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A Course by Cristina López Barrio

UNIVERSAL STORY LINES FOR CREATING

PLOTS AND CHARACTERS
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STRUCTURES FOR THE CREATION OF PLOTS AND CHARACTERS BASED ON

THE SO-CALLED UNIVERSAL PLOTS

In these plots we are going to analyze a universal theme, such as love or

ambition, and a literary work where it has best been developed. These
universal plots have been used as inspiration and a guide in other later works,
giving it a narrative continuity.

Power, Macbeth by William Shakespeare

I love this Shakespearean tragedy. If you haven't read it I highly recommend it.
It has absolutely wonderful, heartbreaking verse.

It seems that the story of Macbeth is inspired by ancient British chronicles.

Let's go over the story a bit. Macbeth is a cousin of the king of Scotland and a
general in his army. When he returns from a battle with his friend Banquo,
some witches appear in front of them and prophesy that he will become
king. This prophecy awakens the ambition that was dormant within Macbeth
but had not yet dared to show its fearsome face. Macbeth tells his wife about
the witches' prophecy and she encourages him to do what is necessary to
fulfill it. That is, to murder his cousin and take his place on the throne of
Scotland. They take advantage of the king's stay in his castle to assassinate
him and blame it on a sentry who is also murdered afterwards. Macbeth is
proclaimed king after carrying out this infamy with his wife. In this case, and
here is one of the main characteristics of this universal plot, the social or
economic ascent of the character supposes his moral descent. Macbeth is
king, but from that moment on he will not rest. He lives tormented by the
idea of having what he took, power, taken away from him, and to avoid it he
commits other murders, including that of his friend Banquo. Other
prophecies let him know that no son born of a woman will kill him, and that
he has nothing to fear castle with branches they have cut from the forest, so
that it seems as if the forest has begun to walk.
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The power that Macbeth has so longed for is destroyed. Macduff, a Scottish
nobleman who was torn from his dead mother's womb, is the one who puts
an end to the tyrant. Thus fulfilling the witches’ other prophecy.

The fundamental characteristics of this structure are the following:

-A magical element is at work in the first place. Macbeth believes that his
destiny is written, and that the witches have come to announce it to him. The
superstition of being born to undertake something great will condition
Macbeth's attitude. The second prophecy - that he can only be killed by
those who are not born of women - also reinforces Macbeth's belief in his
mythical destiny.

-The structure of this story of ambition is based on a rise and a fall.

As indicated above, the ascent of the character to the throne is his moral
descent because he murders to satisfy his ambition. From then on he will live
in the grip of remorse and fear of losing the crown, which is perfectly
expressed in his chronic insomnia.

In the typical structure of ambitious, social, economic, or work-related

ascension of the character supposes his physical or moral death.

-The fall into the temptation of power is the first step in becoming a tyrant.
This is what his enemies call Macbeth in the second part of the play. The
solitary tyrant who lives locked up in his castle, tired of power, disgusted with
it even, but capable of murder or any other miserable action before losing it.

-"Already I begin to be weary of the sun, and I should be glad if the universe
would sink," says Macbeth.

-Going off of the figure of Macbeth as a modern tyrant, we enter the Spanish
tradition of Valle-Inclán's Tirano Banderas, and the great novels of Latin
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American dictators such as Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the

Patriarch.

The Descent into Hell in the Myth of Orpheus

The character's descent into hell is a classic theme in the history of literature.
In The Odyssey, Ulysses also visits Hades on Circe's instructions to visit the
soothsayer Tiresias, who prophesies that in order to return to his homeland he
will have to overcome many obstacles. In the character's descent to hell
there is usually a quest behind it. The character longs to return home or, as in
the case of Orpheus, which we will analyze below, it is love that moves him.
Another example is The Divine Comedy. Dante is lost in the jungle of sin by
the only practical way, that of the subsoil, and by the hand of Virgil, who
symbolizes reason. The descent into Hell is physical, it appears as a kind of
crater like an inverted cone, through which he descends by means of circles
that get narrower and narrower, becoming more painful as he descends.
The character's descent into hell is normally a process of purging or catharsis
in the trajectory of his life, from which he will emerge strengthened, or else
perish in it. We could say that it constitutes a frontier space, since once the
character goes through it, he will never be the same again.

