The podcast discusses the principles of storytelling and whether they are universal across cultures. It highlights the influence of European and North American authors on storytelling traditions, particularly the Western art form of the novel. The podcast also mentions Aristotle's Poetics and the protagonist-antagonist duality as strong influences on Western storytelling. It explores the differences between Western and Eastern storytelling traditions, particularly in terms of antagonism and structure. It emphasizes that Western stories often have clear good versus evil conflicts, while Eastern stories focus more on characters representing conflicting values. It also mentions the importance of seeking advice and the presence of symmetry in both Western and Eastern stories.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the BeamG podcast with another special this time talking about the principles of storytelling and asking the question whether they are really universal across cultures. Let's start with a different question actually. Do you think you know world literature? Just as a matter of interest, can you name four Chinese classics from the Ming and Qing Dynasty periods? Or how about two pre-modern Japanese classics? Or maybe a Korean classic that every Korean has heard of? All right, well maybe all that is too far away from where you are.
How about Persian? What's the great Persian epic? Assuming that you're in Europe or North America, you have likely heard of the Divine Comedy or Don Quixote or Shakespeare. But have you heard of the Three Kingdoms, of Sun Wukong, of Cao Shu, of Qin? I took a look at my bookshelf a few years ago. Take a look at yours. Chances are it'll be a bit like mine. There are mostly European and North American authors there, perhaps some Central or South American writers too, maybe some Indian novels, perhaps some 19th century Russians.
All of these authors wrote or write in the tradition of European storytelling via colonial or cultural influence. The novel is a Western art form. Modern African authors writing novels, for example, have adopted this written prose text form, although African storytelling traditions are primarily oral. Now what most of us, at least in the Western world, know about how to tell stories is influenced heavily by Aristotle's Poetics. In this rather short text, Aristotle describes some basic precepts of dramatic composition that continue to be circulated in creative writing classes and how-to books today, even though he was writing about drama and a very specific form of theatre at that, with no more than three male actors on stage and always wearing a mask called a persona.
Another strong influence on Western storytelling is the protagonist-antagonist duality which arose along with Christianity. One sometimes hears that the conflict between good and evil is as old as storytelling itself, but it is not. Before Christianity, characters in stories might make terrible errors of judgement once in a while, but things were not as black and white as they are in many much-loved stories today. Would there be a Sauron without Satan, a Darth without the Devil, a Voldemort without Lucifer? So what about stories that were created without any knowledge of Aristotle or Christianity? Are stories that had no contact with the Western way of composing narratives different? There are differences between Western and Eastern storytelling traditions, certainly.
We won't go into too many details here, but let's look briefly at at least two aspects, antagonism and structure. Let's start with antagonism. In Asian cinema, for example, baddies are not as prevalent as in Hollywood. Look for an evil antagonist in Studio Ghibli films such as My Neighbour Totoro, for example. You won't find one. That it is possible to tell effective stories without the protagonist-antagonist duality is something only just being recognised in Hollywood. Pixar seems to have learned from Ghibli.
In Western stories that are over 2000 years old, be they for example Roman or Greek, you don't really find goodies fighting out-and-out villains. Rather, characters stand for values that are in conflict with those of other characters, and characters sometimes do dubious things. Ancient heroes make mistakes, which may lead them to tragedy, like Oedipus recklessly killing a guy on the road, who later turns out to be his father. Some main characters from ancient myth and literature are simply not nice guys, really.
Odysseus's morals are questionable. Achilles is permanently in a huff. But they are not evil. They are neither goodies nor baddies, really. Significantly, in Homer's Iliad, neither the Greek nor the Trojan side are morally better than the other. In Greek mythology, even someone as otherwise positively connoted as Heracles at one point murders his wife and children. In Western storytelling, the baddie didn't really get traction until Christianity spread. Now let's compare stories from another tradition. The great classical Chinese novels treat morality and ethical behaviour as strong and important themes, but without overt good versus evil in the story.
Even the incredibly nasty King Cho in the Ming Dynasty novel Investiture of the Gods is no genuine villain, even though he has a big toaster made in which to toast people. He is under the influence of a fox spirit, who has taken her divine assignment to punish him for an indiscretion. Way too far, let's say. Nor is the overly ambitious Cao Cao in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms really a baddie. He's just rather more decisive and ruthless than the other heroes.
The term hero has somewhat different connotations in Chinese stories than to a Western audience. It is used to refer to characters who choose to live a life less ordinary, and the term does not perforce imply a morally superior stance. The 108 outlaws of the marsh are all heroes, though some of them are not particularly nice. In fact, many are rather nasty murderers. In that tremendously popular Chinese classic, also known as Water Margin in English, the outlaw band is set against the imperial regime, but they actually seek to rehabilitate it and themselves.
