For those of you who ask, this is what I mean by Darwinism.

I once heard a lecture by Kurt Vonneghut, who held that there were only three basic plots: Horatio Alger (what the article calls "Rags to Riches"), Snow White ("Rebirth"), and Kafka's Metamorphosis--the latter being something of an outlier.

How can there be any plot for random events?

David -

Too cryptic. Please elucidate.

Mike:

That seems to leave out Finding Nemo, doesn't it?

In Durant's History of Civilization, he quoted one of the Classic Greeks as saying there are (I think) 32 basic plots

"Finding Nemo" is two of the seven interwoven. Marlin is on a Quest to find Nemo, who has embarked upon a Voyage and Return.

C.S. Lewis put forth a similar theory about recurring stories iirc in On Stories. Of course he delineated them along the lines of myth though.

Ghost: Asking "Why has evolution given us the ability to", particularly about something like story-telling, assumes that every last jot and tittle of humanity has been carefully honed by evolution so that every trait adds to our fitness.

David -

Thanks for the clarification. I agree with your implicit skepticism. I do believe those archetypal stories are innate ... or at least that a predisposition to narrate those stories is innate ... but am not willing to attribute them to Darwinian causes.

I once saw a quote attributed to Steven Speilburg that there were only three movie plots:

man vs man
man vs nature
dog vs vampire.

Norton Frye? Wasn't that the litcrit guy from the 50s w/a similar theory?

The fact that a story as old as, say, the Iliad, can still be read today, is remarkable. It's hardly obvious that it should be so. Modern Enlightened Thought would predict that it could not be so. Our socioeconomic circumstances are so different from those of Homer's listeners, how could anything meaningful to them, mean anything to us? So the persistence of the Iliad proves one thing: Modern Enlightened Thought is bunk.

It also suggests that there is indeed some inherent structure to stories, whether plot outlines or something else. The mere survival of society may suggest the same. If television were not forced to tell stories that structurally promote concepts necessary to society, how have we survived?

Robert Heinlein said there are three plots: Boy Meets Girl; The Little Tailor ((a regular person caught up in big events)); and The Man Who Learned Better.

The Internet Public Library lists the theories in The Basic Plots in Literature as either 1 plot, 3 plots, 7 plots, 20 plots, or 36 (or 37) plots, depending on how fine a distinction you want to make.

Bob: Who among us doesn't from time to time feel the urge to go sack Troy?

I tend to agree with Spielburg on the lesser number than seven and C.S. Lewis on the nature of the phenomenon, as posted above.

Wonder what the brothers Grimm had to say on the subject?