The science fiction writer A. E. Van Vogt used to say there were only three storylines: Boy Meets Girl, Local Boy Makes Good, and The Man Who Learned Better. However many basic storylines there are the basic lines have been crafted into a number of Great Stories and those stories are used, modified, adapted, and re-worked, over and over again, some of them over thousands of years. Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, about one of which’s adaptions I posted yesterday, is one of those Great Stories. It’s been adapted, re-worked, and parodied thousands of times. One of the most recent of these adaptations is the movie Dave, which starred Kevin Kline (how Kevin Kline’s and my paths haven’t crossed I’ll never know—we moved in much the same circles in St. Louis). That plot itself has antecedents which go back a couple of thousand years in legends of St. Philemon the Actor.
The story of the birth of Moses is the story of Sargon the Great, the first Semitic king of Mesopotamia, who must have predated any conceivable birthdate for Moses by a thousand years. Of course the story was used. It’s a Great Story.
The story of Jesus is another Great Story. Two of its more recent derivatives are The Lord of the Rings and the movie Pay It Forward.
The Julia Roberts-Richard Gere picture, Pretty Woman, is sometimes characterized as a “Cinderella storyâ€. Wrong story. It’s Pygmalian, the same story re-told by Ovid more than two thousand years ago. It was adapted into a play of the same name by G. B. Shaw, re-worked as the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, and made into a movie of the same name. Pygmalian is also the source material of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and I can see echoes of it in the Book of Genesis. A Great Story.
There are lots of Great Stories: Robin Hood, Beauty and the Beast, Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, Cinderella, Romeo and Juliet, Hercules (a wicked queen assigns Our Hero impossible tasks), and so on. They’re reused over and over again. I don’t know enough about the Confucian societies to know their Great Stories but I’ll bet they have their own. Or maybe they have same stories and the stories go back and back to the very dawn of our species.
Do you have any favorite Great Stories that I’ve missed? Any favorite adaptations? Oddball adaptations?
Cross-posted from The Glittering Eye.
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"The story of the birth of Moses is the story of Sargon the Great, the first Semitic king of Mesopotamia, who must have predated any conceivable birthdate for Moses by a thousand years. Of course the story was used. It’s a Great Story."
Why do you think that the Jews would be familiar with a legend about a 1000 year-old king from an empire which ceased to exist 100 years after him? Do you really think that the story carried on for the next 900 years despite many waves of important kings following? Not to mention just a little influence from Egyptian culture, which grew quite independently of the ancient Akkadian empire.
Isn’t the simpler explanation in the case of Moses either that the thing happened, or if you prefer to believe that it didn’t, that the story was an independent invention?
Unfortunately, I can’t speak for the Confucian stories, other than the story of Monkey. Briefly, a stone egg emerges from a mountain, and a precocious stone Monkey hatches from the egg. Using his innate supernatural powers & superhuman mental genius, the Monkey grows up, gathers an army of monkeys, and lays seige to the Court of Heaven. Failing in that endeavour, Monkey is subsequently imprisoned. Millenia later, he is paroled to assist a Buddhist priest in a quest to bring scriptures back from India to China. This time, using his powers for good, he subdues demons and hostile armies arrayed against the priest, who ultimately succeeds in his quest, and is rewarded with promotion to a Buddha in the afterlife. Monkey is similarly rewarded for his aid to the priest, and also becomes a Buddha in Heaven.
There are echoes of the stories of Jonah and Saul/Paul in this story. Numerous manga & anime adaptations of this story have appeared. In fact, I believe Iron Man & Spiderman can also claim kinship to this story.
In the same vein of comics, I believe the story of Aladdin finds a modern echo in the story of Green Lantern, substituting the ring for the lamp, as with all lesser pretenders with an item of power (Starman, for example).
Finally, the whole Battlestar Galactica ethos might be considered an expansion of the Odyssey or the Wanderings of Israel after their liberation from Egypt.
Taiss: The original Battlestar Galactica was based on the tales of the early Mormon church. Just FYI.
I have seen many sources which claim there are only a certain number of stories, although I’ve never seen any source claim there are only three. The three seem insufficient, although they clearly match a lot of stories very well indeed.
Having completed a novel myself, I can say that the biggest thing I learned was that there really are only so many stories to tell, and that all good ones fall into certain predictable patterns. Indeed, part of the craft is in finding ways to surprise the reader, which is quite tricky given that there really aren’t all that many stories you can tell that aren’t repeated elsewhere in some fashion.
Sure it’s possible that it happened that way or that it was an independent invention. But if you believe that Genesis itself was passed down in oral tradition for 1,000 years it’s not much of a stretch to believe that Semitic people from just exactly the part of the world that Sargon came from and for whom he was a great culture hero could pass the story down, too.
But that’s not the way I look at the story of Moses’s birth. I think that, because the story of Sargon the Great was a Great Story and passed down and re-told over many, many years, that when Moses’s story was told, it was told in this way so that the listeners would immediately know that this was a person from whom great things could be expected, to signal and emphasize his importance.
Prometheus and the War in Heaven (the fall of Lucifer).
The big problem with "there are only X many stories" is that it’s true for any X, so long as the degree of abstraction is a function of X.
For example:
There is only 1 basic story: time passes and — the universe not winking out of existence — it has some characteristics during that time.
There are only 2 basic stories: story 1 == something happens, story 2 == nothing happens
There are only 3 basic stories: something happens and it turns out well, something happens and it turns out badly, nothing happens.
With a few more basic stories you can introduce boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again, boy gives girl up for noble reasons (the plotline of Casablanca).
