The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [6]
To arrive at the point where all this can be finally seen in proper perspective, however, it is necessary to travel on a long and complex journey. And before we embark I should set out a brief route-map, so that it will become clear how the different stages of that exploration build on each other in working towards the eventual goal.
This book is divided into four parts.
Part one, `The Seven Gateways To The Underworld', examines each of the seven `basic plots' in turn. At first sight, each is quite distinctive. But as we work through the sequence, we gradually come to see how they have certain key elements in common; and how each is in fact presenting its own particular view of the same central preoccupation which lies at the heart of storytelling.
Part two, `The Complete Happy Ending, looks more generally at what all these main story-types have in common. In particular we find that there are not only basic plots to stories but a cast of basic figures who reappear through stories of all kinds, each with their own defining characteristics. As we explore the values which each of these archetypal figures represents, and how they are related, this opens up an entirely new perspective on the essential drama with which storytelling is ultimately concerned. But we also come to see how there are certain conditions which must be met before any story can come to a fully resolved ending. This leads on in Part three to an investigation of one of the most revealing of all the factors which govern the way stories take shape in the human mind.
The third part of the book, `Missing the Mark, which concentrates almost entirely on stories from the last 200 years, explores how and why it is possible, in a storyteller's imagination, for a story to `go wrong'; or, as we say, `lose the plot. The first two parts of the book have been primarily concerned with those stories which express the archetypal patterns underlying them in a way which enables them to come to a fully resolved and satisfactory ending. In the third section of the book we see how, in the past two centuries, something extraordinary and highly significant has happened to storytelling in the western world. Not only do we look here at such an obvious question as why in recent times storytelling should have shown such a marked obsession with sex and violence. As we look at how each of the basic plots has developed what may be called its `dark' and 'sentimental' versions, we see how a particular element of disintegration has crept into modern storytelling which distinguishes it from anything seen in history before. But this in turn merely reveals one of the most remarkable features of how stories take shape in the human imagination; because we also see how those archetypal rules which have governed storytelling since the dawn of history have in no way changed. In fact these `aberrant' stories not only obey the same rules; they even in themselves provide all the clues to understanding what has gone amiss, and why they cannot come to fully satisfactory endings. They thus show us just how and why in the collective psyche of our culture this element of disintegration should have arisen.
This third part of the book ends with a chapter on what are arguably the two most centrally puzzling stories produced by the Western imagination, Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannos and Shakespeare's Hamlet. Only at this point have we at last completed the groundwork which is necessary to looking at the deepest questions of all. Just why in the course of our biological evolution has our species developed the capacity to create these patterns of images in our heads? What real purpose does it serve? And how do stories relate to what we call `real life'?
These are the questions we look at in the fourth and final section of the book, `Why We Tell Stories; which begins with two very significant types of story which we have not looked at before. This relates myths about the creation of the world and the `fall from innocence' to the evolution of human consciousness and