The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [148]
(3) eventually the darkness emerges in full force, plunging the hero into a state of total isolation;
(4) this culminates in a nightmare crisis which is the prelude to the final reversal;
(5) the hero `wakes from his sleep, and is liberated through the power of love.
In fact this form of the Rebirth story finally brings us back to the point where we left off at the end of our exploration of Tragedy. As in a tragedy, we are looking from the inside at what happens to someone when he becomes possessed by the dark part of himself. We see him passing into the grip of an egocentric obsession, which renders him both unable to feel for others outside himself and also blind to the reality of what is happening to him. As he sinks ever further into the darkness, however, he does not, like the tragic hero, just plunge on to final destruc tion. What marks out the Rebirth plot is the way we see the central figure eventually frozen in his dark and lonely state with seemingly no hope of escape. And it is here, as light stealing in on the darkness, that the vision appears which inspires the stirring back to life, centred on a particular redeeming figure: invariably, where the story has a hero, a Young Woman or a Child.
Again, as in The Snow Queen, what we thus see happening to the hero is that familiar process which we have already seen in other types of story where the hero makes a switch from darkness to light. He is being put in touch with some deeper part of his personality which he has not previously been aware of. Firstly, this opens his eyes, enabling him to see the world from a wholly new, non-selfish perspective; it allows him for the first time to see everything straight and whole. Secondly, it enables him for the first time really to feel selflessly. As he finally moves securely to this new centre of his personality, love wells up in him like an unstoppable force, giving him a sense of extraordinary liberation, of being linked `with the whole world' - and he experiences this as at last coming to his true, inmost self.
Rebirth: Summing up
We can now sum up this type of story in all the main forms which it can take. Behind them all is the same basic sequence:
(1) a young hero or heroine falls under the shadow of the dark power;
(2) for a while, all may seem to go reasonably well, the threat may even seem to have receded;
(3) but eventually it approaches again in full force, until the hero or heroine is seen imprisoned in the state of living death;
(4) this continues for a long time, when it seems that the dark power has completely triumphed;
(5) but finally comes the miraculous redemption: either, where the imprisoned figure is a heroine, by the hero; or, where it is the hero, by a Young Woman or a Child.
The power of this type of story to move us lies in the contrast between the condition of the hero or heroine when we see them frozen in their isolated, imprisoned state and the moment when the liberation begins, as we see them being released from the dark power's icy grip. Again and again we see the same range of imagery being used to conjure up the former state, when the dark power is dominant:
coldness, hardness, immobility, constriction, sleep, darkness, sickness, decay, isolation, torment, despair, lack of love.
Finally, prevailing against that state as spring follows winter, we see the exactly corresponding imagery of
warmth, softness, movement, liberation, awakening, light, health, growth, joining together, happiness, hope, love.
On every count it marks the move from one universal pole of existence to the other, from death to life: hence the reason why we see this mighty transformation as `rebirth. But we can see this basic underlying drama presented in three different ways.
Initially, corresponding to the kinds of story we come across early in life, we may see the innocent but undeveloped young hero or heroine falling under the shadow of the dark power as it is personified in a mysterious, malevolent figure outside them. Nevertheless it is their own immature state and limited awareness