Recommended Reading
The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories, (The Tablet 2004)
By Christopher Booker, (Continuum)
The heckling begins even when you mention the title of this book: "Oh but it's the flesh of a story that make it alive, not the bones" or "you can make a story mean just about anything". Well, Booker would probably be the first to agree that theorists can bend any story to their will. You can have your Jack and the beanstalk "a la Marx" or "a la Freud". However, what emerges from this book is the conviction that actually it's the story that's in control and it's bigger than us. We are not eager to see through our stories, for fear, perhaps, that we ourselves will be diminished by reductive analysis. In Cinema Paradiso, when the camera is trained on the faces of an audience of hard-nosed Sicilian peasants watching a film, we see how touchingly idiotic they look, grinning and scowling, united in pleasure, fear or anger, as the plot swings between good and bad. Human beings are alarmingly and endearingly simple after all, in their desire to see light, order, love, harmony and life prevail over chaos, egotism, blinkered vision, disintegration and death. If there is any transcendent source of morality the wellsprings of it may be found in this unanimous surrender to a story.
We live by narratives - each to his own, and some more skewed from reality than others. The Comedy plot is the one to which most of us would aspire, since it unites the majority of its protagonists in joyful recognition of a shared reality. They step from the darkness of confusion and egocentric intransigence into the light of a broader understanding where humility and good humour prevail and dissenting stragglers are bundled off the stage. Tragedy, on the other hand - the plot most enacted in real life - is the only one of the basic plots that is concerned with the growth rather than the overcoming of individual egotism. Its protagonist can be described as an "incomplete, egocentric figure" who "meets a lonely and violent end." It shows the process by which a human is disconnected first from himself, then from other people, thus becoming monstrous. Which brings us to another of the plots: "overcoming the monster". The hero who slays a monster is simply terminating someone else' Tragedy. For the monster is always the hero of his own drama. His tragedy is he thinks he's in is different plot from the one everyone else around him thinks he's in. So these two plots are but two sides of the same coin.
The detecting and slaying of monsters is undoubtedly one of life's animating forces. The Monster archetype is an embodiment of the human ego at its worst and the hero defeats it because he combines the masculine values of strength and dominance - which the monster has in superabundance - with the feminine values of selflessness and seeing "whole" - which he doesn't have. The monster's fatal flaw is his egotistical tunnel vision, and the purpose of this archetype is to "show that central internal conflict which exists inside each human individual ...between the power of the ego and the deeper Self." The "Self" is a larger psychic entity than the Ego. It appears to be, in Booker's terms, a body, mind, heart and soul "quaternity" which puts us in tune with each other and that transcendent totality which we call the universe. It is the antagonism between these two polarities of "deeper self" and blind overpowering ego which lies at the root of all stories. The resolution towards which most stories are bound is an image of balance, wholeness and unity restored. The archetypal expression of this is, of course, the prince and princess united in love beside a dead monster and preparing to rule over a kingdom restored to peace and harmony.
The archetype of this "deeper self" is the goal of the "Quest plot". It is the treasure in the dragon's lair, the Golden Fleece, the "Celestial City", the Holy Grail, or the word Eternity which Kay in the Snow Queen cannot form with his Chinese puzzle of ice-splinters until Gerda comes to help him. It is to be found in Newton's "great ocean of truth" which "lay all undiscovered before me". The history of the human race can be seen as a prolonged effort to reconnect with that sense of psychic unity from which Homo sapiens was exiled by his new ego-bound form of consciousness. That bite from the tree of Knowledge severed him from "consonant and conformable" Nature, and with "individual consciousness" came the understanding that he would die. Hence another of the basic plots: "Rebirth" which lies at the heart of religious mythology. What the great religions of the world have to tell us, by way of stories, is that this rebirth is not a literal process but a broadening of consciousness beyond the limits of the individual ego. Which is why Comedy and Rebirth go hand in hand.
The opening out of restricted vision is the essence of the "Voyage and Return" plot. In its simplest terms, Peter Rabbit needs to hop onto a wheelbarrow and get the overview of Macgregor's garden before he can see his way safely home. The overview is what this book is all about. It is done in bold strokes and broad sweeps, from Hollywood pap to piquant Cheyenne fables, from Star Wars to Dante's Divina Commedia, Gothic cathedrals, Ziggurats, cave paintings, Teddy boy culture, the fervours of revolutionary Utopianism, Nirvana, Zoroastrianism, the Yin Yang of Tao, Giles' Granny cartoons, and the well of immortality in Gilgamesh. It proceeds like someone spiralling up a hill, by orderly steps with lucid and often convincing, though sometimes eccentric observations towards a summit from which exhilarating perspectives open out in all directions. On this heady summit you have the agreeable feeling of having wrapped up the world from top to toe and got to the heart of the matter as well - this being a glimpse of the totality or Cosmic Mind of which our own individual consciousness is just a "fleeting minuscule expression". From here you can see where it began to go wrong. The infantile escalation of sex and violence in much of modern culture, which goes nowhere because it cannot be resolved in conformity with the life-giving archetypes, is traced to a "dark inversion", an irreversible unleashing of the rebellious ego which occurred in mid eighteenth century. When imagination sells out to fantasy archetypes become stereotypes.
Having Voyaged and Returned" from these 700 pages it's hard, in a few words, to convey to the cave dwellers back home what the landscape was like out there. They may continue, grumpily, to watch the shadows on the wall. "First people deny a thing; then they belittle it; then they say it was known all along," as Von Humboldt said. Some critics will be unlikely to join in the general laughter of "Recognition". This book is an affront to mandarins, pedants, experts and "secular puritans". Even those who have been enthralled may occasionally detect beneath Wise Old Man who guides your path to enlightenment, the glinting reactionary features of a Senex, that stock character of Roman comedy, who's not above giving etymology a wishful tweak now and then, or deploring the turn music took after Beethoven. Nevertheless, I shall be rattling this secret weapon, this golden key to all mythologies, in every door I come across for months to come.
Noonie Minogue, December 2004
