On the Origin of Stories
January 5, 2010 by Christine Boyko-Head
Filed under Arts & Culture
“Evolution may help explain copulation and even cooperation, but can it account for the creative side of human life? Can it explain art?” (69). This is the main issue concerning Brian Boyd’s mammoth book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (2009). For those of us concerned with art and the creative process we have, as well, struggled with this issue. Undoubtedly, we have challenged our students and colleagues with circuitous discussions over the “what” of art. Boyd’s work, however, throws us a lifeline pulling us from the mire of unsolvable debate and repetitious frustration by shifting the essential question from “what” to “why”. This simple cognitive maneuver is, in my opinion, as significant to art theory and criticism as the first spark that brought fire to human kind.
As Boyd writes in the chapter entitled Art as Adaptation, “An evolutionary account of art can clarify why the history of art runs so deep that it has been ingrained in the psyche of the species and the individual” (73). What this means is that concepts such as cooperation, competition, attention, play, status and sociality take on an evolutionary turn by making all artistic manifestations – even the most useless, and tasteless – a “crucial factor in human evolution” (110). But, before going further, let me take you back to the origin of the text which really began in the mid 19th Century.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published his seminal work, On the Origin of Species. This revolutionary work changed Darwin’s life because of the enormous impact it had on society. 150 years later, that impact is still evident. While I do not want to recap a theory that is well known, I want to focus on an easily overlooked aspect of the original text: namely its creative style. It is widely known that evolutionary concepts were circulating within the scientific community before Darwin published his book, yet it is his name that is intertwined with the theory of evolution. Could one of the reason’s for this lie within Darwin’s creative choice to write for the layperson, the ordinary reader, the dabbler in things scientific, in things of nature, rather than the scientific specialist? Could Darwin’s narrative ability, his skill in shaping complex, scientific concepts into an engaging story have made all the difference in its popularity and its “survival” from then to now?
In sexual selection female attention to the male results in survival. Boyd points out “If a work of art fails to earn attention, it dies” (121). So, if the evolutionary significance of attention can also be applied to art, the answer to my question regarding Darwin’s text would be an emphatic yes: his engaging writing style played a role in the book’s popularity. Thus, I will make the prophetic statement that Boyd’s book will likewise engage and excite readers for decades to come.
I make this bold proclamation because upon reading On the Origins of Stories, I was struck with the same excitement and enthusiasm I can only imagine the readers’ of Darwin’s text felt in 1859. Boyd’s text is itself a seminal work synthesizing various literary theories upon an evolutionary framework strong enough to hold whatever stance from which the reader comes. Boyd illustrates this by applying evolutionary thinking to the works of Homer and Dr. Seuss alike.
Boyd divides his text into two books with the first providing the theoretical frame upon which he rests the second. In Book One, Boyd introduces evolution and human nature then proceeds to explain art in general and fiction in particular “as biological adaptations” (11). The second book applies these concepts and arguments to the ancient story of The Odyssey and then to the 20th Century story Horton Hears a Who! By selecting works at both ends of the literary spectrum, Boyd illustrates the flexibility, adaptability and reliability of evolutionary theory to literature and how it cooperates rather than competes with other literary theories in order to enhance our understanding of art and why we need it in our lives. The Conclusion and Afterword suggests that a biocultural perspective can enrich our understanding of ourselves and our need to create and engage in art: “We do not know a purpose guaranteed from outside life, be we can add enormously to the creativity of life. We do not know what other purposes life may eventually generate, but creativity offers us our best chance of reaching them” (414). With these closing words, Boyd suggests that art and creativity is a human mutation necessary for our survival. It “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 terms…it allows us to see the actual world from new vantage points” (124). This amazing text allows us to see art from new vantage points that may, in fact, ensure its survival within our global culture.
As mentioned earlier, of specific value is the fact that Boyd does not tell us what art is. Instead, he explains why we create art, how our minds understand works of art, and how art-making is another sign of our adaptation to survive as humans. All of this, he says, stems from our biological need to play. He states, “animals love to play…Only we immerse ourselves as children in pretend play and emerge through and beyond childhood into a world surrounded by fiction, a world of actuality surrounded by possibility” (177). Statements such as these illustrate the value of evolutionary criticism as a framework for “unconnected minitheories or empirical findings” (41). As I read this book I was able to pull together the various theories and concepts I have used to discuss art within a biocultural context. This context created a profound “Ah, ha!” moment, a “Eureka” awakening, a lightning bolt of critical potential to my research and that of others.
The strength of Boyd’s On the origin of stories lies in its content and its adaptability to diverse critical agendas. First, his evolutionary criticism provides a fresh lens through which readers can critically engage with art. But, more significantly, he provides scientific justification for practitioners working to save art from the financial chopping block. Esoteric arguments for art in education, the value of play in schools, creativity in the workforce and in communities now can rest upon a biocultural theory that states such practices “aid the evolution of cooperation and the growth of human mental flexibility” (176). Boyd’s work gives substance to these impassioned arguments in a manner that can indeed alter policy and make change for the better. It is a text rich in launching points for further discussion and research. Combine Boyd’s insight with current brain research, the educational philosophy of Freire, Giroux and others who advocate for arts in our schools and communities, and we have a new articulation of “why the arts?”