And so the emperor is not a villain, and neither are the outlaws, though their ostensible goodness is subverted considerably through their actions. It's a bit like reading a version of Robin Hood in which Robin is a bumbling Machiavellian and Friar Tuck is a well-meaning psychopath. The point is, there's no simple good guys versus bad guys. But there's still plenty of fighting and conflict. Perhaps then, if there is less focus on an antagonist, there need also be less focus on a protagonist? Some say that in China the idea of striving is less dominant, since the will of heaven has effectively preordained the success or failure of any venture.
This rather weakens the point of individuals taking on a great challenge or quest. Certainly classical Chinese fiction is less concerned with single heroes prevailing in the face of overwhelming odds than many western tales. In Chinese novels, heroes are rarely alone. They tend to find help in the form of a band of allies. Also, many Asian heroes bide their time and act according to the situation, rather than pursuing a single-minded purpose. And most importantly, before taking a decision, a hero always seeks advice.
Heroic is being able to tell good advice from bad and acting accordingly. This tradition goes back to the narrative commentaries on the very early historic Spring and Autumn Annals, which are now about two and a half thousand years old. In these annals, an important motif is the role of advisors to rulers. In the much later Romance of the Three Kingdoms, no one does anything without lengthy consultations beforehand. In the great Chinese novels, probably the only hero who spontaneously does as he sees fit in the moment is Sun Wukong, alias Monkey, from Journey to the West, and more often than not he gets into hot water because of it.
Perhaps that is why he is such an outstanding and beloved character in Chinese and world literature. The Monkey King is on a quest, and while journeying west he has to fight a lot of monsters, but the monsters in Journey to the West are often not really evil, and many of them end up being shown the way to righteousness. And at the end of the quest is not an evil Sauron or Grendel, but the benevolent Buddha. Now, let's talk about structure.
In typical western stories, the resolution quickly ties up all the storylines after the climax, so that the end section is usually as short as possible, with some notable exceptions such as The Lord of the Rings. This urge for a fast finish is not felt by Asian storytellers, it seems. Chinese novels are not averse to long play-outs. In terms of act structure, one might hypothesise that an Asian final act is typically longer than in the West. Sometimes, instead of rushing to wrap everything up, the last act in an Asian narrative opens up a whole new story arc, a phenomenon I first became aware of when I saw the classic Kung Fu movie The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.
Nor is it essential that heroes survive until the end of the story. In Plum in the Golden Vase, the protagonist Shi Menqing dies in chapter 79 of 100, and none of the main characters of Three Kingdoms make it to the final chapter 120. It may perhaps be more accurate to assume an underlying tendency to four acts in Asian stories rather than three. However, assuming that even in three-act structure, act two is divided by the midpoint into two sections, the structural difference is more one-of-degree than kind.
The notable aspect that Eastern and Western stories share is symmetry. Symmetry is definitely as important a phenomenon to classical Chinese literature as any other stories. Again and again, we see pivotal midpoints, and the mirroring in the second half of events or issues of the first half. The titular Three Kingdoms are established in the middle of the novel. Monkey goes back to heaven in chapter 51 of the 100-chapter Journey to the West, humble this time, whereas in his initial visit he ruined the place.
Shi Menqing acquires the aphrodisiac that will be the death of him at exactly the midpoint of the novel Plum in the Golden Vase, in chapters 49 and 50, as translator David Todd Roy points out. Very interesting, and connected with the idea of the long play-out or long final act, is the seven-tenths rule. This phenomenon seems to be a Chinese special. Around seven-tenths of the way through, something highly significant happens. In The Scholars, the high point of scholarly virtue is the building and consecration of the temple, which happens in chapter 36 and 37 of the 55-chapter novel.
The translator of Plum in the Golden Vase, David Todd Roy, points out that this massive novel is divided into ten units of ten chapters each, with a twist or new development, usually in the seventh chapter, to culminate in a climax in the ninth chapter. We see that the death of the protagonist in chapter 79 adheres to this structural design. In Outlaws of the Marsh, otherwise known as Water Margin, the outlaws reach their complete number and receive the tablet from heaven telling them their star names in chapter 70.
There are competing versions of this book, but the hundred-chapter version is regarded by many as the complete one. All the Chinese great classic novels are segmented into chapters. Within a novel, the chapters are generally of roughly equal length. Furthermore, they tend to show two major events each, which are referred to in the chapter title. For example, Wang Yong shrewdly sets a double snare. Dong Suo starts a brawl at Phoenix Pavilion from Three Kingdoms. Or, an evil demon at Black River captures the monk.
