Then there are the rich stories in the bedrock of all religious traditions. There are the story forms of jokes and urban legends about partying hard in Las Vegas and waking up minus one kidney. And what about poetry or standup comedy or the rapid rise of increasingly storylike video games that allow a player to be a character in a virtual reality drama? What about the way many of us serialize our autobiographies in Facebook and Twitter posts?
We’ll come back to these varied forms of storytelling later. For now, I think the point is clear: The human imperative to make and consume stories runs even more deeply than literature, dreams, and fantasy. We are soaked to the bone in story.
But why?
THE STORY PEOPLE
To see what a hard question this is, let’s conduct a fanciful, but hopefully illuminating, thought experiment. Throw your mind back into the mists of prehistory. Imagine that there are just two human tribes living side by side in some African valley. They are competing for the same finite resources: one tribe will gradually die off, and the other will inherit the earth. One tribe is called the Practical People and one is called the Story People. The tribes are equal in every way, except in the ways indicated by their names.
!Kung San storyteller, 1947.
Most of the Story People’s activities make obvious biological sense. They work. They hunt. They gather. They seek out mates, then jealously guard them. They foster their young. They make alliances and work their way up dominance hierarchies. Like most hunter-gatherers, they have a surprising amount of leisure time, which they fill with rest, gossip, and stories—stories that whisk them away and fill them with delight.
Like the Story People, the Practical People work to fill their bellies, win mates, and raise children. But when the Story People go back to the village to concoct crazy lies about fake people and fake events, the Practical People just keep on working. They hunt more. They gather more. They woo more. And when they just can’t work anymore, the Practical People don’t waste their time on stories: they lie down and rest, restoring their energy for useful activity.
Of course, we know how this story ends. The Story People prevail. The Story People are us. If those strictly practical people ever existed, they don’t anymore. But if we hadn’t known this from the start, wouldn’t most of us have bet on the Practical People outlasting those frivolous Story People?
The fact that they didn’t is the riddle of fiction.
2. The Riddle of Fiction
It seems incredible, the ease with which we sink through books quite out of sight, pass clamorous pages into soundless dreams.
—WILLIAM GASS, Fiction and the Figures of Life
I FACE THE HEAVY security door. I punch my code into the keypad. The lock clicks, and I step through the door into the entryway. I smile a greeting at the director doing paperwork in her office. I sign the visitors log, open an interior gate, and am inside the asylum that I visit most days after work.
The room is wide and long and high-ceilinged. It has hospital-hard floors and fluorescent lights. Colorful art is taped to the walls, and safety scissors lie spread-eagle on the tables. I smell lemony antiseptic and the cafeteria lunches of Tater Tots and Beefaroni. As I make my way toward the back of the room, the inmates babble and yell and bawl and snarl. Some wear ordinary clothes; others are dressed like ninjas, nurses, or frilly princesses. Many of the males brandish improvised weapons; many of the females hold magic wands or swaddled infants.
It’s disconcerting. The inmates can see things that I can’t— and hear, feel, and taste them, too. There are wicked men lurking in the shadows, and monsters, and the salt smell of the ocean, and the mists of the mountains where a lost baby is wailing for her mother.
Small bunches of inmates seem to be sharing the same hallucination. They fight danger or flee from it as one. They cooperate in cooking fake suppers for little babies who just won’t behave. As I continue on toward the back corner of the room, one hero warns me that I am about to step into the jaws of the dragon he is slaying. I thank him. The bold fighter asks a question, and as I veer toward safety, I answer, “I’m sorry, buddy, I don’t know when your mom will be here.”
At the back of the room, two princesses are tucked in a nook made out of bookshelves. The princesses are sitting Indian-style in their finery, murmuring and laughing—but not with each other. They are both cradling babies on their laps and babbling to them, as mothers do. The small one with the yellow hair notices me. Leaping to her feet, she drops her baby on his head. “Daddy!” Annabel cries. She flies to me, and I sweep her into the air.
At about the age of one, something strange and magical buds in a child. It reaches full bloom at the age of three or four and begins to wilt by seven or eight. At one, a baby can hold a banana to her head like a phone or pretend to put a teddy bear to bed. At two, a toddler can cooperate in simple dramas, where the child is the bus driver and the mother is the passenger, or where the father is the child and the child is the father. Two-year-olds also begin learning how to develop a character. When playing the king, they pitch their voices differently than when they are playing the queen or the meowing cat. At three or four, children enter into the golden age of pretend play, and for three or four more years, they will be masters of romps, riots, and revels in the land of make-believe.
Children adore art by nature, not nurture. Around the world, those with access to drawing materials develop skills in regular developmental stages. Children adore music by nature. I remember how my own one-year-olds would stand and “dance” to a tune: smiling toothlessly, bobbing their huge heads, flailing their hands. And by nature children thrill to fictions in puppet shows, TV cartoons, and the storybooks they love to tatters.
To children, though, the best thing in life is play: the exuberance of running and jumping and wrestling and all the danger and splendor of pretend worlds. Children play at story by instinct. Put small children in a room together, and you will see the spontaneous creation of art. Like skilled improv performers, they will agree on a dramatic scenario and then act it out, frequently breaking character to adjust the scenario and trade performance notes.
