The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [139]
One of the subtler clues to the meaning of the tragic pattern lies in the origins of the word `tragedy itself, coming as it does from the Greek tipayws, a `goat. It is derived from the ancient ritual practice of the `scapegoat, whereby a goat or some other creature could be sacrificed to restore health to the community. The animal (or human) scapegoat was regarded as symbolically carrying the sins of the tribe; with the idea that, in its death, those sins were purged and the tribe brought back to wholeness. The pattern this re-enacted was precisely that we see at the end of a tragedy, where a whole community has been cast into shadow by the darkness emanating from the central figure. The removal of that source of darkness brings the community back into the light.
We have come a long way since we first began to explore this strange pattern in storytelling which shows how human beings may get caught up in a course of action which leads eventually to their violent and unnatural death. We have been through some of the darkest stories in the world. We have seen people, possessed by some egocentric fantasy of love or power, gradually separating themselves from everyone around them, more and more submerged in the darkness which springs from their own split, disordered psyches, until finally the violent rejection they have shown to others turns in on themselves. But we have also seen how it is possible for this downward spiral into darkness to be reversed: how it is possible for the hero or heroine to begin to knot together again, within themselves and with others around them, so that light is again breaking in on their darkness.
So far, because we have been looking at Tragedy, we have only seen this return to the light able to operate partially, ultimately insufficient to prevail against the forces of darkness which have been unleashed, and which eventually sweep the hero or heroine away. But there are, of course, stories which show that climb upward from darkness reaching its ultimate triumphant conclusion, where the hero or heroine can re-emerge into the light altogether. This leads us on to the next and last of the basic plots.
`It was on rotting prison straw that I felt the first stirrings of good in myself. Gradually it became clear to me that the line separating good from evil runs not between states, not between classes and not between parties: it runs through the heart of each and everyone of us, and through all human hearts. This line is not stationary. It shifts and moves with the passage of the years. Even in hearts enveloped in evil, it maintains a small bridgehead of good.'
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Early in our lives we come across a type of story not quite like any other. In the form in which we first encounter it, in the stories of childhood, it usually centres round the familiar fairytale cast of young heroes and heroines, princes and princesses, who have fallen foul of dark enchanters, wicked witches or evil stepmothers. But this is not a conventional Rags to Riches or Overcoming the Monster story. It contains a crucial ingredient which marks it out from either.
In the folk tale Sleeping Beauty, a king and queen have a baby daughter. They invite seven fairies to the little Princess's christening, and six in turn bestow great blessings on her - beauty, grace, goodness of heart, and so on. But before the last can speak an old malevolent fairy bursts in, furious at not having been invited, and lays a deadly curse on the child: that she shall prick her finger and die before she grows up. The seventh good fairy can only commute this