The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [514]
One day, I believe, it will eventually be seen that for a long time one of the most remarkable failures of our scientific approach to understanding the world was not to perceive that our urge to imagine stories is something just as much governed by laws which lay it open to scientific investigation as the structures of the atom or the genome.
The paradox, as is mirrored by Plato's Parable, is that it is the very nature of our limited ego-consciousness which stands in the way of our seeing how much stories can teach us about the limitations on our consciousness.
That is why among those who will unconsciously experience the greatest resistance to the approach put forward by this book are those critics and specialists in `literature' who are already sure that they know what stories are about. Many of the interpretations of individual stories in these pages will contradict views they have already formed and would find it hard to abandon.
But in the end, however inadequately I may have argued the case, the general approach to stories set out in this book will come to be widely accepted, simply because it opens up our understanding of why we tell stories in a way which makes it scientifically comprehensible. However many examples the hypothesis is tested against, the laws hold. These are the shapes around which our mind creates stories. This is why we respond to them in the way we do.
Obviously a crucial moment in the narrative we have been following is the change which has come over storytelling in the past 200 years. It is the very fact that so many stories have `lost the plot' in this way, reflecting such a fundamental psychic shift in our culture, which has made it possible to see much more clearly just what is the purpose of the archetypal patterns underlying stories when they are functioning properly. In Dr Salk's words, `it is where life's normal structures are disturbed that we come to know the essential laws of the species'.
There is nothing with which stories are more intimately concerned, as we have seen, than the conflict between `dark' and `light'. Yet, in the words quoted earlier from Laurence Whistler, `the light needs the dark to become articulate'. The very reason why we see the world in terms of this contrast stems from the fact that our consciousness has become separated from its instinctive unity with nature. And certainly in some respects, the further we move away from that unity, as the history of the past two centuries shows, the more confused and lost we become. But the more we experience the darkness and spiritual void this leads to, the easier in some ways it becomes to recognise what it is we have become exiled from. As we explore the shallowness and limitations of the world into which we are unconsciously led by the darkness of the human ego, the more consciously we can appre date the `light, in ways which would never have been possible had we not been separated from it.
Dante needed to travel down to the very lowest point of hell before he could begin the climb up to Paradise. Odysseus needed to go through the hell and darkness of his twelve ordeals before he was ready to reclaim his `other half' and his kingdom. Christ needed to die in his `ego self' before he could be resurrected in the Self that is eternal. In our own time, those Soviet `dissidents' needed to endure the Communist tyranny of lies at its worst, before they could become inwardly strong enough to recognise the truth.
Whatever the power that created the universe, what more extraordinary act of the imagination could there be than that it should create a tiny part of that material universe which took on its own separate