One of my friends got tangled in an argument on Twitter last week about why fiction even matters in the first place. Conveniently, I actually addressed that in one of my recent non-fiction books, so I thought I’d repost here tagged accordingly. This is in two parts – part two will post tomorrow.
Storytelling has been around for at least as long as writing has, and given the centrality of oral storytelling in many cultures, it’s safe to assume it’s been around a lot longer than that.
The first recorded story that we have is the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic written somewhere between 2150 and 1400 BC. It’s a heroic tale from ancient Assyria complete with brave hero, horrible monsters to be slain, and a quest.
But why do we tell stories at all?
Basically, there are two theories when it comes to storytelling. One is that storytelling, like other art forms, is essentially just a meaningless byproduct of human culture.
However, this fails to take into account the cost of creating art and telling stories: particularly in early hunter-gatherer societies, it doesn’t seem sensible that someone would willingly choose to expend significant time and energy creating something that is essentially pointless, when most of their day would otherwise be taken up with activities that ensure survival.
And so we have the second theoretical camp, which suggests that there must be something intrinsically beneficial about creating art and telling stories, in order to make the effort expended on it worthwhile.
So what is this intrinsic benefit? What does make the act of storytelling and story consumption worthwhile?
As we’ll see, research suggests that there are several key benefits:
- Stories draw on our ability to recognise and predict patterns to help us make sense of the world.
- Stories act as memory aids to encode information for easier retrieval later.
- Stories encourage cooperation and sociability.
- Stories and the telling thereof change or reinforce social hierarchies and power structures.
- Stories (of a particular kind) foster and develop empathy and our theory of mind.
So let’s investigate each of these now in more detail.
REASON ONE: RECOGNISING PATTERNS
Human beings, particularly in a pre-industrial, pre-(western)scientific setting, live at the mercy of nature, which can often make life feel chaotic, random, and driven by chance. Although we like to think that our actions drive our successes, many times in life this isn’t the case: we’re blindsided by either good or bad fortune, our hands are forced, and life (or the actions of other people) makes our decisions for us.
Whether there actually isan underlying sense of logic and order in nature that’s simply obscure sometimes, or whether humans simply require logic behind everything in order to satisfy our own intellectual needs, many stories (particularly from pre-industrial, pre-(western)scientific settings) focus on making sense of the world ‘out there’.
Stories have a particular, predictable pattern of their own (which differs a little across cultures, time periods, genres and mode of telling—oral vs. written vs. staged vs. filmed, etc., but not as much as you might expect) and through them, we can impose patterns on what we see around us. It helps us feel in control and stabilised, to find patterns in lives that might otherwise seem chaotic and random, and ultimately helps us to convey these findings to others, in turn helping themto feel more secure as well (which has benefits for the social group as a whole, as well as for the individuals).
In fact, humans are so good at detecting patterns that we often see them even where they aren’t: our habit of seeing faces in everything around us is one example of this, with the human brain so attuned to the importances of faces that it sees them everywhere, from the shape of a plug, to a passing cloud, to a stain on the floor, to a company logo.
This is just as true for stories. A well-known experiment tested this theory by showing participants a series of geometric shapes moving across a screen—some circles, triangles, etc. When asked to describe what they’d seen, almost every single participant responded in the form of a story, assigning emotions and intent to the geometric shapes they’d seen—transforming random movements into part of a pattern, or, more accurately, recognising that the random movements they were seeing actually fit a pre-defined pattern they already knew, a pattern that described a particular type of social interaction.
REASON TWO: MEMORY AIDS
This idea of matching our observations to patterns we already know is actually a very important part of learning; in teacher training, for example, we’re constantly reminded to link new content with something that students already know, to ‘give them a hook to hang it on’ or to contextualise it, so that students can see how it fits and thus remember it more easily. This makes sense: remembering one, random thing in isolation is a lot harder than remembering one new detail that fits in with a bunch of things you already know.
And of course, what is a story but a set sequence of events that you know and remember?! So matching external events to story patterns just makes sense. If you can match the random movement of some shapes on a screen to a familiar story pattern (in the case mentioned above, one of the triangles was frequently said to be chasing the other, smaller triangles, and the story-pattern surrounding domestic violence was repeatedly hinted at), then instead of having to remember random movements in isolation, you now have a story that you have already internalised to help you remember them.
In fact, estimates suggest that people remember information woven into stories up to twenty-two times more effectivelythan information provided through facts alone.
This is also why storytelling is such a popular component in many mnemonic techniques. If you want to improve your ability to memorise random lists of things (say, the items you’re supposed to buy when you next hit up the grocery store), most of the well-known recommendations involve linking the items together in a story in some way. You could, for example, remember the list ‘milk, stock powder, oranges, jam’ by concocting a story like this one:
Once there was a small child who really, really liked to drink milk. They liked it so much that even when they were banned from drinking milk, they would take it down to the stockyard so they could hide away and drink it in peace. Their favourite spot to hide in the stockyards was on the edge under the orangetree, where they could jamthemselves in tightly between the rails and the tree trunk and drink milkin peace for hours on end.
The link to ‘jam’ is a little more obscure than I’d like, but as an example in a book that is not about teaching mnemonic tricks, it’ll do.
