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But does this imply that stories can only be told according to certain preordained rules? Why should a storyteller only be able to imagine a story according to these `rules'? Why should the `values of the Self' always be triumphant? What happens if a storyteller, consciously or unconsciously, is not himself in harmony with those particular values, and sets out to shape a story in a quite different way?

We must now bring into account one of the most remarkable elements of all in the way the human imagination gives birth to stories. In the third part of this book we come at last to the extraordinary change which has come over storytelling in the Western world in the last two hundred years.

`I once made a note of a remark by Jonas Salk, the American biologist, to the effect that it is where life's normal structure is disturbed that we come to know the essential laws of the species.' Kazimierz Brandys, A Warsaw Diary

`Where, I wondered with increasing dismay, had all the stories gone? Why this decay of the great and meaningful orchestration of the story that had occurred everywhere in the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries?'

Laurens van der Post, Testament to the Bushman

What about Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Or Beckett's Waiting for Godot? Or Salinger's Catcher in the Rye? Or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four? Or Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories?

At this stage it would be easy to point to any number of individual stories which, in terms of the archetypal structures we have been looking at, it might seem difficult to place. But the vast majority of such stories date from the last two hundred years. We must now, in the third part of the book, look at one of the oddest and most revealing developments in the evolution of storytelling.

We cannot reach a proper understanding of how and why stories form as they do in the human mind without appreciating the way in which, around two centuries ago, something very unusual began to happen to storytelling in the Western world. In its early stages (although the first signs of what was to come had appeared even earlier, way back into the eighteenth century), it was directly related to that great convulsion in the European spirit which we associate with the rise of Romanticism and with such historic events as the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon. This psychic upheaval was reflected in philosophy, music, painting and all the arts. But nowhere was its true nature revealed more tellingly than in a profoundly significant change which began to emerge at that time in the way writers conceived stories; and which has continued to have the most farreaching effect on the way stories have been told in our modern world ever since.

So far we have been looking at how stories present to us what amounts to a kind of basic ground-map of human nature and behaviour, governed by an absolutely consistent set of rules and values. These values, like the archetypal structures which shape stories, are programmed into our unconscious in a way we cannot modify or control. The essential message implicit in that programming is that the central goal of any human life is to achieve the state of perfect balance which we recognise as maturity; and how the central enemy in reaching that goal is our capacity to be held back by the deforming and ultimately self-destructive power of egocentricity.

For a storyteller to imagine a story which fully expresses this central theme implies that he or she is entirely in psychological harmony with those unconscious archetypal rules and structures which shape stories. Up to now we have been so focused on deciphering the meaning of this symbolic language that we have treated almost all the stories we have looked at in much the same way; as if all storytellers are similarly in tune with the basic archetypal process which gives rise to stories. But here and there, in exploring the structures of one plot after another, we have come across examples of stories which in some way did not