathering menace is built up when they pick up a mad young man who freaks out and slashes himself, before they get rid of him. When they arrive at the grandfather’s old house, now abandoned, they hear from a whirring generator that the only other house nearby is occupied. When first one young man, followed by a girl, go to investigate, the film’s main action begins.
The house, littered with gnawed bones, is occupied by a family of psychopathic abattoir workers, including the young man they picked up on the road, who it turns out are also cannibals. One of them, Leatherface, wields a screaming chain-saw and wears a face-mask made from human skin. The film’s only purpose is to keep the audience’s sense of terror, horror, shock and disgust screwed to the highest pitch, as we see Sally’s friends one after another hacked to death, dismembered, generally treated like animals in an abattoir (we see the girl being hung from a meat hook before her naked corpse is dumped in a freezer) and finally eaten. A particularly obsessional sequence shows the cripple being chased through the woods in his wheelchair, before he meets the same grisly end as the others.
We eventually see that, living upstairs in the house, is the most horrible monster of them all, the family’s patriarchal old grandfather, accompanied, in a self-conscious reference to Psycho, by the mummified corpse of his wife, the grandmother. When only Sally is left, the director plays with his audience by allowing her to escape to what she imagines is the safety of a gas station on a nearby road. Except that she then discovers that the man running it is the family’s father, who returns her to hellish captivity. Finally she is allowed a second ‘thrilling escape’ and the film ends with her sitting alone on the back of a truck from which she has thumbed a lift, laughing in hysterical relief.
At least in Psycho, beyond the claustrophobic little nightmare world of Norman Bates’s motel, there had still been a reassuring framework of normality and social order. The deformed monster could finally be seen being lifted out of his shadowy, nyktomorphic kingdom into the light of common day, sitting as a shrunken, pathetic figure in his prison cell. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre there is scarcely any sense of such a normal, ordered outside world at all. There is no hint of that archetypal ending which would show the monsters being finally brought to book. All that has happened is that one of their victims has escaped, leaving the family of homicidal cannibals to live on in their shadowy kingdom. The film’s sole purpose has been to excite its audience by exposing them to as relentless and claustrophobic a stream of life-violating images as its creators’ fantasies could come up with. And once the compulsion to ‘push back the frontiers’ had reached this point, it would not be easy to find many further extremes of fantasy left to explore.
In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the pattern which has been the theme of this chapter worked towards its logical conclusion. The physical imagery of sex and violence, which had once seemed so novel and shocking when confined to just a few trail-blazing examples, gradually became commonplace across large areas of mainstream storytelling. Shots of naked couples engaging in the sexual act became an increasingly familiar feature of films and television dramas. Use of those once-taboo four-letter words became routine on the pages of novels and cinema screens. Horror movies spared no detail in focusing on the dismemberment of human bodies.
There was one last significant step left for the process to take, and this reflected the dramatic change which was taking place in Western society’s view of women, and in women’s image of themselves. In parallel with the rise of the feminist movement, the most conspicuous feature of this transformation was a conscious rejection of those values which had traditionally been understood as ‘feminine’, and a new emphasis on the importance of asserting that ‘masculine’ element in the female psyche which Jung terms the animus. The image of women was becoming de-feminised. No longer were the styles of women’s clothing intended to express such traditional feminine attributes as grace, allure, prettiness, elegance: they were designed to be either, in a hard, direct way, sexually provocative, or sexlessly businesslike. The more familiar the sight of the naked female body became on screens and stages, not to mention in newspapers and in millions of pornographic magazines, the more it lost its old aura of hidden female mystery. No longer were female characters in stories expected to display such traditional feminine qualities as innocence, modesty, intuitive understanding, a loving heart.
