The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [287]
But we still see many modern comedies where the two elements remain unified, even though, where the desire to make the audience laugh becomes too obviously predominant, as in the novels of Wodehouse or the films of the Marx Brothers, they may persist only in rather uneasy and unequal relationship, with the `love element' retained only as a kind of appendix: an organ surviving beyond the point where anyone can remember what was its original purpose.
Equally we see comedies which manage to retain that original combination of light-hearted humour with romantic love, but where there is no sense at the end of any real access of self-awareness: that fundamental moment of `recognition' in the true comic archetype where we feel the story's centre of gravity finally moving from the claustrophobia of the ego to the liberation of the Self. In Four Weddings and a Funeral we see a group of middle-class young people stumbling through their lives in modern London in a fairly limited state of awareness; trying to work out who they should pair off with; attending each other's weddings; getting drunk (although for once external reality breaks into their muddled haze when one of their number dies, and is revealed to have been a homosexual). We finally see the hero and heroine coming to the climactic moment of `recognition, when they are in a crowded church for his wedding to someone else. In the most embarrassing circumstances they suddenly realise that they are meant for each other after all, with a love they imagine to be so special and unique that it transcends any need to go through the mere outward, social ritual of a wedding. We duly respond in our archetypally programmed way by finding this a touching conclusion. But we hardly have the sense that they have reached that transcendent state of cosmic, selfless union, bringing together a whole community in joy and loving reconciliation, which, at the end of a Shakespearian comedy, can send an audience out of the theatre feeling that they are walking on air and that all the world has been renewed. The hero and heroine of Four Weddings are still the same rather limited, egocentric couple they have been all along. In this sense the film provides yet another illustration of what happens when Comedy is taken over by the ego and turned into only a sentimental vestige of itself.
What we shall see in the next chapter, however, is what happens when the plot of Comedy is both sentimentalised and turns dark at the same time; when it becomes so far removed from its proper roots that we no longer recognise it as related to Comedy at all. Yet in this guise, as we shall see, it helped shape some of the most celebrated stories of our modern civilisation.
`Don Giovanni ... is the most ambiguous of hero-villains. The pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love, which had once seemed so simple and lifegiving, have become complex and destructive; and his refusal to repent, which makes him heroic, belongs to another phase of civilisation.'
Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (1967)
As with the other plots it might seem a contradiction in terms that Tragedy could be viewed through the eyes of the ego, since the whole purpose of this archetype is to show what happens when a hero or heroine gives way to the ego-centred part of themselves. We see them going through the inexorable pattern which leads to their destruction. But when we see this pattern portrayed by storytellers like Shakespeare or Tolstoy, we see it presented objectively, viewed from the detached standpoint of the Self. We may look on Lear or Anna Karenina with pity, as they are drawn down to their doom. But we are in no doubt that they have been