ON THE ORIGIN OF STORIES
Evolution, Cognition and Fiction
By Brian Boyd, Harvard University Press, 540pp.
Reviewed: 24 October 2009
Why do we bother with stories? Why do humans invest so much energy in making, sharing and consuming narratives that we know are not factual, when we could put that energy into competing to accumulate, consume and defend ever more possessions?
“Because we like it” is no adequate answer. In evolutionary terms, pleasure is not the reason for anything, but rather the reward for something that contributes to our success as individuals or as a species.
Brian Boyd is Distinguished Professor of English at Auckland University. He is a recognised scholar of Nabokov, with long-term research and teaching interests in the form, function and art of narrative. With Nabokov, he values curiosity above any dogma. In literary academe, he is fed up with “the recently dominant paradigm that calls itself Theory or Critique”, that Boyd believes has, for the last four decades, displaced holistic study of human culture with shallow, circular, and presumptuous ideologies. The inference is that Barthes, Derrida and Foucault have led an academic generation or two back into neo-scholasticism that over-rates “culture” and denies biological humanity, and perpetuates ideas of human exceptionalism in the web of life.
Over those decades, our understanding of how humans and other creatures actually think, feel and develop has made giant strides via neurobiology, psychology, and cognitive science. For Boyd, the most useful approach to literature, and to art in general, is from the “biocultural” perspective that sees the individual psyche not as a zero-sum balance between Nature and Nurture, but as a dynamic product of both: our evolved and evolving common humanity (with individual genetic variations) refracted, in each person, through the cultures of specific times, places and life experience.
He expects some to scoff that this approach is reductive or mechanistic, because it implies denial of the sublime, the divine, or the grandly political. Boyd argues that, on the contrary, to see culture in the full context of its evolutionary function is to open the study of art and literature to its widest, most inclusive scope. When culture is not even uniquely human (many animals and birds exhibit definite local cultures), the richness of human culture displays an extra dimension to explore.
The evolutionary path to the modern novel, film or video-game begins with basic play – a behaviour common to many animals and birds as education for survival. Imitation is instinctive in infants of many species. When baby humans (and other creatures) play with toys, they demonstrate the ability to engage mentally, physically and emotionally with fiction: “We know this stick is not a baby or a dinosaur, but let’s pretend it is.” Such play constitutes rehearsal for life in ways that contribute to evolutionary success.
Boyd asserts that pre-verbal art, such as pre-historic cave paintings, is costly and therefore must have had strategic value to its practitioners. Primitive humans were already “ultrasocial”, with very high levels of inter-dependence based on communication. Messages could be factual (“Water here”) but, equally, could be assertions of individual or group identity, of status within a group, of territorial claims, etc.
Once human language evolved beyond expressing the now, to the point where it could transmit ideas about past and future, narrative became possible. But why would human cultures choose to employ fiction when they could well have stuck to communicating probable fact? In order for fictional narrative to have useful meaning, without fostering dangerous delusions, the individual requires what psychologists call “Theory of Mind” – the capacity to distinguish between fictional possibility and factual probability.
Few of us expect to meet Norse gods or talking rabbits in our daily life, but most of us can learn something useful from the parables and analogies of such fictions. We have come to recognise false belief as part of the range of cognition. We have learned to use false belief to practice tactical deceits, and also to exchange stories that train our brains for ultrasocial life. Group identity, ideology and religion are reinforced by such stories.
Humans maintain the most complex social relationships of any species (as far as we know). Stories provide the means to transmit condensed social experience from which our minds infer practical information for our individual lives.
The unpredictability of the diverse human environment gives evolutionary advantage to individuals who can learn to cope with threats and opportunities before having to encounter them in the real world.
The first task of the story-teller is to claim and hold attention. Novelty in content and style may gain initial attention, but the long-term inferential value of a story will, over time, separate the classic from the flash in the pan. Literary juries, take note.
This reader found Boyd’s arguments clear, convincing, and well-supported with extensive notes and references. It is less clear why almost half this large book is devoted to detailed biocultural analysis of Homer’s epics and of Dr Seuss’ (ital)Horton Hears a Who(/ital) – classics though they may be. In my case, this failed the evolutionary attention-keeping test. Tighter editing might also have eliminated some repetitious argument in a generally well-organised and readable book.
Boyd’s Darwinian premises will challenge the religious or aesthetic pieties of some readers, but I found nothing contradictory. Those who look to the arts for reflections of the numinous or the sublime may still wonder at a natural order that has evolved whales to sing, wolves to bay the moon, and humans to be enraptured by stories.
Richard Thwaites studied English Literature when professors were demi-gods, deconstruction was a passing fad, and evolutionary bioculture would have been a laughable heresy. He has since experienced life.