The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [523]
1. Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp, from Tales of The Thousand And One Nights, translated by N. J. Dawood, Penguin Classics edition (1955).
2. Puss In Boots, translated by Robert Samber (1729) from the French version of the traditional folk tale published by Charles Perrault in Histoire ou Contes du Temps Passe (1695), and reprinted in The Classic Fairy Tales by Peter and Iona Opie, OUP (1974).
3. The History of Richard Whittington, Of His Lowe Byrthe, His Great Fortune, published anonymously in 1605.
4. We may note that when The Benny Goodman Story came to be made in 1956, the real-life event on which the scriptwriters chose to conclude the story, the Carnegie Hall concert of 1938, had taken place 18 years earlier. In other words, the special demands of fiction had taken over from factual biography, to provide them with a 'fairy tale ending' - the hero winning the `Princess' and succeeding to the `kingdom'; even though this meant omitting from the story everything which, in real life, had happened to Goodman subsequently. Such is the power of the underlying archetype to dictate the shape of a story.
5. Robert Irwin points out in The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994) that the story of Aladdin first appeared in the French translation of Les Mille et Une Nuits published in Paris by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1715. Before this there is no record of the story, so its origins remain a mystery.
1. There is sometimes a variation to this opening in versions of the Quest story based on the search for a buried treasure. As in Treasure Island, there is not necessarily the sense of any enormous threat looming up to force the hero and his companions to embark on their journey. But this is replaced in creating a sense of compulsion by the fact that the drive to reach the treasure becomes a race. In Treasure Island, as in other Quests based on a treasure-hunt, such as the films It'sA Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or Raiders of the Lost Ark, the chief source of suspense driving the plot forward is the realisation that more than one group of people are trying to reach the treasure at the same time. The heroes have `dark rivals' for their goal, like the Nazi treasure-hunters in Spielberg's film, desperate to find the lost ark for their own sinister reasons. In It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World several competing groups of motorists race each other across California to see who can first reach a buried cache of money. The same is true in Treasure Island, where much of the plot centres round who will reach the treasure first: the hero and his friends, or the pirate gang, led by the treacherous, one-legged Long John Silver, who becomes the story's chief `monster'. Even so we still see in the opening scenes of Stevenson's novel the setting up of that brooding air of menace which is familiar at the start of an archetypal Quest story, with the sinister arrival at the remote Cornish inn of Black Dog and Blind Pew. This sets up a powerful sense of threat, even before we learn of the existence of the treasure.
2. We shall not follow The Lord of The Rings in this chapter because its complex story is not based exclusively on the plot of the Quest. It is analysed in detail in Chapters 19 and 34.
3. There is a curious echo of the `journey through the underworld' in King Solomon's Mines. When the hero and his companions are at last on the verge of arriving in the land they have been journeying towards, they have to spend a night in a frozen cave high up on the mountain pass. When they wake in the morning, they find they have been sleeping in company with the perfectly-preserved corpse of the sixteenth-century Portugese explorer, whose ancient map has been