The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [130]
`there is another in me... I am afraid of her. It was she who fell in love with the other one... that other is not I:
But it is the dark `other self' which eventually wins, leading Anna to reject Karenin for the last time and to throw in her lot irrevocably with Vronsky. No sooner has she done so than her lover begins to slip away, a will o' the wisp, leaving her to disintegrate towards that terrible final moment when, all alone, she flings herself beneath the wheels of the advancing train.
The point about the heroes and heroines of Tragedy is that they end up utterly alone (even if, occasionally, like Bonnie and Clyde, hero and heroine die together), completely cut off from the rest of society. They have been drawn by some part of themselves into a course of action which is fundamentally selfish, putting some egocentric desire above every other consideration, isolating them both from reality and from other people. Initially, in the Dream Stage, they succeed in imposing their will on the world and the people around them. They have broken the rules and seem to be getting away with it, because they have seized the initiative and because other people are not yet fully aware of what they are up to.
But gradually the truth of what they are doing begins to dawn on others. Those around them begin to constellate in opposition. The hero or heroine having first set themselves against others, we now see the rest of society gradually setting itself against them.
Finally, having torn and trampled the network of relationships originally surrounding them into shreds, the hero or heroine is left alone. Whereas in other types of story the tendency is for a general gathering together at the end, round the central union of the hero and the heroine, in Tragedy exactly the reverse happens. The hero and heroine are divided in every way: split within themselves, split from their `other self', split from the rest of society, which has gathered together only to encompass their destruction. Entirely isolated, all that is left is that their life should be violently extinguished.
In this image of an incomplete, egocentric figure who meets a lonely and violent end, we may recognise the essential characteristics of another deeply familiar figure from stories, whom we have already met in quite another context. We begin the next chapter by exploring some of the striking parallels which emerge between the hero or heroine of Tragedy and that figure we previously encountered, from a very different standpoint, as the Monster.
Richard III, i.1
When we hear these words spoken at the beginning of a story by a twisted hunchback, exulting in his physical and moral deformity, we have little difficulty in recognising him at once as a `monster'. Indeed Richard of Gloster, as portrayed by Shakespeare, is one of the most explicitly monstrous figures in all storytelling.
Since we are following the story, as it were, through his eyes, Richard III is a Tragedy. We see him, behind the `light' mask of charm he wears to the world, plotting his way ruthlessly to the throne, over a mounting pile of corpses. In familiar tragic manner we see his mounting ambition and treachery casting an ever-longer shadow of fear and suspicion - until at last positive opposition to him begins to constellate round the figure of Henry Earl of Richmond.
But at this point, when we see Richmond landing in England, determined to seek out and destroy the `wretched, bloody and usurping boar' who `lives even now at the centre of this isle', it is as if we are being given