Read Ulysses? It’s no better than Fifty Shades
Highbrow literature has the same six story lines as ‘trashy’ books, university study finds
THERE may once have been cachet in ploughing through Ulysses, War and Peace or Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
But according to one study, readers of highbrow literature have no greater cause to boast about reading James Joyce than EL James, the author of Fifty Shades of Grey.
All novels contain one of just six possible plots, with similar emotional arcs running through every work from the highbrow to the bodice-ripper.
They include the classic “rags to riches” storyline, as in Oliver Twist, the “riches to rags” such as in King Lear, and “man in a hole” such as in Moby-Dick , in which a protagonist finds his way out of a difficult spot.
The “Icarus” plotline sees characters rise before a spectacular fall, “Cinderella” shows the character’s fortunes rise, fall, then rise again, while “Oedipus” shows a character fall, rise, then fall again.
The University of Vermont study was inspired by Slaughterhouse-Five author Kurt Vonnegut, who originally proposed the similarity of emotional storylines in a master’s thesis rejected by the University of Chicago.
Statistician Andrew Reagan said: “Stories help us encode and understand our collective existence, underpin cultures, and help frame the possible.
“Describing the ecology of all human stories is an essential scientific enterprise.
“With the advent of the internet and massive digitisation, this vital work has become, in part, a data-driven one. There are many aspects of stories to characterise and here we take on just one: the overall emotional trajectory.
“In a lecture recorded in 1985, Vonnegut introduced the idea of quantifying the emotional arcs of stories.
“He suggested that ‘man-in-ahole’ is a primary kind of shape in the dimension of good-ill fortune.
“Somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again. People love that story!”
Reagan went on: “Vonnegut pointed out that computers would be perfectly suited to the task of finding good-ill fortune trajectories, and with this inspiration and today’s computing power, we tested his instincts on a large supply of books.
“We extracted and analysed the emotional arcs of 1 722 novels from the Project Gutenberg corpus using sentiment analysis, and found six common shapes.”
The study, published in the journal EPJ Data Science, applied three different natural language-processing filters to extract the emotional content of 10 000-word stories.
The first filter revealed the underlying basis of the emotional storyline.
The second helped differentiate between groups of emotional storylines.
The third used a self-learning approach to sort the actual storylines from the background noise.
Reagan added: “This approach could, in turn, be used to create compelling stories by gaining a better understanding of what has previously made for great storylines.
“It could also help teach common sense to artificial intelligence systems.
“Our work on emotional arcs is just one part of understanding the ecology of stories.
“There is much more to do: extracting and comparing plots, character paths, and comparing across cultures and time periods.
“But all this now seems possible.”
Stories help us encode and understand our collective existence