Dutton's Critique of Booker

After giving a limited background of Christopher Booker’s “Seven Basic Plots”, Dennis Dutton launches his argument against Booker, which rudely derails the treatise off any track of validity or acceptability it was ever on.

It is somewhat difficult to critique the viewpoints of both Dutton and Booker, when Booker’s own position is presented not by himself but by his critic, Dutton. Booker categorizes examples of literature into seven broad, echoing story types with the same overall plot and presents these seven plots as applicable for nearly all works of literature, at least that literature which is valid in Booker’s mind.

I found the overview of “The Seven Basic Plots” to seem logical and sensible. I was a little bothered that for some, such as number five and six, Dutton offers no real explanation of what that category means other than offering a title or two of works which I am apparently supposed to be familiar with. It seems as though Dutton is getting bored and impatient of recapping Booker; he wants to hurry up and get to smashing his ideas into the ground, so he continually presents less information of each consecutive plot. It may be for this reason that I feel more in agreement and understanding of Booker’s first four plots, and confused about plot numbers five through seven. However, according to Dutton’s inclinations, it is because Booker simply tagged on the last few to accommodate those outsiders that just wouldn’t fit into his other groups.

Booker believes in Jungian archetypes that can account for symbolism such as that of malevolent characters representing egotism. Dutton, on the other hand, argues that things just are the way they are, and they things just make sense according to human nature, desires and values. In essence he is saying, “Duh! Of course these are basic plots; there are only so many logical alternatives, according to Aristotle, for a story to follow. This doesn’t mean anything significant and it doesn’t make them archetypes, it just means that this is what interests us and this is what makes sense for literature, just as the layout of rooms in a home makes sense for our way of life.”

Dutton presents a convincing argument. He is harsh and direct in diminishing Booker’s decades of work into a seemingly elementary account of what is obvious and naturally evident in literature.