The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [395]
Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh
`The difference between men and animals is that men tell stories.'
Source untraced
At the beginning of this book I quoted that haunting little poem by Robert Frost
`We dance around in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.'
Without in any way wishing to detract from the genius of our great storytellers, if there is one thing we have seen emerging from the past few hundred pages it is the extent to which the stories told by even the greatest of them are not their own. Their skill lies in the power with which they manage to find new outward clothing in which to dress up a theme which is already latent, not only in their own minds but in those of their audience. What we have seen in the first three sections of the book is how stories take shape in the human imagination round certain archetypal patterns and images which are the common property of mankind. Furthermore, at the very deepest level, the essence of the message they are putting across is always the same.
What this points to is something the implications of which are truly awesome. This is the extent to which stories emerge from some place in the human mind which functions autonomously, independent of any storyteller's conscious control. This is not so startling an idea as it might seem, because we are all in a sense familiar with it in the way in which we experience dreams. By definition, the sequences of imagery which make up our dreams are shaped and presented to our conscious awareness (even though we are asleep) by another part of the brain of which we are wholly unconscious. It is true that dreams are more obviously than stories the products of the dreamer's own personal unconscious (although they can often take on a more universal, archetypal dimension); and to compose a story requires a collaboration between the conscious and unconscious levels of the storyteller's mind which cannot apply when we dream. But the real key to understanding stories lies in seeing how they are ultimately rooted in a level of the unconscious which is collective to all humanity; and how the `Secret' which `sits in the middle', giving them their underlying shape and purpose, is always trying to put over the same fundamental point.
As we come to this final part of the book we can at last confront what are perhaps the most interesting questions of all. Why has the evolutionary process developed in us this ability and need to imagine stories? What is its purpose? How does the imaginary world conjured up by storytelling relate to what we call `real life'?
An appropriate starting point from which to answer these questions lies in two specialised types of story we now look at for the first time.
In the beginning
One of the deepest human needs met by our faculty for imagining stories is our desire for an explanatory and descriptive picture of how the world began and how we came to be in it. There is no culture in the world which does not possess at least one great story to account for how the world came into being, and all such stories have certain things in common. But, broadly speaking, they subdivide into three main categories.
The simplest version is that derived from Jewish mythology and set out at the beginning of the book of Genesis. This is untypical because it begins with a conscious power, `God, who masterminds the whole process of creation in a highly systematic and orderly fashion. He is there before everything else, himself alone. He then creates a duality, heaven and earth. Covered in darkness, the earth is `without form and void'. The `Spirit of God' then `moves upon the face of the waters' and calls Light into being (preceding any source of physical light, such as the sun). This highly significant event (never more dramatically portrayed than by the C Major explosion of sound at the start of Haydn's Creation) creates a second duality, between light and dark. God then creates further dualities, between the earth and the sky, land and sea.