They are all patriarchs who believe that a single universal truth about human aspirations
Posted in General on 26. Sep, 2010
They are all patriarchs who believe that a single universal truth about human aspirations and needs is possible, and that they are in possession of it, if not necessarily its creator.Every story that Booker admires – from Beowulf to The Terminator – is a theodicy in which the natural order of things is threatened and restored. This theme is that story is the means by which the collective unconscious calls us sinners to order, to abandon the selfish pursuit of ego in the name of a greater self that accepts a place in the hierarchy of an organic society. In this sort of society, everyone has a place – and some people’s place is on top of a bonfire of dangerous books.Booker’s heroes, almost all male, are a mixed lot – Plato, Jung, Solzhenitsyn, Tolkien – but a shared theme is visible almost at once. Someone who sneers at “political correctness”, as Booker does, might bother first to acquaint himself with the basic intellectual courtesy that he is insulting.Booker has not contented himself with delineating the seven plots: a book on which, heaven knows, would have been vast and ambitious enough. He sees vast parts of the world as primitive societies citable only for creation myths. Not, of course, that he does any such thing.There are major works of literature that fall outside his definitions.
The Japanese Tale of Genji is, it seems to me, a book whose relationship with any of Booker’s seven plots is remarkably tenuous. But, of course, Lady Murasaki was a woman, and not a European.It is notable that almost every text or film Booker cites is European or North American, and how few women make it into his canon. Some of them – the Killing of the Monster – are rather too specific; others – Comedy and Tragedy – so vague even in his definitions as to be almost useless Most end up having sub-divisions. The entire literature of “conversion narrative”, which includes most stories of black, gay and women’s liberation, would have to be crammed into Booker’s Rebirth plot. It can, however, be wrong-headed and disappointing if, as has happened with The Seven Basic Plots, his extended reading and deep pondering has not changed him fundamentally. It should not have been possible to sit down in advance of reading and make a list of his likely heroes and villains, the writers he thinks of as touching psychic health and those he regards as symptoms of a universal malaise – which this book is meant to signal and help cure.
There is something quite arbitrary about his naming of certain plots as the crucial ones that underlie all story-telling. Finally, Jackson firmly secures Jennings’s place in the artistic history of Britain in the 20th century.
Now all we need is the definitive DVD of the films, for which Jackson rightly calls. Perhaps this book will open the BFI’s eyes.Brian Winston’s books include ‘Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries’ (BFI) Buy any book reviewed on this site at postage and packing are free in the UK. CONTINUUM £25 (728pp) £25 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897
No book on which someone as clever and diligent as Christopher Booker spends 30 years can be wholly worthless. The pre-war upper-middle-class intellectuals’ world is not an exactly unfamiliar milieu, but by making film a central concern rather than the usual despised footnote, Jackson comes up with a most welcome corrective to received history.Jennings died after an accident location-hunting in Greece in 1950 He was 43. This timely biography does more than remind us of his startling films.
This is not to say that he ignores blemishes – Jennings was a woeful, adulterous husband and distant father and, by all accounts, an all-round difficult chap.But, in Jackson’s hands, the man proves to be a wonderful key to unlock the mind of the English avant-garde. In the 1930s, he had a major hand in bringing surrealism to Britain and starting the Mass-Observation project.Above all, in the 1940s, he was the greatest film director the British documentary movement produced. Along the way, amid genteel poverty, there were many abandoned projects, unpublished books and unmounted art shows, often because Jennings was simply not as committed as he might have been to putting work, especially his paintings, before the public.Jackson’s triumph is to make sense of all this by revealing the rich web of interests and people that made up Jennings’s world He does this with a welcome sense of decorum and taste. The scion of Guild Socialists, product of an experimental private school, in 1929 he took the first ever starred first in the brand-new part two of the English Tripos at Cambridge.