The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [416]
Such was the real reason why the ancient Greeks inscribed over the the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the most sacred spot in the Greek world, their belief that the highest value in life was meden agan, `nothing in excess' .9 This grew out of the same intuitive process which had led them to develop their belief in the counterpoint of hubris and nemesis. They were aware that hubris, `stepping over the bounds', represents that imbalance which arises from the inevitable tendency to one-sidedness of the human ego: while nemesis represents that inexorable redressing of balance which ensures that the state of cosmic wholeness will eventually be restored.
The `knowledge' of all this is so deeply imprinted into the human psyche that it unconsciously lies at the heart of storytelling. We cannot imagine stories in any other way. It is precisely to `remind' us of what our limited state of egoconsciousness so easily overlooks that evolution developed in us the capacity to conjure up these patterns of images. And it is only when we begin to understand how this is their real underlying purpose that we can properly begin to explore the relationship between the imaginary world of storytelling and how we live our lives in what we like to call `the real world'. Such is the theme of our next chapter.
`The minority is always right ... the majority is always wrong.'
Ibsen, An Enemy of the People
`So long as one is within a certain phenomenology one is not astonished, and no one wonders what it is all about. Such philosophical doubt only comes to him who is outside the game.'
C. G. Jung, Psychology and National
Problems, Collected Works, Vol. XVIII
One of the hardest things to get straight about stories is their relationship with what we call 'real life' and the `real world' in which we all live. We often hear such dismissive phrases as `that's only a story or `that's just a fairy tale'. When people wish to suggest that something is completely untrue, they say `it's a myth'. The assumption is that what happens in fact and what happens in fiction are so far apart that they are actually opposed to one another.
It is true the relationship between storytelling and real life may not be immediately obvious. But this may be because we are missing the point of what stories really represent. And the main reason for this is that the only instrument we can use to disentangle the true nature of our ability to imagine stories is that from which they originate in the first place, the human psyche. The problem is that the archetypal patterns and laws which shape storytelling are so deeply embedded in our unconscious that our conscious mind finds it hard to recognise them. So instinctive is it to us that stories should take shape in certain ways that we find it almost impossible to stand sufficiently apart from them to ask why this should be so; why, for instance, they should take these forms and not others. Yet once we do manage to make this leap of understanding, we can also begin to see how these same patterns play a huge part in shaping our thinking and our lives in all sorts of ways which have nothing to do with storytelling. Indeed, the real significance of our ability to tell stories is twofold. Firstly, it provides a uniquely revealing mirror to the inner dynamics of human nature. But secondly, by laying bare the unconscious foundations which underlie so much of the way we view the world, this can in turn cast an extraordinarily revealing light on history, politics, religion, philosophy and almost every aspect of human thought and behaviour.
Jack and the Beanstalk: The Marxist and Freudian versions
One of the starting points for my own interest in why we tell stories was a revue sketch staged in London by an American theatre company in the early 1960s. It showed a meeting which had been called in a small middle-American town to discuss a complaint that the copy of Jack and the Beanstalk on the shelves of the local