The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [109]
During the first, twilit period, the world presented by the story is usually divided in some way into an `upper realm', where the story's chief source of darkness holds sway, and a 'lower realm' in the shadows. It is `below the line', in the `inferior realm' that the seeds of life and truth, the potential for love and the ability to see whole are to be found: obscured from the dominant `upper realm' until they are ready to be brought up into the light, to bring both halves of the world together.
Within the context of this general pattern, the great majority of stories shaped by the Comedy plot fall into two main types.
The first is where the chief source of darkness throwing a shadow over the proceedings is some character other than the hero (e.g., an unrelenting father or a 'dark rival') who dominates everyone else in a way which creates unhappiness and confusion and is opposed to the flow of life. In such a story the chief victims consigned to the shadows are likely to be the hero and heroine; and they can only be raised up into the light and brought together when the dark figure either has his eyes opened and goes through a change of heart, or is exposed and pushed off the stage.
The second is where the chief dark figure is the hero himself. It is then the wronged heroine, standing for true feeling and the ability to see whole, who is most obviously in the shadows. Here, to reach the happy ending, it is necessary for the hero to go through a change of heart and `come to himself'. As he is liberated, so also is the heroine, so they can emerge together into the light. In those rare examples where the heroine is the dark figure, it is her own repressed inner feminity which is obscured. It is this which the loving hero perceives and brings out, so that she likewise goes through the change of heart necessary to bring about the happy ending.
There is a third type of Comedy where there is no obvious dark figure in the usual sense, and where the source of confusion is simply a general state of misunderstanding which has everyone in its grip (e.g., The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Guys and Dolls, Four Weddings and a Funeral). But here the resolution can still only be reached when the redeeming truth is won from the shadows. And here we see more clearly than ever how the real preoccupation of Comedy is consciousness: what people are aware of. The real cause of confusion and conflict is always that the characters are not fully conscious of the truth, either about other people or about themselves; and while they are in this limited state of awareness they remain shut off from one another. What dispels the confusion is that their awareness is finally opened out so that they can see everything and everyone, including themselves, straight and whole. It is this which enables them to feel properly and to discover how they can all relate to each other in a state of unity and love: because they have at last `seen the light.
We can now look at the plot of Comedy in the context of the other types of story we considered earlier.
Like the other plots, it conjures up a world in which the threatening power of darkness is, through most of the story, in some way or other dominant. As in the others, this pressure is likely to reach its height just before the end,