The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [276]
Equally revealing is the way Star Wars ends on the image of the two heroes walking up together through a roomful of cheering people, This reflects how, in the prevailing ethos of the American way of life, the highest prize may be not to achieve individual maturity but simply to earn the approbation of the crowd, the collective, one's own group, one's fellow citizens. It is again remarkable how many Hollywood movies end, as in This Wonderful Life, on the image of the hero or heroes being acclaimed by a crowd of their fellow-Americans. This profoundly important aspect of the American character originated in the rootless insecurity of a society which carried so much unconscious emotional bruising from the way it was originally forged: from the rebellious desire to escape from the oppressively `grown-up' old world of Europe, and from the psychological one-sidedness of the struggle to impose the white man's will on that vast natural wilderness and on the original inhabitants who lived there. All this has engendered in American culture an endemic immaturity which we see reflected throughout its history, not just in the all-pervasive sentimentality of Broadway musicals and the celluloid dreams of Hollywood, but even in the stories of America's most admired novelists: Melville and Henry James, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer and J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth and John Updike. It is this which helps to explain the remarkable fact that so few stories conceived in America over the past two centuries have ever managed to resolve in an unambiguous image of the fully mature, fully realised Self.
`Before us was a great excavation, not very recent, for the sides had fallen in and grass had sprouted on the bottom ... all was clear ... the cache had been found and rifled: the seven hundred thousand pounds were gone!'
R. L. Stevenson, Treasure Island
`When the Supreme Value and the Supreme Negation are both outside, the soul is void.'
C. G. Jung
Continuing our survey of what happens to the archetypal plots when they are appropriated by the ego, this chapter looks at dark and sentimental versions of the Quest, Voyage and Return and Comedy.
The fundamental archetype of the Quest, as in the Odyssey, shows us the journey of its hero towards a distant goal which, when it is reached, turns out to symbolise his Self-realisation. The inversion of this, as in Moby Dick, shows us a dark hero whose life-journey is dedicated to destroying an outward projection of the Self, bringing about his own self-destruction.
Such a truly dark form is very rare in storytelling. But we can see the essence of the Quest archetype in a number of well-known stories which are shaped around a dark hero's obsessive drive to reach some distant, all-important goal; but which then turns out to be the destruction of some figure symbolising wholeness and `light'.
A powerful example was that early modern novel Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748). Few books have caused more of a stir in the history of literature than this immensely long story, originally published in eight huge instalments, providing an early premonition of the earthquake which, over the century following, was about to shake Western storytelling to its foundations.
The story centres on the obsessive desire of its dashing libertine hero, Lovelace, to seduce the beautiful, virtuous, strong-minded heroine Clarissa. When she is locked away by her family for refusing the man they want her