Communal Catharsis and The Last Unicorn

Today’s subject is difficult to approach. I don’t want to go off-brand from why we’re here—talking about our common love for stories—but because of the nature of globalism and social media, we’ve all been enveloped these last few years in a constant stream of information about global events like the Gaza/Israel war and the Ukraine/Russia war.

My intention is never to stoke political fires, but rather to step back and look at them from a storytelling perspective. Why? Good stories unite rather than separate us (see my article on polarized storytelling), and it is the great tragedy of our time that the stories that predominate our media are divisive stories. Perhaps the divisive nature of our media is not accidental, but neither do I believe it is the product of some nefarious conspiracy theory du jour trying to infiltrate our thoughts. No, there is a much deeper reality at play here.

Mark Twain, Huck Finn, and American Peter Pan Syndrome

I recently read a collection of Wendell Berry essays, curated by Paul Kingsnorth, titled The World-Ending Fire. In one of these essays, “Writer and Region,” Wendell Berry grapples with his reaction to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn:

“I am supposing that Huckleberry Finn fails in failing to imagine a responsible adult community life, and I am supposing further that this is the failure of Mark Twain’s life and of our life so far as a society. Community life, as I suggested earlier, is tragic, and it is so because it involves unremittingly the need to survive mortality, partiality, and evil. Because Huck Finn and Mark Twain so clung to boyhood, and to the boy’s vision of free bachelorhood, neither could enter community life as I am attempting to understand it. A boy can experience grief and horror, but he cannot experience that fulfillment and catharsis of grief, fear, and pity that we call tragedy and still remain a boy.”

This is a profound thought, and I’ll come back to it in a moment.

As I’m examining our reactions to news on the Israel/Gaza/Iran war and the Russia/Ukraine war, I’m noticing that we’re being dragged back and forth between one ideological position and another depending on the loudness of the opinion we’re hearing at the moment, the level of horror expressed in media photography, and the outrage of stories from the front. 

A One-Sided Narrative and Virtue Signaling

A couple of years ago, I was talking with a fellow writer who recounted an interesting anecdote: her son was talking with someone at church about his desire to enter into the military but also his concern that there might soon be a mass mobilization of the American military to become involved in the Russia/Ukraine war, in which case he wouldn’t want to enlist—a very logical thought process; but the man with whom he was speaking, instead of engaging my friend’s son in conversation, began to bloviate on the evils of the new Hitler (a.k.a. Putin) and would not release the young man from the conversation until he signalled his virtue by denouncing Putin as the next great devil.

I am not recounting this to espouse a position on Putin as a human being. What is more interesting to me is our inability to deal with tragedy. We are emotionally affected by these wars the same way we were emotionally affected by COVID and the ongoing “culture war”. I think this is significant, and it’s very much related to storytelling, which I’ll get to in a moment. 

Why Americans Hide from Tragedy

This idea that Berry presents of communal catharsis is spot on. He’s pointing out a specifically American problem of a Peter Pan syndrome where we’re unable to deal with tragedy because we’re unable to graduate from an idealized vision of boyhood. We hide from tragedy instead of allowing it to transform us through communal catharsis. 

Berry continues:

“[Huck Finn and Mark Twain] cannot experience tragedy in solitude or as a stranger, for tragedy is an experienceable only in the context of a beloved community. The fulfillment in catharsis that Aristotle described as the communal result of tragic drama is an artificial replacement to the way that a mature community survives tragedy in fact.”

The Problem of Consuming Stories Alone

This is partially due to the fact that we no longer have communal storytelling, so we cannot feel the catharsis of tragedy on stage or in public. Storytelling has become an isolated experience, and that isolation is intensified by the individuality of the internet and smartphones—since many of the stories we participate in are watched on small devices and not discussed with others, we rarely enjoy communal catharsis through story. 

We are confronted by a spectre of horrific tragedies, but we cannot process those tragedies through communal catharsis. Because of this, we end up expressing our distress through extreme anger and a need for a scapegoat. But this cannot be cathartic because the object of the ire cannot be sacrificed. There cannot be an atonement as there was in the Old Testament. 

