The New York Review of Ideas » Reviews | June 2009
Living to Tell the Tale
On the Origin of Stories, by Brian Boyd.
By Margaret Wheeler Johnson
Brian Boyd was in his forties when he became a literary Darwinist, though he would prefer that you not use that term. “Evolutionary critics,” he writes in his new book On the Origin of Stories “should appeal not to a founding father”—such as Darwin—“but to a live and empirically accountable research program.”
Boyd, an English professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, made his academic reputation as Vladimir Nabokov’s biographer. He now sets out to understand not just one man’s imagination but that of the whole species. Boyd is determined to prove that our affinity for inventing stories plays a role in the survival of humankind.
In On the Origin of Stories, he makes his case for “evocriticism,” the term he’d like you to use, as the “first truly comprehensive literary theory.” Since the first known cave paintings in Chauvet, France, he argues, fiction has proven socially strategic for human beings. Imagining scenarios we have yet to confront in reality prepares us to respond more creatively to future circumstances as they arise.
The evocritical approach is in part a response to the dominance of post-structuralist theory and the claim that any reading is informed by culture. On the Origin of Stories attempts to ground literary studies in fundamental questions about human life usually addressed in the sciences. In doing so, it strives to give literary scholarship renewed relevance in the eyes of those who run universities and fund research.
One of Boyd’s strengths is his willingness to confront the many arguments others have raised against evocriticism, but he fudges his rebuttal to at least one of those critiques. In response to the claim that our affinity for fiction is not an adaptation in itself but a byproduct of other strategic developments, Boyd responds, “An evolutionary approach to literature…simply requires that we take seriously that evolution has powerfully shaped…our minds and behavior. We can do that whether…fiction is an adaptation, byproduct, or some combination of the two.”
The greater weakness of On the Origin of Stories is unfortunately fundamental. Boyd claims that there is an evolutionary basis for our attachment to fiction in a moment when, with regard to literature, at least, that attachment is on the wane. He asks, in developing his counter-argument, why, “in a world of necessity, we choose to spend so much time caught up in stories that both teller and told know never happened and never will?” Even for those who deeply appreciate fiction, the logic of this question resonates more than Boyd’s attempt to refute it. Perhaps thousands of years will prove nonfiction a momentary preoccupation, but in the meantime, it is hard to agree that fiction has served us more than fact. ♦