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How has our fascination with fiction changed throughout written history?

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Why, throughout human history, have people been so drawn to fiction?

Alexandre Duret-Lutz/Flickr

When an English archaeologist named George Smith was 31 years old, he became enchanted with an ancient tablet in the British Museum. Years earlier, in 1845, when Smith was only a five-year-old boy, Austen Henry Layard, Henry Rawlinson, and Hormuzd Rassam began excavations across what is now Syria and Iraq. In the subsequent years they discovered thousands of stone fragments, which they later discovered made up 12 ancient tablets. But even after the tablet fragments had been pieced together, little had been translated. The 3,000-year-old tablets remained nearly as mysterious as when they had been buried in the ruins of Mesopotamian palaces.

An alphabet, not a language, cuneiform is incredibly difficult to translate, especially when it is on tablets that have been hidden in Middle Eastern sands for three millennia. The script is shaped triangularly ( cuneus means "wedge" in Latin) and the alphabet consists of more than 100 letters. It is used to write in Sumerian, Akkadian, Urartian, or Hittite, depending on where, when, and by whom it was written. It is also an alphabet void of vowels, punctuation, and spaces between words.

Even so, Smith decided he would be the man to crack the code. Propelled by his interests in Assyriology and biblical archaeology, Smith, who was employed as a classifier by the British Museum, taught himself Sumerian and literary Akkadian.

In 1872, after the tablets had been sitting in the British Museum's storage for nearly two decades, Smith had a breakthrough: The complex symbols were describing a story. Upon translating the 11th tablet, now widely regarded as the most important part of the story, Smith told a coworker, "I am the first person to read that after 2000 years of oblivion." The U.K. Prime Minister at the time, William Gladstone, even showed up to a lecture Smith later gave on the tablets, whereupon an audience member commented, "This must be the only occasion on which the British Prime Minister in office has attended a lecture on Babylonian literature."
Humans are inclined to see narratives where there are none because it can afford meaning to our lives, a form of existential problem-solving.
The story on the 11th tablet that Smith had cracked was in fact the oldest story in the world: The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh has all the trappings of a modern story: a protagonist who goes on an arduous journey, a romance with a seductive woman, a redemptive arc, and a full cast of supporting characters.

Humans have been telling stories for thousands of years, sharing them orally even before the invention of writing. In one way or another, much of people's lives are spent telling stories-often about other people. In her paper "Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective," evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar found stories' direct relevance to humans: Social topics-especially gossip-account for 65 percent of all human conversations in public places.

Stories can be a way for humans to feel that we have control over the world. They allow people to see patterns where there is chaos, meaning where there is randomness. Humans are inclined to see narratives where there are none because it can afford meaning to our lives-a form of existential problem-solving. In a 1944 study conducted by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel at Smith College, 34 college students were shown a short film in which two triangles and a circle moved across the screen and a rectangle remained stationary on one side of the screen. When asked what they saw, 33 of the 34 students anthropomorphized the shapes and created a narrative: The circle was "worried," the "little triangle" was an "innocent young thing," the big triangle was "blinded by rage and frustration." Only one student recorded that all he saw were geometric shapes on a screen.

Stories can also inform people's emotional lives. Storytelling, especially in novels, allows people to peek into someone's conscience to see how other people think. This can affirm our own beliefs and perceptions, but more often, it challenges them. Psychology researcher Dan Johnson recently published a study in Basic and Applied Social Psychology that found reading fiction significantly increased empathy towards others, especially people the readers initially perceived as "outsiders" (e.g. foreigners, people of a different race, skin color, or religion).

Interestingly, the more absorbed in the story the readers were, the more empathetic they behaved in real life. Johnson tested this by "accidentally" dropping a handful of pens when participants did not think they were being assessed. Those who had previously reported being "highly absorbed" in the story were about twice as likely to help pick up the pens.

A recent study in Science magazine adds more support to the idea that stories can help people understand others, determining that literary fiction "uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to characters' subjective experiences." That's to say, if you read novels, you can probably read emotions.

