‘When the Way was lost, there was virtue; when virtue was lost there was benevolence; when benevolence was lost there was rectitude; when rectitude was lost there were the rites; the rites are the wearing thin of loyalty and good faith and the beginning of disorder.’
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, XXXVIII
‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood dimmed tide is loosed; and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity ...
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
‘Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy ...
Strength should be lord of imbecility ...
Force should be right, or rather, right and wrong ...
Should lose their names ...
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf ...
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.’
Ulysses, Troilus and Cressida, I.iii
There is one mythological tradition in human history which stands separate from all the others. This is the web of myths which we can piece together from various epics of the pre-Christian peoples of northern Europe, which show the whole adventure of life on earth ending in a mighty, all-consuming catastrophe: the Teutonic Gotterdammerung, the Norse Ragnarok, the passing of the gods and the destruction of the world. There is one particular feature of this story which makes it an apt prologue to our final chapter, which looks at how storytelling has reflected the evolving consciousness of Western civilisation over the past 200 years.
Like many others before it, the Norse mythology saw the world as divided into three levels. That inhabited by mankind was Midgard or Middle Earth. Above it, in the heavens, was Asgard, home of the gods, the Aesir, presided over from his great hall, Valhalla, by the wise ‘All-Father’ Odin. The dim underworld of Helheim (from which we get our word ‘hell’) was where all human beings went after their death, except those killed in battle who ascended to Valhalla. In addition to these three familiar levels, separated from Midgard and Asgard by mountains, was the mysterious realm of Jotunheim, inhabited by giants. Although closely related to the gods, these often brutal, treacherous beings with supernatural powers were the Aesir’s worst enemies. If the gods represented ‘upper world’ consciousness, the giants represented their menacing shadow.
Some time after the creation of the world and all its inhabitants, while Odin and his brother are wandering through Midgard, on a forest path near the borders of Jotunheim they meet a handsome young man with twinkling eyes and a mischievous expression, who introduces himself as their ‘cousin’ Loki.
Loki becomes the most interesting figure in the story. Although he is of giant stock, the gods welcome him, because he is charming and cleverer than any of them. But there is something deeply ambivalent about his nature. In the perpetual rivalry between the Aesir and the giants, Loki’s ingenuity extricates the gods from one difficult situation after another, even though it is often Loki’s own two-sided nature which has created the problem in the first place. His trickery proves so useful to the gods that they invite him to become one of their own number. But somehow it seems there is always a catch to what their crafty new companion is up to; some hidden price to be paid for the benefits he brings them.
The dark side of Loki’s nature is confirmed when one day he disappears and Odin, looking down from the lofty eyrie from which he can view all the world, is eventually horrified to spy him in Jotunheim, playing with three young monsters. It turns out that Loki has sneaked off to have an affair with a giantess, and that these are their offspring: Hela, half a living woman, half a decaying corpse; Jormengand, a fast-growing serpent; and Fenris, a ferocious wolf. The news strikes the Aesir like a thunderclap. Are these hideous creatures destined some day to play a part in the long-prophesied end of the world, Ragnarok, the Last Great Battle? At the urging of Thor, god of physical strength and battles, the gods take steps to neutralise these fearsome new arrivals. Hela is sent down to preside over the underworld. Thor hurls Jormengand into the sea, only for the monster to coil itself round the earth as the Midgard Serpent. The Fenris Wolf is eventually chained up on an island. But from now on the gods live in perpetual fear that, when the day of Ragnarok arrives, the terrifying power of these monsters will be unleashed.
Loki revenges himself for what has been done to his offspring by secretly cutting off the shining golden hair of Thor’s wife. When Thor guesses who is responsible, Loki attempts to appease his wrath by persuading the dwarves who fashion gold and wondrous inventions deep in the mountains to make a succession of miraculous gifts. One of these is new hair for Thor’s wife, spun from purest gold. They also include a gold ring which has the power to multiply itself, thus guaranteeing infinite riches, and a set of magic weapons: a spear for Odin which always returns to his hand after he has thrown it; a boat which can travel by sea, land and air; and a mighty hammer for Thor, so powerful that it will overwhelm any opponent. But the presentation of these gifts itself leads to a further row, which ends in one of the dwarves angrily sewing up the loquacious Loki’s mouth with leather. The other gods all laugh, at seeing him for once unable to speak. When Loki tears off the thong, it leaves his mouth scarred and his smile twisted. From now on he and the Aesir are set ever more at odds.
The showdown comes when it is announced that Baldur, Odin’s youngest son and the most loved of all the gods, has been made invulnerable to attack by any weapon made from a substance which originated in the earth. So dark has Loki now become that, by ‘dark inversion’, he develops a passionate hatred for the perfect young hero. He discovers that the one substance which can harm Baldur is mistletoe, because it grows on trees and therefore not directly from the earth. He hardens a twig of mistletoe into a dart and persuades Baldur’s blind brother to throw it. To the horror of the Aesir, the most loved of their number falls dead. They soon realise who is guilty of this crime and Loki is taken to a cave to be imprisoned, like Prometheus, in perpetual agony, pinned to a rock with venom ceaselessly dripping onto his skin.
How the story eventually ends is only known from a wise old woman who can see the future. She tells Odin that there will be three years of perpetual cold and darkness, the Fimbull Winter. Then the Last Great Battle will begin, when Loki and his three monsters break their bonds, joining the Giants and all the dark forces of the earth in unleashing a fearful assault on Asgard. Looking down on this twilight of the gods will be Surtur who, like his Roman equivalent Saturn, presides over endings and beginnings. After a mighty struggle, Thor and the great Midgard Serpent will kill each other; Odin will be eaten by the ravening Fenris Wolf, now grown to enormous size, although it in turn will then be slain by Odin’s son Vidar. Loki will engage in mortal combat with another of the Aesir, Heimdall the Watchman, ending in both their deaths. Surtur will then spread fire over all the earth, and everything living will perish.
At this point, says the prophetess, ‘darkness descends and I can see no more’. But then Odin himself has a vision. First he sees the earth covered with a great waste of storm-tossed waters. Then, rising out of the sea, he sees a new earth, covered in forests, meadows and rivers. There standing in the sunshine are his two older sons, together with the sons of Thor, and they are joined by Baldur, returned from Helheim. Down in Midgard, it seems that two members of the human race, hiding away in a dark cave, have also escaped Surtur’s holocaust, and they too emerge to begin repopulating the earth. Soon new halls are rising in Asgard, children are playing and Odin weeps for joy. At last he knows the meaning of the mysterious word he had whispered into Baldur’s ear as his dead son lay on his funeral ship. The word had been ‘rebirth’.
What makes the role played by Loki in this sequence of stories so significant is precisely his remarkable ambivalence. He is endlessly inventive, yet strangely amoral. Directly or indirectly he provides the gods with immense benefits. He brings them great riches, security, peace and prosperity, an array of fearsome weapons, magical new modes of transport. But always there is that shadowy underside to his feats of ingenuity, that hidden price to be paid, and nothing more so than the dreadful monsters he brings to birth which, although for a long time they can be kept out of sight and under control, are eventually destined to play a crucial part in destroying the world.
The function of Loki, who like Prometheus was associated with fire, is to personify ego-consciousness1; that inventive capacity of the human brain which, never more than in the past two centuries, has given Homo sapiens astonishing prosperity and the power to transform the earth to his own material advantage on an unprecedented scale. Yet for every new advance made possible by the onward march of one-sided human consciousness there has been a price to be paid: not least, of course, that it has brought that unprecedented command over the forces of nature which has the potential to destroy the earth and all the life it contains a thousand times over.
It is in this respect that the character of Loki provides an appropriate introduction to this final chapter, as we look at what the storytelling of the past 200 years reveals of the lengthening shadow cast by mankind’s triumphantly evolving consciousness.
In Part Three we saw how, in the decades around 1800, a remarkable change began to come over Western storytelling. Up to that time the vast majority of stories imagined by mankind had reflected an instinctive harmony with the values of the Self. But now something unprecedented happened. In many instances, the archetypal patterns underlying stories began to be refracted through the story-teller’s ego, and this had two consequences.
Firstly, it produced a ‘dark inversion’ of the types of story which archetypally show selfless heroes or heroines coming to a happy ending. We now see a new type of hero appearing in such stories, who is himself egocentric; but in thus defying the values of the Self, he cannot ultimately reach the goal.
Secondly, as stories lost touch with the deeper values of the Self, they became sentimentalised. Even where they try to act out the outward form of an archetypal pattern, because they are no longer concerned with the inner transformation of their central figures they become mere ‘entertainments’. They still manage to play on their audience’s archetypally-conditioned emotional responses, but only in an outward, make-believe fashion. Their characters become no more than two-dimensional stereotypes.
Such a psychic earthquake could not have come completely out of nowhere. Its premonitory tremors were felt long before the emergence of Romanticism proper. Even today, for instance, it would be very unusual to find a story which featured a wholly dark heroine and heroine coming to a triumphant happy ending. But such a story appeared as early as 1643, in a work written at the end of his life by Claudio Monteverdi, the first composer of full-scale operas. The Coronation of Poppaea begins by showing the emperor Nero enjoying an adulterous affair with a new mistress, Poppaea, who is engaged to marry young Otho. Seeing the supreme prize almost within her grasp, Poppaea is determined that Nero should leave his wife Octavia and make her his empress. When the wise old philosopher Seneca advises against this, Nero orders him to commit suicide. Poppaea rejoices, but Octavia persuades Otho to murder her in revenge for her faithlessness. The murder plot comes unstuck, and Otho is banished. Octavia resigns herself to her fate. The monstrous hero crowns his scheming mistress as empress of Rome, and they sing an ecstatic duet to celebrate the triumph of their love.
At exactly the same period of that turbulent epoch of the mid-seventeenth century, John Milton was working on the first sketches for his dramatic poem, Paradise Lost. So attractive and plausible did he make his story’s central character and God’s chief antagonist, the fallen angel Satan, that this was later to prompt William Blake to his famous comment that Milton was ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’.
It was not until a century later, however, that more direct precursors of the great Romantic upheaval began to appear, one of the first being that early novel which caused such a stir across Europe in 1748, Richardson’s Clarissa. This account of a dark hero obsessively setting out to deflower a chaste and virtuous heroine, eventually drugging and raping her to succeed in his quest, marked the appearance of that figure who over the following 100 years was to become the supreme expression of the Romantic inversion in Western storytelling: the ‘persecuted maiden’, the violated anima.
In the 1760s Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1765) was the first of those ‘Gothic novels’ which within a few decades would become one of the dominant genres in European storytelling. Complete with all the later familiar stage-machinery of gloomy vaults, ghostly apparitions, sinister forests and bleeding statues, this sensationalist fantasy excited huge fashionable attention by bringing back into storytelling the type of dark supernatural imagery which previously, in the rational ‘age of the Enlightenment’, had virtually dropped out of sight. But it did so in a curiously artificial fashion. What was happening was that the supernatural dimension to human existence which, since the Middle Ages, had been gradually pushed down into the unconscious by the increasingly one-sided consciousness of western civilisation was now re-emerging, but in a sentimentalised, ‘inferior’ form, merely to provide entertainment. Again, at the story’s climax, we see the violation of the anima when the Tyrant hero rushes to a graveyard at night in the hope of stabbing to death the innocent and persecuted heroine, only to find, like the later hero of Verdi’s Rigoletto, that he has inadvertently murdered his own daughter. It was a premonition of that melodramatic twilight world, playing on the emotions to maximum sentimental effect, which was to become commonplace in nineteenth-century storytelling, not least in opera.
Another foretaste of the earthquake to come was the Sturm und Drang movement of the early 1770s, of which the most celebrated product was Goethe’s sentimental fantasy The Sorrows of Young Werther. For the first time we see the ‘dark inversion’ taking over the plot of Tragedy. The audience is invited so to identify with the foolish young central figure in his infatuation with the cardboard heroine that his self-deluding immaturity supposedly becomes heroic.
In the 1780s, as France moved towards the cataclysm of its revolution, de Sade’s Misfortunes of Justine was in psychological terms as black a story as the world had yet seen: centred entirely on the mental sensations its author derived from fantasising about the prolonged sadistic and sexual degradation of the pure and selfless anima-figure who gave the book its title.
The revolutionary 1790s brought that deluge of ‘frantic’ and ‘extravagant’ stories which inspired such contempt in Wordsworth, none more fantastic than those ‘Gothic novels’ which were the best-sellers of the decade. In 1794 Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho won a then-record advance for a novel (£500), describing how its orphaned young heroine is kidnapped by her villainous uncle and imprisoned in a remote, mysterious castle in the Apennines. Here he subjects her to every kind of indignity and horror, some seemingly supernatural, in his efforts to force her to surrender her virtue and her fortune. She eventually makes a ‘thrilling escape’ and finally comes to a pasteboard happy ending in being reunited with the young man she loves. Two years later M. G. Lewis’s The Monk was a similar commercial success, describing a worthy Spanish abbot who becomes corrupted by a woman possessed by the devil, who has entered his monastery disguised as a male novice. Now utterly depraved, he relentlessly pursues a pious young girl who has come to him for absolution. Finally, to avoid detection, he murders her, but is caught and tortured by the Inquisition. He escapes burning by making a pact with the devil, but ends being cast into the fires of hell.
What marked out all these stories from almost anything the world had seen before (except those melodramatic early ‘novels’ which circulated during the later Roman empire) was something sensed by Wordsworth and his friend Coleridge when, in the early years of the nineteenth century, they tried to draw a distinction between ‘imagination’ and ‘fancy’ (or fantasy). There is a fundamental distinction between the psychological process which gives rise to these fantasy-based types of story, and that which created, say, the plays of Shakespeare (or, for that matter, the novels Jane Austen was beginning to write just when the vogue for ‘Gothic horror’ was at its height). Shakespeare’s plays stem from a genuinely creative imagination which connects with our inner reality and that of the world around us, based on profound observation and an intuitive understanding of human nature. By contrast, the stories of de Sade or the ‘Gothic novelists’ were created not from imagination but from fantasy, which operates in a quite different way.
Imagination, as Coleridge puts it in his Biographia Literaria (1817), is a living thing, producing original observations and images which heighten and deepen our perception and understanding of the world. But the fantasy or daydreaming level of the mind is not concerned with understanding. It is two-dimensional. It deals in fixed, ‘dead’ images, which can be used to trigger off in our consciousness a desired effect but which have no connection with the ‘real world’. They are no more than the play of shadows on a wall, which is why stories based on fantasy present us with such cardboard characters and provide only the counterfeit of human emotion.
The effect of fantasy on our minds can be extraordinarily powerful, but this relies on the way that, like day-dreaming, it operates by suggestion. It feeds on nyktomorphs, those shadowy, unresolved images which arouse an emotional response for the very reason that they tease our brain by giving it insufficient information fully to get hold of them. One of the most obvious tricks of fantasy-based writing is the way it uses particular words to trigger off such an automatic response. With the addition of a few suggestively incomplete words such as ‘measureless’ or ‘sunless’, for instance, the otherwise straightforward image of a stream flowing underground may be conjured (by Coleridge himself, in the most overtly dreamlike of all his poems) into lines as powerful as:
‘Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.’
Take away from Romantic storytelling or poetry all such nyktomorphic trigger words as nameless, infinite, weird, mysterious, strange, faery, enchanted, ghostly, gloomy, phantom, wraith-like, dream-like, nebulous, unearthly, lurking, haunting, trembling, obscure, tempestuous, ghastly, fearful, dread, etc, and what was left of many admired stories and poems would be no more interesting and a good deal less meaningful than the telephone directory. Thus in A Vision of the Sea Shelley writes:
‘... where the hum of the hot blood that spouts and rains
Where the gripe of the tiger has wounded the veins
Swollen his rage, strength and effort; the whirl and the splash
As of some hideous engine whose brazen teeth smash
The thin winds and soft waves into thunder.’
In reality this is no more than a catalogue of suggestive imagery and violent sounds working themselves into a frenzy that is ultimately meaningless (e.g., ‘the hum of the hot blood’). But on a fantasy level it achieves its effect, which was why Wordsworth wrote of Shelley’s poetry that it was:
‘what astrology is to natural science – a passionate dream, straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstraction – a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature.’
