Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
November 17, 1957
By Solon Simmons
There is a fundamental tension in the field of peace and conflict resolution. On the one hand, we recognize that there is a basic need for de-escalation. If people are driven by hate, they will always find an occasion to do harm to one another, creating cycles of violence that may never end. This demands that conflicting parties turn their attention to the future.
On the other hand, if we simply ignore the injustices of the past, not only do we fail to ensure that those injustices will be perpetuated, but we also risk their return. Without a focus on healing the wounds of injustice, there can be no hope for lasting peace.
Indicators of this insight pop up throughout the history of contemporary protest movements, from Dr. Martin Luther King’s insight that “true peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice” in 1955 to Pope Paul VI’s 1972 exhortation that “if you want peace, work for justice,” to the popular protest chant of our own day, “No justice, no peace!”
And this idea can be traced at least as far back as the Munich Agreement in preparation for which Neville Chamberlain told the press, “My objective is peace in Europe. I trust this trip is the way to that peace.”
Then, the very day that Nazi troops marched across the border in Czechoslovakia, the prominent American foreign correspondent Dorothy Thompson wrote, “[P]eace is not the absence of war. Peace is a positive condition—the rule of law. … This is not peace without victory. The victory goes to Mr. Hitler.”
Of the sets of rules that constitute what we at TNT Lab call story grammar, the most important among them might be the notion of the Basic Plot Types that we derive from this tension between the the ideals of peace and justice.
No doubt, these are complementary objectives, but they also sit in a kind of tension with one another, especially in times of tense escalation, when parties are planning tactics for social change. When the chips are down, it’s hard to know how the story goes.
To better grasp the implications of this tension, we propose a typology of story types that work with two cross-cutting distinctions, one between collaborative journey and adversarial struggle story types, and the other between happy and sad endings.
The first distinction distinguishes the nature of the relationship between the protagonist and the antagonist of the story, and the second between two basic shapes that a story can take—from negative to positive, or from positive to negative.
Most people who become interested in narrative change see the necessary association between peace and justice. After all, if one party is subject not only to the weight of past injustice but also to the promise of its recurrence, why would they ever approach the other from the perspective of peace? Conditions of injustice demand an answer. They demand closure before peace can even become an object of contemplation.
We can go a little deeper into this distinction if we build on an insight from John Paul Lederach and his germinal work called Building Peace, a monograph he wrote while working with the United States Institute of Peace in the late 1990s.
There he tells a story of a community of peacebuilders he accompanied who relied on a Biblical psalm to anchor their peace work, what he called “the space of reconciliation.” It was psalm 85, verse ten, which he translated as, “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” If we tweak the wording and reframe the center as “the space of conflict transformation” it would look like this:
Rephrasing the poem, it would read, “Forgiveness and Truth are met together; Fairness and Friendship have kissed.” On the left side of the figure you would have accounts that emphasize reconciliation or the repair of relationships. Here, forgiveness and mutual understanding are key points of emphasis. On the right side you have accounts that emphasize accountability or restitution for past wrongs, and reparations and exposure would be emphasized.
Lederach imagined these four concepts as characters in a drama. Right away, you can see how these four different roles would act in distinctive ways, and also how stories told in one mode would differ from the others. None of these four approaches to conflict transformation is inherently better than another; each plays a proper role that depends on the viewer’s definition of the situation. Is it a time to forgive, or a time to pay back? A time to embrace as friends, or a time to reveal the wrongs of the past?
As it happens, the essential character of each of these four elements that Lederach associates with the concept of peace can be mapped onto aspects of story types, what we will call the basic plot types.
This perspective builds on the foundational analyses of literary theorists like Northrop Frye, including his famous essay in The Anatomy of Criticism and his chapter on the “Theory of Myths.” It also builds on the social science applications of Hayden White’s Metahistory, which used Frye’s four mythoi as an explanatory device.
