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Bad Horse


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Oct
15th
2014

ROF1. A general evolutionary theory of fiction · 9:28pm Oct 15th, 2014

What’s a story?

"Story" is a very broad category, even when counting only fiction. It includes:

- nonsense stories that are supposed to be stupid and make no sense:

One fine day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight.
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
Came and killed the two dead boys.

- meta-fiction (stories about stories), like Borges' stories that are literary analyses of imaginary stories ("Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote" is my favorite)

- ancient Greek rape comedies [h]

- Goodnight, Moon

- Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra

- Waiting for Godot, a story about nothing happening

- this story from the infancy gospel of Thomas:

After that again he went through the village, and a child ran and dashed against his shoulder. And Jesus was provoked and said unto him: Thou shalt not finish thy course. And immediately the child fell down and died. ... And the parents of him that was dead came unto Joseph, and blamed him, saying: Thou that hast such a child canst not dwell with us in the village: or do thou teach him to bless and not to curse: for he slayeth our children. And Joseph called the young child apart and admonished him, saying: Wherefore doest thou such things, that these suffer and hate us and persecute us? But Jesus said: I know that these thy words are not thine: nevertheless for thy sake I will hold my peace: but they shall bear their punishment. And straightway they that accused him were smitten with blindness.

I don’t believe there are rules about what kinds of fictional narratives can be set down as text and appreciated. Anything goes. So what am I talking about when I talk about rules of fiction?

A general evolutionary theory of fiction

I think people have evolved cognitive dog-treat-recognizers, things in their brains that give them little jolts of pleasure for doing things that tend to get their genes propagated. When we read fiction, we get these doggy treats even for things we didn’t do ourselves. [1]

The evolutionary explanation for erotica is obvious: People enjoy sex. (I don't know why there isn't food porn, too.) Bashing your opponent on the head gives you a different kind of jolt of pleasure. Action stories are efficient structures that give you jolts of pleasure at bashing other people on the head without suffering the (culturally-specific) jolts of guilt that prevent people from bashing each other on the head all the time.

“Dramatic” stories play on the reader’s emotional bonds to the characters. This requires a complicated story structure to build up these bonds, then yank on them so you react as if these things were happening to your friends.

Dramatic stories are like roller-coasters. Roller coaster design has rules. Some are engineering: The track has to go up before it can go down. Some have to do with what patterns of tension and release feel dramatic: You need to cluster small, fast curves and loops together; you need to have moments of respite between these clusters.

None of the examples I listed at the start of this post are dramatic, except for the rape comedies. So drama isn’t found in all fiction. But it’s in a hell of a lot of fiction. Drama is the backbone behind most good stories. It’s what you feel when something is at stake and you care what happens. When people say stories must have conflict, or that there must be two false climaxes followed by a climax and resolution, or that a play or movie must have a three-act structure, they’re talking about dramatic stories. If you read Syd Field, Jack Bickham, or Writer’s Digest, you’re going to get theories of dramatic structure. Most of what is written about how to write novels and movie scripts, is written as if conflict-based dramatic stories were the only kind of story. So they’re a pretty important class of stories! [2]

BUT. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of sets of “rules” about dramatic stories, or “basic plots” of dramatic stories. They’re… helpful, maybe. But most of them just address the plot: What sequence of events happen in a story? They’re stuff like this:

1. Once upon a time there was …
2. Every day …
3. One day …
4. Because of that …
5. Because of that …
6. Until finally …

What’s the point of that? You’d have to really work at it to write a story that didn’t fit that structure. I want to understand what my brain is looking for when deciding whether to give me a mental doggy treat. Knowing a hundred slightly different plot sequences that trigger it is a good start, but we can do better.

“Literature” is, I’m gonna say for the moment, stories that make you think about things outside of the story. In my mind, Song of Ice and Fire is fantasy, while Lord of the Rings is fantasy and literature. Twelfth Night is (bad) romance. Romeo and Juliet is (bad) romance, and literature. 2001 is science fiction. Brave New World is science fiction and literature. If you read Aristotle or Dramatica theory, you’re going to be reading about how stories make you think.

Literary stories, I think, reward you for learning. They're simulations that teach you what might happen if you do one thing in some set of circumstances. The dog-treat mechanism in your head drives you to seek literary lessons that tackle the questions currently important to you. This may account for the strange fact that there are specific story types, like alicorn OC stories, that many people love and many other people think are stupid. Maybe they’re beneficial to children, or to people struggling with self-confidence.

So stories don’t serve any single function. There are as many broad, top-level story types as there are evolved patterns of experience that trigger mental doggy treats, and a good story will trigger lots of them. But a few top-level story types are very general and very important, and I want to understand them better. If our more-specific theories about how stories work mate well with the top-level evolutionary justification, it’s a sign that we may be onto something.

