The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [515]
Many of these new individual organisms might conclude that their only function in existing was to live separately from that totality of life from which they had emerged, and to enjoy the pleasures of gratifying their instincts until the time came for them to be extinguished. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Others, however, might look on the world and the universe into which they had been born with a sense of holy awe, as the miraculous totality of which their own individual consciousness was just a fleeting, miniscule expression.
The cosmic mind which had originally set all this in motion had at last created an organism which could, however dimly, share a tiny bit of its own consciousness; which could become aware of its own transcendent existence; which could sense that behind all creation and all the universe was one unifying power which bound it all together, as one substance, one structure, one all-connecting impulse and one spirit which, because it transcended matter, was eternal: that four-in-one quaternity which the human mind was to translate into the terms of its own understanding as body, mind, heart and soul. And one way in which it would do this was by imagining it in terms of stories.
In the end we are all of us in a sense experts on stories, because nothing is closer to us than to see the world in the form of stories. Not only are our heads full of stories all the time; we are each of us acting out our own story throughout our lives. Outwardly male or female, we are each of us, like David Copperfield, cast as the hero of the story of our own life - just as we are equally its heroine. And the aim of our life, as we see from stories, is that those two should become one, to `live happily ever after.
Wherever possible, I have tried in this book to supply the original thought behind all the terms we use when we are talking about stories: hubris, nemesis, denouement, catastrophe. The only words for which no dictionary seems to provide the original root idea are in a way the most important of all: those words `hero' and `heroine' themselves. But, after many years working on this book, I am convinced that, lost in the mists of history, they must be closely related in some way to our word `heir'. In other words, the hero or the heroine is he or she who is born to inherit; who is worthy to succeed; who must grow up as fit to take on the torch of life from those who went before.
Such is the essence of the task laid on each of us as we come into this world. That is what stories are trying to tell us.
When in the autumn of 1969 it was first decided that I should write this book, I had little idea that 34 years would elapse before it was finished. To spend half a lifetime writing a single book is obviously ridiculous, and my first debt is to all those people during the decades between who, when told that I was working on a book on `the basic plots of storytelling, greeted the idea that anyone should attempt such a project with such enthusiasm. Their warm response gave me more encouragement than they can have known; even though, as the years went by, not a few began to express a suspicion that, like Dr Casaubon's `key to all mythologies', my efforts would never see the light of day.
The idea for the book originated when I was working on a book called The Neophiliacs, analysing the changes which had taken place in English life