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By Root 1030 0

his plot types with Greek and Roman literature, fairy tales, European epics, novels, plays, familiar Arabic and Japanese tales, operas from Mozart to Richard Strauss, American Indian and Australian Aboriginal folk tales, and movies from the silent era on. He makes plausible case for his typology, at least as applied to literary traditions before the last two hundred years: he observes that the ambiguities and cynicism of modernism have driven literature away from the moral edification seen through most of storytelling history. Booker regards this as failing: contemporary literature, he says, has “lost the plot.” By offering too many antiheroes and focusing on the moral ambiguities of life, modern fiction has in his opinion lost its moral bearings.

Booker believes the psychology that underpins his project is Carl Jung’s theory of symbolism and archetypes, which he describes in a way almost makes it sound like evolutionary psychology: “Carl Jung moved on to the much wider question of how, at a deeper level, we psychologically constructed in the same essential way . . . , in much same way as we are genetically ‘programmed’ to grow physically: and only on, as it were, the more superficial levels of our psyche that our individuality emerges, and that each of us finds our own individual problem in coping with the ‘programme’ of development that our deeper unconscious has laid down for us.”

Booker, however, is essentially interested in why “certain images, symbols and shaping forms recur in stories to an extent far greater than be accounted for just by cultural transmission.” This requires that look deep into the unconscious, to discover what Jung designated as “the ancient river beds along which our psychic current naturally flows,” in Jung’s own words. It is in these archetypal structures that Booker thinks can be found the “basic meaning and purpose of the patterns underlying storytelling.”

Booker’s project is a reminder of the odd place Jung occupies in intellectual history. Against the prevailing social constructionist givens of few generations, Jung looks downright prescient: he at least championed the idea of some kind of innate psychological content, and with human nature, which lies under the endless diversity of cultural expression. In the tradition of Jung, Booker is right to insist that transmission cultures cannot explain the similarities in stories around the world. However, it is delusion to imagine that in Jung’s theory of archetypes and symbols we will find the “basic meaning and purpose” of patterns of storytelling. A plausible account of meaning and purpose—why these putative archetypes should exist in the first place—is precisely what Jungian theory lacks, except in its vague emphasis on self-realization as the ultimate goal of human thought and action. Jungian psychology and archetype theory hold nothing comparable to the explanatory power and rigor find in Darwin’s appeal to selection for survival and reproduction.

In fact, a Jungian reading of fiction conflicts with Darwinian readings in ways that are worth considering. For example, in his Jungian mode, Booker interprets malevolent characters in stories as selfish “Dark Figures,” who symbolize overweening egotism, the selfishness of the individual. The dark power of the ego is the source of evil, along with another Jungian idea, the denial of the villain’s “inner feminine.” A Darwinian could agree that egotism might explain the wickedness of someone Edmund in King Lear. But Grendel? The shark in Jaws? It is not clear that egotism is an index of villainy. Oedipus is arguably a more egotistical character than Iago, who in his devious cruelty is still far more evil. The malevolence of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or the Cyclops in the Odyssey not lie in their selfishness or egotism. Who would ever think to Godzilla selfish? “Selfish” is a term we apply to people, and perhaps animals when they represent people in folktales. But in Darwinian terms, persis tence of large, hungry, dangerous beasts as dramatic threats fiction is explainable as a straightforward