The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [253]
Despite its explicit echoes of a Rags to Riches fairy tale, this bleak, two-dimensional story could scarcely be further from the timeless, almost metaphysical realm of the folk tale, where riches, `Princesses' and transformation scenes stand for something altogether more symbolic and psychologically profound than just the amassing of hard cash and a succession of sexual conquests. As de Rastignac climbs his way ruthlessly up the social ladder, there are no signs of any inner transformation, any development towards wholeness and maturity: merely the acquisition of new and sharper weapons in the war of social self-aggrandisement, and the general hardening of a once relatively innocent heart. What we again see here is an author defying the archetypal rules by trying to imagine a wholly egocentric, pasteboard hero going through the pattern of an ascent from Rags to Riches without any of the essential qualities which could allow him to reach a successful resolution: with the result that the story ends on that chilling final image when de Rastignac issues his angry challenge to the `hostile' city of Paris, symbolising the totality of the Self. In bidding defiance to the city, Balzac's hero is merely reflecting that most ominous psychic split of all: where, far from the conscious ego ending up in harmony with the deeper `centre, the two are left seemingly irretrievably at odds.
As with Stendhal in The Scarlet and the Black, Balzac was drawn to the general theme of the Rags to Riches plot, but in way which had become completely detached from its original deeper archetypal purpose. The traditional Rags to Riches story, as we have seen it in folklore, in Aladdin, in Jane Eyre, in David Copperfield, was the expression of a pattern coded into the human unconscious which, when made conscious in the form of a story, gives us an idealised symbolic picture of a human being travelling the full road of psychological development, from immaturity to integrated maturity.
What was happening in these `Romantic' versions of the Rags to Riches theme was that this pattern was being appropriated by the storyteller's ego. Instead of being held internally, as an expression of inward psychic events, it was being projected onto the outside world, to express the desire of the ego for external gratification. The Rags to Riches story was thus becoming not so much a reflection of the hero or heroine's inner growth towards eventual integration, but simply the vehicle for ego-centred fantasies or daydreams. As Somerset Maugham said of Balzac, whom he admired as the only novelist to whom he could `without hesitation ascribe genius':
`from the beginning his aim had been to live in splendour, to have a fine house with a host of servants, carriages and horses, a string of mistresses and a rich wife.'
When, in Pere Goriot and later novels, Balzac fondly imagines his heroes rising ever more gloriously in Parisian society, it was precisely that aim which, in his fantasy, he was pursuing: by dreaming, through the social triumphs of de Rastignac and others, his succession of `fantasy selves; of winning all those social and sexual gratifications his ego desired.
But for all the significance of this shift of the source in the psyche from which stories were told, it did not mean that the old archetypal forms would now just fade away. Indeed the human mind is so constituted that no storyteller can escape from the archetypes, however hard he or she may try. They are still the basic coding of the human psyche, the only forms around which stories can be told. They can no more be escaped from than storytellers can escape from the greatest archetype of all, the hidden totality of the Self, the ultimate