The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

by Gottschall, Jonathan

  Psychologists call this “the Lake Woebegone effect”: we think we are above average when it comes to just about any positive quality—even immunity to the Lake Woebegone effect. Most of us think we are clear-eyed in our self-assessments. The Lake Woebegone effect applies to other people, not to us. (Be honest, have you been thinking this yourself?) Even when we are willing to admit our failings, we are also likely to denigrate the category. Clumsy at sports? No matter. Sports aren’t important. So what’s important? The things we are good at. Even though most of us will happily concede that we are not geniuses with movie-star good looks, very few of us will concede that we are actually below average in smarts, social ability, or attractiveness (though half of us are).

  It’s not that we are all-around optimists; we describe ourselves in much more positive terms than other people, even our friends. We are protagonists, and everyone else is a bit player in our personal drama. And as impressive as we were when we were young, we almost all see ourselves improving with age. For these reasons, the psychologist Cordelia Fine calls the idea of self-knowledge a “farce” and an “agreeable fiction.”

  Self-aggrandizement starts early and with a vengeance. Small children have grandiose views of their own stellar qualities. This was brought home to me one summer when my daughter Annabel was three. She was convinced that she was breathtakingly fast. How fast? Faster than her father, and certainly faster than her older sister.

  The three of us frequently raced from the garden at one corner of the backyard to the playhouse at the other. Annabel always came in second, surging past me as I pretended to falter near the finish line. But Abby, six years old and long-legged, never took a dive. Abby always dusted her tiny sister by furlongs. And yet no matter how many defeats Annabel suffered, they never shook her confidence in her own blazing speed.

  After perhaps her tenth loss of the summer, I asked Annabel, “Who’s faster, you or Abby?” Her answer was just as proud and confident as it had been after every other crushing defeat: “I’m faster!” Then I asked, “Annabel, who is faster, you or a cheetah?” Annabel knew from watching Animal Planet that cheetahs are scary fast. But she knew that she was scary fast, too. Her answer was a bit less confident: “Me?”

  It’s different for depressed people. Depressed people have lost their positive illusions; they rate their personal qualities much more plausibly than average. They are able to see, with terrible clarity, that they are not all that special. According to the psychologist Shelley Taylor, a healthy mind tells itself flattering lies. And if it does not lie to itself, it is not healthy. Why? Because, as the philosopher William Hirstein puts it, positive illusions keep us from yielding to despair:

  The truth is depressing. We are going to die, most likely after illness; all our friends will likewise die; we are tiny insignificant dots on a tiny planet. Perhaps with the advent of broad intelligence and foresight comes the need for . . . self-deception to keep depression and its consequent lethargy at bay. There needs to be a basic denial of our finitude and insignificance in the larger scene. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah just to get out of bed in the morning.

  It is interesting to note that even in this age of Prozac and Zoloft, one of the most common ways of dealing with depression is by talking with a psychotherapist. According to the psychologist Michele Crossley, depression frequently stems from an “incoherent story,” an “inadequate narrative account of oneself,” or “a life story gone awry.” 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 American Psychologist, controlled scientific studies show that the talking cure works as well as (and perhaps much better than) newer therapies such as antidepressant drugs or cognitive-behavioral therapy. 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—suffering and flawed protagonists, to be sure, but protagonists who are moving toward the light.

  All of this research shows that we are the great masterworks of our own storytelling minds—figments of our own imaginations. We think of ourselves as very stable and real. But our memories constrain our self-creation less than we think, and they are constantly being distorted by our hopes and dreams. Until the day we die, we are living the story of our lives. And, like a novel in process, our life stories are always changing and evolving, being edited, rewritten, and embellished by an unreliable narrator. We are, in large part, our personal stories. And those stories are more truthy than true.

  9. The Future of Story

  HUMANS ARE CREATURES of Neverland. Neverland is our evolutionary niche, our special habitat. We are attracted to Neverland because, on the whole, it is good for us. It nourishes our imaginations; it reinforces moral behavior; it gives us safe worlds to practice inside. Story is the glue of human social life—defining groups and holding them together. We live in Neverland because we can’t not live in Neverland. Neverland is our nature. We are the storytelling animal.

  People dream and fantasize, our children romp and dramatize, as much as ever. We are hard-wired to do so. And yet many worry that fiction may be losing its central place in our lives, that we, as a culture, might be leaving Neverland behind. The novel is a young genre, but for a century critics have been writing and rewriting its obituary. If technological changes don’t spell its doom, cultural ADHD does. Live theater and poetry are even worse off. Theaters increasingly struggle to make ends meet, and poets trade accusations about who killed poetry. University literature departments are in big trouble, too. English departments have been hemorrhaging majors for decades, and the whole field is in the midst of a great and possibly permanent depression, where two-thirds of Ph.D.’s never find full-time, tenure-track work.

