The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [263]
`The activities of our age are uncertain and multifarious. No single literary, artistic or philosophic tendency predominates. There is a babel of notions and conflicting theories. But in the midst of this general confusion, it is possible to recognise one curious and significant melody, repeated in different keys and by different instruments in every one of the subsidiary babels. It is the tune of our modern Romanticism.'
Aldous Huxley, The New Romanticism (1931)
`Never was any age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling than our own ... the radio and the film are mere counterfeit emotion all the time, the current press and literature the same. People wallow in emotion, counterfeit emotion. They lap it up, they live in it and on it ... and at times they seem to get on very well with it all. And then, more and more, they break down. They go to pieces.'
D. H. Lawrence, Apropos of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929)
A key to understanding the enormous change which has come over storytelling in the past 200 years is to recall that an essential feature of all the archetypal plots is how they show the central figure of the story being inwardly transformed. The stories of Odysseus and Perseus, Aladdin and Jane Eyre, Raskolnikov and Peer Gynt, all tell us how they develop the balance of inner qualities required to bring them to Self-realisation. At root this is what our capacity to imagine stories is about: to show how the inner state of any story's hero or heroine is such that it can either bring them to a happy ending or carry them down to destruction.
In the last chapter we began to explore what happens when a split opens up between a storyteller's ego and his unconscious, that hidden level of the psyche containing the archetypal structures which give stories their shape and meaning. One of the most significant consequences, as the ego takes over, is that all the internal symbolism through which the archetypes operate becomes projected outwards, onto the external world. We no longer see the hero or heroine going through the inner transformation which is the real theme of the archetypal pattern. Their transformation is all in their outward circumstances. In this respect, the story has become subtly detached from its archetypal roots. And this disintegration shows itself in three main ways.
The dark version
The first is the one we have just been looking at: the full `dark version, where a storyteller presents us with a hero trying to act out the archetypal pattern which leads to a happy ending but unable to do so because he is egocentric and dark. Because there is no inner transformation to give him the balance of qualities required to reach the complete happy ending, the logic of storytelling dictates that, like Julien Sorel or Captain Ahab, he must ultimately bring about his own destruction.
The lesser dark version
The second form such a story can take is `the lesser dark version'. This is where a dark or inadequate hero or heroine may seem outwardly to reach their goal; but, again, because they have not gone through the necessary transformation, there is a final twist to the tale which shows us they have not really achieved it. Either they end in some kind of frustration or defeat; or we are in some other way made aware that the story has not been properly resolved.
The sentimental version
There is a third form such a story can take, not always so obvious, which has played a hugely important role in the storytelling of the past 200 years: not least through that medium which so dominated twentieth-century popular storytelling, the cinema. This is `the sentimental version: Superficially, the story may seem to go through the archetypal pattern, complete with a happy ending. But because it has all been presented in outward terms, without any inner transformation, the story has been emptied of its