The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [75]
5. Thrilling Escape and return: Just when the threat closing in on the hero or heroine becomes too much to bear, they make their escape from the other world, back to where they started. At this point the real question posed by the whole adventure is: how far have they learned or gained anything from their experience? Have they been fundamentally changed, or was it all `just a dream'?
Again in the Voyage and Return story we see a parallel to that underlying structure we observed in the earlier plots. The story begins with the hero or heroine in that limited or incomplete state which leads to the initial sense of constriction as they are plunged into their adventure. This is followed, as they explore the new world they find themselves in, by a sense of expansion and widening horizons. But then, as the shadow approaches, there is a new sense of constriction. This eventually leads us up to the story's climax, where the sense of constriction is at its most acute; and here at last, if the story is to come to a full happy ending, we see the hero going through a life-changing reversal. At the opposite end of the spectrum, as in the stories by Kafka, are those rare examples of the Voyage and Return story in its darkest, most negative form, where the hero remains trapped in the other world, never coming back at all. Much more common, however, is the lesser dark form of the story where the hero or heroine do emerge again, but having learned nothing; and often having left behind in the other world some figure of the opposite sex who has become important to them. The complete happy ending is reserved for those stories, like The Golden Ass or Robinson Crusoe, where the hero has been fundamentally changed by his experience: from that limited, self-centred, potentially dark figure we saw at the beginning to the mature, fulfilled, light figure he has become by the end. And here, for the first time, we have seen a type of story which, to reach a fully resolved ending, requires its central figure to go through such an inner switch from darkness to light. We are now about to move on to another type of plot where this transformation is so central that the story cannot exist without it. Here we move firmly back into the realm of the complete happy ending as we have seen it in earlier plots, with a hero and heroine joyfully united; providing some of the most sunlit and glorious conclusions to stories in all literature.
`Jack shall have Jill, naught shall go ill; The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well'.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Figaro is planning to marry Susanna, but first he has to win the approval of his employer, the Count Almaviva, who has his eye on Susanna himself, much to the chagrin of his wife the Countess, who is adored by the young Cherubino, who is in turn loved by Barbarina. Just to make things even more straightforward, it also seems that Figaro is already contracted to marry the elderly Marcellina - until it is discovered that she is his long-lost mother.
As soon as we are presented with a situation like this we know we are faced with a type of story unlike any other and one which must be numbered high among the more improbable concoctions of the human imagination. We are entering a world of bizarre conventions, many of them scarcely altered in over 2000 years: the superficial spirit of which was perhaps best summed up by Groucho Marx when, in A Night in Casablanca, he was playing the new manager of a luxury hotel. Summoning his staff, he announces that he is going to change round the numbers on all the rooms. `But the guests' protests one of his employees, `they will go into the wrong rooms. Think of the confusion.' `Yeah' replies Groucho, `but think of the fun:
Confronted by the kind of confusion which prevails at the beginning of The Marriage of Figaro, we may not be entirely surprised if this is made still more complicated by such further familiar sources of misunderstanding as:
• characters donning disguises or swapping identities;
• men dressing up as women, or vice