The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [60]
Nevertheless, just as we earlier saw a'dark' variation on the Rags to Riches story, so there are `dark' versions of the Quest. Perhaps the most obvious example in all literature is Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851). The central figure, Captain Ahab, sets out on his obsessive quest across the oceans of the world to find the almost supernatural great white whale. Ahab looks on Moby Dick, as other quest heroes look on the Holy Grail or the Golden Fleece or the Firebird, as a prize of infinite value, worth any effort or sacrifice to seek out. Certainly the mysterious, numinous whale is an archetypal symbol for the essence of life. But there is nothing life-enhancing or light about the spirit in which Ahab pursues his goal. His only desire is to destroy it. He is not on the side of life but opposed to it. This is why the voyage which makes up his quest is so strained and sinister, fraught with omens of disaster. And when he does finally find the whale, it is of course Ahab himself who is slain. The reasons for this we shall explore more fully in Chapter 21. But once again, by those inexorable rules which govern the way in which stories unfold, all the clues as to why Ahab's quest can only end in disaster are there in this very sombre tale.
`THE DIVERTING HISTORY OF JOHN GILPIN, showing how he went further than he intended and came safely home again.'
Title page of William Cowper's poem
`You know, coming home and finding things all right, though not quite the same.'
Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
`I approached the very gates of death and set foot on Proserpine's threshold, yet was permitted to return ... at midnight I saw the sun shining as if it were noon; I entered the presence of the gods of the underworld.'
Apuleius, The Golden Ass
What do the stories of Alice in Wonderland or Goldilocks and the Three Bears have in common with H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and a great deal of other science fiction? What has Beatrix Potter's little nursery tale of Peter Rabbit in common with Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; or Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with the parable of the Prodigal Son; or the Greek myth of Orpheus's journey to the underworld with the film Gone with the Wind?
There is a second plot based on a journey, quite different from the Quest. It has inspired such an extraordinary range of stories that it might seem impossible that most of them could have anything in common - apart from the fact that they include some of the most haunting and mysterious tales in the world. This is the plot we may call the Voyage and Return.
The essence of the Voyage and Return story is that its hero or heroine (or the central group of characters) travel out of their familiar, everyday `normal' surroundings into another world completely cut off from the first, where everything seems disconcertingly abnormal. At first the strangeness of this new world, with its freaks and marvels, may seem diverting, even exhilarating, if also highly perplexing. But gradually a shadow intrudes. The hero or heroine feels increasingly threatened, even trapped: until eventually (usually by way of a `thrilling escape') they are released from the abnormal world, and can return to the safety of the familiar world where they began.
There are two obvious categories of story where the Voyage and Return plot is particularly familiar. The first is that type stretching back to the dawn of story telling which describes a journey to some land or island beyond the confines of the known or civilised world. The other describes a journey