Once Upon a Time

In Booker's account, denying your "inner feminine" is bad news, and all evildoers, including Lady Macbeth, are guilty of it. Not only do such Jungian clichés wear thin, they get in the way of adequate interpretation. Having seduced so many women and killed the father of one, Don Giovanni will "never develop his inner feminine" and act with the strength of a mature man, according to Booker. This ignores a most piquant feature of Lorenzo Da Ponte's libretto: The Don stubbornly stands up to the Commendatore's ghost at the opera's end and is pulled down to hell on account of it.

Booker's discussion of what he calls "the Rule of Three" reveals his obsessive, self-confirming method. From the three questions of Goldilocks and Red Riding Hood to Lear's three daughters, sets of three are ubiquitous in literature, Booker claims. "Once we become aware of the archetypal significance of three in storytelling," he explains, "we can see it everywhere, expressed in all sorts of different ways, large and small."

Sure, and anyone who studies the personality types of astrology will see Virgos and Scorpios everywhere too. Relations among three, four or five characters in a narrative enable more dramatic possibilities than relations between two. This is a matter of ordinary logic, not literary criticism. The "archetype of three," as he calls it, is no archetype at all, though he contrives to find it where it is plainly absent. Scylla and Charybdis may look like two dangers to you and me, but the middle way between them actually makes, as Booker explains, three possibilities for Odysseus, thus saving his Rule of Three. That Jane Eyre spends three days running across the moors "conveys to us, by a kind of symbolic shorthand, just how tortuous and difficult" her escape is. But why three? If Jane had spent five days on the moors, or 40 days, she'd have been even more tuckered out. And while there are three bears, three chairs and three bowls of porridge in "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," there are actually four characters. The story would better support Booker's theory were it "Goldilocks and the Two Bears." But, like astrologers, he is not keen to consider negative evidence.

The first thinker to tackle Booker's topic was Aristotle. Write a story about a character, Aristotle showed, and you face only so many logical alternatives. In tragedy, for instance, either bad things will happen to a good person (unjust and repugnant) or bad things happen to a bad person (just, but boring). Or good things happen to a bad person (unjust again). Tragedy needs bad things to happen to a basically good but flawed person: Though he may not have deserved his awful fate, Oedipus was asking for it.

In the same rational spirit, Aristotle works out dramatic relations: A conflict between strangers or natural enemies is of little concern to us. What arouses interest is a hate-filled struggle between people who ought to love each other -- the mother who murders her children to punish her husband, or two brothers who fight to the death. Aristotle knew this for the drama of his age as much as soap-opera writers know it today.

Booker has not discovered archetypes, hard-wired blueprints, for story plots, though he has identified the deep themes that fascinate us in fictions. Here's an analogy: Survey the architectural layout of most people's homes and you will find persistent patterns in the variety. Bedrooms are separated from kitchens. Kitchens are close to dining rooms. Front doors do not open onto children's bedrooms or bathrooms.

Are these patterns Jungian room-plan archetypes? Hardly. Life calls for logical separations of rooms where families can sleep, cook, store shoes, bathe and watch TV. Room patterns follow not from mental imprints, but from the functions of the rooms themselves, which in turn follow from our ordinary living habits.

So it is with stories. The basic situations of fiction are a product of fundamental, hard-wired interests human beings have in love, death, adventure, family, justice and adversity. These values counted as much in the Pleistocene era as today, which is why evolutionary psychologists study them intensively. Our fictions are populated with character-types relevant to these themes: beautiful young women, handsome strong men, courageous leaders, children needing protection, wise old people. Add to this threats and obstacles to the fulfillment of love and fortune, including both bad luck and villains, and you have the makings of literature. Story plots are not unconscious archetypes, but follow, as Aristotle realized, from human interests and the logic of what is possible.

Booker ends his 700-page treatise with a diatribe against literature of the past two centuries. Modern fiction has "lost the plot," he argues. Moby-Dick initially may look like a heroic Overcoming the Monster tale, but in the end we do not know who is more evil, Captain Ahab or the whale who kills him. While the ambiguities of modernism trouble Booker, some of his readers will be even more disturbed to find "E.T." and Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies extravagantly lauded in a book that disparages the complex moral pessimism of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and the achievement of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Times Past , which he dismisses as "the greatest monument to human egotism in the history of story-telling."

Fail though it might in its ambition to offer a single key to literature, The Seven Basic Plots is nevertheless one of the most diverting works on storytelling I've ever encountered. Pity about the Jung, but there's no denying the charm of Booker's twice-told tales. ·

Denis Dutton edits the journal Philosophy and Literature and the Web site Arts & Letters Daily.