Books : The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories

Rating: - A quarter good, the rest a mess
Booker kept reminding me, weirdly, as I went through this, of Slavoj Zizek. Just as Zizek, the Lacanian Marxist, trawls through films only to repeatedly discover, each time like a revelation, that we are in the realms of ideology and the 'obscene dominant superego injunction to enjoy', Booker, the Jungian right winger, reads every story as a valediction of Jung's archetypes and hetero family values and a denigration of the ego. Booker's 'ego' and Zizek's 'superego' function in similar ways, roughly speaking, as the psychic embodiment and inspiration for evil, particularly selfishness and it's these devices that bring these apparently antithetical figures into similar territory. Zizek's delineation of the latter's functioning is considerably more complex and, ultimately, useful, but both ego and superego are drivers of the modern decadence perceived and unashamedly pilloried by both authors. At times their targets can seem remarkably similar, e.g. the hippy movement. Reading Booker's characterisation of this as a 'rigidly conformist' 'group fantasy' built on denigration of others felt rather like pulling a poisoned dart out of myself. (Booker goes on to describe Solzhenitsyn's own vilification of western decadence in some detail. Zizek might balk at the comparison, but, as another former Soviet Bloc dissident, feted by a West he continues to phlegmatically critique for its moral bankruptcy, he can seem like a successor of sorts.) It's fun to read contemporary moralists because they provide such a corrective to the sixties' painfully, corruptedly foggy-headed legacy of la la let it all hang out, but where Zizek is rapier-like, challenging, funny and full of surprises, Booker does ultimately just come across as a crank.

In the first section, where he lays out the seven plots of the title, I was with him all the way. Reductive? Incomplete? I can do without the pedantry at this point. You don't have to buy the system wholesale to see that Booker is here, fascinatingly, identifying patterns in storytelling that are extraordinarily consistent over thousands of years. The point is, he's giving you something you can use. In an almost Euclidian way I found myself involuntarily playing with his basic storytelling riffs to come up, giddily, with an ever more complex world of variety. I felt so inspired I thought I was going to pop. It's this section and this section alone that earns the book its stars here.

How could it have got so tangled after this? The second section is eye-wateringly repetitive, telling us in several barely varying passages how stories are peopled by a selection of archetypal figures who's function is to bring us and the hero out of darkness and into light. The same principles come up over and over again: the ultimate aim of 'seeing whole', the need to go down into darkness in order to attain light, the importance of uniting the mature masculine with the mature feminine, the need to go 'below the line' to the realms of the marginalised and oppressed in order to expose the corruption of the 'above the line' world of authority. This is not complex stuff and even if it was, it would only need to be explained well once.

Where was the editor? Asleep it seems, or overawed, because, as the book goes on, it's not just the repetition that becomes wearing, it's the increasing instance of missed out words. There's at least one indefensibly verbless sentence and also a bizarrely erroneous description of the story of Rebel Without A Cause that someone really should have spotted: Dean as a speed-obsessed hero ends by wiping himself out in a car accident. Has Booker even seen this film?

Oh well, even a fully awake editor couldn't have done much to right the book's more serious philosophical flaws, which are, I'm afraid, fatal. Booker's an old-fashioned Tory paternalist and he uses his Jungian system to inform us, in no uncertain terms and with only slightly more intellectual rigour than your average reactionary, that most of nineteenth and twentieth century literature (as well as a great deal of the music and art of this period) is immoral and therefore bad for us. There's a certain amount of shooting the messenger in all this. Booker often doesn't seem to know who his friends are. He off-handedly describes Breathless as one of various new wave films that take us through a series of largely senseless events only to end with an act of shocking violence - completely missing the fact that the film almost precisely conforms to his own description of tragic structure: anticipation followed by decisive immoral act followed by dream stage (it's all going to be OK) followed by frustration, then nightmare stage, brief renewal of hope, then destruction.

Booker can't seem to conceive of the idea that films like Breathless, Bonny and Clyde and A Clockwork Orange might be anything other than unconscious critiques of the sixties licentiousness he disapproves of. The last, in particular, he criticises on the grounds that it leaves its hero unpunished, contains untrustworthy authority figures who have pornographic sculptures in their homes and, most egregiously of all, shows its antihero being inspired to commit acts of violence by listening to Beethoven. Booker's now childlike mind seems incapable of grasping the three key, interrelated points here a) that Alex ends up unpunished precisely because the authority figures are, themselves, hypocritical and deficient in morality - to whit the critique is deliberate, b) the pornographic sculptures are there on purpose as a sign of precisely the kind of moral and aesthetic bankruptcy that Booker bemoans and c) the Nazis listened to Beethoven too; and it's not surprising Booker misses this last, because it's the dangling thread that almost unravels the whole second half of Booker's epic paean to morally uplifting art.

