Questão 76 - UECE 2ª Fase 1° Dia 2022/2

T E X T

 

The Story Paradox

 

Scott McLemee reviews Jonathan Gottschall’s The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down.

 

   Rarely does anyone read a work of
social criticism for the plot. But in the case
of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Story Paradox:
How Our Love of Storytelling Builds
[5] Societies and Tears Them Down (Basic
Books), we have a sort of whodunit: Who is
ultimately responsible for the new world
disorder? The storytellers, as it happens—
although that turns out to be a very broad
[10] category of suspects.
    Gottschall, a research fellow in
English at Washington & Jefferson College in
Pennsylvania, is also author of The
Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us
[15] Human (Mariner Books, 2012), aspects of
which are reprised in the new book. The
basic argument runs like so: Humans are by
no means the strongest of the primates, or
the most nimble or hardy, and our
[20] altogether improbable rise as a species
owes almost everything to having evolved a
capacity to accumulate and transfer
information over time. And in that regard,
storytelling may have been catalytic. Being
[25] able to transmit the message “one of the
ancestors ate those berries and died” counts
as a definite evolutionary advantage, one
that must have developed long before the
cognitive power required to formulate so
[30] complex a concept as “poison.”
    An enormous portion of humanity’s
mental bandwidth is devoted to producing, 

consuming and processing narratives of all
kinds: long and short, serious and trivial,
[35] complex and simple. Whole professions and
industries specialize in factual or
imaginative narratives and the many shades
in between. As an alternative to the self-

bestowed title of Homo sapiens (“wise
[40] person”), Gottschall proposes our species
might better be called Homo fictus (“story
person”). The suggested change in
nomenclature will likely go unheeded, but
the point seems valid: humans are both the
[45] creators and the products of narrative
communication.

    The Story Paradox expands upon
this notion by emphasizing that narrative’s
tool-like aspects are not limited to its
[50] usefulness in transmitting experience.
Through the skills of the teller or the power
of the tale itself, narrative engrosses not
just the individual listener (or reader) but
groups—even whole populations—creating a
[55] sort of coordinated social attention that
influences human thought and behavior.
Gottschall returns to his point about the
presumable long-term evolutionary
advantages: “Human groups with strong
[60] fantasies that bound them together into
well-functioning collectives would have
outcompeted human groups that lacked
them,” he writes. “And we, the
grandchildren of these ancient storytellers,
[65] have inherited the earth.”
    Here the full significance of the
book’s title comes into view. While
storytelling is an occasion for shared
engrossment, the most compelling
[70] narratives—whether real or fictional—
involve conflict. (Everyone knows that “they
lived happily ever after” means the story is
over.) “That people gravitate most naturally
to tales of social conflict,” writes Gottschall,
[75] “is supported not just by the relative
prevalence of these stories but also by
research showing that even little children
are far more attracted to stories of social
conflict as opposed to other kinds.” And
[80] while tales of conflict do not automatically
resolve themselves into a showdown
between good and evil, the total defeat of a
villain does tend to gratify audiences of all
ages. There must be some blockbuster
[85] movie that ends with a reasoned
compromise between people with diverging
conceptions of the common good, though
none springs to mind.
    Fairly recently on the timeline of
[90] human development, another factor has
intervened to make the situation more
precarious: a number of incredibly effective
systems for storytelling over long distances,
with much of it available more or less on
[95] demand. Any evolutionary advantage once
attached to being able to benefit from the
wisdom of the tribe about potential dangers

in the world has morphed into the capacity
to find, absorb and share whatever stories
[100] click with our own worst fears and meanest
impulses. As if that were not worrying
enough, Gottschall refers to efforts to
weaponize narratives and their delivery
systems, with Russian social media
[105] shenanigans in the 2016 election as an
example. The Story Paradox leaves the
reader in the position of a character at the
end of an episode of an old-fashioned
serial—hanging from a cliff and afraid to
[110] look down.

From:https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2021/11/19

The sentences “And in that regard, storytelling may have been catalytic.” (lines 23-24) and “…humans are both the creators and the products of narrative communication.” (lines 44- 46) contain, respectively, a/an