Certainly the ‘Gothic novels’ which launched literary Romanticism on its way achieved their effect through an abundance of such nyktomorphic imagery, which often makes it difficult for the reader to work out exactly what is going on. But the appeal of such stories was not that they cast a clearer light on the world. It was that they provided the reader with a stream of mental sensations: images which trigger a thrill in the mind precisely because they are not resolved.
When we recall that the archetypal purpose of stories is to achieve a perfect resolution, and that the point at which such a story reaches its fullest resolution is where the hero can liberate and be united with the ‘light feminine’, as the highest value in storytelling, we can see why there was no more revealing feature of this new type of story than how obsessively it focused on the image of the abused heroine.
In itself there was nothing new about the sight of a story’s heroine being maltreated. But when Othello murders Desdemona or Hamlet rejects Ophelia or Lear rejects Cordelia, the real significance of this is what it reveals of what is going on inside the hero. It shows more clearly than anything how he has become cut off from true feeling and understanding: the feminine values of the Self. When de Sade fantasises about the cruelties and sexual degradations inflicted on Justine, his only concern is the thrill this can excite in his own mind. The essence of that sensation is the gratification the fantasy-level of the mind derives from contemplating the violation of the anima, as the highest aspect of the Self. By the ‘dark inversion’, the ego no longer subordinated to the Self thus derives its greatest energy from rejecting and violating the very thing it has escaped from.
So subtle are the workings of the unconscious, however, that its response, like a self-correcting mechanism, is then to show that the only way such a course can ultimately end is in death and destruction. Such is the pattern we see emerging in those stories which reflected the darker side of Romanticism as it swept through the collective unconscious of Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1817) was above all remarkable, as we have seen, in showing a dark hero bringing to birth a monster who represents his rejected Self in shadowy ‘inferior’ form. In every other respect it was a typical ‘Gothic’ fantasy, with its routine array of sensational ‘Gothic’ imagery and its cast of cardboard characters. What makes the story so unusual is that we see the monster as initially benevolent. Then, as the blind and heartless hero rejects his shadow three times, that benign monster becomes ever darker, until on the third occasion it turns on its creator and destroys him.
One of the more revealing features of Stendhal’s The Scarlet and the Black (1830) was the way its egocentric and ambitious hero was obsessed with Napoleon. The image of Napoleon had burned itself into the consciousness of his time like no one else in history. The way he had sprung from nowhere to become the ruler of Europe made him in his own way one of the supreme embodiments of the Romantic movement. The French Revolution had pulled down all the old collective framework symbolising the Self, from the monarchy to the Christian religion. And there into the void it left rose this glamorous dream figure, seeming to symbolise a new synthesis: power and youthful energy married to an altruistic new social order, based on liberty, equality and brotherhood. It was not surprising that he exercised such an obsessive hold over the fantasies of millions of his contemporaries.
Even when Napoleon’s ambition swelled into megalomania, as he declared himself emperor and began imposing his will by force over a whole continent, there were many who continued to see him as the most heroic figure of the age. Even when his fantasy-career had run its full five-stage course, ending in humiliating downfall, he still inspired admiration as the model of what an individual human being could achieve, if only he were great enough to throw off all constraint in rising above the mass of mankind. It was such a vision which would inspire Raskolnikov to murder old ladies (although this would be portrayed by Dostoyevsky from the perspective of the Self). And it was such a vision which inspired Stendhal, when he came to fantasise his extended day-dream of a Rags to Riches hero even more ruthlessly egocentric than himself. Even as Julien Sorel stretched out for that make-believe image of the Self subordinated to his own ego, the unconscious intervened, to bring him to a destruction more violent than that which had awaited his hero Napoleon.
But by now, regardless, the Romantic movement was in full swing all over Europe. Thus began that chapter in the evolution of western consciousness which was to lead up to the present day: the history of which we can follow in five stages.
Storytelling was not the only form of artistic expression which went through this kind of transition in the early nineteenth century. We see it in all the arts, from painting to poetry to architecture, but in none more acutely than music, which in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had been the last art-form to express complete harmony with the values of the Self. In the music of Bach and Handel, Mozart and Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, European music had developed to the point where it was able to express those values to the fullest extent of which the Western imagination had yet shown itself capable. One reflection of this was the archetypal structure underlying ‘sonata form’, which was at the centre of classical music during the decades when it reached its zenith. This usually showed an assertive, essentially masculine thematic ‘first subject’ being followed by a more graceful, essentially feminine ‘second subject’, the two then combining and inter-weaving through the ‘development’ section, to return at the end transformed, bringing the movement to a perfect resolution.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, however, there were clear signs in the work of younger composers that the formal structures of the classical era were becoming blurred and sentimentalised by the approach of the age of Romanticism. No composer had ever won such world-wide popularity as Rossini in the decade after 1810. The dazzlingly catchy themes from Rossini’s operas, as his hero-worshipping biographer Stendhal observed, were hailed from New York to St Petersburg, from Buenos Aires to Sydney. Yet no one was more keenly aware that this signalled a profound shift taking place in the nature of contemporary music than Beethoven, as when he observed in 1824 that, ‘in this age of Rossini, true music has little welcome’.2
In his novel Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann describes the narrator and his friends attending a lecture by a wise old music teacher, who plays and expounds to them the closing arietta of Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Opus 111. They are deeply moved. When he has completed the final bars he bangs shut the piano, pronouncing ‘thus ends the sonata’; by which he means not just that this particular sonata in C Minor is concluded but sonata form in general, and all that it represented. The classical age in music, which had plumbed the heights and depths of the human spirit like nothing else, was over (apart from the glorious sunset of Beethoven’s own final works before his death in 1827, and the magical twilight of Schubert, who died the following year).
Suddenly music changed, even more dramatically than storytelling. However gifted composers such as Berlioz and Schumann, Liszt and Wagner, Brahms and Verdi might be, their music was no longer shaped by that instinctive harmony between conscious and unconscious which had raised the works of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to such a transcendent perfection. The direct contact with the Self had been lost. The mould was broken. The ego had intruded. And with it came all the cloudy sentimentality, the disintegration of form, the sensational striving for effect which we associate with the age of Romanticism.
There could be no neater image of the difference between the power of true imagination and the artifice of fantasy than Berlioz’s comment, in a letter to Wagner, ‘I can only paint the moon when I see her at the bottom of a well’. Beethoven had not just believed in the divine power of the Self as the centre of his inspiration. He experienced it so directly he had no need to paint its reflection in a well. The difference between Beethoven and his successors, one might jokingly observe, was that Beethoven believed in God, Brahms believed in Beethoven and Wagner believed in Wagner. But in this declension we can also see the essence of what was happening in the nineteenth century to Western man’s relationship with the instinctive totality of the Self.
Outwardly, the most obvious contrast between the civilisation of the nineteenth century and that of the century which preceded it lay in the astonishing transformation produced by the industrial revolution. The coming of the age of steam power and the machine, factory-based mass-production, the railways and the telegraph bridging distances with unimaginable speed, was suddenly carrying humanity much further from a state of nature than ever before. With this came an unprecedented sense that civilisation was moving forwards and upwards: that belief in ‘progress’ which was reinforced by the new doctrine of evolution. People came to see history as a long climb out of the darkness of mankind’s primitive, superstitious past into the glorious light of modern nineteenth-century civilisation.
Yet, even as this materially triumphant age cut them off from nature and the past to an unprecedented degree, so they hankered for the lost certainties of a vanished time when their ancestors had been able to enjoy the sense of an unshakeable spiritual centre and transcendent dimension to life. Few aspects of the nineteenth century were more remarkable than the extraordinary revival of interest in the imagery of the Middle Ages. At the very time when Western civilisation was making such dramatic material advances, so we see this wholesale gazing backward to the outward forms of mediaeval Christian Europe, in the hugely fashionable novels of Walter Scott, in the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites, in the poems of Tennyson, and above all in the revival of Gothic styles of architecture, so long derided as barbarous and primitive. A fashion which had begun almost playfully, heralding the approach of Romanticism in secular buildings such as Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and Beckford’s Fonthill, now covered Europe in new Gothic churches and cathedrals, not to mention some of its most important secular buildings such as the Palace of Westminster.
The Gothic Revival expressed a sentimental desire to recreate the symbolism of the Self. It was accompanied, of course, by that widespread revival of religious observance which became one of the defining characteristics of nineteenth-century Europe. This in turn was coupled with the emergence of that ‘Victorian’ or ‘bourgeois’ morality, which rested on strict codes of sexual and social behaviour, with ‘respectability’ as one of its highest values. Yet in all this too there was a strong element of mawkish sentimentality, to cover up the repression of everything from sexuality to the awareness of death. To a great degree, the ruling consciousness of the age was adopting the values of the Self as a persona, an outward mask.
For all its Gothic spires, stained glass windows and loving recreations of mediaeval Christian imagery, the Victorian age, with its grim factories belching out stinking smoke over foetid slums to create wealth for the respectable new-rich bourgeoisie, was scarcely a rebirth of the Middle Ages. It is curious how the evolving spiritual consciousness of the previous three centuries had echoed the pattern of that passage from Lao Tsu at the head of this chapter. If the crumbling apart of the religious world-image of mediaeval Christendom had been the moment when ‘the way was lost’, then the stern moralists of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Reformation had replaced it with ‘virtue’. This in turn had been replaced in the religion of the rational, de-spiritualised eighteenth century by ‘benevolence’. Now, in the sentimental nineteenth century, this had given way to ‘rectitude’. And if this was what seemed to rule ‘above the line’, nowhere was its shadow more clearly reflected than in some of the ways in which the nineteenth century told stories.
As always, there is no clearer key to what storytelling can tell us about the inner life of the age which produced it than the way in which it presents the anima, personifying the feminine value and ultimately the ‘soul’. The literary form which came closest to conveying the values of the Self in the nineteenth century was the novel; but even in the greatest novels of the time, such as those of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, let alone those of Dickens or George Eliot, we can often discern more than a hint of sentimentality. When Tolstoy tried at the end of Anna Karenina to describe the religious awakening of his hero Levin, in contrast to the damnation and destruction of the story’s heroine, it was Dostoyevsky who found Levin’s new-found faith so unconvincing that he described as likely to ‘rip apart on the first nail it encountered’. Yet carrying scarcely more conviction is the religious conversion inspired in Raskolnikov by the little prostitute Sonia at the end of Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky hardly develops his redeeming figure into more than a rather thin and pallid ghost of the anima, and it is telling that, when he comes to showing how she transformed his hero’s life, he leaves off by suggesting that this is really the subject for another story.
As the archetypes became projected outwards onto the material world, it is noticeable how often storytellers, to convey the numinosity of their anima-heroines, made them into heiresses. In earlier times, the numinosity of the heroine would often have been conveyed, as in myths and folk tales, simply by making her a ‘Princess’. But now, as in Stendhal or Balzac, Nicholas Nickleby or Jane Eyre, she is either rich to begin with, or she inherits money towards the end of the story, to symbolise her value. In stories written by female authors, the poor but virtuous heroine often falls in love with an animus-hero whose numinosity is heightened by the fact that he is of higher social standing, such as Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester or Elizabeth Bennett’s Mr D’Arcy.
Much more significant as a revelation of the psychic state of nineteenth century civilisation, however, was that persistent obsession with the image of the ‘persecuted maiden’, the trapped, violated or dying heroine who continues to appear in so many guises throughout the age of Romanticism. We see her in the mad scene of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor; in that whole sequence of unhappy and fated Verdi heroines, from the innocent Gilda stabbed by her father in Rigoletto to the consumptive Viola in La Traviata; in Puccini’s consumptive Mimi and the piteous Madam Butterfly. In Romantic ballet we see her as the elusive anima, dying broken-hearted in Giselle, and again as the betrayed and doomed Swan Queen Odette in Swan Lake. We see her in countless novels of the time, including several by Dickens, notably in Little Nell, whose heart-tugging death in The Old Curiosity Shop provoked an almost hysterical reaction from Britain’s reading public in 1841, and in Sykes’s bludgeoning to death of Nancy in Oliver Twist.
In Britain in the 1860s came the vogue for what came to be known at the time as the ‘sensation novel’: highly melodramatic tales which reached an enormous mass audience through their serialisation in newspapers and magazines. What titillated the fantasies of the Victorian public in these tales was their exploitation of such ‘Self-violating’ themes as bigamy and adultery. But a central role in almost all these successors to the Gothic novels of 70 years earlier was played by the maltreated anima. The fashion was set by Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), which begins with the seemingly supernatural apparition on a road outside London of the young woman who, it turns out, has been incarcerated in a mental asylum to prevent her stumbling on the guilty secret of the evil baronet Sir Percy Glyde. The most famous of all these fantasy concoctions was East Lynne (1861) by Mrs Henry Wood. So relentlessly does she heap suffering and indignity on her heroine that Lady Isabel ends up hideously disfigured by the accident in which her illegitimate daughter has died, desperately seeking employment as a governess in the home of her ex-husband. She does this only to be reunited with her children, but it then leads to her having to watch incognito over her son as he dies of a fatal disease (‘dead, and never called me mother’), before she expires herself.3
At the end of this period a particularly notable example of the suffering anima is Hardy’s favourite heroine, Tess. More than anything this story shows us why Hardy’s novels provide such a revealing mirror to the underside of an age which, on the surface, imagined itself to be emerging into the light from all the primitive darkness of former times. We see an author whose first stories had shown him still able to cling on sentimentally to the simplicities and certainties of the rooted rustic world in which he grew up. But then, as the socially emancipated Hardy himself became ever more detached from that world, his stories turn ever darker, their heroes and heroines ever more fatally plagued by an inability to find their right ‘other half’, until he ends by showing his tortured anima so distracted that she is driven to that desperate act which can only precipitate her own death on the gallows.
In this sense, as we saw, the progression of Hardy’s novels reflected something which was happening much more generally to western civilisation in the nineteenth century. No novel more powerfully conveyed the sense of the ‘dark inversion’ than Moby Dick, with its picture of a crazed hero, surrounded by a cosmopolitan crew from all over the world, symbolising mankind, obsessively seeking to find and destroy the mysterious White Whale which stood for the power of nature at one with itself: a living image of the Self. Yet so firmly was Melville himself in the grip of the Romantic dark inversion that, although he intuitively sensed that he had written ‘a wicked book’, he felt as ‘spotless as the lamb’.
Another symptom of the psychic disintegration of the age was the curious fate of the Comedy plot, as it split into two quite separate types of story: on the one hand, inspiring some of the most serious novels of the age, such as War and Peace and Middlemarch; on the other, as in Viennese operetta, Parisian farce or the ‘light operas’ of Gilbert and Sullivan, retaining its frivolous, implausible surface, while losing touch altogether with that serious, unsentimental core which had made the comedies of Shakespeare or Mozart such archetypally complete creations of the human imagination.
More than any age before it, beneath its gravely respectable, materially successful, brilliantly innovative surface, the nineteenth century was two-sided. Behind its church-building shows of piety, it was an age more than ever losing that contact with the Self which inspires a genuine religious sense: an age in which Matthew Arnold could only hear faith’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’; in which Nietzche could confidently proclaim ‘God is dead’. One of the more obvious underlying reasons why Darwin won such a welcome for his theory of natural selection was that it made the whole evolutionary process seem impersonal and self-referential, without the need to imagine that behind it was any transcendent power or guiding mind.
Behind the grandiose new civic buildings which stood proudly at the centre of the great new industrial cities, expressing their unprecedented wealth, were those miles of belching factories and stinking slums, where millions of workers lived their lives wracked by poverty and disease. In the shadows cast ‘below the line’ by all this oppressive one-sidedness, a new vision of the ‘Self’ was emerging, projected onto the potential power of these dispossessed masses.
Into the minds of men such as Karl Marx and his fellow socialists and revolutionaries came the dream that they might one day rise up to sweep away all that corrupt and privileged world ‘above the line’, in the name of a perfect new society, in which the downtrodden peoples of the world could once again be united, in one selfless common purpose. Drawing on precisely those archetypal wellsprings which in previous ages had found religious expression, they projected that spiritual image of totality out onto the material world (as in the synthesis which would emerge from ‘dialectical materialism’). In fact these dreamers had become possessed by the archetypal power of a story, with its plot set in the future: a nyktomorphic vision which, in the century which lay ahead, was destined to become the single most influential legacy of nineteenth-century Romanticism.
