The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

by Gottschall, Jonathan

  If there really is a general pattern of conventional moralizing in stories—one that stands out around the world despite some exceptions—where does it come from? William Flesch thinks it reflects a moralistic impulse that is part of human nature. I think he’s right. I think it reflects this impulse, but I also think it reinforces it. In the same way that problem structure points up a potentially important biological function of story (problem rehearsal), the moralism of fiction may point up another important function.

  In a series of papers and a forthcoming book, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I propose that stories make societies work better by encouraging us to behave ethically. As with sacred myths, ordinary stories—from TV shows to fairy tales—steep us all in the same powerful norms and values. They relentlessly stigmatize antisocial behavior and just as relentlessly celebrate prosocial behavior. We learn by association that if we are more like protagonists, we will be more apt to reap the typical rewards of protagonists (for instance, love, social advancement, and other happy endings) and less likely to reap the rewards of antagonists (for instance, death and disastrous loss of social standing).

  Humans live great chunks of their lives inside fictional stories—in worlds where goodness is generally endorsed and rewarded and badness is condemned and punished. These patterns don’t just reflect a moralistic bias in human psychology, they seem to reinforce it. In his book The Moral Laboratory, the Dutch scholar Jèmeljan Hakemulder reviewed dozens of scientific studies indicating that fiction has positive effects on readers’ moral development and sense of empathy. In other words, when it comes to moral law, Shelley seems to have had it right: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

  Evidence that poetic justice is basic to the fiction impulse comes from children’s pretend play. According to David Elkind’s The Power of Play, children’s pretend play always has clear “moral overtones—the good guys versus the bad guys.” Children’s play scenarios are endlessly convulsed by the collision of evil and good, as in this photograph of children playing cops and robbers.

  Similar evidence comes from a 2008 study of television viewers by the psychologist Markus Appel. Think about it: for a society to function properly, people have to believe in justice. They have to believe that there are rewards for doing right and punishments for doing wrong. And, indeed, people generally do believe that life punishes the vicious and rewards the virtuous. This is despite the fact that, as Appel puts it, “this is patently not the case.” Bad things happen to good people all the time, and most crimes go unpunished.

  In Appel’s study, people who mainly watched drama and comedy on TV—as opposed to heavy viewers of news programs and documentaries—had substantially stronger “just-world” beliefs. Appel concludes that fiction, by constantly marinating our brains in the theme of poetic justice, may be partly responsible for the overly optimistic sense that the world is, on the whole, a just place. And yet the fact that we take this lesson to heart may be an important part of what makes human societies work.

  Go into a movie theater. Sit in the front row, but don’t watch the movie. Turn around and watch the people. In the flickering light, you will see a swarm of faces—light and dark, male and female, old and young—all staring at the screen. If the movie is good, the people will respond to it like a single organism. They will flinch together, gasp together, roar with laughter together, choke up together. A film takes a motley association of strangers and syncs them up. It choreographs how they feel and what they think, how fast their hearts beat, how hard they breathe, and how much they perspire. A film melds minds. It imposes emotional and psychic unity. Until the lights come up and the credits roll, a film makes people one.

  It has always been so. It is easy for us to forget, sitting alone on our couches with our novels and television shows, that until the past few centuries, story was always an intensely communal activity. For tens of thousands of years before the invention of writing, story happened only when a teller came together with listeners. It wasn’t until the invention of the printing press that books became cheap enough to reward mass literacy. For uncounted millennia, story was exclusively oral. A teller or actor attracted an audience, synched them up mentally and emotionally, and exposed them all to the same message.

  In recent centuries, technology has changed the communal nature of story, but it has not destroyed it. Nowadays we may imbibe most of our stories alone or with our families and friends, but we are still engaged in a socially regulating activity. I may be by myself watching Breaking Bad or 30 Rock, or reading The Da Vinci Code or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but there are millions of other people sitting on millions of other couches being exposed to exactly the same stories and undergoing exactly the same process of neural, emotional, and physiological attunement. We are still having a communal experience; it’s just spread out over space and time.

  Story, in other words, continues to fulfill its ancient function of binding society by reinforcing a set of common values and strengthening the ties of common culture. Story enculturates the youth. It defines the people. It tells us what is laudable and what is contemptible. It subtly and constantly encourages us to be decent instead of decadent. Story is the grease and glue of society: by encouraging us to behave well, story reduces social friction while uniting people around common values. Story homogenizes us; it makes us one. This is part of what Marshall McLuhan had in mind with his idea of the global village. Technology has saturated widely dispersed people with the same media and made them into citizens of a village that spans the world.

  Story—sacred and profane—is perhaps the main cohering force in human life. A society is composed of fractious people with different personalities, goals, and agendas. What connects us beyond our kinship ties? Story. As John Gardner puts it, fiction “is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.” Story is the counterforce to social disorder, the tendency of things to fall apart. Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold.

  7. Ink People Change the World

  We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing.

