The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [9]
`Happily such all-embracing theories are now regarded with scepticism. It is no longer felt that any one theory is likely to account satisfactorily for even the majority of the tales. Their well-springs are certainly numerous ... their meanings - if ever they had meanings - are thought to be diverse. Each tale, it is now believed, should be studied separately.' 3
The sigh of relief that one no longer has to think about such difficult matters is almost audible! However, the fundamental riddle remains.
A rather deeper approach to this whole problem in fact began to emerge more than a century ago when the German ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) first put forward the theory that the human mind seems to be so constituted that it naturally works in certain forms or grooves, and round certain basic images. He accounted for the similarities he had discovered in the myths and folk tales of the primitive cultures he had studied by suggesting that such stories were based on what he called elementargedenken or `elemental ideas, which somehow derive from the very nature of the human psyche, and which therefore all human beings have in common.
It was some years later that Sigmund Freud, in the 1890s, began to suggest that a great deal of human behaviour could be explained by the fact that enormous areas of our psychic activity lie in that part of the mind we call the unconscious, below the threshold of our conscious awareness. One of the most obvious ways in which we become aware of the existence of this is through our dreams, which spontaneously present to us sequences of pictures, like fragments of stories, without our being able to intervene consciously in controlling their contents in any way. And Freud was, of course, particularly struck by the parallels he observed between the contents of dreams and the themes of certain myths.
Perhaps in some way such myths were related to the very basis of the way we unconsciously perceive the world: to the inner patterns of our psychic development as individuals? Certainly the celebrated example of the `Oedipal triangle', the perennial battle of the child to cope satisfactorily with the vast, overshadowing psychic presence of its parents, seemed to show a remarkable correspondence between an ancient myth and the experience of countless modern individuals whose problems seemed in large part to derive from this major hurdle on the road to establishing their own healthy, independent psychic identity. Perhaps all the other motifs of myth and folklore could be seen in the same Freudian light, as stories of `rapacious mothers' (Hansel and Gretel), `castration fears' (the sword which breaks) or the `escape from the womb' (Jonah and the whale). After all, this was certainly relating stories to something universally experienced by mankind: our sexuality, our most fundamental human relationships, our memories of birth and fears of death. Over the past 100 years innumerable attempts have been made to interpret myths, folk tales and other stories in this way, from Ernest Jones's essay analysing Hamlet as another example of the Oedipal triangle to Dr Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment (1976) analysing the reasons for the appeal and value of the old fairy tales to the children of today.
But still, as a comprehensive explanation of stories, such an approach seemed far from adequate: even in many instances grotesquely limited. However universal and important our relations with our parents or our sexuality may be, this surely was not the whole explanation of the complex structure of myths and tales all over the world, in all their myriad guises? Was there not a yet deeper level at which the meaning of these tales might be found: not necessarily one which rejected the Freudian explanation in its entirety, but one which