Story and Something More

20 Apr, 2025

I’m going to do my best here to be fair to Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, which I read this week. What I’m interested in, though, is less a review of the entire book, and more an attempt to get at the general impression I was left with during and after reading it.

It was that feeling I get whenever confronted with most writing based even generally in evolutionary psychology: the sense of being dropped into a particularly American need to see and celebrate the transactional utility in objects, phenomena, tendencies, and tasks. In asking why anything occurs, this perspective always seems to be in search of the barest-bones tool-nature of that thing or occurrence, i.e., how it helps me as an individual (or sometimes a particular group) achieve a given form of “success.” And that’s not necessarily a criticism; when we ask why something exists or happens, we probably do want to get as close to a bedrock explanation as possible.

But we’re undoubtedly all familiar by now with the assertion that “science” can give you the facts—though when it comes to the meaning (not the explanation of physical or biological causes) behind behaviors or aspirations or events, science very responsibly says this is not its concern. There are a number of detailed scientific criticisms of evolutionary psychology, but I think what puzzles, even frustrates, me about the field in general is its apparent belief that it’s bridging the chasm that lies between explanation and meaning, and in doing so, asserting that any questions we have, of whatever type, can be answered definitively and hence satisfactorily.¹

That’s too broad a generalization, I know—but it doesn’t seem out of place in an attempt to discover or report on, as Gottschall does, why humans developed the ability to tell stories, and how that ability has helped us survive and thrive. The author acknowledges that some readers will probably get up in arms about his use of “insights from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to try and understand” why we’re gripped by and feel the need to tell our own tales. Even while admitting that “[n]o science can answer these questions”—in this case, questions about what Cormac McCarthy meant by ending The Road with a reflection on how trout used to swim in mountain streams—Gottschall still maintains faith in science’s ability to “help us explain why stories like The Road have such power over us.”²

Fine; there’s not necessarily any harm in that, even though you really don’t need to send anyone through an fMRI or conduct focus groups to know that religions, governments everywhere along the spectrum from democratic to totalitarian, and even parents trying to prevent their kids from wandering into a bog have been keeping people in line pretty much forever via even the crappiest yarns. The book takes us through thoughts on why we dream (and how dreams have narrative structures), how stories attempt to inculcate certain morals and encourage certain behaviors, how we get through our everyday existence by embellishing on mundanities and making ourselves look a little better than we really are. Gottschall admits that just because it’s a story doesn’t make it good—“it could be that an intense greed for story was healthy for our ancestors but has some harmful consequences in a world where… [multiple forms of media] make story omnipresent—and where we have… something like the story equivalent of deep-fried Twinkies.” And he also recognizes the danger of getting lost in unreality; the risk, he says, “isn’t that the story will fade out of human life in the future; it’s that story will take it over completely.”³

It’s here that I’m trying to find what’s bothering me: between what he sees as the story fading out and the story taking over—maybe in a not-great-enough differentiation between the types of story we tell or consume, and how far you want to stretch categories. It’s not that the author and I just have a disagreement about taste, about something other than neatly wrapped up or unhappy endings being dissatisfying, about what constitutes “literary” or “difficult” novels, or about whether the success of the Left Behind series is a super indication that fiction’s not dead.⁴ I think, rather, it’s what feels to me like a too-easy lumping of novel, TV series, film, song, video game, advertising, role playing, and more into the capacious category of story purveyor, and seeming to assert that as long as we’ve got a way, whatever it is, to tell stories, we’ll be fine. As Gottschall says, and it’s not unreasonable as a statement on its own, “the end of the novel would be a very sad thing. But… it would not be the end of story.”⁵

It could be I want to separate storytelling and narration, as Byung-Chul Han does. Han both identifies the former as what happens when “capitalism appropriates the narrative and submits it to consumption” (think advertising and fundraising and getting your employees [nay, your “team”!] excited about towing the company line) and the latter as requiring and encouraging “listening intensely.”⁶ Some of Gottschall’s and Han’s assertions about the role of story/narrative in community formation, for example, probably fit together more than either of them might like to admit, and the live-action role playing Gottschall talks about does involve some sort of necessary, even if not deep, attention to the people you’re playing with, if only to be able to keep up with the swift action. But it’s that Hanian sensibility to the difference (good) narrative makes that’s pulling me away from Gottschall’s willingness to celebrate World of Warcraft as exemplifying where story is going: an ever-developing world—as opposed to the closed nature of narrative for Han—in which “you become a character in an evolving epic.”⁷

I’m sure friendships are formed in gaming communities, and that’s good; and it’s not a bad thing in itself to help craft what seems more like continuing improv or an unscripted drama than a planned, finished narrative. But in this apparently great ability to enter into and participate in the story—making it your own in a way entirely different than is possible with a self-contained book—all I keep coming back to is the absolutely hilarious-sad-brilliant disaster of Woody Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode.”⁸ When the professor gets to jump into Madame Bovary—physically entering and becoming part of the story—not only do the tale and characters lose what made them great; it all just turns into one more headache for the hapless Kugelmass, who of course doesn’t learn his lesson. A novel—and a narrative in Han’s sense—is an entirely different thing from immersive story-play because it “demands distance,” demands the recognition that this situation between characters doesn’t immediately have anything to do with us; before we can reflect on what’s going on, we have to take ourselves and what we want or expect or think we need out of the picture.⁹

Does any of this matter, though, beyond my preference for a story in the long, heavy-attention-demanding form of something like Ducks, Newburyport over The Wire or a romance novel, not to mention creepy pasta or whatever tale you think you can cram into a TikTok video? I’ll say it does, and in a way that tends to agree with much of Han’s declaiming about the selfish and dangerous dumbasses our socially mediated worlds are turning us into. It’s a way of trying to understand, as a rearrangement of Gottschall’s subtitle has it, how (certain types of) stories do or don’t make us human, or better humans, or help us figure out what “human” even means. One of the great things, though, and here Gottschall and I may be able to come to some level of agreement, is that we’ll likely never, nor maybe should we, achieve a definitive answer about any of it—but in continuing to ask questions, share our theories, and really listen to what’s going on, getting through our strange existence might be if not less puzzling, at least more interesting.

Subscribe to Off-Modern Onions!