The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [477]
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1817) was above all remarkable, as we have seen, in showing a dark hero bringing to birth a monster who represents his rejected Self in shadowy `inferior' form. In every other respect it was a typical `Gothic' fantasy, with its routine array of sensational `Gothic' imagery and its cast of cardboard characters. What makes the story so unusual is that we see the monster as initially benevolent. Then, as the blind and heartless hero rejects his shadow three times, that benign monster becomes ever darker, until on the third occasion it turns on its creator and destroys him.
One of the more revealing features of Stendhal's The Scarlet and the Black (1830) was the way its egocentric and ambitious hero was obsessed with Napoleon. The image of Napoleon had burned itself into the consciousness of his time like no one else in history. The way he had sprung from nowhere to become the ruler of Europe made him in his own way one of the supreme embodiments of the Romantic movement. The French Revolution had pulled down all the old collective framework symbolising the Self, from the monarchy to the Christian religion. And there into the void it left rose this glamorous dream figure, seeming to symbolise a new synthesis: power and youthful energy married to an altruistic new social order, based on liberty, equality and brotherhood. It was not surprising that he exercised such an obsessive hold over the fantasies of millions of his contemporaries.
Even when Napoleon's ambition swelled into megalomania, as he declared himself emperor and began imposing his will by force over a whole continent, there were many who continued to see him as the most heroic figure of the age. Even when his fantasy-career had run its full five-stage course, ending in humiliating downfall, he still inspired admiration as the model of what an individual human being could achieve, if only he were great enough to throw off all constraint in rising above the mass of mankind. It was such a vision which would inspire Raskolnikov to murder old ladies (although this would be portrayed by Dostoyevsky from the perspective of the Self). And it was such a vision which inspired Stendhal, when he came to fantasise his extended day-dream of a Rags to Riches hero even more ruthlessly egocentric than himself. Even as Julien Sorel stretched out for that make-believe image of the Self subordinated to his own ego, the unconscious intervened, to bring him to a destruction more violent than that which had awaited his hero Napoleon.
But by now, regardless, the Romantic movement was in full swing all over Europe. Thus began that chapter in the evolution of western consciousness which was to lead up to the present day: the history of which we can follow in five stages.
1. The golden age of romanticism: 1830-1890
Storytelling was not the only form of artistic expression which went through this kind of transition in the early nineteenth century. We see it in all the arts, from painting to poetry to architecture, but in none more acutely than music, which in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had been the last art-form to express complete harmony with the values of the Self. In the music of Bach and Handel, Mozart and Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, European music had developed to the point where it was able to express those values to the fullest extent of which the Western imagination had yet shown itself capable. One reflection of this was the archetypal structure underlying `sonata form; which was at the centre of classical music during the decades when it reached its zenith. This usually showed an assertive, essentially masculine thematic `first subject' being followed by a more graceful, essentially feminine `second subject, the two then combining and interweaving through the `development' section, to return at the end transformed, bringing the movement to a perfect resolution.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, however, there were clear signs in