TLS on Storytelling

on Storytelling

Book doctors
by LAURA DIETZ

a review of
Brian Boyd ON THE ORIGIN OF STORIES Evolution, cognition, and fiction 414pp. Harvard University Press. £25.95 (US $35). 978 0 674 03357 3

" Why do we spend so much of our time telling one another stories that neither side believes?" Brian Boyd, an authority on Nabakov at the University of Auckland, is entering a crowded field with On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, cognition, and fiction. The question is not whether we are addicted to fiction, but why? The only thing more obvious than its universal appeal is our universal embarrassment about it. For the past 2,500 years of recorded literary criticism, the answer has vacillated between attack and apologia. Moralists cite Plato, scorning mimesis as an unseemly taste, childish at best and dangerous at worst. Novels in particular appeal to weak-minded individuals in flight from the real world: Samuel Johnson's grouping of "the young, the ignorant, and the idle". Aesthetes retaliate with Aristotle, calling representation the refined pursuit of an elevated mind - yet still in need of justification. Boyd's contention is that fiction is not a taste at all. It is a tool for survival. Like evolutionary explanations for gender inequality or ethnic strife, his argument offers a release from shame, and is why On the Origin of Stories may have an impact far beyond academic circles.

Boyd sets himself a task in two parts. First, to demonstrate that fiction is an adaptation, rather than a quirky side effect of our overdeveloped neocortex (art as Steven Pinker's "'cheesecake' for the mind"), or a purely cultural phenomenon. Second, that "a biocultural approach makes it possible to explain stories both more comprehensively and more precisely". No one thinks on this scale anymore. Bent to the cultivation of shrinking plots of expertise, enlivened by the occasional boundary squabble, we are illaccustomed to broad new theories even from Young Turks, let alone established critics. Ambition is in itself cause for celebration. Boyd begins with the nature of art. Defining fiction as an art form, rather than information delivery that got out of hand, he graples with the enormous body of research devoted to the evolution of creativity. Even limiting himself to matters biological and skirting philosophical inquiry (though making an intriguing excursion into the storytelling that is religion), the survey is vast. He suggests that we "view art as a kind of cognitive play", a "stimulus and training for a flexible mind". But while play in other species is more easily connected to purpose - a cub pouncing on a sibling and miming a killing bite - the case for sonnets is not so clear. It is easy to argue that mental tasks strengthening mental ability, but why should painting a cave wall exercise us better than skinning another mammoth? (This is, in a sense, the old argument for a liberal arts education over vocational training.) His answer is that humans are hyperintelligent and hypersocial animals. Lining up key elements of intelligence and cooperation - pattern-seeking, alliance-making, theory of mind (the understanding that other beings have beliefs and knowledge of their own) - he seeks to show that art, and specifically the art of fiction, makes them stronger.
read more

Evolutionary psychology is a cross-fertilization of "evolutionary theory, ethology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, game theory, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary economics, neurophysiology, analytic and experimental philosophy, evolutionary epistemology, and many branches of psychology - clin-icalcomparative, developmental, evolutionary, personality, and social". Boyd draws at least one piece of evidence from each field. Mirror neurons fire when we act but also when we see someone act, suggesting a physiological basis for empathy. Fairness sub-routines make complex logic puzzles such as the Wason test easy to solve when reframed as "look for cheaters" tasks. Dolphins blow bubble nets to herd prey, but also in loops and rings and whorls that appear to have no purpose but to satisfy the curiosity, or display the virtuosity, of the blower. The examples here are never random. Each one offers a pleasing trill of "aha!", and Boyd meticulously refers back to his main argument. But the inclusivity is exhausting. This is persuasion by brute force and relies, in part, on the fact that few readers will have the breadth of knowledge to debate with him on every point.

