The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

by Gottschall, Jonathan

  Although fairy tales for modern children have been sanitized, they are still full of disturbing material. For example, while the stepsisters’ bloody mutilation has been scrubbed from the versions of “Cinderella” I have read to my girls, the story still describes something much worse: a girl’s loving parents die, and she falls into the hands of people who despise her.

  So is the storm and strife of children’s make-believe just an echo of the trouble children find in the stories we give them? Is the land of make-believe dangerous because, all around the world, children just happen to be exposed to fictions that crackle with trouble?

  That possibility, even if it were true, wouldn’t really answer this question; it would just prompt a new one: why are the stories of Homo sapiens fixated on trouble?

  The answer to that question, I think, provides an important clue to the riddle of fiction.

  3. Hell Is Story-Friendly

  Like the movie screen depicting a maniac in a hockey mask carving people up with a chainsaw; like Hamlet with its killings and suicides and fratricides and incestuous adultery; like all the violence, family strife, and catastrophic sex in Sophocles or on TV or in the Bible, . . . poems of loss and death, can please the reader mightily.

  —ROBERT PINSKY,The Handbook of Heartbreak:

  101 Poems of Lost Love and Sorrow

  ONCE UPON A TIME, a father and daughter were at the grocery store. They were walking down the cereal aisle. The father was pushing a cart. The cart’s left front wheel clattered and creaked. The daughter, Lily, was three years old. She was wearing her favorite dress: it was flowery and flowing, and it fanned out wonderfully when she twirled. She held her father’s index finger in her left fist. In her right fist, she held the grocery list in a sweaty wad.

  The father stopped in front of the Cheerios. He scratched his stubbled chin and asked Lily, “What kind of cereal are we supposed to get again?” Lily released his finger, unwadded the paper, and smoothed it on the curve of her belly. She squinted at the neat feminine script. She ran her index finger over the list of items as if she were reading the words. “Cheerios,” Lily announced. The father let Lily choose the big yellow box herself and push it up and over the side of the cart.

  Later the father would remember how the people passed them in the aisle. He would remember the way the women smiled at Lily as they cruised by with their carts, and how they nodded approvingly at him as well. He would remember the pimply stock boy passing by with his mop and his sloshing bucket on wheels. He would remember the way Lily’s small hand held his finger, and how the throb of her grip lingered after she let go.

  And most of all he would remember the short man with the dark glasses and the red baseball cap tugged low—the way he slouched next to the pyramid display of Pop-Tarts, smiling down at Lily as she passed, showing a wet gleam of incisor.

  The father and daughter walked a little farther down the aisle. They stopped. Lily hugged her father’s thigh. The father cradled her small head to his leg. He stared at the box of sugary cereal she had thrust into his hand, saying, “Daddy, please!” The father slowly shook his head as he read the ingredients, fascinated. (There was no food in this food, just chemical substances such as trisodium phosphate, Red 40, Blue 1, BHT, and pyridoxine hydrochloride.) The father’s eyes moved up to scan the nutritional information, counting grams of sugar and fat.

  He never felt Lily let go of his leg, never felt her head slip from beneath his sheltering hand. Still staring at the box in his hand the father said aloud, “I’m sorry, baby. This stuff isn’t good for us. Mommy will be mad if we buy it.”

  Lily was silent. The father turned to her, knowing that she would be standing there with her arms crossed tight, her chin tucked to her clavicle, and her lips pushed out in a pout. He turned, but Lily wasn’t there. He spun slowly on his heel, and still Lily wasn’t there.

  And neither was the short man with the red cap.

  Now imagine the story told differently.

  Once upon a time, a father and a daughter went to the supermarket. Toward the end of the cereal aisle, Lily saw the red box with the cartoon bunny. She thrust the box of Trix into her father’s hand and hugged his leg as a bribe. The father didn’t bother to read the ingredients. He said, “Sorry, honey. This stuff is bad for you. Mommy’ll be mad if we buy it.”

  Lily released her father’s leg and whipped her head from beneath his sheltering palm. She stomped her feet, locked out her knees, and tucked her hands defiantly in her armpits. Lily scowled up at her father. He tried to give a stern look in reply, but he was weak, and her charms defeated him. He tossed the Trix into the cart and cracked a conspiratorial smile. “We’re not afraid of that ol’ mommy, are we?”

  “Yeah,” Lily said. “We’re not ’fraid!”

  The father and daughter purchased all the items on their list. They drove home in their minivan. The mother only pretended to be angry about the Trix. The little family lived happily ever after.

  MIND THE GAP

  Ask yourself which story you would rather live, the first one or the second? The second, obviously. The first is a nightmare. But which story would make a better film or a novel? The answer is equally obvious: the one with the wet-toothed man. The first story draws us in and infects us with the need to know what happens next: Has the toothy man taken Lily? Or is she just hiding behind the Pop-Tarts display, smothering her giggles with both palms?

