The counting and classifying of story lines is a venerable literary pastime, one that has occasionally proved so strenuous and competitive that it could pass among book people for sport. For good reason. Any tally of possible plots risks bumping up against what for fiction writers is the cornerstone of the profession: the claim to originality. Long a sensitive issue, it has become only more fraught with the advent of A.I. and the proliferation of chatbots able to generate “new” stories derived entirely from troves of old ones, all without the aid of an author.
Aristotle made the first stab at a plot count around 330 B.C., when he declared that there were just two kinds of stories: simple (featuring a change in fortune) and complex (in which the change in fortune is accompanied by setbacks and reversals — for Aristotle, the perfect tragedy).
Two millenniums later, the count had swelled. In 1892, Rudyard Kipling suggested that the number of plots was actually 69, a high-water mark for sure, but then Kipling had witnessed the novel’s spectacular efflorescence over the course of the preceding century. Still, he floated the claim in a few lines of Victorian doggerel, so it’s possible he intended it partly in jest.
In any case, it didn’t stick. Over the next 100 years, the number ticked steadily downward, from 36, the figure touted in an 1895 book by the Frenchman Georges Polti (who credited it to Goethe, who in turn had gotten it from an 18th-century Italian), to 20, the figure championed in 1993 by the American Ronald Tobias, in his book “20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them.” Tobias gave his prior tabulators a gracious nod (“all of these answers are right to some degree,” he allowed), but in his view the “20 master plots” — from “quest” and “adventure” to “underdog,” “forbidden love” and, my favorite, “wretched excess” — covered the bases.
Then, in 2004, Christopher Booker, a founder of the British satirical magazine Private Eye who claimed to have devoted more than 30 years to the issue, published “The Seven Basic Plots,” delineating the handful of story lines he believed undergird everything from “Beowulf” to “Jaws,” P.G. Wodehouse to Proust, and the Marquis de Sade to “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” It presumably didn’t hurt his case that the number seven has a connotation, dating at least to the Bible, of divine perfection. In Booker’s account, the most impressive stories were those that managed to squeeze all seven plots into a single tale. “The Lord of the Rings” had them all: the quest, vanquishing the monster, rags to riches, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy and rebirth.
But seven, too, was not destined to last. In 2016, data scientists at the University of Vermont, exploiting advances in natural language processing, plugged 1,737 stories scraped from the Project Gutenberg website into a software program in order to chart their “emotional arcs.” Their custom “hedonometer” examined each story in blocks of 10,000 words, assigning a “meaningful sentiment score” to every chunk, and allowing the researchers to express the results as a series of nifty graphs. The one for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” shows a mountain range of peaks and valleys, ending, after Voldemort is finally killed, on a steep upward incline toward a summit at happily ever after. The study made news: The world’s stories boiled down to “six basic shapes.”
If we think of plots in the mathematicians’ terms, as data sets whose patterns can be objectively mapped and compared, then perhaps it makes sense that even as the number of books in the world has soared — about 160 million unique books are estimated to have been printed since the invention of the Gutenberg press — the number of plots might not have followed suit. Human brains are wired for pattern recognition, but so, too, with increasingly fine-grained capability, is our technology. By some measures, machines are now better than us at detecting fundamental patterns in the way we encode information and imbue it with meaning. At least in theory, software can account for bias in how we classify the stories we tell, eliminating subjective differences in our count. Perhaps one reason we like stories so much is that, despite enormous surface variety, they follow predictable trajectories, stimulating our dopamine receptors in just the right ways.
Lately, though, even human consumers of narrative might be forgiven for wondering if the number of plots has dwindled to one. For the past few years, we’ve been inundated with novels hammering home a single theme: the nature and ethics of storytelling itself. From R.F. Kuang’s best-selling “Yellowface” to Christine Mangan’s “Palace of the Drowned,” Chris Power’s “A Lonely Man,” Alexandra Andrews’s “Who Is Maud Dixon?,” Andrew Lipstein’s “Last Resort,” Keziah Weir’s “The Mythmakers,” Virginia Feito’s “Mrs. March” and Danzy Senna’s “Colored Television” (not to mention movies like “The Lesson” and “Anatomy of a Fall”), it would be possible to assemble an entire library of diverting and accomplished contemporary work fixated on literary imitation, appropriation and theft.
Of course, for writers of fiction, anxiety of influence is a well-established hazard of the trade. (See Shakespeare, Sonnet 76: “Why Is My Verse So Barren of New Pride?”) And the ascendance of the meta plot — writers writing about the moral liabilities of writing — doubtless owes much to a decade of strident debate over who is entitled to tell which stories. Even so, the present saturation feels extra — supercharged beyond anything we’ve seen before.
Take Jean Hanff Korelitz’s runaway 2021 best seller “The Plot” (destined to become a series on Hulu). The title and cover image (a mise en abyme illustration of a book titled “The Plot”) clue us in to what awaits inside: a book not just about a book but about something more fundamental — the essence of plot itself. Korelitz cleverly wraps her metafiction in a page-turner: the story of Jake, a writer once successful, now blocked, who makes good when Evan, a former student, dies and Jake helps himself to Evan’s plot (though not his prose), only to be harassed by a mysterious source threatening to expose him as a thief.
