Following on from my recent series of posts on stories and transformations, I thought it would be better to change tack from the theoretical side of things and demonstrate the ideas in a more concrete form by way of an analysis of one of the stories I left out of my recent book on Shakespeare: Henry IV. We’ll get to the details of the story in future posts. What we need to do first is to lay out the method of interpretation we will be using.
In some respects, the method is very simple. We start by recognising what both Aristotle and Joseph Campbell discovered independently two and half millennia apart: stories are always about the transformation of the hero’s identity. Furthermore, transformation has its own logic, which begins with an event that sets the hero on the path towards their new identity and ends with either its attainment or the failure to attain it.
Given the universal appearance of storytelling in the cultures of the world, it is clear that people intuitively understand the structure of a story. We are “in a story” to the extent that a process of transformation is underway. The story ends when the transformation ends, meaning the hero has attained a new identity, although not necessarily the one they thought they were getting.
If every story is a transformation, our fundamental method of analysis to get to the heart of its meaning is to utilise the logic of transformation. This does not negate any of the other qualities we can admire in stories, such as the poetry of the language, the vividness of description, etc. These are all valid in their own way. But our assertion here is that stories are first and foremost about transformation, and that is where the core meaning is to be found. To understand the transformation properly, we need to know how to unpack its logic.
At an abstract level, the transformation process is always the same. The hero begins in what we will call holy state. The word “holy” is related to the word “whole”. It means the hero’s identity is stable, secure, and complete. The society in which the hero lives recognises no deficiency, and the hero has no internal desire for change. They are in a world they understand and know how to navigate.
In order to begin the transformation, the hero must leave the holy state by sacrificing some part of their starting identity. The sacrifice does not need to be consciously understood or deliberately initiated. In fact, most of the time, transformation happens to us whether we like it or not, meaning that the sacrifice is forced upon us. If you are made redundant from your job, you enter the transformation we call “unemployment”. It’s not a sacrifice you wanted to make, but you will have to deal with the consequences nonetheless.
Once the sacrifice is made, the hero enters what we call sacred state. The word “sacred” means “to make holy”. While we are in sacred state, we are striving to get back to holiness, to attain a new identity that is once again stable and complete. Sticking with the redundancy theme, unemployment is the loss of your former identity as an employee of whatever company you were working for. The transformation to unemployment involves the sacrifice of your old job leaving you without an economic identity. Your identity has been made un-whole. There is a gap that needs to be filled.
For a person who is a wage earner that doesn’t have any other source of income or a large amount of savings in the bank, unemployment is not a state that can be ignored. It is possible to pretend that everything’s okay. Indeed, this kind of dissociation is quite common. But a failure to find a new identity (a new job) will only lead to even larger problems later on. Once we are in sacred state, a transformation is going to happen whether we like it or not. We can consciously accept that and try to influence the outcome, or we can dissociate and let events dictate it for us. In this respect, the transformation process aligns to what has traditionally been called “fate”.
This leads to another characteristic of the sacred state of a transformation: there is an irreducible degree of uncertainty and risk involved. The loss of a job may be a minor inconvenience if you find a new one quickly. If you fail to do so, it can spiral into something much more profound. Anybody who doubts that is free to look up the statistics that correlate long-term unemployment with divorce, drug and alcohol addiction, depression, and a range of other problems.
It is precisely because of the inherent uncertainty and risk involved that stories resonate with us because we understand intuitively that the hero is in danger until the matter is resolved. The greater the potential transformation, the greater the risk and danger to the hero. That is why the most memorable stories usually feature a hero whose life is in danger, since that is the highest sacrifice that any of us can make. It is the final transformation.
The sacred state constitutes the main body of any story. The hero must struggle to create for themselves a new identity. The story comes to an end when they have attained a new holy state on the other side of the sacred, meaning they have gained a new identity. For our unfortunate employee who was made redundant, the most common resolution is to find another job. The transformation resolves as a change of employer.
But note that all kinds of other outcomes are possible. A failure to find a new job may force the individual to try something completely different, such as returning to study, trying to retire, starting their own business, or any number of other options depending on their circumstances. In these cases, the transformation process becomes longer and more difficult and only resolves once the new identity has been stabilised into a new holy state.
Since every story is about transformation, every storyteller must describe the process we have just outlined by showing the starting holy state of the hero, the sacrifice they make to enter the sacred part of the journey, and their return to holy state at the end with a new identity. These are the “rules” of storytelling. The rules are very similar to those of grammar in that they may be broken for effect and even stories that are “ungrammatical” can still be understood to some extent.
There are a couple of key points to make about this. It is perfectly possible to write a narrative that does not describe the transformation of a hero. In fact, a great deal of what is considered “high art” in the modern world revolves around avoiding the telling of a story. Thus, not every work of literature or art is a “story” as we have defined it. Furthermore, life itself is not composed entirely of transformation. There are religious and philosophical schools which deny transformation or which see the purpose of life in transcending it. Not everything is a transformation, and therefore not everything is a story. Nevertheless, to the degree that a story is being told, it must follow the pattern just described.
