The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [206]
Initially we see Simba, the story's hero, as foolish and immature, as he takes his little friend Nala, a young lioness, to the `elephants' graveyard' where they have been told never to go. They are rescued from a pack of evil hyenas by Simba's father, the king, who has come to look for them. But then Simba's recklessness leads him to be nearly trampled to death by a stampeding herd of wildebeeste. After again coming to save his son, Musafa escapes up a cliff from which Scar, waiting at the top, pushes him to his death. Simba imagines he has been the cause of his father's death, and wanders miserably off into exile, leaving Scar, helped by the treacherous pack of hyenas, to claim the kingship.
We thus see the archetypally familiar situation of a good King/Father dying or being murdered, at a time when his immature young heir is not yet ready to succeed, so that the role of King/Father is taken on by a usurping dark brother (as in Hamlet, Aladdin and many other versions), leaving the son-hero disconsolate and dispossessed.
The lost and exiled Simba is taken into the care of a warthog and a meerkat, who become his friends, and he stays with them, enjoying a happily irresponsible life out in the bush, without noticing that he is gradually maturing into a fullgrown lion (archetypally, this playful relationship with his friends echoes Prince Hal's friendship with Falstaff and Co.). But eventually a full-grown young lioness intrudes on their peace, who turns out to be Nala. The news from the kingdom could not be worse. Under the misrule of Scar and his hyenas (like Saruman and his ores in The Lord of the Rings), all has gone to wrack and ruin. Food and water are exhausted. It seems the very survival of the Pride is in question. At first Simba seems apathetic, but thanks to Nala and a wise monkey Rafiki, he is called back to himself. This is emphasised when he looks at his reflection in water, to see that he now looks just like his father - who then appears in a heavenly vision to tell him `you have forgotten who you are ... the one true king'.
Simba leads his friends back to Pride Rock to challenge the evil Scar, who scornfully accuses him of having killed his father. But when Scar then tries to kill Simba in the same way, by pushing him off the cliff, he admits that it was he himself who had murdered Musafa. Simba manages to leap upwards to safety, outwrestles Scar in a fight and, when the `dark king' is pushed over the cliff in turn, he is set on and devoured by the hyenas. To the joy of his mother and the other unhappy lionesses, Simba has, like Odysseus, triumphantly reclaimed his kingdom. He marries his loving Nala, and the story ends with a hymn to the `Circle of Life' sung by all the animals, as the new king and queen hold up a new-born daughter to confirm that the continuance of life into the future is now assured.
A version from the Stone Age
Once we begin to recognise the significance of the part played by the `unrealised value' in stories, we see just how crucial it is to the unconscious logic by which they are constructed. All through a story the dark figures identify those negative qualities which must be redeemed into their positive opposites if it is to reach a happy ending. The whole story thus becomes the picture of a changing balance between the power of darkness initially dominant `above the line' and the gradually developing centre of light `below the line'; until finally the balance can tip, the shadows fade away and light can flood up `above the line' to show hero and heroine united and at one with life.
This kind of coding is so firmly built into the structure of myths and folk tales that we find it in storytelling all over