Except there's worse: he lets his manichean good v. bad moralism completely blind him to more nuanced pleasures, both humane and aesthetic, of Remembrance of Things Past and Ulysses. His 'critiques' of these books, centring on Proust's 'immaturity' and Joyce's depictions of masturbation, also 'immature', read like justifications that could have been used at Nazi literary auto da fes. Everywhere, the sound of galloping right wing hobby horses becomes deafening, even as Booker tries to slip in some of his more beyond the pale prejudices by insinuation: William Burroughs' books are mischaracterised as being designed so you can read the sentences in any order (bad) as, in the same sentence, we learn that Burroughs was a drug addict (bad) and homosexual (hmm...bad?).

Oh well. All we can do is try to avoid the same prejudiced reasoning ourselves. So I won't say Booker's argument is bad just because he uses it to be homophobic and anti-feminist, which is just my subjective view. I'll say it's bad because it's hopelessly muddled, which I'm pretty sure is inarguable. One of Booker's main themes, virtually the whole theme of the last section, is the idea that a great deal of immoral behaviour can be shown to be a result of 'ego-Self confusion'. The 'Self' (always capped) in Booker's schema is the light, balanced consciousness that 'sees whole'. It is symbolised in stories by the attainment of harmonious unities, particularly marriage, but it is really only a psychical phenomena, attained by bringing the archetypes in one's own mind into light and balance. Booker cautions, when these archetypes are projected outwards into material goals, we become alienated from the Self and act instead in the service of the ego.

It's an important distinction and one I find I have some sympathy with. I've been putting to good use lately: that shirt I wanted? It's actually just a representation of a certain feeling of confidence I lack. My need for a girlfriend? My need to get in touch with my anima. It's genuinely helping.

It also helps me read Booker, because it means that when he's talking about the need to go below the line socially or reconnect with nature, he's only talking about the mind. Like, he's definitely not defending Communism, which he says is a confusion of ego and Self objectives and, after all, didn't turn out too well - oh, except that its own 'below the line' darkness created heroes like Solzhenitsyn, who is real and not an archetype in your mind or mine. Nor, somewhat surprisingly, is he defending environmentalism, which he wants to tell us is also just another cultlike collective fantasy characterised by nothing but sentimentalism; he dislikes a lot of the real things that environmentalists dislike, but only, apparently, because of the effects on our minds. On the other hand, he does want to tell us that Churchill, the real life flesh and blood Churchill, was good because he was a heroic light father figure archetype, and that all that pitching in during the Blitz was good collective behaviour, even though that was real too. He also likes Thatcher even though she was a woman embodying the same heroic light masculine qualities as Churchill and doesn't like Ripley in Alien because she's a woman embodying heroic light masculine qualities. Oh brother. There's no consistency here. None. And the reason? Well, it's partly that Booker can't stick to his own strictly mental rule and partly that the whole Archetypes idea (as presented here), which Booker describes as being on a par with Einstein's theory of relativity and Crick and Watson's discovery of the double helix, is so nebulous that it allows him to defend and attack whatever he likes with a spuriously scientific underpinning.

In short, in an irony so dumb and obvious you think surely he would have noticed it, Booker's extended warning against the ego is seriously undermined by his own ego.

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Rating: - Are seven plots enough?
There are only three kinds of journey: the ones when you start out, and finish somewhere else; the ones where you finish back where you started; and the journeys where you go from one place, and then go on to another. With that you have what you need to understand the essence of travel. Or perhaps you don't, because you just might think that there are some other important issues to bear in mind - like where you're going, what you see or what you do on the way. That's the central problem with Christopher Booker's work. Booker does say something worthwhile about many stories, and he does point to things that many stories have in common: but it's a moot point whether what he tells us about stories is what actually matters about them.

If we take Booker's premise at face value, it's worth asking: in what sense are these seven plots basic? His classification and treatment is heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, mixed with Aristotle. There's a substantial overlap between the heroic stories - especially "the quest" and "voyage and return" - while others, like "comedy" or "tragedy", serve as elaborate classifications rather than core plots. Reading the outlines, however, I found myself irresistibly thinking of other basic plots with just as strong claims for inclusion. For example, "The sorcerer's apprentice" is the root of a whole class of literature, both tragic (it's the staple of horror stories) and comic (including any farce where events spiral out of control). "Solomon Grundy" (born on Monday, christened on Tuesday, on and so on) may not be much of a plot, but it's the basis of lots of po-faced Victorian and Edwardian novels. "The trickster" is there in Anansi stories, the Bible or The Accidental Death of an Anarchist. "The defiant truth-sayer" is the core of An Enemy of the People, Jaws, Galileo, Butler's Lives of the Saints, perhaps even - if you accept the inversion - Paradise Lost. "The thwarted lovers" are the staple of books like I Promessi Sposi, The Duchess of Malfi and Casablanca. "The merry-go-round" - the patterned repetition and recurrence of events, people and situations - is the basic plot device behind picaresque books like Candide or A Clockwork Orange, and sequential plots like La Ronde or Bunuel's Fantome de Liberte. The list could go on, and on, and on. The Seven Basic Plots is, at one and the same time, engaging, infuriating, insightful and portentous. Unfortunately, the tools it offers are rather too blunt to do the work it sets out to do.

