The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [249]
What we are about to look at, in examining what has happened to storytelling over the past two centuries, is how, in countless modern stories, a fundamental shift has taken place in the psychological `centre of gravity from which they have been told. They have become detached from their underlying archetypal purpose. Instead of being fully integrated with the objective values embodied in the archetypal structure, such stories have taken on a fragmented, subjective character, becoming more like personal dreams or fantasies. Yet what is remarkable, as we shall see, is that in every case the story shows us precisely where this element of disintegration has crept in. And most remarkable of all is the way, even where a story falls short of realising its full archetypal form and purpose, the unconscious laws of storytelling still continue to dictate how it will unfold. It is this which makes the change which has come over storytelling in the modern world so crucial to a proper understanding of how our faculty for imagining stories works; and it is this which forms the theme of the next part of the book.
The Scarlet and the Black: The hero as egotist
To see what happened we may begin by looking at four well-known novels dating from the first half of the nineteenth century.
One of the most famous of the novels produced by the rise of Romanticism was Stendhal's The Scarlet and the Black (1830). When we first meet the young hero, Julien Sorel, he is on the verge of adult life, living at home with his father and brothers in an obscure French provincial town, far from the distant, glamorous centre of France's national life, Paris. Working in the family timber yard, Sorel is scorned and even physically ill-treated by his practical, unimaginative family, not least for his reading of books.
It might seem like the opening of one of those Rags to Riches folk tales which show the persecuted young hero marked out from the rest of his family by the fact that he is a good-hearted little dreamer. But we soon learn that Sorel is not like this at all. Far from being kindly, he is consumed by malevolence ('he hated both his brothers and his father'). He is hugely ambitious and obsessed by Napoleon. He originally dreamed of joining the army, but when a splendid new church is built in the town, with ornate marble columns, he realises that in these peaceful times the Church is a better road to power and position than soldiering. All at once Julien stopped talking about Napoleon. He announced his plan of becoming a priest. 'And immediately he is revelling in `dreams of one day being introduced to beautiful Parisian women, whose attention he would manage to attract by some remarkable feat or other'. All his ambitions are centred on distant Paris, recalling the way in which the far-off city so often appears in stories, drawing the hero towards it as a symbol of the Self.
Already, in the early pages, we have seen how Sorel's fantasies centre round those three familiar aspects of the central goal - winning power and position, union with the opposite sex and the idea of ultimate `Self-realisation' - but only seen through the dark, inverting glass of his all-consuming egotism. We also note that, unlike the fairy-tale hero who has usually lost a father, Sorel is without a mother. There is no feminine influence in his life at all.
Nevertheless, like some fairy-tale hero who is equipped with `charms' or `magic weapons' to enable him to escape any danger, Sorel is also given two attributes which enable him to triumph in any social