The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [2]
In terms of the bare outlines of their plots, the resemblances between the twentieth-century horror film and the eighth-century epic are so striking that they may almost be regarded as telling the same story. Are we to assume that the author of Jaws, Peter Benchley, had in some way been influenced by Beowulf? Of course not. Even if he had read Beowulf, it is most unlikely that he could have conceived a story with the power of Jaws unless it had emerged spontaneously into his own imagination. Yet the fact remains that the two stories share a remarkably similar pattern - one which moreover has formed the basis for countless other stories in the literature of mankind, at many different times and all over the world.
So what is the explanation?
It is a curious characteristic of our modern civilisation that, whereas we are prepared to devote untold physical and mental resources to reaching out into the furthest recesses of the galaxy, or to delving into the most delicate mysteries of the atom - in an attempt, as we like to think, to plumb every last secret of the universe - one of the greatest and most important mysteries is lying so close beneath our noses that we scarcely even recognise it to be a mystery at all.
At any given moment, all over the world, hundreds of millions of people will be engaged in what is one of the most familiar of all forms of human activity. In one way or another they will have their attention focused on one of those strange sequences of mental images which we call a story.
We spend a phenomenal amount of our lives following stories: telling them; listening to them; reading them; watching them being acted out on the television screen or in films or on a stage. They are far and away one of the most important features of our everyday existence.
Not only do fictional stories play such a significant role in our lives, as novels or plays, films or operas, comic strips or TV `soaps'. Through newspapers or television, our news is presented to us in the form of `stories'. Our history books are largely made up of stories. Even much of our conversation is taken up with recounting the events of everyday life in the form of stories. These structured sequences of imagery are in fact the most natural way we know to describe almost everything which happens in our lives.
But it is obviously in their fictional form that we most usually think of stories. So deep and so instinctive is our need for them that, as small children, we have no sooner learned to speak than we begin demanding to be told stories, as evidence of an appetite likely to continue to our dying day. So central a part have stories played in every society in history that we take it for granted that the great storytellers, such as Homer or Shakespeare, should be among the most famous people who ever lived. In modern times we have not thought it odd that certain men and women, such as Charlie Chaplin or Marilyn Monroe, should come to be regarded as among the best-known figures in the world, simply because they acted out the characters from stories on the cinema screen. Even when we look out from our own world into space, we find we have named many of the most conspicuous heavenly bodies - Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Orion, Perseus, Andromeda - after characters from stories.
Yet what is astonishing is how incurious we are as to why we indulge in this strange form of activity. What real purpose does it serve? So much do we take our need to tell stories for granted that such questions scarcely even occur to us.1
In fact what we are looking at here is really one mystery built upon another, because our passion for storytelling begins from another faculty which is itself so much part of our lives that we fail to see just how strange it is: our ability to `imagine, to bring