Do Booker’s Seven Basic Plots reduce to a series of events leading to a change in fortune (reversal, peripeteia), and establishing the outcome?
Moreau
One of the famous painted narratives, Oedipus and the Sphinx proves an exception to all rules, but is glossed over in discussion of the literary narrative.
Having murdered his own mother in revenge for her murder of Agamemnon, Orestes is hounded down and driven mad by the Furies.
The fourth ‘basic plot’ is the story of voyage and return, for which we turn to Ovid’s account of this couple, and a dozen superb paintings. But does the model fit?
How paintings of the Aeneid, Jason and the Golden Fleece, and Homer’s Odyssey match up with the basic plot of The Quest.
Odysseus finally arrives home, but has to decide what to do with more than 100 suitors to his wife Penelope.
Once he has the Golden Fleece, Jason is pursued by Medea’s father. They make away in his ship the Argo, but he later abandons Medea, and everything goes wrong for them both.
Every 9 years, 9 of the finest young men and 9 young maidens from Athens were sent to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. Then Theseus joined them to kill the monster.
Examples from Gustave Moreau, Georges Clairin, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Paul Nash, Joseph Stella, and Nikolai Astrup.
Examples of surreal visual art from Bosch in about 1500, through Piranesi’s Imaginary Prison, Richard Dadd, to Félix Vallotton in 1892.
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