But how other than by force does one take on such a subject? The subtitle is misleading. The book and the theory both deal with art, with fiction being the chosen mode of illustration. It is only after dispatching painting, sculpture, song and dance (forms which Boyd believes emerged before storytelling) that we can look at the collision of art and narrative that makes fiction. Attention, Boyd argues, is the essential component of art, and status the reward that makes storytellers compete to refine their products. Adding the social advantages of enhanced narrative to the cognitive advantages of art makes fiction an adaptation worthy of the energy it requires. This meas-urefiction as a thing that does rather than a thing that is - a tool with measurable utility rather than an object for aesthetic admiration. It is the basis for Boyd's approach to literary analysis. Problem-solution is a model previously applied to visual art by Ernst Gombrich and to film by David Bordwell; extended to fiction, it becomes what Boyd calls "evocriticism". "Unlike current Theory, evocriticism prefers proposals concrete enough to be subjected to potential falsification by evidence." Boyd analyses "supremely successful stories" to prove his method. (Enduring popularity being the evolutionary theorist's way of separating Dickensian sheep from Mrs Humphry Ward goats.) For reasons of space he reduces an intended roster from Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Pride and Prejudice, Ulysses and Maus to two: the Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who! Boyd links the evolutionary imperatives examined in the opening sections with their expressions in Homer and Dr Seuss. He mines the Odyssey not for beauty or meaning but for sophisticated treatments of survival and reproductive success, particularly issues of cooperation within social groups. The same instinct for justice that makes capuchin monkeys angrily reject an unfair market, one that sometimes exchanges tokens for juicy grapes and sometimes for disappointing cucumber, compels listeners to attend to the punishment of Penelope's freeloading suitors. If "the prime impetus for the acceleration of intelligence" had not been "sociality, the need to understand and perhaps outwit others", we would not be so fascinated with Odysseus an honourable, yet deceitful hero.

The thesis sounds, on first airing, ludicrously reductive. Why should life-or-death questions not be interesting to readers, and could a shrewd critic not make up a similar rationale for any work, like a Freudian finding phallic symbols in any dream? But Boyd's treatment is engrossing, as elegant in the writing as the reasoning. It offers a new insight into the question of why some works speak to audiences across cultures and generations. Storytellers have a problem: how to gain and keep their listeners. The listeners have problems of their own: finding mates, earning status, persuading the gods to send fewer locusts. The most successful storytellers apply themselves to the listeners' dilemmas - not just to amuse, but to make them fitter to triumph in the contests of life. They keep attention by balancing pattern and novelty, issues of collective concern with individual twists. Boyd defines a successful story as solving problems on four levels: universal, local ("historical or regional circumstances" such as the hospitality customs in Homer's Greece), individual (the capacities of a given artist), and particular (the challenges of a particular piece, such as working within iam-bipentameter or the limits of early colour photolithography). Homer's disappearance into history makes the individual and particular a matter for speculation. But Boyd's analysis of Theodor Geisel, whose artistic practice as Dr Seuss is well-documented, shows the problem-solution approach in its full range. Horton Hears a Who! (1954) is simultaneously a tale of altruism, of the value of the individual, and of the emergence of democracy in postwar Japan. It sprang from the interests of juvenile readers, and the painstaking development of Seuss's visual and prose styles from bug spray advertisements to picture books, and the need for a sequel to Horton Hatches an Egg. Boyd's four-level model doesn't use lines of inquiry excluded by other literary criticism, but does offer a structure in which to examine the interaction of pressures and influences. It welcomes contradictions, expecting and even celebrating conflicting agendas within a given work. As reshaping the human pelvis for walking on two legs made it less able to cope with childbirth, every literary solution is seen as generating its own suite of problems, which require yet more solutions, and yet more human ingenuity. To look at a story as a naturalist looks at a leaf or shell, not criticizing improvizations but marvelling at its inventive beauty, is a refreshing experience.

The least interesting section of the book moves away from evocriticism to make an attack on competing schools of criticism. After the dutiful exposition of the opening sections (Boyd eschews the jaunty enthusiasm of the popular science writer), and the deftness of the Homer and Seuss analysis, the final chapters recall the Theory wars of the 1980s, about which no one inside an English department needs to be reminded, and no one outside an English department cares. But whatever your opinion of Derrida, Boyd offers absolution to all lovers of fiction. Our childish taste for make-believe, it seems, is a little more serious than we thought