The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [237]
`Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight.'
Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
We end this second part of the book by looking again at the plot of Tragedy. Of the seven plots we looked at in Part One, one stood very obviously as the odd man out. Six lead naturally to a happy ending. Only Tragedy seems to stand at the opposite pole of storytelling, as it brings its central figure to a lonely, violent death. But when we return to it in the context of all that has emerged in recent chapters, we can see what is really going on in a Tragedy in a rather different light.
What is it that brings the hero or heroine of a Tragedy so inexorably to catastrophe? The first people consciously to ask this question were the ancient Greeks; and they had no doubt that all the great tragic figures in their mythology had something profoundly in common. They called it hubris, which we usually interpret as a form of overweaning pride, a reckless arrogance. But the literal derivation of hubris was from the word hyper, meaning `over. It meant a 'stepping over the bounds; a defiance of the cosmic order, that state of perfect balance which ultimately holds the universe together (characterised in the motto `nothing in excess', written up over the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the most sacred spot in the Greek world). By the rule of that same balance, anything which disturbed it would eventually meet with a violent shock as the state of balance and order was restored. The inevitable consequence of hubris was nemesis, from the root nemein, to `allot a due portion, the same root from which sprang nomos, `law. Literally, nemesis was the `due portion' required to restore the equilibrium of the cosmic order when it had been unbalanced by an act of hubris.
But the Greeks went further than this in providing a general answer to the question of why the tragic hero must come to ultimate disaster. As Aristotle put it in a famous passage in the Poetics, there was a specific reason why the heroes and heroines of tragedy - Prometheus, Oedipus, Medea, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra - should fall prey to hubris in the first place. The essence of a tragic hero or heroine, said Aristotle, is that they must not be shown as wholly good or bad, but that they must be shown as being brought from `prosperity to misery' through some `fatal flaw. And the Greek word for this was hamartia, which means literally 'missing the mark, as an arrow fails to reach its target. The fatal flaw in the tragic hero or heroine is that deficiency in their character or awareness which prevents them from `reaching the goal'.'
In other words, the very nature of the `fatal flaw' in these central figures of tragedy is that it is something which renders them unable to `succeed, a word we use in two senses. The first means simply `to be successful, as in reaching a goal of any kind. But we also use the word more precisely in the sense of people succeeding to their parents, succeeding to an inheritance, one generation following or succeeding to another. And through stories we can see how originally our two uses of the word were one. Those who truly `succeed' in life are those who succeed in both senses: they reach the central goal of life which is true maturity, as they develop to the point where they can play their proper role in the succession of one generation to another.
The essence of the tragic hero or heroine, in short, is that they are held back by some fatal flaw or weakness from reaching that state of perfect balance which is presented by stories as the supreme goal of human existence. They are doomed to fall short of the goal because in some way they are stuck in a state of incompleteness or immaturity.
A simple example of this