The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [3]
If someone says to us `the Matterhorn'... or `a zebra'... or `your kitchen table at home'... or `a dragon breathing fire'... something very peculiar happens. Somewhere inside our heads, the words can trigger off a mental picture of each of these things. No one knows exactly where or how that image is produced or perceived. But we have this capacity to conjure up the inward images not only of places, people and things not present to our physical senses, but even of things, such as that fire-breathing dragon, which have never existed physically at all.
And it is of course this ability to conjure up whole sequences of such images, unfolding before our inner eye like a film, which enables us to have dreams when we sleep, and when we are awake to focus our attention on these mental patterns we call stories.
What this book sets out to show is that the making of these patterns serves a far deeper and more significant purpose in our lives than we have realised: indeed one whose importance can scarcely be exaggerated. And the first crucial step towards bringing this into view is to recognise that, wherever men and women have told stories, all over the world, the stories emerging to their imaginations have tended to take shape in remarkably similar ways.
We are all familiar with the teasing notion that there may be `only seven (or six, or five) basic stories in the world'. It is tantalising not least because, even though this suggestion has not infrequently been put forward in print, its authors never seem to carry it further by explaining just what those stories might be. But it is now more than 30 years since I began to realise that there might seriously be some truth in this idea.
While writing a book on a quite different subject, I found my attention focusing on a small number of particular stories. They included a Shakespeare play, Macbeth; Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita; a 1960s French film, Truffaut's Jules et Jim; the Greek myth of Icarus; and the German legend of Faust. On the face of it, these stories might not seem to have much in common. But what haunted me was the way that, at a deeper level, they all seemed to unfold round the same general pattern. Each begins with a hero, or heroes, in some way unfulfilled. The mood at the beginning of the story is one of anticipation, as the hero seems to be standing on the edge of some great adventure or experience. In each case he finds a focus for his ambitions or desires, and for a time seems to enjoy almost dream-like success. Macbeth becomes king; Humbert embarks on his affair with the bewitching Lolita; Jules and Jim, two young men in pre-First World War Paris, meet the girl of their dreams; Icarus discovers that he can fly; Faust is given access by the devil to all sorts of magical experiences. But gradually the mood of the story darkens. The hero experiences an increasing sense of frustration. There is something about the course he has chosen which makes it appear doomed, unable to resolve happily. More and more he runs into difficulty; everything goes wrong; until that original dream has turned into a nightmare. Finally, seemingly inexorably, the story works up to a climax of violent self-destruction. The dream ends in death.
So consistent was the pattern underlying each of these stories that it was possible to track it in a series of five identifiable stages: from the initial mood of anticipation, through a `dream stage' when all seems to be going unbelievably well, to the `frustration stage' when things begin to go mysteriously wrong, to the `nightmare stage' where everything goes horrendously wrong, ending in that final moment of death and destruction. No sooner had I become aware of this pattern than many other well-known stories began to suggest themselves as following the same general shape. Not surprisingly, these included a good many dramatic and operatic tragedies, such as Romeo and Juliet or Carmen. They included myths and legends, such as that of Don Juan;