The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [182]
The essence of all these Voyage and Return stories is that they show their hero having to move away from the pole of limited `ego-consciousness, which puts him at the mercy of events he does not understand, towards that other pole which connects him up to the world outside himself and gives him the wider vision which is necessary for his liberation. This winning of a wider vision is seen to be a process of the most profound importance, essential not just to the hero's survival in a limited, physical sense but, at least in the instances of Robinson Crusoe, Lucius and the Ancient Mariner, to his reaching an entirely new relationship with himself and the universe. The move from restricted ego-consciousness to the state of wider awareness means that he is at last, in some mysterious way, at one with life itself. And of course no type of story is more centrally dependent on the importance of this transition than Comedy: where coming to `see whole' is what the process of recognition is all about.
`I'm still defeated by the conundrum of God. But I have the devil clear.' `And what's he?' `Not seeing whole.' John Fowles, Daniel Martin
One of the parallels between a story and a piece of music is that each is based on a sequence of mental images which we unconsciously anticipate will come eventually to a point of perfect resolution. A movement in a Beethoven symphony develops through a succession of irresolutions each of which is then partly resolved. Only at the end does the pattern come to a full close, resolving all that has gone before.
For several months in 1984, millions of television viewers in Britain were held in suspense by a serialisation of Paul Scott's Raj quartet of novels The Jewel in the Crown. For weeks the story presented them with a complex drama of life in British India during the Second World War, introducing a large cast of characters whose lives were interwoven, full of mysterious and half-explained incidents. But as the plot developed, the one thing which eventually held interest more than any other was the central web of relationships between three characters - the attractive heroine, Sarah Layton, and two young men. The first of these, Merrick, a powerful, resentful, bullying police officer who had set his mind on marrying Sarah was the chief dark figure of the story. The other was a handsome and strong but sensitive and reserved army officer, Guy Perron. The question to which viewers wanted an answer was: which of the two would win the heroine? Would the Dark Rival get his way? Or would the light hero and heroine somehow manage to recognise their love and get together? Only in the closing scenes of the three-month long serialisation was the answer finally given, as Sarah and Guy at last came out into the open and declared their love. At this moment the whole of this enormously intricate drama, which had involved so many deaths and sub-plots, was resolved, in a way which seemed at last to make sense of almost everything that had previously happened in the story.
Again and again we have circled round the importance to stories of the elusive idea of being able to `see whole' which runs through storytelling at so many levels and in so many ways. In that central struggle between darkness and light, for instance, we have seen how it is an absolutely consistent feature of all the monsters, villains, tragic heroes and other figures who embody the dark power that they are in some crucial respect limited in their awareness. They have a blind spot;