I want to deliberately distinguish very broadly between two kinds of stories because these two are so fundamental. There are stories that are bad in the sense that important figures in the story have malice or deliberately cause harm which cause harm and conflict while other stories have all or most of the figures mean well even if mistaken and fall into error or conflict. This is a distinction which predates Greek tragedy in that tragedy is an attempt to rise above the distinction by having malice or niceness despite the point, just people acknowledged as put in by a pickle by their circumstances, those including their good or bad emotions. Who cares or cares to consider whether Oedipus was a nice man or not? He was arrogant and so are many people. The point was how to unravel a mystery of life that is tied into fate and character. Genesis and Exodus are not engaged with such sophistication. Cain was a bad person while Noah was well meaning. Samson was well meaning and so was Moses, while Joseph’s brothers were not, and those facts give not just the character of these people but the flavor or premises of the settings. What to do with bad Cain (he will be exiled) and Joseph’s brothers (they will be forgiven)? How rather than why Noah will carry out his task? Indeed, so fundamental is this division that movies are known for their bad guys or their good guys, whether in Westerns, where Garry Cooper is a good guy in High Noon even if bad guys get into the picture in a world where good is expected to be conquered by evil, or in film noir, where most people have a bad seed and most of the world revolves around that. But this pre greek presentment is present even in elevated epics and dramas. Shakespeare luxuriates at just how awful are the protagonists in his major tragedies, however much you may parse whether they are also somehow tragic, while the Aeneid is about good people trying to manage their lives, both Dido and Aeneas good people who find themselves with different destinies rather than because of character flaws or because of circumstances that could be avoided but just are the givens of the situation; that Dido is a queen and Aeneas has to found an empire. Nobody to blame that the two of them can’t settle down together.
David Konstan has suggested to me that it is not the case that the most fundamental stories are those that are the most primitive in that the earliest stories are made of more rudimentary elements and new complexities get added in that the earliest stories are already complex as to plot and character. There is much to be said about that point. When we itself come into the story of stories, the ones found in Aristotle are already complex, Aristotle like a theatrical director well versed in a highly elaborated past, and even the myths and stories of the Greeks are filled with nuance and irony. So story as an enterprise must have started in the evolutionary view sometime before that, which would mean before “Gilgamesh”, but we have no records of those stories and so are not in a position to see whether they were simple and unelaborated. As Sy Goode said to me many years ago, we will never know what stone age religion was like because we have no records of practice, feelings and points of view, only a few artifacts and those tell us only what we wanted to find, which is that primitive religion was communal. Perhaps, then, we might abandon the evolutionary quest for the basic elements of story and look instead to finding a purification of stories down to their elemental parts by shedding levels rather than accruing them and that becomes clear in what is now taken as the era of mechanical reproduction, in that there are so many stories that are told, so many to be reproduced for mass audiences, that stories become more rudimentary so as to satisfy the never ending need of story by the population, rather than by polishing some story over and over again to produce a very high gloss, as happened within “Beowulf” and perhaps was the model for how that particular story also evolved. Let's look at simple stories meant to be simple.
A good example of that for defining a story not in its plot or genre but in its moral tone and situation is available in a set of films from the late 1940s: “The Jolson Story” and “Jp;son Sings Again”. They may hardly be seen as literature when in comparison to the classic works already cited, buit literature they are if what you mean a story is something that is crafted to be so, even if retelling an old legend around a campfire, and communicates with its putative audience, and so includes Sophocles and James Joyce as well as much lesser and merely temporarily popular work. Remember that Shakespeare and Moliere were out to get socko effects rather than just exemplify meaning by dressing it up with drama. And we are after all trying to describe fundamentals in story, which means what is everywhere in stories and so are not limited to being archival and finding the most ancient stories as the basis for establishing their fundamental nature.
The plot of the biopics about musical composers follows a straightforward birth to death approach. “Rhapsody in Blue'' shows George Girshwin during his childhood in the Lower East Side and then as a song plugger an then as a success on Broadway and then branching out into a kind of classical music and dying early from a brain tumor, in the story never settling down with a girl but always expecting to. In “Words and music”, Rodgers and Hart meet at Columbia, jiot it off, and produce one hit show after another until Hart dies from what seems to be headaches, the easy joke about the scriptwriters avoiding dealing with his long efforts not to recognize his own homosexuality, which was the cause of his miseries. Cole Porter is also not dealt with concerning his homosexuality in “Night and Day” and putting on one hit show after another reprised and also has a near fatal horse riding accident to add drama to his life instead, even if an update of Porter’s story in “It's DeLovely” is more candid.