A general evolutionary theory of popular bad fiction

The brain doesn’t expect your experiences to be fictional. So it gives you a reward even when you’re just imagining someone else having these experiences. An ape gets a big jolt of relief or exhilaration for outwitting a predator or enemy, and that’s fine, because that doesn’t happen much in the wild. But your brain wasn’t informed that you can sit down at B. Dalton’s and read trashy novels and make it give you that jolt every ten minutes, for things that don’t benefit your genes at all.

Some “popular but bad” story types might be ones that fool your brain into thinking it’s succeeding or learning when it isn’t. Nonsense stories, for example, are bad baby literature. Babies learn fastest by looking at things they haven't seen before. They get cognitive dog treats for looking at anything surprising, even if it's surprising just because it's really stupid. Nonsense stories don’t help anybody learn anything, but because they’re full of things that don’t make sense, they keep triggering your brain’s reward for paying attention to things that you don’t understand yet.

Even stories that benefit you some way can be “junk stories” if you indulge in them too much. In a world where we can seek out exactly the kind of food we want, we end up eating too much fat, salt, and sugar. In a world where we can seek out exactly the kind of story experience we want, we end up reading “too much” (from the perspective of our genes) of certain kinds of stories.

So I expect successful stories to include “good good stories” that reward you for confronting things in fiction that help you or your genes in real life, “junk food stories” that we over-indulge in because they give us big rewards for things that don’t happen very often in real life, and “good bad stories” that reward you for mentally jacking off [α].

TO BE CONTINUED...


h. A Greek rape comedy is a once-popular story type in which a young man prepares to marry a young women who, unknown to him, was recently raped. When he realizes she's pregnant, he must cast her off as a shamed woman. But then it turns out that he was the man who raped her, so it's okay. Everybody has a good laugh and they get married and live happily ever after. (This summary is a little unfair to the Greeks, since they didn't have a concept of, or at least a word for, rape. On the other hand, that in itself is another indictment of them.)

1. Transhumans will of course evolve brains smart enough to distinguish real experiences from fictional ones, and to reward them only for real ones. They will therefore no longer enjoy fiction.

2. It’s hard (maybe impossible) to distinguish between drama and tension. Dramatic structure, whether it’s 3-act theory or scene and sequel structure, can be used to create drama, but it can also be used in action movies where we arguably don’t care much about the characters, like Crank.

α. Not that jacking off is bad. Or using birth control. You don't always gotta do what your genes want you to. Usually, your genes are looking out for you. But plenty of stories are designed to teach you altruistic lessons that are good for your genes, or your society, to your detriment!

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Comments ( 45 )

I do love your blogs, Bad Horse. They're the best kind of thought-provoking, and this one was no exception. I look forward to the continuation.

Careful with associating motivation to your genetics and brain chemistry. You might start personifying the processes that make your physicality tick, which can lead to devaluing your sense of self. And jaywalking.

I think you're missing the mark a little here by focusing only on fictional narratives. People do tell stories that involve such simple things as "that thing I found in the noodle salad last night." If you want to talk about the biology behind the enjoyment of fictional narratives, do keep in mind that it probably arose from something else. Of course, you might be already planing on discussing such in future blogposts.

2534989

If you want to talk about the biology behind the enjoyment of fictional narratives, do keep in mind that it probably arose from something else.

That's what the post is about. If you mean it arose from mechanisms evolved for understanding non-fiction narratives, I'd bet no. Speech hasn't been around long enough.

2535010

I'm not sure how to clarity what I meant to say. Or, really, how to say what I meant to say. Oops?

You are awesome, you know that, right?

I am pressed for time[1], but I do have few tiny points to make. It seems to me that your taxonomy of story-reading motivations misses the sort of story I like the best. Or close to, anyway.

Fr'instance I'm currently[2] reading 'Pale Fire[3]' and I'm having a lot of fun with it, but I can't figure out which dog treats it's meant to be feeding me. I don't really identify with the characters or the tension between them. I don't think it applies to my life in any significant way. I just enjoy the densely packed allusions[4], the dark humor, and the simply masterful use of language.

Also it's a story primarily told in endnotes. That's basically crack right there.

I realize you reserve the right to No True Scotsman me[5], but 'Pale Fire' is rated quite highly as a story, albeit an unconventional one. Is it worth leaving undefined? Or is it simply that I have difficulty in recognizing the particular doggy-treat flavor?

