Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories (Belknap 2009) is a book that deserves to be read by anyone who marvels at the pervasiveness and power of fiction, and by writers especially. Steeped in the sciences, particularly evolutionary biology, the book is nonetheless eminently readable and lucid. He’s especially tuned in to the concept of attention—that above all, the storyteller’s foremost job is to keep and hold our interest in the midst of the full gamut of competing elements, whether sabre-toothed tiger semblances in the brush or live tweets. His book speaks to what is most ancient in us and to our interfaced, multitask-addled selves. Boyd is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and among his myriad accomplishments has written a two-volume examination of the life and works of Nabokov which Publishers Weekly called “a triumphant and definitive biography.” He was kind enough to answer some of my questions on Nabokov, the relationship between science and literature, and some of the details of his theory.
TH: This is for a journal called “Necessary Fiction.” Is fiction indeed necessary?
Fortunately, yes. We humans can’t not think without rotating the actual within the space of the possible. That sense of fiction—as sheer imagination—is necessary to our being so much freer than any other animals.
But I also think that we learn to think beyond the given through our earliest fictions, our pretend play, our listening to stories. Fictions are necessary to develop imagination fully.
Very young children can’t readily think offline, away from the here and now. They don’t even easily recall their recent past, but they can easily use the present props of toys, a stick or a rag that can be an animal or a baby, or a modern toy, to conjure up scenarios involving agents that hook their attention.
They learn to think in a sustained fashion in ways decoupled from the here and now, first by using physical props as fellow agents, then by using the ready-made stories and characters of their culture. As we move into completely offline fictions, we continue to try out new possibilities and roles, testing social options and social emotions. The compulsiveness of story helps us improve our skills of switching perspectives, of seeing from other points of view, of imagining alternative or counterfactual scenarios.
Fiction builds on our appetite for social information, stretching our imaginations by taking us from the here and now along tracks that we can easily follow for a long time offline precisely because they are the fresh tracks of agents.
TH: Did you have positive experiences with science growing up?
BB: Not really. I was always curious in many directions, but I had a series of poor science teachers, so when at 14 the school structures required me to make a choice between an arts and a science focus, I chose arts.
TH: How did you first make the “evolutionary turn,” as it were, in your literary criticism? Can you identify a key moment of insight or two?
BB: A series of predestined accidents, a trail of small chance seeds that fell on receptive soil. As a PhD student in English at Toronto, I had a carrel that happened to require passing through the art history books. Stumbling upon Ernst Gombrich in the late 1970s, I soon found his friend and frequent inspiration, Karl Popper, and Popper’s evolutionary epistemology. Popper’s idea of an antifoundationalist science that doesn’t know the answers but keeps progressing by asking hard concrete questions that can eliminate wrong answers immunized me from the much less tenable and theatrically apocalyptic antifoundationalism of Derrida about to sweep into Anglophone academe. Popper made me receptive to Stephen Jay Gould and to popular science magazines. In 1992, as I read Spiegelman’s Maus, I realized immediately I wanted to teach a graduate course in Narrative from Homer and Genesis to the present, looking at as many forms as possible (fiction, fact, myth, film, comics, painting, ads, jokes, . . . ). In teaching the course I was struck by the role animals with speaking parts had in story all the way from then to now. That led me to comparative psychology (comparing, that is, human and other animal minds). A philosopher of science friend put me onto Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, which I loved. The title Mindblindness on the library’s new book shelves leaped out at me just by its poetry, but I was soon hooked by the foreword by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and by Simon Baron-Cohen’s discussion of autism as a failure of Theory of Mind. Fired up by them, I discovered Joe Carroll’s Evolution and Literary Theory. As I was teaching Mansfield Park in my narrative course, I wrote an article on evolution and Theory of Mind in that novel, “Jane, Meet Charles: Literature, Evolution, and Human Nature” in 1997. I thought it would be a one-off, since I was starting work on a biography of Popper. But an invitation to speak at a panel on literature and science at the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts in Wellington in 2000, with Pinker also on the panel, prompted me to catch up on evolutionary reading. I woke up one morning with what I thought was a brainwave, an evolutionary explanation for art. I thought I could write a book on evolution and fiction that would be only a six-month diversion from Popper (I have written books much faster), but it took me eight and a half years.
TH: As a reader, are you aware of your mind functioning differently and distinctly when reading all the scientific articles that you are plainly well-versed in versus reading literature? How do you manage to go back and forth?
