The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [40]
Another form of the Rags to Riches theme particularly beloved by Hollywood has been the story of the poor, struggling artist, inventor or scientist who for long is scorned by an uncomprehending world - but who is eventually recognised as a genius and ends in a blaze of universal acclaim (usually in fond embrace with the wife or girl he loves, who alone has stood by him during the years of rejection and apparent failure).
Typical of this genre was The Benny Goodman Story, made in 1956 about the life of the 1930s bandleader. And although the film was based, as they say, on `a true story, it is fascinating to see how the scriptwriters chose to arrange their material to make it into a satisfactory story for the screen.
A poor Jewish boy, born into the Chicago slums in the early years of the twentieth century, takes up the clarinet and is early spotted by his wise old white-haired teacher to have remarkable talent. Growing up in the `Jazz Age' of the 1920s, he is drawn to the unconventional new music and eventually, after various struggles and rebuffs, becomes leader of his own band. He enjoys initial success, rather as Cinderella enjoys her initial moments of success at the ball. But then comes the crisis. The band's new brand of `swing music' has developed beyond the point where public taste seems ready to follow. As the musicians travel on a make-or break tour across America, audiences dwindle, bookings fall off, money runs out and it seems the orchestra will have to disband. Failure stares Goodman in the face. When they reach California, they have just one last engagement left, at the Palomar ballroom in Los Angeles. A huge crowd of dancers has turned up, but when the band begins to play straight dance music, they seem bored. It seems like the final moment of rejection, until in a final gesture of defiance, Goodman decides to go down fighting, by switching to the hottest music his musicians can play. The dancers break off from dancing and cluster round the bandstand, simply to listen. Suddenly cheering breaks out. It is clear that `swing' is just what America has been waiting for. Headlines pour across the screen recording the band's success, until the film ends with Goodman winning the hand of his `Princess, his rich young impresario's beautiful upper-class sister, while the band faces its final test, a concert in Carnegie Hall, the first time a mere jazz orchestra has ever been permitted into the hallowed citadel of America's classical music. A close-up shows the feet of the heroine's elderly, conventional, rich parents surreptitiously beginning to tap to the rhythm of the music. The entire audience rises to give Goodman an ovation. The slum-born hero has triumphantly won his way into the `kingdom'. 4
We are now in a position to see how, as it unfolds in the mind of the storyteller, a story based on the Rags to Riches plot tends to take on a certain, quite specific shape. The longer and more fully developed such a story becomes, the more apparent this is likely to be, and this may be illustrated in some detail by way of two last examples. On the face of it, these stories could scarcely seem more dissimilar: one is the ancient Middle Eastern folk tale of Aladdin; the other a wellknown nineteenth-century English novel, Jane Eyre. But as we follow the essence of what is happening to the central figure in each of these stories, we begin to see clearly what this structure of the Rags to Riches plot is really about.
The story of Aladdin and His Enchanted Lamp supposedly comes from that famous collection of Middle Eastern tales The Thousand and One Nights dating back to the eighth century (although it has recently been suggested that this story might have been written much later).5
The story begins with Aladdin as an unruly little good-for-nothing orphan, living alone with his mother in a great city. His father is dead and nothing can be done to control him. But one day a mysterious `Sorcerer' appears, claiming to be the dead father's long-lost brother. Aladdin's new `uncle' makes a great show of taking a fatherly