The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [280]
The Quest: The lesser dark and sentimental versions
An early example of the `lesser dark version' of this type of story was one of the most celebrated quests of all: that of the children of Israel as they journeyed out of bondage in Egypt to seek the distant promised land. As recorded in Genesis, this tale has been retold times without number as one of the most inspiring adventures in history, with its miraculous happy ending when the tribes of Israel finally arrive safely in the `land flowing with milk and honey. When we look at the story more closely it is not so simple. From its honoured place in Judaeo-Christian legend, we might imagine that when the Israelites enter the land promised by God it is lying there empty and waiting for them. But, as we learn from the final speech made before his death by their leader Moses (Deuteronomy 7), the future land of Israel is already home to many tribes. In the first part of his speech, Moses recalls the commandments handed down by God on Mount Sinai, including `thou shalt not kill', `thou shalt not steal', `thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods'. But he then dramatically changes tack, telling his followers that when they arrive in the promised land they will find it full of the tribes who already live there: they are to kill them, steal their goods and `show them no mercy'. Those seeming moral absolutes handed down on Sinai are not absolute at all. They apply only within the `in group' of the children of Israel themselves. When it comes to outsiders, no such rules apply. They must be treated absolutely ruthlessly; because on them the Jews have projected the shadow of their own collective egotism.
Sure enough, when they arrive near their goal, they face, like many another group of Quest heroes, a succession of tremendous battles, beginning with the siege of Jericho and ending in the `Battle of the Thirty-One Kings'. At last they establish their sovereignty. But this is no complete happy ending, as the archetype dictates. There is no sign that the children of Israel are going to live happily ever after in their new kingdom. The whole of the rest of their history is to be dominated by other nations and peoples challenging their occupation of that land, beginning with the Philistines and ending with the Roman expulsion of the Jews in the second century AD which was to lead to their diaspora, or scattering, all over the the known world. In the twentieth century, of course, this tragic story was to be acted out all over again, with the reoccupation of Palestine by the Jews of the diaspora, leading first to an uneasy cohabitation with the Palestinians who already lived there and finally, with the setting up of the state of Israel, to their forcible dispossession and suppression.
When, in the original story, the children of Israel arrived at their goal, this could not symbolise a genuine triumph for the values of the Self, because they had collectively projected the archetype out onto the external world, as an expression of that collective ego which must always carry its shadow. Thus the story could never reach a complete and final happy ending. There would always remain that shadow, from which those elements of the whole which had been repressed would continually emerge to haunt them: exactly as was again to be the case in the twentieth century.
A much more domestic example of projecting the Quest archetype out onto the external world can be seen in George Orwell's novel Coming Up For Air (1939). The hero, George Bowling, feels himself trapped in middle age, a loveless marriage, a humdrum job with an insurance firm, a little house in an anonymous London suburb and a life which has become wholly meaningless. He might say, like Dante at the beginning of The Divine Comedy, `midway on the journey of this life, I came to a place where the way was lost'; and like Dante he sets out on a quest to reach paradise. Except that in `Fatty' Bowling's spiritually shrunken world, the heaven he seeks is