There was now a premium on showing animus-driven women capable of competing with men and outperforming them in masculine terms. Female characters were expected to be shown as just as clever and tough as men, mentally and physically. We have already touched on one early example of a film, Alien (1979), in which a woman was cast in an archetypally male role, as the central figure in the crew of a spaceship which is invaded by a peculiarly horrible and deadly monster. The basic plot of this film was very similar to that of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In a terrifyingly claustrophobic, closed little world, we see the seven crew members being picked off one by one, their bodies disintegrating in the most gruesome manner. Eventually only the tough, resourceful heroine is left alive, and in a final shoot-out, worthy of any male hero, she manages in the nick of time to blast the monster into space. The whole point of her part in the story was that nothing about it should be distinctively feminine. She was simply transposed directly into the traditional role of a manly hero.
A rather less straightforward example of the complications this gender-switch could lead to was the horror film The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The heroine Clarice Starling, a young police trainee with a psychology degree, is first shown as physically and mentally tough, a match for her all-male fellow-trainees. The emphasis is placed clearly on her masculine rather than feminine attributes. She is then, in a way which would be implausible whatever her gender, pitted by her superior officer in a battle of wits against the most fearsome criminal of the age.
Dr Hannibal Lecter is himself a renowned psychiatrist, but also happens to be serving a life-sentence as a cruel and clever serial killer who likes to eat the bodies of his victims. The purpose of her being sent to interview him in his prison cell is to pick his brains in trying to track down a second serial killer, still at large, who has killed three young women before removing parts of their skin. To build up the horror of what she has to face, when she walks down the corridor of cells to meet the cannibal, another mass-murderer hisses through the bars ‘I can smell your cunt’ (he later showers her with his semen). Lecter turns out to be a masterful, outwardly courteous, devilishly ingenious representative of the ‘dark masculine’ possessed by the ‘dark feminine’. He has the heartless, intuitive subtlety of a ‘Tempter’ figure, as he tries to lure the heroine under his spell. In this sense the gender wires begin to get crossed because, although Clarice is meant to represent tough modern womanhood, she finds herself getting drawn by his penetrating intelligence into the more familiar archetypal role of a young woman falling into the power of a male monster.
We then, however, switch to the world of the story’s other serial-killer, who we see abducting his fourth prospective victim. This is a young woman whom, as with her predecessors, he plans to keep as a prisoner in a pit in his cellar, until he can kill her and strip off parts of her skin. We thus see the archetypal situation repeated, a second young woman rather more obviously in the power of a ruthless monster. The two elements in the story are then gradually brought together, as Clarice uncovers a direct link between this second monster and Dr Lecter and tries to strike a bargain with him. In return for being taken from his horrible prison cell to more congenial surroundings, he must give her the clues she needs to track down the other killer.
In one sense, her scheme goes hideously wrong, in that this enables Lecter to escape, savagely killing two policemen on the way. In another it works, in that he has given her enough coded clues as to the identity of the second, lesser monster to enable her to track the serial-killer down. This enables her, in classic hero-fashion, to save the girl in the nick of time from a fate worse than death and slay the monster into the bargain. But the fact is that this second killer, a pathetic little obsessional middle-aged man, was only ever small fry. The real monster overshadowing the story is Lecter who, as we see in the film’s closing scene, has escaped to an agreeable Caribbean island. In other words, our heroine has not really fulfilled the proper role of a hero at all. Despite her little cardboard victory over his shadow, the chief figure of darkness in the story has successfully outwitted her. The monster lives on (to allow for him be brought back in the sequel).
In this new age of storytelling where so much of the once clear distinction between ‘light’ and dark’ had been lost, at least some vestige of it remained in stories like this where the conflict centres on a battle between the police, representing the values of the social order, and a psychopathic monster, representing in its most acute form the dark urge to rip all those values to shreds. But even this distinction was open to inversion, as was next year exemplified in another Hollywood film which in a sense brought the story traced in this chapter full circle.
