Para além da linguagem, do simbólico, e da técnica, segundo Jonathan Gottschal em seu livro The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us human, é justamente a capacidade e vontade de tecer e contar histórias que caracteriza o humano.
The Storytelling Animal: A Conversation with Jonathan Gottschall
Stories are all around us. But what is it about the story that holds such a powerful grip on the human imagination? That’s the question thatJonathan Gottschall tackles in his new book, The Storytelling Animal. Stories can change our behavior. They can influence our perceptions. They may even have the potential to, quite literally, change the flow of history—or at least some parts of it.
In the following conversation, Gottschall explores the nature of human affinity for narrative and reflects on the future of story in the age of the Internet, video games, films, and ever-evolving media that may threaten to undermine—or at least, to change in unpredictable ways—the traditional bounds of our storytelling past.
MK: What was your inspiration for the book? Why did you choose psychology (as opposed to say, philosophy) as your main approach path?
JG: My work seeks to bridge the gap between the two cultures of the humanities and sciences. How can we use science to better understand fiction? And what can scientists learn from fiction and the other arts?
But the idea for this specific book came to me not from research but from a song. I was driving down the highway and happened to hear the country music artist Chuck Wicks singing “Stealing Cinderella”—a song about a little girl growing up to leave her father behind. Before I knew it, I was blind from tears, and I had to veer off on the road to get control of myself and to mourn the time—still more than a decade off—when my own little girls would fly the nest. I sat there on the side of the road feeling sheepish and wondering, “What just happened?”
Who hasn’t had a similar experience? When we submit to fiction–whether in novels, songs, or films—we allow ourselves to be invaded by storytellers who seize control of us cognitively and emotionally. I wrote the book to try to understand how stories—the fake struggles of fake people—could have such power over us.
MK: Why hasn’t this book been written before? In other words, why is it so easy for us to be taken in by story—and yet much more difficult to ask the question that you posed, why exactly it is that we are taken in?
JG: Well, I do draw on a lot of excellent research by people working in a similar vein. But I agree with the spirit of your question: If story is such a big deal in human life, why doesn’t it get more attention? I think it’s because, in general, we just aren’t fully aware of it. In the same way that plankton isn’t aware that it’s tumbling through salt water, we humans aren’t aware that we are constantly moving through story—from novels, to films, to religious myths, to dreams and fantasies, to jokes, pro wrestling, and children’s make believe.
From a young age, we are fascinated by stories. Image Credit: Kodomut, Creative Commons.
Then there’s the problem of academic boundaries. In universities, we chop story to pieces and spread it across departments. Psychologists get dreams. Musicologists get song. Literary scholars get novels. Anthropologists and folklorists get traditional tales. And so on. This keeps us from seeing stories–from opera librettos to nightmares–as aspects of a unified mental process involving the construction of imaginative scenarios. And it keeps us from seeing how story infiltrates every aspect of how we live and think.
