Thought for the week before last

The saviour came especially from on high
So he could face the punters eye to eye
No sooner have they nailed him up, there's blessed pulpits full
Bestride the holy lamb, behold the bull...

Prologue

"Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all; again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself, I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god… similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose 'what it meant'.

'Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth, where the others are men’s myth....

'The 'doctrines' we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that what God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning.

'I am also nearly certain that it really happened"

Letter from one Clive Staples Lewis to Arthur Greeves, October, 1931

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12: The Return (VI, VII)

VI: Sleepy

Stories seem important.

Certain kinds of stories seem to be particularly important or important in particular ways.

Star Wars did seem more important that Candleshoe or Herbie Goes to Montry Carlo or One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing.

I didn't like Wagner's Ring more than I liked Remember You're A Womble: I liked it differently.

Asking whether I preferred the Eternals to the Beano (or even to 2000AD) would simply have been a non-sequitur. (Does anyone want to go looking for Oedipal complexes or Castration images in the Beano? Please don't.)

"It's, y'know, mythic" seems as a good a way of putting it as any other.

Was C.S. Lewis onto something when he said that a myth was a story which transcended any particular telling of it?

If I tell you the story of Oedipus, then you know the story of Oedipus, in the same way that if I sing Yesterday to you, you know the turn of Yesterday, and Yesterday is a great song because of the tune, the notes and the order in which they come, and you can probably tell it's a great song even though I am singing it really badly.

But if I tell you the story of Great Expectations, then you only know the story of Great Expectations; which doesn't really tell you anything at all about Great Expectations. The only way to find out about Great Expectations is to read Great Expectation. Dickens isn't terribly good at plots. Its the way he tells 'em. (Someone could probably use my synopsis to writ a novel, but it wouldn't be Great Expectation, it would be a different book which happened to have the same plot as Great Expectations. This is why a movie version of Lord of the Rings was fundamentally silly idea.)

But is it really the "tune" of Star Wars which made Star War seem so important? And has Hero With a Thousand Faces really revealed that tune? And are Star Wars and Harry Potter and the Passion of the Christ really just different ways of singing the same tune?

Lots of the stories in the Bible would look distinctly mundane if you found them anywhere other than the Bible. They are sacred stories because we have agreed to read them in a sacred way. (I'm thinking of Elisha and the bear or Esther and the beauty pageant. Elijah going up to heaven in a chariot would be pretty sacred wherever you found it.) I wonder if stories have "mythic" qualities because we have agreed to read them mythically? Maybe the solemn music and the fanfare and the opening caption tricked us into a state of mind in which we would allow all the other swords we'd ever read about (and all the one's we hadn't) to whisper to Luke Skywalker's lightaber.

Yeah. But some stories let you do this more than others. It's no trick to read the Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the Durbevilles as myths, is it? Henchard is like Job and Cain and Tess is every wronged woman in history and every time anyone walks past a field, it's not just guys growing crops, it's Nature with a big N, even if the text doesn't actually say so. I suppose we could say that the Harvest Festival scene in next weeks Archers makes us think of John Barleycorn and Attis and Mondamin, but we'd sound pretty silly if we did. We just don't approach radio soap operas in that way.

It seems sensible to apply mythical readings to Thomas Hardy because Thomas Hardy is the kind of text which it seems sensible to apply mythic readings to.

That isn't as helpful as I hoped it was going to be.

VII: Bashful 

My English teacher thought that Thistles meant whatever Ted Hughes said it mean, and there was an end to it. If Ted Hughes hadn't said what the poem meant, then it was our job to work out what he would have said if we had asked him.

Campbell thinks that symbols mean what they mean, and there's and end to it. All stories have a meaning, and it's our job to learn the language or crack the code or remove the mask so the One Truth is revealed.

I think that this is a silly, reductive, limiting way of reading stories.

Vogler doesn't mind what stories "mean" so long as they contain a quality which he calls "magic" or "power". Just reading them has an effect on you.

I think that this is simply silly.

A couple of readers, presumably unfamiliar with my oeuvre, have said that they are waiting to see what my point is. As should now be clear, I don't have one. Gavin and Andrew wrote about Joseph Campbell a little while ago, and I thought I would try to write down my thoughts. I took the argument for a walk in order to find out where it ended up. At one time, the idea that all stories were the same story and all heroes were the same hero was really very attractive; but now it seems like a load of tosh.

And yet.

And yet...