At the same time, Korelitz constantly foregrounds the idea of fiction’s intrinsic indebtedness. “Was there even such a thing as ‘a plot like mine’?” Jake reflects early on, after meeting with Evan, who utters this phrase, boasting that his work in progress is “a sure thing” — one that, owing entirely to the novelty of its plot, will make its author rich, become an Oprah pick and wind up a Hollywood blockbuster.
Jake knows better. After all, “greater minds” than his “had identified the few essential plots along which pretty much every story unfurled itself.” Yet when Evan confides his novel’s plot, Jake, rendered speechless, is forced to revise his opinion: “He had no thought of anything but this story, which was none of the great plots — Rags to Riches, Quest, Voyage and Return, Rebirth. … It was something new to him, as it would be new to every single person who read it, and that was going to be a lot of people.”
This is the irony at the heart of “The Plot”: What is greeted by Jake, and eventually by his dazzled reading public, as shockingly new is inexorably shown to have been (depending on your view) reimagined or stolen, not just by Jake but, under different circumstances (read the book to grasp this twist), by Evan, too. Korelitz has ingenious fun with what by her conclusion begins to feel like an infinite regress of appropriations and remakings: Jake’s own novel is called, pointedly, “Crib”; a central character is revealed to have borrowed a back story for herself from the plot of Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping”; and the literary allusions — from Percy Bysshe Shelley and T.S. Eliot to Patricia Highsmith — giddily pile up.
Ultimately, Korelitz’s point is more philosophical than moral: However hard we try to police the boundaries of storytelling, by instilling codes of ethics and enforcing copyright law, stories, by their very nature, want to be free — free to circulate through us and among us, undergoing revision and transformation in an endlessly generative and unstoppable process.
As if to prove her thesis, Korelitz has given “The Plot” a sequel. Published in October and titled (what else?) “The Sequel,” it, too, features a mise en abyme cover, only here the illustration shows the new book perched atop a prone copy of its predecessor, as though supplanting it — which “The Sequel,” or at least its protagonist, tries to do. This time, the efforts to patrol storytelling take a decidedly grisly turn. But though the body count climbs, a reader is unlikely to come away convinced that the trail of muzzled voices means that order has been restored, or to share the killer’s view that control over the tale at these novels’ center has been returned to its rightful owner. Korelitz has taught her lesson well: Censoring a storyteller is unlikely to stop the dissemination of the story — it’s already out there.
Satires of America’s cultural appropriation obsession, Korelitz’s novels up the ante on the age-old conundrum of originality and authorship, one to which the spread of A.I. has given urgent new life. Consider this fall’s much-discussed production of “McNeal,” the provocative new play by the Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Jacob McNeal, an aging, depressed, once towering novelist, a florid specimen of toxic masculinity whose lifetime of self-indulgence has left him with a trail of wounded intimates (along with a wife dead from suicide), and who is now slowly drinking himself into the grave.
Showered with laurels but short on ideas, McNeal uploads parts of “King Lear,” “Oedipus Rex,” “Hedda Gabbler” and “Madame Bovary” into ChatGPT, with the command to “rework these texts in the style of Jacob McNeal.” After all, he remarks by way of rationale, “King Lear” shares 70 percent of its words with “King Leir,” a mediocre antecedent. McNeal’s own previous books, we learn, have included chatbot remasters of his wife’s unpublished novel and anecdotes from the lives of his son and a woman with whom he was having an affair.
“Art,” McNeal declares.
“No. Pillage,” the woman, furious, responds.
So far, so familiar. But Akhtar pushes beyond the confines of the usual morality play. On digital projections looming over the set, we watch McNeal’s words being mixed and blended by a bot with those of Shakespeare and Flaubert, and witness a procession of larger-than-life deepfakes — video composites of McNeal and his wife, McNeal’s wife and his ex-mistress. By the time our protagonist commands ChatGPT to “write a note for a character in a play who wants to commit suicide, in the style of ‘Jacob McNeal,’” it’s no longer clear where Akhtar’s drama ends and the work of an A.I. begins.
Critics faulted the playwright for characters that seemed more notional than human — McNeal is “more a data set than a character,” Jesse Green wrote in The New York Times — and for a “muddled” drama confounding our sense of what’s real and what’s not. But surely these effects are intentional: McNeal, the boozy, macho, male novelist, is a trope, as are his angry ex-mistress and estranged son, just as the loaded gun that appears midway through is a trope, along with the family secret aired in the same scene, one purposely tinged with melodrama. Akhtar’s challenge was to construct characters that register simultaneously as plausible human beings and dramatic conventions.
The result is a play that enacts the predicament of its own creation — and of literary creation, generally. By now, we all know that chatbots don’t invent stories; they simply repurpose pieces of ones already in their possession, an act for which no author is required. But Akhtar’s subversive suggestion is that such a description could apply equally to every real-life Jacob McNeal, and to “McNeal” itself.
“Digital machines are not just remaking stories, they’re remaking us,” McNeal remarks early on. Yet it might be just as accurate to say that the machines are showing us what we’ve been all along. In September, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, conducted a round table with Akhtar, Downey and “McNeal”’s director, Bartlett Sher. To prepare, he fed a chatbot a copy of “McNeal,” instructing it to produce a similar play, in Akhtar’s style.
What emerged was a drama called “The Plagiarist’s Lament.” That seems about right. When it comes to plot, we’re all plagiarists. Or, if you prefer, deepfakers.
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