In a sense, these plots all represent variations on Freud's family romance -- the process whereby a young person comes to terms with parental authority, ventures out into the wider world, faces assorted tests and eventually achieves independence. Along the way, confusion (be it a case of mismatched couples or a community in disarray) is dispelled, and alienation gives way to a new sense of wholeness and well-being. This is often symbolized, Booker argues, by a marriage that represents the coming together of masculine and feminine values and the achievement of balance among the four virtues of "strength, order, feeling and understanding."
Only in the seventh plot type, Tragedy, he observes, is there a deviation from this fundamental pattern. Here, the hero or heroine also goes on a journey, but is "held back by some fatal flaw or weakness from reaching that state of perfect balance," he writes. "They are doomed to fall short of the goal because in some way they are stuck in a state of incompleteness or immaturity."
The problem is that most of Booker's theories -- from his belief that archetypal stories are rooted in the human unconscious to his arguments about Tragedy and Comedy -- are highly familiar, lifted in part or whole from a wide spectrum of influential, even canonical works by writers and thinkers as varied as Jung, Freud, Joseph Campbell, Bruno Bettelheim, Sir James George Frazer, the Shakespeare scholar A.C. Bradley and the folklore experts Peter and Iona Opie.
Not only is Booker a voracious magpie (who does not always acknowledge the sources of his ideas), but he also turns out to be an annoyingly biased and didactic one. As The Seven Basic Plots progresses, it grows increasingly tendentious.
In the past two centuries, Booker complains, "a fundamental shift has taken place in the psychological `center of gravity' from which" stories have been told; as a result, "they have become detached from their underlying archetypal purpose."
Such inane readings of modern literature effectively eclipse the more engaging arguments presented in the first portion of Booker's book. Anyone tackling The Seven Basic Plots would be advised to peruse the informative first half and quickly ditch the second half of this 700-plus page tome.
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