BB: As with anything, it’s a matter of exposure. Plunging straight into a technical article is no more to be recommended than plunging an untrained literary reader into late Joyce or Ashbery. But if you begin more gently and grasp the ideas and issues—and there are many brilliant scientist-writers, from Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson to Brian Greene—then you can tackle the technical papers. I find what is at stake in the scientific articles often so fascinating, and the honesty of the method so palpable, that I am drawn on. That happens much less often with recent literary criticism.
TH: Since so much of your work involves Nabokov, and Nabokov himself had a scientific background, can you talk a bit about how Nabokov reconciled science and art? Were they distinct spheres for him? Do you foresee writing about Nabokov and evolutionary theory at some point?
BB: Nabokov had been a mathematical prodigy (as well as a natural story-teller) from early childhood, but lost that in a fever at seven and became a passionate lepidopterist instead (a switch that fascinates Oliver Sacks). He felt the craving for discovery even more in chasing butterflies than in composing poems and stories, at least until he shucked off his literary derivativeness in his twenties. In the thirties he was making discovery after discovery in his art, but in his forties, in America, writing in English and wanting to write in the Russian he had made such a supple instrument, his art marked time for a while as he worked as scientist at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Between 1941 and 1948, he quickly became the world authority on American lycaenids, and his findings there have astonished specialists in the area in the generations that have followed. But I think the thrill of discovery in the laboratory made him, when he returned to literature, attempt to incorporate a similar thrill for his readers, nowhere more so than in Pale Fire. I signaled that in the subtitle of my book on Pale Fire, “The Magic of Artistic Discovery,” also an echo of Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery (my Pale Fire book was another unexpected diversion from the Popper biography).
When he was asked if there was any connection between his work as a scientist and a writer, Nabokov answered: “There is in a general way, because I think that in a work of art there is a kind of merging between the two things, between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science.” He asked: “Does there not exist a high ridge where the mountainside of ‘scientific’ knowledge joins the opposite slope of ‘artistic’ imagination?” He declared: “I certainly welcome the free interchange of terminology between any branch of science and any raceme of art. There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts.” He once refers to “a work of fiction or a work of science” and adds in parentheses “(the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed).” He insisted that: “In art as in science there is no delight without the detail,” or again: “Only myopia condones the blurry generalizations of ignorance. In high art and pure science detail is everything.”
I read Nabokov’s scientific papers carefully in the 1980s, when I was working on his biography, and interviewed scientists who knew him. I edited his butterfly writings in the 1990s, and worked and wrote with scientists building on his research, so these efforts certainly fed into my own focus on science. Writing on Nabokov’s complicated attitude to evolution helped steer me toward my own evolutionary turn.
TH: I like how committed you are to underscoring surprises in your book as much as the expected. For instance, Steven Brown’s finding that songbird songs and primate calls seem to be more about social bonds than courtship is something that you call our attention to. What are some other findings you’ve stumbled across that you’ve been surprised by?
BB: Small correction: duetting songbirds and gibbons. Solo birdsong is male: “Come and see my woodcuts, my bachelor territory that allows me to feed so well I have the energy to sing this loud.”
Surprises? The presence of play in so many lineages, even in reptiles, even in the smartest invertebrates, octopi. Very young children’s difficulties with what seem no-brainers to us soon after, like understanding that it is possible for someone (or for me) to have a false belief about something. On the other hand, very young infants’ rich expectations about the physical world, and developmental psychologists’ ability to tease out these expectations. The widespread effects on human thought of even unrecognized reminders of death.
TH: I think Origins is among the most panoramic, fully-realized visions of what a fine-grained, nuanced view of evolutionary literary theory ought to look like. For those not familiar (editor’s note—get the tome, though, the Cliff Notes won’t do it justice), can you give us a highlight-reel rundown of what you see as the necessary biological, behavioral, cognitive, and cultural building blocks toward the cultivation of the art of fiction?
Thanks for the promo!
I stress how much of our capacity to understand the world, and objects, agents and events within it, we share with other animals. But we share with far fewer species a capacity to recall events, and with still fewer even the most meager capacity to communicate events. And no other species has a compulsion to invent events.
We also share with many species an inclination to play. Play has been so well preserved across species, despite its costs in energy and risk, because it allows animals to try out, in secure situations, behaviors like flight and fight that it pays to be expert in the first time they are needed in urgent situations.
For humans it is often our mental rather than our physical advantages that are the most telling. So we have evolved compulsive play not just with movement but also with information, and especially with patterns, since information needs to be detected as patterns if it’s to be processed in real time by creatures that have to act now. I explain art as a kind of high play, cognitive play with pattern, in the information modes that matter most to us: sight (in the visual arts), sound (in music), sociality (in fiction).
