BookmarksThe Pleasures of Fiction
Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004): 453-66.
Denis Dutton
www.denisdutton.com
Human beings expend staggering amounts of time and resources on creating and experiencing art and entertainment — music, dancing, and static visual arts. Of all of the arts, however, it is the category of fictional story-telling that across the globe today is the most intense focus of what amounts to a virtual human addiction. A recent government study in Britain showed that if you add together annual attendances in plays and cinema with hours watching television drama, the average Briton spends roughly 6% of all waking life watching dramatic performances. And that figure does not even include books and magazines: further vast numbers of hours spent reading short stories, bodice-rippers, mysteries, and thrillers, as well as so-called serious fictions, old and new. The origins of this obsession with comic and dramatic fictions are lost in remote prehistory, as lost as the origins of language itself. But like language, we know the obsession with fiction is universal: stories told, read, and dramatically or poetically performed are independently invented in all known cultures, literate or not, having advanced technologies or not. Wherever printing arrives, it is used to reproduce fictions. Whenever television appears in the world, soap operas soon show up on the schedule. Both the forms that fiction takes and the ideas, types of characters, and kinds of conflict that make up its content can be shown to be strikingly similar across cultures. It has specialist practitioners — rhapsodes, novelists, playwrights, actors — and is governed both informally with stylistic conventions and sometimes formally — for example, by censorship laws. A love of fiction is as universal as governance, marriage, jokes, religion, and the incest taboo.The question for any general aesthetics is: Why? Joseph Carroll is a literary theorist who has applied his probing mind over the last decade to the origins, nature, and functions of literary experience. His new collection of essays and reviews, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (Routledge, $85.00 boards, $23.95 paper) looks at literature and literary theory through the lens of evolutionary psychology. At the same time, Carrolls eye is that of an extremely perceptive literary critic. In fact, I would judge him to be one of the most acute and knowledgeable readers of fiction Ive ever encountered. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that he is sometimes dubious, or even scathing, about evolutionary explanations of literature that have been offered up by writers whose grasp of psychology exceeds, in his opinion, their command of high literature. His complaints, however, are not about the fundamental notion that evolution by natural and sexual selection have made human beings into the story-loving animals they have become: his adjustments are intended to increase the accuracy and usefulness of Darwins revolution. However critical he is of evolutionary psychologists, Carroll remains a Darwinian through and through.
Joseph CarrollCarroll holds that the only way to attain a general theory of literature is through an account of human nature that builds from the ground up, from the most basic conditions for the evolution of the human species. A Darwinian literary theory first needs a Darwinian psychology. Once we have a basic Darwinian psychology in place, we can see that the narrative proclivities of human beings, far from being an incidental by-product of the evolved mind, are central to some of its most human functions. The structures of basic motives and dispositions are what would be appropriate for a species, as Carroll describes it, that is highly social and mildly polygynous, that displays concealed ovulation, continuous female receptivity, and postmenopausal life expectancy corresponding to a uniquely extended period of childhood development, that has extraordinary aptitudes for technology, that has developed language and the capacity for peering into the minds of its conspecifics, and that displays a unique disposition for fabricating and consuming aesthetic and imaginative artifacts. Such a list alone, he contends, would make it impossible to imagine a blank-slate view of the mind, in which the mind evolves in a vacuum, goes onto produce culture, which then gives back to the mind all content and structure.
Some of the mental processes that grow from this ground are universally predictable for individuals, for example such capacities as the acquisition of language and color vocabularies. Other processes, Carroll says, are characterized by a combinatorial fluidity of a sort that we prefer to call creative or inventive. But in all cases, cultural artifacts, no matter how complex or seemingly arbitrary, are constrained by the limitations of physical nature and are both prompted and constrained by an evolved human psychology. The best way to understand these prompts and constraints for Carroll is in terms of a hierarchical structure of what he terms behavioral systems, which he explicates with a diagram that goes back to the concept of inclusive fitness as a first mover for all adaptations.
The achievement of inclusive fitness requires that human life be organized along lines which Carroll specifies in terms of seven behavioral systems. These systems are saturated by basic human emotions that form the general framework for motivations. These coexisting systems — realms of affect, interest, and constraint — make up the fabric of human life from the Pleistocene to the present. They are the basis for human reproductive success and survival as a social species. Listed along with a few examples of their prehistoric manifestations, the behavior systems are:
(1) Survival: avoid predators, obtain food, seek shelter, defeat enemies.
