The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [485]
What was happening in the 1920s was that, as technological innovations created the sense that society was being carried forward into an era different from anything known before, that traditional framework of social and moral constraints which for centuries had held the power of the human ego in check was beginning to crumble as never before. The ego was being liberated. At the same time, in the upsurge of collectivist Utopianism, the power of the displaced archetype of the Self was being projected outwards, in dreams of humanity being brought together as one, in different visions of selfless totality.
All this was reflected in the decade's storytelling. On the face of it, nothing seemed to capture the mood of youthful hedonism that was sweeping through new-rich America better than the novels of Scott Fitzgerald. In Britain their counterparts were the novels of Evelyn Waugh, celebrating the brittle chatter of the upper-class `bright young things, and the `daring' plays of the young Noel Coward, such as The Vortex, with its hero the drug-addicted son of an adulterous mother. In Italy Pirandello seemed to be pioneering the advance of the drama into even more `experimental' realms, promising some immense nyktomorphic significance. And there were no more celebrated manifestos of the sexual revolution, throwing off the prudish inhibitions of `Victorian morality, than those two most daring novels of the decade, Joyce's Ulysses and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley, so uninhibited that the authorities rushed to suppress them. This in itself only heightened the impression that these books must be striking a brave blow for life, `honesty and the future against all that deadening edifice of authoritarianism and sexual repression which now seemed outmoded.
It might not have taken long to discern the dark underside of all this fictional excitement. Fitzgerald's Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire party-giver, his grand house constantly filled with fashionable socialites, turns out to be a lost soul, living behind a carefully concocted persona and ending up riddled with bullets in his own swimming pool. Pirandello's Six Characters, behind the artifice of its framing device, with fictional characters taking over their own story, turns out to centre on no more than a dismal little fantasy of a father meeting his daughter as a prostitute, winding up with the trick-sensational conclusion of having the two children come to violent deaths. Ulysses, hailed as the bible of post-Freudian sexual liberation, ends up with its two emotionally-inadequate central figures engaging in solitary acts of self-abuse. Lady Chatterley, acclaimed as an even more heroic call to liberation, ends with its two ill-assorted central figures apart and alone, with its pasteboard hero fantasising sadly over a lost sexual adventure whose heady physical pleasures have long faded and which has ruined both their lives.
Not for nothing did Lawrence himself, often shrewder about the work of others than his own, issue that trenchant verdict on the spirit of the 1920s quoted earlier:
`Never was any age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling than our own ... the radio and the film are mere counterfeit emotion all the time, the current press and literature the same. People wallow in emotion, counterfeit emotion. They lap it up, they live in it and on it ... and at times they seem to get on very well with it all. And then, more and more, they break down. They go to pieces.' 5
As for those collectivist Utopias of the future which held such a fascination for the 1920s, there were already storytellers pointing out how these dreams too might lead to nightmares. Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1926) showed a kind