[1] My lovely job got me an all-nighter for my birthday. How thoughtful.
[2] I.e. when not working, which is always.
[3] Which I only got 'round to reading now because I am terrible.
[4] Any book which hides a joke in a deliberate mistranslation of an out-of-the-way bit of Shakespeare is my kind of silly. Seriously, it's like Pinkie Pie got a doctorate in English Lit. (Who's to say she doesn't have one?)
[5] Although I still think that it wouldn't be that because there's no set of criteria for Scottishness we agreed upon beforehand. NTS is a subvariant of special pleading, isn't it?

2535028
I sometimes enjoy stories like this, too (though not nearly as brainy as yours, I'm sure) and I think the dog treats come from puzzle solving. After all, humans are creative monkeys (mostly) and so in our evolution we've done almost as much problem solving as bashing each other over the head or running from wild animals. Allusions and language play reward us for figuring something out, even if it's just "hey, I know what that means!"

Wonderful insights. I'll have to reread this later. After your initial blog post regarding rules for fiction I was worried that you were steering dangerously close to a certain scene from Dead Poet's Society; ie formulaic evaluation to the point of turning poetry (or fiction in this case) into a single number representing its worth. Now I'm simply intrigued to find out what else you have to say :twilightsmile:

Okay, I have one for the crowd:

Alice in Wonderland

Now, I seem to recall reading that it's a complicated allegory for Oxford professors who worked with Carroll, so I suppose if you're up on your 19th century college staffing it could be a puzzle reward. But since that was only ever likely to be true of a very small number of people, I doubt that was the draw.

I suppose it could simply being Alice being thrust into situations we don't understand, which are therefore dangerous, and then being removed from danger. This seems to be the most likely I can think of, but the ways she's removed from danger make equally little sense. We're generally told that having our stories not make sense will make people enjoy them less, and I'd imagine that works into the dog treats somehow...

Is it simply a nonsense story that we've elevated to importance, even literature? And if so, why?

2535010

Speech, no, but internal dialogue, possibly. Bicameral brain theory would suggest that one 'self' comments to the other 'self' about ongoing events, and then fictional narratives could be an extrapolation of things like object and agent constancy.

Assuming all my words are working today, of course. Been having mild visual hallucinations, errors, and misrememberings. If I'm saying nonsensicalia, that's probably why.

I think people have evolved cognitive dog-treat-recognizers, things in their brains that give them little jolts of pleasure for doing things that tend to get their genes propagated. When we read fiction, we get these doggy treats even for things we didn’t do ourselves.

Yes, but everybody's neurobiology is different. So different things appeal to different people.

Choose your audience carefully, and anything can be art. Er, I mean "a story."

I don't get it.

also;

Ladles and Jellyspoons,
I come before you, to stand behind you,
To tell you something I know nothing about.
Next Thursday, which is Good Friday,
There will be a mothers' meeting for fathers only.
Admission is free, pay at the door,
Pull up a seat and sit on the floor.
We will be discussing the four corners of the round table.

and

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

2535163

Okay, I have one for the crowd:

Alice in Wonderland

Dodgeson's books are full of great geeky humor--proof that an appreciation of such is not a modern phenomenon. And now they're doubly geeky because while some of the humor is immediately accessible to us, some is not accessible unless you have an understanding of the Victorian intellectual and middle classes. And if you don't have that understanding it seems like such fantastical invention!

(It's like when Monty Python's Flying Circus first got played on American TV: the jokes were mostly fairly accessible British middle-class topical humor but because they were intended for a British middle-class audience, they came across as wildly absurd and off-the-wall to American yuppies and their emulators, the SF nerds).

However--and this is a sad thing to acknowledge--Dodgeson was obviously a not-very-closeted pedophile.

Well, he was born that way, wasn't he? And there's no evidence that he acted out (though absence of evidence, etc.) So it's like Karl Orff's Nazism, right? You can still listen to Carmina Buran and not think of the Stahlhelms.

Well, maybe. Some people say they can't. And people who have been sensitized to subtextual content, can see creepy allusions all through Alice.

I'm neither a Nazi nor a pedophile but I used to enjoy both Carmina and Alice. Nowadays, not so much. I've known what I know about their authors for too long, for it not to have had an effect on me.

Anyway...[Gump] I'm sorry I spoiled your literary salon party. [/Gump]

2535028

Or is it simply that I have difficulty in recognizing the particular doggy-treat flavor?

At one time I was asked to partake of a re-created medieval feast, in the course (hah!) of which I encountered a sauce that seemed to me the epitome of the old direction and loke that it be poynant and doucet--"see that it is sharp and sweet."

Afterwards I went into the kitchen and raved about it to the cook, who was a friend of mine. She sized me up with a glance and showed me that of which the sauce had been compounded:

Ketchup. And Coca-Cola.

