The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  As literary critics, we have several ways of responding to Pinker’s claims about Woolf. We can hope, together with a representative of The Publications of the Modern Language Association [sic], that not “many students, teachers, theorists, and critics of literature will take [him] seriously as an authority on literature or the aesthetics more generally, especially since he misrepresents both Woolf and modernism.” At first sight, this is a comfortable stance. It assumes a certain cultural detachment of literary studies and implies that cognitive scientists should just leave literature alone, acknowledging it as an exclusive playing field for properly trained professionals—us. (40–41)

  Zunshine proceeds to lament “our own relative interdisciplinary timidity” (43)—relative to that of cognitive scientists, that is—and urge that we make a “good-faith effort to meet Pinker halfway” (44).

  But what can this possibly mean? Pinker’s position is that modernism constitutes a violation of human nature, and he even misquotes Woolf on “human character” (Pinker had construed Woolf’s line as “on or about December 1910, human nature changed,” and Zunshine dutifully corrected the error).2 Is the “halfway” point a position that modernism constitutes only a partial violation of human nature? As for whether literary critics are being narrowly professionalist in rejecting Pinker’s account: let us find some analogy for the strange way we are being hailed here. For what are physicists supposed to do, for example, when someone outside their field complains that quantum theory violates common sense and cuts the sciences off from ordinary people who know that what goes up must come down? Because, truth be told, quantum theory is even weirder than modernist art and literature, and even fewer people understand it. That, clearly, is where the discipline of physics took a wrong turn, turning its back on what had worked for millennia.

  The point, clearly, is that Pinker doesn’t care for proper novels like The Waves. To her credit, Zunshine does, and her work touches on relatively challenging twentieth-century fare such as Mrs. Dalloway and Lolita.3 But Pinker’s abreaction to the last hundred years of art and literature has a counterpart in evocriticism’s intense antipathy to literary theory, which sometimes sounds like a longing for a sudden news flash—This just in, sign not arbitrary after all. (As Boyd puts it, “Joseph Carroll has long combated the indeterminacy of meaning” [64]. I presume this means that Carroll has won, and meanings will henceforth be stable, as Ahab had desired.) Though Pinker himself does not subscribe to the notion that art is an evolutionary adaptation, that aversion to modernism and to critical theory is shared by Carroll, Boyd, and Dutton, who have placed all their chips on the adaptationist thesis. Storytelling has a demonstrable survival value. It is therefore vitally important to us as a species (as long as it isn’t too weird and/or experimental and/or theoretical or even disabled, which would lead it to violate human nature), and therefore, an interdisciplinary form of literary criticism that strives for “consilience” (in E. O. Wilson’s coinage) will highlight the centrality of narrative to our lives and thereby save the humanities from themselves.

  The problem with this adaptationist argument is that it can’t be demonstrated; it can only be taken on faith. Humans might very well be hardwired for storytelling, at least over the last thirty or forty thousand years, when we received whatever cognitive upgrades were necessary to allow us to draw on caves and try to entertain and/or edify and/or bamboozle each other by making things up. Peter Brooks would apparently agree, to gauge by the passage with which I opened this book, and his example suggests that one can readily acknowledge the ubiquity of storytelling among humans without spinning any Just So stories about its origins. And yet Just So stories are precisely, for Dutton, what Darwinism requires: “Thoroughgoing Darwinism makes a specific demand: nothing can be proposed as an adaptive function of fiction unless it explains how the human appetite for fictional narratives acted to increase, however marginally, the chances of our Pleistocene forebears surviving and procreating” (109–10). It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Dutton’s position, like that of Carroll, can be paraphrased as The elephant has a long trunk, and the giraffe has a long neck, and humans tell stories, and thus I have refuted Judith Butler. As Jonathan Kramnick pointed out in a devastating review of the field, “Against Literary Darwinism,” “Once this move has been taken, literary Darwinism can begin its cleaning out of the stables of the humanities. Adaptationism is therefore the underlying rationale and opening gambit” (322).4