Some people may disagree with this approach on the grounds that it is “reductionist”. In fact, the opposite is true. There are several reasons for this.
The first is that every transformation is about the identity of the hero, and we are using the term “identity” in the widest possible fashion to include everything that is involved in being human. Since we don’t have any definitive understanding of what a human being is, it is not possible for this approach to be reductionist. In fact, the very process of transformation often shows us something that we didn’t previously understand. All learning is a transformation, and therefore transformation is the process of discovering new aspects of human nature.
It’s also the case that, even though we may come up with some useful categories of identity, a human being is a whole entity whose wholeness transcends any of the more specific properties we may ascribe. Thus, a change in just one property may have cascading and unpredictable effects. The loss of a job is not a mere change of social status. It comes with all kinds of internal emotions. It changes our relationship with others, especially if we are married. It may lead us to re-evaluate our entire worldview. The sacred state of a transformation is inherently unpredictable. Therefore, transformation can never be reductionist.
Note also that the kinds of identity that an individual may have are fundamentally tied in with the kind of society in which they live. The identity of “employee” is specific to modern Western society. It did not exist in feudal times. It did not exist in ancient Greece or Rome. It may be that similar roles have existed in other civilisations, but the evidence is scant. Therefore, the transformation of unemployment is itself specific to the modern West. Even then, it has changed significantly over time. Nowadays, destitution as a result of unemployment is mostly mitigated by way of the welfare safety net. Thus, becoming unemployed in the modern world is very different from what it was a hundred and fifty years ago. Transformations have both a dynamic inner nature and a highly specific cultural aspect too.
But the most important reason why transformation can never be reductionist is because it is the very process by which something new is ushered into the world. The social role of employee must have begun at some time. From there, it must have grown in prominence until it arrived at the near universality it enjoys today. In fact, we know in great detail how that happened because it coincided with the enormous social transformation that came with industrial capitalism. Along the way, countless people lost their identity as feudal peasants and took up the new identity of employee. A new kind of society was thereby created.
It’s also the case that any individual transformation, while it can result in a number of negative outcomes, may also give rise to something new. It’s a very common story in the lives of notable individuals that they used the disappointment that came from being fired from a job to go on and create not just something new in their own lives but something that changed their society too. The great historian Arnold Toynbee believed that all major historical turning points are born out of this kind of crisis that leads to a novel transformation on the part of a single individual.
Thus, not only are transformations inherently non-reductionist, but we have barely begun to understand the transformations that have taken place in the past, and there is little agreement about how and why those transformations took place. Aristotle’s belief that history could be captured in story form was predicated on his implied understanding that history is made up of transformation. However, the great philosopher also stated that fictional works were better suited for this purpose because storytellers did not get bogged down in the details but were free to explore the more abstract meanings.
Indeed, it’s true that the great fictional storytellers of any age are able to intuit and then communicate the subtleties that go unnoticed in everyday life. Therefore, it is perfectly valid to use great literature as a form of historical analysis. Shakespeare provides an unusually clear case since he sits at the turning point where the modern West emerged from the medieval world and Renaissance. By investigating the kinds of transformations he puts his characters through and how they differ from the fictional works that preceded them, we gain a deep insight into the worldview which is still dominant in our time.
And that is what we will be doing in this series of posts. By analysing Shakespeare’s work from the point of view of transformation, we not only gain a better understanding of the meaning of those works individually, we open up new perspectives on the nature of transformation, especially as it changes as a culture evolves. Shakespeare’s stories are perfectly suited for such an analysis because his plays are entirely about the transformation of the hero. There is not a word spoken or an action undertaken that does not impact upon the hero’s journey. This is in contrast to the more sprawling works of Dickens or Dostoevsky, for example. Their stories are also fundamentally rooted in the transformation of the hero, but the transformation takes place in a far less condensed form.
But the thing that sets Shakespeare’s heroes apart from those of other great writers is the degree to which they are conscious of the transformation they are going through because they deliberately choose it for themselves. Every Shakespearean hero consciously relinquishes their old identity and strives for a new one. To understand their journey, we must follow the pattern described in this post by first identifying the holy state at the start of the story, then finding the sacrifice that signals the transition into sacred state, and, finally, understanding the path that returns to holy state with the attainment of a new identity. In the case of Hal in Henry IV, the story is a comedy, which means that the prince successfully makes it to the other side, unlike his fellow Shakespearean adolescent heroes Hamlet, Romeo, and Juliet.
We’ll begin unpacking Hal’s journey in two weeks’ time. Next week, however, we’ll need to spend some time bedding down our method of interpretation by showing how the model of transformation just presented can be used to interpret nominally different kinds of stories.