The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [114]
5. Act Five (Destruction Stage) shows the nightmare closing in around Macbeth and deepening to its climax: with Lady Macbeth's guilty sleepwalking scene ('unnatural deeds do bring unnatural troubles'); the approach of the avenging army to Macbeth's lair at Dunsinane; Lady Macbeth's death; and finally the battle, when Macbeth learns that Macduff was `not of woman born' just before Macduff slays him. The pattern is complete.
The pattern we have been looking at here is in fact so fundamental to the understanding of stories that its implications will be with us for the rest of this book. It is not just the starting point for exploring all that complex family of stories which we think of under the general heading of Tragedy, because it presents the tragic theme in its blackest and most basic form. It also, as we shall eventually see, provides one of the best starting points for exploring the profound link between the patterns which shape stories and those which shape events in what we call `real life.
Indeed, so important is it that we should become completely familiar with the workings of this tragic cycle that we shall shortly look in rather more detail at a further half-dozen examples; and these have been chosen, in addition to those already touched on, to build up a fuller picture of the range of basic situations from which a Tragedy can unfold.
We shall then, at the end of this chapter, take a look at the most obvious way in which storytellers may sometimes vary the emphasis of their presentation of the basic tragic theme: by concentrating only on the closing stages and beginning at the point, halfway through the complete cycle, where the mood of frustration is coming to be uppermost.
Finally we shall be in a position, in the two chapters that follow, to draw on all these and other examples to look at the essence of Tragedy in a deeper and more general way. What is really happening to the hero or heroine of a tragedy as they get drawn into their fatal course of action? Why does it seem to lead so inexorably to disaster? And what is it which distinguishes this type of story from all the others we have looked at, where the fundamental impulse is to lead the hero or heroine to a happy ending?
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A story which expresses the basic plot of Tragedy with almost allegorical simplicity, like a kind of `black fairy tale, is Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture Of Dorian Gray (1890). We meet the hero, a languid and exceptionally beautiful young man, at just the moment when his artist friend Basil Hallward is completing a portrait of him. At this point the `dark' figure of Lord Henry Wootton enters, and tempts the hero with two thoughts. The first is how wonderful it would be if Dorian Gray could always remain looking as young and beautiful as he does in the picture, while his portrait took on the ravages of the years instead. The second is how wonderful it would be to live a life of total physical self-indulgence, recognising that the most intense spiritual experiences in life come through the senses.
This is the moment of Temptation, or Focus. The young hero becomes possessed by these two related thoughts, and by the excitement of his `dangerous' new friendship with Lord Henry. He takes his portrait home, and immediately plunges into the Dream Stage of his adventure by falling rapturously in love with a beautiful young actress, Sibyl Vane, whom he goes to see playing Shakespeare every night. He proposes to Sibyl; she accepts; and the following night she gives a thoroughly flat and wooden performance. She explains to Dorian that she had only been able to put her heart into acting because it was a substitute for real life, but now he has come into her life, her motivation