Basic Instinct (1992) opens with a shot of an unidentified woman, her face hidden by blonde hair, engaged in passionate sex with a man. She is on top of him, in other words in the ‘male’ position. As they approach climax we see her tying him down to the bed with a white silk scarf, then secretly reaching for an ice-pick. As they come to frenzied orgasm she plunges the pick repeatedly into her partner, blood spurting everywhere, until he is dead.
Cast in what, in conventional terms, would have been the role of the story’s ‘hero’ is the policeman sent to investigate the crime, Nick Curran of the San Francisco Police Department. His chief antagonist is Catherine, the chief suspect, an ice-cold, beautiful, blonde heiress in her thirties. Everything the detective learns about this lady seems to confirm her guilt. She had been a regular sexual partner of the dead man, not because she loved him, as she makes clear, but simply because she enjoyed ‘fucking’ him. She has just published a seemingly self-incriminating novel about a woman who murders her lover with an ice-pick, after tying him to the bed with a white silk scarf. Nick discovers that, while she was at college reading psychology (as with Clarice Starling, this is Hollywood shorthand supposed to convey that she has a powerful, ‘masculine’ intelligence), one of her professors had been found murdered with an ice-pick. There are even suspicions that she had arranged the boating accident which killed her parents, leaving her a rich heiress.
However, Catherine soon begins to run rings round the detective. She deliberately uses her sexuality to draw him under her spell. It seems she knows far too much about his professional and private life, such as that he is former alcoholic and cocaine-user, that his wife committed suicide and that he had been in trouble for accidentally killing some tourists. This is because she has lured one of Nick’s fellow policemen into giving her his confidental police file, and when he discovers this, the culprit is soon found shot, leading to Nick’s suspension from duty as a suspect. He besottedly tracks Catherine down in a nightclub in a converted church, where he finds her taking cocaine in a lavatory cubicle with a black man, with her lesbian partner standing by. But Catherine takes him home to bed, to engage in frenzied sex, and when she insists on tying him down with a white silk scarf he is so carried away by the excitement he no longer cares whether she is about to murder him or not.
In archetypal terms, Catherine is thus a classic Temptress, beautiful and deadly. Yet, in the spirit of late-twentieth-century ‘feminism’, she is very much presented as the story’s heroine, precisely because she is a strong, clever woman making a fool of all the men around her, above all the weak, bemused hero. And just to neutralise any concerns the audience might have at admiring such a ruthlessly dark figure, the script is then given a cunning twist.
By hints and innuendos, a second woman is built up as Catherine’s doppelganger. Nick learns that Beth, his police colleague and former girl friend, had been at college with Catherine, where they read psychology together. They had enjoyed a lesbian affair. They had both dyed their hair blonde, dressed alike and tried to look alike. Had Beth, Nick wonders, killed her husband, just as Catherine killed her parents? When Nick arrives just too late to save his closest friend from being murdered with an ice-pick by a half-glimpsed blonde woman, he then runs into Beth in the same building, seemingly holding a gun, and shoots her. It turns out she had not been holding a gun at all, and her dying words are ‘I love you’. So had Beth really committed this latest murder or not? Had she even been responsible, Nick begins to wonder, for all the other murders as well? Or had all the clues pointing to this been planted with devilish cunning by the real murderer, Catherine herself? Deliberately we are denied any of the information which would provide answers to these questions. Then, when Nick finally returns home, he finds Catherine waiting for him. They make passionate love, with her in the ‘male’ position on top. As the film ends, the camera slides down her side of the bed to the floor, where we see an ice-pick. Is Catherine about to murder the detective in an exact repeat of the film’s opening scene? We are left suspecting she might, but we are never allowed to know.
