The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [504]
This memorable scene is like a positive opposite to that which ends The Third Man, where the uncomprehending hero sees the elusive anima-figure of Anna walking towards him through falling leaves in the wintry cemetery, then straight past him without a look. In Ginsburg's version the hero and heroine, purged of egotism by their suffering, are finally united in the complete, mature love of two people who have grown up. Since her husband has long since died on some other island of the Gulag archipelago, she and her hero can marry, and the story ends on a true note of liberation as they joyfully regain their limited freedom in the grey post-Stalinist world of Russia in the mid-1950s.
In the spiritual depth of this story, as in other books and novels which emerged from the darkness of the Soviet empire in the 1960s and 1970s, we see something of why, when Solzhenitsyn was sent into exile by the Soviet regime in 1974, he was so startled by what he found in the West: the world of A Clockwork Orange, Last Tango in Paris and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which the `dark inversion' appeared to have taken over storytelling and much else besides.
The re-emergence of the ego (II): 1980 onwards
By the closing decades of the twentieth century, there were many respects in which Western storytelling reflected the psychological twilight into which mankind had been heading, but perhaps the most obvious was the continuing obsession of so many film-makers, playwrights and novelists with the imagery of sex and violence. Psychologically, as we have seen, this was the natural outcome of that process which had begun 200 years earlier when stories began to be refracted through the ego and conceived on the level of fantasy rather than imagination.
For two centuries or more, as the consciousness of Western civilisation had continued to travel ever further from unity with nature, its central tendency had been to reinforce those `masculine' physical and mental aspects of the human psyche which are identified with the ego, at the expense of the `feminine' instincts of selfless feeling and intuitive understanding. All the emphasis of this advance had been on extending man's command over nature and to achieve an ever greater understanding of how it worked through the ordering function of the human mind. The most obvious prize this had yielded was to enable part of the human race (but by no means all) to enjoy a materially comfortable existence, catering for its every physical need. But part of the price paid for this one-sidedness had been to cut people off from those deeper `feminine' instincts which can give them the sense of belonging to something larger and more significant than themselves - as could still be seen among those less `developed' peoples of the world who continued to live physically taxing but dignified and uncomplaining lives much closer to nature.
A similar limitation could be seen in how people in the developed world looked for their understanding of how the world worked. For centuries Western civilisation had increasingly sought to rest such explanations on that analytical function of the human mind which could supposedly provide objective, `scientific' answers to every question. This had created a hugely impressive assemblage of knowledge of the physical mechanisms whereby life and the universe operated. But it had become ever harder to hold all this knowledge together in a way which gave any sense of unified meaning. The more the human mind focused on the material details of existence, the more detached it became