One of the more interesting episodes in the evolution of storytelling was that moment in the 1890s when, quite independently, three British storytellers almost simultaneously conceived stories which disinterred the archetypal vision of the monster. For centuries, as advancing Western ego-consciousness had gradually lost touch with the sense of a supernatural dimension to life, the grotesque monsters of the old legends and mythologies had faded into the distant past, as no more than historical curiosities. But all of a sudden they re-emerged. H. G. Wells’s Martians, heaving out of a pit in the cosy, bourgeois Surrey countryside with their leathery skin and tentacles, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, crawling like a bat across the wall of his Transylvanian castle, M. R. James’s nightmarish apparition rising out of the pages of an old book in the Pyrenees, created almost overnight that modern tradition of the nyktomorphic monster which was to become such a significant presence in the popular storytelling of the twentieth century.
In the very years when these monstrous creations were emerging from the unconscious minds of their authors, Sigmund Freud was working in Vienna on his magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). This was the book which more than anything else was to open the eyes of the twentieth century to the idea that our consciousness is only a relatively small and fragile superstructure to all that goes on in the unconscious levels of our brain; and that to understand human nature properly we must recognise how much of the way we think and behave is shaped by forces buried behind our conscious awareness.
James’s first horror story, Stoker’s Dracula and Wells’s War of the Worlds were conceived merely as entertainments. But why in the last decade of the nineteenth century should these menacing embodiments of evil have floated up into the fantasies of storytellers all at much the same time? The archetype of the monster personifies the darkest side of human nature. What did it say about the state of mankind that these fearsome apparitions, representing the power of the human ego in its most grotesque form, should have simultaneously emerged from the collective unconscious just as the new century approached?4
It is remarkable just how many of the features which were to define twentieth-century civilisation as unlike any period in history before first appeared in the years around 1900. The most obvious are the dazzling array of technological discoveries which appeared at this time: the internal combustion engine in the 1880s followed by the first motor cars; the first wireless signals, with Marconi’s transmissions across the Atlantic in 1901; the Wright brothers’ flight in 1903 and the first aeroplanes; the gramophone and recorded music; the first moving pictures and the beginnings of the cinema; the first skyscrapers soaring above the skyline of New York and Chicago. In Zurich in 1905 the young Einstein published the formula e = mc2, heralding the birth of that nuclear age which within decades was to see homo sapiens unlocking the secret power of the most elemental physical unit in the universe.
At much the same time, emerging from the blues and the gospel-singing of the black communities of New Orleans and the southern states of the USA, the hypnotic, fantasy-exciting syncopation of ragtime and jazz were introducing what was to become the single most defining feature of twentieth-century popular music. The campaign for women’s suffrage in the early years of the new century heralded the new spirit of female assertiveness which would lead to a radical realignment in the relationship between the sexes. In Russia in 1902 Lenin published What Then Must Be Done?, the pamphlet which more than anything else was to set out his blueprint for the revolution by which, from ‘below the line’, he planned to save Russia and perhaps the world.
The arts at this time were going through a transformation which reflected another decisive extension of that psychic shift which had given rise to the Romantic movement a century earlier. In painting, the light, evanescent imagery of French Impressionism (in the wake of Turner) had for decades been promoting liberation from the heavy, sentimental formalities of nineteenth-century academicism. But in the early years of the new century these already dissolving figurative images suddenly gave way to the much more dramatically abstract pictures of the Cubists, Fauvists and Futurists. Figurative imagery was finally disintegrating altogether in a haze of suggestive nyktomorphs. It was telling that one of the landmark canvases in this evolution, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907), showed a group of prostitutes: a subject which would have been unthinkable to any ‘above the line’ nineteenth-century academician, except that Picasso’s contemporaries might have found it hard to decipher from the fragmented new ‘Cubist’ style quite what his image was meant to represent at all.
In music, the ponderous, overblown Romanticism of Brahms, Bruckner and their late nineteenth-century contemporaries suddenly gave way to the revolutionary ‘new music’ represented by the stark atonal experiments of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, the nervously exciting rhythms and dissonant polytonalities of Stravinsky.
Meanwhile in storytelling, no writer was to reflect the shift towards twentieth-century sensibility more significantly than Chekhov, with his creation of a new twilight world in which the clear archetypal contrast between light figures and dark dissolved into a grey twilight. Chekov’s plays, in which everyone was trapped in a little prison of the ego, lacking in any spiritual centre, where human life was portrayed as no more than the muddled, altruistic dreams of youth decaying into the egocentric disillusionments of old age, marked the beginning of that new genre of storytelling, where the narrative could have no end other than a despairing shot offstage, or merely a curtain coming down to indicate that the story was over, with nothing resolved. Three years after Chekhov’s death in 1904, Proust began that immense essay in self-absorbed futility which would only be finished 15 years later, and which was to represent a new extreme in the shift of the psychic centre of storytelling from the Self to the ego. But by that time the dream of the ninteenth-century age of progress had exploded into reality, with the greatest explosion of violence the human race had ever experienced.
In many ways it is possible to see the holocaust of the First World War as a kind of judgement on the different forms of hubris European civilisation had enjoyed in the nineteenth century. For decades the Western nations had been using their new technological might to develop ever more destructive means of waging war; but the very fact that these had not been deployed in earnest for nearly half a century before 1914 meant that few people realised how terrible might be the consequences if they were. The stoking up of nationalistic self-esteem, and the imperialist adventures in which the technological superiority of the great powers had allowed them to indulge around the globe, had produced a psychic inflation and a sense of rivalry between their collective egotisms which was tipping towards danger point.
Socially in the years leading up to 1914 we can see all sorts of stresses developing which indicated the onset of a collective psychic fever sweeping through Europe, manifesting itself in everything from the rise of new mass labour movements, demanding radical political change, to the new assertiveness of women. Everywhere the ‘above the line’ established order was under challenge. And this was equally reflected in that disintegration of the old forms and unleashing of new nervous energy which was revolutionising the arts. No artistic event was more symptomatic of the mood of the time than the Paris première of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913, which provoked a storm of controversy by showing the frenzied ritual sacrifice of a young girl, accompanied by music more wildly dissonant than anything its audience had heard before.
Three years earlier, another musician, Edward Elgar, composer of that great nationalistic British anthem ‘Land of Hope And Glory’, had written with foreboding, ‘we walk like ghosts’. In August 1914 vast cheering crowds gathered in the capital cities of Europe, as their countries sleepwalked into war. On the Somme, at Verdun and Tannenburg, the nineteenth-century age of Romanticism finally disintegrated in four years of nightmarish slaughter. Great empires crumbled. In Russia the heirs of Marx, led by Lenin, stormed the Winter Palace to proclaim the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
After all that heady, century-long dream of progress, the spirit of Loki had brought the human race to catastrophe on a scale it had never experienced.
As the peoples of Europe finally stumbled out of the darkness into the wan light of peace, the country which for the first time was to make the running in dictating the spirit of the era just beginning was America.
It was the US President Woodrow Wilson who took the lead in setting up the League of Nations: that idealistic experiment in international co-operation which was to ensure that ‘the war to end wars’ was never repeated. And as a new decade began it would be from America that so many of the phenomena which were to become inseparable with its image originated (even though, in almost every case, these had first appeared in embryo before the war).
The prevailing mood of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ was that of a great burst of liberated energy, reflected in all the nervous frenzy and hedonistic materialism of Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Jazz Age’. It was the age of ‘flappers’ and the Charleston; of the unprecedented share boom on Wall Street, when millions of ordinary folk could for the first time hope to become rich by investing in the stocks of America’s leading companies; the heyday of Henry Ford’s ‘Model T’, when for the first time millions could afford to buy motor cars. It was the age when those soaring skyscrapers, pioneered in the years before 1914, now turned the Manhattan skyline into one of the most powerfully familiar images in the world. It was the first heyday of telling stories through the medium of the cinema, making Hollywood the world centre of mass-entertainment, peopling the fantasies of millions with the dream images of the first ‘movie stars’.
The thread running through all these manifestations of the spirit of the age was their sanctioning of a newly assertive kind of self-expression, nowhere made more visible than in the rivalry of those New York developers to outvie each other in raising the tallest structures ever seen, culminating at the decade’s end in the New Empire State building. This was accompanied by a radical transformation in the appearance of women, as the long flowing dresses, elaborate hairstyles and parasols of pre-war times suddenly gave way to the leg-revealing short skirts, cropped hair and flaunted cigarette holders associated with the young flappers of the Jazz Age. Never in history had there been such a dramatically sudden change in women’s fashions. But the new ‘mannishness’ of their short hair and emancipated attitudes was matched by a corresponding ‘feminisation’ of their male counterparts such as Rudolf Valentino, whose rouged and powdered image aroused mass-hysteria when, in films like The Sheikh, he was magnified by the silver screen into the romantic heart-throb of the age.
In counterpoint to all this ‘mass-individualism’, the 1920s was also marked by an extraordinary wave of Utopian idealism, its tone set by that which inspired the League of Nations itself, as the supposed guarantee of a new age of international peace and brotherhood. In the mid-1920s, the statesmen of France and Germany dreamed of joining together to build a new ‘United States of Europe’. In Russia, after the horrors of revolution and civil war, Lenin’s Bolsheviks were setting out to create an ideal Communist society, of a kind the world had never seen before, in which all the oppressive old hierarchical order centred on the ‘Little Father’, the Czar, had been torn down, and where all its citizens would now be equal.
In Paris the visionary architect Le Corbusier dreamed of tearing down all the old historic cities, starting with Paris itself, and replacing them with his Utopian new ‘City of the Future’, planned down to the tiniest detail, in which vast, shining white concrete skyscrapers would stand amid grass and trees. For millennia, centred on great temples and cathedrals, the city had been a symbolic image of human totality, the Self. Le Corbusier’s vision of his ‘radiant city’, laid out on a perfect four-sided geometric grid, surrounded by woods and fields, was a projection of the same archetype. But by a telling inversion, instead of having a mighty cathedral at its heart, the ultimate focal point of Le Corbusier’s city was its central transport ‘node’; the intersection of its grid of motorways, with above them its main railway station and central airport. Instead of his city being centred on a cathedral spire and high altar, symbolising some ultimate point of inner peace and union with the ‘One’, its centre represented the point of maximum external noise and restlessness. Obsessed as he was with the new aeroplanes, racing cars, ocean liners and other technological wonders of the age, Le Corbusier’s dream was that his new type of city would in itself be the means to bring about a revolution, in that it would soon mould its inhabitants into a new type of man and woman, fit to live in ‘the age of the machine’.
What was happening in the 1920s was that, as technological innovations created the sense that society was being carried forward into an era different from anything known before, that traditional framework of social and moral constraints which for centuries had held the power of the human ego in check was beginning to crumble as never before. The ego was being liberated. At the same time, in the upsurge of collectivist Utopianism, the power of the displaced archetype of the Self was being projected outwards, in dreams of humanity being brought together as one, in different visions of selfless totality.
All this was reflected in the decade’s storytelling. On the face of it, nothing seemed to capture the mood of youthful hedonism that was sweeping through new-rich America better than the novels of Scott Fitzgerald. In Britain their counterparts were the novels of Evelyn Waugh, celebrating the brittle chatter of the upper-class ‘bright young things’, and the ‘daring’ plays of the young Noel Coward, such as The Vortex, with its hero the drug-addicted son of an adulterous mother. In Italy Pirandello seemed to be pioneering the advance of the drama into even more ‘experimental’ realms, promising some immense nyktomorphic significance. And there were no more celebrated manifestos of the sexual revolution, throwing off the prudish inhibitions of ‘Victorian morality’, than those two most daring novels of the decade, Joyce’s Ulysses and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley, so uninhibited that the authorities rushed to suppress them. This in itself only heightened the impression that these books must be striking a brave blow for life, ‘honesty’ and the future against all that deadening edifice of authoritarianism and sexual repression which now seemed outmoded.
It might not have taken long to discern the dark underside of all this fictional excitement. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire party-giver, his grand house constantly filled with fashionable socialites, turns out to be a lost soul, living behind a carefully concocted persona and ending up riddled with bullets in his own swimming pool. Pirandello’s Six Characters, behind the artifice of its framing device, with fictional characters taking over their own story, turns out to centre on no more than a dismal little fantasy of a father meeting his daughter as a prostitute, winding up with the trick-sensational conclusion of having the two children come to violent deaths. Ulysses, hailed as the bible of post-Freudian sexual liberation, ends up with its two emotionally-inadequate central figures engaging in solitary acts of self-abuse. Lady Chatterley, acclaimed as an even more heroic call to liberation, ends with its two ill-assorted central figures apart and alone, with its pasteboard hero fantasising sadly over a lost sexual adventure whose heady physical pleasures have long faded and which has ruined both their lives.
Not for nothing did Lawrence himself, often shrewder about the work of others than his own, issue that trenchant verdict on the spirit of the 1920s quoted earlier:
‘Never was any age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling than our own ... the radio and the film are mere counterfeit emotion all the time, the current press and literature the same. People wallow in emotion, counterfeit emotion. They lap it up, they live in it and on it ... and at times they seem to get on very well with it all. And then, more and more, they break down. They go to pieces.’5
As for those collectivist Utopias of the future which held such a fascination for the 1920s, there were already storytellers pointing out how these dreams too might lead to nightmares. Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1926) showed a kind of Le Corbusier-like city of the future, full of colossal concrete buildings with aeroplanes flying between them: except that he portrayed it as a dehumanised slave-state, with serried armies of regimented workers having to toil ceaselessly at machines in a ‘below the line’ underworld, to serve the ‘above the line’ elite who ruled this hellish new society. Six years later Aldous Huxley delivered his own verdict on the 1920s in Brave New World, extrapolating the obsessive hedonism of those years into the basis for a future World State. Here, again in a Le Corbusier-like city of immense buildings set amid trees, the Alphas were kept by drugs in constant mindless pursuit of promiscuous self-indulgence. Again this was made possible by regimented slave-armies of Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons ‘below the line’. Above them all, the tiny, shadowy elite who were the real rulers of Huxley’s nightmare world strove to ensure that no one should ever develop individual thoughts or feelings, because for everyone to be kept unthinkingly at one with the collective consciousness was the fundamental principle on which this totalitarian state rested.
In fact, by the time Huxley’s book was published, the Dream Stage of the 1920s which inspired it had already come abruptly to an end. In November 1929 the Wall Street crash heralded the greatest economic slump in history, with tens of millions unemployed all across the Western world. Amid the gloom of the Great Depression, Fitzgerald laboured at his last complete novel, Tender is the Night, reflecting how his own 1920s euphoria had soured into a nightmare of failed dreams and alcoholic depression. Meanwhile in Russia and Germany two genuinely totalitarian systems were now in the ascendant, each in its own way darker than anything Huxley had conceived of, and which, in the years ahead, were to cast a shadow extending over the whole of mankind.
The dream of a Communist Utopia which took over Russia in 1917, as we have seen, was the most extreme expression of that collective fantasy which had begun to emerge in the minds of Marx and other early Socialists in the nineteenth century, in response to the one-sidedness of mass-industrialisation. They became gripped by the vision of the downtrodden proletariat rising up from ‘below the line’ to sweep away all the oppressive old political and social structure, to build a perfect society in which everyone could be equal. The hypnotic appeal of this vision derived precisely from the extent to which it unconsciously drew on the power of the archetype of the Self. In claiming to act in the interests of all mankind, it tapped into that sense of moral righteousness which could be generated around the dream of building a community which transcended selfish interests, when in fact it was only expressing the collective egotism of a particular group.
Every group-fantasy – such as Communism – depends on three factors. The first is the particular dream or collective act of make-believe which binds its followers together. The second is its need for ‘dream heroes’ who are inflated to superhuman stature because they embody and act as projections of the fantasy. The third, playing a crucial role in reinforcing the sense of collective identity of those caught up in the fantasy, as Dostoyevsky portrayed in The Possessed and as Orwell was later to show in Nineteen Eighty Four, is the need for ‘enemies’ and ‘hate-figures’: those outside the fantasy against whom they can work up feelings of aggression. Caricaturing the ‘enemies’ as darkly and negatively as possible plays a key part in helping those within the fantasy to see their own role in a heroic, idealised light.
For Russia, in the years after 1917, the dream was to ‘construct Socialism’, leading ultimately to the achievement of the perfect Communist state. The first ‘dream heroes’ whose iconic images were soon to proliferate all over Russia were Marx and Lenin, joined in the mid-1920s by Stalin. The necessary hate-figures were all those ‘enemies of the revolution’ who needed to be rooted out and crushed, from the remnants of the discredited social order defeated in Russia’s Civil War to the ‘wreckers’, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘reactionaries’ of whom the years which followed would provide a limitless supply.
