The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [93]
An aspect of both these stories very near the heart of Comedy is the dramatic contrast between the role played by the chief masculine and feminine characters. In each story it is a man who is the chief dark figure, abusing his power and spreading disorder and misery in all directions because he is unable to see straight and whole. In each case the other leading male characters - Figaro and Polixenes - also get infected by the confusion and fail to see things straight. It is the feminine characters - Hermione and Perdita, the Countess and Susanna - who remain faithful and unshakeable, standing at the heart of the story for true love and for seeing things straight and whole. And it is not until the men can go through the transformation which softens them and straightens them out, bringing them into harmony with the loving feminine, that the final image of wholeness which rounds off the story can be reached. This is the true significance of `the obscured heroine. So long as the male figures remain egocentric and confused by `darkness, she will remain in the shadows. Whether she is `passive' or `active' (and these feminine pairings, Hermione and Perdita, the Countess and Susanna, each comprise an alliance of both) she is the light at the heart of the story, obscured by the darkness in others. Only when the male characters have eliminated the darkness in themselves can the light represented by the feminine at last shine out to illumine them all.
"`Princess for God's sake!" he exclaimed, trying to stop her. "Princess!" She turned round. For a few seconds they gazed silently into one another's eyes - and what had seemed impossible and remote suddenly became possible, inevitable and very near.'
Nikolai Rostov to Maria Bolkonskaya, War and Peace
More than with any of the other basic plots, it may be tempting to see Comedy as a type of story arrived at by conscious contrivance. Compared with the great primeval shapes of, say, the Quest or the Overcoming the Monster story, with their misty origins in myth and legend, there seems to be something artificial about Comedy. We have already seen how, unlike any of the other basic plots, that of Comedy emerged in historical times and developed to its full extent only in a series of stages. There has certainly been a self-conscious tradition in the writing of comedies for the stage, in a way not true of any other kind of story. The playwrights of the post-Renaissance, such as Shakespeare and Moliere, were very much aware they were reviving a form and conventions established by their Graeco-Roman forerunners. And when we consider such familiar situations and devices of Comedy as `the unrelenting father' or the belated revelation of someone's true identity through tokens or birthmarks, we might be tempted to conclude that later authors were merely writing `in a tradition, consciously drawing on a stockpile of comic conventions bequeathed them by their predecessors.
But to explain the emergence and staying power of the Comedy plot only in this way is to beg two hugely important questions. The first is: why did this particular kind of story establish itself so strongly, over such a long period, as one of the central threads in the literature of Western civilisation? It must have expressed something much deeper than can be accounted for just by the force of convention.
The second question arises when we look at what happened when the Comedy plot, more than ever before, began to move off the stage. How did it eventually come to give rise to stories which seemed to owe little, if anything, to the tradition established by writers for the theatre?
When the first recognisable modern novels began to appear in the eighteenth century, it was perhaps hardly surprising that Comedy should have been one of the plots to which their authors were most obviously drawn. For half a century comedies had been the most prominent