The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [415]
Nothing is more basic to the processes of human thinking than how we divide everything into oppositions between one thing and another. We orientate ourselves through the world by speaking of up or down, forward or backwards, left or right, over or under, long or short, heavy or light, hot or cold, dry or wet, soft or hard, future or past, good or bad, light or dark, alive or dead. So fundamental is this dualism to the way our consciousness works that we are scarcely aware of what an omnipresent part it plays in our thinking. And this duality is of course one of the crucial ways in which we establish and define our own identity, because we are constantly dividing the world into groups and entities which make us aware that we belong on one side of the line rather than the other. We recognise our own identity in sensing our difference from the `others:
Each of us is profoundly aware, for instance, that we are either male or female. We are aware that we belong to one country rather than all the rest, to one part of that country, to one city, town or village, to one family. This sense of belonging to one place or group rather than others, and all the loyalties it brings with it, obvi ously plays a large part in building up our sense of who we are and how we fit in on this earth. But the most fundamental division of all is that which gives each of us a sense of our own individual identity, separate from everyone and everything else in the world. This is the division which, steming from our ego-consciousness, we again experience to a degree unique in the animal kingdom. And it is this division which more than anything else the patterns of storytelling are designed to overcome, as they work towards a point where the opposites can become reconciled and transcended.
This is why nothing is more central to the way in which stories shape themselves in the human unconscious than the idea of bringing that which is unbalanced and incomplete to a final state of balance and completion. This is why stories are concerned with reconciling dualities, such as masculine and feminine, `above the line' and `below the line; ego and Self, in all that they symbolise. This is also why in so many stories we see the need for the hero or heroine to tread a path between two opposites, each of which is negative, inadequate or wrong in its own way.
One of the greatest problems posed to us by the partial nature of our consciousness is the difficulty of judging correctly the point of balance between opposing viewpoints. When we see two people locked in bitter dispute, almost invariably neither is wholly right. Each may be partly right and partly wrong. The truth lies not so much at some halfway point between them as in some third position, from which their opposing views can be seen in a wider and clearer perspective. Again, as with the archetypes themselves, almost everyone and everything in the human world presents both light and dark aspects. Yet it is only too natural to us to oversimplify: to see only the light or only the dark. The truth in human affairs almost invariably lies not on one side or the other of a set of opposites, but in some third position which transcends them both.
Again and again in stories we see that deadly division between two opposing figures, each in their own way `one-sided'; such as when we see the heroine having fallen into the clutches of a villain or monster, the `light feminine' in the grip of the `dark masculine'. We know that such an impasse can only be resolved by the intervention of a third figure, the hero, representing the balance of qualities which can rise above it. Such is the subtlest message of that archetypal `rule of three'. The way of growth, allowing a story to reach a happy ending, lies not just in taking a middle way between two inadequate extremes; it lies