‘Then Job answered the Lord, and said: “I know that thou cans’t do every thing, and that no thought can be witholden from thee ... I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.” ’
Book of Job, Ch. 42
‘ “Then you think there is no God?”
“No, I think there quite probably is one.”
“Then why ...?”
Mustapha Mond checked him. “But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In pre-modern days, he manifested himself as the being that’s described in these books. Now ...”
“How does he manifest himself now?” asked the Savage.
“Well, he manifests himself as an absence, as though he weren’t there at all.” ’
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
‘It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.’
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
In this chapter and the next we shall be looking for the first time at two new plots. Although no survey of the patterns of storytelling would be complete without them, there are good reasons why they should not have been included among the seven central plots which form the core of this book. The Mystery, which we come to in the next chapter, has over the past two centuries provided the basis for one of the most successful genres in modern popular storytelling, the detective story. But, as we shall see, this type of story only emerged as a by-product of that shift in the psychological ‘centre of gravity’ which has characterised storytelling since the rise of Romanticism.
Similarly the plot which is the theme of this present chapter cannot be described as basic to the understanding of stories, because it only occurs very rarely. Indeed we shall be looking at only three examples. One is ancient, taken from the Bible. The others are two of the best-known novels produced by the twentieth century. But between them they shed a clearer light on a particularly important aspect of human psychology than we see reflected in any other type of story.
The essence of this plot is that it shows us a solitary hero who finds himself being drawn into a state of resentful, mystified opposition to some immense power, which exercises total sway over the world in which he lives. Initially he increasingly feels he is right and that the mysterious power must in some fundamental way be at fault. But suddenly he is confronted by that power in all its awesome omnipotence. The rebellious hero is crushed. He is forced to recognise that his view had been based only on a very limited, subjective perception of reality. He ends accepting the power’s rightful claim to rule over the world and himself.
The story of Job, probably developed from a Babylonian original around 400 BC, is not like anything else in the Bible. It begins with a hero who is described as ‘a perfect and upright’ man, ‘one that feared God and eschewed evil’. He is rich and powerful, ‘the greatest of all the men in the East’. He has ‘a very great household’, many servants and possessions, and lives happily surrounded by a large family, including seven sons and three daughters. But then Satan, described as a ‘son of God’, suggests to God that the only reason why Job seems so perfect is that God has ‘made a hedge about him’. Of course it is easy for Job to be God-fearing when he enjoys every blessing the world can offer. But Satan throws down a challenge. If God will allow him to undermine Job’s prosperity, he will soon win Job away from his perfect loyalty. God agrees to this, on condition that no harm is done to Job physically.
Satan sets about destroying Job’s ‘kingdom’ with a will. Job is robbed of all his possessions. His servants are put to the sword. A mighty wind blows up from nowhere, destroying his eldest son’s house and killing all his sons and daughters. In face of all this horrifying news Job remains unshakeable. ‘The Lord giveth’, he says, ‘the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ Round one to God. However, Satan then gets permission from God to afflict Job directly, with the worst possible physical torments, so long as he does not actually kill him. Job develops boils all over his body, so agonising that he finally curses the day he was born. He is beginning to crack.
Then follows a long debate between Job and three of his friends, who come to comfort him. Initially he seems to have recovered his philosophical acceptance of what has happened. But gradually he turns on his ‘comforters’, accusing them of just preaching empty words at him. He muses on how really wicked people, ‘those that rebel against the light’, so often seem to get away with their crimes, without being punished. He reminisces self-pitifully about how he used to be blessed and respected by all, but now ‘they that are younger than me have me in derision’. He begins to list all the virtuous things he has done throughout his life, to show how little he has deserved his terrible fate. Why has God abandoned him? And at this point ‘the three men ceased to answer Job because he was righteous in his own eyes’.
