The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [72]
Lucius in The Golden Ass begins as a feckless, self-centred young man whose only interests are promiscuous sexual gratification and the pseudo-spiritual titillations of the occult. He ends as a mature, disciplined, spiritually-illumined figure, dedicating his life to the goddess personifying selfless love and wisdom who has been his saviour and the inspiration of his enlightenment.
The Ancient Mariner begins as a feckless young man, like Crusoe `all at sea', who blindly and heartlessly shoots the albatross. The consequences of this crime against the great numinous symbol of life which has been accompanying the ship are that he sees death closing in from every side, until he is seemingly all alone, frozen in a state of living death. The only other living creatures visible are the `thousand, thousand creeping things', the water snakes: and when, almost with his dying breath, he whispers a blessing on them, this proves the turning point. He has at last begun to move from his original centre of awareness, his limited little ego, to another, much deeper centre in himself, from which he can recognise his kinship with all life. From this moment, as the frozen, deathly world around him begins to stir to life again, he is saved.
What we thus see in all these characters is that they have begun as selfish, not really recognising anything in the world outside themselves. In this state they exhibit very much the same blind egocentricity which in earlier plots we saw characterising those dark figures who were opposed to the hero or heroine. Here it is the hero himself who is initially presented as far from light; and it is precisely this which plunges him into the adventure which threatens to destroy him. But in the end he is saved, because his eyes have been opened and he has gone through a fundamental change of heart. He has made the switch from dark to light. Such is the case with Crusoe, with Lucius, with the Ancient Mariner, with the Prodigal Son. The real victory of such Voyage and Return heroes is not over the forces of darkness outside them. It is over the same dark forces within themselves.
In this respect, of course, this plot is rather different from the three types of story we have looked at earlier. And equally it does not share their general tendency to culminate in a final triumphant union of the hero with his `Princess'. The complete happy ending of the Voyage and Return story is simply that the hero returns to his familiar world transformed. He has become a new man. By discovering a new, much deeper centre to his personality, he has `seen the light'. And this in itself, the story suggests, is enough to guarantee that he will `live happily ever after'.
But even though the Voyage and Return story does not end on that familiar concluding image of hero and heroine united in love, this is not to say that, during their dreamlike experience of the other world, relations with some figure of the opposite sex may not play an important part. Indeed such a relationship often marks the only real personal contact or point of engagement they have with the elusive other world. Yet, significantly, this is much more consistently true of those stories where the central figure returns again to the `real world' without having been transformed, and without having won anything positive from the adventure. If he or she does form such a relationship in the other world, and it may seem of the highest importance to them, when they make their escape back to reality again, it has to be abandoned. When the hero returns, the girl is left behind.
In Wells's The Time Machine, for instance, the only identifiable