The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [516]
The following year I gave a talk on Hamlet and the underlying pattern of Tragedy at my old school, Shrewsbury, and parts of that lecture have been incorporated into Chapter 30 as the oldest surviving chunk of the book's final text. Within 18 months, having filled a pile of notebooks with synopses, I had completed a first draft outline of `the seven basic plots, already recognising two general principles on which it would be advisable to choose examples to illustrate the theme.
Firstly, to convey the `universality' of these recurring patterns behind storytelling it would be necessary to include as wide a range of story-types as possible, from myths and folk tales, through the plays and novels of `great literature', to the Hollywood films, thrillers and science fiction of the present day. But, secondly, to prevent the argument becoming clogged with endless obscure plot-summaries, it would be desirable wherever possible to use stories which were already familiar to the greatest number of potential readers. This would means keeping in general within the Western cultural tradition of storytelling, only mentioning instances outside it where this was necessary to underline the ubiquity of a particular theme.
One enormous debt I owed at this early stage was to the Penguin Classics series, launched in 1944 by E. V. Rieu whose translation of the Odyssey was a particular inspiration for this book, and co-edited at this time by Betty Radice (who, as it happened, had written me a very generous letter about The Neophiliacs). More than 300 of these volumes have lined the shelves around my desk throughout the writing of this book, ranging all through the ages from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the novels and plays of the nineteenth century. Without the easy access to world literature they made possible, it would have been infinitely harder to carry out the basic groundwork for this project (just as, decades later, it would have been difficult to track down detailed summaries of many films without the blessings of the Internet).
It soon became clear that my first draft was only an inadequate overture. Through the 1970s I was having to get more closely to grips with how far the symbolism of storytelling derived from archetypal structures within the human unconscious, and here I benefited hugely from reading through the works of Jung; although I could already see that a proper understanding of stories might make it possible to develop his intuitive approach to the workings of the psyche into something rather more systematically structured than the form in which he had left it. By the end of that decade I was well into a second draft, enough to begin discussing the book with potential publishers, one of whom, Richard Cohen, was to remain tirelessly encouraging for several years.
Only when this draft itself became bogged down in chaotic detail did I finally start again on what was to be the third and final draft. Athough this emerged with painful slowness, by the end of the 1980s I had completed the introductory chapters on the `seven basic plots' (constituting most of Part One of the final version), foolishly thinking that I had almost finished the book. One particular benefit of these years was the opportunity to study in detail just how my two young sons took to being told stories, watching out for what it is, particularly in early years, which first draws us all into the world of storytelling, and what are the patterns a child is unconsciously looking for. But at the end of this second decade, I had no idea how much work was still to come.
By the mid-1990s