The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [183]
Equally we have seen how it is an inseparable part of `coming to the light' that this should bring a clearer vision. When, at the end of a story, characters are lifted out of the shadows, this is because they have been lifted out of all that obscures their vision. `Seeing whole' does not mean they see and know everything. What it does mean is that they can see everyone and everything objectively, for what they really are. They have been liberated from the distortions of ego-consciousness, onto a different level which gives them a clearer understanding.
On another level, this transition between a long period of constricted vision and finally coming to a new centre of perspective which gives an uninterrupted view in all directions relates directly to one of the most fundamental satisfactions we ourselves get from following a story. Few things hold our interest in a story more compulsively than the desire to arrive at that point at the end where everything will finally be explained. Gradually we have been drawn deeper and deeper into a tangled knot of obscurity and uncertainty, setting up a tension in our minds which cries out for resolution. We long to know how it is all going to turn out; whether the hero and the heroine will finally be united; what unexpected twist at the end will suddenly make everything `come out right'. In the earlier stages of a story all sorts of details may have been introduced which at the time seem puzzling, their significance not clear at the time. But if the story is properly constructed, by the time it reaches its conclusion the point and purpose of each will have been revealed. As in a piece of music, we have finally been lifted clear from the tangle of irresolution to the point where the pattern is complete; where we can see how everything in the end played its part in the whole. And no type of story illustrates this more subtly than Comedy, where the transition from baffling obscurity to a final phase of illumination when all is made clear is built into the very structure of the plot.
Comedy
Three things mark out Comedy from other types of story. The first is that, more insistently than any other type of plot, Comedy is concerned not just with the individual fate of its central figure but with the network of relationships between a group of people. Initially we see these relationships all knotted up because something fundamental has gone wrong; at the end we see the `unknotting' where everyone has at last been brought into the right relationship with everyone else.
The second unique feature of Comedy is the extent to which, except on those rare occasions where a dark figure remains unreconciled, it shows us all the characters in the story being brought at the end into the light. In this sense Comedy is the most idealised of the plots (although in this it overlaps with Rebirth) because it ends on a vision of a world entirely at one, from which no one is excluded.
The third distinguishing mark of Comedy is the emphasis it places on the fact that the fundamental reason why everyone is at odds through most of the story is that there is something very important that they do not know or cannot see; just as the miraculous coming together at the end results from the fact that something very important has been discovered. As Aristotle puts it, `recognition is the change from ignorance to knowledge'. And this recognition is precisely what allows everyone to come into a new and quite different set of relationships to one another. Because everyone can at last see clearly and whole, because they have at last discovered who they and each other really are, and who belongs with whom, they can