The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [99]
But of course War and Peace does not end there. In Tolstoy's Epilogue we are carried forward a few years to be given a glimpse of the family life of the two couples after their marriage. Earlier authors of novels based on the Comedy plot, such as Fielding and Jane Austen, were able to remain within the archetypal framework and to end their stories quite happily on the great symbolic image of the wedding. But Tolstoy was so preoccupied with the `realistic' and historical element in his story that he could not resist wanting to see what happened next, how the story continued after the archetypal ending; with the result that, as he explored the strains and disagreements which would inevitably be part of that aftermath, he was in danger of dissipating the impact of that final image of unity and life renewed, by allowing his story to peter out on an unresolved image of new disunity and uncertainty.)
This was merely one instance of the problems which were beginning to surround the Comedy plot in the mid-nineteenth century as it moved away from its original forms of expression. It was not that the plot was changing its structure; simply that it was being put to purposes which were threatening to detach it from its original archetypal foundations. And this was leading to a new phase in the history of the plot which has, in the past century or so, drastically altered its role in Western storytelling.
The plot burlesqued
Ever since its beginnings one of the most remarkable things about Comedy was the way it had preserved a balance between the superficially light-hearted presentation of apparently quite implausible events and a core of fundamental seriousness. Part of the miracle of the comedies of Aristophanes or Shakespeare or Mozart is that, while constantly provoking their audiences to laughter, they manage to explore some of the deepest issues of human life. But in the nineteenth century, as Comedy moves into new forms of expression, there are signs that this balance is being lost. Tolstoy would never have thought of War and Peace as a'comedy', even though unconsciously he was drawing on the archetypal outlines of the ancient plot, because he was emphasising its serious, `realistic' element to create one of the greatest and most profound novels ever written. And shortly we shall look at what was happening in the other direction, as Comedy began to be used in forms which preserved the lightheartedness while losing its core of seriousness, a tendency which first showed itself on the stage.
On the stage, in fact, Comedy had by the mid-nineteenth century fallen into relative eclipse since its prominence in the previous century. In 1868 (as it happens, the year Tolstoy began publishing War and Peace), it made a conspicuous reappearance in a form which seemed to owe little to the tradition of the earlier operatic comedy of Mozart and Rossini. Wagner's Die Meistersinger is a unique opera. It is unmistakably shaped by the plot and conventions of Comedy (even to the extent of having a comic `midnight assignation scene' where another woman impersonates the heroine), But it was intended by its composer as a fundamentally very serious work. And we shall consider it briefly in conjunction with another