I also know from War and Peace that when young Petya is killed in battle, Captain Denisov is very sad. But how do I know? Tolstoy never tells me so. He never shows me Denisov’s tears. All I see is Denisov walking slowly away from Petya’s warm corpse. Denisov puts his hands on a fence. He grips the rails.
The writer is not, then, an all-powerful architect of our reading experience. The writer guides the way we imagine but does not determine it. A film begins with a writer producing a screenplay. But it is the director who brings the screenplay to life, filling in most of the details. So it is with any story. A writer lays down words, but they are inert. They need a catalyst to come to life. The catalyst is the reader’s imagination.
LOST IN NEVERLAND
It is obvious that small children are creatures of story. My own daughters are four and seven as I write this book, and their lives are drenched in make-believe. They spend most of their waking hours traipsing happily through Neverland. They are either enjoying stories in their books and videos or creating, in their pretend play, wonder worlds of mommies and babies, princes and princesses, good guys and bad. Story is, for my girls, psychologically compulsory. It is something they seem to need in the way they need bread and love. To bar them from Neverland would be an act of violence.
Annabel and Abigail Gottschall at play.
In these respects, my children aren’t special. Children the world over delight in stories and start shaping their own pretend worlds as toddlers. Story is so central to the lives of young children that it comes close to defining their existence. What do little kids do? Mostly they do story.
It’s different for grownups, of course. We have work to do. We can’t play all day. In James Barrie’s play Peter Pan (1904), the Darling children adventure in Neverland, but eventually they get homesick and return to the real world. The play suggests that kids have to grow up, and growing up means leaving the pretend space called Neverland behind.
But Peter Pan stays in Neverland. He won’t grow up. And in this, we are all more like Peter Pan than we know. We may leave the nursery, with its toy trucks and dress-up clothes, but we never stop pretending. We just change how we do it. Novels, dreams, films, and fantasies are provinces of Neverland.
Londoners browse through the library at Holland House after an air raid during the Blitz. Unlike other leisure activities—such as quilting, gambling, or sports—everyone does story in one form or another. We do story even under the worst conditions, even during war.
One of the puzzles this book addresses is not just story’s existence—which is strange enough—but story’s centrality. Story’s role in human life extends far beyond conventional novels or films. Story, and a variety of storylike activities, dominates human life. You might suspect that my enthusiasm leads me to exaggerate—that I am selling you too hard and too early. Maybe so. But let’s look at the numbers.
Even in an age of anxiety about the demise of the book, publishing books is still big business. And more juvenile and adult fiction is sold each year than all categories of nonfiction combined. Some of fiction’s competitors read like fiction in drag. For instance, the New Journalism that arose in the 1960s—which has strongly influenced nonfiction across genres—was about telling true stories using fictional technique. Similarly, we like biographies partly for the same reason we like novels: they both follow richly characterized lead protagonists through the struggles of their lives. And the most popular form of biography—the memoir—is notorious for the way it plays loose with facts in search of the grip of fiction.
Still, it is lamentable that while more than 50 percent of Americans still read fiction, we don’t read a lot of it anymore. According to a 2009 survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American reads for just over twenty minutes per day, and that figure includes everything from novels to newspapers.
We read less than we used to. But this isn’t because we have forsaken fiction. No, the page has simply been supplanted by the screen. We spend a staggering amount of time watching fiction on screen. According to a number of different surveys, the average American spends several hours each day watching television programs. By the time American children reach adulthood, they will have spent more time in TV land than anywhere else, including school. And these numbers don’t account for the time we spend in movie theaters or watching DVDs. When you add in these figures, Americans spend about nineteen hundred hours per year awash in the glow of television and movie screens. That’s five hours per day.
Of course, not all of this screen time is spent watching comedies, dramas, and thrillers. People also watch news, documentaries, sports, and a hybrid genre called “reality TV,” which may not quite be fiction but is also not nonfiction. Still, almost all of our time in theaters and in front of DVD players is story time, and television remains largely a fiction-delivery technology.
Then there’s music. The musicologist and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin estimates that we hear about five hours of music per day. It sounds impossible, but Levitin is counting everything: elevator music, movie scores, commercial jingles, and all the stuff we mainline into our brains through earbuds. Of course, not all music tells a story. There are also symphonies, fugues, and avant-garde soundscapes blending wind chimes and bunny screams. But the most popular brand of music tells stories about protagonists struggling to get what they want—most often a boy or a girl. Singers might work in meter and rhyme, and alongside guitarists and drummers, but that does not alter the fact that the singer is telling a story—it only disguises it.
So far we have considered fictions created by artists. But what about the stories we tell ourselves? We are at our most creative at night. When we sleep, the untired brain dreams richly, wildly, and at great length. Consciousness is altered in dreams but not extinguished. We just have a limited ability to remember the adventures we consciously experience throughout the night. (People vary in their ability to remember dreams, but sleep lab studies show that virtually everyone dreams.) In dreams, our brains—like cheating spouses—live a whole separate existence that they conceal from the waking mind.