(2) Technology: shape cutters and pounders, use levers, attach objects, use fire.
(3) Mating: Assess and attract sexual partners, overcome competitors, avoid incest.
(4) Parenting: nurse, protect, provide, nurture, teach.
(5) Kin: distinguish kin, favor kin, maintain a kin network.
(6) Social: build coalitions, achieve status, monitor reciprocity.
(7) Cognition: tell stories, paint pictures, form beliefs, acquire knowledge.
This schema locates imaginative artifact manufacture and story-telling alongside other normal human pursuits. This is surely a valid move, given the sheer quantity of attention human beings devote to fictions and other aesthetically imaginative activities. These cognitive pursuits are not a special, rarified useless realm, but are in different ways mutually implicated with the other specified behavioral systems — in particular, we might imagine, technology, mating, parenting, and general social life.
The seven behavioral systems are the foundation for most of what might be regarded as the social constructions of human life: national politics, specific languages, law, local customs and belief structures. But the seven systems are not themselves social constructions: their existence is not arbitrary and contingent but present today in all human cultures because of the operation of Darwinian mechanisms: ancestors who favored these propensities and strategies survived; their survival over times made such propensities innate. The systems are intrinsically regulated by emotions of pleasure and aversion: Carroll relies on Paul Eckmans basic psychological typology: fear, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, and surprise. (These emotions of course subdivide indefinitely into the likes of shame, chagrin, embarrassment, affection, regret, and so forth, depending on local emphasis and traditions: but once again, basic emotions such as joy and sadness are not themselves social constructions, they are the universal conditions for having an emotional life at all.) These emotions saturate behavioral systems, constituting the motivational mainsprings for their relevant attitudes and behavior.
Carrolls behavioral systems form discriminable contexts for the operation of cognitive modules, the individual blades and pop-up tools of the Swiss Army knife metaphor of mind: For instance, the cognitive module of vision — edge and motion detection, color, depth, etc. — would be activated within the technological behavioral system and survival system. . . . Face recognition modules would be activated within all interpersonal behavioral systems (mating, parenting, kin, social interaction). He also thinks it likely that the brain has specific modules geared to the construction of narratives and the recognition of aesthetically pleasing verbal patterns, and that these modules would be intrinsic to the cognitive behavioral system. In addition to this active mental apparatus, Carroll believes that experience, certainly including the experience of fictional narratives, is conditioned by life-history categories: our life is divided into phases of birth, growth, mating, parenting, and death. Evolutionary psychology has typically over-emphasized mating (and courtship) as the focus of attention, and indeed fictional narrative universally deals with the trials of love. But Carroll thinks that all these life-period patterns must be kept in mind when discussing fiction. He does not accept that maximizing human reproductive potential is so vastly important in the scheme of human history. Sultans who sire hundreds of children, he remarks, are not typical of the human race. Much of what has taken human attention in evolutionary history is directed at bodily survival and at social maintenance: keeping yourself and your family well-fed and healthy, defending family and tribe, and making the tribe a stronger, more fit social unit. Inclusive fitness toward successful reproduction is the ultimate goal, but the lived fabric of daily human life brings many other purposes and ideas into play. Issues of social dissonance and cohesion, death and its meaning, as well as the challenges and adventures of youth that do not involve courtship, can also be expected to figure into the cognitive content of stories and art. I imagine most evolutionary aestheticians would welcome Carrolls outline of a Darwinian psychology. However, this account so far leaves open the question of how fiction functions as an adaptation. Fictional narrative supplies us with pleasure, but what does it do for us adaptively? Steven Pinker, writing from the standpoint of empirical psychology, supplies one answer to this question. Joseph Carroll, literary connoisseur and theorist, thinks on the other hand that Pinkers answer shows he does not know what literature is in the first place. Its instructive to trace out the implications of their dispute.