But why start telling stories in the first place? Their usefulness in understanding others is one reason, but another theory is that storytelling could be an evolutionary mechanism that helped keep our ancestors alive.
Storytelling could be an evolutionary mechanism that helped keep our ancestors alive.
The theory is that if I tell you a story about how to survive, you'll be more likely to actually survive than if I just give you facts. For instance, if I were to say, "There's an animal near that tree, so don't go over there," it would not be as effective as if I were to tell you, "My cousin was eaten by a malicious, scary creature that lurks around that tree, so don't go over there." A narrative works off of both data and emotions, which is significantly more effective in engaging a listener than data alone. In fact, Jennifer Aaker, a professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, says that people remember information when it is weaved into narratives "up to 22 times more than facts alone."

The value humans place on narrative is made clear in the high esteem given to storytellers. Authors, actors, directors-people who spin narratives for a living are some of the most famous people in the world. Stories are a form of escapism, one that can sometimes make us better people while entertaining, but there seems to be something more at play.

Perhaps the real reason that we tell stories again and again-and endlessly praise our greatest storytellers-is because humans want to be a part of a shared history. What Smith discovered on that 11th tablet is the story of a great flood. On the 11th tablet-or the "deluge tablet"-of Gilgamesh, a character named Uta-napishtim is told by the Sumerian god Enki to abandon his worldly possessions and build a boat. He is told to bring his wife, his family, the craftsmen in his village, baby animals, and foodstuffs. It is almost the same story as Noah's Ark, as told in both the Book of Genesis and in the Quran's Suran 71.

Humans have been telling the same stories for millennia. Author Christopher Booker claims there are only seven basic plots, which are repeated over and over in film, in television, and in novels with just slight tweaks. There is the "overcoming the monster" plot ( Beowulf, War of the Worlds); "rags to riches" ( Cinderella, Jane Eyre); "the quest" ( Illiad, The Lord of the Rings); "voyage and return" ( Odyssey, Alice in Wonderland); "rebirth" ( Sleeping Beauty, A Christmas Carol); "comedy" (ends in marriage); and "tragedy" (ends in death).

Helpful as stories can be for understanding the real world, they aren't themselves real. Is there such a thing as too much fiction? In Don Quixote, Cervantes writes of main character Alonso Quixano, "He read all night from sundown to dawn, and all day from sunup to dusk, until with virtually no sleep and so much reading he dried out his brain and lost his sanity ..."

The next morning, however, Alonso Quixano decided to turn himself into a knight. He changed himself into Don Quixote, deciding he would pave his own journey. Then he went off, "seeking adventures and doing everything that, according to his books, earlier knights had done."

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The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling

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Why, throughout human history, have people been so drawn to fiction? When an English archaeologist named George Smith was 31 years old, he became enchanted with an ancient tablet in the British Museum. Years earlier, in 1845, when Smith was only a five-year-old boy, Austen Henry Layard, Henry Rawlinson, and Hormuzd Rassam began excavations across what is now Syria and Iraq.

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Of all the indignities visited on the writer's life these days, none is more undignified than the story or pitch meeting, a ritual to which every writer, from the gazillion-dollar screenwriter to the lowly essayist, will sooner or later submit. "So tell us the story," the suits say after a few minutes of banter and schmooze, and the writer gulps and jumps in. "Well, uh, it's sort of, like-it's sort of a fish out of water story..."and then as one pale incident succeeds the next, the tycoons emit a slow burn of polite disbelief and boredom, ending with a forced smile and a we'll-get-back-to-you. Sometime. Soon...

And yet something interesting, even encouraging, is revealed in this ritual, all its humiliations aside. Stories, more even than stars or spectacle, are still the currency of life, or commercial entertainment, and look likely to last longer than the euro. There's no escaping stories, or the pressures to tell them. And so the pathetic story-pitcher turns to pop science-to Jonathan Gottschall's new book, " The Storytelling Animal," for instance- for some scientific, or at least speculative, ideas about what makes stories work and why we like them. Gottschall's encouraging thesis is that human beings are natural storytellers-that they can't help telling stories, and that they turn things that aren't really stories into stories because they like narratives so much. Everything-faith, science, love-needs a story for people to find it plausible. No story, no sale.

