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accordance with those underlying rules which ultimately dictate how any story shall unfold. Like any other storyteller, he followed the inner logic of the story, as it developed in his imagination: with the result that, at the very moment when, on the conscious `upper level' of the story the hero seems finally within reach of his goal, of union with the pasteboard infantile anima-figure, and succession to the `kingdom' of great wealth and position, out from the `inferior realm' emerges the vengeful `Dark Mother' to snatch it all away. At the end we see the extraordinary ceremony of the 20 priests blessing Sorel's corpse in the candelit cave, the `womb unconscious' from which he could never escape. Mathilde is left with the severed head, the only part of Sorel which the anima could ever get hold hold of, his head or imagination. Only when he is buried does the `Dark Mother, Mme Renal, relinquish her fatal grip. Psychologically, and to this extent unconsciously, it was the story of the weak, vain, `mother-fixated' Stendhal himself.

In other words, we see two very significant things having taken place in this story. The first is that a storyteller, for reasons directly reflecting his own psychology, has himself become subject to what we saw earlier as `the dark inversion, siding with his egocentric hero against the values of the Self. His story has become an ego-centred fantasy, akin to a prolonged daydream. But the second is that we still see the hero, by those implacable rules, eventually bringing about his own destruction. The values of the Self remain triumphant, because by the logic of that unconscious power in the human mind which governs the shaping of stories, they cannot be successfully defied. If an author sets out to tell his story round a dark, egocentric hero, there is no way the plot can unfold to a fully-resolved happy ending. Sooner or later those hidden rules will come into play to ensure that the hero cannot realise his goal.

Balzac: The storyteller as egotist

Four years after Stendhal's book appeared, Balzac published the first of his series of novels La Comedie Humaine, portraying life in contemporary France,

Pere Goriot (1834) focuses on the rise to fame and fortune of a poor law student, Eugene de Rastignac. Just as in The Scarlet and the Black, the story is in some ways reminiscent of a Rags to Riches fairy tale. The ambitious young hero arrives from the provinces in Paris, like Dick Whittington arriving in London, without a penny to his name. The only card in his hand is his distant kinship to `one of the queens of fashionable Paris, the immensely grand Vicomtesse de Beauseant. This powerful lady becomes in effect de Rastignac's `fairy godmother', and determines to use her influence to launch him on a dazzling social career. She first arranges for him to meet a certain rich Countess. But this is no fairy tale `Princess' whom it is intended de Rastignac should marry. The Countess is married already. The aim is simply that he should win social advancement by becoming her lover. When this proposed affair comes to nothing, thanks to a social gaffe by de Rastignac, the `fairy godmother' propels him in the direction of the Countess's sister, an equally rich Baroness. This time the ruse is more successful, not least because de Rastignac has discovered the guilty secret of both the sisters' wealth. They are being privily supported by their old father Goriot, a little retired vermicelli manufacturer, who just happens to live in de Rastignac's humble lodgings; and whom de Rastignac just happens one day to see through the keyhole, melting down the last of the family silver (like some fairy-tale gnome in the forest) to provide his daughters with more funds. Goriot and the Baroness combine to set up de Rastignac in a lavish apartment. Having moved in,

`Eugene, completely overcome, lay back on the sofa, unable to utter a word or make sense yet of the way in which the magic wand had been waved yet again for this final transformation scene.'

But, again, the fairy-tale happy ending is not to be. Suddenly disaster