BOOK REVIEW
The Play’s the Thing
Michael Bérubé
ON THE ORIGIN OF STORIES: Evolution, Cognition, and
Fiction. Brian Boyd. xiv + 540 pp. The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2009. $35.
Let me explain a thing or two about humanists like me. There
are legions of us who reach for our guns when we hear the word
genome. That’s because we’re all too familiar with the
history of eugenics, and we flinch whenever someone attempts an
“evolutionary” explanation of Why Society Is the Way It Is; we
suspect them, with good reason, of trying to justify some
outrageous social injustice on the grounds that it’s only
natural. Likewise, there are legions of us who clap our hands
over our ears when we hear the term evolutionary psychology.
That’s because we’re all too familiar with the follies of
sociobiology, and we’ve suffered through lectures claiming that
our species is hardwired for middle-aged guys dumping their
wives for young secretaries and students (I sat through that
lecture myself) or that men run the world because women have
wide hips for childbearing, whereas men can rotate
three-dimensional shapes in their heads (okay, that one is a
mash-up of two different lectures).
Brian Boyd is here to change all that. On the Origin of
Stories attempts an evolutionary explanation of the
appearance of art—and, more specifically, of the utility of
fiction. From its title (with its obvious echo of Darwin) to its
readings of The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who!,
Boyd’s book argues that the evolution of the brain (itself a
development of some significance to the world) has slowly and
fitfully managed to produce a species of primate whose members
habitually try to entertain and edify one another by making
stuff up.
If this sounds reductive, don’t worry: Boyd patiently
explains that this isn’t your father’s sociobiology or your
great-grandfather’s eugenics. To say that something is
genetic is not, despite decades of bad science followed by
decades of bad popularizations of bad science, to say that it is
genetically determined, if “determined” means (as it
usually does) “inevitably fated.” Boyd expresses some
exasperation at the idea of genetic determinism, arguing that
the notion that genes shape us is less
deterministic than the notion that we are the product of our
environment, since the complexity and randomness of genetic
recombination in sexual reproduction means that we are each
the result of an unpredictably generated variation unique to
each of us rather than of anything imposed from without.
Thus, writes Boyd, “we should see genes less as constraints
than as enablers,” just as “we should see genes not as deniers
of the role of the environment but as devices for extracting
information from the environment.” Boyd acknowledges
that “those uneasy about applying evolution to human behavior
often assume that doing so must require stressing selfishness
and competition at the expense of altruism and cooperation,” but
notes that it ain’t necessarily so: “[Richard] Dawkins points
out that he could with equal validity, though with less impact,
have called his famous first book not The Selfish Gene
but The Cooperative Gene.” Well, that’s nice to know
after all these years, now that three decades of popular-science
enthusiasts have convinced themselves that Nature herself speaks
in the language of Ayn Rand. One hopes the word will get around.
Indeed, one of the virtues of On the Origin of Stories
is that its author is up to speed on recent work in neurology,
genetics and evolutionary theory. He is therefore ideally
positioned to persuade his fellow humanists that a “biocultural”
approach to art and literature doesn’t entail any Just So
stories about how humans came to love Just So stories, or any
triumphant tales of how self-replicating molecules persevered
over a few billion years until they reached the telos of
existence, at which point they were capable of producing
Everybody Loves Raymond. For as Darwin insisted, evolution
doesn’t have a telos. It consists of a series of
open-ended experiments with no final end in sight: “A Darwinian
system . . . remains open, unpredictable, and free. It cannot
presuppose a best option, an ideal fit, a goal that can be
precisely determined beforehand.”
Regrettably, Boyd stumbles out of the gate, working himself
into a nasty and unnecessary self-contradiction in the first
chapter, where he argues that “the cultural constructionist’s
view of the mind as a blank slate is ‘a dictator’s dream,’
[quoting Steven Pinker],” for “if we were entirely socially
constructed, our ‘society’ could mold us into slaves and
masters, and there would be no reason to object.” This is a
shallow conception of social constructionism (admittedly, a
conception often promulgated by social constructionists), in
which saying that “X is socially constructed” is
tantamount to saying “X can be changed at will.” But
what makes Boyd’s critique so unfortunate (and
self-contradictory) is that he immediately proceeds to insist
that, unlike social constructionism, “an evolutionary view
allows for informed social change.” He goes on to note
that “Owen Jones compares the law to a lever to change human
behavior, and an informed knowledge of human nature to the
fulcrum the lever needs to exert its force.” I’m sorry, but I
think I might have missed something here. How is this
evolutionary view of how to change human behavior not a
dictator’s dream?
