The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [546]
7. It was telling that, after the first nuclear test at Alamagordo, on 16 July 1945, Robert J. Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, resorted to religious imagery to express his awe. Quoting Shiva from the Baghavadh Gita, he exclaimed `I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.'
8. Greene's two most overtly `Catholic' novels - The Power and the Glory (1938) and The Heart of the Matter (1948) - centre on a hero who has in reality lost his faith but clings on in desperation to an idea of Catholicism, as embodying the Self with which he no longer has any living contact. When it comes to a final test, Greene's `whisky priest' in The Power and the Glory faces the firing squad unable to pray. In The Heart of the Matter, Scobie, the policeman whose life has fallen apart, escapes the problems he has brought on himself by suicide, which his Church teaches is the ultimate mortal sin. In each case Greene tries to end his story with a positive `Catholic' twist. Despite the Church's apparent defeat in the priest's execution by an atheist regime, the novel ends with the secret arrival of a new priest, to show that the Church goes on forever. When Scobie dies, the book ends with a priest saying he was sure that Scobie `really loved God', while Scobie's wife agrees that `he certainly loved no one else'. Apart from these sentimental conclusions, the picture of human nature given by the two novels is unrelievedly bleak. Their characters are shown as confused or empty, lost in a moral twilight. In later years Greene abandoned his attempt to use `Catholicism' as an image of `saving grace' in his books, and, in proclaiming sympathy for various Communist regimes, appeared to have switched his sentimental projection of the `Self' from Catholicism to a fuzzy Marxism.
9. Plato's original version was: `A change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard to all our fortunes. For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions' (The Republic, Book IV).
10. Another feature of Lady Chatterley echoed in other novels and plays by `lower-class' writers in the late 1950s, was the way it centred on Lawrence's fantasising about his socially `below the line' hero dominating an aristocratic `above the line' heroine. An important ingredient in Look Back in Anger was the verbal raping by Osborne's assertively `lower-class' hero of his submissive `upper-class' wife. Similarly John Braine in Room at the Top fantasised about his ambitious young working-class hero sweeping off her feet and dominating the millionaire's daughter he was set on marrying (an echo of Stendhal's fantasising about his hero Sorel sexually humiliating Mathilde in Le Rouge et Le Noir).
11. Nothing better reflected the changing mood of these years when the Sixties fantasy was at its height than the way the words of the pop songs of the period reflected the five stages of the fantasy cycle. Early Beatles songs, such as `Love Me Do' and `Please, Please Me, expressed the mood of an Anticipation Stage. The projected anima was still to be won. The Dream Stage, as their fame took off in 1963, was expressed in the child-like euphoria of songs such as `She Loves You' and `I Wanna Hold Your Hand' (the girl was theirs, the anima had been won). By 1964 and early 1965, as the strain of their fame and new life-style began to tell, the mood changed to one of frustration (`A Hard Day's Night') and loss ('Help!'). The Frustration Stage, as the dreamed-of resolution proved ever more elusive, was never better expressed than in the Rolling Stones' 1965 hit `I Can't Get No Satisfaction: Shortly afterwards, the Nightmare Stage (now fuelled in America by the growing real-life nightmare of Vietnam) inspired a despairing American hit-song proclaiming `We're on the eve of destruction. This was followed, as Britain's chief pop-craze in the autumn of 1965, by the frantic, auto-destructive guitar-smashing