• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 5611 0

As a young man he discovers that part of the vast commercial empire he has inherited includes an ailing newspaper, which he decides to edit himself. To the horror of his guardian, Kane transforms it, through muckraking journalism and by buying up all the best journalists of the day, into the most successful newspaper in America. He makes an eminently respectable, unloving marriage to a Senator's daughter, for once approved by his sternly moralistic guardian. He buys more newspapers, becomes ever richer and embarks on a political career which everyone assumes will end in the White House. But in the middle of his first dazzling campaign (when the Dream Stage of his story is at its height), he one night meets in the street a poor, naive, vulgar young girl, Susan, who has dreams of becoming a professional singer. He becomes infatuated, his political opponents discover his `secret love nest' and blow it up into a huge scandal, and his political career is in ruins.

Now the pattern of Tragedy is firmly in the ascendant, as Kane divorces his hard, respectable wife, marries the pitiful young Susan and uses his millions in a bid to launch her as an opera singer (hiring a grand opera house and boosting her through his newspapers). She is an appalling, embarrassing flop and takes to drink. Kane immures her in his vast, remote castle, stuffed with so many works of art shipped in from Europe that many have never even been removed from their crates. On the public stage, he cuts an increasingly impotent, absurd figure, richer than ever, but quite unable to exercise any influence on political events, as he wishes. Finally, pathetic, lonely and prematurely aged, he dies, uttering the mysterious word `Rosebud'; as his fingers let slip a cheap glass paperweight showing a snowstorm, which falls to the floor and shatters.

At the end of his quest, the journalist who has pieced all this story together, still utterly baffled by `Rosebud; comes to the castle in a last desperate search for clues. He sees an army of workmen sorting through Kane's mountains of possessions and throwing huge quantities of rubbish into a furnace. Among the debris is a child's toboggan and, as it is thrown into the fire, the licking flames illumine the name written on it, `Rosebud. The journalist does not even see it. But for us, the audience, the mystery is at last solved. The inner tragedy of Kane's life had begun at that moment when, all those years before, he had been torn away from his happy childish games in the snow and from the softness and love of his mother, to be propelled into the hard, alien, outside world, dominated by the `masculine' ego-values of money, respectability, power and fame. `Rosebud' was his soul, the secret heart of the identity he had lost, that he was still hankering for with his dying breath. It symbolised his lost inner feminine, everything the doomed love he had projected onto the little infantile anima-figure of Susan, with her vague `artistic' dreams, had been a last, pitiful attempt to recapture; but which had signalled instead only the onset of his inner ruin, so that he ended like the hero of a dark Rebirth story, trapped in unseeing egotism with no hope of redemption.2

Whodunnit?

The real point of the Mystery story, and what distinguishes it from every other type of story we have looked at in this book, is that the hero - the detective or investigator - is in a peculiar way not directly involved in the central drama of the story. He or she stands outside it, as a kind of voyeur, only intervening, if at all, as a detached, superior dens ex machina to sort out what has happened.

In fact, when we examine such stories more carefully, we see that the drama the investigator is observing, like a spectator contemplating a picture or play, is invariably shaped by one of the basic plots we have already looked at, as Citizen Kane is shaped by the five-stage plot of Tragedy. In the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, for instance, most begin with the great detective sitting in his cosy Baker Street lodgings. Then some distraught figure intrudes