A striking feature of Communism was the speed at which, having torn down Russia’s old social order, centred on a religiously-sanctioned autarchy, it replaced it with a caricature of what it had destroyed. In place of the absolute rule of the Czar came the absolute rule of the Communist dictators, Lenin and Stalin. In place of the old aristocracy emerged the new ruling elite of ‘the Party’. In place of that Christian Orthodoxy which had provided the people of Russia with an explanation for the world and the faith they should live by came the new Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, seeking to do precisely the same.
Initially Communism had been a below-the-line, ‘left-wing fantasy’, associated with all the ‘progressive’ tendencies of the early twentieth century, from avantgarde painting and ‘modernism’ in architecture to a belief in ‘free love’. Within a few years the new Soviet Union had officially reinstated a belief in marriage and the family as a keystone of Communist society. It had imposed on its artists and writers the rigid doctrines of ‘Socialist Realism’, whereby their only duty was to produce films, novels, plays, paintings, statues, buildings and musical compositions designed, in crudely sentimental fashion, to extol the glories of Communism and the heroic achievements of the proletariat.
As with any fantasy, Soviet Communism was based on building up a state of expectation which was unable to resolve with reality. It therefore needed constantly to be fed with new promises of glorious achievements to come, along with new excuses as to why it had so far failed to deliver on its earlier promises. At the end of the 1920s, Stalin unveiled the first of his ‘Five Year Plans’, holding out the Utopia which would arrive when he had taken the Soviet Union’s agriculture into state ownership and completed his visionary programme for dragging his backward country into the age of heroic industrialism. The first class of ‘enemies’ and ‘wreckers’ who were demonised as obstacles to achieving this were the kulaks: all those peasants with their little plots of land who still clung onto a belief in private property. Millions were either murdered directly, or died in the mass famine which followed when the land confiscated from them failed to produce food. In the late 1930s, frustrated by his continuing failure to achieve the Communist Utopia, Stalin switched the blame onto his own followers, as millions of Party members and officers of the Red Army were either shot or deported to die more slowly in the slave camps of Siberia.
The infection of one group-fantasy often helps to set off another. By this time, partly in response to the spread of Communist ideas across Europe, a new group-fantasy had taken possession of Germany: the virulence of which would before long pose a threat to the entire continent.
We traced earlier how Hitler’s career as Nazi leader followed the five-stage fantasy pattern. The Anticipation Stage lasted through his rise to power in 1933. From then onwards he entered the Dream Stage in which everything seemed to be miraculously going his way. The key to the hold he exercised over Germany was the way he managed to collectivise the egos of his followers behind that particular projection of the Self archetype which was identified with German nationhood. By playing on the archetypal elements which provided the German people with the emotional core of their collective sense of identity, Hitler welded them into a single totality, obedient to his will: not least through the skilful use of quasi-religious imagery, from the swastika symbol to that ‘cathedral of light’ which was Speer’s masterpiece in stage-managing the Nuremberg rallies.
Like Communism, Nazism was dependent on those same three factors displayed by any group-fantasy. The collective act of make-believe which bound its followers together was the dream of Germany reborn from its post-war humiliations, as the ‘Fatherland’ of a ‘master race’ equipped to take on the world. Its supreme ‘dream hero’ was the spell-binding, superhuman Fuehrer himself. The role of the ‘hate-figures’ needed to fuel its aggression was played, initially, by the Communists and the Jews, then by any ‘lesser breeds’ from outside Germany who dared stand in its way.
If Communism had begun as a ‘left-wing’ fantasy, centring its appeal on raising up the oppressed and building a classless, internationalist new world order, Nazism, like Fascism, was more obviously a ‘right-wing’ fantasy, centred on nationalism, racial superiority and myths from the past, and the masculine values of power and strength, discipline and order. But it had not taken long for Communism to demonstrate that, behind its outward show of altruistic concern for the underdog, it was really driven just as much by an obsession with power and order as its right-wing ‘opposites’. Similarly Nazism pretended to have the caring ‘feminine’ values, in its relentless sentimentalisation of kinder und kuche, the role of ‘Aryan womanhood’ and blond, blue-eyed children.
For both ideologies, their supreme mode of self-expression was staging spectacular displays of war machines and serried ranks of uniformed men marching with mechanical precision, to demonstrate total obedience to the ‘dream hero’ leader. Based on a ‘dark inversion’ of the Self, Communism and Nazism were equally totalitarian, seeking to control the inner life of each individual citizen and every aspect of collective life. Inevitably both were implacably atheistic, seeing religion as their despised and hated ‘opposite’.
Just as any fantasy to stay in being must step up its demands, so the most obvious characteristic of Hitler in the 1930s was his need constantly to expand his power: firstly by building up his armed might within Germany itself, then, as Predator, by seizing one neighbouring country after another.
In the fast-lengthening shadow cast by this colossal projection of collective egotism, the other nations of Europe in the late 1930s seemed weak, effete and powerless. Their well-meaning leaders seemed paralysed, unable to summon up any ‘masculine’ strength of character in response. The Western world in general, as it slowly emerged from the trauma of the Great Depression, had become preoccupied with the material pleasures of returning prosperity.
In the cinema, it took refuge in the sugary escapism of Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley musicals, and by 1939 in two of the most successful escapist movies of all time, each centred on a female character. Gone with the Wind, centred on a beautiful heroine caught between two men who, for opposing reasons, were both inadequate, carried audiences back to the romantic lost world of the Southern States aristocracy before the American Civil War, and ended on the despairing pseudo-optimism of its lost and battered heroine proclaiming ‘tomorrow is another day’. The Wizard of Oz, centred on the child-star Judy Garland, carried them off to the infantile Technicolor-fantasy world of Munchkin-land, the Yellow Brick Road and a ‘wise old man’ who turned out to be a silly old fraud, accompanied by the equally sentimental pseudo-optimism of ‘Somewhere, over the rainbow’.
Confronted by the gravest threat Western civilisation had ever faced, the peace-loving democracies, it seemed, had gone soft. What happened next was to provide the greatest psychological reversal of the past 200 years.
A measure of the psychic shift which was to follow was the contrast between the thin, defeated voice in which Neville Chamberlain informed his fellow-countrymen on 3 September 1939 that Britain was ‘now at war with Germany’ and the masculine rhetoric in which, within nine months, Winston Churchill would be inspiring them to one of the greatest acts of national defiance shown by any people in history.
On 24 August 1939 the two great totalitarian powers of Europe had joined forces in the Nazi-Soviet pact, to divide up Poland. A week later, Britain and France finally accepted that they could appease Hitler no longer. Thus began the six months Anticipation Stage of the ‘phoney war’, as armies massed along the Western front for the immense conflict which now seemed inevitable. On 10 May, following his lightning seizure of Denmark and Norway, Hitler launched his blitzkrieg on Holland, Belgium and France. In London the discredited Chamberlain gave way to the towering figure who was to lead his country through the next five years. That summer, as the skies of southern England provided the stage for the Battle of Britain, giving way in the autumn and winter of 1940 to Hitler’s blitz on London and other cities, Churchill’s rock-like presence focused his countrymen’s resolve with a manly strength they had not known in their leaders for decades.
The prevailing archetype in British life changed with startling speed. The heroes of the hour were the gallant young pilots of the RAF; the sailors of the Royal Navy who had already raised the spirits of the nation by pulling off such dazzling victories as that over the pocket-battleship Graf Spee; the troops and the crews of the ‘little ships’ who turned defeat into moral victory at Dunkirk.
In archetypal terms what these new national heroes represented was the ‘light masculine’: strength and bravery made positive by the fact that, like the indomitable will of Churchill himself, it was being exercised selflessly. But behind this was the spirit of a whole nation, welded together in common cause, showing ‘the spirit of the Blitz’ and determined that, come what may, it would stand up to this assault by the forces of darkness until final victory was assured.
The real archetype now coming into play in British life was that of the Self: giving each individual a part to play in a cosmic battle between the powers of darkness and those of light. Men were again liberated to play a fully masculine role. Women could again become feminine, courageously representing those values of heart and soul for which so much was now being risked. Everyone was caught up in the new-found national spirit. From the King and Queen, venturing out from a bomb-damaged Buckingham Palace to tour the blitzed slums of London’s East End, down to a country village clustered round its ancient church or the shipyards of the ‘Red Clyde’, the British people had never before felt so united: as was nowhere better symbolised than by the eagerness with which they clustered round radio sets to listen to the speeches of the robust ‘father-figure’ who was now their leader.
The reason why an entire nation could become possessed by the archetype in this way was that the ‘dark power’ they were up against so obviously represented its opposite: a complete inversion of the Self. Much more than in the First World War, the ‘enemy’, personified in Hitler’s evil genius, now represented unalloyed darkness. By so clearly representing the extreme dark pole of the human psyche, this had now constellated in the hearts and minds of the British people the archetype which was its light opposite.
We have noted before how the Second World War was to give rise to immeasurably more ‘stories’, from fictional films and novels to factual documentaries, than any other event in history. One reason for this was that, in real life, the war was made up of countless individual episodes, air and sea battles, campaigns on land, each of which in due course could lend itself to retelling as a story in its own right. But what really made this possible, apart from the fact that advances in technology made World War Two much more far-reaching and fast-moving than its predecessor, was precisely that the conduct of the Germans and their Japanese allies, so much more obviously than in World War One, cast them so unequivocally into the archetypal role of the ‘monster’.
This was why, first for the British, then for their other allies, the pattern which shaped their emotional response to the war was that of participation in a huge, real-life Overcoming the Monster story: an archetypal drama in which everyone felt involved, and which would not be over until the monster was finally tracked down to his lair and slain. Even when that distant prospect of victory was as yet almost unthinkable, the war gave rise to a host of fictional stories, all of which, more than almost any conceived in the inter-war decades, were firmly rooted in the values of the Self.
As early as 1940, Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose wove out of the tragedy of Dunkirk an extraordinary parable of light and dark, centred on a hero who was portrayed as completely light, in a world where darkness seemed to reign supreme. Yet even in his death, ran the message of the story, life and light were triumphant (as in the story of Christ). In the same years, welling up from the unconscious of an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon literature, was that huge story of how two little, very English heroes, Frodo and Sam, eventually saved Middle Earth from the terrifying monster whose world-conquering ambitions were casting such a shadow over it from the east.
Nowhere, however, was the change which had come over storytelling more immediately obvious than in the cinema, In 1942 Noel Coward, whose pre-war plays about drug-addiction and divorce had made him synonymous with modern ‘decadence’, came up with one of the most robustly patriotic films of the war. In Which We Serve moved audiences with its tribute to the selfless courage of those enduring terrifying ordeals at sea, and the equally selfless strength of character shown by those they loved at home. Other popular wartime films drew on Britain’s history to centre on such manly national heroes from the past as Nelson, Pitt the Younger and Henry V, in Laurence Olivier’s unashamedly morale-boosting version of Shakespeare’s play. Carol Reed’s The Way Ahead (1944) told the story of how a group of British soldiers rebuilt their morale after defeat at Dunkirk, to end with their part in the victory over Rommel at El Alamein. The Way to the Stars (1944) hinges on the love between a young RAF bomber pilot and his wife, representing the ‘eternal feminine’, who is left alone with their baby son, after her husband, like so many of his comrades, has made the supreme sacrifice in a raid on Nazi-occupied Europe.
Of course to the inhabitants of those German cities which between 1942 and 1945 allied bombers were reducing to rubble, as for those once all-conquering German armies now in retreat all over Europe, the plot they were caught up in was very different. It was that of Tragedy, as Hitler’s fantasy gradually moved from its dream stage to frustration in 1941–1942, then to the nightmare which, from 1943 onwards, closed in on Germany from all sides.
Archetypally, a significant moment of the war came in the Soviet Union in 1942, when Stalin, reeling from his Red Army’s initial catastrophic reverses, dropped the slogans of Communism and appealed to all the most atavistic patriotic instincts associated by his people with ‘Mother Russia’. Persecution of the Church ceased. Army officers could again wear uniforms to mark them out from their men. The Russian people were now engaged in ‘the Great Patriotic War’. At least in propaganda terms, Stalin had reversed something of Communism’s ‘dark inversion’, and sought to play on precisely those archetypal emotions centred around the collective symbolism of the Self which for two decades he had done everything to root out and destroy.6
When America’s entry into the war was precipitated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, it did not take long for her national mood to go through much the same transformation as that which had already overtaken Britain. Her people became caught up by the same sense that they were involved in a cosmic struggle for the forces of light against darkness. There was the same realignment of archetypal values, soon reflected by Hollywood, reinstating to a place of honour those masculine virtues which were now identified with heroic young American servicemen, and the firm, ‘fatherly’ leadership of their President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1945 the image of US Marines raising the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima became for their compatriots the war’s supreme icon of idealised American manhood, just as for the British the iconic image of their indomitable island spirit had been the shot of St Paul’s standing unbowed amid the fire and smoke of the London Blitz.
Then, in August 1945, came another unforgettable image for all mankind: that of the fireball and mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima. Guided by the ambiguous ‘spirit of Loki’, Homo sapiens had finally learned how to unlock the most basic power of the universe, to bring the greatest war in history to an abrupt end.7 The shock which forced the surrender of Japan saved many more lives than those lost in the pulverisation of two of her cities. Even the firestorm which engulfed Dresden in the closing weeks of the European war might have seemed justified when allied troops uncovered the unimaginable horrors of the extermination camps in which Hitler and his followers had murdered millions of victims. By a collective demonstration of that combination of archetypal qualities required in any hero of myth, the ‘monster’ had finally been overcome. But as humanity stumbled out into the dawn of a fragile peace, it was haunted by the knowledge that advancing consciousness had now called into being a monster potentially even more terrifying, with the power to destroy life many times over.
In many ways, the realignment of the prevailing archetypes which had so changed the mood of the Western world during the war years persisted through the decade that followed. America assumed the role of the west’s superpower, the bastion of freedom and democracy against the new ‘dark empire’ of Communism which had taken over half of Europe, followed by the country containing a quarter of the world’s population, China. Toughened by war, America’s leaders, under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, seemed appropriately masculine and mature for their new role. And, as her economy again took off into the greatest material prosperity the world had ever known, her storytelling mirrored a society still at home with those conservative values of the Self which were symbolised in Norman Rockwell’s covers for the Saturday Evening Post, showing an idealised family of loving father and mother gathered with their smiling, well-dressed children round the Christmas tree in a neat, ‘all-American’ suburban home.
From It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) through High Noon (1952) to Ben Hur (1959), the ethos which governed post-war Hollywood movies still held to those values by which stars such as James Stewart (himself a wartime bomber pilot), Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, John Wayne and Charlton Heston could be shown as men who were unmistakably masculine, brave, decent, good-hearted, chivalrous to women. Their unmistakably feminine counterparts, in flowing calf-length ‘New Look’ dresses, were stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Debbie Reynolds, Doris Day, Kim Novak, Sophia Loren. Similar values shaped the Rogers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter musicals which so dominated post-war entertainment, such as Oklahoma, South Pacific, The King and I, Paint Your Wagon, Kiss Me Kate and Call Me Madam. Sentimental they may have been, but in almost all such stories, the uplift of the archetypal happy ending, the uniting of hero and heroine before the curtain fell, had become almost synonymous with storytelling.
In Britain, amid the austerities of the immediate post-war period, a new Labour government seemed to continue that sense of communal idealism generated by the war, as it set out to build a selfless, fair new world supposedly dedicated to the interests of all ‘the People’. In the early 1950s, Churchill returned to 10 Downing Street, to preside over his country’s gradual return to prosperity. In 1953, the ancient pageantry surrounding the Coronation of a new young Queen, attended by representatives from Britain’s Empire and Commonwealth, projected an extraordinary image of a worldwide ‘family’, gathered together to pay homage to the archetypal symbols of its collective Self. British society, its class structure still largely intact, still held together by a framework of traditional social and sexual morality, seemed to be returning to a conservative ‘normality’.
