Of all the indignities visited on the writer’s life these days, none is more undignified than the story or pitch meeting, a ritual to which every writer, from the gazillion-dollar screenwriter to the lowly essayist, will sooner or later submit. “So tell us the story,” the suits say after a few minutes of banter and schmooze, and the writer gulps and jumps in. “Well, uh, it’s sort of, like—it’s sort of a fish out of water story…“and then as one pale incident succeeds the next, the tycoons emit a slow burn of polite disbelief and boredom, ending with a forced smile and a we’ll-get-back-to-you. Sometime. Soon…
And yet something interesting, even encouraging, is revealed in this ritual, all its humiliations aside. Stories, more even than stars or spectacle, are still the currency of life, or commercial entertainment, and look likely to last longer than the euro. There’s no escaping stories, or the pressures to tell them. And so the pathetic story-pitcher turns to pop science—to Jonathan Gottschall’s new book, “The Storytelling Animal,” for instance— for some scientific, or at least speculative, ideas about what makes stories work and why we like them. Gottschall’s encouraging thesis is that human beings are natural storytellers—that they can’t help telling stories, and that they turn things that aren’t really stories into stories because they like narratives so much. Everything—faith, science, love—needs a story for people to find it plausible. No story, no sale.
O.K. Anyone in dissent? But this claim, itself hardly momentous, then opens onto something sadly like a forced march of the platitudes: We all like stories. When we don’t have a story we make one up—that’s why the juxtapositions of film editing work. People usually like stories to have “morals” at the end. Religions are so successful because they tell moralish stories, though, to be sure, some of their stories are nice and some are not nice at all. Different people like different kinds of morals in their stories. Hitler loved the heroic stories of Wagner, for instance. That was too bad. (“The musical stories that Hitler most loved did not make him a better person,” Gottschall writes.) On the other hand, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an influential story about the evils of slavery. That was good. People say that fiction is dead. Well, “when did authors sell more books to a more devoted public than John Grisham, Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, Nora Roberts, Stephen King or Steig Larsson?” Gottschall asks. Writers exist who have tried to alter or revise the “universal grammar in world fiction”—Proust and Joyce, for instance, but “aside from English professors, no one much wants to read them.” (Oh, yes? Ask any publisher whether they would rather have the Proust and Joyce backlists or those of the Nora Roberts and Tom Clancy of Proust’s and Joyce’s day. Really good stories, like really good wines, really do drink well for a longer time.)
The interesting questions about stories, which have, as they say, excited the interests of readers for millennia, are not about what makes a taste for them “universal,” but what makes the good ones so different from the dull ones, and whether the good ones really make us better people, or just make us people who happen to have heard a good story. This is a case, as with women’s fashion, where the subtle, “surface” differences are actually the whole of the subject. Questions about those small differences seem not to have occurred to Gottschall. There is not a single reference in Gottschall’s book to such students of the mechanics of storytelling as William Empson, Samuel Johnson, Lionel Trilling, Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, or Randall Jarrell, all of whom brooded long and hard upon stories and their subjects. Wilson, for instance, who despised “college professors” and their tastes, tackled the problem of the “boring” modern story at great and lucid length, ending with the intriguing conclusion that each age has its own acceptable boredoms, with Joyce’s boredoms being no greater than Sir Walter Scott’s. It is one thing to think that psychology may solve problems that baffle philosophy or criticism; it well may. But to think that the invocation of empirical studies on a subject frees one from the job of finding out what the great instinctive psychologists have said about that subject before you got to it is just misguided.
Do entertaining stories make us more ethical? “The only way to find out is to do the science,” Gottschall says, reasonably enough, and then announces that “the constant firing of our neurons in response to fictional stimuli strengthens and refines the neural pathways that lead to skillful navigation of life’s problems” and that the studies show that therefore people who read a lot of novels have better social and empathetic abilities, are more skillful navigators, than those who don’t. He insists that storytelling is adaptive, on strictly Darwinian terms, but surely this would only have meaning if he could show that there were human-like groups who failed to compete because they didn’t trade tales—or even that tribes who told lots of stories did better than tribes that didn’t. Are societies, like that of Europe now, which has mostly rejected religious storytellers, less prosperous and peaceful than ones, like Europe back when, that didn’t? Would a human-like society that had lots of food and sex but no stories die out? When has this happened? (It’s true that there are those who think that the “symbolic” revolution among our sort of people doomed the Neanderthals, but this is, to put it mildly, a very speculative story, more “Star Trek” than “Mr. Wizard.”)