Sin and redemption and damnation, struggle and victory and loss form the basis of our stories because as sinful animals our two biggest issues are that (1) we’re separated from God and (2) the world is a nasty place. This isn’t an insight into literature, but into humanity. "There are only X kinds of Y" are often useful to illustrate a point about something else.
Saying "there are only two types of chairs: ones with backs and ones without backs" tells you that the speaker likes to slouch, or wants lumbar support, or something. It’s not a complete classification of chairs. If you want to be complete, then there’s either only 1 type of chair (the chair), or as many chairs as actually exist, since every one is individual and thus distinguishable from every other chair by spacial location, material composition, etc.
The theory of great stories can tell you about human beings, but it’s not useful to tell you about stories.
Well, there are arguments and such on the matter, but what it amounts to is that there are only so many things human beings can do, no matter how powerful or interesting they are. Love found, love lost, great victory, great defeat, tragic death, happy death, pilgrimage, jeremiad, evolution of the soul, learn a lesson, gigantic disaster, and a few others are all the stories there really are; the rest of it is how the author expresses it.
Even the archetypes for characters are usually easy to spot once you see them; in the simplest terms, you have the hero and the villain. Then you may have the anti-hero, the love interest, the mother or father figure, the rogue, the knight errant, the crazy person, the dying person, the damsel in distress, the supportive friend, the turncoat, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, and a few others, and that’s really all there is.
There’s something in us that fights the idea that stories and characters fall into predictable patterns, but unless you’re intentionally writing something chaotic and full of non-sequiturs, these patterns will emerge. And those patterns pretty closely match the normal range of human emotions; you only have so many emotions, like happy, sad, angry, wounded, bitter, in love, loving, hating, tired, bored, energetic, and a few others.. There are only so many permutations of the human condition, and no matter how unique one individual is, there will be other individuals much like that person.
In English Lit classes we learned that there are four basic plots -Â since all plots require some form of conflict, they are:
man vs. nature
man vs. man
man vs. God
man vs. himself
Then there’s the more modern ‘man vs. technology’..
Well, the story of Samson stands out as iconic, both in the exposure of the weakness and the pulling the down of the house around himself.
Then there are all the Hero/Quest things, starting with the story of Gilgamesh back in Sumerian times.
Fountain of Youth or Tree of Knowledge stories are out there in many variations including ‘forbidden knowledge’ types.
I guess you could say that these are all ‘Man vs. X’ stories, but that’s like saying they all use words. Excepting some rare science fiction, stories on this planet do tend to involve ‘Man’.
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How about the thousands of variations, across numerous cultures, of "Young hero with mysterious patrimony meets great teacher. Using newfound skills, takes offense to bad guy over a woman, oppression, etc – but bites off more than he can chew and gets ass kicked in opening scenes. Great teacher further instructs hero in the arts of kicking butt. Conclusion: Hero kicks evil leader heinie after going through a whole bunch of minions. Hero ends up becoming King, a great teacher himself, etc. and gets the girl if there is one."
Here, you’ve got everything from a thousand kung-fu movies to Ivanhoe to Star Wars.
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Foobarista, that’s what I consider the "Messiah" or "The One" plot, with modern variations being Dune, or The Matrix, or Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, etc.
However, even those encompass the major story basics.Â
Stranger In A Strange Land was another "messiah" plot. And while it’s his most cited work in literary circles, it was far from my favorite.
ctl, Wikipedia has a good summary of various Deluge stories worldwide. It does seem likely from the archeological evidence the Noah flood story may have derived from earlier Sumerian flood stories. After all, Abraham is said to have been a native of Ur, and he lived later than Noah in the Biblical chronology.
I think it also likely as a result the Moses story to be a derivative of the Sargon story.
Taiss,
There’s always "may have". The thing that bugs me about all this is that it’s not particularly simpler to pass a story on for 1000 years than it is for someone to have just come up with it.
And it’s not like "put child in basket on river" is some terribly complex idea that’s only plausible in a story, and only one great genius in all of humanity’s history might have thought of it.
So when there are so many very plausible ways for something to have happened, it seems to me absurd to cling fervently to the notion of one particularly complex method. They may have gotten the story from a bunch of now extinct talking crocodiles, for all you know.
And the method of transmission that’s suggested is so implausible: "I’ve got this thing that I want to say, and this traditional story, so I’ll just rewrite the latter to say what I want." That’s just not how human beings work. And it presumes that the audience won’t mind a blatantly and uncreatively recycled story that, if it looks familiar to us, will look far more familiar to them.
It’s possible. Anything is possible. But it lacks the ring of truth.
ctl,
I must disagree with your statement on the implausibility of recycling of plots. For the vast majority of recorded history, only an elite minority were literate. The bulk of humanity relied on oral tradition and recitation from memory of epics by bards to transmit stories. Only much later were these oral stories transcribed into written form.
I paraphrase from Dr. Robert Fagles, who notes these bards had a stock of turns of phrase and plot motifs to help spur the memory to keep time with the lyre. These memory aids endured because they were memorable. Indeed, the image of the baby in a basket in a river would’ve been as striking in a pre-literate society as in today’s tabloid age.
Indeed, as these bards travelled the trade routes, it is quite likely they heard new stories, and incorporated them into their personal repertoires.
Notwithstanding, the event itself could have occurred multiple times in antiquity. (Infant exposure was a common form of infanticide, and this could’ve been just one of many forms it took.) The memorable quality is not just the riverine abandonment, but the subsequent royal discovery, which would have guaranteed its recording in whatever royal annals happened to exist at that time & place.
Thus it is noteworthy that the Sargon story is the first known recorded transcription of what was probably an ancient oral tradition at the time. I see no great stretch in presuming other Semitic bards adapting this story to their own times & places.
(Some would say present-day writers continue in the grand tradition of plagiarizing their forebears for story ideas.)
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