All this was reflected in the post-war years by the British cinema, happily projecting a particular view of Britain as it had emerged from its heroic wartime ordeal, keenly aware of class differences but still a society bound together by shared traditional values. It was the heyday of Ealing comedies, such as Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob; of films like The Blue Lamp, with Jack Warner creating the idealised fatherly policeman later to become the hero of a 1950s television series Dixon of Dock Green; of the classic film versions of Dickens’s nineteenth-century novels, such as Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. The events of the war itself did not much feature on the screen until, in the early 1950s, a flood of films appeared recreating heroic British wartime episodes, from the Battle of Britain, the Dambusters raid and the sinking of the Graf Spee to prison-camp escape stories.
In the theatre it was the heyday of West End ‘drawing room comedy’, Terence Rattigan, T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party: thoughtful, undisturbing plays for respectable middle-class audiences, about the lives of socially ‘above the line’ people like themselves. Evelyn Waugh, the provocative young novelist of the 1920s, had embarked on his earnest trilogy about the war, Sword of Honour, partly inspired by his conversion to Roman Catholicism; while his longest novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945) was like a serious revisiting of the plot of his first, Decline and Fall (1928), replacing its sardonic satire of the amoral 1920s with a haunting portrait of an old upper-class Catholic family in its decadence, clinging on to a sentimentalised version of its Catholic faith as the rising tide of modern barbarism consigned it to the past. Even Waugh’s contemporary, Graham Greene, although he specialised in portraying the social and moral twilight world dubbed ‘Greeneland’, clung on to his own sentimental version of Catholicism, as offering the hope that there was light flickering somewhere in the darkness.8
However much some were still holding to the imagery and symbolism of the past in their search for meaning, the world in that first post-war decade was changing rapidly. It was symbolically apt that the crowning of a new Queen in the mediaeval setting of Westminster Abbey should have been the occasion which more than anything else introduced the people of Britain to the new medium of television. On all sides the pace of technological innovation was now transforming human life more rapidly than ever before: the first jet airliners; transistors; new wonder-drugs like penicillin, which promised a revolution in man’s ability to combat disease; new pesticides like DDT, which promised a worldwide revolution in food production; nuclear fission producing electric power; the first rockets reaching into space.
By the mid-1950s there was a growing sense that humanity was standing at the dawn of a wholly new era, with a power to command the forces of nature which would dwarf anything which had gone before. Nowhere was this more obvious than in America, now, under the presidency of the elderly and conservative wartime general Eisenhower, indisputably the richest, most powerful, most technologically advanced nation in the world. But along with this vision of a shining future had come the uncomfortable awareness that it cast a long shadow. The advance of nuclear physics had already produced the hydrogen bomb. Those advances in rocket science were creating missiles capable of carrying such weapons halfway across the globe. The dreams of mankind were now becoming haunted by a barely imaginable new nightmare.
At least on the surface such fears could be turned into popular entertainment. Both in America and Britain, the early 1950s saw a rash of science fiction horror stories showing humanity facing some final catastrophe: either through its own technological ingenuity having created monsters which run out of control, or through the arrival of aliens from outer space bent on taking over planet Earth. The power of stories such as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids or Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass serials for television derived from the way they began by showing their characters living in a peaceful, everyday contemporary world of the 1950s, and how this peace was then suddenly shattered by the terrifying irruption of some dark and monstrous power. Invariably, just when the nightmare reached its height and mankind seemed doomed, the hero and his companions either managed to destroy the monster, or at least to escape from its clutches, in a way which offered hope that humanity could survive and that the reign of darkness could one day be brought to an end.
The prevailing archetype in the societies of the West was again about to go through a startling change.
‘When the mood of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.’
(Late 1960s slogan, attributed to Plato.9)
The psychic upheaval about to engulf the Western world first showed in the younger generation. By the mid-1950s various films were catching a newly restive mood now affecting many of those on the verge of adult life, who 10 years earlier would have been preoccupied with fighting World War Two. In 1953 The Wild One featured Marlon Brando as the leader of an aggressive gang of leather-jacketed ‘tonup kids’ descending on a California town (and ended with him being accused of murder). Two years later teenage American movie-goers were hypnotised by a new young Hollywood star James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), playing a speed-crazed hero who ended up killing himself in a car crash (only months before Dean died in identical fashion in real life). Across the Atlantic Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1954) centred on a bored, sensation-seeking bunch of Italian teenagers, showing, like the contemporary ‘Teddy boy’ craze in Britain, that, as the shadows of the war receded, the new hunger for excitement was not confined only to America.
The first real sign of the scale of the earthquake to come, however, was the reaction in 1956 to the movie Rock Around the Clock, starring a group known as Bill Haley and the Comets (who had briefly featured the previous year in a film about violence in a New York slum school, Blackboard Jungle). Their music aroused such excitement that it set off riots. In south London a mob of three thousand ‘Teddy boys’ rampaged through the streets for several hours, leaving a trail of devastation. Within months Haley was overshadowed by another new cult hero, Elvis Presley, the epitome of rampant young male sexuality. The pounding beat of rock ’n’ roll became the most feverish craze in popular music since the 1920s.
At much the same time, apparently unconnected, a new play in London, by an unknown young playwright, became overnight the theatrical sensation of the year. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, showing its bored, angry, ‘lower-class’ young hero Jimmy Porter in a seedy Midlands flat, ranting at the middle-class, Establishment values which he saw as suffocating English life, was unlike anything audiences had seen before. It was hailed by critics like Ken Tynan as roaring like a gale of fresh air through the stifling conservative conventions which had dominated English drama since the war. Soon Osborne and other new, young, ‘below the line’ writers, such as the novelists Kingsley Amis and John Braine, had been dubbed by the press as ‘angry young men’.
A remarkable feature of the last four decades of the twentieth century was the extent to which they would be characterised by a set of values and attitudes which came into being in the space of just a few years, between the middle of the 1950s and the late 1960s. Already by the mid-1960s it was being observed that a ‘revolution’ had taken place in the Western world, exemplified in everything from popular music, the rise of ‘youth culture’ and ‘sexual liberation’ to the new omnipresence of television and the rise of the ‘consumer society’. The transformation this had brought about in the way people thought and behaved would last to the end of the century and beyond. But essentially it had begun at that moment in 1955–1956 when ‘the mood of the music’ changed.
Over the next few years a distinct new ‘sub-culture’ emerged among the young of the Western democracies, whereby they saw themselves as in rebellion against the older generation and all it stood for. Bonded together by their new music, their fashions in clothes and jazz-derived American slang (‘cool’, ‘crazy’, ‘rave’, ‘wild’, ‘freaky’, ‘kicks’), their collective mood exhibited all the familiar symptoms of a group-fantasy: rigidly conformist, centred on rock ’n’ roll singers as its iconic dream heroes, and exhibiting a sense of aggression towards the ‘boring’, ‘repressive’ values of all those outside their fantasy-community, who were dismissed as ‘squares’. In America the mood of this new ‘beat generation’ found expression in Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957). In Britain a middle-aged novelist Colin MacInnes tried to capture this dream-state in Absolute Beginners (1959), as he described his young hero looking down on London from a plate-glass window:
‘pressed up so close it was like I was out there in the air, suspended above the city, and I swore by Elvis and all the saints that this last teenage year of mine was going to be a real rave. Yes, man, come whatever, this last year of the teenage dream I was out for kicks and fantasy.’
By the late 1950s, however, it was not only the young who had the sense that some extraordinary new world was opening up. What was happening was that, after that revival of the values of the Self which had characterised the war years, the mood of the age was picking up where it left off in the ‘Roaring Twenties’: and this was now generating different bubbles of expectation which overlapped and soon began to merge with each other.
Underpinning it all was the exhilarating pace of technological change, which for most people in the richer countries of the West was bringing an entirely new kind of material prosperity. ‘Affluence’ had arrived. As millions bought their first cars and refrigerators, the coming of the first motorways, the first neon-lit supermarkets, above all the now ubiquitous television screens were filling people’s heads with a new vision of ‘modernity’. Symbolically, the feel of city life was being transformed as massive new metal, glass and concrete towers (again picking up on ideas from the 1920s) began to rise above skylines until now dominated by the towers, spires and domes of churches.
So headily all-pervasive was the sense that society was being carried into a new, exciting future that, even more obviously than in the 1920s, this brought an urge for liberation from all that framework of social and moral structures inherited from the past. From the class structure to sex, long-established constraints and attitudes seemed suddenly restrictive, outmoded, irrelevant to the needs of the new world technology was making possible.
In 1950 an American sociologist, David Riesman, had published a prescient book, The Lonely Crowd, identifying three basic ways in which human beings formed their values and attitudes to life. The first was what Riesman described as the ‘tradition-directed’ society, in which people in general inherited conventions and belief-systems passed on to them by their parents and by previous generations. The second was the ‘other-directed’ society, in which people took on the fashion-based values dictated by their peer-group and by all the pressures of the contemporary world around them. A third, much rarer category included those ‘inner-directed’ individuals who gradually discover their own autonomous inner ‘centre’, evolving values based on their own experience and understanding.
The change coming over Western society around 1960 represented a move on an unprecedented scale away from a ‘tradition-directed’ society to one in which people were becoming ‘other-directed’. Reinforced by the new power of advertising, the pace of technological change, reflected in everything from the contraceptive pill to the new architecture, helped to create the sense that a wholly new type of society was coming to birth: free-thinking, classless, sexually emancipated. People were at last being liberated to express their own ‘individuality’: but only so long as this conformed with the collective norms dictated by the new ruling consciousness. In the slang of the time, the need was to be ‘with it’. No one could have defined precisely what ‘it’ was; but everyone knew intuitively what was meant.
In the wider world there was an awakening desire for liberation among all those who saw themselves as ‘below the line’, such as the black population of the USA and those countries which could now look forward to independence from European colonial rule. When Britain’s prime minister Harold Macmillan remarked, as the new decade of the 1960s began, that ‘a wind of change’ was blowing through Africa, he might have been speaking not just of Africa but for humanity as a whole. A new archetype was in the ascendant, which everywhere was promoting the imagery of youth, vitality, freedom, excitement and the future against structures of thought and behaviour which seemed suddenly oppressive and to belong to a dead past. It was the power of this new imagery over people’s minds which was now going to shape their thinking in everything from social attitudes to politics for a long time to come. And as usual nothing reflected the psychic upheaval more vividly than the way in which this new age told stories.
As the world stood on the edge of the 1960s, one group of storytellers who picked up the new mood to particular effect were the young film-makers of the nouvelle vague in France. Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1959), Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist (1960) and Jules et Jim (1962) were strange dream-like narratives which each began in a mood of reckless youthful euphoria. But each then gradually turned to a puzzling nightmare, ending abruptly in a sudden, shocking death.
In Britain in 1960 it was appropriate that it should have been that most ‘daring’ novel of the 1920s, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which reappeared to become the focus of the new battle for sexual liberation. But it was telling that the essence of this battle against the ‘reactionary prudes’ and ‘killjoys’, at a time when Playboy magazine was pioneering the drive to make pornographic pictures of naked women socially acceptable, lay in the urge to enjoy not so much sexual gratification itself as the mental image of sex.10 In the same year, the impact of Hitchcock’s Psycho was so great because its central image of a naked young woman being sadistically stabbed to death provided such a shocking contrast to the decorous image of womanhood familiar from films of the post-war era.
However, the event of 1960 which most vividly reflected the arrival of the ‘Sixties dream’ was the American presidential election which, thanks for the first time to the power of the televised image, led to the replacement of America’s oldest-ever President with her youngest. John F. Kennedy’s charismatic good looks and ‘dynamism’ immediately made him the new decade’s first ‘dream hero’ (as the novelist Norman Mailer excitably put it, ‘Superman comes to Supermarket!’). Within months this had provoked growing tension between the glamorous new young leader of the free world and his ageing counterpart in the Soviet Union, Nikita Khruschev. In 1961 Kennedy’s failed invasion of the Soviet empire’s satellite in Cuba was followed by Khruschev’s Berlin Wall, provoking the worst crisis of the Cold War. In October 1962 came the even more dangerous crisis when Khruschev’s dispatch of nuclear rockets to Cuba brought the world to the edge of nuclear catastrophe.
The mood of the times was becoming ever more feverish. In November 1962, within weeks of the Cuba crisis, London saw the premiere of the first James Bond film Dr No (coincidentally featuring a monstrous villain who, from his lair on a Caribbean island, planned the nuclear destruction of the West). This coincided in London with a clutch of nightmarishly sensational new plays (referred to in Chapter 27), centred on the imagery of sex and violence. In the same month the hitherto staid and deferential BBC introduced the ‘satire craze’ to a mass-audience with That Was The Week That Was, mocking everything established and traditional in British national life, not least the government headed by the now seemingly antiquated and ‘upper class’ father-figure, Macmillan. The same weeks saw the first entry into the charts of a new rock ’n’ roll-based ‘pop group’ from Liverpool, the Beatles.
One of the most acclaimed ‘art films’ of 1962 was the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s Eclipse, a drifting nightmare which ended in a cloud covering the sun, throwing the world into a silent twilight. Through 1963, as Macmillan’s Conservative government disintegrated in a cloudy miasma of rumour and scandal, the hysteria surrounding the Beatles, the epitome of ‘classless’, ‘irreverent’ youthful energy bubbling up from socially ‘below the line’, grew ever more deafening. In Washington in September another ‘dream hero’ of the early 1960s, Martin Luther King, led a million protestors through ‘above the line’ Washington in an unprecedented demonstration for the civil rights of America’s black minority. Then, on 22 November, after a year when the headlines had been dominated by one sensation after another, came the most shocking moment of the post-war era: the assassination of President Kennedy.
In the aftermath of this eruption of ‘shadow’, America’s own mood turned darker. Over the next two years, it was to become dominated by race riots in her cities and, increasingly, the catastrophe unfolding in Vietnam. But in these same years it became obvious that the psychic upheaval which began at the time of rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1950s had produced a remarkable change in the character and mood of Western life, nowhere more obviously than in London.
As obsessive attention centred on its classless ‘new aristocracy’ of pop singers, model girls, actors, photographers and dress-designers, it emerged in 1964 and 1965 that Britain was leading the way in promoting that bubble of image-based fantasy which caused London to be hailed as ‘the most swinging city in the world’. On the surface there was an almost child-like innocence about the crazes and fashions which swept through London’s boutiques, discotheques and glossy magazines, from the dazzling patterns of Op Art to the shiny PVC uniforms, mini-skirts and little white boots which depersonalised young girls into throwaway sex toys, But in an earlier chapter we traced how this remorseless pursuit of novelty was accompanied by the drift of plays, films and novels into an ever more sensational twilight world, preoccupied with sex and violence and culminating in November 1965 in the spectacle of young men stoning a baby to death in its pram.11
By the beginning of 1966, a curious change of mood was taking place. The new craze among the pop culture’s elite was the psychedelic drug LSD, which helped to inspire a new interest in the imagery and message of Eastern religions. As the now bearded and kaftanned Beatles sat at the feet of their guru, the Maharishi, and strummed their sitars with Ravi Shankar, they had travelled a long way in just five short years from the leather-jacketed suburban teenagers who had first earned a living together imitating American rock ’n’ roll in the nightclubs of Hamburg’s red-light district.
Psychologically what was happening was that, for those at the heart of the fantasy bubble, the untrammelled egotism it represented had now gone so far that it was producing that familiar unconscious reversal. The archetype of the Self was returning in an ‘inferior’ form. The craze for ‘Eastern mysticism’ represented a form of ‘ego-Self confusion’, whereby the ego, having wearied of all the novelties of overt ego-gratification, now wanted a sentimental version of its ego-transcending opposite. In 1967 this took on more widespread form in the craze which swept young people across the Western world for the hippie bells, joss sticks, ‘peace and love’ of the ‘flower power’ movement, which had originated in San Francisco. Pseudo-religious cults flourished, invariably centred on some darkly charismatic leader-figure and based on the ruthless separation of their members from the rest of society.
In 1968 the prevailing fashion again mutated, as mobs of unkempt students demonstrated, half-angrily, half-playfully, across the world against any symbol of the adult, established order, from the Vietnam war to their university curriculum. As they mouthed the slogans of Trotskyite revolution, decorated their rooms with iconic posters of the dead Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and daubed walls with such graffiti as ‘make love, not war’, this coincided with the news from the USA of the assassinations of two more ‘sixties dream heroes’, Martin Luther King and President Kennedy’s younger brother Bobby. The following year in California, the story of one particularly dark quasi-religious cult ended in hideous catastrophe, when Charles Manson, leader of ‘The Family’, egged on his followers to an orgy of violence which led to the murder of the film actress Sharon Tate. By fearful symmetry, she was married to one of the decade’s most obsessive creators of the imagery of sex-and-violence, Roman Polanski, the director of Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1966), centred on a pregnant young mother who gives birth to the devil (that ultimate inversion, the ‘Dark Child’).
