The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [429]
All the great comic characters in storytelling are defined by the fact that they are living in an ego-centred dream world, from which they are then brought abruptly down to earth. We see the `foolish knight' Don Quixote, hubristically fantasising that he is slaying monsters with his rusty lance, and constantly having to be brought back to earth by his resolutely commonsensical squire Sancho Panza. We see the gullible Bertie Wooster constantly having to be reconnected to the real world by his shrewd but ever-tactful servant Jeeves. We see Thurber's Walter Mitty spiralling off into one daydream after another until in each case he is brought back to reality with a bump. This is the pattern of countless television situation comedies: the fanciful Tony Hancock being brought to earth by his shrewdly cynical friend Sid James; Captain Mainwaring, the Home Guard commander in Dad's Army, having to be brought to earth by his lugubrious second-in-command, Sergeant Wilson; Sergeant Bilko constantly trying to outwit his colonel and his fellow soldiers with some new money-making scheme and invariably being caught out; Basil Fawlty, constantly trying to preserve his persona as an efficient hotel manager, pretending to his guests that everything is under control, when behind the scenes we see only too clearly it is in chaos.
In each case the central joke of the story is the way we see how the mask keeps slipping, until the denouement when the delusions of the central figure are finally irretrievably exposed. And because the central purpose of Comedy is to show up this two-sidedness of human nature in a playful manner, no one usually ends up getting too badly hurt. Where we see the problem of the persona presented in a much darker light, of course, is in Tragedy. As we saw in Chapter Nine, `The Divided Self', it is a crucial part of the make-up of most tragic heroes and heroines that, consciously or unconsciously, they try to hide the dark side of their nature from the world behind a `light' mask of respectability. This is the two-sidedness so vividly personified in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where the hero's persona and his shadow are actually split into two separate characters. But we can see the same split between the `light' outward persona and the shadowy ego-self behind it in almost any of the central figures in tragedies. And equally we can see it all around us in real life.
Each of us to a greater or lesser degree has an ego-centred `shadow self' which we would like to keep hidden from public view. Although we may continually be aware of it in our own heads, we try to conceal it from other people behind a mask of sociability. But there are occasions when the mask slips, as when someone loses their temper and starts shouting in an uncontrollably ego-centred manner, or is in some other respect caught out acting badly, in a way they would normally wish to hide from the world.
We then see the `dark self' out in the open, in all its unattractive horror. And the essence of all those tragic situations in real life where people bring disaster on themselves is that their `dark self' has taken them over to such a degree that it can no longer be hidden. In this way Comedy and Tragedy are merely looking in different ways at the same aspect of human nature. No one was more keenly aware of this universal feature of human psychology than that master of both types of story, Shakespeare. In Hamlet we hear the hero say of Claudius how `you may smile and smile and be a villain'. In The Merchant of Venice Antonio speaks of the `villain with a smiling cheek ... 0, what a goodly outside falsehood hath'. In Pericles Cleon says `who makes the fairest show