  It’s not just the “higher” fictional forms that people worry about. “Lower” forms are struggling, too. Many lament the way that cheap and seamy “reality” shows are displacing scripted television. Video games—and other digital entertainments—are also on the rise, drawing audiences away from traditional story. The gaming industry is now much bigger than the book industry, bigger even than the film industry. The 2010 release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 made more money ($360 million) in the first twenty-four hours than Avatar did.

  Don’t these trends show that fiction is dying a slow death? David Shields thinks so. In his bracing manifesto Reality Hunger, Shields proclaims that all forms of conventional fiction are used up, punched out, and withering away. Shields, a former novelist, has tired of his former love, and he wants to help speed this process along: “I come to . . . dispraise fiction, which has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.”

  Shields oversells his case. Take the novel. Rumors of its demise are exaggerated to the point of absurdity. For some reason, literary intellectuals love to wallow masochistically in the notion that we are living in the last days of the novel. Yet tens of thousands of new novels are published around the world every year, with the total numbers trending up, not down. In the United States alone, a new novel is published every hour. Some of these novels sell by the ton and extend their cultural reach by being turned into films.

  When have novels ever delighted more juveniles and adults than Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga or J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books (which are twice as long in their entirety as War and Peace)? When was the last time any novels made a bigger cultural splash than the postapocalyptic Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, with 65 million copies sold? When did authors sell more books to a more devoted public than John Grisham, Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, Nora Roberts, Stephen King, or Stieg Larsson? When has a literary genre outstripped the popularity of the romance novel, which does a cool billion dollars in sales per year? When has any novelist been able to brag—as J. K. Rowling can—of having the same sum in her bank account?

  After queuing until midnight, readers swarm through a California bookstore to
snap up copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007).

  Literary novels are having a harder time of it, but when did they not have a harder time? Novelists who target highbrow readers shouldn’t complain when those are the only readers they get. Still, over the past decade, many literary novels have found large readerships, including works such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (which put him on the cover of Time magazine), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—which is, I think, about as good a story as a human being can hope to tell.

  So whenever you hear that the novel is dead, translate as follows: “I don’t like all of those hot-selling novels that are filling up the bestseller lists—so they don’t count.”

  But what if the novel were actually to die or just dwindle into true cultural irrelevance? Would that signal the decline of story? For a bookman like me, the end of the novel would be a very sad thing. But, as David Shields himself stresses, it would not be the end of story. The novel is not an eternal literary form. While the novel has ancient precursors, it rose as a dominating force only in the eighteenth century. We were creatures of story before we had novels, and we will be creatures of story if sawed-off attention spans or technological advances ever render the novel obsolete. Story evolves. Like a biological organism, it continuously adapts itself to the demands of its environment.

  How about poems? I have a friend, Andrew, who is a talented poet. We sometimes meet for beers, and he laments the decline of poetry’s status in the modern world. Poets, he tells me, used to be rock stars. Byron couldn’t turn around—in a bar, in a park, in his own drawing room—without getting a pair of silky knickers pegged at him. But, I remind him, poets are still stars; they still get underwear thrown at them. People still love the small, intense stories poets tell. In fact, they love them more than ever—as long as the little stories are accompanied by melody, musical instruments, and the emotion of a singer’s voice.

  Ours is not the age when poetry died; it is the age when poetry triumphed in the form of song. It is the age of American Idol. It is the age when people carry around ten or twenty thousand of their favorite poems stored on little white rectangles tucked into their hip pockets. It is an age when most of us know hundreds of these poems by heart.

  The 2010 release of The Anthology of Rap, Yale University Press’s nine-hundred-page collection of rap lyrics, shows that scholars are starting to take hip hop seriously as poetic art. In Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, English professor Adam Bradley argues that rap music is the “most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world . . . The best MCs—like Rakim, Jay-Z [pictured here], Tupac, and many others—deserve consideration alongside the giants of American poetry.”

  My daughter Abby is dancing in the living room with a wooden spoon in her hand—tossing her hair, swinging her hips, and singing along with her new Taylor Swift CD. When the song reaches an unfamiliar stretch, Abby goes still. She tilts her ear to the speaker and concentrates on learning the words to a story about a modern Romeo and Juliet. Her little sister is dancing wildly in her princess gown and tiara, moving her lips in front of her own wooden spoon and pretending that she, too, knows the words.

  My girls live in a particular place and in a particular time. But what is happening in my living room is ancient. As long as there are humans, they will delight in the beat, the melody, and the stories of song.

