Oral Storytelling
Storytelling has always been a part of human behavior. We have no information on early storytelling, but we can triangulate backwards from what we do know of storytelling in early societies to cobble together a decent characterization of those stories. The first stories were essentially educational in nature, in which elders transferred their accumulated experiences to youngsters. However, the need to retain the interest of the youngsters forced upon the elders the need to provide some entertaining elements. Thus, tales of saving oneself from predators were embellished with horrifying details of the huge size of the predator, its razor-sharp claws, its speed, and its power. As a child became old and re-told the stories of his youth, he improved upon the story, and so the stories grew in dramatic power. Societies accumulated a collection of stories dealing with every aspect of life.
Amalgamation
The next step was the assembly of the disparate stories into a coherent over-arching story. Every story needs a protagonist, and multiple protagonists in multiple stories was not as dramatically powerful as a single protagonist facing multiple challenges. Audiences could more readily identify with a single protagonist with whom they were already familiary. Thus, the stories were amalgamated into a single epic in which the Great Hero overcomes the many challenges. Inasmuch as nobody could expect all the challenges to come to one location, the Great Hero had to travel from place to place, having new adventures and facing new challenges.
Thus was born the basic storyline of so many cultural epics. The Odyssey is the cleanest, clearest example of this type of epic, but we see much the same thing in many other cultures: The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Aeneid, Beowulf, the Song of Roland, the Nibelungenlied are just a few examples of a universal phenomenon.
Folktales
The grand epic amalgamations never managed to collect all of the common tales into a single mass; usually they were more like a “Greatest Hits” collection of stories from the culture. Lots of other stories circulated as folktales, and every society had its extensive collection of folktales. There are so many of these that scholars have tried to collect the folktales of different societies. There are collections of folktales from all over the world, such as this and this, but these only scratch the surface of a huge body of stories. Indeed, there have been a number of attempts to create taxonomies of folktales, such as the Aarne-Thompson catalog of folktale motifs.
These folktales retain the original characteristics of the first stories: a variety of protagonists, exotic challenges, and resolutions that communicate some tidbit of wisdom. Gretel outwits the witch and saves herself and Hansel. The princess is kind to the lowly frog and is rewarded with a marriageable prince. Cinderella virtuously endures gross injustice and is rewarded with a marriageable prince.
From Oral to Written
Because handwriting was such a tedious effort, only a small fraction of the total corpus of stories for any society were put down in writing. The invention of printing didn’t change much; for the first few hundred years, most printed books addressed religious topics. Even as late as 1700, 52% of the titles printed in London were religious in nature (see the pie chart on this page) — and only 1% of the titles were fictional. What little fiction that was printed during the first few centuries after the invention of the printing press tended to be ancient works of fiction, such as the Arthurian legends. In those days, most books were reproductions, translations, or digests of classical works from ancient Greece and Rome. Even original works were mostly commentaries or interpretations of the Bible. The notion that a modern author would have a worthwhile story to tell was preposterous to European readership. So the Arthurian legends were just about the only works that were printed for pure enjoyment.
After a while, though, people started getting sick and tired of reading the same old Arthurian stories over and over again. This was the genesis of Don Quixote, a clever satire on the Arthurian stories. Don Quixote was a knight errant, just as in the Arthurian stories — but he was a fool. He engaged in many of the same adventures as the knights in the Arthurian stories, except that he managed to invert or bungle everything. Gargantua and Pantagruel was vaguely similar in style, satirizing many of the tropes common to the popular knights’ stories.
The door was pushed further ajar with more humorous novels. In those days, serious matters remained mostly the preserve of religion, so books refrained from directly addressing difficult issues. However, Gulliver’s Travels provided a lighter touch. Gulliver traveled the world, just as the Great Hero did, encountering all manner of strange people and situations, just as the Great Hero did. Only now his adventures presented subtle social commentary. So also was Candide a satirical work of social commentary presented in the format of a hero’s journey.
Meanwhile, back at the theater
While all this was going on, something important was taking place in a related art: the theater. For about fifty years after about 1580, the English theater enjoyed a burst of wild creativity personified in William Shakespeare. There were quite a few other playwrights, but the striking thing about all the plays of this period is that they opened up new ground that had barely been trod before: human emotion. Yes, the plays of classical Greece had a great deal of depth, but they were about larger, more abstruse matters like destiny and hubris. Lady MacBeth’s “Out, damn spot!” or Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” would never show up in a Sophocles play. Sure, Oepidus Rex is powerful drama, but when all is said or done, who do you feel you know better: Oedipus or Hamlet?
The theater opened up a new field for storytelling: human emotion. For the next few centuries, literature dipped its toes into the new pool, but shirked from plunging in. The better people who could read felt that raw emotion was too coarse to appear in their refined literature. Better to read effete poety and devotional books.
