The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [5]
Of course I could already see that the truth was by no means as simple as those lighthearted references to a limited number of basic stories might imply. Obviously it was not true that every story fits neatly and with mechanical regularity into one or another category of plot: otherwise we should all have noticed the fact long ago, and stories would scarcely be the endlessly varied and fascinating things that they are. There are extensive areas of overlap between one type of plot and another. Indeed, there are many stories which are shaped by more than one `basic plot' at a time (there are even a very small number, including The Lord of the Rings, which include all seven of the plots which give this book its title). There are still other stories which are shaped only by part of such a plot. Again there are others, a great many, which show the story somehow `going wrong, in terms of failing fully to realise the basic plot which lies behind it. As we shall see, the question of how and why stories can go wrong in this way, usually leaving us, the audience, with a dissatisfied sense that something has somewhere gone adrift, provides some of the most significant clues of all as to how stories work and what they are really about.
But the further my investigation proceeded, the more clearly two things emerged. The first was that there are indeed a small number of plots which are so fundamental to the way we tell stories that it is virtually impossible for any storyteller ever entirely to break away from them.
The second was that, the more familiar we become with the nature of these shaping forms and forces lying beneath the surface of stories, pushing them into patterns and directions which are beyond the storyteller's conscious control, the more we find that we are entering a realm to which recognition of the plots themselves proves only to have been the gateway. We are in fact uncovering nothing less than a kind of hidden, universal language: a nucleus of situations and figures which are the very stuff from which stories are made. And once we become acquainted with this symbolic language, and begin to catch something of its extraordinary significance, there is literally no story in the world which cannot then be seen in a new light: because we have come to the heart of what stories are about and why we tell them.
The perception that various basic themes and situations seem to recur through human storytelling is scarcely a new one. I shall end this introduction with a kind of technical note giving a brief background to how, over the past two centuries, a succession of writers, anthropologists, scholars and psychologists have approached this puzzle from many different angles, as they tried to explain why the same basic types of story should be found in the literature, folk tales and myths of different cultures all over the world.
Where this present book approaches storytelling in a quite different way from anything written on this subject before, however, is the extent to which it looks at all kinds of storytelling on the same level. We are not concerned here just with the well-known plays and novels of what is regarded as `serious' literature. We shall be looking at every type of story imaginable: from the myths of ancient Mesopotamia and Greece to James Bond and Star Wars; from central European folk tales to E. T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind; from P. G. Wodehouse to Proust; from the Marx Brothers to the Marquis de Sade and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; from the Biblical story of job to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; from the tragedies of Aeschylus to Sherlock Holmes; from the operas of Wagner to The Sound of Music; from Dante's Divine Comedy to Four Weddings and a Funeral. This is because, when we penetrate to the root of what our impulse to imagine stories is really about, we see there is in fact no kind of story, however serious or however trivial, which does not ultimately spring from the same source: which is not shaped by the same archetypal rules