Although the story is thus deliberately turned into a nyktomorph, an image which cannot be resolved, to tease its audience into seeing Catherine as an ambivalent figure who just might not be guilty after all, Yet we have already seen quite enough of her to know that she has all the attributes of a heartless monster. As a metaphorical counterpart to Hannibal Lecter, she is a complete ‘man-eater’. She is a supreme example of a woman in the grip of her ‘negative animus’, driven by the masculine component in her personality in the darkest way possible. Using her sexuality as a bait, she is hard, cruel, calculating, predatory, using her power only to destroy. She is egotism incarnate. And in this respect, we have seen the world of fantasy moving from one end of the spectrum to the other. In the beginning was de Sade enjoying the spectacle of Justine, the selfless ‘light feminine’, being made the helpless victim of a succession of devilish men. The pattern eventually comes full circle, showing a devilish woman, possessed by her inner masculinity in its darkest form, making helpless victims of a succession of weak men. Yet, so far had the ‘dark inversion’ taken over the fashionable image of womanhood that, unlike her male counterpart Lecter, this glamorous psychopath could somehow be presented to the audience as a heroine to be admired.
What may be seen as a final forlorn footnote to the story traced in this chapter was reflected in a London critic’s summary at the end of the century of what he called ‘possibly the most significant phenomenon in British theatre since the premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956’. He described how, in the mid-1990s, a ‘new breed of writers in their twenties and early thirties’ had ‘burst through from nowhere’, with a new style of play which had been ‘quickly dubbed ‘in-yer-face’ theatre’. This featured such apparent novelties as:
‘sickening acts of sexual and physical violence, obscene langage and a despairing view of contemporary society that seemed entirely nihilistic ... anal rape, eyeball gouging, on-stage defecation, drug-addicted rentboys, cannibalism and torture became stock ingredients in the dramatic stew.’
Can we not hear a yawn stretching back at least a generation, if not further? After all, had not even Shakespeare included cannibalism in Titus Andronicus and eyeball gouging in King Lear? Although in his case, of course, these images had merely been incidental to the unfolding of larger and more complete stories, in which the perpetrators of the original shocking acts of violence eventually pay the penalty, according to the pattern of the archetype.
The central figure in this new vogue was a young female playwright, Sarah Kane, whose Blasted, written when she was 23, was first staged at London’s Royal Court in 1995. Ian, a hardbitten, foul-mouthed tabloid journalist with a liver problem, and Cate, a simple-minded 21-year old who lives with her mum, are in a hotel room. He carries a gun, constantly uses four-letter words and makes racist comments about the hotel’s non-white staff. He starts to masturbate in front of Cate, tries to undress her, then forces her to hold his penis while he concludes his masturbation. She says she will not have sex with him because she is not his girlfriend any more and has promised herself to Shaun. They talk inconsequentially about football, her chances of getting a job and whether he has ever killed anyone.
When they wake early next morning, Cate is angry and prepares to leave. He holds his gun at her head, lies between her legs and simulates sex until he ejaculates. He tells her that people are trying to kill him. Cate performs oral sex on him, and ends by biting his penis. They order breakfast. When it arrives, Cate disappears into the bathroom because she feels sick after her sex act. A soldier enters with a rifle. He takes Ian’s gun, eats both breakfasts, looks into the bathroom and finds Cate has disappeared. There is a loud explosion. The hotel has been blasted by a mortar bomb, knocking the soldier unconscious. When he comes round, he tells Ian how he and other soldiers had been inspecting a house, where they had only found a small boy. One had shot him through the legs. Then they found three men and four women hiding in the basement. He himself had raped the women, the youngest a girl of twelve:
‘then she cried. Made her lick me clean ... shot her father in the mouth. Brothers shouted. Hung them from the ceiling by their testicles.’
After more conversation, in which the soldier recalls how his own girlfriend had been buggered, had her throat cut and her ears and nose hacked off and nailed to the front door, he holds the revolver to Ian’s head and rapes him, while ‘crying his heart out’. The scene ends with the soldier sucking out each of Ian’s eyes in turn, and eating it. The final scene opens with the soldier having blown his brains out. Cate enters, soaking wet, carrying a baby a woman has given her to look after. ‘Everyone in town is crying ... soldiers have taken over.’ The baby is crying for food. Ian wants to kill himself. Cate says this would be wrong, ‘God wouldn’t like it’. Ian replies:
‘there isn’t one ... no God. No Father Christmas. No fairies. No Narnia. No fucking nothing.’