The classical myth of Orpheus proposes the search for romantic love beyond
life. But Orpheus, besides being a man in love in search of his beloved, is a
poet, an artist. Recovering artistic inspiration also comes into play. Again, one
has to descend towards death so that a change takes place in the character,
who is reborn like a phoenix, most of the time after a journey, either physical
or inner, to the hell of life or of himself. Orpheus' wife, Eurydice, dies from a
snake bite. The poet and singer, in despair, decides to descend to hell to
recover her. He crosses the Styx lagoon and appears before Hades and
Persephone, rulers of the kingdom of shadows. With a beautiful song he asks
them to return with him his beloved wife.
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The sovereigns, moved by his art, grant his wish, but on one condition: He
cannot look at her until they leave the valley of Avernus. Orpheus does not
comply with the command, and fearful that his wife is not following him, he
looks back to see with horror how Eurydice returns again to the world of
shadows. He tries to go down again to look for her, but Charon, the ferryman
of the lagoon, will no longer allow him to pass. Orpheus begins an erratic life
in which he does not want contact with any woman, until the Maenads attack
him and dismember him, and Orpheus' shadow descends to the realm of
the dead to meet Eurydice.

In a first plot line narrated by Ovid in The Metamorphoses, we find an

Orpheus who transgresses the forbidden and wanders, erratic, to atone for
his guilt. Orpheus is, therefore, a character who knows pain and death. There
is only joy and peace in Orpheus once he meets death through the Maenads.

One of the characteristics of the Orphic character is his renunciation of living

in the real world, his yearning to go beyond, the need to go through the
mirror. Orpheus is also an artist in search of inspiration. In Thomas Mann's
Death in Venice, we find an Orphic character who has lost his wife and his
inspiration and wanders through melancholy Venice in search of beauty and
lost artistic inspiration. No character emerges unscathed from his passage
through hell. It is a frontier space that leads them to catharsis, to change, and
thus to the enrichment of the character.

The Return Journey in Homer's Odyssey

Every journey implies a change in literature. The journey can be physical or in

the character's consciousness. It is an experience where the character is
transformed; we will see the difference between flat and round characters.
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The latter are those who are subjected to a journey that changes them. The
character is never the same as when he started the journey.

The universal argument about the journey home is of course found in The
Odyssey. The return home after a series of adventures is one of the classic
themes of literature. The wandering nature of Ulysses is found in James Joyce,
in his Ulysses. In a single day in Dublin, we appreciate the change operated
by the character after the explorations and vicissitudes of an inner life.

The return of the expatriate, the fugitive, after a journey of adventures and
misadventures where the character has suffered his particular purge and has
learned what he had to learn, is a constant in the plots of both literary and
cinematographic works.

Another plot line is found in what happens in Ithaca while the hero of Troy is
away. Penelope, besieged by suitors, sews and unsews a cloak in the most
mythical representation of waiting, and Telemachus, her immature son, who
needs his father.

But it is the theme of the journey that undoubtedly finds its plot inspiration in
the Odyssey.

Duality Between Good and Evil in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson and
The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino

The idea of the double or the character that splits into two different
characters, each with opposite characteristics, but which in reality form a
whole, is a universal theme in literature, although it found its maximum
expression during romanticism, especially in the fantasy genre. The authors
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Jordi Balló and Xavier Pérez, in their book The Immortal Seed, analyze the
theme of the double from the point of view of the mythology of a sinister
double, associated with evil or death, which reaches its maximum expression
in the myth of Narcissus. The adolescent who, fascinated by his figure in the
water of the pond, falls into it and drowns.

E.T.A. Hoffman also deals with the theme of the double in several stories, or
of characters whose resonance appears in others, as in the story The
Sandman, providing a sinister effect. The duality of the human soul, the
insecurity of the self that does not dare to engage in certain behaviors or
that believes it is obliged to repress them, is a metaphysical theme that
enters literature fully. Although this is what it is all about, we previously saw
how literature is also a source of human knowledge, both of man's
environment and of himself; every literary work that boasts of being so
translates a human experience.

Human duality, that dissociation that we often feel, that impulse that is often
repressed by reason or fear. The struggle between good and evil that lies
within us, in some way influenced by our Western and Judeo-Christian
education, the struggle of opposites, of temptations and sacrifices.

It is, undoubtedly, Romanticism, the era where several stories emerge in

which it is dealt with. Edgar Alan Poe, in his story William Wilson, presents us
with a sinister double that anticipates him in all his steps, conquering the
triumphs that the character had longed for himself. When the protagonist
murders him, he realizes that he has killed himself.

