The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [33]
In other words, the inmost rhythm of our experience of the story is of an initial sense of constriction, followed by a phase of relative enlargement, followed by a more serious constriction. Then the story works up to its climax, when the threatening pressure on the hero is at its greatest. This is released in a final, much deeper act of liberation, coupled with the sense that something of inestimable and lasting value has been won from the darkness.
Such is the underlying structure of most Overcoming the Monster stories. But, as we shall see, this fundamental rhythm is so central to the way we tell stories that we find it, in different guises, almost all through storytelling.
We can now move on to our second plot.
`Though for the moment K. was wretched and looked down on, yet in an almost unimaginable and distant future he would excel everybody.'
Franz Kafka, The Castle
Again and again in the storytelling of the world we come across a certain image which seems to hold a peculiar fascination for us. We see an ordinary, insignificant person, dismissed by everyone as of little account, who suddenly steps to the centre of the stage, revealed to be someone quite exceptional.
An obscure little squire accompanies his master up to London for the solemn ceremonies surrounding the choice of a new king. A mighty stone has appeared in St Paul's churchyard, with a sword fixed in it and the inscription that anyone who can pull out the sword shall be king. All the great men of the nation try and fail. But to everyone's astonishment the unknown young squire steps forward and removes the sword effortlessly. He becomes King Arthur, the greatest king his country has ever known.
A little ungainly duckling, quite different in appearance from all his brothers and sisters, miserable at being ridiculed for his size and clumsiness, sets out into the world where he sees a sight which takes his breath away - some great white birds, more beautiful than anything he has ever known. They are swans, but they fly away for the winter, leaving the duckling more miserable than ever. Finally spring comes, and he see three swans on a lake. He swims towards the `kingly' birds, fearing that, like everyone else, they will only mock him for his ugliness. He lowers his head in apprehension and catches sight of his reflection in the water. To his astonishment and joy, he sees that, without knowing it, he has become a swan himself - in the words of an onlooker, `the most beautiful of all'.
A dirty, ragged little Cockney flower-seller, treated by passers-by almost as refuse, is picked up in the streets by a distinguished professor of phonetics. Hidden away from the world, she is scrubbed clean, given fine clothes and her tortured vowels are gradually moulded into the accents of the aristocracy. A few months later, she is brought into public for the first time, when she is taken to a grand ball, attended by the cream of London's fashionable society. As she enters, there are gasps of astonishment at her beauty and bearing, and she is taken by many present to be a princess.
Few images in the popular storytelling of our time have fixed themselves more vividly in the mind than the moment when Clark Kent, the weedy, bespectacled newspaper reporter, is suddenly transformed into `Superman, the all-powerful righter of the world's wrongs'; or when Popeye, the shambling, ineffectual sailorman, swallows his tin of spinach and swells up into a bulging-muscled hero, effortlessly despatching the bully who has been forcing his attentions on Popeye's helpless girlfriend. Few cliches of old pre-feminist Hollywood were so well-tried as the moment when the handsome hero removed the plain, bespectacled girl's glasses, let down her tightly-coiled hair, gazed at her with awe and exclaimed `Gee ... but