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into contact with that deeper centre of his personality which can enable him to see the objective truth of his situation and to be brought back into living contact with others. If he can do this, like Leontes or Count Almaviva or Raskolnikov or Peer Gynt, we see that extraordinary moment of inward and outward transformation which marks the coming to wholeness. Liberated from the grip of the dark power within himself, he discovers that the heart of his identity, the inner self which has been liberated, is inextricably identified with the loving feminine, both within and outside him. At this moment his masculinity is no longer dark. And this is precisely the moment when his other half emerges from the shadows to join him up with all the world.

(4) Dark heroine/light hero

More rarely, we see the same kind of story where it is the heroine who is dark and has become hard, self-centred and domineering, like Shakespeare's Shrew, Emma Wodehouse, Tracy Lord or Mary Craven in The Secret Garden. Their personalities are strong, but they are heartless and blind, cut off from their inner feminine. What each of these heroines requires is a hero who is a perfect balance of masculine strength with a loving heart and the capacity to see whole (in particular to perceive the heroine's own repressed inner femininity). This is precisely what Petruchio, Mr Knightley, Dexter Haven and young Dickon represent. The result is that the heroine is liberated from the `dark masculine' which has possessed her and isolated her from the world; her true feminine self emerges from the shadows to bring her alive and make her whole; and for the first time she is happily at one with all around her and with life.

So we come to the central goal around which - whether or not it can be reached - all storytelling ultimately revolves.

The cosmic happy ending

The supreme moment of liberation in a story may well come at precisely that point where the hero and heroine are finally brought physically and spiritually together, melting into each other in an act of overwhelming love. We see such a moment when, after all his journeyings, all his ordeals, culminating in the great battle with the suitors, Odysseus can at last clasp his loving Penelope to him with no longer a trace of shadow between them:

'Penelope's surrender melted Odysseus's heart, and he wept as he held his dear wife in his arms, so loyal and so true.'

We see such a moment when the frozen statue of Hermione thaws into life and she steps down from her pedestal to embrace her contrite Leontes. We see such a moment when the Prince, having penetrated the hedge of thorns and found his way to the little hidden room at the heart of the castle, finally wakens the Sleeping Beauty with a kiss. But no sooner has the Prince done this than an extraordinary sequence of other events begins to unfold around them. All over the castle, every man, woman, child and animal that has also been frozen in sleep begins to stir. From the King and Queen downwards, the whole household awakens joyfully back to life.

Up to this point we have been looking almost entirely at what happens to the central characters in a story. We have concentrated on that great central theme of storytelling, as it may be seen from different angles: the working of the hero or heroine of the story towards some ultimate goal of wholeness and personal fulfilment. But a last enormously important element must now be brought in to complete the picture: and that is the wider context in which this individual drama of salvation is being worked out. For the outcome of the personal drama of the hero and heroine often has repercussions which affect many more people than just themselves.

In fact we are almost never presented in a story with a picture of the hero or the heroine in isolation. We usually meet them in the context of a group or community of others - a family, a household, a town, a city, a country, a kingdom. This is the `little world' conjured up by the story, and it is almost invariably a world in which, in some way, `the time is out of joint, something