  There is a yawning canyon between what is desirable in life (an uneventful trip to the grocery story) and what is desirable in fiction (a catastrophic trip). In this gap, I believe, lies an important clue to the evolutionary riddle of fiction.

  Fiction is usually seen as escapist entertainment. When I ask my students why they like stories, they don’t give the most obvious answer: because stories are pleasurable. They know this would be a superficial response. Of course stories give pleasure, but why?

  So my students dig for a deeper cause: stories are pleasurable because they allow us to escape. Life is hard; Neverland is easy. When we watch reruns of Seinfeld or read a John Grisham novel, we take a short vacation from the pressures of reality. Life hounds us. We hide from it in fiction.

  But it’s hard to reconcile the escapist theory of fiction with the deep patterns we find in the art of storytelling. If the escapist theory were true, we’d expect stories to be mainly about pleasurable wish fulfillment. In story worlds, everything would go right and good people would never suffer. Here’s a plot summary of the kind of story the average joe would be reading (all stories would be written in the rare second person to help the reader identify with the main character):

  You are the shortstop for the New York Yankees. You are the greatest ballplayer in the history of the known universe. This season, you’ve faced 489 pitches and smacked 489 home runs. You live mainly on fried ice cream, which, in lieu of bowls, you spoon from the smooth bellies of the lingerie models who lounge around your swanky bachelor pad. Despite the huge number of calories you consume, you never add an ounce of fat to your chiseled frame. After you retire from baseball, you are unanimously elected president of the United States, and after bringing about peace on earth, you live to see your face carved into Mount Rushmore.

  I’m exaggerating, of course, but you get the point: if fiction offers escape, it is a bizarre sort of escape. Our various fictional worlds are—on the whole—horrorscapes. Fiction may temporarily free us from our troubles, but it does so by ensnaring us in new sets of troubles—in imaginary worlds of struggle and stress and mortal woe.

  There is a paradox in fiction that was first noticed by Aristotle in the Poetics. We are drawn to fiction because fiction gives us pleasure. But most of what is actually in fiction is deeply unpleasant: threat, death, despair, anxiety, Sturm und Drang. Take a look at the carnage on the fiction bestseller lists—the massacres, murders, and rapes. See the same on popular TV shows. Look at classic literature: Oedipus stabbing out his eyes in disgust; Medea slaughtering her children; Shakespeare’s stages stre
wn with runny corpses. Heavy stuff.

  But even the lighter stuff is organized around problems, and readers are riveted by their concern over how it will all turn out: Can Dumb and Dumber overcome their obstacles to win mates who are way out of their league? Will Sam and Diane on Cheers, or Jim and Pam on The Office, get together? Will the mousy librarian in the newest Harlequin romance tame the studly forest ranger? Will Bella choose the vampire or the werewolf? In short, regardless of genre, if there is no knotty problem, there is no story.

  A MIRROR OF LIFE?

  Stories of pure wish fulfillment don’t tempt us, but what about stories that show us life as it is actually lived? A truly mimetic fictional work might describe an accountant trying to finish an important but crushingly boring project.

  The middle-aged man sat at his desk, poking indifferently at his keyboard. He scratched himself furtively, even though he was alone. He rolled his head on his neck. He stared blearily at his screen. He looked hopefully around the office, seeking some excuse not to work. Something to organize. Something to eat. He spun slowly in his chair. Once. Twice. On the third revolution, he saw himself in a window. He made cannibal faces at his reflection. He fingered the bags under his eyes. Then the man shook his head back and forth, took a long swig of cold, sour coffee, and returned to his screen. He poked some keys and bothered his mouse. Soon he was thinking, Maybe I should check my e-mail again.

  Now imagine this passage not as a prelude to a story where something happens. (For instance: The man suddenly saw a strange woman—naked, obese—reflected in the window. She was standing behind him, shaking a knife at his back. Or maybe she was just giving him the finger.) Imagine this story going on, with nothing of interest happening, for fifteen excruciating chapters.

  In fact, writers have experimented with stories like this. So-called hyperrealist fiction does away with the old plot contrivances of traditional fiction. It presents wafers of life as we actually experience it. The crime novelist Elmore Leonard has described his novels as life with all the boring parts snipped out. Hyperrealist fiction pastes them back in.

  In the 1891 novel New Grub Street by George Gissing (pictured here), a character named Harold Biffen writes a novel called Mr Bailey, Grocer, which describes the life of an ordinary grocer in absolutely realistic detail and with zero dramatic shaping. Biffen’s novel is “unutterably boring” by design; it is about the dull monotony of a man’s life. The novel is a work of art but sheer drudgery to read. Disappointed in love and in art, Biffen ends up poisoning himself.

  Hyperrealism is interesting as an experiment, but like most fiction that breaks with the primordial conventions of storytelling, almost no one can actually stand to read it. Hyperrealist fiction is valuable mainly for helping us see what fiction is by showing us what it isn’t. Hyperrealism fails for the same reason that pure wish fulfillment does. Both lack the key ingredient of story: the plot contrivance of trouble.

