The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [171]
At an even deeper level, as we saw at the end of Chapter Twelve, the whole of the way in which the human imagination unconsciously shapes a story is itself rooted in the `rule of three, in that it follows that three-fold rhythm which provides stories with their most basic archetypal structure. Firstly, we see the central figure in some way constricted, but then enjoying a phase of limited enlargement. Secondly, we see the dark power closing in to impose a more severe sense of constriction (the `central crisis'), which leads in turn to that gradual constellation of the light and dark elements in the story as they move towards their final showdown. Thirdly, in the story's climax, we see the most acute phase of constriction of all, as the prelude to that reversal which leads to the overthrow of darkness and the liberation of light.
Thus is the rule of three, as the pattern of growth and transformation, built into the very foundations of the way we imagine stories. But the nearer we get to the moment of completion or wholeness at the end of a story, the more likely we are somehow to see the number four appearing. In Cinderella the heroine is three times transformed from her rags into her finery, as she goes to the ball. Each time she returns to her rags and ashes, until she has gone through a second process of three, whereby the two ugly sisters try on the slipper and fail and she succeeds. Then at last, as the story reaches its conclusion, we see her make the fourth and final transformation back into her fine clothes. 2
We see many similar examples of how some image of four emerges at the ending of stories. Hans Andersen's little ugly duckling, after his transformation, joins the three `kingly swans' to make the fourth. At the end of The Three Musketeers, as the young outsider D'Artagnan finally emerges triumphant from his long battle with his monstrous opponent Lady de Winter, he is at last accepted by his closeknit trio of comrades as `the fourth musketeer'. In A Winter's Tale and The Marriage of Figaro, we see the power of the Comedy ending reinforced by the bringing together not just of one couple but two, so that the stage can be dominated by four joyful figures, all at last at one with each other. In The Secret Garden the redeeming figure of Dickon triggers off three successive `rebirths; those of Mary, Colin and finally Mr Craven, so that the closing image of the story is of all four standing joyfully together in the garden.
Four in stories is the number of completion and perfection. Even during the earlier stages of the story, we often have a subconscious sense of the presence of four elements or figures which have not yet come together and revealed their potential, as when the hero of The Three Languages is waiting with his three skills for the moment of transformation. And in the next part of the book we shall see just how profoundly the number four as a symbol of totality provides the bedrock for the unconscious processes which create stories in the human imagination.
But of course the supreme symbol of completion in storytelling is the union of two people, hero and heroine, masculine and feminine, to make a whole: because they are seen as complementary in a more fundamental way than anything we know. Only when this has been achieved can hero and heroine together succeed to the kingdom: because the two have finally become one.
Such is the complete happy ending which lies at the heart of storytelling. What this really stands for is the theme of the next section of our book. And in exploring this we shall see how the hidden significance of numbers in stories opens up in a wholly new and dramatic way.3
`The treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern is life: it is himself.'
C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation
One of the most popular Hollywood films of the mid- 1980s, Crocodile Dundee (1986), began with the dramatic arrival by helicopter in the remote Australian outback of a young American woman journalist. Sue Charlton was everything a thrusting professional woman in the post-feminist age