Then a fourth, younger man, Elihu, breaks in to reprove not only Job himself but also the three others, because they have so obviously failed in getting Job to understand. ‘Job hath spoken without knowledge.’ He has dared question the actions and wisdom of the creator of the universe, whose power and knowledge are far greater than any mere mortal can begin to understand. Not only are all men sinners, including Job. He has now added ‘rebellion to his sin’. And at this point, in an awesomely dramatic intervention, God himself addresses Job ‘out of the whirlwind’, in a speech of overwhelming power. ‘Who is this that darkeneth counsel without knowledge?’ Where were you, he asks Job, ‘when I laid the foundations of the earth?’ After a long recital demonstrating his omnipotence and omniscience, Job is utterly crushed: ‘I know that thou cans’t do everything ... I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes’. Seeing his abject capitulation, the Lord accepts that the test is over and blesses ‘the latter end of Job more than his beginning’. He ends up twice as rich as before, with seven new sons and seven new daughters (‘in all the land were no women found so fair’) and lives happily for many more years until finally coming to a peaceful end, ‘old and full of days’.
In the Book of Job the omnipotent power is presented as entirely ‘light’. The symbolism of light and dark runs through the story. We are never left in any doubt that the only character who is dark and entirely at fault is Job himself. It is his self-justifying ego which blinds his understanding, rendering him unable to see whole. The central point of the story is that his ego has to be crushed and his eyes opened, so he can at last see that he is just a self-centred little mortal creature who has no right to see himself as separate from the all-powerful, all-knowing spirit which created him and everything else, from the stars in heaven to the monsters of the deep. In this sense, Job ends the story entirely at one with the eternal power which lies behind the universe. He has come to see whole. He has at last found his inmost identity, and for this he finds happiness to the end of his days.
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, when civilisation had been through unimaginable changes, two English novelists produced well-known stories based on a dark version of this plot. Each is set in an imaginary future, showing a world which has passed under the control of an immense totalitarian power which purports to be light, and which demands total conformity to its collective ways of thought and behaviour. Each centres on a hero who, like Job, sets out to question that power – until in the end he is crushed into submission.
Like all stories set in some future time, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is based on projecting into the future certain characteristics of the contemporary world in which the author was writing.1 In his case these were features of modern Western civilisation which had become increasingly prominent in the 1920s, with its technological innovations, material comfort and loosening codes of sexual behaviour. The inhabitants of his ‘brave new world’ live in a London dominated by a series of huge, shining concrete skyscrapers, set amid trees (along the lines of Le Corbusier’s contemporary vision of the ‘radiant City’ of the future). They are conditioned by drugs and by unconscious brainwashing to see themselves as entirely happy. Their consciousness is shaped entirely by the state, through slogans drilled into their subconscious while they sleep. They are born from test tubes, so that family life has been completely eliminated. The idea that anyone should have a ‘Father’ and a ‘Mother’ is regarded as obscene. They have been conditioned to hate anything to do with nature. The world, as they are conditioned to see it, is entirely shaped by man and his technology, just as history has been rewritten to support this view. And the ultimate crime in this society is for any of its members to think or feel for themselves. They must never be alone, except to engage in incessant, promiscuous sex. No one must form a lasting relationship with anyone else.
What this brave new world order represents is a collectivising of the human ego in the name of a selfless totality, except that everything representing the genuine Self has been ruthlessly excluded. Its citizens engage in quasi-religious ceremonies to keep them securely bonded into the collective identity. And what above all binds them together is the collectivising of the physical and mental pleasures of the ego, as the state arranges for them to enjoy an unlimited supply of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll (or its contemporary equivalent). This is performed in what had formerly been churches, such as Westminster Abbey, now converted into the equivalent of ‘discos’ as society’s central shrines.