The universal fascination with fictions is a curious thing. If human beings were attracted only to true narratives, factual reports that describe the real world, the attraction could be attributed to utility. We might imagine that just as early homo sapiens needed to hew sharp adzes and know the ways of game animals, so they needed to employ language accurately to describe themselves and their environment and to communicate truths to each other. Were that the case, there would be no problem of fiction, because there would be no fiction: the only alternatives to desirable truth would be unintentional mistakes or intentional lies. Such Pleistocene Gradgrinds would be about as eager to waste linguistic effort creating fables and fictions as they would be to waste their manual skills laboring to produce dull adzes. We can speculate even that the enjoyment of fictions might have put them at an adaptive disadvantage against more Gradgrindish neighboring tribes: homo sapiens would in such a circumstance have evolved to react to untrue, made-up stories much as it reacts to the smell of rotting meat. Now as it happens, this speculation does not accord with facts: the human reaction to fictions, at least when they are properly understood to be fictions, is not aversion, but runs anywhere from boredom to amusement to intense pleasure.
At this point we reach a fork in theorys road. There are two issues to be distinguished. First, there is the adaptive usefulness of fiction, its functional benefits, from Pleistocene campfire stories to modern novels and movies. Second, there is the pleasure — and perhaps related felt satisfactions that are not well described as immediate pleasure — which the experience of fiction evokes. On the first topic, the functional uses of fiction, Carroll, Pinker, and other evolutionary aestheticians agree. There is an enormous potential survival value for a species in being able to hypothesize non-obtaining states of affairs — imagining, contrary to known facts, what it would be for the neighboring tribe to attack the camp when the men are out hunting, or what it would be to travel in an area where water is scarce. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides talk about the advantages of decoupled imaginative acts, Michelle Sugiyama writes of fictions as a kind of imaginative preparation for dealing with real-world problems, and Pinker himself uses a games analogy in How the Mind Works (1997): Life is like chess, and plots [in fiction] are like those books of famous chess games that serious players study so they will be prepared if they ever find themselves in similar straits. In life as in chess, there are too many possible sequences of moves and countermoves for all of them to be played out in ones mind. Familiarity with fictional plots obviates the need always in to learn things in first-hand life experience; it can aid in the development of mental flexibility and adaptability to new social problems and expanded physical environments.
On the other, Pinker and Carroll starkly diverge on how to regard the pleasure produced by fiction. Pinker treats the intense pleasures of art, including fiction, essentially as by-products. The arts are a means by which we identify pleasure-giving patterns in the brain. For him, the arts purify these patterns, concentrate them, allowing the brain to stimulate itself without the messiness of electrodes or drugs . . . [to] give itself intense artificial doses of the sights and sounds and smells that ordinarily are given off by healthful environments. Pinker explains this process with a culinary analogy: We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. Pornography is another pleasure technology. For Pinker, the arts are yet another. On this account, the arts seek out and find the pleasure centers associated with meeting adaptive challenges — ones which increased fitness in the Pleistocene — and stimulate those centers without going through the risks and toil of actually undertaking the challenging activities. In the creation and experience of art, our minds rise to a biologically pointless challenge: figuring out how to get at the pleasure circuits of the brain and deliver little jolts of enjoyment without the inconvenience of wringing bona fide fitness increments from the harsh world. The arts are pleasure short-cuts, variously likened by Pinker to puzzles and games, alcohol and drugs, and sweet, rich desserts — things that also give us little jolts of enjoyment.
Pinkers view of pleasure in the experience of music, literature, and art brings to my mind one of the most enduring arguments in aesthetics. It was first raised not in connection with literature, but as a move in the musical aesthetics formulated in the nineteenth century by Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904). Even though Hanslick only applied his argument to music, it has application to other arts, including fiction, where I think it can be used to resist Pinkers position. Hanslick was the champion of Brahms against Wagner, for which Wagner pilloried him as Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger. In his 1854 tract, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful), he attacked the idea that the purpose of music was to excite emotions — a common opinion then as now. While he granted that sometimes incidental emotions can be produced by music (parades, church music, dance music, nostalgic music, perhaps), there was no reliable connection between the emotions in music and those putatively produced in listeners — no invariable and inevitable nexus between musical works and certain states of mind, as he put it. The beauties of music are peculiar to it, and can be perceived in music even when perhaps little or no emotion is felt by a sensitive and perceptive listener. (A fine discussion of Hanslick is found in Geoffrey Payzants 2002 monograph, Hanslick on the Musically Beautiful).