They'd tried to make an authentic sauce, Lord knows. But the seasonings just wouldn't balance and time was running out and they couldn't see slathering a failed effort on the carcass of some poor animal that'd died for our sins (gluttony, to be specific). So they went with what they knew would work: it tasted good, was easy to do on short notice, and--hey, fooled me, right?

I haven't read Pale Fire but I do know that successful art is as much about sudden moments of desperate invention as it is of careful and deliberate planning. Maybe the author is working deeply to have some deliberate effect. Or maybe he's just grabbing whatever's in the kitchen cabinet of his mind, throwing it together as his instincts (honed by years of study and experience) inspire him--and serving it up as authentic literature.

And you like the flavor. And it seems authentic. Well, in a sense, it is The Real Thing(tm).

Just so we're definitionally clear: is My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic literature under the definition you propose? It's inspired a huge community of fanfic authors, who clearly are thinking of things beyond the core stories of the show when they post the billion words of their hundred thousand stories. Or is there a different kind of thinking-beyond-the-story at issue here?

For that matter, does your definition imply literature is different for everyone? There's tens of thousands of fanfic authors inspired by MLP, but a million more who aren't driven to create. I suspect you're aiming for something more here but I don't know what it is.

My first instinct was to say that transhuman me would still enjoy literature because the wisdom of others can be useful, but then I realized that there are more efficient ways of conveying those wise thoughts. So Animal Farm wouldn't offer many more utils than would "Stalinism bad".

First of all, I should say that I liked your blog, and have enjoyed reading about your project. An etymology of literature is a Sisyphean task, and it is interesting to see someone attempt.
Now I have said the nice part, it is time for me to take two lines out of context and accuse you of being pure evil.

“Literature” is, I’m gonna say for the moment, stories that make you think about things outside of the story.

This, I must disagree with. Take, what most people would consider "so literature it hurts": James Joyce. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are seen as these impenetrable books that you need a reference book or two along for the ride to read them, because it is so dense and hard to understand all the pieces.
This is the opposite of Joyce's intention. He wrote for "the common reader," that is, he intended that if "you are Catholic, you will recognize this and that allusion. You don't play cricket; this word may mean nothing to you. But you are a musician," and so on. He was a populist, he believed in an art with universal appeal. That his works should be isolated to a literary elite of overthinkers would have saddened him.
But this just says, "literature is subjective." It isn't a problem.
The other side is the problem. To take your own example of the Greek rape comedy, or to take a more recent example of cartoons like Coalblack and the Sebin Dwarves, here is something that is placed outside of literature. You're not supposed to think about it, but because of its triviality, that is what makes it worth thinking about. The category of "literature" is used to exclude these things, and so they work their way through society, reaffirming and naturalizing those attitudes.

The evolutionary explanation for erotica is obvious. Starving people sometimes tell stories about meals they’ve eaten.

While this analogy ("starving people") may or may not be true for readers of clopfiction, we can ignore the question of that particular stereotype since you're writing about erotica in general.
Readers of erotica are not "starving," studies (such as this one) have shown that readers of erotica have more active sex lives than those who don't read erotica. There was another study (I can't find it, I'll beg you to trust me on this) where the most common reasons people read erotica is either diversion or enhancement of their sex lives (for example, sales of light bondage equipment went up a couple years ago), the least common is replacement for a partner.
It is not some biological imperative that drives people to erotic fiction, it is the act of fantasy itself, with the biological act just being an inert mass around which to build this role play of power or guilty pleasure or secrecy or whatever else I can think of.
"The play's the thing," to completely abuse someone else's words.

2536243

Now I have said the nice part, it is time for me to take two lines out of context and accuse you of being pure evil.

Why, thank you. :trixieshiftright:

James Joyce ... The category of "literature" is used to exclude these things, and so they work their way through society, reaffirming and naturalizing those attitudes.

I don't know what you're trying to say there.

The evolutionary explanation for erotica is obvious. Starving people sometimes tell stories about meals they’ve eaten.

Readers of erotica are not "starving,"

I didn't mean for the second sentence to explain the first. I meant, "People read erotica because they like sex. And sometimes people even read food porn."

I think people have evolved cognitive dog-treat-recognizers, things in their brains that give them little jolts of pleasure for doing things that tend to get their genes propagated. When we read fiction, we get these doggy treats even for things we didn’t do ourselves.

I don't think stories are mono-sourced like that, and are almost certainly not from that one well. Tragedy has no bearing being a story type under that definition -- it is, almost by default, events that do not help in the spreading of the genes -- but still it stands as one of the oldest types of story there is.

