The Plot Thins

[Dave Monroe]

The Village Voice
Education Supplement 2005
The Plot Thins
English majors! Christopher Booker's new study just
made your life much easier—maybe
by Jessica Winter
January 11th, 2005 12:28 PM

I want to let the, uh, movie exist rather, rather than
be artificially plot-driven.... I don't want to cram
in ... characters learning profound life lessons or
growing or coming to like each other or overcoming
obstacles to succeed in the end. —Charlie Kaufman in
Adaptation (2002)

Though it's intently concerned with conflict,
adversity, and triumph, Christopher Booker's imposing
new tome, The Seven Basic Plots, should tempt few
serious challengers in the momentous Battle of the
Blurbs. "One of the most important books to have
appeared in my lifetime!" —Anthony Stevens, Jungian
analyst. "Booker now interprets the mind of God!" —Fay
Weldon, novelist. Big praise for a Big, albeit
familiar, Idea, as The Seven Basic Plots (Continuum)
proposes a cosmic septet on the order of the seven
wonders, seven deadly sins, and seven habits of highly
effective people. Booker compiles a Jungian taxonomy
of stories, distilling the entire history of the
fictive arts into a handful of flexible but
unbreakable archetypes—Overcoming the Monster, Rags to
Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy,
and Rebirth—and then extracts from those seven
imaginative drops a single battle royal between Dark
and Light.

A founding editor of the indispensable British
satirical magazine Private Eye and a formidable
political columnist for London's Telegraph, Booker
hastens to admit in his first pages that The Seven
Basic Plots is hardly the maiden attempt to identify a
markedly finite number of story species. Boswell
reported that Dr. Johnson once intended to write a
book on "how small a quantity of REAL FICTION there is
in the world"; Carlo Gozzi and George Polti counted up
36 "dramatic solutions"; Joseph Campbell conceived his
monomyth; the German ethnologist Adolf Bastian
identified a stream of elementargedenken or "elemental
ideas" in folktales. But the book gets by for a couple
hundred pages ("It is so well planned with an
excellent beginning!" —John Bayley) on a charming
eclecticism that mixes canonical texts with popular
spectacle. Booker begins with Jaws, which is just
Beowulf redux. He finds a genetic through-line from
Aristophanes to Crocodile Dundee, from The Epic of
Gilgamesh to The Terminator. It's a good lark, up to a
point.

We all write in a genre; we must find our originality
within that genre. See, it turns out there hasn't been
a new genre since Fellini invented the mockumentary.
My genre's thriller. What's yours? —Donald Kaufman to
Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation

At college, the English major generally takes courses
inscribed by time, not type, with names like
"Shakespeare's Late Comedies," "The 19th-Century
American Novel," "Postcolonial Narrative 1981-2001."
Historical and cultural context—an inherent assumption
of the progression, evolution, and mutation of
accepted forms—is a given when the syllabus is
primarily set by the hands of the clock. The
creative-writing tutor guides her pupils toward
situations, formal strategies, a mode of one's own;
when William Boyd proposed seven types of short story
in The Guardian this past October, his allocations
owed more to movements and style than to plot. For
Booker, however, the seven plots are autonomous and
universal, existing outside of culture and history,
part of what Jung called our "preconscious psychic
disposition"—and, as Booker intones, "the archetypes
programmed into the human psyche cannot be cheated and
can never die"!

If you accept those terms and conditions, then
Booker's lifework (34 years in the toil) becomes an
unusually thickset instruction manual for a
serviceable parlor game: Which Basic Plot Are You?
Recent film critics' darling
Sideways is a textbook melding of Voyage and Return
and Comedy. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and
the Spiders From Mars announces itself as Tragedy as
soon as we learn that the hero is "making love with
his ego"—imminent tragedy for Icarus figure Ziggy, of
course, but also for fiction as Booker knows it, since
Seven Basic Plots posits that storytelling started
going to hell about 200 years ago, when "the
archetypal patterns underlying stories began to be
refracted through the storyteller's ego." The Plot
Against America is classic Overcoming the Monster,
though the only mention Booker gives Philip Roth—or
Henry James, for that matter—is when he lists the
egotistical American writers guilty of "an endemic
immaturity" (also Melville, Fitzgerald, Mailer, et
al.).

Reading The Seven Basic Plots is also to watch it age:
from a passionate, book-devouring student armed with a
tenuous but amusing thesis to a cranky old man
muttering to himself about the good old days before
the Romantics slurred our speech with their befogging
opiates and hippie dream visions. John Simon would be
hard-pressed to match Booker's one-liners for jowly
indignation. On Shelley's verse: "no more than a
catalogue of suggestive imagery and violent sounds
working themselves into a frenzy that is ultimately
meaningless." On Ulysses: "a mind churning away out of
contact with meaning." On the finale of Remembrance of
Things Past: "Thus ends the greatest monument to human
egotism in the history of storytelling." On '70s
feminism: "Never before had the idea of women behaving
so egocentrically on behalf of their sex become so
acceptable." Because Booker's view of stories is
essentially ahistorical, the sharp-elbowed incursions
of sociocultural shifts and upheavals come as an
affront, not as a given.

Sir, what if the writer is attempting to create a
story where nothing much happens, where people don't
change, they don't have any epiphanies, they struggle
and are frustrated and nothing is resolved—more a
reflection of the real world? —Charlie Kaufman
addressing Robert McKee in Adaptation

Booker has written a manifesto for a fiction that
believes in heroes capable of growth and change, a
proudly overdetermined creature that forswears bleak
fatalism and lurid sensation. Fair enough, but even if
you excuse the metafictionists, the digressive social
novel (ruling out Tristram Shandy and much of Salman
Rushdie), and most short stories from the table, and
concentrate solely on recent nonexperimental narrative
fiction, it's amazing how many largely optimistic,
popularly successful stories of recent years don't fit
into any of Booker's assigned slots. Jonathan
Franzen's The Corrections doesn't. Nor does Zadie
Smith's White Teeth or Monica Ali's Brick Lane.
(Nonwhite, non-male writers don't exist in
Bookerland.) Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle is a Quest, maybe, but the hero is too
passive and unassuming for Booker's tastes. Adaptation
and Toni Morrison's Beloved both amalgamate Overcoming
the Monster with Rebirth, but if you cram a
meta-comedy about a blocked, self-loathing
screenwriter into the same pigeonhole as a
supernatural novel that reckons with the legacy of
slavery in America, you only succeed in trivializing
them both.

The Seven Basic Plots, for its part, remains
archetypal to its last breath. It begins as Overcoming
the Monster and ends as a meta-Tragedy: The book
crosses over to the dark side of the grumbling
fuddy-duddies, while storytelling in all its
polymorphic perversities continues skipping,
shuffling, and crawling toward the light.

http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/0502,winter,59908,12.html

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