The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [336]
Such is the `fantasy spiral': the need constantly to `up the dose', as with certain types of drug, simply in order to sustain the sense of gratification. In the words of Yeats quoted above `we have fed the heart on fantasies, the heart's grown brutal from the fare. Each time the fantasy achieves a mini-climax which cannot lead to resolution, it requires something stronger to achieve the next. As in the tragic `fantasy cycle', the story's mood thus constantly swings between anticipation and frustration, on an ascending curve. Nevertheless it is notable how, in each of the stories we have been looking at, the ultimate charge of shock is reserved for the moment when heroine finally loses her virginity. In each book, to maintain the sense of anticipation, the moment when this takes place is delayed as long as possible (as it was, even more so, in the novel which appeared the year before Fanny Hill, Richardson's Clarissa). In the case of Justine, it is particularly significant that this act of violation is carried out by four `holy' monks, representing that symbol of wholeness, the Church, so that the sense of Self-violation is redoubled (just as it is in the incident where the monks are shown raping a girl dressed as the Virgin Mary, before using her bleeding, naked body as a Communion altar). But from this point on in each of the stories, it is hard for the author to sustain the sense of shock, because he has played his trump card. All that is left is to go on repeating more of the same formula, now subject to diminishing returns in terms of its power to shock or thrill, until the moment when the author has to bring his narrative to a conclusion. In Fanny Hill, he simply tacks on a sentimental cardboard replica of the archetypal happy ending, which has no connection with the rest of the story. In The Misfortunes of Virtue, de Sade produces the only remaining trick he has up his sleeve, in arranging for his hapless heroine to be destroyed, almost literally out of the blue, by as shockingly disfiguring a form of death as he could think of.
Indeed no aspect of this cult of sensation is more revealing than the way it engenders in the ego the illusion that, in escaping from the archetypal constraints of the Self, it can achieve an ever greater state of liberation. In reality, by the law of the `dark inversion, the very opposite is the case. The further the ego attempts to `push back the frontiers, the more it becomes boxed into an ever more constricting prison of cliches and stereotypes. To this the plodding, mechanical narratives of Cleland and de Sade have already borne witness. In the rest of this chapter we shall see to just what a limited little wasteland this fantasy of liberation eventually leads.
Countdown to the explosion: Joyce's Ulysses
At the time they were written, in terms of the general landscape of storytelling these two obscure eighteenth-century novels (and others of the time) were no more than faint earth tremors, heralding a subterranean build-up of energies which were only to erupt above the surface far in the distant future. Both books were almost immediately suppressed after they were written. In July 1789, two years after writing The Misfortunes of Virtue, de Sade was transferred from prison to the insane asylum at Charenton, where he was eventually to produce an even more lurid version of his tale under the title of Justine. Just a week after his move, the Paris mob broke into the Bastille to liberate its remaining prisoners, the event which more than any other marked the onset of the French Revolution.
Europe was plunging into that quarter of a century of upheaval and