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By Root 5384 0

a final despairing gesture of defiance at the values of the Self which the whole novel has tried to deny; that of Ulysses is a last forlorn act of masturbatory make-believe in the meaningless wilderness of the ego. Lady Chatterley peters out in vacuous wishful-thinking. At least in Psycho the monster is finally shown, in rather half-hearted fashion, as having been brought to justice. By the time we reach Last Exit to Brooklyn and Saved the values of the Self have passed so far out of sight that their stories scarcely try to resolve at all. In A Clockwork Orange the psychopathic hero does eventually seem about to change, but only to re-emerge at the end in the same monstrous state in which he began. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the monsters simply live on, as they do in Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct. Nothing in any of these stories is ever properly resolved, because their only real purpose has been to titillate the fantasies of their audiences with a stream of Self-defying images which by definition are incapable of leading to a resolution.

The only real value of this explosion of sex and violence in the storytelling of the late twentieth century lies in the evidence it provides of how quickly, when human fantasy ventures down this path, it runs into a dead end. We soon become familiar with the same repetitive handful of cliched images, mechanically revolving round in the same claustrophobic little circle, unable to lead anywhere and totally divorced from any deeper meaning. But the realm of the imagination open to storytelling is so infinitely larger than this that it is time to return to the wider world.

`Then Job answered the Lord, and said: "I know that thou cans't do every thing, and that no thought can be witholden from thee ... I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes."' Book of Job, Ch. 42

"'Then you think there is no God?"

"No, I think there quite probably is one."

"Then why ...?"

Mustapha Mond checked him. "But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In pre-modern days, he manifested himself as the being that's described in these books. Now ..."

"How does he manifest himself now?" asked the Savage.

"Well, he manifests himself as an absence, as though he weren't there at all."'

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

`It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.'

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

In this chapter and the next we shall be looking for the first time at two new plots. Although no survey of the patterns of storytelling would be complete without them, there are good reasons why they should not have been included among the seven central plots which form the core of this book. The Mystery, which we come to in the next chapter, has over the past two centuries provided the basis for one of the most successful genres in modern popular storytelling, the detective story. But, as we shall see, this type of story only emerged as a by-product of that shift in the psychological `centre of gravity' which has characterised storytelling since the rise of Romanticism.

Similarly the plot which is the theme of this present chapter cannot be described as basic to the understanding of stories, because it only occurs very rarely. Indeed we shall be looking at only three examples. One is ancient, taken from the Bible. The others are two of the best-known novels produced by the twentieth century. But between them they shed a clearer light on a particularly important aspect of human psychology than we see reflected in any other type of story.

The essence of this plot is that it shows us a solitary hero who finds himself being drawn into a state of resentful, mystified opposition to some immense power, which exercises total sway over the world in which he lives. Initially he increasingly feels he is right and that the mysterious power must in some fundamental way be at fault. But suddenly he is confronted by that power