Has anyone heard of the puer aeternus? I learnt about it from Christopher Booker’s book Seven Basic Plots. It is a wonderful idea: it is the boy who never grows up. It came to its literary height in Peter Pan, the story written by the diminutive Scot, J.M. Barrie. Peter Pan is the boy who is destined to remain a child. Seven Basic Plots is a great book. Part of Booker’s intention was to explain the structure of the seven plots, and then to explain how they are basically the same. But the other part of his intention was to register a great criticism of the modernity he supposed emerged around the time of Stendhal in the early 19th century: a modernity in which stories started to go wrong. Stories before, say, 1820, according to Booker, always ended in resolution: where resolution took the form of marriage for the comedians like Rosalind and Benedict and death for the tragedians like Macbeth and his Lady. There was an ‘inevitability’ – to use a T.S. Eliot word – about what happened. Great poetry and drama had inevitability about it. Booker argued that, after 1820, everything changed. Stories no longer resolved. There were no recognition scenes. Dialogue became interminable. Plots were left unfinished. Or they ended with a non sequitur, a moving on to another adventure. There was an obsession with unliterary reality. This obsession, alas, generated a literature far more literary and unrealistic than the one before.
It also meant that characters could remain undeveloped, unfinished, unrecognised, unresolved. From now on Alice would never grow up, or learn anything from Wonderland. Frodo would learn nothing from Mordor. In fact, does Rupert Birkin really learn anything through the course of Women in Love? Does Paul Pennyfeather learn anything through the course of Decline and Fall? Do the boys learn anything in Lord of the Flies? Nay, one just rewinds the tape and plays it again.
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