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of sequels and `prequels' Lucas was inspired by its success to produce over the following decades, he continued to play around extensively with the archetypal figures who appeared in the 1977 version, to the point where we eventually learn that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father. As a young man, Vader had been one of the bravest of the Jedi Knights and Obi-Wan Kenobi's closest friend. But he had then switched to the side of darkness, like other `fallen angels' in the history of storytelling, from Lucifer in Milton's Paradise Lost to Saruman in The Lord of the Rings. In archetypal terms there is nothing odd about this since, even in the original movie, Luke's relationship to the `Dark Lord' is entirely consistent with that of a Son-Hero to a Dark Father-figure.

1. Another episode in Proust's own life presented only obliquely is the year he spent in the army. But this is reflected through another significant character in the novel, Robert Saint-Loup, the dashing, confident young aristocrat, popular with women, who serves as an army officer, and who cuts the kind of manly figure the masculine part of Proust might have liked to be (his name echoing the pet name Proust was given by his mother). In this sense, like Swann, Saint-Loup represents his (and the narrator's) `split-off' manhood, although eventually we see him too entering the sexual twilight zone, first in his love affair with the prostitute `Rachel When From The Lord, and finally when he also becomes at least in part homosexual.

2. Part of the reason for the emergence of science fiction (which of course has virtually no connection with science fact) is precisely that it has enabled storytellers of the past century to imagine stories of mythical dimension. Not only, since H. G. Wells's Martians in The War of the Worlds, has this allowed for the creation of `monsters' just as monstrous as any in the myths of the ancient world. It also, in tales like Star Wars, enables storytellers to create alternative realms, peopled by kings, `dark lords, princesses, knights, goblins, giants and all the archetypal paraphernalia of myth and legend, without seeming to be self-consciously archaic, because such stories are set in `the future'. In the same way, by calling on the `magic' of science, it can also, of course, provide heroes with the modern equivalents of those `magic' weapons used by Perseus and Co. in the myths and legends of yore.

3. In archetypal terms, E. T. carries clear echoes of the `Christ myth' (see Chapter 33). Like Jesus, E.T. is a supernaturally intelligent hero who comes to earth from `somewhere else', performs a series of miracles and builds up a small group of devoted followers. He becomes increasingly at odds with the earthly `ruling power, which eventually traps him and puts him to death. He is miraculously resurrected and remains for a short further time with his followers, before he leads them out into a lonely place to watch him ascending back into the heaven whence he came.

1. We get a first hint that the whole book is going to be a defiance of the Self when, in its opening paragraph, Buck Mulligan holds up his shaving bowl in a parody of the Latin Mass and intones `Introibo ad altare Dei' ('I am about to enter before the altar of God'). One puzzle raised by the novel is why Joyce should have been attracted to creating a modern rival to a story of which he seems to have had so little understanding. In Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce, he cites him asking why was he `always returning to this theme?' Joyce's answer: `I find the subject of Ulysses the most human in world literature. Ulysses didn't want to go off to Troy; he knew that the official reason for the war, the dissemination of the culture of Hellas, was only a pretext for the Greek merchants, who were seeking new markets....' This is bizarre. The `official' reason for the war was the one described by Homer, that Helen, the wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, had run off with Paris, the son of the Trojan king Priam. Since there is no historical evidence that the Trojan War ever took place,