Minds can be reshaped through repeated and focused activity. First some new neural connections form, then new connections on top of these, and so on, until dedicated and efficient channels permit new kinds of information flow. Play has evolved to be compulsive, so that animals repeat it again and again and always stay highly focused. That way, they unknowingly reshape their brains. The same applies to art, and especially fiction.
As children we engage in pretend play compulsively, then as we mature we turn to readymade fiction, to sophisticated social simulation machines that allow us, like social flight simulators, to experience, safely, even the most turbulent situations. Just as pilots can learn how to assess and respond faster to extreme conditions through risk-free practice in flight simulators, so we can navigate social space better through repeat exposure to the high intensity and the rapid swoops of fiction. Our minds have been shaped to be reshapable by our compulsive appetite for fiction.
TH: You’re staunchly critical, as are many of the literary Darwinists, of poststructuralist thinkers. But isn’t it confusing the issue to see what Derrida and Nietzsche are doing as equivalent to what you’re doing? Aren’t they hybrids, perched somewhere midway between art itself and criticism? Are there any advantages to dissolving that boundary and conceiving of works of criticism and philosophy to also be not just artfully written, but themselves works of art?
BB: I don’t find much art in Foucault or Derrida, although a lot of display. I have nothing against hybrid forms that combine reflection and explanation with artistry, but I find that not in poststructuralism but in science writing, by people like Richard Dawkins and Oliver Sacks, and very occasionally in modern philosophy, as in the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah. I prefer plain explanation, like Karl Popper’s, to work more determined to showcase the would-be impressive than to seek after truth.
TH: Your book is of obvious value to literary theorists, many of whom are also fiction writers/poets. But does it have any value for writers who are purely novelists, short story writers, poets, playwrights, etc.? Have you tried writing fiction, even if only as another way to understand it?
BB: I think David Bordwell one of the best theorists in any literary or paraliterary form. The director James Mangold supplied a blurb for Bordwell’s recent Poetics of Cinema: “Film Theory, rightly or wrongly, makes most film makers cringe. We rarely see our processes, collaborations, technologies, obsessions, or underlying motivations thoughtfully examined in such writings. David Bordwell’s work is radically different. Whether examining Hollywood cinema, Hong Kong, Independent, New Wave, silent or sound, high grossing or unknown, he addresses film with a clear mission — to understand how a film works, how it’s made and why — and to discuss his findings in a direct style that embraces intellectuals and non-academic readers too.”
I couldn’t imagine more valuable acclaim. I would be more than happy if writers see their preoccupations and practices reflected in what I write—something that I suspect happens rarely when writers read recent academic criticism. I would hope that creative writers would find recognizable my stress on earning attention, and on the different costs and benefits of earning it in tried or untried ways, and on the chain of problems and solutions authors encounter as they balance the benefits and costs for themselves in composing and for readers in comprehending. If storytellers felt they actually learned from my work something they could apply to theirs, I would be very pleasantly surprised. You’re one, you tell me.
No, I haven’t tried writing fiction. I’m too interested in the very top performers, Shakespeare, Austen, Tolstoy, Joyce, Nabokov, to consider venturing into the arena they dominate. I have worked with non-fiction narrative, as a biographer, and that offers me practitioner’s insights in a smaller stadium I’m not too daunted to enter.
TH: Why did you choose The Odyssey and Dr. Seuss as the playing fields upon which to scrum with your theories?
BB: I love them. I think The Odyssey the greatest display of narrative art before Shakespeare. It does not quite match The Iliad in poetic majesty and emotional depth, but as a triumph of storytelling it has no rivals in early narrative. The Epic of Gilgamesh of course is much earlier, but frustratingly fragmentary and in any case much more primitive. I wanted to work with a masterpiece near the recorded start of story.
And I also wanted to work with a masterpiece near the recorded start of children’s encounter with story. Dr Seuss seems to me pure genius, and able to inject his genius into telling stories to the very young, even to holding their attention before they can cope with stories, in something like Fox in Socks. I entirely agree with Bennett Cerf’s judgment that—although he published Faulkner and O’Neill—the only genius he published was Dr Seuss.
TH: You’ve gotten caught up in some debates about Theory of Mind, our ability to attribute intentions, and motivations to others and to infer these on the basis of behavior and appearances. It seems one place where evolutionists and cognitive psychologists can gather round. And its easy to understand why literary theorists might get on board, too, as it yields a new but intuitively satisfying way of thinking about the relationship between the reader and the characters, all while highlighting the notion of empathy, a starting point for finding a moral function for literature. We empathize with the other, thus we circumvent otherness, overcome solipsism, confer dignity, etc. How important is Theory of Mind in your view, and has it been oversold?
