The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [296]
In that typical cult film of the early 1960s, Jules et Jim, we are not expected to view the obsession of the two young heroes with the fey, beguiling Temptress who leads them on to destruction as simply a sign of their weakness and immaturity; as showing how they lack either masculine strength of character or feminine understanding. The film's whole appeal was that the two good-looking young men were seen as glamorous and attractive, unshackled by bourgeois convention, losing themselves in a heady, wild, romantic adventure of precisely the kind the 1960s liked to fantasise about. And when the dark anima finally drives Jim off the bridge to their deaths, leaving Jules to stare bewilderedly at their ashes, we are meant to share his incomprehension; thinking how sad that malign fate should have brought such a terrible end to such a beautiful, if confusing dream.
In that typical cult film of the later 1960s, Bonnie and Clyde, we are not expected to view the young hero and heroine who egg each other on into a life of crime `for kicks' as being led by their immaturity into something horrifyingly destructive and evil. We are invited to see their driving around the sunlit roads of America in vintage cars, occasionally stopping to rob a bank or blast off at someone who has got in their way, as another typical, wild, exhilarating, sixties-style adventure. When we finally see their car and bodies being riddled with bullets in dream-like slow motion, we are meant to think how sad that such daring defiance of humdrum normality in the name of freedom should have had to come to such a depressing end.
The point of what happens when the archetype of Tragedy is taken over by the human ego is not that it ceases to be tragic. It is that the balance of the story becomes inverted. Instead of presenting an objective portrayal of how the imbalance of egotism ultimately works to bring about its own destruction so that cosmic balance can be restored, the story now has no interest in seeing how the wider whole is restored. We do not see, as at the end of a tragedy like Macbeth, that solemn mood of celebration as the world returns to peace and normality after the terrible irruption of darkness has been purged. Its concern is solely internal, with what is going on inside the tragic pattern itself. Which is why, at the end of a romantic tragedy like Young Werther or Bonnie and Clyde, or the Ring cycle, or a Verdi or Puccini opera when we have seen the anima brought to her cataclysmic end, there is nothing left but a very lonely and silent darkness. Because, outside the world of the ego which has shaped such a tale, there is nothing else.
Rebirth: A dark and sentimental version
Again it might seem a contradiction that the ego could take over the plot of Rebirth, since this is concerned with showing how its central figure moves from being centred on the ego to the deeper centre of the Self. The only example we shall look at here manages to present the Rebirth theme in both dark and sentimental guise at the same time.
By the time Ian Fleming came in 1963 to write his last completed James Bond novel, You Only Live Twice, the books he had been turning out every year for a decade had already made him rich. When his stories began to be adapted for the screen, with Dr No (1962) and From Russia With Love (1963), they