With these visions of a world turned to nightmare, the great 1960s hysteria was in fact running out of steam. Psychologically it had been one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of mankind (comparable perhaps only with the much more violent frenzy which gripped France in the 1790s). But the cultural legacy it left behind, in everything from the rhythmic beat of its music to the acceptance of sexual promiscuity, from the importance of drugs to the fashionable orthodoxy of an anti-establishment, ‘left-wing’ attitude to authority was going to remain at the heart of Western life for many decades to come.
The decade which followed was like a prolonged hangover from the excesses of the 1960s. The self-destructive power of the mass-neurosis unleashed in those years was reflected in the deaths of several of its drug-addicted dream heroes, from Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix to Elvis Presley and John Lennon. Lesser stars continued to emerge to feed the collective youthful fantasy. New films, such as A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs, Last Tango in Paris and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ratcheted up the sensationalism with which the cinema fed the appetite for the imagery of sex and violence. But the outlines of how the group-fantasy continued to evolve were all by now well-established. And in some respects the 1970s saw a reaction to the relentless neophilia of the previous decade, nowhere more conspicuously than in the widespread revulsion against the inhuman environments created by the megalomaniac architectural revolution of the 1960s. The gargantuan housing estates and concrete tower blocks which had so powerfully expressed the hubris of the sixties now came widely to be seen as ugly, soulless and a social disaster. Many films and television commercials reflected a sentimental nostalgia for the imagery of earlier times, before the modern age, when the world had seemed quieter, more ordered, more colourful and more innocent.
This nostalgia for the world as it had been before the rise of modern technology had already found expression in the late 1960s in the remarkable revival of interest in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, for its conjuring up of an entire pseudo-mythic world set in an imaginary pre-mechanical age, when battles were still fought with swords and axes, bows and arrows. Watership Down similarly became one of the best-sellers of the 1970s by conjuring up a natural world in which anthropomorphic animals could be portrayed as relying on basic human qualities, and in which the creations of modern human technology – cars, barbed wire, bulldozers – were seen as monstrous and destructive intrusions. Even in one of the most futuristically technological fantasies of the decade, Star Wars, the make-believe hardware and dazzling special effects only provided the outward clothing for an essentially timeless story in which knights of old fought hand-to-hand duels to save the Princess from imprisonment and the kingdom from destruction.
Another respect in which the headlong rush of technological advance was now inspiring a reaction – although again its origins first appeared in the 1960s – lay in the growing sense that it represented a collective hubris which was threatening to destroy all life on earth. Increasingly prominent in the 1970s was the worldwide environmental movement, which had developed its own ‘narrative’ centred on what it saw as man’s reckless over-exploitation of the earth’s natural resources and the ever-increasing pollution of land, sea and air caused by the waste products of his material self-indulgence. As the world’s forests were laid waste, as human activity led each year to the extinction of thousands of other species, as the earth’s atmosphere (according to the narrative) became subject to potentially disastrous chemical changes, humanity’s defiance of nature for its own egocentric advantage was casting Homo sapiens as a cosmic ‘cuckoo in the nest’: the ultimate ‘monster’. And nowhere was the ambivalence of ‘the spirit of Loki’ more obvious than in the way dramatic advances in medical knowledge and agricultural technology were helping to promote an explosion in the world’s human population. Whenever in nature such an exponential rise was observed in the numbers of any other species, this was invariably the prelude to a devastating population collapse.
No single image did more to bring all this home than than ‘Earthrise’, the picture taken by the Apollo 8 mission in 1968 by the first men to orbit the moon, showing the Earth rising above the lifeless lunar landscape. There floating, unimaginably beautiful, in the blackness of space was the soft blue image of the world they had left: the place which was home to themselves and to every known form of life; the only true source of their identity; the living centre of all meaning and existence. In that unforgettable image Earth became a symbol of the Self. Yet now, through that same hyper-developed consciousness which had enabled Homo sapiens for the first time to step outside the confines of the Earth where nature had placed him, an ever-lengthening shadow was stretching across all those fragile ecosystems and natural balances which allowed life on that planet to survive. The Earth itself had become a symbol of that wholeness against which the collective ego of mankind was now in potentially catastrophic rebellion.
The response to this awakening perception was, on the one hand, an apocalyptic sense that, unless the human race took the most drastic steps to mend its ways and curb its material appetites, life on Earth must be doomed to destruction. On the other, there was no sign that the measures humanity was prepared to take to reduce its despoliation of the natural world were anything more than sentimental gestures. ‘Environmentalism’ thus became another expression of ‘ego-Self confusion’. A vocal minority worked up a tremendous sense of self-righteousness about the need to ‘save the planet’; while mankind as a whole (including most of the would-be planet-savers themselves) carried on consuming and destroying its natural resources at a greater rate than ever.
The two decades which followed the late 1950s had seen a shift in the ruling consciousness of the Western world which was without precedent. We can catch a little glimpse of this change in comparing two British films made twenty years apart but each based on the same event, the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.
A Night to Remember (1958), recreated this familiar tragic story according to the values dominant during the Second World War and the decade which followed. The film showed the liner’s passengers as a microcosm of pre-First World War society, divided between an ‘upper world’ of aristocrats and millionaires travelling in first-class luxury and the Irish and working-class emigrants travelling ‘below the line’ in steerage. But when disaster strikes, almost everyone, ‘upper class’ and ‘lower ’ alike, is portrayed as acting bravely and unselfishly, displaying that ‘stiff upper lip’ courage still familiar from the war years. The ship’s captain and his officers (led by Kenneth More) are shown playing a positive masculine role, concerned only to do their duty in an honourable, humane fashion, just as their Second World War equivalents (also not infrequently played by Kenneth More) had been shown doing in so many other films of the 1950s.
Twenty years later, S.O.S. Titanic (1979) presented a startlingly different picture. No longer are the liner’s occupants seen as a single community, united by a common danger. The privileged upper classes inhabiting the ‘above the line’ world are now caricatured as cold, spoiled egotists, concerned only with saving themselves. The captain and his officers are shown as weak and vacillating. The only group now shown as warm, human and heroic are those trapped ‘below the line’ in the bowels of the ship, notably the Irish, sentimentally portrayed as doomed victims of a heartless class system and arrogant British imperialism.
The shift of perspective reflected in these two versions of the same tale conveys how far the prevailing archetype of the time had changed. Up to the late 1950s Western society had still managed to preserve an idealised image of its own totality, corresponding to the Self. Vital to this had been those ruling masculine principles of order, discipline and hierarchy which archetypally constituted the ‘values of Father’. The institutions and conventions traditionally regarded as essential to holding society together had generally remained intact. Importance was still attached to such concepts as ‘duty’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘good manners’. The social order still rested on the respect accorded to ‘authority figures’: from parents to political leaders, from teachers to policemen. A framework of sanctions still existed to uphold sexual discipline and the central importance of marriage, from laws prohibiting homosexuality to social taboos on promiscuity and adultery.
One of the more obvious features of the change which came over society after the late 1950s had been the extent to which all this was rejected. All that complex of ‘masculine’ principles associated with duty, discipline, hierarchy, tradition and authority came to be perceived as oppressive and life-denying. The new ruling consciousness was one which promoted ‘below the line’ values at the expense of those ‘above the line’; the attributes of youth over those of maturity; liberation over constraint; ‘lower class’ over ‘upper’; the future over the past. A dominant archetype of the age – personified in such hero-figures as Elvis Presley or the Beatles – became that of the rebellious puer aeternus, ‘the boy hero’ frozen in immaturity. No longer was it generally taken for granted that the ultimate goal of human life was to work towards the wisdom of age. What mattered in an age of incessant change was to remain in touch with the new: to aspire to a state of perpetual youth. And again, as we see from stories, wherever the archetype of the immature ‘boy hero’ is in the ascendant, never far away is the archetype of the emasculating ‘Dark Mother’.
Certainly in all the transformation which had taken place in the 1960s and 1970s the ‘values of Father’ had in many ways been replaced by the more liberal, more indulgent values of ‘Mother’. This found every kind of expression, not least in the qualities shown by the political leaders of the time, as the dominant figures shaped by the war, such as Churchill, Eisenhower and de Gaulle, gave way to a new generation of politicians who seemed by comparison softer, weaker and more lightweight, typified in the new age of television more by a self-regarding concern with ‘image’ than by strength of character.
What more than anything else lay behind the psychological change which had come over the Western world was a consequence of all those technological advances which had brought an entirely new kind of prosperity. It was this which had turned its inhabitants into ‘consumers’. It was this all-providing technological ‘machine’ which could now gratify their every material need: from the supermarkets which provided their frozen, plastic-wrapped food to the machines which washed their clothes; from the heating which kept them warm to the cars and jet airliners which carried them about; from the blaze of electric light which turned night into day in their homes to the hypnotic presence of the television screen through which they now derived much of their entertainment and their picture of the world.
Never before had any civilisation been so cocooned from nature. Never before had human beings been so dependent for their comfort on something so vast and impersonal outside themselves that they could survive through much of their everyday lives without having to take any real direct responsibility (other than knowing which buttons to press). Without being aware of it, they were being infantilised, reduced psychologically to a child-like state of dependence on that ‘Great Mother’ which had been called into being by late-twentieth-century technology. And an inevitable consequence was that the traditional constraints on the gratifications of the ego were being eroded as never before.
On the surface, the prevailing mood of the years since the 1950s had been one of liberation. For most people, life had in so many ways become easier, materially more comfortable, morally more relaxed, less constrained by social conventions. But in all directions this was accompanied by a social disintegration which manifested itself in the soaring incidence of crime; in the breakdown of discipline in families, communities and schools; in addiction to drugs and pornography. One of its more conspicuous features was an unprecedented increase in the breakdown of marriages, and of that basic family unit which had been the bedrock of every human society since the dawn of recorded time.
Another phenomenon reflecting the new prominence now given to the ego was the cult of ‘celebrity’. Athough this was a process which had begun in the earlier decades of the twentieth century, not least with the worldwide fame won by the first movie stars, the glamour and deference once attached to royalty and those occupying leading positions of responsibility in society now increasingly centred on a new fantasy-community of ‘celebrities’, blurring together actors, sportsmen, pop singers and other ‘personalities’ created by the media. Although those inhabiting this unreal bubble did occasionally include politicians, by definition they were responsible to no one. Most were in reality very ordinary, shallow individuals whose only claim on public attention was that they appeared on television, and, in the words of Daniel J. Boorstin, had become ‘famous for being famous’.12
At the end of the 1970s, the writer Tom Wolfe, writing about the ego-obsessed culture of contemporary America, preoccupied by personal vanity, reflected in anything from slimming and physical fitness regimes to the vogues for self-regarding psychobabble and pseudo-spirituality, summed up these years as ‘The Me Decade’. But no one cast a more questioning eye on what had happened to Western civilisation since the 1950s than the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, after his exile in 1974 from the Soviet Union.
In 1978 Solzhenitsyn delivered the verdict of a shocked outsider on the culture he had found on arriving in his new home, America.13 His first surprise was the lack of ‘civil courage’ and moral character he saw in those who were supposed to be society’s leaders: their air of weak geniality and a tendency to say only what people might want to hear. Another, in a society which gave its citizens a degree of material comfort which 30 years earlier would have seemed inconceivable, was how strained and unhappy so many people looked. A third was the emphasis now placed on people’s ‘rights’, rather than their duties and obligations. A fourth, which shocked him as much as anything on his emergence from a tyranny where every public word was controlled by the state, was the relentless triviality and conformism of the supposedly ‘free’ Western media.
The picture Solzhenitsyn painted was of a society of spoiled children, sunk in mindless egotism. No longer, he said, could he recommend the western way of life as a model for the transformation of the Russia he had escaped from. ‘Through intense suffering’ he went on, ‘our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion’ looked singularly unattractive. ‘A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the west, while in the east they are becoming firmer and stronger ... life’s complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those generated by standardised western well-being’.
At the time Solzhenitysn was speaking, it seemed as though the empire of Communism, which in the 1970s had taken over ten more countries in Africa and Asia, its greatest advance since the late 1940s, was better placed to challenge American hegemony than ever before. As if desperate to provoke some response in the complacency of his audience, he went on:
‘There are meaningful warnings which history gives to a threatened or perishing society. Such as, for instance, the decadence of art or the lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings too. The centre of your democracy and your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden American citizens start looting and creating havoc ... The fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future. It has already started. The forces of evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?’
Solzhenitsyn’s comments might have acted as a reminder that, for the people living over a large part of the globe, the experience of the previous 30 years had been very different.
‘The lack of bitter experience of people in the west makes them incapable of imagining tragedy.’
Vladimir Bukovsky, BBC TV, 1980
By the end of the 1970s, more than a quarter of mankind had spent the decades since the Second World War living under the tyranny of darkness to a degree which was almost beyond the comprehension of people living in the West. By the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, he had already been responsible for the deaths of anything up to 20 million of his own people. Millions more were barely surviving in the slave camps of ‘the Gulag archipelago’. In China Mao-tse-Tung’s dictatorship had in 1949 established the terror which over the next three decades would kill tens of millions more.
One of the few westerners who had early developed an intuitive understanding of the realities of life under Communism was George Orwell, whose Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) held up such a vivid mirror to how such a supposedly idealistic system worked in practice. In particular, with his picture of the totalitarian rule of ‘the Party’, centred on the ubiquitous image of ‘Big Brother’, the incessant lying propaganda, the ‘two-minute hate’, ‘thoughtcrime’ and ‘newspeak’, he showed how such a regime set up a complete dark inversion of the Self; and how its central aim was to deny its people any right to individuality or an inner life. As Orwell showed in the crushing of his hero, each citizen had to be forced into subjection to the collective consciousness and to that projection of the collectivised Self the Party had created.
In the closing years of the 1950s, however, a novel smuggled to the West showed that, behind the monolithic propaganda surface of the Soviet Union, there were still individuals with an inner life, capable of thinking for themselves. What made Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago (1958) so subversive that the Soviet authorities immediately suppressed it was that it looked back to the Russia of the revolutionary years around 1917, not according to the prescribed Party line, but through the private life and sufferings of its strictly non-ideological hero.
Stripped to its essence, the story of Yuri Zhivago was that of a decent, intelligent, spiritually-sensitive man whose outer and inner life had been destroyed by the chaos of the revolution. Before it, he had been a promising young middle-class doctor, conventionally married, with a small son. Called up into the army, he then meets and falls in love with the bewitching Lara. Zhivago returns to his family in Moscow, but when they retreat to the country he again meets Lara and they begin an affair, which he eventually breaks off and admits to his wife. He is then conscripted to serve with Communist partisans in Russia’s civil war, after which he resumes his affair with Lara. Despite the deprivations of the time, they spend several happy months together but eventually, to save her life, he tricks her into fleeing under protection to a safer part of Russia. His wife and child have by now disappeared into exile abroad. Yuri returns to Moscow, where he begins living with a third woman, by whom he has two more children. Two male friends tell him he must choose between his new mistress and his wife. Amid the miseries and cold of post-revolutionary Moscow he is lucky to get a menial job. On his way to start work he collapses in the street with a heart attack and dies. At his funeral Lara turns up, mysteriously asking Yuri’s half-brother if there is any way to track down a child who has been given away to strangers. She disappears, and is supposed eventually to have died in a slave-camp (it was from Dr Zhivago that Western readers first learned the word ‘Gulag’). Serving in the army in World War Two, after themselves spending years in the Gulag, Zhivago’s two friends meet a laundry-girl, Tanya, who tells them her horrendous life story. Abandoned by her mother as a child, and after then becoming involved in an episode of chilling violence, she had been cast out on the world without family, friends or support. From her evidence they guess she must be the daughter of Yuri and Lara, and arrange measures whereby her life may now modestly improve.