  But what part of storytelling served to get us through the Pleistocene, one wonders. In Kramnick’s follow-up reply to Carroll, Boyd et al.’s responses to the original essay, the answer is whatever part you feel like stressing:

  There is (again) no way to adjudicate between Carroll’s belief that literature provides an emotional skein to brute existence and Dutton’s that literature was useful for counterfactual role playing or Vermeule and Dutton’s that literary language was a kind of courtship ornament or Boyd’s that stories and other art forms hold our attention and so “make the most of the brain’s plasticity” (Boyd 94). Each is merely one belief asserted against another. (446–47)

  For that matter, there is no evidence that storytelling in general conferred an evolutionary advantage on us, as opposed to some combination of traits and proclivities that go into storytelling, as Kramnick argues in his initial essay: “It might accompany features of mind that do serve some advantage—modal syntax, memory, imagining objects and events not immediately present—and yet still be a further fact, subject to more local and historical constraints, like writing and literacy, for example” (332).

  Boyd, for his part, opens On the Origin of Stories—with its obvious nod to Darwin in the title—by assuring his fellow humanists that he is not a genetic reductionist. As he puts it, “We should see genes less as constraints than as enablers,” just as “we should see genes not as deniers of the role of the environment but as devices for extracting information from the environment” (24). Boyd acknowledges that “those uneasy about applying evolution to human behavior often assume that doing so must require stressing selfishness and competition at the expense of altruism and cooperation,” but notes that it ain’t necessarily so: “[Richard] Dawkins points out that he could with equal validity, though with less impact, have called his famous first book not The Selfish Gene but The Cooperative Gene” (26). That’s nice to know after all these years, now that three decades of popular-science enthusiasts have convinced themselves that Nature herself speaks in the language of Ayn Rand. One hopes the word will get around.

  Notably, Boyd shares Pinker’s antipathy to environmental explanations for human behavior, and (relatedly) his taste for concocting social-constructionist straw-humanists who apparently believe that human beings are infinitely malleable. Boyd thereby works himself into a nasty and unnecessary self-contradiction in his first chapter, where he argues that “the cultural constructionist’s view of the mind as a blank slate is ‘a dictator’s dream’ [quoting Steven Pinker],” for “if we were entirely socially constructed, our ‘society’ could mold us into slaves and masters, and there would be no reason to object” (26–27). This is a shallow conception of social constructionism, in which saying that “X is socially constructed” is tantamount to saying that “X can be changed at will.” But what makes Boyd’s critique so unfortunate (and self-contradictory) is that he immediately proceeds to insist that, unlike social constructionism, “an evolutionary view allows for informed social change”: “Owen Jones,” he writes, “compares the law to a lever to change human behavior, and an informed knowledge of human nature to the fulcrum the lever needs to exert its force” (27). If this lever-fulcrum apparatus really works, how is this evolutionary view not a dictator’s dream?

  But the really important thing here for Boyd is (of course) the origin of stories. Like the other evocritics, Boyd is convinced that art is good for us (quite apart from allowing us to survive all these years), in that it hones and enhances those functions of mind that in turn enhan
ce our capacity for social interaction and exploration:

  Art develops in us habits of imaginative exploration, so that we take the world not as closed and given, but open and to be shaped on our own terms. . . . By refining and strengthening our sociality, by making us readier to use the resources of the imagination, and by raising our confidence in shaping life on our own terms, art fundamentally alters our relation to the world. The survival consequences may be difficult to tabulate, but they are profound. We have long felt that art matters to us. It does, objectively as well as subjectively. By focusing our attention away from the given to a world of shared, humanly created possibility, art makes all the difference. (124–25)

  I think it would be a mistake for humanists to dismiss this line of thought out of hand. This is rousing stuff; it not merely reassures us that all our museum-brochure rhetoric is telling the truth, but also, and more importantly, confirms that Friedrich Schiller was right to propose, in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, that humans possess a “play-drive” that leads us to create and be amazed by art: “For, to declare it once and for all, Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing. This proposition . . . will, I promise you, support the whole fabric of aesthetic art, and the still more difficult art of living” (80). It is no slight to Boyd to say that On the Origin of Stories sometimes reads like Schiller combined with a few graduate courses in neuroscience. Whether one prefers to say, with Emily Dickinson, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” or, with Boyd, “Neurons in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental areas of the brain secrete dopamine in reaction to the surprising but not to the expected” (184) is merely a matter of taste.