These four basic plot types correspond to the kinds of stories we tend to see in a typical escalated conflict setting. Both sides tend to emphasize the righteousness of their own cause and the injustices committed by the other side. Both see themselves as protagonists in their own story and cast the other as the antagonist. This is what the narrative theorists John Winslade and Gerald Monk call “the two protagonists” assumption. The story is assumed to play out as a struggle for power. When the good guys win, it is a good thing. When they lose, it’s a terrible thing. If we think about each side as a ‘blue team’ and their antagonists as a ‘red team,’ we can combine Lederach’s four roles with Frye’s four mythoi, which would look something like this:
A struggle story can turn out one of two ways: either the good guys win and we have a romantic outcome, or the bad guys win and we have a satirical one. Obviously, we are using ‘romance’ and ‘satire’ in a restricted and technical sense here; a romantic struggle is any story in which good triumphs over evil in the end, and a satirical struggle is one in which evil triumphs over good. When we tell stories about “them,” they tend to be satirical in this technical sense. When we tell stories about “us,” they tend to be romantic
A journey story is different from a struggle story in that it is often harder to differentiate the good from the bad guys, and also in the corresponding way that empathy is directed toward both the story’s protagonist and antagonist. We can see the separation between the struggle from the journey story as early as Vladimir Propp’s analysis of the folktale—what he described as two pairs of functions, one concerning “the struggle with the villain” and the other “the difficult task and its resolution.”
[W]e must separate tales in their essence…we observe that there are two such pairs of functions which are encountered within a single move so rarely that their exclusiveness may be considered regular, while their combination may be considered a violation of the rule…These two pairs are the struggle with the villain and victory over him, and the difficult task and its resolution. Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale (1968, pp. 101–102)
When a journey story—one that narrates how a difficult task is resolved—turns out badly, meaning the protagonist does not achieve the objective developed in the story set-up, the journey story turns tragic. We are sad at the end, but we see both (or all) sides of the story. We often feel as bad in the end for the formal antagonist as we do for the protagonist. Conversely, when the story ends well, we have a comic story. We are happy for both the hero (or main subject) and their opposition. These kinds of stories have no real villains, and their resolution often meets the needs of all parties involved. You can immediately see the tie-in with the concept of peace and peace building.
These four basic plot types have four corresponding forms of “post-plot pressure” or typical story effect. This residue of purely narrative inspired tension can be thought of as the purpose or function of telling one or the other type of story in any given situation. It will tend to motivate a different type of reaction in the audience. We can summarize these four types of post-plot pressure with a variation on the basic plot type figure above:
In this table, we have the same four part structure but emphasis is placed on whether the desire engendered in the set-up of the story is satisfied or not and then on whether the problem was solved for a journey story (you either get there or don’t) or if the abusive power was overcome for a struggle story (you either win or lose).
Notice what the story structure does with our expectations at the story’s end. If things turn out well, we can feel good. We will be tempted to sit with satisfaction if we have solved our problem and perhaps to apply our solution to other settings. If we are successful in a struggle, we will want both to hold on to our victory and to apply it in other similar settings. The romantic struggle story is the “chosen glory” that Vamik Volkan has written about.
On the other side, when the story does not meet our expectations and ends badly, we are left with a another feeling, one given in the very structure of the story itself. If our (the protagonist’s) problem is not solved, we have a sense of tragic loss. With no one to blame (no villain), we are encouraged to introspect. We might choose to change or grow, altering our perspective on the subject matter of the story.
But if the story ends badly and the villain wins, we are left with a deep sense of violation. We are perhaps angry or afraid—very explosive emotions. The post-plot pressure cannot sit comfortably in this space. We are either crushed or animated. The tendency is to imagine ways to plan our attack, to win in another way. This satirical struggle story is the “chosen trauma” that Volkan wrote about, and the post-plot pressure explains why it is useful for political movements and mass mobilization. Almost every political attack advertisement has an element of the satirical struggle about it.
These four basic plot types are quite general and perhaps universal. We can see them in stories no matter how they are organized for telling, from film, to folklore, to televised political campaigns.
To cite this article
Simmons, Solon. “Basic Plot Types for Peace and Justice.” The Narrative Transformation Lab. https://tntlab.carterschool.gmu.edu/learn/narrative-transformation-guides/guide-basic-plot-types/.