  Along with the fear of things dying, there’s a fear of things rising. Video games are a prime example. But do they represent a movement away from story or just a stage in story’s evolution? Video games have changed massively from the first arcade games I remember playing as a boy: Asteroids, Pac-Man, Space Invaders. Most hit video games are now intensely story-centric. The gamer controls a virtual character—an avatar (or “mini-me”)—who moves through a rich digital Neverland. Pick up a copy of PC Gamer magazine, and you will find that—with the exception of sports simulators—most video games are organized around the familiar grammar of problem structure and poetic justice. Marketed mainly to testosterone-drunk young males, the games are usually narratives of lurid but heroic violence. Such games don’t take their players out of story; they immerse them in a fantasy world where they get to be the rock-jawed hero of an action film.

  The plot of the average video game—like that of the average action film—is usually a thin gruel (a guy, a gun, a girl). But we are on the cusp of something richer. As the novelist and critic Tom Bissell notes in his book Extra Lives, we are living through the birth of a new form of storytelling where the conventions are still being discovered and refined. Ambitious designers are trying to fuse the appeal of gaming with all the power of musical, visual, and narrative art. For example, the writer/director of Sony PlayStation’s Heavy Rain, David Cage, sought to push game design forward in the revolutionary fashion of Citizen Kane (1941). Heavy Rain was conceived not as a video game but as an “interactive film,” where you play the roles of several characters who are trying to save a boy from a serial murderer known as the Origami Killer. Throughout Heavy Rain, the “player” inhabits several different characters (including the Origami Killer) and makes decisions that determine how the story will end.

  TRUE LIES

  The way we experience story on television does seem to be changing, but television is still, in the main, a story-delivery technology. The rise of reality programming, and the displacement of scripted shows, has been greeted as a gruesome sign of the end of fiction, if not of civilization. But tawdry reality shows have risen alongside a true golden age of televised drama (think The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos), and in any case, reality shows are hardly nonfiction. Reality show producers trap clashing strangers in houses or on deserted islands in order to instigate as much dramatic conflict as possible. The “characters” are, to one degree or another, acting. They know that the cameras are on. They know that they are expected to play the part of the hothead drunk or the ingénue or the sexpot, and they know that outrages equal screen time.

  Together with teams of editors, reality show writers (yes, writers) take raw footage and twist it into classic story lines. Extreme Makeover, Queer Eye, The Osbournes, The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Whale Wars, Jon and Kate Plus 8—these and scores of other reality shows have hewn closely to the universal grammar of storytelling.

  For example, on Spike TV’s The Ultimate Fighter, a group of young men move into a big, fancy house, where they are given all the free booze they can drink but are prohibited from watching TV, reading books, using their phones, or seeing their girlfriends or wives. The point is to make the men as tense and quarrelsome as possible. Like Survivor, The Ultimate Fighter is a competition that will leave only one person standing. The original twist of The Ultimate Fighter is that all of the contestants do one thing especially well: enter an octagonal steel cage and beat other young men into submission. On The Ultimate Fighter, you don’t get voted off the island; you get pounded out in the cage.

  In the show’s tenth season, a cage fighter called Meathead defeated a fighter named Scott Junk, seriously injuring Junk’s eye. This enraged Junk’s friend Big Baby, who immediately rushed into the gym to confront Meathead. Big Baby, an enormous ex–NFL lineman, towered over Meathead with his heavy fists quaking at his sides. He barked hoarsely into Meathead’s face, “Swing at me, please! Hit me, bitch! Hit me! Give me a fuckin’ reason and I’ll kill you, motherfucker!” Meathead stared back at Big Baby, and then he took a small step backward, as if he hoped no one would notice.

  On The Ultimate Fighter, Big Baby was mainly presented as a good guy and Meathead as a villain. Despite his intimidating build, Big Baby was soft-spoken and kind, with the good manners of a well-raised southern boy. Meathead was the show’s outcast. The other fighters thought he lied a lot, and they insulted his intelligence and courage. But both characters were—to use E. M. Forster’s term—round, not flat. When Meathead was alone,
talking to the camera, he came off as the most cerebral contestant on the show. He seemed to really get that his job was dangerous and that every time he entered the cage, big and scary men were trying their utmost to beat or choke him unconscious.

  And while Big Baby seemed like a gentle giant out of central casting, his dark side made him interesting. He reeled back and forth between his two basic personality states: cheerful and enraged. His coach, Rampage Jackson, commented that Big Baby was “the nicest guy in the world . . . who will kill you.”

  The Ultimate Fighter is based on footage of real people—not actors—negotiating extreme conflict situations. Maybe the show isn’t quite fiction, but it also isn’t nonfiction. It gives us everything we gravitate toward in stories: extreme and often violent conflict, classic arcs of story and character. But it gives us one thing more: a sense of compelling realism. Most fiction has to strive hard for authenticity. Achieving verisimilitude is a large part of the craft of fiction. Reality programming doesn’t have to strive. Robert De Niro’s portrayal of a half-mad fighter in Raging Bull (1980) is among the greatest performances in cinema history. But it is still a performance—an act of fakery. When De Niro pretends to be crazy with rage, it is not as convincing or terrifying as when Big Baby loses control for real.