The Problem of Losing Antinomy

This leads to a further issue: our inability to deal with a reality in which two opposites can be simultaneously true. I came across a wonderful quote in the introduction to a translation of the Psalter by the poet Donald Sheehan. Sheehan talks about how the Psalms are very often an expression of antinomy, a word first used in classical Roman law to describe the circumstance of jury law in which one side prosecutes while the other side defends, the truth arising only through such jarring antinomic interaction. Kant uses the idea of antinomy to describe how a thesis and antithesis clash together to create a synthesis which will necessarily be more true than either the thesis or the antithesis.

This is practically true for anyone seeking truth: the best way to find truth is to carefully examine each side of the issue (and to recognize that there is limited truth in both) and come through the clash to decide there must be an ultimate truth higher than either extreme.

But we have not been trained to deal with antinomic realities. Most of the time, we choose one side or the other while treating those who espouse the opposite view as the great enemy. That desire to “other” those who oppose us is bolstered by our sense of moral righteousness. This sense of moral righteousness is very dangerous because it is formed in isolation, not community, and therefore cannot be tempered by coming into contact with the faces of those with whom we disagree. That’s why so much of this happens over impersonal, text-based, online interactions. 

The tragedy is that we are living only half a life. This will not help us deal with the hard reality of what is happening in our global wars. The wars will play out the way the wars will play out, and we cannot affect their outcome by constantly beating ourselves like waves against a cliff; most of the time, our emotional energy goes nowhere, and we become increasingly miserable. 

But there is a way of dealing with difficult realities, and it has to do with the escape of the prisoner, the consolation of fantasy.

The Hero’s Journey Gone Wrong

This situation we’re in is a great example of how the hero’s journey can be perverted and misused and how our proper experience of it through a storytelling medium can do something wonderful to us; it won’t directly change the world, but it can change us in a way that allows us to affect the world. 

This is difficult for me to say because I’m being critical of my own people, but as I step back and try to make sense of what is happening in Russia, I cannot help but see Russia’s war on Ukraine as an expression of the hero’s journey gone wrong. The hero’s journey is intrinsic to most fairy tale/fantasy storytelling structures. (You can find out more about the hero’s journey, plus a bonus breakdown of the heroine’s journey, here.) 

In this paradigm, it is necessary for the hero to leave his community and encounter danger and darkness, both in the world and in himself, away from the comforts of home and family. He must come to a point where he is utterly defeated; only by going through that failure can he find the strength, usually mediated by unexpected grace outside himself, giving him the means to destroy the dragon both outside and inside himself.

But if we see the hero’s journey as the only way of living, we can end up ill-prepared for the dragon we encounter in isolation and make the fatal mistake of swinging our swords in the wrong direction and killing the innocent. The hero’s journey, untempered by the overcoming of internal dragons, can create “heroes” who are a menace to themselves and to others. 

This is what seems to me to be happening with Russia: Russia seems to see itself as a hero going out into the darkness and slaying fascism, neo-Nazism, etc., but they are swinging their sword randomly, and it seems like they are being blinded in the process and harming a great number of innocents. 

This is terrible. We cannot stop it, but what we can do is vicariously experience the reality we see in the world within the safe space of story. Reading will not give you the external catharsis of tragedy experienced in community, but it will give you an internal catharsis that can be strong enough to allow you to become a source of that catharsis for your community. 

But didn’t I just say that the isolation of modern story consumption makes this impossible? 

Ok, fair. But let me qualify this point. 

In a world where you cannot have communal catharsis, like war veterans in ancient Greece and Rome did through public readings of The Iliad, you have to choose an individual catharsis delivery mechanism. Visual media are not good for this, because they do not promote deep engagement with the subject. Deep reading (not surprisingly an art that is becoming ever more niche) seems to be effective in profoundly changing one’s perspective and making it possible to inhabit the perspectives of people very different from you. This is a point I address in detail in my previous post on Empathy vs Compassion.

In other words, my advice is this: heal the division within yourself through targeted consumption of story. By becoming a calm center that has passed through danger, other people will be attracted to you. 

The Last Unicorn

We have a poignant example of how this process might work in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. This is a wonderful book, not least because it simultaneously plays to the tropes of the hero’s journey, subverts them, makes fun of them, but ultimately embraces them. It also embraces the tropes of the heroine’s journey and combines them in an experience of harmony and beauty that is quite unusual and unexpected in fantasy literature. 