The story begins when its hero, Bernard Marx, begins to commit the ultimate offence against this totalitarian order by feeling increasingly resentful of all the techniques used to make him conform. He invites a female colleague to join him on a visit to the ‘New Mexico Savage Reservation’, inhabited by North American Indians, one of the few places in the world where nature and human beings are still allowed to survive in a ‘wild’ state. Here, in this ‘inferior realm’, he meets John, generally described as ‘the Savage’. This young man is the son of an English white mother who had been lost and abandoned when she was brought here on a fleeting visit from London, and he has been born and raised among the local Indians. John, ‘the Savage’, represents everything the World-State has eradicated and suppressed in its conformist subjects. He loves nature. He feels genuine, selfless personal emotions, like his love for his now decaying, dissolute mother. He has educated himself by reading the plays of Shakespeare (totally banned in the outside world). He is, in short, himself.
Marx is permitted to bring the Savage and his mother out of this ‘inferior realm’ back to the ‘above the line’ world in London, where John is horrified by everything he sees as being a hideous stultification of human nature. He sees its inhabitants as having been reduced to no more than sleep-walking zombies. At this point, so much clearer is the Savage’s perception of how limited the ‘ruling consciousness’ of this society has become, that he takes over from Bernard Marx as the story’s real hero. Finally, in the equivalent of Job’s confrontation with God, he and Marx are summoned for an interview with the immensely powerful Mustapha Mond, one of the World Controllers of the universal totalitarian state.
This seemingly benevolent, quasi-god-like figure explains in a fatherly way how he too had once been tempted to rebel against the new world order and to think for himself. He and the Savage even swap quotations from Shakespeare. But the World Controller has now come to appreciate the deeper and wider truth that the highest good for mankind is a completely stable, orderly society in which everyone unthinkingly and happily conforms to the collective stereotype. There can be no place in such a society for family life, great art or any deeper human feelings, because these are individualistic, disruptive and dangerous. The perfect unity of the new world order must at all costs be preserved.2
This is why Mond rules that Marx must be sent overseas to one of the remote islands reserved as prison camps for such dissidents. The story’s real hero, the Savage, is meanwhile allowed to leave London, to live in a lonely spot in the empty and abandoned countryside of Surrey. Here he becomes a tourist attraction, besieged by hordes of journalists, film cameras and coach parties, peering at him like some bizarre wild animal, Soon he can take no more of this brave new world and hangs himself.
At least in Huxley’s version neither Marx nor the Savage end up being crushed into willing submission to the totalitarian power. For the full dark inversion of the Job story we must go to the novel written by George Orwell shortly before his death in 1950. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) projects into a nearer future a picture of the rundown, bomb-damaged post-World War Two London in which Orwell lived but now ruled by a totalitarian regime far blacker than Huxley’s, based more than anything on what was then the contemporary Communist regime of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
As in Huxley’s version, London is dominated by a handful of huge skyscrapers. But these, inspired by those of Stalin’s Moscow, are the ministries through which the ‘Party’ imposes its ruthless will on the cowed citizens. Orwell’s ‘brave new world’ is the nightmare counterpart to that of which Huxley’s pleasure-dominated ‘Utopia’ had been the dream version. No one in Orwell’s world is happy. Spied on by the state through telescreens in every room, people are desperately short of food, perpetually fearful for their lives, and under relentless pressure night and day to conform like zombies to the model of citizenship imposed on them by the Party. They must join in collective hate of its enemies, and demonstrate unceasing collective love for the figure of the Party’s remote, mysterious Stalin-like leader ‘Big Brother’. In contrast to Huxley’s state, family life is still permitted, but only so that children can be encouraged by the state to spy on their parents. Sex is allowed only as a means of reproduction, a ‘duty to the Party’, never as a source of pleasure.
Again the story begins when its hero, Winston Smith, whose daily task is to play a tiny part in the Party’s incessant rewriting of history, finds himself questioning this totalitarian power which claims sway over every aspect of the world he lives in. It purports to be wholly benign, under the fatherly guidance of Big Brother, ‘full of power and mysterious calm’ (‘My Saviour’ shouts one woman when she sees him on the telescreen). All evil and darkness in the world is concentrated in the figure of the shadowy traitor Goldstein and in the country’s external enemies. But Winston becomes increasingly aware that the whole system is built on lies, a total dark inversion of the truth. He then surreptitiously meets and falls in love with the heroine, Julia, whom he had initially assumed was a fanatical Party member, but who then becomes a brave, loving anima-figure, much more practical and ingenious than himself in knowing how to evade the Party’s controls. Their secret commitment to each other is their ultimate act of disobedience to the regime, and as they are drawn ever further into opposition to all it stands for, they come to believe that a seemingly wise, powerful member of the ‘Inner Party’, O’Brien, is secretly sympathetic to their beliefs. O’Brien encourages them in this, and gives them a book which explains how the Party is in fact ‘dark’ and Goldstein ‘light’.
