The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall

Author:Jonathan Gottschall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)

VIRTUE REWARDED

The Greek philosopher Plato banished poets and storytellers from his ideal republic for, among other sins, peddling immoral fare. And Plato’s was just the first in a long string of panic attacks about the way fiction corrodes morality—how penny dreadfuls, dime novels, comics, moving pictures, television, or video games are corrupting the youth, turning them slothful and aggressive and perverted.

But Plato was wrong, and so were his panicked descendants. Fiction is, on the whole, intensely moralistic. Yes, evil occurs, and antiheroes, from Milton’s Satan to Tony Soprano, captivate us. But fiction virtually always puts us in a position to judge wrongdoing, and we do so with gusto. Sometimes we find ourselves rooting perversely for dark heroes such as Satan or Soprano, or even the child molester Humbert Humbert in Lolita, but we aren’t asked to approve of their cruel and selfish behavior, and storytellers almost never allow them to live happily ever after.

One of the first novels in English was Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). That subtitle could be tacked onto most stories that humans have dreamed up, from the first folktales to modern soap operas and professional wrestling. Story runs on poetic justice, or at least on our hopes for it. As the literary scholar William Flesch shows in his book Comeuppance, much of the emotion generated by a story—the fear, hope, and suspense—reflects our concern over whether the characters, good and bad, will get what they deserve. Mostly they do, but sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t, we close our books with a sigh, or trudge away from the theater, knowing that we have just experienced a tragedy.

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