Personally, I find the idea that stories are a by-product of communication to be a far more likely a scenario than that they occur due to brain foolment. It is also a far more varied pool to play sources with -- list of what I can think of below -- which means we aren’t so likely to run into the tragedy problem.

I'm not saying that your source is wrong -- it explains erotica adequately -- but that it can in no way stand alone.

1) Play -- Practicing for things that have not occurred. Stories are the mental equivalent of the physical practice we see all over the animal kingdom.

2) Boasting -- Spreading of credit for deeds to people who were not there at the time; and for the listener, a better grasp on how to rank the one telling you the story, either as a rival, friend or potential mate. Stories are what happens when truth in boasting becomes untethered.

3) Advice/History -- Learning what to do and what not to do. Similar to play except the listener does not play an active role in the story -- it is not about trying out techniques to see what works so much as it’s learning about what does work, and also what does not.

4) Cultural Laws -- Information about what is acceptable to the group. The Greeks’ ’rape story’ tells other Greeks that it is acceptable to marry a raped woman provided you’re the one who raped her. Modern stories would tell us that it is not acceptable to rape women in the first place.

5) Gossip -- Information about what is happening to other people that are important to the listener. Similar to boasting except the speaker isn't the star. Stories are when this person's existence ain't.

2536441 What I think 2536243 is trying to say that defining some narratives as 'literature" and others as "not literature" can be problematic. And that's certainly true, as in the case of James Joyce gaining a reputation for being unreadable that would most likely upset the author greatly.

For this to be a case of problematic usage, though, one would need to attach differential value to literature versus non-literature. I didn't quite get that from what you said, but having looked back you haven't backed off from saying that sort of thing as strongly as I've seen you state elsewhere.

2535541
:rainbowlaugh:

I am sure it was Ye Olde ketchup, though. Prepared to exacting specification laid down by blind stylite monks, and so on.

Well... Pale Fire doesn't seem pretentious or portentous. It doesn't want to Mean-with-a-capital-sodding-M anything (though I am sure it can be profitably dwelt upon). It's just... well it's as if a very clever man decided to have fun with words and allusions and metafiction over the course of a hundred thousand words and has invited you to join him. So, yes, I think it is likely it's not a vast cathedral of words revealing a grand secret on the altar. More of a dance, really.

2535444
...:facehoof:
Didn't know about Orrf. Damn. That's rather taken the shine of Fortuna Plango Vulnera for me. Or 'Si Puer Cum Puella,' for that matter. It's even made it somehow less fun to spring the translation of the lyrics of that last one on people.

Damn.


2536243
I am intrigued by your choice of name, I must say. :twilightsmile:

I have to ask: how does a populist approach to literature produce Finnegans Wake, a book written in a language almost entirely but not quite unlike English?

2535028

There's the puzzle-solving doggy treats that have been previously discussed, but it sounds like there's another one operating here as well.

Part of the appeal of allusions and referential humor is the fun of solving the puzzle, but the other component is social identification. Solving and responding to the shibboleths gives you a doggy treat that tastes like social belonging and acceptance.

2537051
Ah... I see. By reading this I confirm that I belong in the Tribe Of Literary Silly Bastards. Hmm. There's something in what you say.

2536497

Tragedy has no bearing being a story type under that definition -- it is, almost by default, events that do not help in the spreading of the genes -- but still it stands as one of the oldest types of story there is.

That's a good criticism of what I said, which was that we like reading about pleasurable experiences.

But EVERYTHING about us can be explained by evolution. So all literature has an evolutionary explanation. The question is how convoluted it is, and how much of it is causal and how much is accidental.

The evolutionary explanation of tragedy is non-obvious. But note that tragedy isn't just a story with a sad ending, or a story where a character has a downfall, or a story where a character makes a mistake leading to his downfall, or even a story where an admirable character makes a mistake leading to his downfall. It has to be a story where an admirable character makes a mistake leading to his downfall, AND that mistake was doing something that society often encourages. All of those elements need to be present. It's not a tragedy if Oedipus is blinded by the citizens of Thebes because he introduced them to disco dancing.

The complexity of the tragedy predicate suggests our experience of tragedy is at least as complex. I think a functional definition of tragedy would be something along the lines of: A tragedy is a story that examines our culture's values, and finds a case where everyone did the things they were expected to do, and this caused everything to go horribly wrong. A tragedy tells us there is something wrong with our ethos, or something wrong with the world. It is therefore attempting to learn something important at the edge of our knowledge, where our beliefs break down. So thinking about it gets us a big "learning" reward.

(That's odd; that's what I've been calling "dark" stories until now. Except "dark" is more general; it doesn't have to involve a character's downfall due to their own actions.)