Scientists used to believe that humans dreamed in a vivid and storylike way only during their REM sleep cycles. If this were true, people would spend about two hours per night—and six years per life—spontaneously scripting and screening night stories in the theaters of their minds. It’s amazing that even people who are dull by day can be so creative by night. And it’s more amazing that dream researchers now know that storylike dreams actually occur independent of REM and across the whole sleep cycle. Some researchers think that we dream almost all night long.
And we don’t stop dreaming when we wake. Many, perhaps most, of our waking hours are also spent in dreams. Daydreams are hard to study scientifically, but if you tune in to your stream of consciousness, you will discover that daydreaming is the mind’s default state. We daydream when driving, when walking, when cooking dinner, when getting dressed in the morning, when staring off into space at work. In short, whenever the mind is not absorbed in a mentally demanding task—say writing a paragraph like this one or doing some difficult calculations—it will get restless and skip off into la-la land.
Clever scientific studies involving beepers and diaries suggest that an average daydream is about fourteen seconds long and that we have about two thousand of them per day. In other words, we spend about half of our waking hours—one-third of our lives on earth—spinning fantasies. We daydream about the past: things we should have said or done, working through our victories and failures. We daydream about mundane stuff, such as imagining different ways of handling a conflict at work. But we also daydream in a much more intense, storylike way. We screen films with happy endings in our minds, where all our wishes—vain, aggressive, dirty—come true. And we screen little horror films, too, in which our worst fears are realized.
Some people heap scorn on those Walter Mittys who build castles in the air. But the imagination is an awesome mental tool. While our bodies are always lo
cked into a specific here and now, our imaginations free us to roam space-time. Like powerful sorcerers, all humans can see the future—not a clear and determined future, but a murky, probabilistic one.
What will happen, you wonder, if you yield to your powerful need to kick your boss in the testicles? You fire up your imagination to find out. You zoom forward in time. You see your boss’s smug face. You hear your shoe sizzling through the air. You feel the contact—squishy at first, then hard. And the simulation convinces you that if you kick your boss, he might return the favor. And then fire you (or call the cops). So you keep your foot holstered; you stew in your cubicle.
But our immersion in story goes beyond dreams and fantasies, songs and novels and films. There is much, much more in human life that is thoroughly infiltrated by fiction.
NOT FICTION, BUT FICTIONY
Pro wrestling is closer to ham theater than sport. The spectacle, all choreographed in advance, gives us elaborate story lines with heroes to love and heels to hate: the pompous magnate, the all-American boy, the evil communist, the effeminate narcissist. It gives us all the grandiose pomp and scale—all the fearless bellowing and overacting—of opera. The fake violence of pro wrestling is exciting. But every atomic drop, Mongolian chop, and camel clutch also advances the plot of a slapstick melodrama about who slept with whose wife, who betrayed whom, who really loves America, and who only pretends to.
Real combat sports obey similar storytelling conventions. Boxing promoters have long understood that fights don’t attract fan interest (and dollars) unless they feature compelling personalities and backstories. Prefight hype shapes a story about why the men are fighting and, usually, how they came to despise each other. Fight hype is notoriously fictionalized—men who are friendly off camera pretend to hate each other for the sake of good drama. Without a strong backstory, a fight tends toward dullness, no matter how furious the action. It’s like watching the climax to a great film without first watching the buildup that gives the climax its tension.
Vince McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). In rebranding pro wrestling as “sports entertainment,” McMahon shattered “kayfabe”—wrestling’s long-standing refusal to admit that its violent stories were fake. McMahon describes a season of pro wrestling as a serial novel whose story lines culminate in the annual WrestleMania extravaganza. In Barry Blaustein’s wrestling documentary Beyond the Mat, McMahon is asked to describe WWE’s product. He smiles impishly and says, “We make movies.”
Pro wrestling is pure fiction, but it only exaggerates what we find in legitimate sports broadcasting, where an announcer—a skilled narrative shaper—tries to elevate a game to the level of high drama. Olympic coverage, for example, is thick with saccharine docudramas about the athletes’ struggles. So when the starting gun finally sounds, we are able to root for the competitors as struggling heroes in an epic battle—we are able to feel more fully the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. A recent New York Times Magazine article by Katie Baker makes a similar point. Increasing numbers of women watch televised sports precisely because broadcasters have learned to package it as “interpersonal drama.” For female fans, Baker argues, the NFL’s appeal overlaps with that of Grey’s Anatomy: “characters, stories, rivalries and Heartbreak.” (I’m not sure it’s any different for guys. ESPN Radio is clearly targeted at men, but it showcases relatively few actual sporting events. Instead, the network mainstay is dishy, often catty talk shows about sports personalities. Is LeBron James a jerk for jilting Cleveland? Is “Big Ben” Roethlisberger a sex criminal? Will Brett Favre stay retired, and are the penisgate photos a frame-up?)
