“According to the journalist Christopher Booker, the plots of all stories fall into seven basic categories.
The names he gives to these seven plots are Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth.
The circumambient mythos, being A Story itself, must always fall into one of these categories.
In the medieval Christian West, for example, the overriding plot structure of our culture was Voyage and Return. We had come from God, and it was back to God we would return. This narrative explained a relatively stable society with little in the way of technological change or economic expansion, and it remained the plot of our culture for many centuries. If there was a better world somewhere, then this was understood to be the Classical civilisations of the past. The idea that a better earthly world resided in the future was not part of the story.
Around 500 years ago we slowly started to move to a different plot. As the insights of The Renaissance led to The Enlightenment, our focus moved from waiting for The Afterlife to actively working to materially improve our time on Earth. Our Story was now one of progress. This circumambient mythos is the reason why we automatically speak of ‘technological advancement’ instead of the more accurate ‘technological change’, even when we know that new technology does not necessarily make our society better.
The name of this new plot, according to Booker’s list, was The Quest.
We were on A Journey to a better place, provided we could overcome all the obstacles that the journey tests us with.
If Hollywood is to be believed, we’ve now stopped using The Plot of The Quest, and the idea of progress, to understand ourselves.
As the sociologist Robert Nisbet has written, ‘The skepticism regarding Western progress that was once confined to a very small number of intellectuals in the nineteenth century has grown and spread to not merely the large majority of intellectuals in this final quarter of the [twentieth] century, but to many millions of other people in The West.’
The story structure which Western culture adopted to replace The Quest is Tragedy.
Tragedy, Booker tells us, is the story form that always ends in Defeat. According to Aristotle, the downfall of a character in a tragedy is not caused by outside forces, such as the gods or fate. Nor is it the result of vice or moral deficiency. Instead, there is a central character flaw in the heart of the hero which cannot be resolved. Aristotle used the word hamartia to describe this flaw, which translates as to miss the mark or to err. To possess hamartia is not to be a bad person, for there is no moral judgement involved. But it compels you to act in a way that causes events to evade your control, and these actions inevitably result in destruction.
Booker, in the spirit of literary theorists since Aristotle, defines Tragedy in a particular way. Tragedy ‘shows a hero being tempted or impelled into a course of action which is in some way dark or forbidden’, he wrote.
‘For a time, as The Hero embarks on a course, he enjoys almost unbelievable, dreamlike success,’ he continued. ‘But somehow it is in the nature of the course he is pursuing that he cannot achieve satisfaction. His mood is increasingly chequered by a sense of frustration. As he still pursues his dream, vainly trying to make his position secure, he begins to feel more and more threatened – things have got out of control. The original dream has soured into a nightmare and everything is going more and more wrong. This eventually culminates in the hero’s violent destruction.’
This is not, I think, a million miles away from how we see ourselves today.
But there is also a narrative plot which, for the characters living it, appears to be identical to Tragedy. That plot is Comedy.
Nowadays, we think of Comedy as something funny which has jokes in it. For this reason, schoolchildren often complain that the Greek or Elizabethan ‘Comedy’ they study is not funny. But, technically, Comedy is not defined by laughs.
A Comedy is A Story that uses a plot structure similar to Tragedy, except that the character flaw or hamartia at the heart of The Story is not fatal. It can be resolved. In doing so this leads to a happy ending or a loving union. Traditional comedies are about people who don’t see themselves as who they truly are. They tell of peasants who have no idea that they are really royalty, or lovers who are blind to who their true love is. They are stories full of mistaken identities, cross-dressing and delusions. Yet those delusions can be overcome, and characters can gain a glimpse of The World as it appears through the audience’s eyes.
As Booker describes comedy, ‘the essence of The Story is always that :
(1) We see A World in which people have passed under a shadow of confusion, uncertainty and frustration, and are shut off from one another;
(2) the confusion gets worse until the pressure of Darkness is at its most acute and everyone is in a nightmarish tangle;
(3) Finally, with the coming to light of things not previously recognised, perceptions are dramatically changed. The shadows are dispelled, the situation is miraculously transformed and the little world is brought together in a state of joyful union.’
We think that The Plot we are enacting is Tragedy, but it could equally be the second part of Booker’s definition of Comedy. If there is a shift in perception coming that would reveal the plot as comedy, we would, by definition, be blind to it.
Comedy is a clash of perspectives.
Characters like Basil Fawlty or Alan Partridge do not know that their behaviour is outside that of the social norm, although the watching audience see this clearly. While Charlie Chaplin thinks that he is walking proudly into a happy future, the watching audience know that he is walking towards a banana skin. In order for Chaplin slipping on the banana skin to be funny, it is necessary for The Audience to know in advance that it is there, and for Chaplin to remain blissfully ignorant until the final moment.
At this point, his view of The World collides with, and is destroyed by, the perspective of the watching audience. Even with surrealist humour or simple pratfalls, there is a clash between what should happen and what actually occurs. It is this collision of perspectives that causes laughter. The difference of awareness between the characters inside The Comedy and those outside means that it is not possible for those characters to know if they are in A Comedy.
To them, it appears that they are in a Tragedy. The events that befall them are only funny from a higher perspective, and they remain ignorant of the bigger picture. They don’t know about the banana skin until the last moment.
