Why Is the U.S. Government Interested in Storytelling?

According to an impenetrable special notice from the D.S.O. of the D.A.R.P.A. of the D.O.D. (that’s the Defense Sciences Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense), the government wants to turn literary criticism into an exact science. D.A.R.P.A. invited interested literary theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and related “ists” to the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville, Virginia, last month to answer a question frequently posed to junior-high-school students: “What is a story?”

I’m simplifying the whole thing because I’m confused. D.A.R.P.A. funds projects involving cyborg insects and killer robots. Why the interest in narrative theory? The special notice says last month’s workshop was intended to be

a precursor to exploring the neurobiological mechanisms which undergird narrative processing so as to establish fertile ground for connecting our understanding of the neuropsychology of stories with models, simulations and sensors salient to security concerns.

D.A.R.P.A. calls the project “Stories, Neuroscience and Experimental Technologies” (STORyNET) and its overriding goal is to understand the biological and literary processes behind story-telling. Here are a few questions D.A.R.P.A. posed to the “ists”:

Does the structure and function of stories vary considerably across cultural contexts or is there a universal theory of story?

How can we take stories and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion?

What analytic approaches or tools best establish a framework for the scientific study of the psychological and neurobiological impact of stories on people?

D.A.R.P.A. officials declined comment, so I e-mailed Blakey Vermeule, a Stanford professor of English interested in cognitive and evolutionary approaches to literature.

“I’m truly puzzled by D.A.R.P.A.’s interest in storytelling,” she replied. “Last I heard they were working on making robots that could move around easily in sand. I guess this may have something to do with the rise of the conspiracy blogosphere and its power over otherwise rational minds. But that’s just a guess.”

Once D.A.R.P.A. discovers a way to write clearly and understand narrative, I think they should drop special notices and turn to sci-fi novels.