The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [1]
30 The Riddle of the Sphinx: Oedipus and Hamlet ........................................ 517
PART FOUR: WHY WE TELL STORIES
Chapter 31 Telling Us Who We Are: Ego versus Instinct .............................................. 543
32 Into the Real World: The Ruling Consciousness ........................................ 571
33 Of Gods and Men: Reconnecting with `The One' ...................................... 593
34 The Age of Loki: The Dismantling of the Self ............................................ 645
Epilogue: The Light and the Shadows on the Wall .......................................................... 699
Author's Personal Note ........................................................................................................ 703
Glossary of Terms ................................................................................................................ 707
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 711
Index of Stories Cited .......................................................................................................... 715
General Index ...................................................................................................................... 720
This reprint includes corrections of various factual or typographical errors which appeared in earlier printings of this book. If readers spot any further mistakes, the author would be grateful if these could be passed on to him for correction in future editions.
`He had likewise projected, but at what part of his life is not known, a work to show how small a quantity of REAL FICTION there is in the world; and that the same images, with very little variation, have served all the authors who have ever written.'
Dr Samuel Johnson, recorded in Boswell's Life of Johnson
In the mid-1970s queues formed outside cinemas all over the Western world to see one of the most dramatic horror films ever made. Steven Spielberg's Jaws, which heralded the arrival of the most successful popular storyteller of the latetwentieth century, told how the peace of a little Long Island seaside resort, Amity, was rudely shattered by the arrival offshore of a monstrous shark, of almost supernatural power. For weeks on end the citizens are thrown into a stew of fear and confusion by the shark's savage attacks on one victim after another. Finally, when the sense of threat seems almost too much to bear, the hero of the story, the local police chief Brody, sets out with two companions to do battle with the monster. There is a tremendous climactic fight, with much severing of limbs and threshing about underwater, until at last the shark is slain. The community comes together in universal jubilation. The great threat has been lifted. Life in Amity can begin again.
It is safe to assume that few of the millions of sophisticated twentieth-century moviegoers who were gripped by this tale as it unfolded from the screens of a thousand luxury cinemas would have paused to think they had much in common with an unkempt bunch of animal-skinned Saxon warriors, huddled round the fire of some draughty, wattle-and-daub hall 1200 years before, as they listened to the minstrel chanting out the verses of an epic poem.
Yet just consider the story of that ancient poem which has survived to our own day mainly to be dissected in examination rooms by generations of bored and baffled students of Anglo-Saxon literature.
The first part of Beowulf tells of how the peace of the little seaside community of Heorot is rudely shattered by the arrival of Grendel, a monster of almost supernatural power, who lives in the depths of a nearby lake. The inhabitants of Heorot are thrown into a stew of fear and confusion as, night after night, Grendel makes his mysterious attacks on the hall in which they sleep, seizing one victim after another and tearing them to pieces. Finally, when the sense of threat seems almost too much to bear, the hero Beowulf sets out to do battle, first with Grendel, then