Note that Greek tragedies fit this theory pretty well; Shakespeare's tragedies don't, except for Julius Caesar, which I've said before is the only Shakespeare tragedy I really like. I've complained that King Lear isn't tragic at all, because Lear is a blowhard and a fool. And Lear doesn't fit this theory of tragedy for that reason.

2536243
2536894

What I think >> Slavoj Zizek is trying to say that defining some narratives as 'literature" and others as "not literature" can be problematic.

Yes, I got that much. I don't think there's any way around that. My purpose is to write better stories. That means understanding more clearly what the difference is between a good story and a bad story. That means calling some things bad stories.

Now, "bad story" isn't the same as "not literature". Maybe there's something more controlling about saying "this is (not) literature" than "this is (not) good". Historically, the former has been abused more. People wouldn't often say "Mystery stories are not good, therefore Agatha Christie stories aren't good", yet they felt free to say "Mystery stories aren't literature; therefore, Agatha Christie stories aren't literature." Why this is, I don't know.

2535444

(It's like when Monty Python's Flying Circus first got played on American TV: the jokes were mostly fairly accessible British middle-class topical humor but because they were intended for a British middle-class audience, they came across as wildly absurd and off-the-wall to American yuppies and their emulators, the SF nerds).

By coincidence, the second half of this post talks about when Monty Python's Flying Circus first got played on American TV. But my thought was that they were wildly absurd and off-the-wall. Can you give examples? I can't imagine interpreting the spam skit, or "Climbing the north face of the Uxbridge road", as middle-class topical humor.

2536441
2536894 got the first part of it. The subjectivity of literature, but I also acknowledge that it is just a cliche to say "in the eye of the beholder."
The problem is not that particular things are held up as literature--I like your definition of stories to think about the outside--but the sleight of hand that is accomplished. While attention is focused on this handful of "literary" works, the non-literary is quickly swept into the shadows. You don't need to think about that, that isn't literature, let it be. Focus your thoughts on this minority of stories on a minority of topics directed to a minority of people.
Meanwhile, the actual dirty work of culture, the formation of people's minds, and so on, is done by the non-literary. One shouldn't just accept that this is worthy of thought and that is not, but question the basis of his decision.

I didn't mean for the second sentence to explain the first. I meant, "People read erotica because they like sex. And sometimes people even read food porn."

To be pedantic, the rest of the paragraph continues the same logic. I cannot be violent, so I will read a violent book. And I will retain, that you would have fantasy in any case. Even during violence and sex, you have the fantasy.
And I still think you are cheating. You can say people like comedy because they like to laugh, but that doesn't explain the why or the what of any of it. It's a non-explanation.

2537507
I'm don't wish to imply that literature has anything to do with being good. Whole swaths of "literature" are abyssally boring. If I never read another novel about the existential hardships of a writer or college professor again, it will be too soon.

2536945
I didn't choose the Zizek life, the Zizek life chose me.

I have to ask: how does a populist approach to literature produce Finnegans Wake, a book written in a language almost entirely but not quite unlike English?

For the people who like dialects, particularly Irish brogue, and know different languages. There is also, this is just my interpretation, but the language rolls the reader along, allowing one to pass over the passages that aren't directed at them. Finnegans Wake was an attempt to write the night, and part of dreams is that large swaths of the dream fall out of our consciousness almost immediately, leaving only a collection of details--for some reason or another--preserved in memory.
This isn't too defend Finnegans Wake. To the extent one can say a novel fails, Finnegans Wake obviously failed. It tried to go all directions at once, and no one has proven capable of following it, so it becomes a gold mine for people writing papers about, to take one example, a couple references and stylistic similarities to the Koran,while ignoring the rest.

2536945

Um...sorry.

I really do hate to spoil peoples' enjoyment of things. So I guess that was a dick move but I didn't mean it as such. Really.

For what it's worth, Orff's fascism is more comprehensible than, say, Gertrude Stein's or Ezra Pound's*. Orff was German and Germany was at war, and he threw in with his country's rulers, who were an hideous crew but still his countrymen (this is not an excuse but an explanation). Stern and Pound crossed oceans to support their country's wartime enemies--Stein as an apologist for the Vichy regime, Pound as a propagandist for Mussolini, broadcasting fascist propaganda while fascists were killing Americans.

Pound got off on an insanity plea--he was Ivy League. And Stein had written successful Broadway musicals (yes!) so she was rehabilitated. Neither was working-class and so perhaps for that reason they escaped the fate of Lord Haw-Haw, whom the British hung with gusto. Can't say as I blame 'em, either.

