Imagine we are about to be plunged into a story – any story in the world. A curtain rises on a stage. A cinema darkens. We turn to the first paragraph of a novel. A narrator utters the age-old formula ‘Once upon a time...’
On the face of it, so limitless is the human imagination and so boundless the realm at the storyteller’s command, we might think that literally anything could happen next.
But in fact there are certain things we can be pretty sure we know about our story even before it begins.
For a start, it is likely that the story will have a hero, or a heroine, or both: a central figure, or figures, on whose fate our interest in the story ultimately rests; someone with whom, as we say, we can identify.
We are introduced to our hero or heroine in an imaginary world. Briefly or at length, the general scene is set. The purpose of the formula ‘Once upon a time ...’, whether the storyteller uses it explicitly or not, is to take us out of our present place and time into that imaginary realm where the story is to unfold, and to introduce us to the central figure with whom we are to identify.
Then something happens: some event or encounter which precipitates the story’s action, giving it a focus. In fact the opening of the story is governed by a kind of double formula: ‘once upon a time there was such and such a person, living in such and such place ... then, one day, something happened’.
We are introduced to a little boy called Aladdin, who lives in a city in China ... then one day a Sorcerer arrives, and leads him out of the city to a mysterious underground cave. We meet a Scottish general, Macbeth, who has just won a great victory over his country’s enemies ... then, on his way home, he encounters the mysterious witches. We meet a girl called Alice, wondering how to amuse herself in the summer heat ... then suddenly she sees a White Rabbit running past, and vanishing down a mysterious hole. We see the great detective Sherlock Holmes sitting in his Baker Street lodgings ... then there is a knock at the door, and a visitor enters to present him with his next case.
This event or summons provides the ‘Call’ which will lead the hero or heroine out of their initial state into a series of adventures or experiences which, to a greater or lesser extent, will transform their lives.
The next thing of which we can be sure is that the action which the hero or heroine are being drawn into will involve conflict and uncertainty, because without some measure of both there cannot be a story. Where there is a hero there may also be a villain (on some occasions, indeed, the hero himself may be the villain). But even if the characters in the story are not necessarily contrasted in such black-and-white terms as ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, it is likely that some will be on the side of the hero or heroine, as friends and allies, while others will be out to oppose them.
Finally we shall sense that the impetus of the story is carrying it towards some kind of resolution. Every story which is complete, and not just a fragmentary string of episodes and impressions, must work up to a climax, where conflict and uncertainty are usually at their most extreme. This then leads to a resolution of all that has gone before, bringing the story to its ending. And here we see how every story, however mildly or emphatically, has in fact been leading its central figure or figures in one of two directions. Either they end, as we say, happily, with a sense of liberation, fulfilment and completion. Or they end unhappily, in some form of discomfiture, frustration or death.
To say that stories either have happy or unhappy endings may seem such a commonplace that one almost hesitates to utter it. But it has to be said, simply because it is the most important single thing to be observed about stories. Around that one fact, and around what is necessary to bring a story to one type of ending or the other, revolves the whole of their extraordinary significance in our lives.
One of the few general texts ever to have been written on stories was Aristotle’s Poetics, left unfinished well over 2000 years ago, It was Aristotle who first observed that a satisfactory story – a story which, as he put it, is a ‘whole’ – must have ‘a beginning, a middle and an end’. And it was Aristotle who, in the context of the two main types of stage play, first explicitly drew attention to the two kinds of ending a story may lead up to.
On the one hand, as he put it in the Poetics, there are tragic stories. These are stories in which the hero or heroine’s fortunes usually begin by rising, but eventually ‘turn down’ to disaster (the Greek word catastrophe means literally a ‘down stroke’, the downturn in the hero’s fortunes at the end of a tragedy). On the other hand, there are, in the broadest sense, comedies: stories in which things initially seem to become more and more complicated for the hero or heroine, until they are entangled in a complete knot, from which there seems no escape. But eventually comes what Aristotle calls the peripeteia or ‘reversal of fortune’. The knot is miraculously unravelled (from which we get the French word denouement, meaning literally an ‘unknotting’). Hero, heroine or both together are liberated; and we and all the world can rejoice.
This division holds good over a much greater range of stories than might be implied just by the terms ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’. Indeed, with qualifications, it remains true right across the domain of storytelling. The plot of a story is that which leads its hero or heroine either to a ‘catastrophe’ or an ‘unknotting’; either to frustration or to liberation; either to death or to a renewal of life. And it might be thought that there are almost as many ways of describing these downward and upward paths as there are individual stories in the world. Yet the more carefully we look at the vast range of stories thrown up by the human imagination through the ages, the more clearly we may discern that there are certain continually recurring general shapes to stories, dictating the nature of the road which the hero or heroine may take to their ultimate destination.
It is at the most important of these underlying shapes or ‘basic plots’ that we must now look.