Once we get past that little tangle, however, the first half
of On the Origin of Stories is exhilarating. Boyd
rehearses the history of the rapid growth in hominin brain size
over the past couple of million years, showing that with the
development of the neocortex we’ve been endowed with all kinds
of cleverness to compensate for the fact that we’re slow, weak,
flat-toothed and clawless. We are thoroughly social creatures,
and when we work together we can be formidable predators;
accordingly, we’ve evolved various attributes that enable
mutualism, such as shared attention, mirror neurons and theory
of mind. The latter allows us access to something no other
animal seems aware of, namely, the notion that other members of
our species might have false beliefs. The survival value of art,
then, is that it hones and enhances those functions of mind that
in turn enhance our capacity for social interaction and
exploration: “Art develops in us habits of imaginative
exploration, so that we take the world as not closed and given,
but open and to be shaped on our own terms.”
By refining and strengthening our sociality, by making us
readier to use the resources of the imagination, and by
raising our confidence in shaping life on our own terms, art
fundamentally alters our relation to the world. The survival
consequences may be difficult to tabulate, but they are
profound. We have long felt that art matters to us. It does,
objectively as well as subjectively. By focusing our
attention away from the given to a world of shared, humanly
created possibility, art makes all the difference.
This is rousing stuff. Not only does it reassure us that all
our museum-brochure rhetoric is telling the truth, it also
confirms that Friedrich Schiller was right to propose, in On
the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), that humans possess
a “play-drive” that leads us to create and be amazed by art:
For, to declare it once and for all, Man plays only when he
is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only
wholly Man when he is playing. This proposition . . .
will, I promise you, support the whole fabric of aesthetic
art, and the still more difficult art of living.
It is no slight to Boyd, surely, to say that On the
Origin of Stories sometimes reads like Schiller combined
with a few graduate courses in neuroscience. Whether one prefers
to say, with Emily Dickinson, “If I feel physically as if the
top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” or, with
Boyd, “Neurons in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental
areas of the brain secrete dopamine in reaction to the
surprising but not to the expected,” is surely a matter of
taste.
The second half of the book, however, probably won’t go over
as well with the humanists Boyd is trying to reach. He opens
that half by assuring us that “a biocultural approach to
literature simply requires that we take seriously that evolution
has powerfully shaped not just our bodies but also our minds and
behavior.” This much is incontrovertible, and I share Boyd’s
hope that someday our fellow humanists will be less averse to
thinking in terms of the species-wide universals we’ve inherited
as part of the legacy of life on Earth. But Boyd’s application
of the principle seems to me to have two weaknesses.
The
first, upon which some reviewers have already remarked, is that
the resulting readings of The Odyssey and Horton
Hears a Who! don’t appear to be entirely worth the journey.
Much of Boyd’s approach consists of explaining how Homer and Dr.
Seuss manage to win and keep our attention, and Boyd castigates
contemporary literary criticism for failing to attend to this
important matter. But might it not be that “Homer organized the
poem in this way so as to win and keep your attention” is the
kind of thing that, in literary criticism, literally goes
without saying? Similarly, readers for almost three millennia
have recognized that Odysseus is one crafty fellow, and that one
indication of his craftiness is that he does not act on impulse;
even when he’s trapped in a cave with a one-eyed giant eating
his men, he takes a deep breath and comes up with a
well-considered plan. Boyd explains precisely what this means in
neurological terms: “Rapid-fire reactions have to be inhibited
(in the orbitofrontal cortex) so that there is time to formulate
and assess new options (in the dorsolateral cortex) before
acting on them.” Personally, I am tremendously pleased that my
species has gotten to the point at which it understands things
like this. But how much is added to the history of criticism,
finally, by the realization that Odysseus was doing his crafty
plotting in his dorsolateral cortex?