Hanslicks essential meaning can be captured with a thought experiment: suppose you are listening with pleasure to a particular piece of music, say, the achingly melancholy first movement of the Brahms 4th Symphony. You have a strong sense of its emotions, a sense of its atmosphere. Is the transaction between the music and you properly described as those emotions being produced in you? That is the model Pinker describes — art produces, causes, emotions in us, pushes our pleasure buttons. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, he says, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.
Now let us imagine that some clever neurophysiologist invents a drug or technology that can give you the emotion of the Brahms movement directly, without having to sit through the music itself. This might involve taking a pill, or attaching little wired pads to your temples. The Hanslickian claim is that such a procedure is unintelligible. It makes no sense because the intense emotional tone of the Brahms 4th is not something in your brain externally caused by the music, and therefore extrinsic to the music. The emotion is known only in experiencing that very piece of music, in the minutes that you experience it. The emotion is both individual and intrinsic to the experience of that individual musical work itself. Hanslick called such moments the experience of The Musically Beautiful, and his rather Kantian point is that we have them only in contemplating music. For Hanslick, as for a Kantian, music is not an aesthetic form that has an emotional content which might be delivered by some alternative, non-musical means.
In the Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, Hanslick contrasts two aspects of music that resonate with the dispute between Pinker and Carroll on the nature of aesthetic pleasure. Few people respond adequately to beauty in music, Hanslick says. They do not listen actively, intellectually, but as passive recipients of emotion. Hanslick likens this to eating, getting drunk, or taking opium. Its important to realize that Hanslick is not denying that music has what he calls this pathological aspect. He only wants to argue that as a high and lasting art, music must be listened to in a manner of active, informed contemplation. This is a kind of listening that requires cultivation; it addresses the mind and not just the emotions. The effects of such listening on the mind are not evanescent, Hanslick furthermore argues, but permanent. In this respect, we can only imagine Hanslicks response to a remark Pinker makes about music: Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged (How the Mind Works, p. 528).
Carroll, for his part, regards Pinkers outlook as fundamentally misguided. He writes, Despite the concession to the utility of fiction as a model for moves in the game of life, Pinkers wider exposition makes it apparent that like Freud he regards literary representation as largely a matter of pleasurable fantasy. It is different from pornography only in that the pleasure buttons it presses are not those literally and concretely of sexual activity. So what does art and literature give us? Carroll does not deny that literature gives us simulations that can act for models of behavior, game plans in Pinkers sense. But art goes further: It helps us to regulate our complex psychological organization, and it helps us cultivate our socially adaptive capacity for entering mentally into the experience of other people. This is not quite the same thing as imaginatively encountering a dangerous elephant in a story. It is rather a matter of entering empathically into the minds of our fellows. It may come to us as entertainment, but fiction has profound effects on making us what we are.
Carroll elaborates this claim by referring to Dickenss persistent attention to the role fiction plays in the lives of abused and neglected children. There are many such in Dickens: the Smallweed children in Bleak House — little Judy, who never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played any game, as the family had discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. The Smallweed children are grotesques. Little Tom and Louisa Gradgrind in Hard Times are more tragic figures. Deprived of art and literature by their father, a utilitarian ideologue, they grow up emotionally and morally impaired. Esther Summerson, the protagonist of Bleak House, grows up in a world, as Carroll says, devoid of affection. She survives by creating a imaginative world of her own, a private, imaginary place where she talks with her doll and engages normal human affection, keeping her emotional nature alive, till the plot turns in her favor and she moves to a better environment: The conversations she has with her doll are not fantasies of pleasure; they are desperate and effective measures of personal salvation. Carroll also mentions the abused David Copperfield, who discovered next to his bedroom dusty, forgotten books that had belonged to his dead father: Tom Jones, Humphrey Clinker, Don Quixote, and Robinson Crusoe. Carroll argues his case thus:
What David gets from these books is not just a bit of mental cheesecake, a chance for a transient fantasy in which all his own wishes are fulfilled. What he gets is lively and powerful images of human life suffused with the feeling and understanding of the astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them. It is through this kind of contact with a sense of human possibility that he is enabled to escape from the degrading limitations of his own local environment. He is not escaping from reality; he is escaping from an impoverished reality into the larger world of healthy human possibility. By nurturing and cultivating his own individual identity through his literary imagination, he enables himself to adapt successfully to this world. He directly enhances his own fitness as a human being, and in doing so he demonstrates the kind of adaptive advantage that can be conferred by literature.