In archetypal terms, what was significant about this bleak tale was the way it showed Russia’s revolution and civil war as the cause of the hero’s disintegration. From being happily married, with a son, he is first guiltily divided when he becomes bewitched by the elusive anima-figure of Lara. He attempts to behave responsibly by returning to his wife, but is then bewitched again. He again attempts to behave selflessly by sending Lara to safety, but when this leaves him unhappy, confused and alone, he takes up with a third woman, by whom he has children. His friends confront him with the need to resolve the crisis brought on by how his anima is now split three ways. Symbolically, his heart gives way under the strain. The real carrier of his anima mysteriously rematerialises at his funeral, only to slip back into the unconscious, where she is crushed by the new tyranny of the proletarian state. We are left years later with the image of Tanya, the tragic, orphaned anima-figure who is the sole relic of their love – although a final sentimental twist gives the tale some vestige of a positive ending.
Decades later, it may seem hard to recall why the publication of this novel created such a stir in the West (where it later became the basis of an even more sentimentalised film version), let alone why it seemed to pose such a challenge to the Soviet system that it was instantly suppressed. But, along with the release of millions of Stalin’s prisoners from the Gulag archipelago in the mid-1950s and Khruschev’s secret attack on Stalin’s tyranny at the 1956 Communist Party Congress, the very fact that such a private book could have been written marked a faint but striking crack in the seemingly all-powerful Communist monolith.
Five years later came another, when Khruschev permitted the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), the first story by one of those millions of zeks or prisoners who had been released from Soviet labour camps in the post-Stalin ‘thaw’. On the face of it, Solzhenitysn’s novella was a slight tale, merely describing a single day in the life of an anonymous zek. The hero wakes up in his bunk early in the morning, freezing, ill and utterly miserable. We follow him into a hellish day, being bullied by guards, as he works at laying bricks for a wall. Gradually his mood changes. He finds himself taking pleasure in the neatness with which he is laying his bricks. He forgets his illness. In the evening a fellow zek gives him a fragment of sausage. By the time he is ready for sleep, he is surprisingly content. He has been through a kind of Rebirth. Inwardly, in his own tiny way, he has triumphed over the system.
So powerfully did the waves which flowed from the publication of this story establish Solzhenitsyn as everything the Soviet system did not want him to be, as his own man, implacably tough and devoutly religious, that over the next few years, through further books smuggled out to the West, including in 1974 The Gulag Archipelago, he established himself as the central inspiration for Russia’s burgeoning ‘dissident’ movement. He and other brave individuals, such as the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, were now ready to challenge the system and all its lies head on.
What was happening in the Communist empire in the 1960s and 1970s offered a curious parallel to what had happened to Britain in 1940. After decades when the force of the Soviet totalitarian system had succeeded in crushing its subjects into submission, the very fact that it constituted such an extreme psychological pole was now provoking an equal and opposite reaction. Here and there individuals were now appearing for whom its very power was concentrating their human and spiritual energies into its opposite. Confronted by this collectivised outward projection of the ‘dark Self’, they were discovering the power of the ‘light Self’ within themselves. It became one of the paradoxes of this period of history that it was those societies governed by a system dedicated to eradicating human individuality which ended up by producing some of the outstanding individuals of the age. Not least among them was the Polish bishop, Karol Woityla, whose faith and character had been forged in opposition to both Nazi and Communist regimes; and whose elevation to the Papacy in 1978 and first triumphant return to his homeland the following year did much to inspire that heroic resistance to Poland’s Communist government in 1980 which would eventually play a key symbolic part in bringing about the downfall of the entire Soviet system.
One of the most remarkable books written in the twilight years of Communism was the autobiography of Eugenia Ginsburg, smuggled out to the West to be published in two volumes in the 1960s and 1970s as Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind. Although her book was based on fact, Ginsburg’s story reads with all the imaginative power of a novel. She described how, in the 1930s, she had been the wife of a leading Party official in a provincial Soviet capital, enjoying a privileged life ‘above the line’. In 1937, like so many others, she and her husband were arrested by the secret police in the first of Stalin’s great purges. She found herself disappearing through the floor of Soviet society into the foetid, violent underworld of its vast prison system. Much of her book described the horrendous sufferings she endured in this twilight world, subjected to Kafkaesque interrogations by the NKVD and spells of solitary confinement, ending eventually in a hellish succession of slave camps in the icy wastes of the Soviet Far East.
What makes her book exceptional is the way we see her experience turning into an inner journey, as she develops the kind of understanding which enables her immediately to capture the human essence of each person she meets. Just as in a fictional story, we can see at once whether each new character she meets is ‘dark’ or ‘light’: devious, bullying and ego-centred, or honest, goodhearted and selfless. As the story nears its end, she comes to work with a fellow-prisoner, a German doctor, who shines out as a moral giant, strong, compassionate, wise and revered by all around him. The two are separated, but when they meet again we at once know, as they walk towards each other through a raging blizzard, that they love each other and are not going to be parted again.
This memorable scene is like a positive opposite to that which ends The Third Man, where the uncomprehending hero sees the elusive anima-figure of Anna walking towards him through falling leaves in the wintry cemetery, then straight past him without a look. In Ginsburg’s version the hero and heroine, purged of egotism by their suffering, are finally united in the complete, mature love of two people who have grown up. Since her husband has long since died on some other island of the Gulag archipelago, she and her hero can marry, and the story ends on a true note of liberation as they joyfully regain their limited freedom in the grey post-Stalinist world of Russia in the mid-1950s.
In the spiritual depth of this story, as in other books and novels which emerged from the darkness of the Soviet empire in the 1960s and 1970s, we see something of why, when Solzhenitsyn was sent into exile by the Soviet regime in 1974, he was so startled by what he found in the West: the world of A Clockwork Orange, Last Tango in Paris and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which the ‘dark inversion’ appeared to have taken over storytelling and much else besides.
By the closing decades of the twentieth century, there were many respects in which Western storytelling reflected the psychological twilight into which mankind had been heading, but perhaps the most obvious was the continuing obsession of so many film-makers, playwrights and novelists with the imagery of sex and violence. Psychologically, as we have seen, this was the natural outcome of that process which had begun 200 years earlier when stories began to be refracted through the ego and conceived on the level of fantasy rather than imagination.
For two centuries or more, as the consciousness of Western civilisation had continued to travel ever further from unity with nature, its central tendency had been to reinforce those ‘masculine’ physical and mental aspects of the human psyche which are identified with the ego, at the expense of the ‘feminine’ instincts of selfless feeling and intuitive understanding. All the emphasis of this advance had been on extending man’s command over nature and to achieve an ever greater understanding of how it worked through the ordering function of the human mind. The most obvious prize this had yielded was to enable part of the human race (but by no means all) to enjoy a materially comfortable existence, catering for its every physical need. But part of the price paid for this one-sidedness had been to cut people off from those deeper ‘feminine’ instincts which can give them the sense of belonging to something larger and more significant than themselves – as could still be seen among those less ‘developed’ peoples of the world who continued to live physically taxing but dignified and uncomplaining lives much closer to nature.
A similar limitation could be seen in how people in the developed world looked for their understanding of how the world worked. For centuries Western civilisation had increasingly sought to rest such explanations on that analytical function of the human mind which could supposedly provide objective, ‘scientific’ answers to every question. This had created a hugely impressive assemblage of knowledge of the physical mechanisms whereby life and the universe operated. But it had become ever harder to hold all this knowledge together in a way which gave any sense of unified meaning. The more the human mind focused on the material details of existence, the more detached it became from those deeper levels of the psyche which alone can provide it with a real sense of meaning and purpose. Yet it is from precisely those deeper levels of the psyche that our archetypal urge to imagine stories originates, and it is only when human beings can make contact with them that they can reach proper maturity.
This had profound relevance to another significant development mirrored by storytelling in the closing decades of the twentieth century: the change which was now coming over the relationship between the sexes and the relationship of men and women to the internal balance of their own gender attributes. An inevitable corollary of the difficulty people in the West were now finding in achieving psychological maturity was the tendency for men to become softer and less overtly masculine, while the effect on women was the opposite.
The new assertiveness of women became particularly obvious from the late 1960s onwards, with the rise of the ‘Women’s Lib’ movement. Like so many other features of twentieth-century life, this tendency had first begun to appear in the years before the First World War, with the campaign for women’s suffrage; and before that in the writings of the early ‘feminists’, such as Mary Woolstonecraft, at the time of that psychic upheaval which had coincided with the French Revolution and the dawn of Romanticism. But much more aggressively than ever before, the new feminists of the 1960s and 1970s could see women only as oppressed victims, in a world dominated by men, treated as mentally and socially inferior, as little more than ‘sex objects’ and slaves. They indiscriminately projected onto the male sex the archetype of the ‘dark masculine’; seeing men as wholly egocentric, either as bullying Tyrants or as insensitive, immature ‘little boys’, or both.
Even more than in its earlier manifestations, the new feminism was concerned not with promoting the importance of ‘femininity’ but the reverse. It despised the ‘feminine’ values of feeling and intuition. Its central drive was to show women as equal to men in masculine terms. Despite their contempt for men and for the ‘values of Father’, the feminists had become dominated by the animus: that masculine component in a woman’s psyche which can give her the strength and rational intelligence which is necessary for psychological balance, but which, if it is allowed to override her femininity, renders her negative, hard and combative.14
In no sense was possession by the negative animus a new phenomenon. More than 2000 years earlier it had been portrayed by Aristophanes in his Thesmophoriazusae, showing the pack of Athenian women driven by their collective negative animus into wishing to kill Euripides for the dismissive way in which he presented women in his plays. It was memorably depicted by Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew and had been portrayed in many other stories down the ages, showing a virago having to be ‘tamed’ back into contact with her femininity. What that was new about its late-twentieth-century manifestation was the scale on which it was now becoming adopted by the ruling consciousness of the time. Never before had the idea of women behaving so egocentrically on behalf of their sex become so acceptable.
This new female assertiveness did produce one episode of considerable psychological irony. A particular grievance of the feminists was the extent to which men dominated the world of power and politics. Yet when, in 1979, Britain became the first major country to elect a woman as its prime minister, the feminists were appalled. In all respects but her gender, they saw Margaret Thatcher as representing everything they abhorred.
Mrs Thatcher’s significance as a leader was that, at a time when male politicians had been losing their masculinity, she stood for masculine qualities in politics more effectively than any of the men around her (as we have seen from stories, when the hero is weak, it can often fall to the heroine to supply the masculine strength he lacks). With her strength of character and firmness of principle, her opposition to dependence on the ‘Great Mother’ of the state and her belief in individual self-reliance, she stood for the ‘values of Father’ more than any other politician of her generation. This was reflected in the virulence with which her left-wing opponents saw her as ‘heartless’ and in her opposition to the Soviet Communists, who first nicknamed her ‘the Iron Lady’. It was seen supremely in the masculine role she played in taking back the Falklands, the most successful military operation Britain had mounted since World War Two.
In 1981 Thatcher was joined in championing the ‘values of Father’ by President Ronald Reagan, who had first won fame in the 1940s and 1950s by playing ‘masculine’ roles in Hollywood films (he was thus the first major political figure in history to have founded his career on acting out characters in fictional stories). Their partnership through the 1980s was defined not least by their opposition to the ‘evil empire’ of Soviet Communism, now under such pressure from its internal contradictions that by the end of the decade it was disintegrating. Almost Mrs Thatcher’s last act as a world leader was to supply the masculine resolve which persuaded Reagan’s successor President Bush to deploy overwhelming military force against that archetypal ‘monster-figure’ and tyrant Saddam Hussein.
With her departure, Western politics settled back to their domination in the 1990s by ‘mother’s boys’, the first generation of leaders whose coming to adulthood had been shaped by the values prevailing in the late 1960s and 1970s. Conspicuously lacking in any firm moral ‘centre’, these were exemplified by the vain, promiscuous President Clinton, and later by the puer aeternus figure of Tony Blair who, as much as any politician before him, relied on projecting a fantasy-image of himself which bore scant relation to reality.
The ‘feminisation’ of men and the ‘masculinisation’ of women had already become a central feature of that new ideological orthodoxy which was sweeping the Western world under the name of ‘political correctness’. In psychological terms, this was a ‘left-wing’ phenomenon and one of the most remarkable developments of the twentieth century. The kind of self-righteous intolerance once associated with the more puritanical forms of religion and the more extreme forms of Socialism now reappeared to promote the ‘rights’ of women, homosexuals, racial minorities, the disabled and any group of people who could be portrayed as being ‘below the line’ and therefore discriminated against. Closely allied to this was the new social pressure for the power of ‘Mother State’ to be used to regulate to protect its citizens from any conceivable risk, however imaginary. The key to the nature of this new secular puritanism was the degree of self-righteous inflation it inspired in its adherents. Like their religious and political forerunners they presented a classic study in ‘ego-Self confusion’. Unconsciously they were using the belief that they were acting in the name of selfless moral principle simply as a cloak for asserting their ego, and as a means to enjoy feelings of moral superiority. In the cause of ‘toleration’ and promoting collective ‘rights’, they had become possessed by a fanatical and humourless intolerance.15
So deeply did political correctness permeate the ethos of the time that it inevitably found reflection in storytelling, in no respect more obviously than the urge to reverse what became known as the ‘gender stereotyping’ which had characterised stories since the dawn of civilisation. An early example, as we saw, was the science-fiction horror film Alien (1979), a classic Overcoming the Monster story in which the archetypally masculine role of the monster-slaying hero was deliberately given to a forceful heroine, representing the ‘new woman’. Many other examples were to follow, not least in the role of monster-slayer played by the heroine in The Terminator (1984).
As became evident, however, to defy the unconscious pull of the archetypes is not easy. We saw, for instance, how in The Silence Of The Lambs (1991), the attempt to give the archetypal hero-role to a ‘new woman’ was subtly undermined when the power of the repulsively dark but devilishly charming and clever male villain eventually proved too much for her. She ended up being outwitted and allowing him to escape. Basic Instinct (1991) carried the sexual inversion to its ultimate, by featuring a wholly dark heroine, possessed by her negative animus, who succeeds in mastering and making a fool of the inadequate hero. But even here, so remorselessly did the film attempt to turn the archetypes upside down, that its makers could not quite bring themselves to press their inverted logic to its full conclusion, leaving the ending tellingly ambiguous.
Equally revealing of the underlying power of the archetypes was the way some of the more popular films of this period managed to challenge the new orthodoxy of the times head on. Crocodile Dundee (1986) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968, new version 1999), for instance, each featured a heroine who was a model of the new, assertive ‘post-feminist’ career woman. But in each story the hero manages to display such a masterful combination of ‘masculine’ strength of character with ‘feminine’ emotional intelligence that this eventually proves enough to free the heroine from the stifling grip of her animus. Her suppressed femininity is brought to life, and hero and heroine are united in an archetypal happy ending.
Another aspect of how storytelling reflected the psychological twilight of the time was the extraordinary popularity in the second half of the twentieth century of the ‘soap opera’, simple, untaxing dramas regularly broadcast on radio or television portraying the everyday lives of a community of ‘ordinary’ people. From the 1960s onwards, no form of television entertainment attracted a larger or more devoted following, from I Love Lucy through Dallas to Friends, from Coronation Street and Eastenders to Neighbours.
The most obvious feature of the soap opera was the way it used the power of stories like a mental drug, addicting its audiences and keeping them hooked by playing sentimentally on their emotions. Soap operas exploited all the basic archetypal material of storytelling by reducing it to a mechanical formula, designed to set up a continual stream of teasing or heart-tugging suspense. Boy meets girl. Boy betrays girl. Can they make it up? Man intent on behaving badly seeks to deceive. Man is caught out in his deception. Will he get away with it? Not only is every situation in a soap opera stereotyped, so is the language in which it is couched. No character ever speaks except in clichés. In real life ‘ordinary’ people often use unexpected or quirky turns of phrase. In a soap opera they never say anything which has not been said a million times before. But in plot terms the most significant characteristic of soap operas is that their stories never truly resolve. The aim of the industrial process which creates them is to produce an unending succession of emotional cliff-hangers, to keep the audience switching on to see what happens next – whereas the archetypal purpose of any proper story is that it must eventually work up to a full-scale climax, followed by a conclusion which resolves everything that has gone before.16
Related to the soap opera, although less mechanical in its construction, was its more obviously episodic counterpart, the situation comedy, usually centred on the life of a particular family or a small group of people who had for some reason been brought intimately together. A study carried out in the late 1980s of the 25 most popular situation comedies on American television which centred on the life of a family found that in 24 of them the most intelligent and sensible member of the family was the mother, followed by her children, The stupidest family member, most prone to act foolishly, was the father.
