The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [545]
2. From a conversation with Beethoven in 1824 recorded by Johann August Stumpff. Rossini at this time was at the height of his fame. Beethoven was still to write the final sequence of quartets, stretching the framework of the classical style to its ultimate imaginative extreme, which brought his life's work to such a perfect resolution.
3. Lady Isobel Vane, Mrs Wood's heroine, having been left poor and alone by her father's death, marries the ambitious young lawyer who has bought the family's home East Lynne, even though she has already fallen in love with another man. Despite giving birth to three children, she feels neglected by her husband, whom she falsely suspects of being unfaithful. She eventually elopes to France with her lover, by whom she has an illegitimate daughter, but he abandons her. Isobel and her daughter become the victims of a railway accident, which kills the child and leaves Isabel hideously crippled and disfigured. Desperate to see her children again, and disguised by her maiming, Isabel implausibly wins the post of governess in her old home. She first has to endure the sight of her former husband living happily with his new wife, and then has to watch her son falling so ill that, despite her loving care, he dies ('dead, and never called me mother' was introduced in the stage version). Isobel then dies herself, but not before she has revealed her true identity to her former husband. Naturally he forgives her to provide a 'happy ending.
Novels of this genre, so popular in the 1860s, were satirised in W. S. Gilbert's musical comedy A Sensation Novel (1871), in which, foreshadowing Pirandello by half a century, the stock characters of a melodramatic novel step outside their fictional roles, to comment scornfully on what a silly piece of make-believe they have become caught up in.
4. Another instance can be seen in Wells's short story The Time Machine, where the society of the future is shown as divided between the `above the line' daylight world inhabited by the infantile, pleasure-loving, fruit-eating Eloi, and the subterranean `below the fine' world, in which the flesheating Morlocks live in darkness, working at machines, before coming out at night to terrorise and prey on the Eloi. As a late nineteenth-century Socialist, Wells would probably have seen this as a parable of how the division of society between the privileged, effete upper-classes and the industrial proletariat would eventually separate them, in effect, into separate species.
5. One artistic product of the 1920s which reflected this in its own way was Ravel's Bolero (1922), musically expressing the need of any pattern based on fantasy to create a rising spiral of sensations. The same tune, almost indefinitely repeated to a hypnotically insistent rhythm, rises ever louder through a Dream Stage, but towards what? How could Ravel bring his fantasy pattern to a climax and a resolution? In the closing bars we hear how, in desperate pursuit of that elusive climax, he is finally driven to change key (Frustration Stage). This only makes the search for a climax even more frantic. The piece falls into a series of jagged discords (Nightmare Stage), before finally collapsing into the cacophony by which the fantasy destroys itself. By such a pattern does fantasy demonstrate the way in which it ultimately develops its own `death wish'.
6. Interestingly this switch was unconsciously foreshadowed by the great Soviet film-maker Sergei Eistenstein, whose Alexander Nevsky in 1938 had returned to the Russian Middle Ages to show a devout Russian king eventually leading his people to a heroic victory over Germanic invaders from the West. Eisenstein's previous films, such as