Ian tries to shoot himself, but the gun doesn’t work. Cate discovers the baby is dead. She buries it beneath the floorboards, under a cross made from two pieces of wood, and leaves to find some food. Ian masturbates to the word ‘cunt’ repeated 11 times. He defecates on the floor, tries to clean it up and then hugs the soldier’s corpse. He tears the cross out of the ground, lifts out the baby’s body and eats it. He puts the remains back under the floor and climbs into the hole. It rains through a hole in the roof. Cate returns, gives him food and gin, drinks some herself and sits sucking her thumb. At last Ian says ‘thank you’. The stage blacks out.
In 1999, as the twentieth century came to its close, the authoress of Blasted hanged herself, at the age of 28. Before her death, according to an anthology of contemporary British plays, she had ‘established an international reputation as the leading playwright of her generation’. Her ‘theatrical gods’, according to her director, included Samuel Beckett and Edward Bond. Psychologically, by far the most interesting feature of her best-known play was the character of Cate who, most unusually in stories of this blackness, is shown as essentially good-hearted. She tries to live by some values, has a simple religious sense, cares for the baby, marks its death with a cross, and ends up feeding the eyeless, hopeless Ian like a child. In her mentally retarded state, Cate is a projection of the authoress’s own repressed inner femininity. But this part of her is constantly degraded and overridden by the hard, superior masculine element in her personality, the dark animus represented by the figure of Ian (which eventually splits into two, with the appearance of the even more brutalised soldier). It is a tragically familiar pattern in real life that, when such a conflict develops in a woman’s personality, the aggression of her dark animus may eventually turn in on itself, driving her to suicide. In this sense, Sarah Kane’s play and her death were a final dark mirror to the inner world of the age: to that psychic disintegration which storytellling had not only reflected but was helping to urge on.
We ended the last chapter with a Hollywood film of the 1980s, E.T., which showed how, even in the least promising surroundings, stories can still, on a sentimental level, recover contact with their fundmental archetypal purpose. At first sight The Terminator (1984) might seem just another story relentlessly parading the gratuitous imagery of violence. But, when it is taken together with its sequel, Judgement Day (1991), we can see how the unconscious structures ultimately bring this story back to an almost completely archetypal resolution.
The first film opens with the arrival in Los Angeles in 1984 of a truly monstrous figure (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger). Outwardly he appears to be a human being. In fact he is a magically ingenious computer, sent back to contemporary California from a time nearly 50 years into the future, on a deadly errand. That world of the year 2029 is in ruins, after a nuclear war launched in 1997 by a near-omnipotent computer system, Skynet. This autonomous super-intelligence runs the future world like a totalitarian state, and wishes to eliminate human beings altogether. But those humans who survive have launched a heroic war of resistance, under their leader John Connor. The mission of the terminator in returning to 1984 is to seek out Connor’s mother, Sarah, and destroy her, before her son can be born.
The terminator is only programmed to do one thing, to kill. It is a perfect representation of the ‘masculine’ aspects of the human psyche without any ‘feminine’ balance. Physically and mentally it seems unstoppable, It is so cleverly designed that, even if smashed to pieces, it can immediately restore itself to full working order. But, like any computer, it completely lacks the feminine attributes which would be necessary to make its strength positive. It is totally incapable of feeling, and it lacks intutive understanding, the ability to see whole. It can only see what it has been programmed to see.