It seems they are on the edge of an astonishing, life-giving revelation. But suddenly Winston and Julia are arrested, prisoners of the all-seeing Party. Like Job when brought face to face with God, or Marx and the Savage in their interview with the World Controller, they are confronted by O’Brien himself, who turns out to be a senior member of the Thought Police. In the cells of the Ministry of Love O’Brien crushes Winston by physical torture and shows him how the Party is more all-powerful and all-seeing than he had ever imagined. For years he tells Winston:
‘I have watched over you. Now the turning point has come. I shall save you. I shall make you perfect.’
O’Brien tells Smith he has:
‘failed in humility ... you would not make the act of submission ... you believe that reality is something objective, external ... but reality exists only in the human mind.’
The aim is to ‘cure’ a man of such illusions:
‘We convert him ... we burn all evil and illusion out of him ... we bring him over to our side ... heart and soul.’
Winston asks whether Big Brother will ever die. ‘Of course not’. By now, like Job, he has been physically reduced to a rotting ‘bag of filth’. He accuses O’Brien of having done this to him. ‘No Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when you set yourself up against the Party’. Although Winston now accepts Big Brother’s authority, he still hates him. The time has come for the final ordeal. ‘It is not enough to obey Big Brother’, says O’Brien, ‘you must love him.’ Winston must be exposed to that which he fears most in all the world (‘he was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the other side of was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced’). The nature of this ordeal, because it is so profoundly personal, is for each victim different. In Winston’s case, it is the sight of giant, ravenous rats ready to gnaw his face. He shouts out that they should do it to Julia rather than himself. He has committed the ultimate betrayal. He has disowned his anima. He has submitted to the universal Dark Power. He can be released, to live out his days for a short time as a broken figure, in a kind of limbo. One day he meets Julia. She too has betrayed him and is a broken ghost. Winston waits for the unknown day when he will be summoned to be shot. In the meantime, he feels himself at one with the Party and all it stands for. As the story ends, ‘he had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother’.
In an earlier chapter, ‘Going Nowhere’, we looked at one way in which twentieth-century storytelling reflected the disappearance of that centrally important archetype of totality, the Self. The human psyche is so constituted that if any of its archetypal components no longer appear on a conscious level, this is not because they have vanished altogether. They regress into the unconscious, to re-emerge in some dark or ‘inferior’ form. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot we saw how the archetype of the Self casts its spell over the entire play in the mysterious off-stage presence of ‘Godot’.
Through most of human history, this archetype was nowhere more obviously represented than in the symbolism and myths associated with the world’s religions. Their central purpose was to bring human beings into contact with a deeper component in their psyche, which gave them the sense of belonging to something far transcending their own individual ego-existence. Where this level could be reached, it gave a sense of meaning and purpose to life; a sense of connection, not just to other people and all the world but to a dimension beyond time and existence altogether.
We see how this archetype was called into play by the story of Job and how, in the appearance of the all-powerful, all-knowing spirit behind the universe, Job is overwhelmed into a sense of his own utter insignificance. Up to this point, however aware he may have tried to be of some ‘higher power’ in his life, and of the need to conform his own life with what he imagines to be a pattern dictated by that power, he has still only been able to perceive the world from within his own little bubble of ego-consciousness. But now this bubble has been shattered, showing him how little he has really understood. Compared with the majesty of this super-mind which has created every last, minute detail of the universe, he knows nothing. Yet the very fact that he is part of this creation, that he is part of its complex purposes and that it is somehow concerned with his existence, gives Job a sense that, although in himself he is nothing, he is also identified with something infinitely greater than himself. He is part of the totality, ‘the One’. We thus see the immense power which this archetype can generate. But if its original purpose is light, so also it can be taken over by the ‘dark inversion’and turned to very different ends. Such is what we see in the other two stories.
