The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories

Downhill since Milton

'Hoo!' quod the Knyght, 'good sire, namoore of this! / That ye han seyd is right ynough ywis, / And muchel moore'." Chaucer's Knight was objecting to the gloomy catalogue of tragedies rehearsed by his fellow pilgrim the Monk, seventeen of which are summarized before the Knight brings his performance to an end. Many readers of The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker's mammoth account of plot types, archetypes, their role in literary history and where Western culture has gone horribly wrong, will find themselves echoing the Knight long before they have reached his catalogue of tragedies. The book took more than thirty years to write; as Ian Hislop observes on the back cover, it is really three books in one, but its accumulation of detail, though exhausting and repetitive, is crucial for the development of Booker's argument.

He begins by outlining his seven plots: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, Quest, Voyage and Return, Tragedy, Comedy and Rebirth. In addition he admits and discusses later in the book two other plot types: "Rebellion against the One", epitomized by Nineteen Eighty-four and Brave New World, and the detective story. Then follows a fundamentally Jungian argument: the seven plots manipulate a series of archetypes, primarily rooted in the family. Thus Father, Mother, the Individual and his/her Alter Ego and the Other Half are figured, along with the anima and a Wise Old Man. Each of the main types may appear in "dark" or "light" versions, in Booker's terminology. The seven plots permit slightly differing trajectories for the hero, who usually starts out young and ignorant, gains maturity and some kind of success, marries the girl and achieves a happy, or at least worthy, ending. Tragedy, the exception to this general pattern, shows the Hero himself becoming a Dark Alter Ego. At his death, however, catharsis of some kind occurs, and the world is restored to a state in which natural order reigns.

Thus far the argument is predictably structuralist and Jungian. Hereafter Booker adduces as the "collective unconscious" the human propensity to tell stories conforming to the seven basic plots. These are "somehow" (there are a good many "somehows" when Booker turns to neurological matters) hard-wired into the brain. Booker has ignored most other theoretical treatments of narrative, from Vladimir Propp to Northrop Frye to Jerome Bruner, whose 2002 book Making Stories would have been a valuable corrective throughout. Next, the Jungian idea of transcendence, confusingly labelled the "Self", is invoked: "the sense of a perfection beyond the limitations of our own ego" is the closest Booker comes to defining this important criterion for the "good" writer. The evolutionary purpose of the seven plots, it seems, was to encourage humanity to strive for the "Self" values of harmony and transcendence. Unfortunately, about 200 years ago things went badly wrong. Romanticism, technological progress, women's liberation, capitalism and Communism are, one way or another, all responsible. So, sadly, very little written since the emergence of the novel has been much good, as a result of the intrusion of the author's ego in his text and the abandonment of "Self" values. Next comes a gallop through world history, swiftly narrowing to English history, where, with the exception of the Second World War and the 1950s (until the birth of rock'n'roll), cultural life has been going downhill since Milton. The book ends with a dystopic chapter, "The Age of Loki", which warns of the consequences of abandoning transcendent ideals: cosmic destruction -- the Norse Ragna rok in which Loki plays a major role -- may come to pass. Comfort is derived from the Dantean vision of the "love that moves the sun and the other stars", to which each individual consciousness will return.

It is easy to criticize a book like this for what it leaves out: almost anything outside the European literary canon, much of popular culture (though Hollywood products such as The Lion King or Terminator are singled out for discussion), literature written by women in the twentieth century, apart from Up the Junction (though there is no name check for Nell Dunn) and Sarah Kane's play Blasted. The extent of the omissions in a book which purports to make universalist claims is problematic. The repetitiousness is tiresome; once a work has been summarized as epitomizing a plot type, it is endlessly re-summarized when later examination in terms of character archetypes is called for. These analyses of plot and characterization fall foul of the besetting problem of comparative literary study: erasing those differences which ultimately are what engage the reader's imagination. Otherwise we might just as well read The Lord of the Rings again and again, instead of deriving pleasure from the differences between, for example, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.

Whatever these shortcomings, it is the thesis that industrial progress and its concomitants have fatally damaged literature and other narrative art forms by encouraging the ego-driven author which astonishes. Moby-Dick, Jude the Obscure, Proust, Ulysses, The Great Gatsby and Waiting for Godot as well as less defensible candidates such as Lady Chatterley's Lover and Four Weddings and a Funeral, are indicted for failing to conclude with a return to natural order and, very frequently, for containing "cardboard" or "two-dimensional" characters. Booker's argument proceeds by juxtaposing uncritical nostalgia for Shakespeare and pre-Victorian religious certainties with a harrumphing, wholesale condemnation of modern culture with its "pop-groups", "art films" and "rights" for women and homosexuals (the scare quotes are Booker's). Tolkien is admired as the most successful author of the twentieth century: his combination of all seven of Booker's plots in The Lord of the Rings, produces, Booker suggests, catharsis in readers and cinema-goers alike, rather than a sense that The Return of the King is never going to end. Thanks to a more informed study of medieval literature and European myth than is attempted here, Tolkien was highly conscious of the power of archetypes; in his essay "On Fairy Stories" he writes of the "Joy beyond the walls of the world", the transcendent resolution which Booker praises here as the highest aim of narrative art.

Factual errors are frequent. Educated medieval people knew perfectly well that the world was round; Columbus sailed west in the belief that he would find the Indies, not that he would fall off the Earth. The Norse fire-giant Surtr is not the origin of the English "Saturday", nor is any captive princess rescued from a castle in the Quest for the Holy Grail. The re-narrations are often partial: Jason's story hardly ends as happily as Booker suggests; it is difficult to see why Saul's jealousy of David should be an example of the "Dark Feminine". Nor is confidence in the concluding chapter "The Age of Loki" inspired when one discovers that Booker's understanding of Norse myth is exclusively derived from the classic children's retelling, Tales of the Norse Heroes. How did this book gain its celebrity endorsements? Can John Bayley really agree with Christopher Booker's castigation of Chekhov? Does Fay Weldon concur with the exclusion or condemnation of every woman writer in literary history except for Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot? These, alas, may be the most provoking questions which The Seven Basic Plots raises.

Carolyne Larrington is Tutor in Medieval English at St John's College, Oxford. She is the author of A Store of Common Sense, 1993, a study of old Icelandic wisdom poetry.

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