And if these claims seem almost too large to argue, the more central claim—that stories increase our empathy, and “make societies work better by encouraging us to behave ethically”—seems too absurd even to argue with. Surely if there were any truth in the notion that reading fiction greatly increased our capacity for empathy then college English departments, which have by far the densest concentration of fiction readers in human history, would be legendary for their absence of back-stabbing, competitive ill-will, factional rage, and egocentric self-promoters; they’d be the one place where disputes are most often quickly and amiably resolved by mutual empathetic engagement. It is rare to see a thesis actually falsified as it is being articulated.
You just don’t like the enterprise, and are territorial on behalf of your tribe, that of book readers and literary critics! I hear a resentful science-minded reader insist. Would you ever allow a book of evolutionary psychology applied to art not to be entirely fatuous? Actually, yes. Robin Dunbar’s “Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language,” from a few years back, for instance, had a thesis and a sharp one: that primates groom each other not to pick out nits, which do not really trouble them, but as a form of gossip, a way of exchanging social information—who grooms who for how long tells who’s up and who’s down. This primate grooming and the “gossip” that it entails actually produce brain-opiates; they’re our monkey junk. Since human groups are roughly three times larger than other primate groups, tactile gossip was no longer enough to produce the opiates that make social existence tolerable, even pleasant, for primates. We started talking as a way of gossiping and grooming each other at a remove, so to speak—and, indeed, to this day, almost all talk, before it is communication, is gossip and grooming: “He said what?!” “They fired who?” We have to invent very natural unnatural situations—classrooms where everyone faces front, usually under the threat of more or less brutal discipline—to get people to use language for learning outside the gossip-context. This thesis may or may not be true, but it has the excitement of a theory that surprises: it’s a good story.
And it is exactly in that excitement that the real relation of stories and science might be found. Good stories are strange. What strong scientific theories, even those crafted in pop form, have in common with good stories is not some specious universality. It’s that they make claims so astonishing that they seem instantly very different from all the other stories we’ve ever heard. Good stories are startling. A sensitive, educated man is mad with lust for an eleven-year-old girl! Yikes! (Or, Yuck! Which is the same reaction with a slightly different sound.) lt isn’t Miss Havisham who is turning him into a gentleman? It ‘s that convict all the way back from the first chapter? Are you serious? This power to astonish is true even of seemingly long or esoteric stories that no one is said to read: the way to Swann’s house and the way to the Guermantes house turn out to have been the same way all along? It took us so long, and so many long sentences, to find that out—but it was worth it.
Good scientific theories are always startling, too. The narrative excitement of the great scientific theories, far from residing in their reassuring simplicity, lies in their similarly radical exclusions, their shocks: Everything in the whole universe is instantly attracting everything else! Everything! The big earth is dully pulling the apple and the apple is pluckily pulling on the earth. If you raced in your carriage as fast as you could and your friend raced in his carriage alongside yours as fast as he could, there would be absolutely no way for either of you to tell if you were both moving really fast or both just completely standing still! Really. No way at all. But—and here’s the weirdly special sequel, Relativity II—if you went really, really, really fast, so that you were almost moving at the speed of light, and your friend just stayed in his carriage, time would actually slow down all around you! You’d end up younger than he. Or consider this story: the Archbishop of Canterbury is actually the offspring of a little fox with pointy ears that lived in a tree! (The idea, by the way, that evolution is not a “good story” is so bizarre as to be incredible to anyone who knows the history of the reception of evolutionary theory; it was such a good story that, published by Darwin in November, by Christmas every half-educated person in England was telling it, in shock or excitement.) Or simply consider this story: locked inside the nucleus of each little invisible atom is a force so vast it can destroy an entire city!
Now, those are stories worth pitching; the suits stand up when they hear them, and say, My God, we must make that! (Or test that in a lab, or tell that to our students, which is the same thing.) And the story that everything is, one way or another, give or take a turn or two, really sort of like a story? The suits in the meeting where this story about stories is offered fidget: “Yeah? Right. And, uh, then? It’s all stories? Yeah, I get that, but … where’s the, uh, drama?” Good science is more like Proust than Mr. Popper’s Penguins; its stories startle us with their strangeness, but they intrigue us by their originality, and end by rewarding us with the truth, after an effort. It is the shock good stories offer to our expectations, not some sop they offer to our pieties, that makes tales tally, and makes comtes count. The story that tells us only that we like all kinds of stories lacks that excitement, that exclusionary power, which is the only thing that makes us want to hear stories at all.
Photograph by Berthold Steinhilber/Laif/Redux.