Story Summary

Let me set the scene: This book is the story of a unicorn who suddenly desires to leave her forest. This is unusual for unicorns, who generally inhabit and beautify one place. But this unicorn hears that she may be the last unicorn, and she decides she needs to go out and find out what has happened to the other unicorns. 

She encounters a series of curious characters, most of whom are comical while also having a depth of drama and tragedy that makes this book an unusual example of successful genre juggling. The unicorn comes into contact with a bumbling magician named Schmendrick who accidentally transforms her into a human woman. This is a terrible thing because unicorns are immortal and humans are not, so her immortality is in danger of fading away, as is her identity. 

In her newly transfigured form, our heroine encounters a lazy, ne’er-do-well prince named Lír who is the son of an archetypal villain. The pure beauty and goodness of her presence awaken his heart, transforming him. He begins, initially in a rather comical fashion, to do feats of valor, like setting forth to slay dragons. In this process of acting the hero, he actually becomes a proper hero who passes through all the stages of the hero’s journey, which ultimately allows him to perform an act of self-sacrifice that leads to his own death. In return, our heroine—after being transformed back into a unicorn—gives the prince back his life. The prince then becomes king of the land and is faced with the loss of his love.

What the new king does with this reality is what I want to examine:

King Lír said, “She is gone. Find my horse and saddle him. Find my horse!” His voice was harsh and hungry, and the men-at-arms scrambled to obey their new lord.

But Schmendrick, standing behind him, said quietly, “Your Majesty, it may not be. You must not follow her.”

The king turned, and he looked like Haggard [his villain father]. “Magician, she is mine!” He paused, and then went on in a gentler tone, close to pleading. “She has twice raised me up from death, and what will I be without her but dead for a third time?” He took Schmendrick by the wrists with a grip strong enough to powder bones, but the magician did not move. Lír said, “I am not King Haggard. I have no wish to capture her, but only to spend my life following after her–miles, leagues, even years behind–never seeing her perhaps, but content. It is my right. A hero is entitled to his happy ending, when it comes at last.”

But Schmendrick answered, “This is not the end, either for you or for her. You are the king of a wasted land where there has never been any king but fear. Your true task has just begun, and you may not know in your life if you have succeeded in it, but only if you fail. As for her, she is a story with no ending, happy or sad. She can never belong to anything mortal enough to want her.”

Most strangely then, he put his arms around the young king and held him so for a time. “Yet be content, my lord,” he said in a low voice. “No man has ever had more of her grace than you, and no one will ever be blessed by her remembrance. You have loved her and served her–be content, and be king.”

“But that is not what I want!” Lír cried. The magician answered not a word, but only looked at him. Blue eyes stared back into green; a face grown lean and lordly into one neither so handsome nor so bold. The king began to squint and blink, as though he were gazing at the sun, and it was not long before he lowered his eyes and muttered, “So be it. I will stay and rule alone over a wretched people in a land I hate. But I will have no more joy of my rule than poor Haggard ever had.”

The Limitations of the Hero’s Journey

This scene is very moving to me because it shows the limitations of the hero’s journey and how, at some point, there needs to be a letting go of what it means to be a hero. That letting go comes when you return back from your journey to your community. The hero has passed through hell and heaven, and he has become transformed by his heroic journey. But it is not enough for him to go on traipsing around the world like Huck Finn. He has to come home. He has to become the agent of change, the agent of communal catharsis.

Becoming the Hero for Our Own Communities

Each one of us can become this hero for our own communities. Instead of spending every waking hour looking at the never-ending doom posts, I wish for all of us to have the fortitude to understand that nothing we can do on the internet is going to change what ultimately happens in global politics. The best thing we can do—perhaps the only thing we can do—is to find internal healing and become the heroes we read about for our own communities.

(There is a deeper point here that Paul Kingsnorth addresses poignantly in his Erasmus lecture, by the way. It’s a theological point, and one I would love to discuss with those who would like to take it further.) 

If we feel we can’t do that yet, the intermediary step is to read books that give us great examples of how to live heroically. Today, your homework is to read The Last Unicorn, in which you’ll experience a hero’s journey that is softened by the heroine’s journey. Through reading books like this, we can start to become agents of communal catharsis. If we can do this, even just for our own families, imagine the good we can do!