Children don’t need to be tutored in story. We don’t need to bribe them to make stories like we bribe them to eat broccoli. For children, make-believe is as automatic and insuppressible as their dreams. Children pretend even when they don’t have enough to eat, even when they live in squalor. Children pretended in Auschwitz.
Why are children creatures of story?
To answer this question, we need to ask a broader one first: why do humans tell stories at all? The answer may seem obvious: stories give us joy. But it isn’t obvious that stories should give us joy, at least not in the way it’s biologically obvious that eating or sex should give us joy. It is the joy of story that needs explaining.
Impoverished Indonesian children in the garbage dump where they play.
The riddle of fiction comes to this: Evolution is ruthlessly utilitarian. How has the seeming luxury of fiction not been eliminated from human life?
The riddle is easy to pose but hard to solve. To begin to see why, hold your hand up in front of your face. Rotate it. Make a fist. Wiggle your fingers. Press each fingertip to your thumb, one after another. Pick up a pencil and manipulate it. Tie your shoelaces.
The human hand is a marvel of bioengineering. In a compact space, it packs 27 bones, 27 joints, 123 ligaments, 48 nerves, and 34 muscles. Almost everything about the hand is for something. The nails are for scratching and picking and prying. The fingerprints, or papillary ridges, are crucial to our fine sense of touch. Even the sweat ducts on our hands are arranged with purpose: they keep our hands moist, which improves the stickiness of our grip. (A dry finger slides, which is why you may lick your finger before turning this page.) But the pride of the hand is the fully opposable thumb. Without thumbs, our hands would be only a marginal improvement over a pirate’s hook. Other animals, with their thumbless extremities, can merely paw at the world, or butt and scrape it with their
hooves. But because we humans have thumbs, we can seize hold of it and manipulate it to our ends.
Clay bison, Tuc d’Audoubert cave, Ariège, France. The riddle of fiction is part of a bigger biological riddle, the riddle of art. Fifteen thousand years ago in France, a sculptor swam, crawled, and squirmed his way almost a kilometer down into a mountain cave. The sculptor shaped a male bison rearing to mount a cow and then left his creation in the guts of the earth. The clay bison are an excellent illustration of the evolutionary riddle of art. Why do people make and consume art when doing so has real costs in time and energy and no obvious biological payoffs?
Now indulge me by asking yourself what might seem like a stupid question: what is your hand for?
Using their hands and faces, humans can be eloquent without words.
Well, a hand is obviously for eating. A hand is for caressing. A hand is for making fists and bludgeoning. A hand is for making tools and wielding them. A hand is lascivious: it is for groping and tickling and teasing. Hands are for making sense: we wave them around to amplify what we are saying. My own hands are for all of the above, but these days they are mostly for thumbing through books and typing.
Our hands are tools, but evolution did not shape them for one single thing. The hand is not the biological equivalent of a hammer or a screwdriver; the hand is a multipurpose tool like a Swiss Army knife—it is for many things.
What is true for the hand is true for many other body parts. Eyes are mainly for seeing, but they also help us communicate our emotions. They narrow when we sneer and when we laugh. They water when we are very sad and, strangely enough, when we are very happy. We have lips because we need a hole to take in food and breath. But lips are multipurpose, too. We use them to express affection through kisses. We flex our lips to let people know what’s going on inside our skulls: if we are happy, sad, or killing mad. And lips, of course, are also for speaking.
What is true for lips and hands is also true for the brain, and the behaviors driven by it. Take generosity. While evolutionary psychologists debate where humans sit on the continuum between selflessness and selfishness, it is obvious that humans behave generously under many conditions. What is generosity for? It is for a lot of things: enhancing reputation, wooing mates, attracting allies, helping kinsmen, banking favors, and so on. Generosity isn’t for any one thing, and it wasn’t forged by a single evolutionary force. Likewise the human penchant for story. Fiction might be for a lot of things.
Like what?
Some thinkers, following Darwin, argue that the evolutionary source of story is sexual selection, not natural selection. Maybe stories, and other art forms, aren’t just obsessed with sex; maybe they are ways of getting sex by making gaudy, peacocklike displays of our skill, intelligence, and creativity—the quality of our minds. Thumb back a few pages to that image of the !Kung San storyteller on page 19. Look at the young woman sitting to the storyteller’s left—very pretty, very rapt. That’s the idea.
Or maybe stories are a form of cognitive play. For the evolutionary literary scholar Brian Boyd, “a work of art acts like a playground for the mind.” Boyd suggests that the free play of art, in all its forms, does the same sort of work for our mental muscles that rough-and-tumble play does for our physical muscles.
Or maybe stories are low-cost sources of information and vicarious experience; maybe, to modify Horace, stories delight in order to instruct. Through stories we learn about human culture and psychology, without the potentially staggering costs of having to gain this experience firsthand.
Or maybe story is a form of social glue that brings people together around common values. The novelist John Gardner expresses this idea nicely: “Real art creates myths a society can live by instead of die by.” Go back again to the !Kung San storyteller. Look how he has brought his people together, skin against skin, mind against mind.