At the end of the century this was echoed in the most popular cartoon sitcom ever produced by American television, The Simpsons, where the self-deluding schemes of the father, Homer, made him the perpetual fall-guy. He was followed in stupidity by his son Bart, whose bright younger sister Lisa was so much more on the ball (as even, on occasion, was his dummy-sucking baby sister Maggie). The long-suffering mother of the family, Marge, was invariably shown as most sensible of all. But it would be a mistake to see these characterisations as simply reflecting post-feminist political correctness. In archetypal terms, The Simpsons could scarcely have been more traditional. The role of the obsessively self-deceiving father, as a representation of the deluded ruling consciousness, has been basic to Comedy back to the time of Aristophanes, The son, Bart, represented a lesser version of the blindness of ego-centred masculinity. The female members of the family represented that wider ‘feminine’ vision which we invariably see in stories emanating from ‘below the line’, centred particularly (as in, say, A Winter’s Tale or The Marriage of Figaro) on the bright Daughter/Princess and the put-upon but emotionally wise Mother/Queen.17
In this respect The Simpsons took its place in the mainstream of a tradition of storytelling which could be traced back through more than two and a half thousand years. But the very fact that probably not one of the countless millions of people watching the series were aware of this (any more, one suspects, than were its authors) was in itself a measure of just how unconscious is the process whereby human beings are carried along by a story. We can follow hundreds of different versions of the same archetypal plot, each reflecting something profoundly significant about how our own psyche works. Yet so beguiled are we by the magic of storytelling that we do not even notice that fundamentally they are all telling us the same story.
If the evolution of human consciousness is really concerned with developing a clearer understanding of how we and the world work, perhaps the time has come when we should begin to appreciate what this astonishing faculty we each possess is really about: this mystery so close beneath our noses that we do not even recognise it to be a mystery at all.
The fact that, as the year 2000 began, almost the entire human race celebrated the start of a new millennium, was itself a tribute to the power of a story. Even though Christianity was still, statistically, the world’s leading religion, it had retreated a long way from the overwhelming dominance it once exercised over the individual and collective life of the inhabitants of a mainly European ‘Christendom’. For most people in the Europe of the early twenty-first century, the nearest they still came to observing Christian rituals was the continuing, largely secularised role played by the celebration of Christmas (although this too reflected the archetypal hold over the human imagination of a story). As Lao Tsu had put it, when ‘rectitude’ was lost, all that was left were those outward ‘rites’ which mark ‘the wearing thin of loyalty and good faith and the beginning of disorder’.
Quite apart from religion itself, however, all across the world the traditional frameworks of belief and symbolism designed to integrate human beings with the idea of the Self had long been in retreat against the advancing forces of secularism, the primary psychological effect of which was to promote the power and influence of the ego. Yet at the same time, the very fact that even those parts of the world which had never been predominantly Christian joined in marking the onset of the new millennium reflected the extraordinary speed with which in recent years the human world had seemed to shrink. What had brought it together as never before were the innovations in technology. Not only had the increased speed and ease of physical travel now made it possible for people to move around the globe in unprecedented numbers. Even more dramatic was the way in which satellite communications, global television coverage and the Internet had transformed it into what Marshall McLuhan called ‘the electronic village’. Much more obviously than ever before, the entire human race was now involved in the same common story.
As the twenty-first century began, three particular ways could be singled out in which the urge to see life in terms of stories might help to shed light on the state in which mankind now found itself.
The first was that, thanks again to technology, stories were now more freely accessible than ever before in history. One of the more prominent forms this took, although not normally recognised as such, was the unprecedented ubiquity of ‘news’. Never had people been bombarded with such a plethora of ‘stories’, reflecting the daily drama of human life as it unfolded in all parts of the globe. But obviously only the tiniest fraction of what was actually going on in the world was deemed worthy to be considered as ‘news’. It was noticeable how much of what was considered appropriate for this treatment – political dramas, tragic accidents, the committing of crimes, the doings and misdoings of celebrities – was now presented through the new intimacy made possible by the modern media as if it were a kind of continuous soap opera. And the values which lay behind this were much the same as those which determined the contents of fictional soap operas. What made ‘news’ were not the routine events of life but anything unusual which disturbed the order of the human world; anything which conjured up images of conflict, dissension, violence or abnormality, as was reflected in those familiar trigger words done to death in newspaper headlines such as ‘crisis’, ‘storm’, ‘row’, ‘rift’, ‘shock’, ‘horror’, ‘crackdown’, ‘blitz’, ‘bombshell’. Just as in a soap opera, there would always be room for episodes which played sentimentally on the public’s emotions: a man and woman in love; the birth of a baby; an act of heroism. But essentially the purpose of ‘news’ was to appeal to the fantasy-level of the mind, in much the same way as a fictional story might do, by setting off a stream of titillatory mental sensations. And, just as in their fictional counterpart, this was most effectively achieved by conjuring up almost any image which represented some assertion of the ego which violated the totality of the Self.
Inevitably many of the fictional stories of the time reflected the same values, and with them all the ego-based obsessions, confusions and immaturities of the contemporary world. But what might have been thought remarkable was the degree to which, despite all the shattering changes which had taken place in how people now led their outward lives, the underlying patterns of the tales which held their attention were much the same as those which had held their ancestors spellbound for thousands of years.
Nothing might have seemed more peculiarly modern, for instance, than the ‘interactive’ games millions were now able to play on their computer screens. Yet the form many of these took was only too familiar. The player would identify with a ‘hero’ (or a super-feminist heroine, such as Lara Croft), through whom he or she would then have to overcome dragons and super-villains, venture on complex quests or thread the way through some treacherous labyrinth, in order to reach the ultimate goal of the game – which might well be the need to free a Princess (or mankind) from the clutches of a Monster.
In the years around the turn of the new millennium a series of stories which had begun being scribbled out by a single mother living on income support struck such a chord with millions of readers and cinemagoers across the world that, within less than a decade, they had made their authoress J. K. Rowling one of the richest women in Britain. Yet with their combination of wizards and magic, trolls, overcoming monsters, quests, light triumphing over darkness and a seemingly ordinary little hero turning out to be extraordinary, the essential symbolism of the Harry Potter stories was again entirely familiar.
Most remarkable of all was the impact between 2001 and 2003 of the three-part film version of The Lord of the Rings, a phenomenon which had no real parallel in the history of the cinema.
The circumstances in which this film came about were themselves unprecedented. A story originally created by an Oxford professor of literature was taken on half a century later by a young film director, Peter Jackson, living in New Zealand at the other end of the world, and turned into a project involving literally thousands of artists, craftsmen and technicians from different nations. The task of welding all their skills together to produce such a monumental work of the human imagination was not unreminiscent of the teamwork which had gone into building a great mediaeval cathedral.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy could not have been created without the tricks of the latest computer technology, from its breathtaking battle scenes featuring thousands of participants to the haunting visualisation of the deformed little creature Gollum. Yet, even more than in the Harry Potter films, the actual contents of the story could not have been more timelessly archetypal.
For those who fell under the spell of The Lord of the Rings (and of course there were those who did not), Jackson’s film version only reinforced the sense that this story, with all the epic grandeur of its theme set in a vast mythic landscape, was cast on a scale which somehow set it apart from any other. But the real reason for the power of its appeal was that it drew so deeply on the wellsprings of all that storytelling has been about ever since stories were first told.
As we saw in Chapter 19, The Lord of the Rings is one of those rare stories big enough to incorporate all the seven basic plots of storytelling at once. It presents the central battle between darkness and light in the most cosmic way imaginable. Frodo’s quest is a symbolic struggle to get rid of the beguiling power of the ego. At the heart of the story we see a perfect golden ring, seemingly so small, so attractive, so harmless. Yet through it can be summoned up all the immense, shadowy power of Sauron, the ultimate representative of all that is evil in the world: the bringer of darkness, destruction and death. We see Sauron only as one enormous, burning eye, at the top of his proud tower, symbolising the single-eyed tunnel-vision of the human ego. Under his sway, vast regimented legions of deformed human monsters can be launched against the frail forces of decent, honourable, loving humanity, destroying the ordered peace of their homes and communities, putting innocents to the sword, just as the world has seen so often through history, and never more than in the twentieth century.
In the earlier stages of his journey, Frodo has loyal companions and the guidance of the Wise Old Man Gandalf and the Anima Galadriel, between them representing that power of spiritual human maturity which must inspire him on his way. In its closing stages, accompanied only by the faithful Sam, but now dogged also by Gollum, representing the obsessive inner state of someone who has fallen irreparably into the grip of the ego, Frodo personifies all the loneliness of humanity’s struggle to be free of egocentricity. Yet it is the very fact that he and Sam are so selfless in serving their cosmic, ego-transcending cause which enables them in the end to reach their goal.
The nearer Frodo gets to the end of his Quest, the more his story is paralleled by the equally timeless story of a man who, after long exile from his home, is at last ready to claim his kingdom. Like Odysseus, Aragorn is returning from long wanderings through the world, to seize back his kingdom from the impostors who have usurped it. Only when he has proved himself ready and worthy will he emerge in all his kingly majesty, to be brought together with the feminine ‘other half’ who will make him whole. Aragorn’s story is that of every man who, after years when he has been lost because the inner kingdom of his soul has been under inadequate rule, is finally ready, in The Return of the King, to reach that state of maturity which means that he knows who he is.
In this final episode the two dramas coincide. Only when Frodo has succeeded in the inner drama of destroying the ego, is the darkness which has cast its shadow over the world finally dispelled. In all directions, light and life return. On the outward stage Aragorn can now succeed to his kingdom, marry his Princess and become at one with himself and the world. And again we see it symbolised, as in so many other stories before, how each victory by one individual over the power of darkness can somehow take on a cosmic significance. As an old Vietnamese put it to a Guardian journalist, when his country was being torn apart by the unimaginable hell of war in the late 1960s:
‘Humanity is one. Each of us is responsible for his personal actions and his actions towards the rest of humanity. All we can do is hold back our own brand from the fire. Pull it back, do not add to the flame.’
As crowds emerged from watching The Lord of the Rings in the first years of the twenty-first century, they might have felt just as mysteriously elevated by the immense drama they had just witnessed as their predecessors emerging from a theatre in sixteenth century London or Athens of the fifth century BC, or an audience hearing of the battle between Gilgamesh and Humbaba in some city of ancient Mespotamia; even though, outwardly, the world they emerged into seemed so unrecognisably different. But what they would then also have found was that this world was itself now acting out its own version of the cosmic drama they had just been following; except that it was by no means so clear where the powers of darkness and light lay.
When on 11 September 2001 images flashed round the globe of the airliners crashing into the towers of New York’s World Trade Center, the single most shocking event since the Kennedy assassination, mankind was drawn into a conflict which could only be properly understood by recognising the extent to which all the different players were projecting onto it their own versions of precisely those same archetypes which shape storytelling.
From the point of view of George W. Bush, he was involved in a battle with the supreme embodiment of evil: that many-headed monster of global terrorism which initially centred on the invisible figure of Osama bin Laden, lurking like the bearded Saruman in his cave. But it then appeared that bin Laden, like Saruman, was only a front for an even more deadly figure of evil. Now Sauron himself could be seen casting his threatening shadow over the world, from the centre of his dark empire in Baghdad.
For Bush and his allies, a good part of the power of the archetypal narrative now calling them to action was the memory of how his father had failed to press his earlier bid to overcome Saddam Hussein to its proper archetypal conclusion. In 1991, after the heroes had set out, like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, to travel half across the world to slay the monster, they had at the last minute stayed their hand, leaving the monster untouched. Now Bush the son set out to complete his father’s story. When in 2003 his forces had won their brilliant military victory, and Saddam was finally pulled like a shrivelled monster from his hole in the ground, it might have seemed the tale was finally over.
But already it was apparent that the plot was not quite so simple. This was to become even more obvious when it emerged just how far Bush and his faithful companion Tony Blair had, in projecting onto Saddam rather more power to threaten the world than reality justified, been emulating Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, launching a ferocious assault on giants and discovering them to be only windmills.
From another point of view, of course, it was not Saddam who was the monster of the story at all. For many this archetype was now projected on America and Bush himself, representing that ruling consciousness which, from ‘above the line’, cannot see the truth of what is going on in the shadows cast by its egocentric power. The United States was now the one undisputed global superpower, in a way the world had never seen before. But ‘below the line’, in the world of Islam, in Europe, in the awakening giant of China, all sorts of forces were beginning to constellate in resentment at their perception of how one-sided America’s domination had become.
Nowhere, however, was the balance of power more intractably one-sided than in that country allied to America which had only come into being because of a story: Israel. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Jews of Europe had become the supreme example of ‘below the line’ victims, first persecuted and driven into exile by the Russian empire, then falling prey to the genocidal madness which possessed Hitler’s Nazis, the darkest tyranny of the age. But in the second half of the century, the aftermath of this astonishing tragedy was to be an uncanny re-enactment of that story recounted through much of the Old Testament when, following the arrival of ‘the children of Israel’ in their ‘promised land’, they had found it inhabited by all those people for whom it was already their home. In ancient times this had led to all those centuries of violence which were only to end when, first, the Jewish people were taken into captivity in Babylon, and then, after their return, saw their homeland taken over by the Roman empire, which in 70 AD sent them again into an exile which was to last for nearly two thousand years.
After 1948 when, with the aid of terrorism, those European Jews who had been returning to Palestine since the 1890s set up their new state of Israel in the land which for centuries had been home to the Palestinian Arabs, they provided yet another example of what can happen when people once ‘below the line’ then manage to rise ‘above the line’ to a position of dominance. The new state displayed towards the dispossessed Palestinians all the archetypal characteristics of a tyrannical ruling power. It was now the turn of the Arabs to be cast in the role of victims, as Israel created a society just as firmly divided into two groups, above and below the line, as that of South Africa during the years of apartheid. Inevitably such one-sidedness threw a shadow across the Middle East which lay at the heart of much of the tension and instability which was to plague that region through the next half century, leading to five successive wars – and which perpetually threatened one day to explode into a catastrophe which could draw in much of the rest of the world.18
All this leads on to a third way in which the understanding of stories can help to shed light on the state of mankind at the start of the twenty-first century. If we are to look on the entire history of the human race as itself a colossal story, what is the archetypal pattern which is shaping that story? How is the story likely to end?
The starting point must be that Homo sapiens is the one form of life on earth which has stepped outside the instinctive frame of nature to develop ego-consciousness. It is this which, to an ever greater degree, has enabled it to enjoy such success in bending the powers of nature to its own advantage. But with every advance in consciousness it has lost more of its innocence and cast an ever longer shadow. There is always some price to be paid. Each time consciousness has expanded, so in another sense it has become more limited. And eventually its ingenuity has created the potential to destroy all life on earth, including itself. Although mankind has no obvious external rival, apart from the power of those humblest of organisms, viruses and bacteria, its greatest potential enemy is its own divided nature.
Looked at from another perspective, this breaking out of from a state of nature has been like an ever-greater act of rebellion against the unity of nature. And if we see characters behaving like this in a story, we know that such hubris will in the end contrive to bring about its own nemesis, so that cosmic balance can be restored. Which brings us back to the story of Loki, the original stealer of the ring which inspired Tolkien’s story: the ring of ego-consciousness which gives great power but carries with it the fatal curse which, in Wagner’s version, eventually brings about the twilight of the gods and the ending of the world.
In the original Norse version, the story does not end like this. Loki eventually calls into being those three monsters which are to play their part in the ending of the world, just as our own ego-consciousness has called into being those ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – biological, chemical and nuclear – which could bring about the destruction of our own world. But on the far side of the eternal winter and holocaust of fire which marks the final catastrophe, comes Odin’s vision of some strange and wonderful rebirth.
The truth is that we can dream dreams, we can paint word-pictures, we can imagine stories – but they cannot tell us for certain how the story of mankind will end, let alone what form such a ‘rebirth’ might take. As Robert Frost had it:
‘Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate,
To say that, for destruction, ice
Is also great
And would suffice.’
What stories can tell us, however, much more profoundly than we have realised, is how our human nature works, and why we think and behave in this world as we do. That is why I believe that to arrive at a proper understanding of why our species has the compulsion to imagine stories is as important a riddle as there is left for mankind to solve on this earth.
Even if it cannot save us from ourselves, it may help us to understand why Dante ended his great poem on that most extraordinary thought of all: his vision that, even when life is ended, we can still be absorbed back into that unimaginable power which ultimately holds all the universe together and which continues for ever: ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’.