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becomes increasingly lost. In Waugh's case this was unconsciously reflected in the way both Decline and Fall and Brideshead Revisited showed a rather limited little middle-class hero finding himself drawn into a glamorous, upper-class `other world' in which he is never wholly at ease or at home, and from which he is eventually rejected, sad and alone. But none of Waugh's stories was more directly self-revelatory than that of Gilbert Pinfold: portrayed as, like its author when he wrote it, a successful novelist with social pretensions who, in his early fifties, suddenly finds his life empty, suffocating and meaningless.

Pinfold decides to take a cruise to Ceylon, but no sooner has he boarded the good ship Caliban (echoing `the shadow') than he hears an almost continuous babble of sounds, irritating dance music and voices, which he imagines must be emerging from some shipboard internal communication system. As he identifies the voices, what they are saying seems more and more to be directed at him personally, in an accusatory fashion. Much of their abuse is on a crude, rather babyish level, reflecting the ethos of the public school-educated English upper-middle class, accusing him of being a Jew, an enemy agent, a homosexual, a drunk. But he is so convinced of the reality of his paranoid delusions that they make it impossible for him to relate rationally to his fellow-passengers or the crew who, although initially polite, eventually shun him as a sad eccentric. Eventually one voice stands out from the babble, that of a young woman called Margaret, with whom Pinfold imagines he is establishing a kind of relationship. He also learns she is called `Miss Angel: She claims to love him, and in a particularly embarrassing scene they agree a midnight assignation, whereby she will come to his cabin to make love. But of course the elusive anima never appears, and eventually Pinfold abandons the ship and makes his way back to meet his wife in a London hotel, where the voices finally leave him. The last he hears is that of the anima, Miss Angel, repeating `I do love you Gilbert. I don't exist but I do love ... Good-bye ... love .... He is then alone with his wife. He has made his Voyage and Return and comes back having understood nothing.

Three features in particular characterise all these examples of the dark Voyage and Return. In each case their hero, Joseph K., Gregor, Holden Caulfield and Pinfold, is almost wholly egocentric, trapped in his own limited awareness and lack of feeling for other people. In each case, when confronted by the challenge of the `other world', this only heightens his isolation, in that he cannot properly communicate or establish a relationship with any of the people he meets there. But in each case, the one exception is the girl who represents the feminine: Leni, Gregor's sister, Caulfield's sister, Pinfold's Miss Angel, She tantalises the hero as his elusive anima, representing precisely that central value which is missing in his life: the sense of connection; the feeling and understanding of the inner feminine which, if only he could get properly in touch with it, might enable him to become a full man. But this cannot be. The hero remains trapped in his egotistical prison. Whether he stays trapped forever in his other world, like Kafka's heroes, or at least outwardly seems to return to where he started, like Pinfold, he has failed the challenge. Frozen in a state of arrested development, he is unable to grow up.

In this sense, these stories are typical of all those versions of the Voyage and Return plot we saw earlier, where the hero or heroine emerges from the other world basically unchanged. In some, the sentimental versions, like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz, the experience has been just like some strange dream. It has not touched their lives; they can carry on as if it never happened. In other examples, the lesser dark versions, like Le Grand Meaulnes, Gone with the Wind, Brideshead Revisited, the hero or heroine lose the `other half' they have encountered in the other world, and face the