The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [209]
A plot which particularly lends itself to presenting the story in this way is Comedy. When we earlier traced the historical evolution of Comedy, we saw that this type of story was originally concerned with showing the transition from fragmentation to wholeness only in more general terms. In the Lysistrata Aristophanes shows the city of Athens under a shadow because its ruling menfolk have become imprisoned in their obsession with making war. In their shadow the women, representing the feminine value, band together with masculine strength of will and organisation to win the men from the grip of the `dark masculine'. The result is that, at the end, masculine and feminine are brought together in harmony and the community is restored to wholeness. In the Thesmophoriazusae it is the women of Athens who have become possessed by the `dark masculine, in their obsessive desire for violent revenge on Euripides. It is he who, by putting them back in touch with their proper feeling and sense of proportion, wins them back to balance, so the play can end on an image of good-humoured reconciliation. In The Wasps, the tyrannical old Dark Father Procleon represents all those ageing, dried-up senior citizens who wish to uphold a lifeless vision of social order by their obsessive desire to condemn others) Here it is his son, representing youth and life, who liberates his father from his imprisonment by enabling him once more to feel, to see whole and to become once again his true living self.
What happened when the plot developed from these beginnings into the New Comedy was simply that it moved into the mainstream of storytelling and became anchored in that same archetypal family drama which is at the centre of other types of story. The focus of the story becomes the need to make that successful transition to a new generation which is centred on the union of the young hero and heroine. And in this context, as we have seen, Comedy took on two main forms, according to whether the main obstacle to their union lies in the older generation or the younger.
The first shows us the hero and heroine in love, longing to get married, but with the way ahead to their union barred by a Dark Father or a Dark Mother. We thus see a little world in which the road to future life is blocked by the fact that the ruling figure in that world has fallen into a state of darkness and become a Tyrant. The young hero is placed in the familiar situation of all those other types of story where the `Princess' is in the grip of a tyrant or a monster; and in those other types of story he would now have to destroy the monster, in order to free the heroine from his clutches.2 But in Comedy, where everyone in the end has to be brought round to playing his or her role in the archetypal drama properly and positively, it is the tyrant himself who has first to be liberated from his prison, in order for everyone else to be liberated. As his eyes are opened and he goes through a change of heart, he is discovering the `unrealised value' in himself. He is transformed into a `light Father'. This enables him to recognise the supreme value of the love between the hero and the heroine. The way to the succession has been cleared, and hero and heroine can step out into the light as the centre of life for the next generation.
The other type of Comedy is that where the problem lies in the younger generation. Either the young hero is not yet ready to succeed, because he has been cut off from his inner feminine by his own state of darkness; in which case it is he who must discover the `unrealised value' in himself (exactly the same is true when the central figure is a dark heroine). Or we see one of those comedies where the problem simply lies in general confusion as to who should properly end up united to whom; in which case it is this uncertainty itself which