Bosley Crowther, who was the lead film reviewer of the New York Times for many years, and so found it necessary to find something to appreciate in some dreadful movies, was very critical of “The Jolson Story'' when it first came out, stating that the plot was just a labored excuse to allow Jolson to sing the old songs for a new generation, and in fact led to something of a Jolson revival for the few years that were left to his life. But I want to focus on that plot as achieving something of its own, a kind of simplified, purified, fundamental story. Every one of the characters are well meaning and even their lapses are understandable and people get along except for the existential facts that people age and have mismatched characters. Though Jolson is raised in a Jewish household, there is no trope of anti-semitism, only a running joke about how powerful is the horseradish hios mother offers to gentiles about how hot it is. When Jolson is divorced by the figure who in real life is Ruby Keeler, he runs around in Monte Carlo and his mother offers that he shouldn’t be doing so when her people are so suffering in europe, but on the home front there are no such problems, and the Arkansas woman Jolson marries in “Jolson Sings Again'' also fits in with the father in law, Cantor Jolson, who is the wise one who knew that his son’s first wife and he could not settle down into retirement and also knew that the second wife had to encourage his husband to resume singing. The vaudevillian who introduces the young Al Jolson to his singing career becomes later on his manager and life long friend. Everything works out except those matters that can’t and only those present tension and conflict. And, as in other musical biopics, Jolson may not die on screen, but the drama is just that he gets old, outlasts his age, and has the unusual event of getting a reprise towards his end. Very satisfying and something most people don’t achieve. More of a story than Crowther can acknowledge.
Such a story structure of mostly good tidings, people going from triumph to triumph except for a preordained crisis, seems a simplification of life, a bare bones presentation of the arc of life, even if that most sophisticated drama, in “Oedipus Rex” also portrays a triumph followed by a great personal disaster occasioned by having met a stranger at a crossroads. The difference is that the two films of Jolson arepap, to avoid complexity, while sophocles is presenting as complex and intricate a story as there is, full of ironies and unexpected turns and slow revelations and deep emotions. Put the story aside or the poetry, what the films have is to provide an emotional smoothness and a good feeling which can be taken to have a story that is elemental rather than sophisticated. It is able to move itself along just enough to engage the audience with its warmth and banter rather than testing existential limits and so is successful rather than, as Crowther thinks, a failure of imagination. It is not art but it is artful in allowing it to be so palatable, and so in keeping with those other late forties musical biopics that pulled all their ounces so as to provide great production numbers and reprise the music of not very far behind and so remembered rather than found new.
It is very difficult for all of us to rid ourselves of the evolutionary mode whereby our thought and behavior move from the simple to the complex or perhaps, in Levi Straus, always were and remain complex. Both Liberals and Conservatives, whether Durkheim and Parsons, in the latter or Jefferson and FDR in the former, identify change as the result of unfolding the old so as to find new adumbrations that become extant even if languages, queerly enough, seem to go from more complexity to simplification. FDR made government grand and, so some people think, improved, by adding new agencies, and Jefferson thought that rights could be indeed on or newly recognized. What passes as simplification is generally regarded, on the other hand, as degeneration, as is the case with mass culture. I am suggesting a different model, which is purification through excluding unnecessary conventions so as to get purer or more fundamental aspects of story, though this alternative process applies not just to story but also to art, where the line from Pocasso through jockney, while apparently obscure is in fact a simplification so that a few lines and bold colors are able to do essential art without compromising what art is: its ability to feel new emotions and see new sights. The same is the case in storytelling. One of ishiguro's accomplishments is not only to convey meaning and a world view through diction but also to minimize dramatic event, so central to the history of the novel, so the actual events are either trivial or made significant only by the setting, as when in “Clara and the Sun’, watching a sunset come into a barn seems profound, something anticipated what seems long before when Updike makes the sight of floating pigeon feathers a kind of religious epiphany without the grandeur provided by Rubens, let us say, or the theological complexity of Dostoevsky. I would suggest rereading and reviewing contemporary culture in this non-evolutionary, fundamental light.