The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [10]
When I first came to this subject through my initial researches into the basic plots underlying stories, I discovered that in the previous 70 years yet another, much more fundamental, approach to myths and folk tales had been emerging which corresponded more closely to what I had begun to recognise as the real nature of stories. So much does my own approach lie in this tradition, and so much did it help me to understand all sorts of things about stories more clearly, that I will not even attempt to summarise it here, since it is implicit in much of the book which follows, and at certain points, where appropriate, I hope I shall make that debt explicit.
Suffice it to say that this tradition has in many ways built on that first perception by Bastian, over a century ago, that the human imagination seems to be so constituted that it naturally works round certain `elemental' shapes and images; and on the further insight of Freud and others that, for an explanation of a great deal of what is most significant in human behaviour we must look into those parts of the psyche of which we cannot be directly aware, because they are below the threshold of our immediate consciousness. But whereas Freud became preoccupied with just a part of the picture, with sexuality and with the problems of the individual psyche, his Swiss colleague Carl Jung moved on to the much wider question of how, at a deeper level, we are all psychologically constructed in the same essential way. We all, at that deeper level, have the same psychological makeup, in much the same way as we are all genetically `programmed' to grow physically: and it is 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 problems in coping with the `programme' of development that our deeper unconscious has laid down for us.
If we are looking for an explanation of why certain images, symbols and shaping forms recur in stories to an extent far greater than can be accounted for just by cultural transmission, we must look first to those deeper levels of the unconscious which we all have in common, as part of our basic genetic inheritance. These work around what Jung called `archetypes': `the ancient river beds along which our psychic current naturally flows'; and it is only on this level of the archetypal structures that the basic meaning and purpose of the patterns underlying storytelling can be found.
Jung himself, of course, wrote much about myths and folk tales, as have many of his followers, such as Marie-Louise von Franz. Another author generally in the same tradition was the American Joseph Campbell who attempted in The Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God to relate an enormous amount of such storytelling to what he called `the monomyth, a kind of universal story of which indvidual myths and tales merely present different aspects. Other authors have extended this kind of general approach to take in some of the better-known literary works of our culture, as did Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism and Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death In The American Novel, cited in the pages which follow. And I cannot conclude this brief summary of writers whose work I found illuminating without referring to an author much less well-known than any of these, John Vyvyan, whose little book The Shakespearean Ethic was not only an attempt to extend this kind of analysis to some of Shakespeare's plays, but is also the most original book about Shakespeare I have ever read.
The crucial point of departure, however, widening out these approaches in a way which allows us at last to see the activity of telling stories from a wholly new perspective, is the recognition that all kinds of story, however profound or however trivial, ultimately spring from the same source, are shaped around the same basic patterns and are governed by the same hidden, universal rules.
At this point our journey can begin.
`When first we mean