The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [525]
3. The truly `dark' version of this plot is seen in those rare examples where we do see what happens to a hero who becomes fatally trapped in the `other world: Two examples we shall look at in more detail (in Chapter 23) are by Franz Kafka. In The Trial, the hero Josef K. suddenly falls out of his safe, normal world when he finds himself inexplicably under arrest for some mysterious offence. Like many another Voyage and Return hero, he cannot make head or tail of the nightmare world he has been plunged into. But he is finally executed without ever learning what he has been accused of. Kafka's short story Metamorphosis describes a hero who is plunged into his nightmare 'other world' when he wakes up one morning to find he has become a huge and hideous insect. Eventually, without changing back again, he dies: which is rather as if Lucius in The Golden Ass never found the remedy to undo his transformation, and had become fatally trapped in his new identity as a donkey.
4. Another familiar example of an unhappy love story based on the Voyage and Return plot is the post-war British film Brief Encounter (1946), written by Noel Coward and directed by David Lean. The `normal' world is represented by the humdrum home life of the heroine (played by Celia Johnson) married to Fred, her kindly, unimaginative, boring husband, who likes nothing better than to sit by the fire doing the crossword puzzle. In interior monologue, with a romantic Rachmaninov piano concerto blasting out of the gramophone, she unhappily reconstructs how some weeks before, in the station refreshment room in the nearby town, she had unexpectedly `fallen into another world'by meeting a handsome, sensitive doctor (Trevor Howard), also married. She recalls how they fell in love, snatching several more surreptitious meetings, visits to the cinema, drinking champagne in a restaurant, walking in the country. Their affair goes through the familiar cycle of dream stage; frustration stage (as she feels growing guilt, lies to her husband, is spotted by friends in the restaurant); and nightmare stage (their attempt to make love in a friend's flat is aborted when he unexpectedly returns, they both realise the affair cannot last, he tells her he is about to leave with his family for a new job in South Africa). After they have made their final farewells on the station platform, she returns miserably home to the `normal' world of Fred and his crossword, puts on the Rachmaninov and relives in her mind the whole sad story.
5. Other well-known American examples of Voyage and Return stories where the central figure has to leave the `other half' behind include The Student Prince (1924) and the Hollywood movie Roman Holiday (1953). The hero of Sigmund Romberg's operetta is a prince, bored with the formalities of life in his father's kingdom, who seeks diversion by making an incognito visit to the university town of Heidelberg There he has an exhilaratingly informal time surrounded by students, and falls in love with an innkeeper's daughter. News comes of his father's death and duty calls him home to take up his duties as king (where it has also been arranged that he should marry a princess for reasons of state). He cannot forget his true love and makes another secret visit to Heidelberg to say goodbye, but he must then sadly return to the `normal' world, leaving her behind for ever. In some ways very similar is the story of Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn as a European princess on an official visit to Rome, likewise bored with all the stuffy formalities of her royal life. She secretly escapes at night from the embassy where she is staying and, after walking the streets, falls asleep on a bench where she is picked up by an American journalist, played by Gregory Peck, in the city to cover her visit. He has no idea who she is but, concerned for her welfare, takes her back to the flat where he is staying. In the morning she asks him to show her the city, and she has an exhilaratingly informal day wandering incognito with him round Rome, with the inevitable result that, by nightfall,