This account is some distance from pleasure buttons. It is intended by Carroll to support his central contention that literature is an important means by which we cultivate and regulate the complex cognitive machinery on which our more highly developed functions depend. Carroll accuses Pinker of failing to grasp the importance of such cultivation, as evidenced by his claim that the human race could do away with music and be basically unchanged, and that music can be analogized to recreational drugs. Drugs, Carroll says, are disorienting and demoralizing. If young people use them habitually, they become incapable of adapting to the demands of a complex environment. Music has no such deleterious effect. More importantly, it seems very likely that people raised with no exposure to music, art, or literature would be psychologically and emotionally stunted, that they would be only marginally capable of developing in normal ways. The notion of a recreational-drug shortcut to achieve a Darwinian fitness reward is a delusion. Nor, it would seem, is the pleasure value of art an end to which the art itself is a mere shortcut. Working through and understanding in experience a work of art is an achievement, and an intrinsic value.
Carroll argues that literature is a means by which people learn to understand their own emotions and the feelings of others. Fiction provides us with templates for a normal emotional life. For these mental maps or models to be effective in providing behavioral directives, he says, they must be emotionally saturated, imaginatively vivid. Art and cultural artifacts like religion and ideology meet this demand. They help us make sense of human needs and motives, simulating life experience, allowing us to grasp social relations, evoke sexual and social interactions, depict the intimate relations of kin, and locate the whole complex and interactive array of human behavioral systems within models of the total world order. Humans have a universal and irrepressible need to fabricate this sort of order, and satisfying that need provides a distinct form of pleasure and fulfillment.
The mention of David Copperfields discovery of his dead fathers books also suggests another idea central to understanding literature. The meaning of a literary work, Carroll says, is not in the events it recounts. It is how events are interpreted that makes meaning. Interpretation, in turn, involves necessary reference to a point of view. This is defined as the locus of consciousness or experience within which any meaning takes place. Following M.H. Abrams, Carroll argues that an interpretive point of view is constituted by three elements: the author, the represented character, and the audience. These elements come together, in the experience of the reader, as situated in the mind of the author. That is why part of the significance for David Copperfield in discovering the books is that he is being introduced, as Carroll says, to the astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them. The importance of fiction depends on a sense of a communicative transaction between reader and author — understood as a real, not an implied or postulated author. Authors are actual persons who negotiate between the various points of view of fictional persons (the characters), the authors own point of view, and the point of view of the audience. Carroll insists that these three elements are present in every literary experience and that they exhaust the list of operative elements: There are always three components. There are only three components.
This isnt to deny that the components overlap, that audiences change (hence our interest in recovering the meanings and values of the original audiences of historic works), and that authors contrive even to hide themselves. Nevertheless, the author is trying to control the show — the interpretation of characters, their actions and the events that befall them. Authors attempt this by persuading, manipulating, wheedling, and so forth: whatever will appeal to the reader and create a convincing interpretation, including ambiguous interpretations of polysemic events.
This then is how Carrolls evolutionary substructure underpins a general theory of literature. Authors are people talking to people about people. Behind the talk lies an evolved structure of behavioral systems, a Darwinian psychology, and the emotions that characterize it. Literary forms are analyzed and understood in terms the complex relations between authors, characters, and audiences. As I understand Carrolls view, this makes the experience of a work of literature inescapably social, and not just about an imaginary social life. The author is always a palpable presence, which would explain why intentionalism has never died in criticism or literary theory.
Literary Darwinism contains many passages analyzing literature to good effect. His discussion of Pride and Prejudice is especially useful to illustrate the kind of analysis for which his literary theory calls. For example, he cites the episode in which Mr. Collins introduces himself to the Bennett household in a letter that is read by the family. This letter is, as Carroll nicely describes it, an absolute marvel of fatuity and of pompous self-importance, and much is revealed in how mother, father, and the Bennett sisters react to it. The excessively sweet-tempered older sister, Jane, is puzzled by it, though she credits Mr. Collins with good intentions. The dull middle sister, Mary, says she rather likes Mr. Collinss style. The mother, in her typical manner, only reacts to it opportunistically, in terms of a potential advantage in the situation. It is up to Elizabeth and her father to see clearly what a clownish performance the letter represents: their understanding marks an affinity of temperament and a quality perceptiveness the others lack. But what Carrolls analysis makes clear is that there are two more people — not fictional characters, but actual human beings — who are in on the agreement between Mr. Bennett and his second daughter. These two further individuals are also members of their circle of wit and judgment. First, there is Jane Austen, the author of Pride and Prejudice. And second, there is you, the reader of Pride and Prejudice. The creation and experience of the novel brings about a uniting of points of view, a sense of shared sensibility not open to everyone, and a broadening of perspectives. It is no small enjoyment for the reader to be included in this exclusive group.
