Once again, I was tempted by a
New York Times book review to reserve a book at the library; this time,
The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall. Despite a quoted
endorsement from Steven Pinker on the back cover, the book is
superficial in that it approaches creating a tale, story, myth, or
legend from a psychosocial need rather than analyzing the merits of plot
construction or literary merit. Here is his major premise: "As the linguist Noam Chomsky showed, all human languages share some basic structural similarities -- a universal grammar. So too, I argue, with story. No matter how far we travel back into literary history, and no matter how deep we plunge into the jungles and badlands of world folklore, we always find the same astonishing thing: their stories are just like ours. There is a universal grammar in world fiction, a deep pattern of heroes confronting trouble and struggling to overcome."
Gottschall observes that
everyman is creating the story of his life every day, editing memories
and forgetting facts. He also emphasizes the time humans spend in the
head, imagining as they dream at night or daydream.
He provides some evolutionary
time line to storytelling, tracing its oral tradition all the way to
World of War virtual creation of characters and conflict resolution. I
don’t think he makes a strong enough distinction between memoirs and
novels. Does everyone think their created life is conflict ridden
wherein they can emerge as the hero?
Ranging a bit out on a branch, Gottschall posits about why people fall for and promote conspiracy theories, as a corollary to a listener's willing suspension of belief from the storyteller: "Conspiracy theories are not, then, the province of a googly-eyed lunatic fringe. Conspiratorial thinking is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy. It is a reflex of the storytelling mind's compulsive need for meaningful experience. Conspiracy theories offer ultimate answers to a great mystery of the human condition: why are things so bad in the world? They provide nothing less than a solution to the problem of evil."
As I am always reading more than one book at a time, I must compare Gottschall to Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. Bloom does a wonderful job in describing the denigration of American culture, morality, faith and patriotism; he shows in there place, America's reliance on values and communication. As a perfect illustration of this insidious seepage into pseudo-scientific analysis of literature, here are two more of Gottschall's observations which are nothing to brag about as being core to the human condition:
"Put differently, the past, like the future, does not really exist. They both are fantasies created in our minds. The future is a probabilistic simulation we run in our heads in order to help shape the world we want to live in. The past, unlike the future, has actually happened. But the past, as represented in our minds, is a mental simulation too. Our memories are not precise records of what actually happened. They are reconstructions of what happened, and many of the details ... are unreliable." Thus spake Nietzsche.
"Psychotherapy helps unhappy people set their life stories straight; it literally gives them a story they can live with. And it works. According to a recent review article in the American Psychologist, controlled scientific studies show that the talking cure works as well as newer therapies ... A psychotherapist can therefore be seen as a kind of script doctor who helps patients revise their life stories so that they can play the role of protagonists again." Morality is individualistic and relative.
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