Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
by Christopher Booker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Christopher BookerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-01-09
ISBN: 0826480373
Number of pages: 736
Publisher: Continuum
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780826480378
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
Book Review: Brilliant and bone-headed
Summary: 5 Stars
I love books that attempt grand syntheses: Aristotle's Poetics, V. I. Propp's Morphology of the Folk-Tale, Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, and the writings of Kenneth Burke, to name just a few. For 30 years, Booker worked on this, and has for the most part achieved something spectacular. Like most great ideas, this starts off with very basic observations and questions -- indeed, questions that seem too obvious to ask: Why do stories have heroes? Why do they portray some sort of conflict? We take such things for granted. Booker, to his credit, does not.
The book is in several large parts. The first talks about the "seven basic plots": Overcoming the Monster; Rags to Riches; Voyage and Return; The Quest; Comedy; Tragedy; Rebirth. The second part talks about the four major archetypal characters (Booker acknowledges a debt to Jung) -- Father, Mother, Animus, Anima -- in their dark and light manifestations and revisits the plots in terms of these interactions. The third part talks about how plots go wrong. The fourth part, the least worthwhile chapter of the book, tries a tour-bus view of millennia of intellectual history with a view to showing inexorable decline.
Just coming up with his 7+4 theoretical framework constitutes a major achievement. As long as works conform to his archetypal plots and characters, he provides brilliant analysis, although here and there I may disagree with this view of certain aspects of a work (his downgrading of Frodo as a character in Lord of the Rings and his underestimation of Spielberg's Close Encounters seem major misreadings, despite a generally wonderful discussion). He's also very sharp on where conforming plots go wrong. The problem comes when he insists on his archetypes as the only successful patterns.
I grant that these patterns are extremely satisfying. I see the basic dramatic movement most easily in comedy. Booker lets me understand why I find Bringing Up Baby and Clueless ultimately more satisfying than Duck Soup, as funny (to me, actually much funnier than the previous two) as the Marx Brothers epic undoubtedly is. All of these plots are metaphors for an unformed or destructive set of circumstances resolving in various ways toward light and wholeness.
The problems with the book come up with stories that don't conform to the archetype. Booker rightly points out a weakening of these patterns in the 17th and especially the early 18th centuries. According to Booker, it's due to mankind's increasing alienation from a sense of cosmic wholeness. Dante's Divina Commedia can't be written now, I think we'd agree. The decline of religious dogma and the rise of scientific or empirical observation have been responsible for this. Booker blames the alienation, which I think a sentimental cop-out. It's hard to write a classic, convincing rags-to-riches story in the age of Trump. The rain falls largely on the just, while the unjust seem to have cosmic umbrellas. Millions of innocents died during the Great Leap Forward. Stalin and Mao died in their sleep. These stories also need to be told. They may be less satisfying, but they show something true, rather than, as Booker tries to argue, sentimentality. Booker refers to the Book of Job as a "good" resolution of the problem of innocent suffering. I find the end of that story incredibly hollow. Sure, Job gets a new family, but what about the old family? Why does God allow Satan to afflict Job? According to Robert Frost in his Masque of Reason, "I did it on a bet," says God, citing the very beginning of the story. Job replies, "I expected more than I could understand, and what I get is almost less than I can understand." Job is brought back into wholeness with the One (Booker uses terms like this), but does this really satisfy anybody? "Gaining the kingdom" doesn't make everything all right and indeed comes with its own set of problems. Stendahl, Proust, Joyce, and Melville don't write their stories solely out of individual psychosis or neurosis, but out of universal experience and sharp observation.
The fourth part of the book is to me little more than sentimental nostalgia for the good old days before the post-lapsarian Fall represented by Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism. As he himself shows, Booker's archetypes persist with wonderful results to the present. But that's not the only way great art can be made. Booker has fallen so in love with his own analysis that he has closed his mind to the possibility of other ways to artistic success.
Summary of Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling. But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose. Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years. This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.Criticism & Theory Books
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