The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [482]
James's first horror story, Stoker's Dracula and Wells's War of the Worlds were conceived merely as entertainments. But why in the last decade of the nineteenth century should these menacing embodiments of evil have floated up into the fantasies of storytellers all at much the same time? The archetype of the monster personifies the darkest side of human nature. What did it say about the state of mankind that these fearsome apparitions, representing the power of the human ego in its most grotesque form, should have simultaneously emerged from the collective unconscious just as the new century approached? 4
It is remarkable just how many of the features which were to define twentiethcentury civilisation as unlike any period in history before first appeared in the years around 1900. The most obvious are the dazzling array of technological discoveries which appeared at this time: the internal combustion engine in the 1880s followed by the first motor cars; the first wireless signals, with Marconi's transmissions across the Atlantic in 1901; the Wright brothers' flight in 1903 and the first aeroplanes; the gramophone and recorded music; the first moving pictures and the beginnings of the cinema; the first skyscrapers soaring above the skyline of New York and Chicago. In Zurich in 1905 the young Einstein published the formula e = mc2, heralding the birth of that nuclear age which within decades was to see homo sapiens unlocking the secret power of the most elemental physical unit in the universe.
At much the same time, emerging from the blues and the gospel-singing of the black communities of New Orleans and the southern states of the USA, the hypnotic, fantasy-exciting syncopation of ragtime and jazz were introducing what was to become the single most defining feature of twentieth-century popular music. The campaign for women's suffrage in the early years of the new century heralded the new spirit of female assertiveness which would lead to a radical realignment in the relationship between the sexes. In Russia in 1902 Lenin published What Then Must Be Done?, the pamphlet which more than anything else was to set out his blueprint for the revolution by which, from `below the line', he planned to save Russia and perhaps the world.
The arts at this time were going through a transformation which reflected another decisive extension of that psychic shift which had given rise to the Romantic movement a century earlier. In painting, the light, evanescent imagery of French Impressionism (in the wake of Turner) had for decades been promoting liberation from the heavy, sentimental formalities of nineteenth-century academicism. But in the early years of the new century these already dissolving figurative images suddenly gave way to the much more dramatically abstract pictures of the Cubists, Fauvists and Futurists. Figurative imagery was finally disintegrating altogether in a haze of suggestive nyktomorphs. It was telling that one of the landmark canvases in this evolution, Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon (1907), showed a group of prostitutes: a subject which would have been unthinkable to any `above the line' nineteenth-century academician, except that Picasso's contemporaries might have found it hard to decipher from the fragmented new `Cubist' style quite what his image was meant to represent at all.
In music, the ponderous, overblown Romanticism of Brahms, Bruckner and their late nineteenth-century contemporaries suddenly gave way to the revolutionary `new music' represented by the stark atonal experiments of Schoenberg,