The point is that even in concocting this tiny, three-sentence example, I couldn’t help myself: I turned it into a real story. This was not pre-planned in any way, shape or form; I literally just invented this as I was typing it. And yet, I have a character, in a specific setting, with a clearly defined goal, and some conflict—there’s the child, in some kind of rural or semi-rural setting, who really, really wants to drink milk, but has to hide in order to do so because they’re banned from it.
(Maybe they have an intolerance, I don’t even know. Also, why you’d put an orange tree right next to your stock yard is beyond me. BUT NEVER MIND. It’s a shopping list, not a candidate for the Nobel Prize.)
Storytelling as a memory aid also has much more significant cultural implications than mnemonic tricks and shopping lists. People are significantly more likely to remember things and be impacted by them when they understand them both intellectually andemotionally, so if I simply tell my child not to play with chainsaws, that’s one thing, but if I tell them not to andtell them that they could get hurt andshow them the pictures of my friend’s knee when he nearly severed his own leg off in a chainsaw accident? Yeah, whole lot more effective.
(And no, I haven’t traumatised my children, I promise. Well, not yet, anyway.)
(This is also why ads, both of the commercial variety and the ‘save a child’ social-issue variety, are careful to include an emotional pull, as well as mere intellectual information.)
This concept of passing important factual information via stories is illustrated clearly in the Indigenous Australian concept of songlines. A songline is a particular story or set of stories that is connected to physical locations within the people’s geographic area, and while the stories hold immense religious and cultural significance, they also expertly convey the factual information necessary to survive in that area: the location of seasonal water and food, to name just one example. And in an awe-inspiring example of the social currency of stories, many of these songlines are connected from culture to culture, over-arching narratives with individual chapters, with each culture the curators of the particular ‘chapter’ of the story relevant to their land.
REASON THREE: SOCIAL COOPERATION
Which segues nicely into our third point: that stories foster social cooperation.
The act of telling a story implies an audience, someone to have the story told to, especially in the case of oral storytelling. And there’s a reason that parents are encouraged to read to their children: the act of storytelling is bonding, reinforcing the relationship first between both story tellers and story-consumers, and secondly between all the various story-consumers together (I mean, witness the fan-led forums online where people bond fiercely over their favourite books, movies and TV shows—a perfect example of storytelling creating bonds and group identity).
This is also where you see the power story has over groups with a shared story-background; not only do you get passionate fandoms, you get things which are conceptually similar but on a larger scale: patriotism, after all, is simply a shared story about how wonderful our own corner of the world is, and an invested belief in it being better than other corners of the world. Democracy, freedom, equality—these are not physical, absolute things, but rather values that arise out of a shared narrative. We tell each other stories about how things matter, how they make the world a better place, and if we tell these stories often enough, and the people in power tell them enough, the concepts they embody become a reality. A shared cultural narrative—a common set of stories you tell yourself about who you are like, and who you are not like—is one of the key traits of group belonging, whether that group is a Harry Potter fan club or the United States of America.
I can attest personally to the power of this kind of storytelling: my son is of an age where he is noticing that other people sometimes choose to do things that we encourage him not to do, or that we just happen to not do in our house.
An easy example: we’re vegetarian. A lot of our extended family is, but not all of them, and certainly most of his friends at school are not. And the simplest explanation for him is, some families choose to do things differently. Some families choose to eat meat, and that’s fine. It’s just that in our family, we choose not to.
You’d think this would be on par with ‘Because I said so’ as reasoning goes, but this is where we see the subtle, yet persuasive, power of stories: we are notsaying ‘Do this things for no reason’. Instead, we are suggesting (and this was totally unintentional at the time!) that in order to belong, in order to be a part of our family, this is the story we tell: that we do not eat meat. And so, because there is the hint of a story attached, a story that describes the members of our family group, he seems to have not only accepted it unquestioningly, but (to my utter embarrassment) also to have become one of those militant vegetarians who proudly informs all his friends, Well, we don’t do that in our family!
I mean, it’s embarrassing as heck sometimes, but it shows clearly the power of a shared narrative in forming group identity and cooperation between group members, right?
(Pity about the conflict between non-group members…!)
On a broader scale, religion serves a similar purpose, particularly in post-agricultural societies: as well as linking back to that idea of providing patterns in chaos and thus meaning in our lives, religion also functions as a way of ensuring social harmony (again, as with the example of my son, at least within the group) by telling stories that convey a shared set of expectations for behaviour.
In hunter-gatherer societies, we can see clearly how stories perform this role of maintaining social harmony: in studies conducted into the cultural stories of hunter-gatherer societies across southeast Asia and Africa, anthropologists found that around 70% of stories specifically concern social behaviour, implicitly conveying the social rules around hunting, sharing food, marriage, and interactions with members of other groups.
Some anthropologists suggest that it’s important for groups to share stories like this not just because it lets us know how we should act, but also because it means we can rest assured knowing that other people know the same set of social rules as we do.
If we know that someone belongs to the same religion, or meet someone of our own nationality while overseas, or discover someone has a similar physical condition to us, we instantly know that they ‘get it’—that they understand some of the rules by which we operate and through which we frame the world. We can rest easier, knowing that a shared set of stories has done the heavy lifting for us in defining the way we should interact.
(See pt 2 for the final two reasons why fiction is important)
Excerpted from Laurens, A (2018). How To Theme. Inkprint Press, Australia.