The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative

Afterword

Afterword Denis Dutton W orks of literary criticism and theories of literature are portrayals and understandings of the human mind’s storytelling capacities. Think of them as an analogy with visual portrayals—drawings and paintings—of the human body. A period spent teaching in the fine arts department of my university has provided me with a useful lesson or two in this connection. Much art practice today forsakes , for better or worse, accurate, “hand-guided” representation of the world. Fine arts students, attracted to such techniques as graphic collage and sculptural construction, influenced by modernism and the easy use of computers, no longer immerse themselves in life drawing as students once did. Whether or not this is a justifiable development, it is certainly understandable: the human body and the human face are very hard to draw, much harder than natural objects, landscape features, and most artifacts. There are two notable reasons for this difficulty. First, whatever the myriad ends the body evolved for, being easy to render with pencil or paintbrush was not one of them. There may be aspects of the human form that make drawing easier —the most obvious is its left/right symmetry—but they come about as accidents of an evolution that was governed by other factors in how it constructed and adapted the skeleton and musculature. What’s worse, human beings already possess an evolved ability to read the body, especially the face, with the utmost acuity. The visual sensitivity required to establish and recognize eye contact by normal-sighted individuals ought to astound us: the angular difference in arc degrees between an eye that is looking at you across a room and one that isn’t would be close to immeasurable. Yet we are able to distinguish eye contact, catching a glance at a distance, as a normal part of everyday life. We also have a constant, lifelong awareness of the positions and appearance of arms, hands, and fingers—a sense of their posture and gestural meanings—that is complex and subtle. An artist’s inability to draw well will therefore reveal itself most immediately in badly rendered faces and hands: drawing your neighbor’s house or dog or lawnmower is so much less testing than drawing your neighbor. (This challenge is often resolved by lazy art students who render a figure as facing away from the viewer, Casper David Friedrich–style, with hands conveniently in pockets.) 259 I raise this in analogy: just as ordinary experience of the human form sets a high bar for any artist who would draw it, so our lifetime experience with narrative sets a high bar for anyone who would theorize about it. We grow up as audiences , tellers, and critics of jokes, gossip, fairy tales, plays, movies, anecdotes, novels, poems, and histories. These narrative objects, which reflect immensely complex interests and capacities, are universal in genesis if not in every instanced type. Literary theories of any kind have to stand up against our highly developed, preexisting sense of the uses and pleasures of stories. We know too much already to be persuaded by any over-simple, one-dimensional account—from a philosopher , scientist, or literature professor—that isolates some aspects of stories and discounts others that we know in experience to be important. This stubborn fact, however, has tended to be ignored in literary theory since its very beginnings. Anyone who teaches the history of aesthetics is in the business of surveying a long series of exaggerated, partial, one-sided, all-ornothing claims purporting to explain the nature of art and its creation. It is a tendency most conspicuously present in Plato—who stressed the social utility of art—but is also found to some extent in Aristotle—who concentrated on mimesis —and in the early sections of Kant’s Third Critique, where the disinterested contemplation of form is so stressed. (In later sections, Kant’s thesis becomes more richly complex.) Closer to our time, Tolstoy’s obsessive concentration on the communicative functions of art, including artistic sincerity, is a good example of the single-dimension tendency. Tolstoy, like all the others, is useful to study (and a pleasure to teach) because he captured a crucial aspect of art and articulated its importance with passion and insight. His theory, however, is far from adequate to the totality of art, ignoring form. In just as provocative a manner, the formal values ignored by Tolstoy became the centerpiece of Clive Bell’s Art, famous for...