The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [156]
`The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.'
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
So far in this book we have really been doing two things.
On one level we have been looking at hundreds of different stories, including many of the best-known tales in the world, seeing the remarkable extent to which these are formed round one or another of seven basic plots. What we have been exploring are seven of the central ways in which, when the human imagination conjures up a story, its contents naturally take shape. This does not mean, of course, that every story in the world falls neatly and exclusively into one of these categories. At this stage it would be easy to point to countless individual stories which in one way or another do not correspond precisely to any of these plots. Indeed a whole section of this book will later be devoted to looking at such stories and why they vary from the basic patterns. There are even a handful of other, more specialised plots - such as that behind `creation myths' explaining how the world came into being, or the Mystery plot which underlies detective stories - which we have not yet touched on at all.
On another level, however, we have also through these past eleven chapters been building up a picture of something much deeper and more general than just a catalogue of story-types. We have been gradually laying bare a hidden landscape of figures, situations and images which run through stories of all kinds, regardless of which type of plot may on a more superficial level be directing our interest in the story. We have seen such motifs as `the thrilling escape from death', the overthrow or redemption of the dark figure, the final union or separation of hero and heroine, appearing again and again, in one plot after another. And however far we continue our exploration of stories we shall find that they always return in one way or another to these same basic patterns and images. What we have been uncovering, in short, is the essential core of the way stories are made, how they work and what they are about. In this sense the real value of examining the seven central plots is that, between them, they provide a comprehensive introduction to all the fundamental elements from which a story can be made up.
The significance of this can hardly be exaggerated. For what it means is that whenever any of us tries to create a story in our own imagination, we will find that these are the basic figures and situations around which it takes shape. We cannot get away from them because they are archetypes. They are the elemental images around which the whole of the storytelling impulse in mankind is centred. And the reason for this is that these underlying patterns and images are somehow imprinted unconsciously in our minds, so that we cannot conceive stories in any other way.
This is why, when we are first introduced to stories in early childhood, we instinctively recognise what they are on about. The small child being told a story may be confronted with the images of all sorts of things which it has never seen in the real world, or which have never existed: bloodthirsty giants; animals which talk; dragons breathing fire. But the child can immediately accept and relate to such mythical beings, because the symbolic language in which stories are dressed up meets with an instinctual pattern of response which is already programmed into the child's own unconscious.
We have virtually no idea how this miraculous process works in neurological terms. We cannot explain physically how it is that we are able to conjure up these images in our `mind's eye'. We cannot even locate precisely in which parts of our brain this hugely complex activity