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Rating: - Why we should sometimes keep our own stories to ourselves
This is a book of grand pretensions and equally grand narratives. It brings forth equally grand expletives. It is written as if the theoretical problems with the idea of the auteur, grand narratives, identity, otherness, the ego, Freud and Jung had never existed. It has a latent Christianity (at least a latent religiosity), homophobia and puritanism which, in this post-modern, liberal age seems disturbingly Victorian, transparently prejudiced and disqualifies the author from making the kinds of universalising claims that he makes about certain texts. Don't we live in an age of pluralism where simple binary distinctions such as 'light and dark' don't necessarily apply to people, stories, places and events? Methodologically, his arguments are crippled by such reductio ad absurdums and such abstractions render the meta-analysis of plot to his narrow Jungian taxonomy of archetypes failures of classification and analysis.

His attacks on Proust's homosexuality, masculinity and introspectiveness and on masturbation in Joyce are just two clear examples where this prejudice (which will be clear to most humanities undergraduates) is evident and which will entirely discredit the author in academic circles. These are just the tip of the critical ice-berg. Stylistically, the book is repetitive and clearly needs editing. In terms of the endless plot summaries, if you want all the best stories in the world that you have never read/seen to be spoilt then this is the book for you. If you have read/seen lots of them and want to see them butchered and spoon-fed back to you by your provincial, fascist school-master then read on. It feels as if the major achievements of psychology, philosophy, literature, critical theory, cultural studies and most of the humanities have passed Mr Booker by.

While the idea, as a question, problem and research area of this book is undoubtedly an interesting one and Mr Booker should be patted on the head for reading a lot of stories and writing 'high-concept' style Hollywood veneers of these, the other substantial texts on this subject are ignored. He also relies exclusively, bar one or two examples on Western authors and stories. Africa, Oceania, the early Americas, most of Asia, Scandinavia and South America are largely unrepresented as are plots in other forms of culture which are not books such as art, popular culture, design and ritual. So with such a narrow sample of stories from such a narrow range of possible narrative forms and media, without a context, precedents, method or a methodology, critical theory or some kind of idea of how he might validate or compare his ideas about plots with alternate or different and opposing ideas and arguments, the book becomes a kind of solipsistic, egotistical evidence against itself. More importantly, he fails to identify that some of the reasons why people tell stories are to try to tell new stories (they want the 8th and nth basic plots), because their own stories are untold, to correct false tellings of their stories and so that they don't have to hear other people's stories continuously retold to them or to counter their own stories being falsified, re-interpreted, butchered and force-fed back to them in seven pre-packaged portions.

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Rating: - Beckett, Chekhov and Orwell 'Missing the Mark'? Are you mugging me off?
I may have missed the subtleties of Mr Booker's arguments but when moving onto the section about stories that don't work and having the fellas in the title of my review mentioned I was absolutely gob smacked. He describes 1984 and Waiting for Godot amongst many others as 'flawed' and not working as stories. I presume Virginia Woolf and James Joyce would be thrown into Mr Booker's rejected pile too? Delving through the early chapters of this immense book I knew there was a reason I felt uneasy about his fundamentalist theory on stories but thankfully he provided the later chapters in order to reassure me I hadn't gone stark staring bonkers. This would be very useful if you want to write a lovely animated film for Disney or 'do a Lucas' and bodge up another Indiana Jones or Star Wars film to pay for the next four generations of your family to heat their swimming pools but in terms of an intellectual insight into stories and how they operate it shares a similar vibe with an Abu Hamza sermon in the middle of a rainy Finsbury Park road. If i've missed the point I humbly apologise but human psychology, story-telling and philosophy that fit into a comfortable 7 point plan went out of fashion with Stalin and Hitler, I hope.

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Rating: - Flawed but important
Reading other reviews there seems to be quite a heated difference of opinion on this book so I will endeavour to give a middle view. A lot of people are saying it's important and I absolutely agree. Others point out numerous flaws and they are true too. In short the idea behind the book is a definitely 5 stars. The execution is at best 3.

What is most odd is the fact that a book called "the seven basic plots" is about 500 pages long. The font is pretty small too meaning this is a very long way round explaining a perfectly reasonable and highly enlightening idea.

What Mr Booker points out is that the vast majority (if not all) stories can be neatly summarised into definite areas- the quest, the comedy etc. He then goes on to show how the basic frame work of Gilgamesh works in exactly the same way as something more modern like Dr No. He also does a very good job of explaining that these basic ideas are so ingrained in us that we tend to not like stories that break the rules of each type of plot.

I can understand why this may annoy some in the literary circles but I absolutely think his points are valid. However he uses too many examples- there are pages of them when the point has already been made and the second half of the book goes off on all sorts of tangents many of which are unnecessary.

Ultimately I think an abridged version of this book would be a vast improvement getting to the point quicker, summarising the ideas more succinctly and then not meandering around other ideas for 250 pages.