Which brings us back to pleasure and its place in literary theory. Carroll claims in the spirit of scientific neutrality that Darwinian literary theory ought to be applicable to any literary specimen, just as DNA analysis should apply equally to human beings or to flatworms. This may be so, but it seems to me that Carrolls approach is most congenial to classic fictions of the sort we read from Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, George Eliot, or Jane Austen. If we set Carroll against Pinker, we find, as so often in the history of aesthetics, that the two theoretical outlooks look better or worse depending on the choice of examples adduced to back them up. Does everything Carroll says in applying his evolutionary theory of fiction work as well with a Harlequin Romance as it does with Daniel Defoe? I think not. Carroll dislikes Pinkers characterization of literature in terms of fantasy, escapism, and ephemeral entertainment values, and provides powerful arguments for seeing fiction in a different, more cultivated and informed way. But he has not so much refuted Pinker as shown that literature can do more than Pinker seems to suppose.
Hanslick distinguishes the ideal aspect of music from its elemental aspect: attention to the former is the smart way to understand music. Those who know only the latter aspect possess only a passive, dumbed-down way to listen. Hanslick does, however, allow that music itself does, whether we like it or not, have both of these aspects: there are Sousa marches and there are Bartok quartets. We ought to make ourselves, he thought, into informed, cultivated listeners in order to appreciate all music has to offer. If we listen to it as shallow entertainment, so much the worse for us. Literature offers a parallel distinction. There is no doubt, we might similarly argue, that just as Robinson Crusoe helped make a man of the fictional David Copperfield, so George Eliots and Charles Dickenss fictions have helped real readers develop and mature. But evolutionary aesthetics has also to account for the fact that Eliot and Dickens were not the most popular novelists of Victorian England. That honor belonged to the nearly forgotten Maria Corelli, Queen Victorias favorite novelist, whose metaphysical twaddle may more clearly accord with Pinkers than Carrolls characterization of literary experience. In any event, the drugs, porn, and cheesecake analogues certainly seem more plausibly applied to aspects of contemporary popular fiction and movies than to Middlemarch. And even if we grant the important ways serious literature can provide audiences today with Carrolls templates, his cognitive maps and models, why should we not allow that Mills and Boon readers today are also provided with cognitive maps and templates by their literature? By Carrolls own admission such templates might include religious ideologies and mythologies, as well as fictions from Gilgamesh to V.S. Naipaul. So why not movies, which, a cynic might insist, provide relatively unsophisticated life-advice for relatively unsophisticated people? If there is adaptive survival value in ancient, Stone-Age storytelling, it ought to extend to our own time and explain somehow the pleasure we get from fictions. It strikes me that Carroll and Pinker are both correct to some extent about all fiction, with each more correct than the other about different subclasses. Pinker is most right about popular, effects-driven blockbuster movies, TV, and cheap thrillers. Carroll is most right about high art, the classics whose values endure across generations, the best that is known and thought in the world.
This is not a surprise: Joseph Carroll brings to his Darwinian position a sensitive aesthetic and critical sense. He writes beautifully about deep, rich works of art. This gives a wholly earned air of importance to the essays in Literary Darwinism. For the last decade, Ive heard it said that evolutionary aesthetics is a field of great potential. Read his extended analysis of Pride and Prejudice and you can see how Carroll goes beyond the promises into the payoff. He is able to demonstrate how a knowledge of Darwinian mechanisms shines light on some of the most cherished aesthetic emotions and experiences we are capable of feeling — and he does it without impoverished reductionisms, without making the endlessly complex seem stupidly simple. His Literary Darwinism is a book to reckon with.
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
denis.dutton@canterbury.ac.nz
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