Narrative archetypes as memes

I've been wondering where the so-called 'semi-reality' meme - a regular feature in recent situation-comedy, drama, and soap-opera - might have started.

Writing in The Guide - an authority on matters of narrative playfulness, David Stubbs posits Curb Your Enthusiasm as the ultimate model for successful semi-reality shows on both sides of the Atlantic. From the UK-centric perspective, without CYE there would be no Extras and no Moving Wallpaper / Echo Beach, ITV's current experiment in scheduling symbiosis. Both follow CYE's semi-real formula by introducing story components (but not entire stories, as in the case of factual drama) from either the real world or the worlds of other stories to splendidly surreal effect.

Stubbs' article also highlights the host of character, plot and plot-device archetypes which crop up time and again in these 'Curb-lite' shows. This stirred my own slowly-fermenting fascination with narrative archetypes.

Why the fascination with narrative archetypes? Because all narrative archetypes are memes. The classic character, the age-old plotline, the cliched plot device - each has been passed from writer to writer by imitation.

By their nature, archetypes (narrative-related and otherwise) are super-successful memes - to become archetypal requires that a meme establish itself within a culture to the point that it be recognised by a sizeable proportion of the population.

But how and why do archetypes become archetypes?

Well, in the case of narrative archetypes, our (memetic) fondness for hit films and books guarantees that the components - character, plot - of such hits find an audience of millions, whether by chance or by substantive contribution to that hit status. Some of these components - not necessarily the substantive contributors - then go on to become archetypes, embedding themselves in the minds of a population through endless replication with myriad mutations.

Note that a positive feedback loop kicks in here: writers are more likely to replicate narrative archetypes which audiences replicate enthusiastically. Why? Because audience replication tends to correlate positively with size of audience over time, as the replicated archetypes become familiar and salient to ever more people, who are in turn disposed to choose stories containing those archetypes in the future.

I would conjecture that there are two groups of narrative-archetype memes likely to be replicated in the minds and behaviour of writers and their audiences. The first group includes memes which hold a mirror up to everyday experience. The second includes those which express unlived fantasies. In each case, the meme contains potentially useful information that - if coded and stored correctly in a brain - could deliver improved fitness to the organism embodying that brain. This simple evolutionary advantage, combined with the advanced human cognition (theory of mind, imaginative foresight) required for said coding and storage to occur, would explain the replicatory success of narrative-archetype memes.

Admittedly, this is idle speculation. Which is fine, if labelled as such. Like evolutionary biologists, memeticists just need to be careful to distinguish between evidence-based conclusions and plausible but unverified accounts of casually observed phenomena. For the purposes of this blog I'm happy to play around with memetic explanation as a means to greater understanding.