The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [193]
The process whereby this is achieved invariably requires a specific sequence of steps. First we see the hero or heroine in that incomplete, unresolved state which characterises the beginning of a story. Then something has to emerge which opens them out to the possibility that eventually they may achieve the distant state of wholeness. Thirdly, and this may comprise almost all the action of the story, they have to be shown as developing, or in some way being brought to the point where they are finally ready to realise that state. Only then, as in the opening of some complicated lock which requires all the tumblers to be aligned in exactly the right way before it will open, can we see the fourth, concluding step: the moment of final transformation and liberation from the dark power which releases the lifegiving treasure and brings the story to its triumphant resolution.
So fundamental is this pattern that it shapes even some of the simplest stories in the world. In the little Russian folk tale, The Turnip, a man plants a seed which grows into an enormous turnip. When it is fully grown (or `whole'), he tries to pull it out of the ground and cannot. We have the image of some great prize which cannot yet be secured because the hero is not yet adequate to the task. The man calls his wife, but even their combined strength is not enough. To help in the task, he then summons in turn a boy, a girl, a succession of animals, each adding to all the rest. The image is of the hero's original inadequate powers being gradually built up, until at last the smallest animal of all - a mouse (in some versions a beetle) - provides the final extra ounce of strength necessary to do the trick. The prize can finally be wrested from the earth, and they can all sit round together having a joyful feast. Indeed the turnip proves so large that it will continue to provide them all with food for a long time to come.
Two principles have been required to release the life-giving treasure. Obviously it needed the building up of a sufficiency of strength. But this could not have been achieved unless the hero had been able to join up with the other characters around him, in a state of mutual sympathy and co-operation. Only when the chain is absolutely complete (as is underlined by the way each link added to it is smaller and smaller) can the treasure be won.
In other words, the first essential principle is the masculine one of power and control. The second, allowing the state of potential wholeness to be reached, is the feminine one of connection and joining together. Such are the two elemental principles around which stories are constructed. If the hero of a story is destined fully to succeed, he must be shown to be fully masculine. He cannot be weak and ineffectual. But his masculine power must not be hard and inflexible. He must not be egocentrically closed off within himself. He must be open, in ways which connect him positively with others, with all that is beyond him, with the flow of life. Only when this potential state of balance has been achieved is the hero ready for the moment of liberation when the life-giving treasure is released.
In some stories we may see this process of coming to wholeness symbolised almost entirely in terms of what is happening to the hero himself. Even so, when we look carefully, we see how both the necessary elements are involved. The Ugly Duckling begins in a completely undeveloped, immature state. He then sees the swans, like a distant vision of some unattainable perfection and wholeness. He then goes through a long period of further testing and inward growth, until he is ready for his climactic transformation: and we then see his