Storytelling is the spine of televised sports. This struck me powerfully during the 2010 Masters Golf Tournament. It was the great Tiger Woods’s first tournament after a long and lurid sex scandal. Even people who dislike golf didn’t want to miss this new chapter in the Tiger saga: would the fallen titan struggle to his feet, or would his bad behavior prove karmic? The broadcast’s subplot focused on Tiger’s main rival, Phil Mickelson, whose mother and wife were both fighting cancer. The announcers shaped a narrative in which every missed putt or crushed drive was intensely meaningful thanks to these bigger stories.
Mickelson won. Striding victorious from the eighteenth green, he stopped to embrace his cancer-stricken wife. The camera caught a single tear rolling down Mickelson’s cheek. It wasn’t quite a storybook ending. It was a little too shameless for a storybook.
Television shows such as Law and Order and Survivor give us story. And they are liberally peppered with breaks in which we are given more story. Social scientists define television commercials as “fictional screen media”; they are half-minute short stories.
A commercial rarely just says that a laundry detergent works well; it shows that it does through a story about an overworked mom, rascally kids, and a laundry room triumph. ADT Security Services terrifies us into buying home alarms by showing short films where helpless women and children are rescued from wild-eyed home invaders. Jewelry stores get men to buy sparkly little rocks by screening stories in which besotted suitors pinpoint the exact price of a woman’s love: two months’ salary. Some ad campaigns are designed around recurring characters in multipart stories, such as the humorous “caveman” ads for Geico insurance or the inspired “Messin’ with Sasquatch” ads for Jack Link’s Beef Jerky. The latter say nothing about the product, by the way. They just tell stories about beef-jerky-loving guys who foolishly harass an innocent Sasquatch and earn a violent comeuppance.
Humans are creatures of story, so story touches nearly every aspect of our lives. Archaeologists dig up clues in the stones and bones and piece them together into a saga about the past. Historians, too, are storytellers. Some argue that many of the accounts in school textbooks, like the standard story of Columbus’s discovery of America, are so rife with distortions and omissions that they are closer to myth than history. Business executives are increasingly told that they must be creative storytellers: they have to spin compelling narratives about their products and brands that emotionally transport consumers. Political commentators see a presidential election not only as a contest between charismatic politicians and their ideas but also as a competition between conflicting stories about the nation’s past and future. Legal scholars envision a trial as a story contest, too, in which opposing counsels construct narratives of guilt and innocence—wrangling over who is the real protagonist.
A recent article in The New Yorker dwells on the role of story in court. The author, Janet Malcolm, describes a sensational murder trial in which a woman and her lover were accused of killing the woman’s husband. Malcolm says that the prosecuting attorney, Brad Leventhal, began his opening statement “in the manner of an old-fashioned thriller.” Here’s Leventhal:
It was a bright, sunny, clear, brisk fall morning, and on that brisk fall morning, a young man, a young orthodontist by the name of Daniel Malakov, was walking down 64th Road in the Forest Hills section of Queens County just a few miles from where we are right now. With him was his little girl, his four-year-old daughter, Michelle . . . As Daniel stood outside the entrance to Annandale Playground, just feet from the entrance to that park, just feet from where his little girl stood, the defendant Mikhail Mallayev stepped out as if from nowhere. In his hand he had a loaded and operable pistol.
Leventhal won his verdict largely because he was able to craft a better story from the shaky facts of the case than his opposing counsel, who wasn’t as gifted a storyteller.
Like Malcolm’s piece in The New Yorker, much good journalism is shaped in an intensely storylike way —that’s part of what we mean when we call journalism “good.” Malcolm doesn’t provide a neutral account of what happened. Rather, she takes the chaotic events of a murder and a long trial and weaves them into a suspenseful, character-driven narrative with all of the page-turning appeal of fiction. Here is the way she turns Leventhal into a character in her story: “Brad Leventhal . . . is an exceptionally formidable trial
lawyer. He is a short, plump man with a mustache, who walks with the darting movements of a bantam cock and has a remarkably high voice, almost like a woman’s, which at moments of excitement rises to the falsetto of a phonograph record played at the wrong speed.”
Artist’s rendering of the big bang. Science, I argue, can help us make sense of storytelling. But some say that science is a grand story (albeit with hypothesis testing) that emerges from our need to make sense of the world. The storylike character of science is most obvious when it deals with origins: of the universe, of life, of storytelling itself. As we move back in time, the links between science’s explanatory stories and established facts become fewer and weaker. The scientist’s imagination becomes more adventurous and fecund as he or she is forced to infer more and more from less and less.
We tell some of the best stories to ourselves. Scientists have discovered that the memories we use to form our own life stories are boldly fictionalized. And social psychologists point out that when we meet a friend, our conversation mostly consists of an exchange of gossipy stories. We ask our friend “What’s up?” or “What’s new?” and we begin to narrate our lives to one another, trading tales back and forth over cups of coffee or bottles of beer, unconsciously shaping and embellishing to make the tales hum. And every night, we reconvene with our loved ones at the dinner table to share the small comedies and tragedies of our day.
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human Page 2