  —VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Pale Fire

  ALOIS SCHICKLGRUBER WAS BORN in 1837 in the tiny village of Strones, in the hilly region north of Vienna. The Schicklgrubers were peasants, but Alois rose by pluck to a good job in the civil service. Alois raised his family in the town of Linz. He sired nine children in all, including a son named Adolfus, who lived for opera.

  Adolfus’s boyhood friend August Kubizek relates how, when Adolfus was just sixteen, the two boys attended a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Rienzi. For five full hours, the two friends gazed down from the cheap seats as the story of Cola Rienzi, the heroic Roman tribune of the people, unfolded in blasts of song. Afterward, exhausted and emotionally spent, the two friends walked the winding streets of Linz.

  The voluble Adolfus was oddly quiet. In silence, he led his friend up the Freinberg, a hill overlooking the Danube. There Adolfus stopped and grasped Kubizek’s hands. Trembling with “complete ecstasy and rapture,” he said that Rienzi had revealed his destiny. “He conjured up in grandiose, inspiring pictures his own future and that of his people . . . He was talking of a mandate which, one day, he would receive from the people, to lead them out of servitude to the heights of freedom.” Then Kubizek watched Adolfus walk away into the night.

  Adolfus as a baby.

  As a young man, Adolfus dreamed of being a great painter. He dropped out of school at seventeen and moved to Vienna, hoping to attend the Academy of Fine Arts. But while Adolfus could paint landscapes and architectural scenes, he was defeated by the human form, and so he was twice rejected by the academy. Depressed, Adolfus slipped into an aimless, loafing existence. He whipped off paintings of Viennese landmarks and sold them to tourists for the equivalent, in today’s money, of ten or fiftee
n dollars. He flopped for a time with winos and hoboes in a homeless shelter, walking the streets for hours to escape the bugs in his room. He took his meals in soup kitchens. In the winter, he shoveled snow to earn money and spent time in public warming rooms. He sometimes hung around the train station, carrying bags for tips.

  Adolfus’s relatives tried to get him jobs as a baker’s apprentice and a customs officer. He brushed them off. Through all the years of struggle and failure, the confidence he gained from his Rienzi epiphany never wavered; he knew he would make his mark.

  Adolfus’s last name was not Schicklgruber. His father, Alois, had been born out of wedlock, so Alois was given his mother’s last name. But Alois’s mother later married Johann Georg Hiedler. When Alois was thirty-nine, he legally took his stepfather’s name, which was variously spelled Hiedler, Huetler, or Hitler. The government clerk processing the name change settled on the last spelling, and Alois Schicklgruber became Alois Hitler.

  One of Adolf (“Adolfus” is the name on his birth certificate) Hitler’s best biographers, Ian Kershaw, writes, “Hitler is one of the few individuals of whom it can be said with absolute certainty: without him, the course of history would have been different.” Historians have, therefore, speculated endlessly about whether the twentieth century might have taken a gentler turn if Hitler had been admitted to art school, or if he had not attended Rienzi that night in 1906 and gotten drunk on a fantasy of himself as his nation’s savior.

  Historians question much in August Kubizek’s memoir, The Young Hitler I Knew, which began as a work of hero worship commissioned by the Nazi Party but was not finished until after World War II. However, the Rienzi episode seems to be authentic. In 1939, Hitler was visiting the family of Siegfried Wagner (the composer’s son) at Bayreuth. The children adored him and called him by a special nickname, “Uncle Wolf.” Siegfried’s wife, Winifred, was a particular friend, and Hitler said to her of his Rienzi epiphany, “That was when it all began”—“it” being the process that turned an unpromising boy into the great führer. Hitler also told the Rienzi story to members of his inner circle (such as his architect, Albert Speer) and to the generals on his staff.

  The Courtyard of the Old Residency in Munich (1914) by Adolf Hitler. A book called Adolf Hitler as Painter and Draftsman was published in 1983 in Switzerland. It catalogs some 750 of Hitler’s watercolors, oils, and sketches. Offered to several New York publishing houses, it “was rejected on the grounds that it risked making Hitler appear human.”

  Of course, this doesn’t mean that if young Adolfus had skipped Rienzi, the world could have skipped World War II and the Holocaust. But even historians who are skeptical of the Rienzi story do not deny that Wagner’s sprawling hero sagas—with their Germanic gods and knights, their Valkyries and giants, their stark portrayals of good and evil—helped shape Hitler’s character.

  Richard Wagner (1813–1883).

  Wagner was not just a brilliant composer. He was also an extreme German nationalist, a prolific writer of inflammatory political tracts, and a virulent anti-Semite who wrote of a “grand solution” to the Jewish menace long before the Nazis put one in place. Hitler worshiped Wagner like a god and called Wagner’s music his religion. He attended parts of Wagner’s Ring Cycle more than 140 times, and as führer he never traveled anywhere without his Wagner recordings. He considered the composer to be his mentor, his model, his one true ancestor. According to André François-Poncet, the French ambassador to Berlin in the 1930s, Hitler “‘lived’ Wagner’s work, he believed himself to be a Wagnerian hero; he was Lohengrin, Siegfried, Walther von Stolzing, and especially Parsifal.” He saw himself, in other words, as a modern knight locked in a struggle with evil.

