The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [481]
Another symptom of the psychic disintegration of the age was the curious fate of the Comedy plot, as it split into two quite separate types of story: on the one hand, inspiring some of the most serious novels of the age, such as War and Peace and Middlemarch; on the other, as in Viennese operetta, Parisian farce or the `light operas' of Gilbert and Sullivan, retaining its frivolous, implausible surface, while losing touch altogether with that serious, unsentimental core which had made the comedies of Shakespeare or Mozart such archetypally complete creations of the human imagination.
More than any age before it, beneath its gravely respectable, materially successful, brilliantly innovative surface, the nineteenth century was two-sided. Behind its church-building shows of piety, it was an age more than ever losing that contact with the Self which inspires a genuine religious sense: an age in which Matthew Arnold could only hear faith's `melancholy, long, withdrawing roar'; in which Nietzche could confidently proclaim `God is dead'. One of the more obvious underlying reasons why Darwin won such a welcome for his theory of natural selection was that it made the whole evolutionary process seem impersonal and self-referential, without the need to imagine that behind it was any transcendent power or guiding mind.
Behind the grandiose new civic buildings which stood proudly at the centre of the great new industrial cities, expressing their unprecedented wealth, were those miles of belching factories and stinking slums, where millions of workers lived their lives wracked by poverty and disease. In the shadows cast `below the line' by all this oppressive one-sidedness, a new vision of the `Self' was emerging, projected onto the potential power of these dispossessed masses.
Into the minds of men such as Karl Marx and his fellow socialists and revolutionaries came the dream that they might one day rise up to sweep away all that corrupt and privileged world `above the line; in the name of a perfect new society, in which the downtrodden peoples of the world could once again be united, in one selfless common purpose. Drawing on precisely those archetypal wellsprings which in previous ages had found religious expression, they projected that spiritual image of totality out onto the material world (as in the synthesis which would emerge from `dialectical materialism'). In fact these dreamers had become possessed by the archetypal power of a story, with its plot set in the future: a nyktomorphic vision which, in the century which lay ahead, was destined to become the single most influential legacy of nineteenth-century Romanticism.
2. The birth of `modernism': 1890-1918
One of the more interesting episodes in the evolution of storytelling was that moment in the 1890s when, quite independently, three British storytellers almost simultaneously conceived stories which disinterred the archetypal vision of the monster. For centuries, as advancing Western ego-consciousness had gradually lost touch with the sense of a supernatural dimension to life, the grotesque monsters of the old legends and mythologies had faded into the distant past, as no more than historical curiosities. But all of a sudden they re-emerged. H. G. Wells's Martians, heaving out of a pit in the cosy, bourgeois Surrey countryside with their leathery skin and tentacles, Bram Stoker's Dracula, crawling like a bat across the wall of his Transylvanian castle, M. R. James's nightmarish apparition rising out of the pages of an old book in the Pyrenees, created almost overnight that modern tradition of the nyktomorphic monster which was to become such a significant presence in the popular storytelling of the twentieth century.
In the very years when these monstrous creations were emerging from the unconscious