the uses of narrative

Life imitates art?

1. Stories provide low-cost, low-risk surrogate experience. They satisfy a need to experiment with answers to "what if?" questions that focus on the problems, threats, and opportunities life might have thrown before our ancestors, or might throw before us, both as individuals and as collectives. Fictions are preparations for life and its surprises.

2. Stories—whether overtly fictional, mythological, or representing real events—can be richly instructive sources of factual (or putatively factual) information. The didactic purpose of storytelling is diminished in literate cultures, but by providing a vivid and memorable way of communicating information, it likely had actual survival benefits in the Pleistocene.

3. Stories encourage us to explore the points of view; beliefs, motivations, and values of other human minds, inculcating potentially adaptive interpersonal and social capacities. They extend mind-reading capabilities that begin in infancy and come into full flower in adult sociality: Stories provide regulation for social behavior.

Narrative has to begin with a problem

Cross-culturally today and through all of known cultural history, stories are about problems and conflict: competing human interests for power or love are prime topics, as well as natural threats to life and limb. In this way, the most abstract characterization that can be given of stories is that they involve (1) a human will and (2) some kind of resistance to it. That is why "Mary was hungry, Mary ate dinner" narrates a sequence of events that does not yet seem like a story, while "John was starving, but the pantry was empty" does sound like the beginning of one. Obstacles—to life, wealth, ambition, love, comfort, status, or power—are one central element in the fundamental idea of a story; the other element is how a human will triumphantly overcomes—or tragically fails to overcome—obstacles. Stories are intrinsically about how the minds of real or fictional characters attempt to surmount problems, which means stories not only take their audiences into fictional settings but also take them into the inner lives of imaginary people...

Narrative deals with the human condition

...The issue of dealing with human relationships of many variety--social coalitions of kinship or tribal affinity; issues of status; reciprocal exchange; the complexities of sex and child rearing; struggles over resources; benevolence and hostility; friendship and nepotism; conformity and independence; moral obligations, altruism, and selfishness--constitute the major themes and subjects of literature and its oral antecedents. Stories are seen in all cultures because of the role they play in helping individuals and groups develop and deepen their own grasp of the human social and emotional experience. The teller of a story has, in the nature of the storytelling art, direct access to the inner mental experience of the story characters. This access is impossible to develop in other arts—music, dance, painting, and sculpture—to anything like the extent that it is available to oral or literary narrative. As Sugiyama points out, pictures can represent single views of a subject matter, and music can express emotions, but neither of these arts can unambiguously portray the complicated causal sequences of linked events and intentions that is natural to storytelling in its most rudimentary forms. Storytelling is a mirror of ordinary everyday social experience: of all the arts, it is the best suited to portray the mundane imaginative structures of memory, immediate perception, planning, calculation, and decision-making, both as we experience them ourselves and as we understand others to be experiencing them. But storytelling is also capable of taking us beyond the ordinary, and therein lies its mind-expanding capacity.

- Denis Dutton