  The second half of the book, however, turns out to be a profound disappointment. It bears the subtitle “From Zeus to Seuss,” lending the section a kind of alpha-to-omega sweep that suggests it practically covers everything worth covering about literature.5 Boyd opens by assuring readers that “a biocultural approach to literature simply requires that we take seriously that evolution has powerfully shaped not just our bodies but also our minds and behavior” (210). This much is incontrovertible; but Boyd’s application of the principle has two overwhelming weaknesses. The first is that the resulting readings of The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who don’t appear to be worth the journey. Much of Boyd’s approach consists of explaining how Homer and Dr. Seuss managed to win and keep our attention, and Boyd castigates contemporary literary criticism for failing to attend to this important matter. But might it not be that “Homer organized the poem in this way so as to win and keep your attention” is the kind of thing that, in literary criticism, literally goes without saying? (I will return to this point a bit later on.) Similarly, readers have known for almost three millennia that Odysseus is one crafty fellow, and one index of his craftiness is that he does not act on impulse; even when he’s trapped in a cave with a one-eyed giant eating his men, he remains reflective and comes up with a well-considered plan. Boyd explains precisely what this means in neurological terms: “Rapid-fire reactions have to be inhibited (in the orbitofrontal cortex) so that there is time to formulate and assess new options (in the dorsolateral cortex) before acting on them” (258). Personally, I am tremendously pleased that my species has gotten to the point at which it understands things like this in such a minute and precise way. But how much is added to the history of criticism, finally, by the realization that Odysseus was doing his crafty plotting in his dorsolateral cortex?6

  This is a real and not a rhetorical question. Boyd closes On the Origin of Stories by remarking that “evocriticism” will have to make its way by devising compelling and convincing readings of works of literature, attending not only to the universal features of human minds but also to the cultural and historical particularities of time and place. On one hand, this school of criticism will provide a desperately needed justification for literary study: “If storytelling sharpens our social cognition, prompts us to reconsider human experience, and spurs our creativity in the way that comes most naturally to us”—as it surely does—“then literary studies need not apologize” (384). On the other hand, evocriticism comes bearing not only a rationale but also a sword: as Boyd remarks time and again, the enemy to be vanquished is Theory, “which cuts literature off from life by emphasizing human thought and ideas as the product of only language, convention, and ideology—although Theory then tries to compensate for severing literature from three-dimensional life by insisting that it is always political or ideological” (385).

  It is odd, to say the least, for a literary critic to suggest that stressing “language, convention, and ideology” somehow cuts one off from “life” (one would have imagined that these were aspects of human social life, and important ones too—things that developed because of the evolution of our brains).7 It is similarly strange for someone to claim that “a fine work of art not only expresses creativity but also inspires it in those who enjoy it” (376–77) but fail to consider that “theoretical” readings of language and literature caught on in the 1970s and 1980s because they were, back in the day, compelling and creative. Everyone who, like Boyd, believes that Alan Sokal killed Theory dead in 1996 really should go back and read Barbara Johnson on Melville’s Billy Budd or Paul de Man on the famous rhetorical (or is it real?) question that closes Yeats’s “Among School Children.”8 As for myself, even though I’ve never been a card-carrying deconstructionist, I was fascinated by those readings when I first encountered them because they taught me that Melville’s novella was even more extraordinary than I’d thought, and that when you’re trying to determine whether a question is real or rhetorical, even an utterance like “eh, what’s the difference?” can open onto a hall of mirrors. Boyd never stops to consider that maybe, just maybe, the clever human minds responsible for literature are the same clever human minds responsible for literary theory; if he had, he might have been able to say, more plausibly, that Theory started (as do all our endeavors) in the impulse to play and create, and became routine and stultifying only after many weary iterations. At which point, after the 350th New Historicist reading of The Tempest, neurons in the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental areas of the brain stopped secreting dopamine, and people decided to do something else instead.