While Boyd’s work brings diverse theoretical approaches under an evolutionary umbrella and enables readers to explore the why and how of art, its style also attracts attention. Boyd jumps beyond the exercise of categorizing, marginalizing, and prioritizing art. Instead, he provides an articulation of why a child telling a story, or Shakespeare scripting a play offers tangible advantages for human survival. He does this by guiding us through the language of science, biology, physiology and evolution in a manner that makes these concepts accessible to anyone. Not only does he write about the evolution of artists as strategists in holding attention, his text illustrates this crucial point. He places sign posts along the way reminding us of what we read chapters earlier, of what we will read forthright. In short, he uses the literary techniques of echoing and foreshadowing, direct address and phatic statements to keep the reader in the picture. Our presence is important to him, just as the audience’s presence is important to any storyteller.
That is where Boyd and Darwin intersect; that is where Boyd and other theorists and scholars diverge. Just as Darwin wrote for a non-scientific public and gained immediate popularity, so to does Boyd. Written on the book jacket is the statement that the ability to hold an audience’s attention is the fundamental challenge facing all storytellers. Later in the book, Boyd says “works of art need to attract and arouse audiences before they mean” (232). Criticism, he says, “tended to underplay the ‘mere’ ability to arouse and hold attention” (232). While this suggests criticism’s lack of focus on this fundamental aspect of art, it can also apply to the writing of criticism itself: a task that rarely takes audience engagement into account.
Brian Boyd elevates the writing of criticism to an art form by indeed considering the arousal and sustained engagement of his readers. On the Origin of Stories is itself a welcomed mutation in critical writing. Boyd carries his reader along an original odyssey into science, literature, human nature, the epic landscape of Ancient Greece and the tiny world of Whoville. Like Homer and Dr. Seuss, Boyd cares about his readers and wants us to find our way home to the text without sacrificing intellectual integrity and scholarly research.
Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2009. 540pp. ISBN 978-0-674-03357-3 Hardback Price £25.95/€31.50/$35.00
Christine Boyko-Head is National Faculty for the Creative Arts in Learning Division at Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a playwright, producer and columnist.
I’ve always suspected that evolutionary psychology and the like are made up of individuals who don’t like music, poetry and the like, and so make them nothing more than phenomena emerging in the course of our early socialization.
Well, I am a fan of Buxtehude’s organ works. In particular, his fugue in F, BuxWV 157, struck me as particularly splendid.
However, it is a complex composition and so I called organists friends until one of them came up with a score and sent me it.
Now I can follow all the voices and, when I finally got so I could actually hear them all, the hairs on my arm stood up!
Dog, bears )and that wonderful collared lizard!) and the like have evolved, so we are told, this trait in order to appear bigger than normal and thus frighten a preditor.
And Buxtehuda’s Fugue in F?
Dr. Boyko-Head might listen to it and see what happens to her.
Bon Appetit!
Art and creativity are born ed from evolution. They arise from survival instinct.Every man and woman living for creation.Not only they creating but eager to show their creation to public. If you watch carefully every one very eager to show his creation, they expect that other appreciate their creation.Even small child also very eager to show his mark list, his award to his acquaints. They want compliment from you.If there is no survival instinct no one create a art or any other creation.From creation man want to be immortal. Greatest sceptic Nietzsche say about his writing” To create things on which time tests its teeth in vain;inform, in substance,to strive for a little immorality— I have never yet been modest enough to demand less of myself.
Virtually all discussions over the “what” of art—that is, over the question “What is art?”—are “circuitous” and leave us mired in “unsolvable debate and repetitious frustration” because they are not based on an objective definition of the term “art.”
To ask “why art is” instead of “what art is” leaves the concept “art” completely open-ended. Anything can be art from that perspective, which effectively means that nothing is art.
In truth, no avant-garde work ever created—from abstraction to present-day postmodern or “contemporary” art—is art by any objective definition of the term. Let me propose one here: Art is the selective re-creation of reality according to the fundamental values of the artist.
The subject is terribly complex, of course. Interested readers may want to know about four essays on the nature of art that “created a profound ‘Ah, ha!’ moment” for me when I first read them decades ago. They form the basis of a book I co-authored in 2000—’What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand’—which for the first time applies Rand’s essays to the purported art of the twentieth century (and, by extension, to that of the twenty-first).
Louis Torres, Co-Editor, Aristos (An Online Review of the Arts) and Co-Author, ‘What Art Is.’ — http://www.aristos.org
I would like to raise two somewhat related questions: Does art have to be intentional for it to be art? Does there have to be intelligence and “purpose” behind it for it to be art?
