The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [483]
Meanwhile in storytelling, no writer was to reflect the shift towards twentiethcentury sensibility more significantly than Chekhov, with his creation of a new twilight world in which the clear archetypal contrast between light figures and dark dissolved into a grey twilight. Chekov's plays, in which everyone was trapped in a little prison of the ego, lacking in any spiritual centre, where human life was portrayed as no more than the muddled, altruistic dreams of youth decaying into the egocentric disillusionments of old age, marked the beginning of that new genre of storytelling, where the narrative could have no end other than a despairing shot offstage, or merely a curtain coming down to indicate that the story was over, with nothing resolved. Three years after Chekhov's death in 1904, Proust began that immense essay in self-absorbed futility which would only be finished 15 years later, and which was to represent a new extreme in the shift of the psychic centre of storytelling from the Self to the ego. But by that time the dream of the ninteenth-century age of progress had exploded into reality, with the greatest explosion of violence the human race had ever experienced.
In many ways it is possible to see the holocaust of the First World War as a kind of judgement on the different forms of hubris European civilisation had enjoyed in the nineteenth century. For decades the Western nations had been using their new technological might to develop ever more destructive means of waging war; but the very fact that these had not been deployed in earnest for nearly half a century before 1914 meant that few people realised how terrible might be the consequences if they were. The stoking up of nationalistic self-esteem, and the imperialist adventures in which the technological superiority of the great powers had allowed them to indulge around the globe, had produced a psychic inflation and a sense of rivalry between their collective egotisms which was tipping towards danger point.
Socially in the years leading up to 1914 we can see all sorts of stresses developing which indicated the onset of a collective psychic fever sweeping through Europe, manifesting itself in everything from the rise of new mass labour movements, demanding radical political change, to the new assertiveness of women. Everywhere the `above the line' established order was under challenge. And this was equally reflected in that disintegration of the old forms and unleashing of new nervous energy which was revolutionising the arts. No artistic event was more symptomatic of the mood of the time than the Paris premiere of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913, which provoked a storm of controversy by showing the frenzied ritual sacrifice of a young girl, accompanied by music more wildly dissonant than anything its audience had heard before.
Three years earlier, another musician, Edward Elgar, composer of that great nationalistic British anthem `Land of Hope And Glory, had written with foreboding, `we walk like ghosts'. In August 1914 vast cheering crowds gathered in the capital cities of Europe, as their countries sleepwalked into war. On the Somme, at Verdun and Tannenburg, the nineteenth-century age of Romanticism finally disintegrated in four years of nightmarish slaughter. Great empires crumbled. In Russia the heirs of Marx, led by Lenin, stormed the Winter Palace to proclaim the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
After all that heady, century-long dream of progress, the spirit of Loki had brought the human race to catastrophe on a scale it had never experienced.
3. Brave New World: 1918-1939
As the peoples of Europe finally stumbled out of the darkness into the wan light of peace, the country which for the first time was to make the running in dictating the spirit of the era just beginning was America.
It was the US President Woodrow Wilson who took the lead in setting up the League of Nations: that idealistic experiment in international co-operation which