But the conception of the double as a unique being is actually found in

Stevenson's short novel The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Due
to experiments conducted by Dr. Jekyll, obsessed with the dual nature of the
soul, he finds a scientific formula to separate the good from the evil
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within a human being, the good and the bad elements. Thus, he creates an
alter ego, Mr. Hyde, whose transformation is not only spiritual but also
physical. The atrocious murders committed by Mr. Hyde can only be
stopped by Dr. Jekyll himself, so he immolates himself in his laboratory. The
novel ends with the death of the character as the only remedy to end this
duality that wreaks havoc in the community.

In the 20th century we find a novel that fascinates me and deals with this
theme in a somewhat comical way without being any less profound. I am
referring to The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino. In the 17th century,
Viscount Medardo de Terralba goes to fight the Turks with his squire. He is
not an experienced warrior, so he is knocked off his horse, and while fighting
on foot a cannonball literally cuts his body in half. In this fantastic fable the
viscount of Medardo becomes two different people, Gramo, the bad guy,
and Buono, the good guy. The doctors stitch up Gramo and he is able to
return home, while Buono is cured by a group of hermits, and soon after he
also returns to Terralba. There are therefore two viscounts: Buono, a paragon
of virtue to the point that his altruism for others is somewhat disturbing and
terribly heavy in many moments, and Gramo, who represents evil, but
carried with grace by the author. Let us not forget its aftertaste of satire,
which causes the reader's sympathy despite being a character who builds
guillotines and represents all the evil of the viscount.

The two fall in love with the same woman, the peasant Pamela. She loves
Buono, but forced by her parents, she accepts Gramo's proposal. On the day
of the wedding, she arrives late and marries Buono. Gramo challenges him to
a duel to see who will finally be the husband. Both fall wounded, the court
physician heals them, uniting them again, and the viscount of Terralba, now
only one, complete, lives a happy life with the peasant girl.

We see that while in the other examples the awareness of a double, or the
splitting in two of the same character, each part representing a facet of his
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personality, ended in death and tragedy, very typical of the sinister and
fantastic mentality of the Romantics, Calvino presents us with a happy
ending, where the viscount is able to have a full life with the two halves of
which he is composed, one part complementing the other.

Marked Destiny and Free Will in Calderón de la Barca's Life is a Dream

This is a universal theme in literature that draws from Greek sources, from
tragedy to be more precise. The fatum or destiny that appears as something
immovable, is magical in the lives of the characters and conditions their lives
no matter what they do, like a curse from which it is difficult to escape. The
struggle between the marked destiny and the free will of man is a universal
theme that is touched on in the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex and many others,
in a play with one of the most beautiful monologues in the history of
literature: Life is a Dream by Calderón de la Barca.

The element of written destiny is part of a fantastic genre. A marvelous

element, which escapes all rationality, hovers over the character, who has no
choice in deciding about his life, or rather of all the decisions he makes to
escape from the destiny that is given to him, the only thing he does is to
throw himself into its arms.

In Life is a Dream we find a dramatic character who has suffered the ravages
of a marked destiny. Segismundo lives in a cave, a prisoner since birth, having
seen no other human being than his jailer Clotaldo. Life for him is nothing
more than the reality of the cave - we see the Platonic influence on the myth
of the cave. A soothsayer predicted to his father, king of Poland, that his son
would eventually rebel against his father and dethrone him. The problem of
predestination is key in this work, where Basilio, father of Segismundo, ends
up surrendered at the feet of his son after numerous
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vicissitudes in which the concept of life as a dream, as a tragedy, very typical

of the time it was written, comes into play: the Spanish Baroque.

Because the most elusive fate, the most violent inclination, the cleanest planet
on the will incline towards, not force, the will.

There is also the dialectic of the time, in which the Jesuits defended man's
intelligence and free will, with the support of divine grace, but with full
freedom to choose his path and to be master of his actions. Against them is
the theology of the Dominicans for whom there is the omnipotence of God.
Calderón, trained with the Jesuits, follows this trend that allows man to face
negative fate. We find the tragic struggle of man, as a microcosm, against
the universe, a macrocosm, focusing the story on human existence. Plato
deals with it in the dilemma between reason and the human will that can
break fatality.

The end of the work gives encouragement to the idea of man's freedom in
the face of established destiny. A different end from the aforementioned
Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex. Segismundo does not submit to Basilio, but it is
he who surrenders to his feet.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Immortal Seed, Balló and Pérez. Editorial Anagrama

©Copyright: Cristina López Barrio