BB: Yes, Theory of Mind seems the obvious first patch of common ground for evolutionary, cognitive and other literary critics. Understanding other minds—characters, authors, and the others in the audiences we belong to—lies at the core of literature. Theory of Mind has evolved in such sophisticated forms in humans that it seems effortless and obvious, as if there’s nothing to explain, just as we can think vision no more than looking out and seeing what’s there. Only when we consider other animals, young children, or computers that cannot process social information as we do, can we realize the complex inferences we make, often quite automatically, in understanding the intentions, actions, and reactions of others. Theory of Mind hasn’t been oversold, but sometimes it has been, in another way, undersold: introduced into literary criticism in too narrow a fashion, by critics who have ransacked only one cupboard, and not the most recently stocked, in the whole storehouse of Theory of Mind.
TH: Are you able to read for pleasure? If so, what’s been on your nightstand of late?
BB: I almost always read for pleasure, although it’s also usually for work, and it’s less often fiction than it used to be. In fiction, I have recently enjoyed Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins, which won the 2009 Believer Book Award. Wonderful gifts of observation in both local detail and widespread quirks of thought, speech, behavior, daily routine and life stages. I’m proud to have such a talented colleague. Orhan Pamuk and Colm Toibín. In poetry, Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain, and Carol Ann Duffy. Any comic by Art Spiegelman.
TH: What’s next on your theoretical itinerary?
BB: I have just written a book on lyric verse, focusing on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I have always worked more with narrative than verse, and I was conscious that evocritics in general had done too little with poetry.
Fiction, I argued in On the Origin of Stories, is an adaptation: it became fixed as a human impulse because of the biological advantages it offers us, especially in improving our skills in social and event cognition. Verse, I argue in this new book (due out from Harvard in spring 2012), which I’d like to call On the Absence of Stories, is not an adaptation, but a cultural invention attuned to a universal of human cognition.
Verse also appeals to our craving for pattern, which is adaptive, and this helps explain why common elements of verse, like rhythm and rhyme, recur so prominently in song lyrics and rap. Yet many find literary verse aversive. I try to explain both the appeal of elements of verse taken separately and the high comprehension cost of much literary verse, where the elements combine in such rich ways that the cost can be too much for many readers to want to pay.
I argue that Shakespeare, having proved himself in drama, in tragedy, comedy and history, and in comic and tragic narrative verse, turned in the sonnets to show what he could do in verse without story. In narrative, all kinds of patterns tend to converge on the story. Without narrative, Shakespeare could proliferate patterns in other ways, not necessarily convergent, and in a kind of hide-and-seek fashion that invites endless return. Even his Sonnets, centuries before Mallarmé or Ashbery, place high demands on readers, so while they are the most successful collection of Western secular verse, few readers read them end to end. I try to account for their success and appeal and their enigmatic and forbidding aspects.
But you asked “What next?” My next project is resuming a biography of philosopher of science Karl Popper. In one sense it’s a return to the sort of work I undertook in my Nabokov biography. In another sense it continues the evolutionary line: I have felt the power of Popper’s evolutionary epistemology since the 1970s. In another sense, it’s scary new territory: philosophy, physics, and much more.
TH: What is science?
BB: The best way for evolved creatures to understand the world.
Evolution could never evolve an organ of truth, it simply makes organisms good at surviving and reproducing. For that, knowing enough to cope with your immediate surroundings suffices.
Sharing the information challenge with others of your kind, pooling crucial knowledge like the presence of predators or prey, offers such benefits that many species have become social. Probably because protohumans evolved to be more and more social, we eventually developed an understanding of false belief, a recognition that we might misconstrue things if we lack access to information that others might have. That ramped up the curiosity already strongly developed among great apes.
Specialization in settled communities lets ants seek out information within a large radius from their colonies. In the same way, once agriculture—through a proto-scientific understanding of the relation between seeds and growth—created surpluses that allowed humans to become settled, we could specialize so that some could become knowledge experts. But we don’t like doubt, and we overattribute agency, so rather than accept that we don’t know, we have plugged our ignorance with explanations involving gods and spirits. We also welcome apparent confirmation, so our early sages tended to pass on an accumulation of error as well as of insight.
Systematically challenging what we think we know and racking our brains to attempt new explanations that, instead of trying to confirm, we then subject to hard tests flies in the face of many evolved dispositions. No wonder it took millennia more for science at last to establish itself. It still offers no guarantees of truth, but its complex interplay of cooperation and competition in the quest for knowledge offers limited minds the best way of discovering ideas that have a chance of truth. We test and discard both old and new ideas to the point where the best ideas left withstand any tests we can yet devise and outperform any others we have so far proposed. Not perfect, but perhaps the best platform for discovery imperfect creatures can ever construct.