I mean this as a real and not a rhetorical question. Boyd
closes On the Origin of Stories by remarking that “evocriticism”
will have to make its way by devising compelling and convincing
readings of works of literature, attending not only to the
universal features of human minds but also to the cultural and
historical particularities of time and place. On one hand, this
school of criticism will provide a desperately needed
justification for literary study: “If storytelling sharpens our
social cognition, prompts us to reconsider human experience, and
spurs our creativity in the way that comes most naturally to
us”—as it surely does—“then literary studies need not
apologize.” On the other hand, evocriticism comes bearing not
only a rationale but also a sword: As Boyd remarks time and
again, the enemy to be vanquished is Theory,
which cuts literature off from life by emphasizing human
thought and ideas as the product of only language,
convention, and ideology—although Theory then tries to
compensate for severing literature from three-dimensional
life by insisting that it is always political or
ideological.
Well, Theory-bashing can be good fun, I suppose, and some
forms of theory deserve it. But it is odd to suggest that
stressing “language, convention, and ideology” somehow cuts one
off from “life.” And it’s even odder to note that “a fine work
of art not only expresses creativity but also inspires it in
those who enjoy it” but fail to consider that “theoretical”
readings of language and literature caught on in the 1970s and
1980s because they were, back in the day, compelling and
creative. Everyone who, like Boyd, believes that Alan Sokal
killed theory dead really should go back and read Barbara
Johnson on Melville’s “Billy Budd” or Paul de Man on the famous
rhetorical (or is it real?) question that closes Yeats’s “Among
School Children.” Even though I’ve never been a card-carrying
deconstructionist myself, I was fascinated by those readings
because they taught me that Melville’s novella was even more
extraordinary than I’d thought, and that when you’re trying to
determine whether a question is real or rhetorical, even an
utterance like “Eh, what’s the difference?” can open onto a hall
of mirrors. Boyd never stops to consider that maybe, just maybe,
the clever human minds responsible for literature are the same
clever human minds responsible for literary theory; if he had,
he might have been able to say, more plausibly, that theory
started (as do all our endeavors) in the impulse to play and
create, and only became routine and stultifying after many weary
iterations. At which point, after the 350th New Historicist
reading of The Tempest, neurons in the substantia nigra
and ventral tegmental areas of the brain stopped secreting
dopamine.
More important, Boyd is sometimes reluctant to give culture
and history their due. He scoffs, for example, at the idea that
romantic love was invented at some point in the 12th century,
because “cross-cultural, neurological, and cross-species studies
have demonstrated the workings of romantic love across societies
and even species.” This just won’t wash. Other species might
court and mate for life, but they do not engage in romantic love
in the sense that humanists employ the term, save perhaps for
the cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew. “Romantic love” does not mean
“mammals doing it like mammals”; it refers to the conventions of
courtly love, which were indeed invented in the European middle
ages and cannot be found in ancient literatures or cultures.
Those conventions are culturally and historically specific
variations on our underlying (and polymorphous) biological
imperatives, just as the institution of the Bridezilla and the
$25,000 wedding is specific to our own addled time and place.
Nothing about the evolutionary record, from amoebas to Homo
sapiens sapiens, is denied or contravened in acknowledging
this.
On the Origin of Stories is a fascinating book, even
a necessary book. At its best, evocriticism can help to reorient
the arts and humanities, renewing (or, in some benighted
quarters, sparking) our appreciation for the creative works of
human minds and hands, and leading humanists to take a fresh
look at the rich evolutionary record. But it will accomplish
this, I suspect, only if it is complementary to, and not
sweepingly dismissive of, the intellectual traditions humans
have devised for the study of human cultures.
Michael Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in English
Literature and Science, Technology, and Society at Penn State
University. He is the author of, among other books,
Rhetorical Occasions: Humans and the Humanities (University
of North Carolina Press, 2006) and The Left at War (New
York University Press, 2009).