The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [283]
Voyage and Return: The dark version
According to its full archetype, the Voyage and Return story begins with an incomplete or inadequate hero or heroine being taken out of their original state of limited consciousness and plunged into an unfamiliar realm representing a world of which they were previously unaware. It is through this confrontation with 'unconscious elements' that, like Robinson Crusoe or Lucius in The Golden Ass, they learn that which is necessary to make them whole. Their final return to the normal world, inwardly transformed, marks the happy ending of the story.
The most completely dark version of this pattern, as we saw, is in those rare stories where the hero enters the abnormal world and remains trapped, never returning. Kafka's The Trial (1920) begins with its hero Joseph K. finding `one fine morning' that `without having done anything wrong', he has been arrested. He is at once plunged into a mysterious world where he knows he is under investigation for some shadowy and serious crime but is never told what it is. Outwardly, on the conscious level, he tries to continue living his normal life, as senior manager in a bank. But all the time he is aware that, on this mysterious unconscious level, the investigation by the mysterious `Court' is continuing and that more and more people he knows or meets are somehow connected to it. Despite many knowing hints and innuendos, no one will tell him directly what is going on. Even when he visits an old bedridden lawyer who is meant to be his 'Advocate' in the case, nothing is ever properly explained. But here K. makes his only direct contact with anyone he encounters in the twilight world, the young maid Leni, who kisses, fondles and claims to love him; although he is later told she falls in love with any accused man who visits her employer. Finally, after an interview with a priest in a cathedral, still without any idea of what he is accused, K. receives a visit from two men who lead him out into the countryside, take out a butcher's knife and stab him, `like a dog', through the heart.
What has caught people's imagination about this story, popularising the term `Kafka-esque' even among those who have never read his books, is the sense it conjures up of someone feeling totally alone in a wholly baffling world, where he feels increasingly threatened by guilt while never being given enough information to understand what is happening to him. In this sense K. is like the central figure of other Voyage and Return stories, such as Alice in Wonderland (who also ends up being mysteriously put on trial and found guilty). A similar echo of many Voyage and Return stories is the haunting presence of Leni, the elusive anima, as the only character in the unconscious world to whom the hero can relate. But, unlike these other stories, K. is doomed never to escape from his shadow world and ends up dying a premature death without ever knowing why.
In this respect it may not be irrelevant that Kafka wrote his story during the early stages of the consumption which, four years later, was to kill him. On one level, in this picture of a man threatened by a shadowy, inexorable process which ends in his death without apparent reason, we may see a personification of the shadowy, fatal disease which already had him in its grip. For a time Kafka had a peculiar horror of his physical body, which may account for the even darker version of a Voyage without Return conveyed in his short story Metamorphosis. This begins with the hero, Gregor, waking up one morning to find he has turned into a monstrous, repulsive insect. Since his parents and young sister wholly depend on his earnings as a hard-working commercial traveller, they cannot understand why he has not got up for work, and