The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [7]
The last two chapters, the longest in the book, attempt to use all we have learned about storytelling to reinterpret the psychological evolution of mankind since the dawn of civilisation. The first, `Of Gods And Men, takes the story from the cavepaintings of Lascaux up to the French Revolution and the rise of Romanticism. The final chapter takes the story through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to the present day, ending with the film-version of The Lord of the Rings and the second Gulf War of 2003. The book then ends with a brief epilogue touching on one of the greatest stories ever written, Plato's Parable of the Cave.
By the time we have reached this point in exploring the real reasons why we tell stories, I hope I shall have conveyed something of why there can be few more important mysteries left for humanity to unravel on this earth.
WHY DO SIMILAR STORIES APPEAR ALL OVER THE WORLD? A HISTORICAL NOTE ON PREVIOUS APPROACHES TO THIS QUESTION
The earliest instance which has come to light of an author observing that similar stories and situations may be found throughout literature appears in the late eighteenth century, in James Boswell's biography of Dr Samuel Johnson. In one of those poignant references to projects which Johnson talked of during his life but never got round to completing, a friend recalled to Boswell how the great man had once mentioned his intention to write a book showing (in the words quoted at the beginning of this Prologue):
`how small a quantity of REAL FICTION there is in the world; and that the same images, with very little variation, have served all the authors who have ever written.'
Dr Johnson was one of the best-read men of his age. He was familiar with virtually the whole of the surviving literature of classical times, not to mention most of the outstanding plays and novels written since the Renaissance (at least in English). It seems clear that his sharp and capacious mind had been so struck by the constant recurrence of certain images and situations in storytelling that he hoped one day to think about the matter more systematically. Alas, he leaves us with nothing more than this tantalising clue as to how far his observations might have taken him.
Another well-read near-contemporary of Johnson's whose thoughts seem to have turned in the same direction was Goethe (1749-1832), who several times in his Conversations With Eckermann touches on the same question: most notably in the remark often quoted since:
`Gozzi maintained that there can be but thirty-six dramatic situations; Schiller took great pains to find more, but was unable to find even as many as Gozzi.' 2
Then, from quite another direction, in the second half of the nineteenth century, came the startling discovery by the growing army of anthropologists, ethnologists and students of folklore of the extent to which the same themes and motifs appeared through the myths and folktales of the entire world. It was not just that, as Sir James Frazer showed in The Golden Bough (1890), there were remarkable similarities in the central religious myths of different cultures, such as the idea of the god who dies and is reborn (as early as 1871 George Eliot's Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch had been engaged on `a great work' to show that `all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed': again, we are not given the slightest clue as to why Casaubon might have come to such a notion). The really