The most obvious expression of the Self archetype in the twentieth century was that it shared the same fate as other archetypes. It was taken over by the ego and projected outwards. That once-religious hunger for a sense of totality, to be part of a single all-embracing unity, took on political expression: most notably through those totalitarian political systems which in the twentieth century came to be imposed over large parts of mankind. The whole point of a totalitarian system is that it seeks to control everything in the lives of the individuals who live under it. And it does so precisely because those who create it have become possessed by that unconscious archetype of totality which is now projected onto every detail of the way society is organised. But this is not done in the name of a genuine sense of totality, but only as the expression of a collectivised form of egotism, representing the attempt by one group of human beings to impose their power and control over the rest. The Nazi ideology claimed transcendent justification for imposing on the world the collective will of German nationalism and Aryan racial supremacy. Still more powerfully, Communism claimed universality for its wish to create a new world order in the name of the proletariat, the downtrodden masses. These totalitarian ideologies were unconsciously driven by that archetype of wholeness, but only in the name of part of the whole: as was unconsciously revealed in how they spoke of ‘the Party’ as the supreme embodiment of their collective will, the ‘part’ laying claim to the whole. It was the nature of this phenomenon which Orwell portrayed so acutely in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The appeal of Communism lay precisely in the extent to which it was inspired by an image of human totality, personified by Orwell in the all-wise, benevolent, almost god-like father figure of Big Brother. Obviously Communism represented the ‘above the line’ masculine attributes of strength, power, discipline and order. But it also claimed to speak in the name of the selfless ‘feminine’ values, the need to fight on behalf of all those ‘below the line’, to protect the oppressed. In holding out its Utopian vision of the ideal Socialist society, in which all egotism and exploitation have been abolished and all its members can march towards the ‘radiant future’, bound together in total unity, it projected a universal image of fully-realised humanity: body, mind, heart and soul in perfect balance. But this was no more than a colossal act of make-believe. There was no genuine balance to Communism. Certainly it represented power and organisation. but only as expressions of collectivised egotism, to be imposed on others. It had no life-giving feminine qualities at all. It was utterly heartless and soulless. It represented the ‘dark masculine’ in the grip of the ‘dark feminine’, the ego masquerading as the Self.
This is why Orwell’s novel is still so powerful, because, without using such language, it captures all this so accurately. Winston Smith comes to recognise that the system is all a lie, a dark inversion of the truth, and it is this which connects him to Julia, the anima-figure who represents instinct, individual feeling, everything the system cannot tolerate. But in the end the brutalised ‘dark masculine’ hits back, crushing them into submission, stamping out their feelings, their desire for truth, every last, selfless ‘feminine’ quality within them. In this sense, as a complete inversion of the book of Job, it can be read as one of the darkest stories ever conceived.
What Orwell was not to know, since he was writing in 1948 when Stalin’s tyranny was at its height, was that the time would come, only a few decades later, when the whole of this particular system of tyranny would come tumbling down, for precisely the reasons he intuitively grasped in his novel. All over the Soviet empire, from Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov in Russia to Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement in Poland, individuals would see how the claims of that ruling consciousness represented by the Party did not match up to the bleak, heartless, soulless reality based on lies they saw all around them. Eventually, from ‘below the line’, they would develop sufficient inner strength to bring the entire, decayed, corrupt, ‘above the line’ structure crashing in ruins. In this sense Winston Smith was destined ultimately to win: because, like the Savage in Brave New World, he represented that Self, that core of individual human identity, which can never be wholly suppressed. In the end, it will always somehow re-emerge, because the archetypes programmed into the human psyche cannot be cheated and can never die.3