The Western Ocean's Dragon Prince catches the iguana from Journey to the West. Pardon my pronunciations, by the way. A major event or narrative unit is called a mu apparently. To mu make up a hui, a double-item chapter. Large books were printed in standard printing units called shuans. Binding techniques probably couldn't handle entire novels, and also longer stories appeared in serial form, so typically a bound book would contain five shuans, so an entire one-hundred-chapter novel would mean twenty shuans, or volumes, on your shelf.
Furthermore, the internal dramaturgical logic of many of the Ming novels reveals a tendency to arrange plot arcs in such a way that they are neatly finished within ten hui units. So it's possible to trace ten decades in a hundred-chapter novel, or twelve in Three Kingdoms or Story of the Stone, otherwise known as Dream of the Red Chambers, which have a hundred and twenty chapters. So two shuans would often contain a more or less coherent and complete story unit, though this unit fits into the overall structure of the narrative arc of the novel in its entirety, too.
So the discipline with which the authors maintain what are essentially structural conventions is really remarkable, and establishes a mesmerizingly rhythmic quality to the reading experience. Chinese novels are sometimes criticised for being episodic, instead of having a clear plot throughline or story arc. Nonetheless, there is usually, as we have seen, a design principle at work which, when you take a step back and review the overall story, demonstrates a high degree of structural organisation, with foreshadowing and parallelism, and especially symmetry.
The ten-chapter decades sometimes echo each other, with a later decade bearing resemblance to a former one, but this time gaining in meaning or significance because of the existence of the former one. Furthermore, there are often recognisable capsules of plot, more or less self-contained stories spanning two or three or four subsequent chapters. These episodes are distinct enough that they may be found as dramas or short stories in their own right, much in the same way as Greek hero cycles such as the Iliad spawned plays built around specific events taken from the grand narrative.
Next to the possible parallelism of decades, such capsules may be found to resemble each other and gain meaning with each new variation of a motif or theme, topos or pattern of action. Recurrence is part of the design principle. Episodes are therefore not just strung together haphazardly. There is nothing haphazard whatsoever about any of the great works of classical Chinese fiction. Consider an analogy from landscape painting. A single mountain may be brought into relief in the composition of a painting by placing another mountain behind it.
The foreground gains clarity through the background. By retelling a similar story in another capsule with different protagonists, the novels take the time to represent another perspective, as if showing the background mountain in the foreground this time. Readers end up comparing and understanding the nature of mountains much better than if they had seen just one. One of the reasons for the criticism that Chinese stories are supposedly episodic is surely a failure or a refusal to recognize the importance of cyclical narrative structure.
For example, the story of one character may be very similar to the story of another character told in later chapters, capsules, or decades, but with subtle variations. Such recurrence of motif or action is not laziness on the part of the Chinese authors, but is deliberate and conscious, and may serve various functions in terms of how the story is understood. The parallelism in terms of story content adds meaning, while in terms of structure, chapters and decades, creates an astonishingly rhythmic effect.
The idea that narratives are cyclical is nothing new to modern Western writers and readers. For instance, the hero's journey paradigm prescribes a return to the origin. The long Chinese novels add cycles within the greater cycle, which Western audiences accustomed to direct and straightforward narratives, directly back to the point of departure, may initially find a bit dizzying. However, this kind of structural device is found in some well-known Western stories too. Stephen King, for example, does the same kind of thing in some of his longer novels, for example in It.
Consider an analogy from another art, music. In Chinese novels, recurrence and cyclical structure is part of the course, as are variations on a theme. In Western music, for the likes of Bach or Beethoven, we could consider units or capsules of plot like movements in which themes can recur. In any case, it seems that in Chinese fiction, a straightforward story arc is just too simplistic to cast valuable or meaningful light on the complexities of universal human existence.
So in summary, there are differences between the Western and Eastern storytelling traditions, certainly. All in all, symmetry seems to apply as a general principle in Asian stories too, while they don't work in quite the same way, perhaps, as three-act structure that is so popular in Hollywood. Especially in the second half of an Asian story, look out for structural differences. But the spectrum of fiction is huge, and with this spectrum so huge, with so many stories of either European or Asian tradition displaying such a wide variety of styles and topics, to concentrate on supposed general differences would belittle the worth and value of works of both Asian and European literature.
Suffice it to say then that looking to the East, there is a world of literature as yet waiting to be discovered by most Western readers. We can learn from the great Eastern classics for the sake of the works themselves, and in the sense of what we may glean about the people of a continent, which in the global geopolitical context today is simply important. We can also look at the great works of classical Asian literature and see if there's anything we might learn about telling our own stories.
So thanks for listening. If you want to know more about the Chinese novels that I mentioned today, go to bingy.com, to the blog, and look for, search for, top seven classical Chinese novels.