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12: The Return (V)

V: Mars

You knew if you waited long enough that I would get back to that bloody film.

You may remember that, at the end of the Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader reveals that he is Luke Skywalker's Father, and cuts off his hand. In a single moment, the Hero (very definitely the Hero) is deprived of his right hand, his much revered paternal role-model, and his only weapon. This scene is widely regarded as "quite good". Some people (for example, me) have said that the scene "means" that Darth Vader has castrated Luke.

But what does "mean" mean?

If we read, in a medieval legend, that a certain King has been wounded in the bottom then we probably spot that "bottom" is a euphemism for "genitals" – especially if the injury makes him and his land infertile for seven years. The fairy tale Rapunzel simply makes more sense if we assume that when it says that the Prince fell from the tower and lost his eyes, "eyes" really means "balls". And people like Fred Astair and Elvis Presley wouldn't have had careers if we couldn't easily see that "dancing" usually means "having sex".

So: George Lucas is using one terrible injury (the loss of a hand) as a euphemism for a different terrible injury (the loss of a penis).

Well, no, obviously not. On at least two occasions, James Bond is literally threatened with being emasculated. And you can sort of see why. When a man is so thoroughly defined by his masculinity and has such a big collection of guns, motor cars and ladies then threatening his penis with a whip or a laser beam seems appropriate – even funny. It makes him even more masculine when he pops up again. It's a sort of an apology to the ladies in the audience for the existence of a character called Pussy Galore. It really doesn't make much sense to say that Casino Royale said plainly what George Lucas expressed coyly – that the film would have been essentially the same if Vader had taken Luke to a torture chamber and attacked his gonads with a knife.

So: all that happens at the end of the Empire Strikes Back is that one character sustains a nasty injury and silly people have read all sorts of silly meanings into it in order to justify their enthusiasm for what is, after all, only a kids movie.

No, that won't do either. The scene isn't just about a boy having a fight with his dad, any more than Moby Dick is just about a man chasing a whale. It's about a Son having a fight with his Father. It is about Fathers and Sons with Capital Letters. Darth Vader fighting Luke Skywalker packs an emotional punch which Sherlock Holmes fighting Moriarty simply doesn't.

Does it resonate with us because many of us have experiences of idolizing our fathers and being scared of our fathers and being disappointed with our fathers all at once? Or does it seem particularly significant because this is the kind of story in which particular significance is attached to Fathers and Sons? Because it is like other stories about Fathers and Sons? You would, I am sure, be quite upset if someone murdered your Dad; but then you'd be equally annoyed if someone bumped off your Mum. (A lot of people would regard the loss of Mummy has an even worse tragedy for a child than the loss of Daddy.) But in literature – in stories – the Death of the Father is a specially big deal. Lots of heroes are motivated by the deaths of their fathers. Can anyone think of one who is mainly motivated by the death of their Mother? [*]

The Empire Strikes Back isn't about fathers and sons nearly as much as its about stories about fathers and sons. (Move on to the next point quickly, Andrew, they may let you get away with that one.)

When a hero does something Heroic, it is very likely to make us think of other stories where other heroes have done other heroic things. If you want to make your hero seem extra-heroic by all means make him re-enact the exploits of other heroes. When Spider-Man carries the whole weight of Doctor Octopus's base on his back, it's a bit like Atlas [**] holding up the Sky and a bit like Samson bringing down the Philistine temple. But it would be an act of reckless lunacy to say that Spider-Man "means" Atlas, or that we can sort through all the irrelevant Christmas Pudding of Spider-Man and get to the precious little sixpence of Samson or that even though Stan Lee was Jewish and Martin Goodman was Jewish and Steve Ditko was Jewish its obviously a Christian allegory. [***]

Spider-Man and Atlas and Samson and Jesus and nine hundred and ninety six other heroes are all a little bit like each other. That's not because there's a deep underlying Jungian meaning to strong guys lifting things which are a bit too heavy even for them to lift. It's because people who tell stories draw on the stories which other people who tell stories have told and people who listen to stories associate stories they hear with other stories they have heard whether the story teller meant them to or not.