The machine’s inability to see the wider picture soon becomes apparent when it starts to track down women called Sarah Connor in the telephone book. There are only three of them and, of course, by the storytelling Rule of Three, it coldly wipes out two before finally locking onto the right one. But by this time she has a helper, Kyle, another figure from the future, this time fully human, who has been sent to protect her by the resistance leader, her son, as yet unborn. The Terminator’s seeming invincibility, in that it can never be destroyed, is of course, only a reworking in modern terms of that archetypal motif familiar from so many earlier myths and stories, from Hercules’s Hydra to Dracula: the monster’s capacity, however many times the hero manages to cut off its head or hack it to pieces, simply to re-form itself and reappear as good (or bad) as new. The film thus becomes like one of those Tom and Jerry cartoons in which cat and mouse repeatedly flatten or blow each other to bits, before they jump up again as if nothing has happened.
Eventually the heroine and Kyle escape just long enough for him to make her pregnant, before a final nightmare chase when the machine closes in to destroy them. Kyle manages in a heroic, suicidal gesture to blow both the Terminator and himself to pieces. But still the machine re-emerges, to crawl relentlessly after the heroine through a gigantic metal press. And it is of course she who, according to the late-twentieth-century’s gender-reversal, ends up playing the archetypal role of the hero, by managing in the nick of time to bring the press crashing down, imprisoning and crushing the monster beyond repair. It is as if Perseus or St George had been overcome by their monsters, leaving their Princesses to finish it off. But at least our heroine is now pregnant with the hero of the future, and the film ends with her in Mexico, driving off as a great storm brews up, full of foreboding for the future.
Judgement Day, set some years later, shows the boy John as a young tearaway who had been adopted after his birth by a suburban family because his mother Sarah is locked away in a lunatic asylum. She had been certified as insane because of her babbling on about how her son’s father was a man sent from the future to make her pregnant. Again two figures from the future then appear, but this time both are humanoid computers which have been sent to track John down at all costs.
One is the stony-faced Schwarzenegger, re-born from his earlier destruction. When the other, who can take on the outward appearance of any human being, disguises himself as a policeman, we are meant to assume he must be a new protector-figure, sent to save the young hero from the deadly Terminator. But we then learn, after various exhibitions of mutual violence and mayhem, that their roles are in fact reversed. Our old friend the Terminator is now the ‘goody’, sent from the future by John in his adult self, to ensure that he survives to play his future role as resistance leader. The ‘policeman’ is an even more deadly brand of Terminator, sent by the totalitarian computer system to ensure that John and his mother are eliminated. The ‘good’ Terminator saves Sarah in the nick of time from destruction by his rival in the mental hospital, and escapes with her and the boy to a kind of ‘hippy’ encampment in Mexico (a typical ‘inferior realm’ in which the seeds of redemption are destined to germinate). Here he reveals he has been programmed to do anything the boy orders him to do. John’s mother, watching them play together, sentimentally muses that he is the ideal, strong, protective ‘father’ her son never had; although, being a machine, he of course has no comprehension of human feelings and cannot, for instance, understand why they sometimes cry.
Sarah also now discovers that, at this very moment, a brilliant scientist called Dyson, a black American, is putting the final touches to the super-computer system which is destined eventually to launch a nuclear holocaust and take over the world. She realises she must avert this catastrophe by destroying his research institute. And although she storms into Dyson’s family home with all the violence of a Terminator herself, she soon convinces him that, for the sake of the future of mankind, his project must be aborted. Although the ‘bad’ Terminator inevitably tries to stop them, and the ‘good’ Terminator has now been ordered by young John not to kill any more human beings, there follows yet another luridly violent battle which ends in the institute being destroyed.
