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A review by snukes
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall
4.0
Let me tell you a story.
I spent a decade of my life in the fundamental depths of Christianity, where the promise of an afterlife was the promise of living forever in perfection - no sickness, no death, no being double-crossed by your cheating former best friend right at the crucial moment in your new romantic relationship. Some of my non-religious friends suggested that such an afterlife would be boring - where's the intrigue? Where are the shades of gray? But I was never troubled. It's a matter of scale, I reasoned. Just because you take away some of the extreme aspects of badness doesn't mean the remaining experience within the scale of neutral to mind-blowingly-good wouldn't be amazing.
(Incidentally, I still believe that and occasionally spend a little time mourning for my lost afterlife.)
But one thing always concerned me. Would the abolition of pain and suffering necessarily include the abolition of conflict? What would life be like without conflict? Sure, some aspects of the answer to that question sound nice - see above note on cheating former best friends - but isn't conflict and its resolution what makes a story so interesting? What would become of story in this paradise world? I felt like I could live happily enough without conflict, but an eternity of reading stories that go "she was beautiful and healthy and fell in love with a man who loved her back and they lived happily ever after" sounded... well, awful.
While yearning for eternity and perfection, I was also dreading what eternity and perfection would do to my beloved art of storytelling.
Later, my religion and I had a falling out. I looked at my expectation for an eternity of perfection, and could no longer make the belief hold water. I went into mourning. I WANT eternity. I want to try everything and do everything and see everything and maybe invent some new things.
And I want to know how the stories end.
Is America ever going to recover from the political nightmare it's currently in, or will it go down in flames and pave the way for the next, new civilization? What will become of my nephews, of any children I might have, and their children? Will my lineage fizzle or evolve to become monarchs of that next world power? WILL SOMEONE FINALLY PLEASE INVENT TIME TRAVEL?
And thus (she finally rambles on to the point) was my obsession with story revealed.
I actually found this book while doing research into this small spark of an idea that I'd had, that story equals humanity, that without story we are nothing more than animals or robots. I thought it was a new, shiny idea, but this book is pretty much exactly the book I would have written if I'd beaten Gottschall to the punch and actually done something with my idea.
I highlighted about half the sentences in the book, so I'll spare you all my notes and individual thoughts, but here are a few of my favorites:
I was fascinated by the scientific concept of "mirroring" that Gottschall discusses, where a brain's reaction to experiencing something directly (by doing it) or vicariously (by watching or reading about it) is identical. I've been thinking about that nonstop, particularly as I've been consuming some first-rate video media lately (Bladerunner: 2049 just about ruined me last week). I also loved his exploration of the fantasy that is memory, and how as humans we are not a compilation of facts, but rather the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves. The rest of the book was also interesting but not surprising to me, since apparently Gottscall has just been living in my brain for the past five years.
Gottschall's narrative style occasionally struck me as strange (maybe because the ideas felt so much like mine, but the writing style wasn't?), but I think this would be an interesting read for anyone intrigued by the role story plays in our lives, the future of fiction, and human psychology in general.
I spent a decade of my life in the fundamental depths of Christianity, where the promise of an afterlife was the promise of living forever in perfection - no sickness, no death, no being double-crossed by your cheating former best friend right at the crucial moment in your new romantic relationship. Some of my non-religious friends suggested that such an afterlife would be boring - where's the intrigue? Where are the shades of gray? But I was never troubled. It's a matter of scale, I reasoned. Just because you take away some of the extreme aspects of badness doesn't mean the remaining experience within the scale of neutral to mind-blowingly-good wouldn't be amazing.
(Incidentally, I still believe that and occasionally spend a little time mourning for my lost afterlife.)
But one thing always concerned me. Would the abolition of pain and suffering necessarily include the abolition of conflict? What would life be like without conflict? Sure, some aspects of the answer to that question sound nice - see above note on cheating former best friends - but isn't conflict and its resolution what makes a story so interesting? What would become of story in this paradise world? I felt like I could live happily enough without conflict, but an eternity of reading stories that go "she was beautiful and healthy and fell in love with a man who loved her back and they lived happily ever after" sounded... well, awful.
While yearning for eternity and perfection, I was also dreading what eternity and perfection would do to my beloved art of storytelling.
Later, my religion and I had a falling out. I looked at my expectation for an eternity of perfection, and could no longer make the belief hold water. I went into mourning. I WANT eternity. I want to try everything and do everything and see everything and maybe invent some new things.
And I want to know how the stories end.
Is America ever going to recover from the political nightmare it's currently in, or will it go down in flames and pave the way for the next, new civilization? What will become of my nephews, of any children I might have, and their children? Will my lineage fizzle or evolve to become monarchs of that next world power? WILL SOMEONE FINALLY PLEASE INVENT TIME TRAVEL?
And thus (she finally rambles on to the point) was my obsession with story revealed.
I actually found this book while doing research into this small spark of an idea that I'd had, that story equals humanity, that without story we are nothing more than animals or robots. I thought it was a new, shiny idea, but this book is pretty much exactly the book I would have written if I'd beaten Gottschall to the punch and actually done something with my idea.
I highlighted about half the sentences in the book, so I'll spare you all my notes and individual thoughts, but here are a few of my favorites:
I was fascinated by the scientific concept of "mirroring" that Gottschall discusses, where a brain's reaction to experiencing something directly (by doing it) or vicariously (by watching or reading about it) is identical. I've been thinking about that nonstop, particularly as I've been consuming some first-rate video media lately (Bladerunner: 2049 just about ruined me last week). I also loved his exploration of the fantasy that is memory, and how as humans we are not a compilation of facts, but rather the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves. The rest of the book was also interesting but not surprising to me, since apparently Gottscall has just been living in my brain for the past five years.
Gottschall's narrative style occasionally struck me as strange (maybe because the ideas felt so much like mine, but the writing style wasn't?), but I think this would be an interesting read for anyone intrigued by the role story plays in our lives, the future of fiction, and human psychology in general.