  More importantly, Boyd is exceptionally reluctant to give culture and history their due—as most humanists understand these things. He scoffs, for example, at the idea that romantic love was invented at some point in the twelfth century, because “cross-cultural, neurological, and cross-species studies have demonstrated the workings of romantic love across societies and even species” (341). This just won’t wash, in the humanities or in the sciences. “Romantic love” in the sense used by contemporary humanists does not mean “mammals doing it like mammals”; it refers to the conventions of courtly love, which were indeed invented in the European Middle Ages, and cannot be found in ancient literatures or cultures. Those conventions are culturally and historically specific variations on our underlying (and polymorphous) biological imperatives, just as the institution of the $25,000 wedding is specific to our own addled time and place. Nothing about the evolutionary record, from amoebas to Homo sapiens sapiens, is denied or contravened in acknowledging this.

  It is a shame that a branch of criticism purportedly devoted to explaining our abiding love for storytelling turns out to be so sweepingly dismissive of so much of the intellectual traditions humans have devised for the study of human cultures. Even worse, this branch of criticism, in its hostility to every other school of criticism, seems to have no interest in getting into the grainy textual details of individual stories—or the various interpretive disputes about those stories—that make up so much of the work of literary criticism. Once you have decided that all art and storytelling is an evolutionary adaptation that got us through the Pleistocene, it appears, you have said everything worth saying, and the only task remaining is to take other critics to t
ask for not remarking that storytellers have devised a variety of ways to win and hold our attention. Nor is it clear that the insights vouchsafed to us by evocriticism couldn’t have been arrived at without evocriticism. In The Storytelling Animal, for instance, Jonathan Gottschall insists that fiction has a generally moral effect on us, creating communities not unlike those formed by religious belief, which in turn rests on the power of stories. But why is this (hopeful if not naive) understanding of literature any better than that proposed by Matthew Arnold long before the advent of neuroscience? Likewise, Gottschall rightly suggests that humans need a sense of order and coherence that only narrative can provide. But why is this understanding of narrative any better than that proposed by Kermode in The Sense of an Ending?

  But finally, the most remarkable and disturbing problem with evocriticism is that its understanding of stories doesn’t have anything to say about the difference between oral and written literature, or literature and visual media. (And though Zunshine’s work has none of the evocritics’ adaptationist commitments, Getting Inside Your Head is, as we have seen, aggressively indifferent to such concerns as well.) This is not an oversight. As Kramnick points out, “The adaptation thesis speaks to dimensions of literary competence that may be said to be very old, present in the notional prehistory of the human species, prior to writing, literacy, or any work with which we are familiar” (326).9 At this reach, evocriticism is not merely a question of spanning Zeus to Seuss. It proposes that storytelling is important because it helped us fend off predators and manage a series of Ice Ages, and that nothing about the evolution of storytelling since its origin is as important as that. What makes this claim especially weird is that in 2007 a practicing neuroscientist (i.e., a real scientist, not a literary critic with a secondary interest in evolution and neuroscience) wrote a book about the importance of the invention of writing, a book that one would think might be of some interest to people who claim to be interested in evolution and narrative—people who believe, as Gottschall does, that fiction works by “literally rewiring our brains” (63). That book was Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, and it makes a persuasive and detailed case for the way the invention of writing (as opposed to the general invention of lying and storytelling) rewired our brains. To date, not a single evocritic has given Wolf’s argument the time of day, precisely because it would require an attention to written language and historical specificity that is anathema to the project of literary Darwinism.