Image: “Lonely Galaxy Lost in Space” by NASA Goddard Photo and Video, Licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Really, this topic is so vast that I could devote an entire week to it. When you consider that stories have been told for as long as humanity has existed, it’s small wonder that certain themes and morals endure the rise and fall of civilizations, and that common threads wind through the evolution of communication technologies.
Quite simply, certain themes in storytelling are universal. I’m sure you’ve thought of some just now. Good versus evil. The hero’s journey. Coming of age. Revenge. Forgiveness. Hope. War and peace. Etc., etc. Why? Because they’re broad. They appeal to everyone, because everyone has, at some point or another, dealt with these issues. They resonate with us, to use a common turn of phrase. Another way of putting it is that they are inherently familiar topics. And it doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from, everybody has a concept of the hero or wants a story about hope. Everyone is familiar with war, and also with villainy. You don’t need cultural translation to understand that there are good things in the world and also very bad things.
So, some stories have that universal appeal. How do we know which ones? Well, it takes a bit of patience to find out, doesn’t it? When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, he didn’t know his novella would be a staple of literature over 150 years later. Neither did the Greek poet Homer know that The Odyssey and The Iliad would still be studied to this very day.
Wait fifty years. Is the story still popular? More importantly, is it still relevant? Do people still care?
For every masterpiece, there must be ten thousand forgotten works. So many stories fade away with time. Sometimes, it’s due to bad luck or happenstance, and some never get a chance to be recognized. And some were a flash in the pan: Their plots were ripped from the headlines, centered around current events. What was hot and fresh that year gave them a brief celebrity. Then the world moved on, and these stories became anachronisms. Their identities were fixed in current events, and without that context they remain curiosities at best.
I won’t give any examples. Maybe you can think of a few yourself.
Universality and timelessness go hand-in-hand. The greatest stories don’t need to be shackled to any one era. They can be retold, again and again, in any age, at any time, because the core of their identity and popularity isn’t the bells and whistles of the current year. It is their basic, broad, foundational themes that reverberate throughout the ages. Sherlock Holmes is Sherlock Holmes, whether he’s in the 19th century or the 21st. Journey to the West has been retold as a post-apocalyptic video game. You can’t count the number of adaptations of Little Red Riding Hood on your hands and feet – you’ll run out of digits.
The very best stories can be told over and over again, and they have something to say to us every time.
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Jake W. Powell 