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By Root 5563 0

have overcome this personification of all that is dark in human nature, it might seem as if the age-old archetype was being fully acted out. But when we examine these stories more closely we can see how something very significant has happened since this plot first centred on such great mythic prototypes as Gilgamesh or David, Perseus or Beowulf. The key is to recall how the archetype is not just concerned with the outward act of saving the community from the monster. It is also the personal story of the hero himself, showing how he develops inwardly through his struggle with the monster until we see him emerging to full Self-realisation, usually symbolised by his union with the anima and his succession to rule over a 'kingdom.

One obvious way in which the story can fall short of its archetype is in all those `monster' stories where the hero does not actually overcome the monster but where he simply makes a 'thrilling escape from death': The Pit and the Pendulum, La Peste, Inferno, Jurassic Park and many others. The point about such stories is that they are just playing sentimentally with the outward form of the archetype: the sensation to be derived from identifying with a hero who faces the mounting threat of death but finally makes a miraculous escape through no particular effort of his own. George Clouzot's film La Salaire du Peur (The Wages of Death, 1952) was a classic example of this type of story, where three truck drivers must take their lorries packed with highly dangerous nitro-glycerine across miles of precipitous unmade mountain roads. Inevitably two explode, leaving the hero, by the Rule of Three, to make it to safety in the nick of time. But though he may have shown admirable courage, he is scarcely a hero who has been through the full character-forming ordeal of confronting and slaying a living monster. In a sense, he has experienced his ordeal passively, just sticking doggedly to his task, trusting to luck until he comes through.

Another obvious way in which this story can become detached from its full archetypal form is where the monster is no longer presented as an abstract of all that is dark in human nature, but where its characteristics are projected outwardly onto some rival social or national group. There are elements of this, as we saw, even in the Bible, where Goliath, the champion of the Philistines, is invested through Jewish eyes with all the archetypal character of the monster. Samson, the Jewish strong man, on the other hand, is presented as a national hero; although, by the Philistines, he might have been viewed in much the same light as was Goliath by the Jews.

We see a similar tendency in those countless fictional versions of the Overcoming the Monster plot inspired by World War Two, where the Germans are invested with all the archetypal characteristics of the monster. This does not mean that Hitler and the Nazis did not in reality display such characteristics. But when this vast historical struggle came to be turned into fictional entertainment, as in The Guns of Navarone or The Battle of the Bulge, it was inevitable that these should be dominated by the outwardly projected battle with the `monster'. We see the heroes of such stories as light, because they are shown behaving heroically, bravely, honourably and selflessly; and because their opponents are generally shown with all the dark and negative qualities displayed by dark figures in stories down the ages. But in acting out the outward pattern of the Overcoming the Monster story, the inward aspect of the original archetype, as the story of a hero's personal maturing to Self-realisation, has virtually disappeared.

An element of this outward projection remained in that series of tales which, first appearing in the early years of the Cold War, were to provide popular storytelling in the second half of the twentieth century with its most celebrated 'monster slayer'. The success of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and the films they subsequently inspired, lay precisely in the extent to which they managed to create a hero who, while wholly