O.K. Anyone in dissent? But this claim, itself hardly momentous, then opens onto something sadly like a forced march of the platitudes: We all like stories. When we don't have a story we make one up-that's why the juxtapositions of film editing work. People usually like stories to have "morals" at the end. Religions are so successful because they tell moralish stories, though, to be sure, some of their stories are nice and some are not nice at all. Different people like different kinds of morals in their stories. Hitler loved the heroic stories of Wagner, for instance. That was too bad. ("The musical stories that Hitler most loved did not make him a better person," Gottschall writes.) On the other hand, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an influential story about the evils of slavery. That was good. People say that fiction is dead. Well, "when did authors sell more books to a more devoted public than John Grisham, Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, Nora Roberts, Stephen King or Steig Larsson?" Gottschall asks. Writers exist who have tried to alter or revise the "universal grammar in world fiction"-Proust and Joyce, for instance, but "aside from English professors, no one much wants to read them." (Oh, yes? Ask any publisher whether they would rather have the Proust and Joyce backlists or those of the Nora Roberts and Tom Clancy of Proust's and Joyce's day. Really good stories, like really good wines, really do drink well for a longer time.)

The interesting questions about stories, which have, as they say, excited the interests of readers for millennia, are not about what makes a taste for them "universal," but what makes the good ones so different from the dull ones, and whether the good ones really make us better people, or just make us people who happen to have heard a good story. This is a case, as with women's fashion, where the subtle, "surface" differences are actually the whole of the subject. Questions about those small differences seem not to have occurred to Gottschall. There is not a single reference in Gottschall's book to such students of the mechanics of storytelling as William Empson, Samuel Johnson, Lionel Trilling, Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, or Randall Jarrell, all of whom brooded long and hard upon stories and their subjects. Wilson, for instance, who despised "college professors" and their tastes, tackled the problem of the "boring" modern story at great and lucid length, ending with the intriguing conclusion that each age has its own acceptable boredoms, with Joyce's boredoms being no greater than Sir Walter Scott's. It is one thing to think that psychology may solve problems that baffle philosophy or criticism; it well may. But to think that the invocation of empirical studies on a subject frees one from the job of finding out what the great instinctive psychologists have said about that subject before you got to it is just misguided.

Do entertaining stories make us more ethical? "The only way to find out is to do the science," Gottschall says, reasonably enough, and then announces that "the constant firing of our neurons in response to fictional stimuli strengthens and refines the neural pathways that lead to skillful navigation of life's problems" and that the studies show that therefore people who read a lot of novels have better social and empathetic abilities, are more skillful navigators, than those who don't. He insists that storytelling is adaptive, on strictly Darwinian terms, but surely this would only have meaning if he could show that there were human-like groups who failed to compete because they didn't trade tales-or even that tribes who told lots of stories did better than tribes that didn't. Are societies, like that of Europe now, which has mostly rejected religious storytellers, less prosperous and peaceful than ones, like Europe back when, that didn't? Would a human-like society that had lots of food and sex but no stories die out? When has this happened? (It's true that there are those who think that the "symbolic" revolution among our sort of people doomed the Neanderthals, but this is, to put it mildly, a very speculative story, more "Star Trek" than "Mr. Wizard.")

And if these claims seem almost too large to argue, the more central claim-that stories increase our empathy, and "make societies work better by encouraging us to behave ethically"-seems too absurd even to argue with. Surely if there were any truth in the notion that reading fiction greatly increased our capacity for empathy then college English departments, which have by far the densest concentration of fiction readers in human history, would be legendary for their absence of back-stabbing, competitive ill-will, factional rage, and egocentric self-promoters; they'd be the one place where disputes are most often quickly and amiably resolved by mutual empathetic engagement. It is rare to see a thesis actually falsified as it is being articulated.

You just don't like the enterprise, and are territorial on behalf of your tribe, that of book readers and literary critics! I hear a resentful science-minded reader insist. Would you ever allow a book of evolutionary psychology applied to art not to be entirely fatuous? Actually, yes. Robin Dunbar's "Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language," from a few years back, for instance, had a thesis and a sharp one: that primates groom each other not to pick out nits, which do not really trouble them, but as a form of gossip, a way of exchanging social information-who grooms who for how long tells who's up and who's down. This primate grooming and the "gossip" that it entails actually produce brain-opiates; they're our monkey junk. Since human groups are roughly three times larger than other primate groups, tactile gossip was no longer enough to produce the opiates that make social existence tolerable, even pleasant, for primates. We started talking as a way of gossiping and grooming each other at a remove, so to speak-and, indeed, to this day, almost all talk, before it is communication, is gossip and grooming: "He said what?!" "They fired who?" We have to invent very natural unnatural situations-classrooms where everyone faces front, usually under the threat of more or less brutal discipline-to get people to use language for learning outside the gossip-context. This thesis may or may not be true, but it has the excitement of a theory that surprises: it's a good story.