These and other theories are all plausible, and we’ll return to them later. But before doing so, we need to tackle a different possibility: that story may be for nothing at all. At least not in biological terms.
YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS
The Krel made first contact at a professional football game, easing their flying saucer down on the fifty-yard line. A mouth yawned open in the ship’s belly, and a ramp protruded like a tongue. The terrified fans watched as an alien named Flash appeared in the portal and staggered down the ramp. Flash had a white-blond brush cut and ears like small, fleshy trumpets. He wore a red jumpsuit with a bolt of lightning tearing across his chest. Flash hurried down the ramp, saying, “Cocaine. We need cocaine.”
In John Kessel’s short story “Invaders,” the Krel cross the universe just to score coke. The earthlings are confused, so the Krel explain that they have a different sense of the aesthetic. For them, the beauty of the cocaine molecule is simply shattering. Cocaine is the universe’s most sublime chemical symphony. The Krel don’t do coke; they experience it as art.
Toward the end of the story, Flash reclines on trash bags in an alley, sharing a crack pipe with a fellow junkie. The alien makes a confession: that talk about the beauty of the cocaine molecule was high-minded nonsense. The Krel, Flash admits, do coke “for kicks.”
And that’s the point of Kessel’s story. Fiction, like cocaine, is a drug. People may invent high-minded aesthetic (or evolutionary) justifications for their fiction habits, but story is just a drug we use to escape from the boredom and brutality of real life. Why do we go to see a Shakespeare play, or watch a film, or read a novel? Ultimately, from Kessel’s point of view, it is not to expand our minds, explore the human condition, or do anything else so noble. We do it for kicks.
Many evolutionary thinkers would agree with Kessel’s position. What are stories for? Nothing. The brain is not designed for story; there are glitches in its design that make it vulnerable to story. Stories, in all their variety and splendor, are just lucky accidents of the mind’s jury-rigged construction. Story may educate us, deepen us, and give us joy. Story may be one of the things that makes it most worthwhile to be human. But that doesn’t mean story has a biological purpose.
Storytelling, in this view, is nothing like the opposable thumb—a structure that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. In this view, story is more akin to the lines on your palm. No matter what your fortuneteller claims, the lines are not maps of your future. They are side effects of the flexion of the hand.
Let’s make this point more concrete with an example. I recently watched the silly and poignant Judd Apatow film Funny People—a “bromance” about a standup comedian (Adam Sandler) with a terminal illness. I liked it: I laughed, I cried, the whole bit.
Why did I enjoy the film? If fiction is an evolutionary side effect, the answer is simple: because I enjoy funny things and the film was funny. I laughed a lot, and laughing makes people feel good. I liked it also because, as a human, I’m nosy and gossip-hungry. And the film let me spy, unseen, on people living at the extremes. I liked the film because it soaked my brain in the heady chemicals associated with wild sex, fistfights, and aggressive humor, without the risk of earning those chemicals honestly.
Other evolutionary thinkers find this side-effect view deeply unsatisfactory. No way, they insist. If story were just pleasurable frippery, then evolution would have long ago eliminated it as a waste of energy. The fact that story is a human universal is strong evidence of biological purpose. Well, maybe. But is it really so easy for natural selection to target the genes that lead me to waste my time on Funny People and Hamlet—time that could be spent earning money or procreating or doing any number of other things with obvious evolutionary benefits?
No. Because my strong attraction to fiction is deeply interwoven with my attraction to gossip and sex and the thrill of aggression. In short, it would be difficult to get rid of the evolutionary bathwater of story without also throwing out the baby—without doing violence to psychological tendencies that are clearly functional and important.
If you feel as if your brain is being t
wisted into a knot, you’re not alone. I don’t know for sure whether story is an evolutionary adaptation or a side effect, and neither at this point does anyone else. Science consists of repeated rounds of conjecture and refutation, and when it comes to this particular question—“Why story?”—we are mainly in a conjectural phase. My own view is that we probably gravitate to story for a number of different evolutionary reasons. There may be elements of storytelling that bear the impression of evolutionary design, like the tweezing grip we can make with our fingers and thumbs. There may be other elements that are evolutionary by-products, like the specific pattern of freckles and hair follicles on the backs of our hands. And there may be elements of story that are highly functional now but were not sculpted by nature for that purpose, such as hands moving over the keys of a piano or a computer.
Behind the scenes on a porn set. Storytelling may also be a simple by-product of having an imagination. Maybe once we evolved a “mental holodeck” for game planning and other practical purposes, we realized we could get cheap thrills by uploading fictions onto it. This would parallel the evolution of the computer: we invented it for utilitarian reasons but soon figured out that we could use it to look at naked people doing naughty things.
In chapters to come, we’ll explore the evolutionary benefits of story, the way that a penchant for pretend has helped humans function better as individuals and as groups. But before we get to the arguments and evidence, we need to prepare the way by returning to the nursery. The carnage and chaos of children’s make-believe provides clues to fiction’s function.
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human Page 3