I read one of these books from about 1650, and its boringness exceeds modern imagination. Addressing some moral issue such as giving to charity, it advises, “Do the right thing”. Then it expands upon the theme: “Do the right thing because it is virtuous to do the right thing.” Then it adds “Doing the right thing is what a true Christian does.” Then it summarizes: “Therefore, be sure to do the right thing.” Then it turns to some other behavior, such as refraining from beating one’s servants. “Do the right thing…” it begins.
Enter the Hoi Polloi
By the early nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had brought such wealth to society that the do-gooders resolved that everybody should learn to read. This was good for business, too, because they would read the Bible and understand that they should accept their miserable lot in life so that they could go to heaven afterwards. And while the newly literate masses did indeed read some Bible, the ingrates also wanted to be entertained. They turned to authors like Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, and other entertaining storytellers. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a completely new industry appeared: entertainment literature. A talented person could actually earn a living writing good stories. A flood of such authors emerged, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, we actually had some pretty good stuff.
But these were not epic stories about Great Heros conquering mighty opponents. They lacked the awesome tales of strange monsters in distant lands. They were about people, ordinary everyday people, fer crying out loud! People caught up in all manner of emotionally fraught situations. I mean, really — a story about some stupid kid named Tom Sawyer living in some noplace of a town on the Mississippi River, whitewashing fences and collecting marbles? Sophocles would have peed in his pants.
The explosion of available stories created a new problem: a shortage of stories. This may sound strange, but the fact is that all the basic storylines had been thoroughly explored during the nineteenth century. People were getting tired of reading the same old stories over and over. Two new developments arose to meet the challenge.
The first was the mystery. These were elaborate puzzles with the reader following along as the sleuth unravelled the puzzle. The story was nothing more than the solution of the puzzle. The appeal of the mystery story was the cleverness of the sleuth. The first murder mystery, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, was written by Edgar Allen Poe and published in 1841. In it, the detective exercises his masterful “analytical power” to solve the murders. The genre grew slowly at first, but really took off with the Sherlock Holmes series of detective stories in 1887. The genre reached its peak in the 1930s. The basic structure remained the same: the detective used superhuman powers of deduction to expose the murderer. Often the entire plot revolved around a single obscure factoid. I will never forget a silly story I read as a boy in which the denoument was achieved by virtue of the fact that extremely hot glass is visually indistinguishable from room-temperature glass. Wowie-zowie, isn’t that author smart!
The second development was the ironic plot twist. Plot twists were themselves were nothing new, but the deliberate development of major ironic plot twists first showed up brightly in the works of the French writer Guy de Maupassant and, shortly later, the American writer O. Henry. These short stories ended in a startling plot twist that completely negated or reversed the previous development of the plot.
From expansion to explosion
With the development of the movies and their immense popularity in the 1930s, storytellers were presented with even greater demands on their originality. Then along came television in the 1950s and now storytellers had to produce several dozen completely new stories every week. Storytelling was not just a mass market — it was also a mass manufactory. Many of the developments that had been brewing for decades shot to prominence during the 1950s through the 1970s.
One of these was the soap opera. This was an endless story with no overarching plot. “Random character interaction” might be the best description of the structure of these products. Characters entered the soap opera, remained as long as their interactions proved appealing to the audience, and then disappeared. Story arcs involving particular characters might last for several dozen episodes. While daytime soap operas were thrown together cheaply, there were also more expensively produced soap operas showing on nighttime television. The first of these in America was Peyton Place, beginning in 1964. The British have produced a long series of high-class soap operas, such as Upstairs, Downstairs, I Claudius, and Downton Abbey. Currently The Game of Thrones is the reigning champion of this genre.
What I find striking about this genre is its antitheticality to the original epic story of antiquity. Instead of one character experiencing extravagant adventures while moving relentlessly towards a clear goal, the soap opera presents a host of characters coming and going, with no apparent goal. There are character arcs but no plot arc.
The many-stories-in-one
The development that most impresses me is the modern mystery story. This is easily the most prolific genre; between television, movies, and print, mystery stories of many ilks are numberless. And modern mystery stories have merged a number of past elements into something quite new.
Such stories always begin with what appears to be a standard mystery-story launch. But the storyteller subtly uses plot twists to redirect the audience’s perceptions. I’m not talking about red herrings that crudely distract the audience; modern mystery stories use “pink herrings” (or “pink sardines”?) to create uncertainties in the mind of the audience. The audience attempts to formulate an explanatory story that solves the mystery, but each new subtle plot twist forces the audience to concoct a new story. Thus, while experiencing a single story, the audience experiences a host of stories of its own creation. It’s rather like funhouse mirrors:
Which is the real Charlie Chaplin?
These modern mysteries provide a dozen stories for the price of one — and the audience itself creates all the others. But here’s a question: in developing this one story that has many ghostly parallels, is the storyteller not creating something that could be interactive, allowing the audience to actually walk into the virtual world of the mirrors?