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Can Science Explain Why We Tell Stories?

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Of all the indignities visited on the writer's life these days, none is more undignified than the story or pitch meeting, a ritual to which every writer, from the gazillion-dollar screenwriter to the lowly essayist, will sooner or later submit.

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How is folklore created and perpetuated in the digital world?

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Many believe our traditions around Halloween have religious roots.

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Over the past few decades, Halloween celebrations have gained in popularity , not only with children and families, but with all those fascinated with the spooky and scary.

As a scholar of myth and religion in popular culture, I look at Halloween with particular interest - especially the ways in which today's Halloween tradition came to evolve.

A pre-Christian tradition

Many practices associated with Halloween have origins in the pre-Christian, or pagan, religion of the Celts, the original inhabitants of the British Isles, as well as parts of France and Spain.

The Celts held a feast called Samhain - a celebration of the harvest, the end of summer and the turn of the year. Samhain was separated by six months from Beltane, an observance of the beginning of summer, which took place on May 1 and is now known as May Day. Because Samhain led into the cold, fruitless and dark days of winter, the feast was also an opportunity to contemplate death and to remember those who had gone before.

The Celts believed that the veil between the living and the dead was thinner during this time, and that spirits of the dead could walk on Earth. Bonfires were lit to ward off the coming winter darkness, but also to sacrifice livestock and crops as offerings to the gods and spirits.

Some scholars - because of the long historical association of the Celts with the Romans - have also linked the modern observance of Halloween to the Roman festival honoring Pomona , the goddess of fruit trees. During that festival people practiced divination, which uses occult for gaining knowledge of the future.

One of the practices was similar to the modern-day Halloween tradition of bobbing for apples - a party game in which people attempt to use only their teeth to pick up apples floating in a tub or a bowl of water. Originally, it was believed that whoever could bite the apple first would get married the soonest.
A bonfire, ancient tradition at Samhain
Later influences

Many of the modern-day practices of Halloween and even its name were influenced by Christianity.
People lighting candles on All Saints' Day. Reuters/Philippe Wojazer
Halloween coincides with Christian celebrations honoring the dead. In the autumn, Christians celebrate All Saints' Day - a day to honor martyrs who died for their faith and saints. They also celebrate All Souls' Day - a day to remember the dead and to pray for souls more generally.
The history of how these dates came to coincide is worth noting: It suggests ways in which the pagan holiday may have been absorbed into Christian observance. Starting around the seventh century A.D., Christians celebrated All Saints Day on May 13. In the mid-eighth century, however, Pope Gregory III moved All Saint's Day from May 13 to Nov. 1, so that it coincided with the date of Samhain.

Although there is disagreement about whether the move was made purposely so as to absorb the pagan practice, the fact is that from then on Christian and pagan traditions did begin to merge. In England, for example, All Saints Day came to be known as All Hallows Day . The night before became All Hallows Eve, Hallowe'en, or Halloween, as it is now known.

Around A.D. 1000 , Nov. 2 was established as All Souls Day. Throughout the Middle Ages, this three-day period was celebrated with Masses. But the Pagan tradition of appeasing the spirits of the dead remained, including the Christian - now Catholic - practice of lighting candles for the souls in Purgatory.
Guy Fawkes Day celebrations in East Sussex, England. Peter Trimming ,
People still light bonfires on Oct. 31, especially those in regions where the Celts originally settled. In Ireland, bonfires are lit on Halloween . In England, the bonfire tradition has been transferred to Nov. 5. This is known as Guy Fawkes Day and commemorates the Gunpowder Plot , a thwarted attempt by Catholics, led by Guy Fawkes, to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605.

There are other practices that continue today. In England, for example, one of the practices on All Hallows Eve was to go door to door begging for small currant biscuits called soul cakes , which were offered in exchange for prayers. While not all scholars agree , it is part of popular belief that this practice is echoed in the modern tradition of trick-or-treating.

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Tricking and Treating Has a Long History

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Over the past few decades, Halloween celebrations have gained in popularity, not only with children and families, but with all those fascinated with the spooky and scary. As a scholar of myth and religion in popular culture, I look at Halloween with particular interest - especially the ways in which today's Halloween tradition came to evolve.