The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [135]
From this Frustration Stage, Samson is quickly thrust into the Nightmare Stage, when the Philistines put out his eyes, bind him `with fetters of brass' and `he did grind in the prison house'. But what the Philistines forget is that, while he is in prison, Samson's hair will grow again.
They throw a great feast, to celebrate their capture of their deadly enemy. Three thousand Philistines gather in a great building, and when they are drunk they call for Samson to be brought in so they can mock him. He asks the boy who is leading him to guide his hand to the pillars of the building, so he can lean on them. Then, calling on his God, and with a final superhuman heave of his now recovered strength, Samson pulls the whole building down, killing everyone in it: `so the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life: It is his greatest victory.
There are important issues raised by this tale to which we shall have to return, because they have implications central to the nature of storytelling and the different psychological levels on which the basic stories can be told. As the story is presented to us, for instance, the Philistines are cast as wholly dark, unredeemedly evil; although they doubtless behaved little differently from the way the Israelites themselves would have done if they had caught the champion and strongman of the Philistines (e.g., the portrayal of Goliath). In this respect Samson's victory over `evil' can only be seen in partial terms: we can hardly see it as a great liferenewing act, an absolute victory for life over death. But in our next example, one of the most profound tragedies in literature, we get right down to bedrock: with a play which looks head on at one of the most fundamental questions which Tragedy can pose.
The Oresteia
It is a curious fact about Greek Tragedy that so few of the plays which have survived from its golden age in the fifth century BC present the tragic theme simply in its basic five-stage form. From Aristotle we know the general theory which the Greeks developed to account for the fact that they found themselves telling stories in this way: a central part of which was that tragedy should show a hero or heroine, otherwise noble in character, but with a fatal flaw which catches them out, leading to their destruction. This might seem a perfect summing up of the story of Samson; indeed of many of the tragedies we have been looking at. In practice, however, one of the strengths of the Greek tragedians (as of the Greek mind generally) was their capacity to appreciate the complexities of human existence. They were not satisfied with black-and-white answers. They were always looking round the corner for another question to ask. Despite Aristotle's dictum that a satisfactory story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, they were always asking `what happened before the beginning?, `what happened after the end?, which is why so many of the stories in their mythology seem to meander on interminably, with each episode before its conclusion sowing the seeds for the next. And one of the most basic questions posed by Tragedy is this: if a tragic hero arouses such opposition by his actions that he is eventually put to death by someone else (which is after all where the tragic pattern so often ends up), where morally does that leave the person who has killed him? Is it not possible that the avenger too, in killing another human being (for whatever reason), may not have become infected by something of the very evil he is trying