And there is my whole quarrel with Joseph Campbell, or maybe just with Vogler. ("Campbell was all right, but his followers were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it which ruins it for me.") Of course we can say that the life of Harry Potter is a bit like the life of King Arthur. And of course "his parents were killed when he was a little boy, for reasons he doesn't know yet" sets up expectations in our heads about what kind of story this story is going to be. And of course those expectations are one of the things which J.K. Rowling uses, well or badly, depending on your point of view. (The fact that he's called "Harry" sets up some expectations too: it's both a common, working class name and a royal name. The fact that he wears little round National Health glasses make us think that he'll be a nerd, and shy, but maybe one day he'll become a famous rock and roll star like that other shy orphaned nerd who wore cheap National Health glasses. Everything in a story allows meanings from other stories to pour into it. You can't say "It was a beautiful summers day" or "It was a dark and stormy night" without making the reader think about other beautiful summers days and dark and stormy nights.) Some stories are like other stories and the whole point of Star Wars was that it was like lots and lots of other stories. But I don't believe that Star Wars and The Philosopher's Stone and Spider-Man all point to (or disguise) a single archetypal truth in the same way that The Stork, The Gooseberry Bush and the New Baby Train all point to to (or conceal) a single biological fact.

C.S. Lewis noted that that the original point of Sorhab and Rustum was that it reminded classically educated English readers of Homeric diction. But most English schoolboys, reading the Iliad for the first time, say "Oh! It reminds me of Sorhab and Rustum." Nowadays, they probably say "Oh, it reminds me of the Empire Strikes Back." I know I did.



The more times a scene has happened the more times it has happened. When Obi-Wan gives Luke his father's lighstsaber, it reminds us of Prince Arthur taking the sword from the stone. Or Father Christmas giving Peter the magic sword in Mrs Beaver's house. Or Lion-O taking up the Sword of Omens for the first time. But it might very well be better to say that it reminds us of every scene in every story where a hero is given an important sword. Even the ones we've never heard of. And that might very well be all "archeype" means. 

("So, Andrew, archetype really is only a posh word for cliché.")

But do you really think we can strip away all the particulars of all the different stories until you are finally left with "Hero Getting Sword From Mentor" or "Hero Getting Weapon From Weapon-Giver" or "Person Getting Thing From Person Who Gives People Things" and then say that we've arrived at the original form of the image? And that this "original form" is more important than the scene in the cave with Mark Hamill and Alec Guiness? That the image somehow contains the true kernel of meaning and the eternal energies of the cosmos?

Freud thinks that boys can't turn into Men because they are afraid that their fathers will Castrate them. Freud seems to have meant this quite literally: kids and neurotic grown ups have a real (but unconscious) fear that their bits will be chopped off; lots of guy's hangups go back to standing next to an older man in the shower and wishing theirs was like that. But it works better as a metaphor. If "your penis" is literally "your manhood" -- "whatever makes you a man" -- then "castration" is simply "losing whatever it is that makes you a man". The "castration complex" is "the feeling that whatever it is which makes you a man is going to be taken away".

And it is by no means far fetched to say that Star Wars (and Harry Potter, and Spider-Man) is a Growing Up story; and that for Luke Skywalker Growing Up means "Becoming a Jedi, like my father before me."

And it is quite true that Obi-Wan Kenobi is a sort of father figure, and that he give Luke the lightsaber and that Darth Vader, in the great primal scene, stops Luke from growing up by violently removing the exact thing which will make him a man.

And if you put George Lucas's growing up story alongside Freud's growing up story you'll probably spot that they have things in common. And some of those things were probably put there by Lucas who had probably read Freud or met people who'd read Freud, or seen films made by people who'd met people who'd read Freud. And some of them were probably not there until the first time we put the two stories side by side, and that's fine too.

Freud's story of how Little Hans' Daddy said that if he didn't stop playing with his widdler he would chop it off is a good story. Lucas's story of how Luke rushed in to confront his enemy before he was prepared and learned truths he wasn't ready for is also a story. I think that George's story is like Sigmund's story in some ways, but unlike it in other ways. I don't think that George's story "means" Sigmund's story. I like George's better.

[*] Joe Chill and/or the Joker killed both Bruce's parents. The Orestia involves a bloodbath in which Daddy kills daughter, Mummy kills Daddy (to get back at him for killing her daughter), Son kills Mummy, (for killing his father for killing his sister) and so one until everyone is thoroughly dead or the Furies intervene. Greek tragedy and comic books: with this footnote you are spoiling us, Mr Ambassador.

[**] Steve Ditko. Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged. Bang. Bang. Bang.

[***] Spider-Man is bearing the sins of the world on his back. He goes through a whole series of deaths and resurrections. He wins an elixir of life which brings Aunt May back from the point of death. And it all happens in issue #33. See how easy it is?

continues

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