The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [320]
`believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning ... so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'
Those closing words might have seemed like an echo of the conclusion of Proust's novel, written just four years before.
The third form of `pseudo-ending', that which tries to make a positive virtue out of the fact that nothing at the end of the story has been resolved, can be seen in Fitzgerald's longest novel, Tender is the Night (1934). This was written when Fitzgerald was in his late thirties. The heady days of his early fame were behind him. The `Jazz Age' to which he had given its name was over. Inwardly wearying of the hectic, rootless life success as a writer had brought him, and of the strain of his marriage to the unstable Zelda, he was taking to drink. His new hero, Dr Dick Diver, is a highly promising young psychiatrist, who has studied in Vienna and Zurich and has a great future before him. His greatest individual success as a doctor has been in restoring Nicole, the beautiful, but mentally unstable daughter of a Chicago millionaire, to apparent health. Under the unwitting influence of Nicole's older sister Baby, Dick is lured into marrying Nicole, and initially the marriage appears to be a success. This is the `dream stage' of the story, when they are living in the south of France with their two children. Then Rosemary, a new young Hollywood movie star, enters their life and tries to seduce Dick. At first it seems out of the question that the happily married hero will give way. But gradually, as his resolve begins to weaken, Nicole simultaneously begins to show returning signs of her old schizophrenia. For the sake of her sister, Baby puts up the money for Dick to set up a psychiatric clinic. This places him more than ever in a state of financial dependence on his wife's family, which emasculates him. Now in the `frustration stage', he begins to fall apart. He has a brief, unsatisfactory affair with Rosemary. He takes to drink, leading to awkward incidents, one of which forces him to resign from the clinic. This only drives him to drink even more, pushing him into the `nightmare stage'. He and Nicole are now miserable together. He has become a social embarrassment, and she views him with increasing contempt. Conscious that there is now another, more obviously masculine man who is attracted to her, she feels a new confidence, and tells Dick he has made a failure of his life. She finally feels liberated, both from the doctor who had once helped to cure her and from their marriage. Nicole goes off to marry her new admirer, and the last we hear of Dick is that the once brilliantly promising young psychiatrist has returned to America, drifting from town to town as a humdrum general practitioner. He has lost everything: both his manhood and his anima. Nicole, happily cocooned in her new ego-life, sentimentally consoles herself that he must be merely waiting for some call at last to fulfil his great talents. The truth, as we know, is that Dr Diver is going nowhere. Six years later his creator was dead, from excessive drinking, at the age of 44.
Camus: The egotist as complete outsider
In his novel L'Etranger (1938), translated as The Outsider, Albert Camus carried the idea of the egocentric hero totally split off from the Self to its logical conclusion. Not of course that Camus himself would have described it like this. What inspired him was the idea of a hero who becomes admirable because he finds the centre of his identity solely within himself. He has been liberated from any sense