So Orff's sins are less than those of lesser artists. Maybe I'm just feeling bourgeois squeamishness. Well, then I am.

* Of note: a young Ezra Pound and his mother:

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/97/EzraPound%26IsabelPound1898.jpg

"Ezra's mom--has got it goin' on--Ezra's mom--who-o-oa..."

2537251

But EVERYTHING about us can be explained by evolution.

As a cultural anthropologist, I can only agree with that statement if we use a very broad definition of evolution; specifically one that includes cultural evolution as well as biological. We do a lot of things to fit in with the group, but the definition of fitting in varies faster than biology can possibly allow for. Also, language affects the symbols we use to think about things. But I digress.

Tragedy certainly makes sense from a sociological standpoint: don't kill yourself over teenage romance, make a damn decision, don't fight your fate are all good lessons to teach kids in one's society, or at least were in the context in which the stories I'm thinking of were written. Society, as a whole, benefits from its members learning these lessons. (Or it thinks it does. Cultures can have mental blocks and cognitive dissonance too) So I can see a number of people sitting through a staging of Hamlet and the only pleasure they get out of it is "See how intellectual I am! Notice my improved status!" because society want to encourage this.

Later on it got tied into a showing of wealth, which can make a work of art last a lot longer than it otherwise should.

But some other people actually enjoy it. I'm not really one of them, so from here out I'm thinking out loud. I can appreciate a good staging on a technical level (and being proud of another member of one's tribe would be an evolutionary doggie-biscuit).

Is "dying well" something that excites a pleasure center? I think maybe it must be; people put a lot of stake into honor, in a way almost outsized by the obvious utility of the thing. Perhaps, as you noted with drama, part of our brain is saying "If I were faced with the realization that I had accidentally married my own mother, I would have the honor to be a man and put my own eyes out."

Or not. I don't know.

2537561

And I still think you are cheating. You can say people like comedy because they like to laugh, but that doesn't explain the why or the what of any of it. It's a non-explanation.

Aha! Now I think you are cheating, by using an example where the difficulty is that we don't understand why people laugh. We understand why people like sex and violence.

2537561

Meanwhile, the actual dirty work of culture, the formation of people's minds, and so on, is done by the non-literary.

You're making me show my hand...

I'm highlighting 2 categories, which I'm calling "drama" and "literature". These are the two big classes of story types that account for almost everything you'll find in the bookstore.

The remarkable thing is that, in the bookstore, they're almost non-overlapping. Some publishers deal only with "literature"; others deal only with "commercial fiction".

I'm going to argue that this is deliberate; that editors of "literature" dislike dramatic stories, and that editors of dramatic stories dislike "literature". And I'm going to argue that this is a recent historical split. Older works such as the Iliad, the Death of Arthur, Don Quixote, and Hamlet were both literary and dramatic. And I'll argue that this split does not exist in fan-fiction.

Only that's tangential to developing a theory of story, so I don't know when I'll get to that.

2537528

I'm thinking mainly of the segments which parodied the sort of things one could usually see on the BBC in the late 60's and early 70's.

For instance one could see a lot of segments dealing with fears of rising crime and youth violence. Simply invert the paradigm and you get:

(Now you're going to say "but that's just one example," and I'm going to say "what do you want--a statistical analysis of Monty Python's entire oeuvre?" And then I'm going to kick myself because of course that's exactly what you want and you could write an algorithm to do it and code it. In Cobol, if need be.)

(Did you ever bloody talk to my bloody friend who wants to give you a bloody job, by the way? :raritydespair:)

2537584

As a cultural anthropologist,

:pinkiegasp:
Hold it right there!

How do you get to be a cultural anthropologist? What's your typical workday like?

Seriously, that sounds fun.

2537679

How do you get to be a cultural anthropologist? What's your typical workday like?

"Tonight on Dirty Jobs..."

2537679 Formal answer: by training. (That's what my degree is in)

Serious but informal answer: any one can, and everyone should, do this in their day-today life: pay attention to how people do... stuff. That's it.

Anthropology is just the study of people, and culture doesn't actually mean anything, to cultural anthropologists. It just the things that a group of people (however you decide to define a the group) tend to do.

But mostly it affects they way I look at questions of human behavior. The difference is especially prominent when compared to Titanium Dragon: he's a geneticist, so when presented with a near-universal human behavior, his first instinct is to look for a genetic (or at least biological) reason. My first instinct is to look for a cultural answer.

So we tend to approach the same problems very differently. Both approaches are completely valid, of course.

And because of that, I 1) tend to pay attention to the way words affect interactions between people, which is really obvious when two people are assigning different definitions to the same word 2) I tend to put a lot of weight on socialization (over genetic tendency) when examining behavior and 3) I think people are a lot more fluid in their behavior than most people assume they are.