  The acclaimed Hitler biographer Joachim Fest agrees with François-Poncet: “For the Master of Bayreuth [Wagner] was not only Hitler’s great exemplar, he was also the young man’s ideological mentor . . . [Wagner’s] political writings, together with the operas, form the entire framework for Hitler’s ideology . . . Here he found the ‘granite foundations’ for his view of the world.” Hitler himself said that “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must understand the works of Wagner.”

  INK PEOPLE

  The characters in fiction are just wiggles of ink on paper (or chemical stains on celluloid). They are ink people. They live in ink houses inside ink towns. They work at ink jobs. They have inky problems. They sweat ink and cry ink, and when they are cut, they bleed ink. And yet ink people press effortlessly through the porous membrane separating their inky world from ours. They move through our flesh-and-blood world and wield real power in it. As we have seen, this is spectacularly true of sacred fictions. The ink people of scripture have a real, live presence in our world. They shape our behaviors and our customs, and in so doing, they transform societies and histories.

  This is also true of ordinary fiction. In 1835, Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote a novel called Rienzi. The young Richard Wagner was inspired by the novel and decided to base an opera on it. Bulwer-Lytton conjured people out of paper and ink. Wagner put those ink people onstage and told their story in song. Those songs changed Adolf Hitler and, through Hitler, the world. Wagner’s ink people—Siegfried, Parsifal, Rienzi—may have been significant in the wild mix of factors that brought on the worst war in history, and the worst genocide.

  James Koehnline’s Literature (2007).

  The eleventh edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica claimed vast power for literary art, saying it has had “as much effect upon human destiny” as the taming of fire. But not everyone thinks so. W. H. Auden wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen,” and Oscar Wilde wrote that “all art is quite useless.” Stories, in this view, are relatively inert in their effects. After all, most people are not stupid. They know the difference between reality and fantasy, and they resist being manipulated.

  Until very recently, this debate was driven largely by anecdote. The most famous by far involves the plight of an ink person named Eliza Harris. Young and beautiful, spirited and good, Eliza was a slave who belonged to Arthur Shelby. Rather than see her small son Harry sold “down the river” to the much rougher plantations of the Deep South, Eliza ran for the North. An account of her flight was serially published beginning in 1851 in the newspaper National Era. Readers held their breath as Eliza stood on the south bank of the Ohio River, looking out over the churning expanse of ice floes that separated the slave state of Kentucky from the free state of Ohio. At her back, the slave catchers were already in sight, closing fast. Holding little Harry in her arms, Eliza stepped onto the uncertain ice. Then, leaping and slipping from ice floe to wobbly ice floe, she made it to the other side, and eventually to freedom in Canada.

  In 1852, the story of Eliza’s terrible struggle, and those of another slave from the Shelby estate, Uncle Tom, was republished in book form. It would become, with the exception of the Bible, the best-selling book of the nineteenth century. Uncle Tom’s Cabin polarized the American public. By showing the cruelty of slavery, the book roused abolitionist sympathies in the North. And by depicting slavery as a hellish institution ruled over by brutes, the book helped galvanize the South in slavery’s defense. The book’s representative slave owner, Simon Legree, is a sadistic monster who has a fist like a “blacksmith’s hammer.” He shakes that hammer in the face of his slaves and says, “This yer fist has got as hard as iron knocking down niggers. I never seen the nigger yet I couldn’t bring down with one crack.”

  When, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he famously said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” Lincoln went a little far in his flattery, but historians agree that Uncle Tom’s Cabin “exerted a momentous impact on American culture (and continues to do so),” inflaming the passions that brought on the most terrible war in American history. Moreover, it affected international opinion in important ways. As the historian Paul Johnson has written, “In Britain, the success of the novel helped
to ensure that . . . the British, whose economic interest lay with the South, remained strictly neutral.” If the British had jumped into the fight, the outcome may have been different.

  Eliza Harris crossing the Ohio River. A promotional poster for an 1881 theatrical adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  People who believe that story systematically shapes individuals and cultures can cite plenty of evidence beyond Rienzi and Uncle Tom’s Cabin: the way D. W. Griffith’s 1915 epic film, The Birth of a Nation, resurrected the defunct Ku Klux Klan; the way the film Jaws (1975) depressed the economies of coastal holiday towns; the way Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) is—in the words of Christopher Hitchens—responsible for much of “the grisly inheritance that is the modern version of Christmas”; the way The Iliad gave Alexander the Great a thirst for immortal glory (the eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson asked, “Would Alexander, madman as he was, have been so much a madman, had it not been for Homer?”); the way the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) inspired a spate of copy-cat suicides; the way novels such as 1984 (George Orwell, 1948) and Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler, 1940) steeled a generation against the nightmare of totalitarianism; the way stories such as Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952), To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960), and Roots (Alex Haley, 1976) changed racial attitudes around the world.