The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [18]
The nightmarish realisation dawns that these huge `fungoid' monsters climbing out of the cylinders are implacably hostile. They assemble great `tripod machines' which stride across the countryside, armed with `Heat Rays' and the deadly `Black Smoke, against which mankind has seemingly no defence. Southern England is laid waste, as towns and cities burn, corpses pile up and the countryside is gradually submerged beneath the horrible `Red Weed'. Can the world survive?
Then, as the hero cowers in a cellar in south London, all alone and imagining his wife to be dead, he hears floating across the deserted, half-ruined city a ghastly, wailing cry, `Ulla, ulla, ulla'. He cautiously picks his way up to Primrose Hill, where he sees the great machines standing silent, the dead Martians hanging out of them as strips of decaying meat. The invading monsters have fallen prey to humble earthly bacteria, the one thing against which they had no defence. Mankind is saved; and the story ends on the image of the hero being joyfully reunited with his wife who turns out, like him, to have miraculously survived.
I have highlighted this little group of stories dating from the closing years of the nineteenth century in some detail because they represent one of the most remarkable developments in the entire history of stories: the sudden onset of that fascination with monsters of a near-supernatural power which was to become such a conspicuous feature of twentieth-century popular storytelling. In the latter-day Draculas, bug-eyed `extra-terrestrials, triffids and other shapeless creature of the night which have swarmed in such numbers across the cinema screens and through the fantasy life of our time, we may see almost everything which characterised the most lurid monster-tales of the distant past. Since Perseus and Andromeda, for instance, has there been any more vivid image of the `Princess' struggling in the clutches of the monster than the famous shot in the film King Kong showing the pretty young heroine being waved above the skyline of New York in the grip of the gigantic ape?
What is certain is that it is by no means necessary to believe in the physical reality of such monsters for them to loom up, as it were unbidden, in the mysterious processes of the imagination which lie behind the creation of stories. Indeed, so fundamental is this phenomenon to an understanding of how stories work, that we must now look at it more closely.
`MONSTER ... something extraordinary or unnatural ... an animal deviating in one or more of its parts from the normal ... an imaginary animal having a form either partly brute and partly human, or compounded from elements from two or more animal forms ... a person of inhuman and horrible cruelty or wickedness.'
Oxford English Dictionary
What is this monster which, since time immemorial, has so haunted the imagination and fantasies of mankind? As we shall see, it is a question of deepest importance to the understanding of stories, relevant to tales of many kinds other than just those centred on the plot we have been discussing.
The question maybe put in the singular - speaking of one `monster' rather than many - if only because the essential characteristics of this creature are so unvarying, regardless of the variety of outward guises in which he (or she) appears.
For a start, throughout the world's storytelling, we find the monster being described in strikingly similar language. It tends, of course, to be highly alarming in its appearance and behaviour. It may be:
horrible, terrible, grim, mis-shapen, hate-filled, ruthless, menacing, terrifying.
As goes without saying, it is mortally dangerous:
deadly, bloodthirsty, ravening, murderous, venomous, poisonous.
It is a deeply deceitful and tricky opponent to deal with:
cunning, treacherous, vicious, twisted, slippery, depraved, vile.
There is also often something about its nature which is mysterious and hard to define.