And since my day job includes management consulting, I do and use anthropology to get paid - sort of, but close enough.

:twilightsmile:


2537697 "Mike tries to figure out why anyone thought opening a curry truck in Maine was a good idea."

2537599
We have as much of an understanding of sex and violence as we do of laughter. We can say: this social benefit, these chemical or electrical signals in the brain, this mechanical behavior, this many times each week, these long term effects on psychology, these physical or mental abnormalities which overstimulate or block the functioning ...

You attribute sex and violence to a lower order of being--to say that it is just the lizard brain--but animals whose behavior patterns are sufficiently close to humans (rats, chimpanzees, dogs) also "laugh." Many of these animals are still regulated by a heat cycle, so it could be argued human sexuality is of a higher order of complexity and social involvement than laughter.
I'm not denying you couldn't produce a functional evolutionary explanation for erotica, but it would be far more involved than the one you've offered.

However, you don't really read or write erotica, and I feel like I've dragged you into a particular conversation you were neither interested in nor in need of. So I'm prepared to drop it at that if you want the last word.

2537638
You'll have to expand on that dichotomy more some time later, because I don't really see it. I'd say the average pot boiler (Da Vinci Code) fails your drama definition because nobody cares about the characters. It relies entirely on the twists and turns, and the protagonist is just there to occupy a narrative space.

I don't know anything about fiction publishing, so I can't comment on that.

2537986

You'll have to expand on that dichotomy more some time later, because I don't really see it. I'd say the average pot boiler (Da Vinci Code) fails your drama definition because nobody cares about the characters. It relies entirely on the twists and turns, and the protagonist is just there to occupy a narrative space.

You're right. The dichotomy in the marketplace is between "literary" and "commercial" fiction, and Da Vinci Code is commercial. Not everything commercial relies on caring what happens to the characters. But the techniques used in commercial fiction, especially action / potboiler stories, are very similar to the ones used in what I called dramatic fiction. They use the same dramatic structures with the same prominent place given to tension and pacing. I tried to deal with this in footnote 2, but I haven't worked that into my definition of drama. I think character drama and action are closely related. Some other genres are more of a problem, like mystery and science fiction.

Hap

2537251 I think it's simpler than that. A tragedy tells us that, even if we fail, "it's not my fault."

Excuse-making and blame-shifting are so deeply ingrained in western thought, it almost has to be evolutionarily supported somehow. I mean, kids nowadays consider "failing with a good excuse" to be equivalent to "succeeding."

... You would enjoy the book "A Theory of Fun For Game Design". (You seem to be the kind of person who has already read it.) It talks about just this kind of dog-treat and reward for learning stuff, except of course at a somewhat higher/less-plain-metaphor level.

2535235
... Now I'm wondering about a (alien?) species with three-part brains, and whether instead of two opposing thought-processes (such as the classic shoulder angel/shoulder devil) they would have three...

2537251
This leads me to think we need a different term for, pardon my handwaviness, that. It seems to me that stories of this type don't have to be dark. It's just that they often are, for reasons I'm deceitfully sure I "know", or knew when I started writing this paragraph, but can't quite put into words right now.

2545821

Tricameral thinking from tri-lobed brains? That could be a fascinating kind of thing. The aphorisms they'd have would be more complicated, too, now that I think about it. ("Of three minds", etc. etc.)

Perhaps they'd have developed trinary code. :twilightsheepish:

Food porn = Most modern cookery books. God knows, they have little other purpose.

3373498 What makes a cookery book modern?

I'm kinda surprised that cookbooks are such good sellers. How many cookbooks does a person need? My mom cooked every day for decades with just one cookbook. Almost everything she made was from a recipe she copied from someone else, not from a book.

3381975 Regarding food-porn, quoting from here:

The emphasis is on gorgeously shot images – often dubbed “food porn” – rather than instructional recipes, Leith said.

I work part-time in a charity shop selling second-hand books, cookery books move very slowly. All those celebrity chef cookbooks, they end up on a table outside the shop selling for 50p a time, they still hardly move. Nice pictures though.

3382612 Yet the big chains still stock whole sections of cookbooks. I wonder if the cookbooks are fashion items--like, nobody wants to buy last year's celebrity's cook-book.

3382658 Pretty much. Also, some executive's wife can throw a dinner party with recipes by the latest celebrity chef - that she has cooked with her own hands - and enjoy the added benefit of being current.

Though putting it in those terms makes me sound a little jaded.

3382675 That's funny. Here in the midwest, a recipe that's less than a hundred years old is viewed with suspicion.

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