The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [475]
Another foretaste of the earthquake to come was the Sturm and Drang movement of the early 1770s, of which the most celebrated product was Goethe's sentimental fantasy The Sorrows of Young Werther. For the first time we see the `dark inversion' taking over the plot of Tragedy. The audience is invited so to identify with the foolish young central figure in his infatuation with the cardboard heroine that his self-deluding immaturity supposedly becomes heroic.
In the 1780s, as France moved towards the cataclysm of its revolution, de Sade's Misfortunes of Justine was in psychological terms as black a story as the world had yet seen: centred entirely on the mental sensations its author derived from fantasising about the prolonged sadistic and sexual degradation of the pure and selfless anima-figure who gave the book its title.
The revolutionary 1790s brought that deluge of `frantic' and `extravagant' stories which inspired such contempt in Wordsworth, none more fantastic than those `Gothic novels' which were the best-sellers of the decade. In 1794 Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho won a then-record advance for a novel (£500), describing how its orphaned young heroine is kidnapped by her villainous uncle and imprisoned in a remote, mysterious castle in the Apennines. Here he subjects her to every kind of indignity and horror, some seemingly supernatural, in his efforts to force her to surrender her virtue and her fortune. She eventually makes a `thrilling escape' and finally comes to a pasteboard happy ending in being reunited with the young man she loves. Two years later M. G. Lewis's The Monk was a similar commercial success, describing a worthy Spanish abbot who becomes corrupted by a woman possessed by the devil, who has entered his monastery disguised as a male novice. Now utterly depraved, he relentlessly pursues a pious young girl who has come to him for absolution. Finally, to avoid detection, he murders her, but is caught and tortured by the Inquisition. He escapes burning by making a pact with the devil, but ends being cast into the fires of hell.
What marked out all these stories from almost anything the world had seen before (except those melodramatic early `novels' which circulated during the later Roman empire) was something sensed by Wordsworth and his friend Coleridge when, in the early years of the nineteenth century, they tried to draw a distinction between `imagination' and `fancy' (or fantasy). There is a fundamental distinction between the psychological process which gives rise to these fantasy-based types of story, and that which created, say, the plays of Shakespeare (or, for that matter, the novels Jane Austen was beginning to write just when the vogue for `Gothic horror' was at its height). Shakespeare's plays stem from a genuinely creative imagination which connects with our inner reality and that of the world around us, based on profound observation and an intuitive understanding of human nature. By contrast, the stories of de Sade or the `Gothic novelists' were created not from imagination but from fantasy, which operates in a quite different way.
Imagination, as Coleridge puts it in his Biographia Literaria (1817), is a living thing, producing original observations and images which heighten and deepen our perception and understanding of the world. But the fantasy or daydreaming level of the mind is not concerned with understanding. It is two-dimensional. It deals in fixed, `dead' images, which can be used to trigger off in our consciousness a desired effect but which have no connection with the `real world. They are no more than the play of shadows on a wall, which is why stories based on fantasy present