The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [111]
`For that - for that - I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!W
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
'He felt that all his powers, hitherto dissipated and scattered, were now concentrated and directed with terrible energy towards one blissful aim.'
Vronsky in Anna Karenina
`From that moment her whole existence was nothing but a maze of lies.'
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Richard III (on the eve of his death,
Hamlet, Act v. Sc.ii
Sooner or later, in any attempt to explore the deeper patterns which shape storytelling, we are brought up against one central, overwhelming fact. This is the way in which, through all the millions of stories thrown up by the human imagination, just two endings have far outweighed all others. In fact we might almost say that, for a story to resolve in a way which really seems final and complete, it can only do so in one of two ways. Either it ends with a man and a woman united in love. Or it ends in a death.
On the face of it, this might not seem particularly odd. Nothing in human life, after all, might be considered more final than death, What could be more natural than that our imaginations should conjure up stories which conclude with their hero or heroine reaching old age and death?
But the point is that the number of stories which end like this, with their hero or heroine passing peacefully away in the fullness of years, is not very great. When we talk of a story ending in a death we do not usually mean that kind of death at all. We mean a death that is violent, premature, a death that is `unnatural'. In other words, we mean a death which shows that something has gone hideously or, as we say, tragically wrong.
Of course the huge mass of stories which end in violent death do not by any means all have the same underlying shape. It is possible to arrive at such an ending by any of a number of routes. For a start, as we have seen from our glimpses of the `dark' versions of other plots - the dark Rags to Riches story, the dark Quest and so on - it is possible for other basic types of story to lead up to such a conclusion, when we might talk of them having a `tragic ending'. And even when we turn to that great family of stories which have for thousands of years been more specifically described as `tragedies, we find considerable variety in their underlying shape and moral emphasis. Even more than with Comedy, we are venturing here into an area of storytelling which cannot be delineated in just one simple formula.
Nevertheless, all through the history of storytelling, we find one particular type of story which is shaped by a pattern so persistent and so distinctive as to make it unmistakable. This can be illustrated by five well-known examples, composed in a wide variety of cultural circumstances and for greatly differing purposes: the Greek myth of Icarus; the German legend of Faust; Shakespeare's Macbeth; Stevenson's nineteenth-century horror story, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; and a modern novel, Nabokov's Lolita.
The story of Icarus tells of how he and his father, the inventor Daedalus, are enabled to escape from the island of Crete by means of feathered wings. Before they set out his father gives him an impassioned warning to fly neither too high, lest the heat of the sun melt the wax holding the wings together, nor too low, lest they fall into in the sea. They set off, and for a while all goes well - until eventually the temptation to ignore his father's advice to keep between the opposites proves too much for Icarus. He wishes to soar up higher and higher, towards the sun. His initial exhilaration turns first to anxiety, as the wax begins to melt, then to panic. The wings are giving way, Icarus can no longer keep up, and he plunges headlong to his death in the sea below.
The learned scholar Faust, eager for `forbidden knowledge' and the mastery of occult powers, sells his soul to the devil. At first he is given glimpses