This leads to the climactic ‘nightmare stage’, conveniently ending in a metal foundry, in which the ‘bad’ Terminator closes in on John, his mother and his ‘good’ rival. Thanks to Schwarzenegger, the ‘bad’ Terminator is eventually plunged into a vat of molten metal and is hideously destroyed. But then comes a last twist to the whole story, which shows the power of the archetypal structure once again reasserting itself. In a typically sentimental Hollywood ending, the ‘good’ Terminator explains to John and his mother that, in order to save mankind, they must help him to be melted down too. Otherwise he and the computer ‘super-chip’ he is carrying would be enough to ensure that the totalitarian computer-system would still take over the world. As he bids his farewell to them, he says he has at last learned why it is that human beings cry. As a machine, he has at last done the impossible and begun to develop human feelings. That is why he knows he must selflessly sacrifice his own existence, to save humanity. With tears in their eyes, John and his mother see their friendly Terminator dissolving into a molten lake, throwing in the vital chip after him. Humanity has been saved. The values of the Self have won the day.
In rational terms, of course, none of this stands up for a moment. If the dark power of the Terminators has truly been destroyed, then so has the supercomputer of the future which created them. They could never have existed in the first place. The world of 2029 could never have materialised in the way it has been described. There would be no nuclear holocaust in 1997; no ruins amid which John could lead his resistance struggle; no John Connor in 2029 to send his father back to the world of 1984 to impregnate his mother. The boy John, whom we have been watching throughout the film, could never have been born. None of this remotely makes sense, but that is not the point.
The point is that, through all this endless parade of make-believe violent imagery, in one of the most relentlessly violent stories ever put on a cinema screen (apart from a Tom and Jerry cartoon), we have seen the two dark versions of the Terminator as personifications of the human ego and the ‘masculine’ values of physical and mental power, in their most deadly, remorseless guise. We have seen them as agents of an immense, all-knowing totalitarian power, a ‘dark Self’, dedicated to the extermination of the human race. Yet in the end they have all been destroyed, simply because one of these mechanical embodiments of the human ego has been through a classic Rebirth. Its heart has been awakened, its eyes have been opened to ‘see whole’. It has switched from ‘dark’ to ‘light’. And by dying in its ego-self, it has merged with the interests of the true totality; that universal, eternal ‘Self’ which is the living force behind all the universe. Out of the black depths of such a vision of chaos and destruction, the archetype has again re-formed itself into that image of wholeness which lies at the heart of what our urge to imagine stories is about.
But, if the conclusion of The Terminator finally shows the archetype of the Self winning the day, in one sense it always wins the day in stories, because, even on a sentimental level, this is the only way in which any story can be brought to a proper resolution. The archetype cannot be cheated. If it is defied, the story is doomed just to peter out, or to be forced into some implausible ‘pseudo-ending’ which leaves its audience curiously unsatisfied. None of the other stories we have looked at in this chapter have been able to reach anything like such an all-resolving conclusion. The ending of Fanny Hill is just a little cardboard fake; that of Justine is like a final despairing gesture of defiance at the values of the Self which the whole novel has tried to deny; that of Ulysses is a last forlorn act of masturbatory make-believe in the meaningless wilderness of the ego. Lady Chatterley peters out in vacuous wishful-thinking. At least in Psycho the monster is finally shown, in rather half-hearted fashion, as having been brought to justice. By the time we reach Last Exit to Brooklyn and Saved the values of the Self have passed so far out of sight that their stories scarcely try to resolve at all. In A Clockwork Orange the psychopathic hero does eventually seem about to change, but only to re-emerge at the end in the same monstrous state in which he began. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the monsters simply live on, as they do in Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct. Nothing in any of these stories is ever properly resolved, because their only real purpose has been to titillate the fantasies of their audiences with a stream of Self-defying images which by definition are incapable of leading to a resolution.
The only real value of this explosion of sex and violence in the storytelling of the late twentieth century lies in the evidence it provides of how quickly, when human fantasy ventures down this path, it runs into a dead end. We soon become familiar with the same repetitive handful of clichéd images, mechanically revolving round in the same claustrophobic little circle, unable to lead anywhere and totally divorced from any deeper meaning. But the realm of the imagination open to storytelling is so infinitely larger than this that it is time to return to the wider world.