The (Two?) Basic Plots

Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is the search for a book – not a perfect one, certainly, but at least one which both the narrator and his potential love interest Ludmilla -that perfectly imagined (if you are an insecure early twenty-something male) well-read yet not intellectually too threatening female – want to read. Despite both claiming to be confirmed Calvino literati, the hook that grabs them both is the hoary old chestnut of the arrival of a stranger in a new town. This inciting incident, the tangential opposite of Joseph Campbell’s ‘call to adventure’, is what  Scarlett Thomas in Monkeys with Typewriters has suggested to be one of only two real plots. The other, before Campbell enthusiast take up their pitchforks, is someone going on Campbell’s journey.

All stories, Thomas feels, metaphorical or otherwise, classic literature or genre pot-boiler – can be boiled down to one of these two basic plots. Journeys blend the literal and the metaphorical – Lord of the Rings, On the Road, The Old Man and the Sea or The Secret History. These journeys involve both outer and inner change. Frodo Baggins, Sal, Santiago, and Richard Papen all have to overcome both physical and psychological geography to reach their destination, whether it be leading to a fiery pit, San Francisco, self-actualisation or coming to terms with your faults and place in the world.

Conversely, the arrival in town of a stranger both means the creation of conflict and flux. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita begins with the arrival in Moscow of Satan – bent on creating mischief and toppling over the status quo. Dea Poirier’s Next Girl to Die sees a detective return to her hometown to investigate the slaying of a young woman. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series in many ways has its cake and eats it. Reacher is on a journey that never seems to end (certainly not if Child is passing on writing duties to his younger brother) while his arrival in town in novels such as Make Me invariably signals seismic changes that at least some of the Mother’s Rest locals definitely don’t want to see. The stranger will arrive, the status quo will be flipped, and nothing will ever be the same again.

I’ve been thinking about ‘the journey’ trope recently, worried that my WIP was too similar to a previous book and that maybe I was just re-treading old ground. When I read Thomas’ comments on that and ‘the stranger’ trope, it was with a mixture of trepidation and relief. Trepidation that my inciting incident was the latter while my overall arching theme was the former. Relief because these plots – of The Odyssey, Oedipus, The Epic of Gilgamesh – have been around since humanity first told stories. My stumbling plots underline the fact that there is nothing new under the sun bar in perhaps execution. They totter alongside antecedents – some worse, many probably better – and will be followed and superseded by others. While Calvino’s novel may start with the ‘stranger comes to town’ trope – and many of the stories within have similarly elusive arrivals – the story is ultimately is the narrator and Ludmilla experiencing their own literary journey. In search of their Holy Grail, they stumble on an international book fraud conspiracy populated by academic turf wars, publishing houses in the throes of anarchy, a tricky translator, a reclusive novelist and even a repressive government regime. By the time their journey is over, they’ll have experienced a range of genres and learnt more about themselves as both readers and as people. Like reading twelive books (well… the beginnings of at least) with an adventure story in between. And plenty of both arrivals and departures.