Vonnegut's breakfast
Anu granted him the totality of knowledge of all. He saw the Secret, discovered the Hidden, he brought information of (the time) before the Flood. He went on a distant journey, pushing himself to exhaustion, but then was brought to peace.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
Stories have always been the cornerstone of civilization. The central stone even, or perhaps all of civilization is actually a giant story of stories of stories of... There was some truth to the Tower of Babel, after all!
The power of stories is really encoded in the degree of relatability they have to our lives. Consider this: An explorer ventures into an ancient forest in search of a mythical land where dinosaurs roam free...
This is a premise quite common to numerous stories across history, starting from Gilgamesh to Ken Liu. Replace "explorer" and "dinosaurs" with any iteration of "seeker" and "mystery", and the most general mold for all stories is ready. But what about drama? Historical fiction? Romance? Politics? War? Surely everything doesn't fit into one template! But it does.
The objective has always been to grab the reader or viewer by their eyes, eliminate everything else in their consciousness and draw them into a narrow cul-de-sac where the storyteller decides the rules of the game. An explorer is thus a tool that the storyteller employs to an end, the mystery. Unravelling the mystery at just the right pace as the reader's inner monologue is the key. That of course, is based on the assumption of an inner monologue to start with.
Kurt Vonnegut in his famous (and criminally underappreciated) work "The Shape of Stories", tries to [deconstruct](tab: https://bigthink.com/high-culture/vonnegut-shapes/) the landscape of stories into 8 distinct trajectories. What is interesting is how almost all of our stories fit somehow into these patterns, albeit some at a bigger stretch than others. I would like to go a step further and hypothesize that there really is just one premise at the root of all - the seeker and the mystery. And the reason for this lies in one of Vonnegut's works itself.
In "The Breakfast of Champions", Dwayne Hoover - an influential man - is on the verge of losing his sanity. Kilgore Trout, a struggling artist who publishes fantastical pieces of science fiction, ends up influencing the world in unprecedented ways. As a critical consequence, one of his books leads Hoover into a complete unhinged breakdown, and the author, Mr. Vonnegut, toys around with it all through the fourth wall and its innumerable breaks in ways that stretch the limits of storytelling. The act of reading, thus, becomes an intimate dialogue with "free will", and the decision to read the next word becomes a decision to exercise and test the true limits of the same.
Dwayne Hoover, is a sit-in for the explorer, hapless and perplexed in the zoo of ideas. He's losing his sanity in a materialism-induced existential crisis, an allegory of the "American Dream" gone south. The landscape is treacherous - racism, systemic violence, chaos, corruption - and Kilgore's work acts as the eye of the beast. The dance of the macabre begins the moment the two meet, like a spark in a keg. It is at this critical stage, that the eternal "quest" for meaning takes center stage, and this is precisely where the eternal story roots itself -
The seeker and the mystery
There is no singular mystery, no single point of contention. Some believe God to be the ultimate mystery; some believe in an even bigger mystery. Some consider the dichotomy of the vile and the sacred; some unify both into a monad. Either way, the mystery depends on the individual capacity to grasp his/her free will. The higher the capacity, the richer is the journey through the deep, dark forest.
It all boils down to the internal monologue and the capacity to draw the threads of this monologue over to the greater mystery. So, the classic chase between Holmes and Moriarty is a chase between the righteous and the shrewd. The struggle of Prof. Shonku against the Septopus is a game of controlling the untamed and the strange. Tintin's battles against Rastapopoulos is actually a battle of wits between the libertarian and the capitalist powers that be. In effect, every bit of story is a conflict between "what is" and "what could be", which is apparent in the grand unity between Vonnegut's octet.
Does this reductionism hold water, or is this another piece of unverified crap? I do not know now, but I intend to find out. These questions are inherently statistical, which removes any predictive possibility and introduces the element of empiricism. And I think in the end, the evidence of truth outweighs the truth of evidence. And that is the way with stories.
The mystery outlives the seeker, and that's a good thing.