The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [330]
Aaron, Titus Andronicus, v.1
`Ne coram populo, pueros Medea trucidet' ('Medea must not kill her children in sight of the audience'). Horace, Ars Poetica
`The trouble with the modern world is that it has sex on the brain, which is the wrong place to have it.'
Malcolm Muggeridge, various times in late 1960s
`We have fed the heart on fantasies, the heart's grown brutal from the fare.'
W. B. Yeats, The Stare's Nest by my Window (1922)
Unquestionably the most striking feature of Western storytelling in the closing decades of the twentieth century was the unprecedented way in which it became dominated by the imagery of sex and violence. In one sense, of course, sex and violence had been the stuff of storytelling back into the mists of history. Adultery, seduction, promiscuity, acts of rape had been a prominent feature of myths all over the world, from those of ancient Greece to those portrayed on the Hindu temples of India. The stories of Homer and the Old Testament were as full of death and destruction as the corpse-laden stages of Elizabethan England. Not even the twentieth century could offer much competition for the catalogue of horrors conjured up by the most chilling of Shakespeare's plays, Titus Andronicus. These range from the episode describing how the hero's daughter Lavinia is raped, has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, to the later scene where Titus cuts the throats of the perpetrators of these deeds, so that their blood runs out into a basin held by Lavinia between her stumps, before he invites their unsuspecting mother to a dinner party to be served with the bodies of her sons baked into a pie.
But even in this unusually lurid example of pre-twentieth-century sensationalism, the single most shocking incident, the premeditated rape and mutilation of an innocent young girl, does not take place in front of the audience. In conformity with an age-old code, this would have been categorised as `obscene, literally something which must take place, from the Latin `ob scena, `off stage. As Horace put it in his Art of Poetry, the idea of Medea butchering her children or Atreus cooking a dish of human flesh is so offensive to the moral sense that, although such things can be described by a narrator, they must not be put on public show. A similar taboo, until the twentieth century, generally applied to performances of the sexual act, or exhibitions of female nudity (apart from those depicted as `ideals of the female form' by serious artists). Socially regarded as `below the line', such things were confined to brothels or bawdy shows, where their purpose was quite clear. They were regarded as `pornography, from the Greek word porne, `a prostitute': images designed specifically for the purpose of arousing sexual desire.
What was new about what happened to storytelling in the later decades of the twentieth century was that it was precisely these physical images of sex and violence which emerged into full view. In plays and novels, above all in its display on cinema and television screens, all that subterranean realm of imagery previously hidden away as `obscene' now came to be regarded as acceptable. Of course, this was only part of a much more general shift in social attitudes. The new freedom with which sexually arousing imagery could be put on public show was by no means confined only to stories. It could be seen in newspapers and advertising, in the nature of women's fashions, in millions of pornographic magazines. But the real reason why all this came about was that it was an entirely natural consequence of that seismic shift which had been taking place in the Western psyche for two centuries, whereby to an unprecedented degree the ego had been losing contact with the deeper archetypal framework of the Self. Inevitably, as stories came increasingly to be spun out of the fantasy level of the mind, centred on the ego, this was where they would one day end up. How and why this should have come about is the theme of this chapter.
De Sade: The degradation of the feminine
In 1749 an English government