The Secret History of the World

But the greater contribution of the novel to the human sense of self is, as we have just suggested, the formation of the sense of an inner narrative, the sense that an individual life seen from the inside has a meaningful shape, a story.

^{Mother Goose in an eighteenth-century engraving. Mother Goose here reveals her secret identity as Isis, the Moon goddess and priestess of the secret philosophy, not only by her name — in ancient Egypt the goose was one of the traditional attributes of Isis — but also by the crescent shape of her profile. The fairy stories of folk tradition are saturated with the numinous and paradoxical qualities of the ancient and secret philosophy.}

Underlying these notions of shape and meaning are beliefs about the ways people’s lives are formed by their being tested — the labyrinth that keeps morphing.

What shapes lives in novels is life’s paradoxical quality, the fact that it does not run in a straight, predictable line, the fact that appearances are deceptive and that fortunes are reversed. The notions of the meaning of life and the deeper laws here come together.

IF THESE DEEPER LAWS REALLY EXIST AND are universal and so important and powerful, if history really does turn on them, isn’t it perhaps surprising that we are not more aware of them? In fact, isn’t it odd if we in the West don’t even seem to have a name for them?

It is surprising, not least because if these laws come into play when human happiness is at stake it should follow that they could be very useful when it comes to our hopes of living a happy life.

Of course the most common sets of rules for achieving a happy life are the down-to-earth wisdom contained in proverbs and the common-sense cautionary advice traditionally given to children.

But one difference is that both proverbs and the cautionary advice given to children only address the basics — how to avoid physical harm and obtain the bare necessities — while the deeper laws deal in grand notions of destiny, good and evil. As we shall see, they advise us on satisfying our craving for the highest, most ineffable levels of happiness, our deepest needs for fulfilment and meaning.

Compare the proverbial advice to ‘look before you leap’ with the recommendation contained in this perverse little parable by the proto-Surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire:

Come to the edge, he said.
They said, We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came. He pushed them.
They flew.

^{Like Paracelsus, the Brothers Grimm collected esoteric folklore before it died out. Dopey, Happy, Bashful, Sleepy, Grumpy, Sneezy and Doc might seem humorous, child-friendly, made-up names, but in fact they are all literal translations of seven earth demons from Scandinavian esoteric lore: Toki, Skavaerr, Varr, Dun, Orinn, Grerr and Radsvid. Even in the cosy world of Disney the esoteric lies closer to the surface than you might think.}

Inspired by the teachings of the secret societies, the Surrealists wanted to destroy entrenched ways of thought, to smash scientific materialism. One of the ways they did this was by promoting irrational acts. Here Apollinaire is saying that if you act irrationally, you will be rewarded by the irrational forces of the universe.

If what Apollinaire is saying is true, this is one of the deeper laws of the universe, a law of cause and effect lying outside the laws of probability.

Surrealists were unusually open about their irrational philosophy and its roots in the secret societies, but this same irrational philosophy is also implicit in much more mainstream culture. Take It’s a Wonderful Life, an old film that on the surface seems homely and comforting, together with its literary forebear A Christmas Carol, which Charles Dickens imbued with the philosophy of the secret society of which he was an initiate.

Scrooge is confronted by ghosts that present him with visions showing how his behaviour has caused great misery, together with a vision of what will result if he continues in the same vein. George Bailey, the character played by James Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life, believes his life has been a complete failure and he is about to commit suicide when an angel shows him how much unhappier his family, friends, the whole town, would have been were it not for him and his self-sacrificing nature.

So both George Bailey and Scrooge are invited to ask themselves how the world would have been different if they had chosen to live differently. At the end of this process of questioning both characters are asked to go through the same door they were about to go through at the beginning of the story — but this time do the right thing. George Bailey decides not to commit suicide and to face his creditors. Scrooge redeems himself by coming to the aid of Bob Cratchit and his family.

So in a way both It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol depict life as having a kind of circular quality and of being a test. They show how life directs us towards crucial decisions and how we may be made to loop round and come back to confront these crucial decisions again if we get it wrong.

I imagine that most of us feel that both It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol are in some way true. It’s difficult to see how anything in science or nature could account for life’s being patterned in this insistently testing way, but most of us probably feel that both these very popular works are more than just entertainments, that they say something deep about life.

A few moments consideration may now be enough to convince us that the same sorts of mysterious and irrational patterns also inform the structure of some of the greatest works of literature in the canon: Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Doctor Faustus and War and Peace.

Oedipus somehow draws to himself the thing he fears most, and ends up killing his father and marrying his mother.

Hamlet repeatedly ducks out of his life’s challenge — avenging his father’s murder — but this challenge returns to confront him in increasingly dire forms.

Don Quixote holds a good-hearted vision of the world as a noble place, and so strong is this vision that by the end of the novel it has in some mysterious way transformed his material surroundings.

In his heart of hearts Faust knows what he ought to do, but because he does not do it, a providential order in the universe punishes him.

Tolstoy’s hero, Pierre, is tortured by his love for Natasha. It is only when he lets go of his feelings for her that he wins her.

Imagine if you fed all these great works of literature — in fact all literature — into a giant computer and asked it the question: What are the laws that determine whether or not a life is ultimately happy and fulfilled? I suggest the result would be a body of laws that included the following:

If you duck out of a challenge, then that challenge will come round again in a different form.

We always draw towards us what we fear most.

If you choose the immoral path, ultimately you will pay for it.

A good-hearted belief will eventually transform what is believed in.

In order to hold on to what you love, you must let it go.

This, then, is the type of law that gives great narrative literature its structure, and if we read Oedipus Rex or King Lear or Doctor Faustus or Middlemarch and feel that in a deep and important sense they are true, it is surely because the working out of the laws they portray resonates with our experience. They accurately depict the shape of our lives.