When I walk to school after it rains and I see patterns of silt and leaves and the stains of leaves and small twigs on the sidewalk, I stop and look at them, and I think I see the patterns as art, art that has no intelligence or “purpose” behind their creation. The only “purpose”, I think, is the purpose I give to it, and the only intelligence is mine, such as it is. Still, I am awed every bit as much by this “natural” art in mundane places as I am in world-class art galleries. Moreover, I am awed and moved by this art more than I am by the majesty of mountain ranges or countless stars on crisp winter nights.
Maybe I should not stand on the sidewalk and admire silt and leaf-stain patterns–doing so probably confirms the worst suspicions of my neighbors–but I do, and I think I am finding unintentional art in commonplace places, for whatever it is worth. I know I am the richer for it.
This quote by George B. Shaw comes to mind:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
The question that jumped into my mind was whether a theory about why art is remains a theory of art. Probably it is a theory of rhetoric. It explains (maybe) the capacity of ideas, in general, to influence and spread.
But, frankly, I doubt if it really even does that. A simplified lens that eager beavers like the author of the above review can use to publish in academic journals: a latest thing, a new perspective… that kind of garbage goes over well in tenure hearings, even if it doesn’t illuminate much.
Profound reflection on art requires profound reflection on the ways in which nature and convention overlap and, just as importantly, where they separate. A reductionist, materialist approach neglects the fragmentary nature of human identity and its implications for how we evolve and live.
Survival, incidentally, requires a perspective on survival. An evolutionary theory of politics, for example, would have to explain why people choose leaders using criteria that guarantee a pathological outcome. The same kind of problem has been making hash out of rational choice in economics. The diversity of “ways of survival” starts to look an awful lot like the diversity of “ways of life” once the initial enthusiasm wears off.
Nevertheless, evolutionary theory does provide an excellent theory of rhetoric, as previously noted, and thereby an excellent explanation for the appeal of ideas like these.
To begin with, there is nothing wrong with the flow of thoughts in the article. Even the arguments offered are tenable enough. Yet, can we afford to ignore the simple fact that the age-old dynamics of evolution never cease to work and they work mercilessly in all walks of life? By the same logic, is it not a bit naive on our part to expect creativity of any kind to be an exception?
“In sexual selection female attention to the male results in survival. Boyd points out ‘If a work of art fails to earn attention, it dies’ (121)”
The danger of applying this kind of METAPHORICAL thinking to art in the marketplace is that the disappearance of various art – and/or the people that make it – is justified by “survival of the fittest”.
The argument that evolutionary theory be applied to art is over 100 years old and many early anthropologists inspired by Darwin or Herbert Spencer wrote books arguing just this point. See, for instance, Alfred C. Haddon’s Evolution in Art. The argument was used in part to justify the “survival” of white European art and culture and the suppression of “savage” or “primitive” art and the people that produced it.
Art perhaps is based in the origins of the species and is a human necessity – I like the idea that this be used tactically to argue for the importance of art and human creativity. But until human beings really undergo environmental pressure and evolve, I see little reason to apply this kind of thinking to what is a CULTURAL phenomenon – the survival of various artistic productions in a CULTURAL marketplace in a species that is NOT undergoing serious evolution. Again, evolution does not occur without environmental pressures that necessitate it. I hope that Brian Boyd takes this into account.
Nothing more boring than the assumption you can explain everything from evolution. It makes evolution involution. Freud supposed that there is no progress at all. But neurotics, unadapted subjects, are the real trigger for making any difference as desirable.
Excellent discussion above!!! I will add only an observation from my experience, that corresponds to the idea of art for survival. Since cats who paint seem to do it as an extension of their territorial marking behavior, perhaps we do it not only as a way to organize ourselves and make sense of the world, but to ease our loneliness. We decide who is our tribemember by expressing ourselves,and listening/watching for responses of a like kind. And we learn from each other about how to be human in a way, through art, that is more immediate and inherently powerful than an other, to the extent that the art engages deeper realms than simply new sensations for their own sake. Of course, what’s old to me may be uplifting and insightful to another…..thus precluding the need for anyone to get too precious about their insights & theories….
Comments such as those claiming that “even the most useless” artistic products become “a crucial factor in human evolution” illustrate just how strained and contrived much evolutionary thinking is–whether it’s “evolutionary psychology” or “evolutionary literary criticism.” Something “useless” is “crucial” to evolution? As long as the theory of evolution, a work very much in progress, is considered absolutely proven, then it seems that any concept which can be remotely connected with the theory, and given some kind of strained plausibility, is then also considered “proven,” and becomes the basis for further speculation. But there’s a difference between speculation and scientific proof, and the latter is often conspicuously lacking. Evolution happened the way it did, and there’s no control group to show how it would have happened otherwise. We’re left with only speculation, not science.