  A UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

  Fiction—from children’s make-believe to folktales to modern drama—is about trouble. Aristotle was the first to note this, and it is now a staple in English literature courses and creative writing manuals. Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction is adamant on the point: “Conflict is the fundamental element of fiction . . . In life, conflict often carries a negative connotation, yet in fiction, be it comic or tragic, dramatic conflict is fundamental because in literature only trouble is interesting. Only trouble is interesting. This is not so in life.” As Charles Baxter puts it in another book about fiction, “Hell is story-friendly.”

  The idea that stories are about trouble is so commonplace as to verge on cliché. But the familiarity of this fact has numbed us to how strange it is. Here is what it means. Beneath all of the wild surface variety in all the stories that people tell—no matter where, no matter when—there is a common structure. Think of the structure as a bony skeleton that we rarely notice beneath its padding of flesh and colorful garments. This skeleton is somewhat cartilaginous—there is flex in it. But the flex is limited, and the skeleton dictates that stories can be told only in a limited number of ways.

  Stories the world over are almost always about people (or personified animals) with problems. The people want something badly—to survive, to win the girl or the boy, to find a lost child. But big obstacles loom between the protagonists and what they want. Just about any story—comic, tragic, romantic—is about a protagonist’s efforts to secure, usually at some cost, what he or she desires.

  Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication

  This is story’s master formula, and it is intensely strange. There are a lot of different ways stories could be structured. For example, we have already considered escapist fantasies of pure wish fulfillment. But while characters frequently do live happily ever after in fiction, they must always earn their good fortune by flirting with disaster. The thornier the predicament faced by the hero, the more we like the story.

  The idea that stories slavishly obey deep structural patterns seems at first vaguely depressing. But it shouldn’t be. Think of the human face. The fact that all faces are very much alike doesn’t make the face boring or mean that particular faces can’t startle us with their beauty or distinctiveness. As William James once wrote, “There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.” The same is true of stories.

  Most people think of fiction as a wildly creative art form. But this just shows how much creativity is possible inside a prison. Almost all story makers work within the tight confines of problem structure, whether knowingly or not. They write stories around a pattern of complication, crisis, and resolution.

  Over the past one hundred years, some authors, writhing in their chains, have tried to break free from the prison of problem structure. The modernist movement in literature was born when writers realized, much to their horror, that they were working inside well-established walls of convention and formula. They sought to take something as old as humanity—the storytelling urge—and “make it new.”

  Modernist attempts to transcend conventional story were nothing short of heroic (in the way of doomed but noble rebellions). Here’s one breathtaking passage from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake that pretty much gives the flavor of the whole book:

  Margaritomancy! Hyacinthinous pervinciveness! Flowers. A cloud. But Bruto and Cassio are ware only of trifid tongues the whispered wilfulness, (’tis demonal!) and shadows shadows multiplicating (il folsoletto nel falsoletto col fazzolotto dal fuzzolezzo), totients quotients, they tackle their quarrel. Sickamoor’s so woful sally. Ancient’s aerger. And eachway bothwise glory signs. What if she love Sieger less though she leave Ruhm moan? That’s how our oxyggent has gotten ahold of half their world. Moving about in the free of the air and mixing with the ruck. Enten eller, either or.

  In contrast to the conventional, if virtuosic, storytelling of Joyce’s Dubliners, Finnegans Wake is almost impossible to love. It is easy to worship the genius of it—the awesome creativity of the language, the half-loony commitment it took to write this way for almost seven hundred pages and seventeen years. You can celebrate Finnegans Wake as an act of artistic revolt, but you can’t enjoy it as a story that takes you out of yourself and infects you with the need to know what happens next.

  Gertrude Stein praised herself, along with writers like Joyce and Marcel Proust, for writing fiction in which “nothing much happens . . . For our purposes, events have no importance.” Nothing much happens, and aside from English professors, no one much wants to read them. Yes, experimental fictions like Finnegans Wake are still in print, but they are mainly sold either to cultured autodidacts dutifully grinding their way through the literary canon, or to college students who are forced to pretend that they have read them.

  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.

  But there is more to this grammar than the similarities in skeletal structure; there are also similarities in the flesh. As many scholars of world literature have noted, stories revolve around a handful of master themes. Stories universally focus on the great predicaments of the human condition. Stories are about sex and love. They are about the fear of death and the challenges of life. And they are about power: the desire to wield influence and to escape subjugation. Stories are not about going to the bathroom, driving to work, eating lunch, having the flu, or making coffee—unless those activities can be tied back to the great predicaments.

  Why do stories cluster around a few big themes, and why do they hew so closely to problem structure? Why are stories this way instead of all the other ways they could be? I think that problem structure reveals a major function of storytelling. It suggests that the human mind was shaped for story, so that it could be shaped by story.