Back From The Beyond
Thank you to OverMelodramatic Post Titles for that one.
So where have I been? And what have I been doing? Well interesting questions with some dull answers. I’ve been training in C# (wake up!), HydroZorbing (not as interesting as it sounds, not dull either), watching movies, thinking about stuff, writing bits and bobs. And reading this book which has to stand as one of the most important books written for writers or story lovers ever, ever, ever. Seriously, if you love stories (whether delivered through the medium of print, movies, plays, whatever) then this book is essential reading.
Intrigued as to the author’s history I looked him up and was surprised to find that he is a journalist and not some Jungian literary ubermensch. This piece of information tells you a lot about how deferential he is to the Jungian model of archetypes he uses to view the component parts of his Seven Basic Plots. There are, in fact, several different theories about how many plots there are and he deals with why he settled on this basic seven. However later on he admits to at least four more “highly specialised/imperfect” plots. I guess The 7 Major and 4 Lesser Plots wasn’t as catchy.
Booker also accepts Jungian theory as fact. Now although I have a lot of time for Mr C.G. Jung I think some of his notions aren’t entirely one hundred per cent accurate in their analogies, something some people have picked up on and used as a stick to beat Mr. Booker. For example there’s a lot of talk about male/female and dark/light and anima/animus which all have merit as explanations for parts of our mind but the map is not the territory. I think, in some ways, Jung has had a bad ride in that he was so wise and yet so fragile. No one has really come up with any different way fo explaining the things that he explained and so it is easy to find fault with him in that the explanations are never going to be as easy to be put into words you can read, digest and understand fully.
By extension this means that sometimes Booker ends up in the wrong place from some earnest but misguided initial premises. He also seems to want (as a heavily political writer in the past) to use the history of stroytelling to advance a common older writer’s point of view that everything’s going to hell in a handbasket. This is perhaps the strangest link in the book, that because we are immersed every day in what he regards as substandard story telling that this contributes, fuels and is symptomatic of terminal moral decay.
Actually this message is never more than implicit in the volume but the implication is pretty clear. I found it strange that a man so in love with stories might not find some examples of great storytelling in modern cinema (I’d also bring in modern literature but that’s a *lot* harder to find his favourite kind of story telling in). I got the distinct impression that he confused big box office or some intangible MPAA conferred kudos with the great stories of our age.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
For the next few weeks I intend to explore the ideas Mr. Booker puts forward in more depth and intermingle them with a conceptual framework of my own. The reason for the former is that his huge - 30 years in the making - work deserves the time. The reason for the latter is that when I wrote a short essay called “The Story of Head, Heart and Home” I didn’t, at first, really know what to do with it.
In the context of all the Jungian theory thrown at me by The Seven Basic Plots I began to see ways in which Jung’s ideas could actually be mirrored (but only by a kind of equivalency) in mine. Essentially, my ideas re frame Jungian concepts. The value in this reframing is that people often take issue with values of personality being viewed as masculine and feminine, a post-feminist reading of Jung does throw up a problem when a woman acting out of cold rationality is seen as masculine or a man who acts with emotional intuition is seen as female. These qualities should not be gender ascribed, although ascribing those gender roles does have a certain value in the place of real world tendency or likelihood. My interpretation of the qualities and personifications is non-gender specific so might help a gender-critical reader gain some distance from that sensitive part of the issue.
I don’t know. Time will tell.
I hope you all enjoy, questions, comments and so on are always welcome.
