The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [12]
On the one hand, as he put it in the Poetics, there are tragic stories. These are stories in which the hero or heroine's fortunes usually begin by rising, but eventually `turn down' to disaster (the Greek word catastrophe means literally a `down stroke, the downturn in the hero's fortunes at the end of a tragedy). On the other hand, there are, in the broadest sense, comedies: stories in which things initially seem to become more and more complicated for the hero or heroine, until they are entangled in a complete knot, from which there seems no escape. But eventually comes what Aristotle calls the peripeteia or `reversal of fortune'. The knot is miraculously unravelled (from which we get the French word denouement, meaning literally an `unknotting'). Hero, heroine or both together are liberated; and we and all the world can rejoice.
This division holds good over a much greater range of stories than might be implied just by the terms `tragedy and `comedy'. Indeed, with qualifications, it remains true right across the domain of storytelling. The plot of a story is that which leads its hero or heroine either to a 'catastrophe' or an `unknotting'; either to frustration or to liberation; either to death or to a renewal of life. And it might be thought that there are almost as many ways of describing these downward and upward paths as there are individual stories in the world. Yet the more carefully we look at the vast range of stories thrown up by the human imagination through the ages, the more clearly we may discern that there are certain continually recurring general shapes to stories, dictating the nature of the road which the hero or heroine may take to their ultimate destination.
It is at the most important of these underlying shapes or `basic plots' that we must now look.
`Legends of the slaughter of a destructive monster are to be found all over the world. The thought underlying them all is that the monster slain is preternatural and hostile to mankind:
E. S. Hartland, The Legend of Perseus (1896)
In 1839 a young Englishman, Henry Austen Layard, set out to travel overland to Ceylon, the island now known as Sri Lanka. Halfway through his journey, when he was crossing the wild desert region then known as Mesopotamia, his curiosity was aroused by a series of mysterious mounds in the sand. He paused to investigate them, and thus began one of the most important investigations in the history of archaeology. For what Layard had stumbled on turned out to be the remains of one of the earliest cities ever built by humankind, biblical Niniveh.
Over the decades which followed, many fascinating discoveries were made at Niniveh, but none more so than a mass of clay tablets which came to light in 1853, covered in small wedge-shaped marks which were obviously some unknown form of writing. The task of deciphering this `cuneiform' script was to take the best part of the next 20 years. But when in 1872 George Smith of the British Museum finally unveiled the results of his labours, the Victorian public was electrified. One sequence of the tablets contained fragments of a long epic poem, Dating back to the dawn of civilisation, it was by far the earliest written story in the world.
The first part of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, as we now know it, tells of how the kingdom of Uruk has fallen under the terrible shadow of a great and mysterious evil. The source of the threat is traced to a monstrous figure, Humbaba, who lives half across the world, at the heart of a remote forest. The hero, Gilgamesh, goes to the armourers who equip him with special weapons, a great bow and a mighty axe. He sets out