The Universal Structure of Storytelling

Of course, if there's an instinct in humans to get along with each other in groups, there's also an instinct to get ahead. We proposed that agonistic structure in stories generally, not just in Victorian novels, reflects the ancient morality of hunter-gatherer life. If most stories are supposed to be either explicit or implicit morality tales, then what about Hitler's highly dramatized life story, Mein Kampf? Was that moral? What about Thomas Dixon's 19th-century novel The Clansman, which did so much to popularize and spread the mythology of the Ku Klux Klan and inspired The Birth of a Nation? Was that a moral story? In both cases, of course, the answer is a resounding no! For now, the claim I'm making isn't that it's impossible to write wicked stories or that all stories contain a moral message that everyone can agree on. To sum up, I'm saying that stories are generally less moral-in the sense of capturing universal principles-than they are moralistic. In the same way that it's hard to write a compelling story that lacks a thorny problem, it's very hard for tellers to escape the deep moral gravity of stories. The deeply moralistic, judgy character of stories is embedded in the very word story, which is derived from the ancient Greek historía. The universal grammar of stories can also be paranoid and vindictive.