The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [262]
When Melville completed Moby Dick, he famously wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne `I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as a lamb'. Without fully understanding how or why, he must have sensed that his imagination had become possessed by a story which tried to turn the archetypal foundations of storytelling on their heads. He had relished conceiving a tale in which the hero, Ahab, was all dark, setting out to destroy the `White Whale' which was a symbol of all that is light; even though the hidden logic of the tale continued to insist this could only end in his hero's destruction. Somewhere from his unconscious Melville knew he had written `a wicked book', a story which attempted to defy all the cosmic order of things. But at the same time he felt `spotless as a lamb'. He did not wish to feel any remorse, because, like other Romantic writers of the age, he had the exhilarating sense he was venturing into wholly new, uncharted waters of the human spirit, where no storytellers had ever travelled before.
There are obvious parallels here between Moby Dick and Frankenstein. In both stories, although they are fundamentally shaped around the Overcoming the Monster plot, the hero, as an embodiment of dark, heartless, all-consuming egotism, is the true monster. In each case his `opposite' as we originally see him, is presented, in an `inferior' way, as light, an image of the Self. But eventually in each case, reflecting the hero's own state of darkness, this shadowy antagonist does indeed turn, like the statue of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, into the monstrous embodiment of the `unrealised value' who must destroy him.
It is no accident that each of these stories was written at a time, the first half of the nineteenth century, when a highly significant change was coming over the psychology of Western man. Already the tumultuous political and social upheavals at the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon had created the sense that some entirely new age was dawning for mankind. In the dramatic advance of scientific knowledge, of which the immense material changes being brought by the industrial revolution were only the most obvious outward sign, man had begun to step out of his natural frame in a way that had no precedent. His new technological power was giving him the sense that he now had the power physically to `conquer' nature as never before. Unprecedented advances in scientific knowledge were giving him the sense he could conquer the mysteries of the universe intellectually. On all sides there was the exhilarating sense of stepping on to that escalator of `progress' which was carrying the human race up out of the dark, primitive past into an ever more glorious future; and this reflected the most profound shift taking place in Western man's psychological centre of gravity.
In fact, in taking this further giant step out of the natural frame from which he had sprung, there was an immense unconscious price to pay, in the severing of his new, seemingly all-powerful consciousness from that deeper level of his being which linked him instinctively with nature. In becoming emancipated from the constraints of nature as never before, he was also becoming in a new way alienated: not just from the natural world outside him but from the deeper levels of his own nature. It was in this process of separation, this splitting off of conscious from unconscious, that the fundamental psychic shift was taking place which was beginning