How many Plots?

So, I was playing with the “How many plots are there?” idea from last week, and came up with this, based on various comments and just a teensy bit of googling around using “how many plots are there?” as the search term.

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I think it’s probably not especially useful to try to boil down stories the The Seven Basic Plots (or any variation on that theme). Looking at this now, I still wouldn’t say it’s necessarily useful, but (like so many other types of categorization) it’s kind of interesting. I forgot about Boy Meets Girl and then decided there was no way to separate it from other so-called “basic plots” and superimposed it over the top, but I think that could be where it belongs. Suppose you have a basic romance in which nothing much happens except Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl — the simplest possible plot. Doesn’t that always also include something like The Man (And Woman) Who Learn Better? Or, I mean, something besides purely Boy Meets Girl.

Boy Meets Girl strikes me as somewhat like Comedy. When I googled “seven basic plots,” sure enough, one of the top hits has this list where Comedy and Tragedy are listed as basic plots, and my reaction is still ???. How are those plots?

Let’s think of some classic Comedy or Tragedy — how about Romeo and Juliet. The plot is — what? What is the basic plot? Can you just say “Tragedy” and stop there? I don’t think so. I think that’s Boy Meets Girl (Idiot Teenager Subplot), plus Things are Not As They Seem, and then on top of that, it’s also a tragedy.

How about a comedy? Much Ado About Nothing, say. What good does it do to say it’s a comedy? It’s Boy Meets Girl, plus The Man Who Learns Better. Plus on top of that, it’s a comedy.

What is The Count of Monte Cristo? It’s Journey and Return, Man Caught in a Trap, Rebirth, Rags to Riches, The Man Who Learned Better (maybe that’s the same thing as Rebirth), Overcoming the Monster (maybe?), and even maybe A Stranger Comes to Town. It’s neither a tragedy nor a comedy. It’s a romance, but not exactly Boy Meets Girl. Except for Maximilian and Valentine, and then maybe it is. Maybe Things are Not As They Seem. There’s a lot to it.

I don’t know that it’s particularly useful to attempt to lay out plots and categorize novels, but I think I can say with assurance that statements such as “There’s only one plot: Things are not as they seem” are wrong. It’s easy to look at that diagram and pick out a plot that does not fit: Man Versus Nature. That can be an extremely straightforward plot in which everything is exactly as it seems and one hundred percent of the tension comes from elements that are right there in the open. The giant storm is exactly what it seems to be, the killing cold is exactly what it seems to be, the parched desert is exactly what it seems to be, and the question is: how does the protagonist survive. The Martian is a Man Against Nature story. Is it anything else? Return, maybe, although not Journey. The Journey happens before the story opens. Basically it’s just pure Man Against Nature.

How about We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. I didn’t put “Good Versus Evil” in the Venn diagram because, like Boy Meets Girl, it’s everywhere. But Man Versus Nature is again an exception, isn’t it? Unless you define the courage (or obstinacy) to keep going as “good” and the surrender to death as “evil,” which I don’t think I do, but if you did, that might do the job of bringing that plot into the overall umbrella of “Good Versus Evil.” How does The Martian look now? Actually, in a way, the story does fit the Good Versus Evil paradigm, not because of Mark Watney’s efforts to survive, but because of the efforts of other people to save him. The frame story rather than the main story does fit with Good Versus Evil. I can imagine where a Man Versus Nature story might not have any kind of frame, and then it might still be an exception.

However, no matter how purely a Man Versus Nature story might belong to only that category, this —

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us …. Humans are caught … in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well — or ill?

Would still be true. You could argue that the man caught in a plot Man Versus Nature plot, faced with the prospect of death, is also intrinsically faced with that question, even if that’s not what the immediate story is about.

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