In this installment of Narrative Evolution, Emmett Furey explores:
- Narrative Correlationism
- Person-to-Person Information Transfer
- Fiction and Narrative as Art
- Understanding Narrative and Discourse
- Sensory Input and Brain Processing
- Automatic Cognitive Processes
- Subjectivity in Narrative Experience
Narrative correlationism holds that the original purpose of conscious processing was to enable us to experience our lives as stories, because doing so could increase our chances of surviving and thriving in the world. And once humanity started experiencing our lives as stories, it was only a matter of time before we started telling stories to other people. At base, storytelling is just a way of transmitting information from one person to another, and, as it turns out, there are a lot of reasons why person-to-person information transfer is valuable, from an evolutionary perspective.
We’ve discussed at length the scenario of nascent humans using their new-found faculty of consciousness to learn about the dangers of unfamiliar predators through firsthand experience. But obviously it would be much safer if someone else could simply tell you about those dangers, so you never had to experience them yourself.
This kind of person-to-person information transfer was, of course, made all the easier by the advent of written and spoken language. Sharing a common language allowed humans to warn each other when any kind of danger was imminent, with a high degree of specificity and urgency. Language also allowed humans to teach each other how to become better hunters and gatherers, and how to work together to tackle problems that no one person would have been able to solve alone. Written language has enabled the wisdom of the past to survive far beyond the people who originally coined it. And mass production and our modern internet have enabled the dissemination of information farther and faster than anytime in human history.
Of course, person-to-person communication inevitably led to the chief focus of narrative correlationism: narrative as a form of art. Fiction, in particular: Invented stories, peopled by characters who aren’t real and never were. Now, I’m not going to spend a great deal of time here describing the ways in which fiction can add value to the human experience, we’ll discuss that at length deeper into this series. But we’ve got time, at least, for a speed round. Fictional stories can sometimes be parables, tales which - while not literally true - can convey useful morals and other lessons about society and how best to live in it. Fictional stories can help us learn at an optimal aesthetic distance things which could sometimes be harder to learn from comparable real-life experience. Consuming fictional stories about people who are different from us can be a great way to foster empathy, to get us closer to understanding the thoughts and feelings of others.
Fiction, in other words, “allows us to experiment in a controlled and safe manner with intentions, emotions, and emotion-evoking situations that would be impossible and often highly undesirable in the real world.” (1) Identifying with situations presented in fiction that mirror things we’ve experienced in our real lives can help us better understand and come to terms with those experiences. On top of that, devoting our full attentional resources to a work of fiction can also distract us from thinking about things that are preying on our mind that might otherwise be damaging to our emotional health. Sometimes, in other words, consuming narrative fiction can simply be a form of escapist entertainment.
Consuming stories has certainly always been one of the foremost joys of my own life. If you were anything like I was in my formative years, nothing your parents could have told you would have been more hotly anticipated and full of promise than, “I’m going to read you a story.” But buried in that simple statement is the core of one of the most divisive questions in all of narratology: Is a children’s storybook a narrative, in and of itself, or does narrative only exist in the mind of the beholder? Well, our definition of narrative is dependent upon meaning, and meaning - as narrative correlationism understands it - cannot exist absent a brain capable of making those kinds of conscious connections. So, by that way of thinking, a book isn’t a story in and of itself, it’s merely a representation of one; Nothing more than a means of transmitting information from one person to another.
Let’s take a novel as an example. For a fully conscious adult who takes language and consciousness for granted, it’s easy enough to assume that a story springs fully formed from the pages of a book. You might not think that reading a novel should require an instruction manual, but interpreting a narrative out of that particular medium is actually decidedly complex. You have to understand the concept of spoken language. Those specific vocal sounds, when used in certain configurations, connote meaning. You have to recognize that written symbols can represent spoken language. You have to actually know the language the novel is written in, and be literate in it. If the novel is in English, you have to know that English text is meant to be read left to right, top to bottom. And really, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Absent all of that knowledge, a novel is just a bound sheaf of papers with unrecognizable markings printed on them. Without a conscious brain to interpret them, the words on those pages have no meaning. And absent that meaning, there can be no story.
Narrative, by this way of thinking, is not a property of the book, but the cognitive experience we have while reading the book. But, if that’s the case, what do we call the book itself? For our purposes, we’ll be referring to it as discourse. Because, again, when you boil it down, a novel is just words on a page. And if narrative is the way our brains ascribe cohesive meaning to a bundle of connected information, then the discourse is merely the information itself, no more and no less. So, a piece of narrative discourse is just a means of conveying information from one human being to another. It starts as a story in the mind of the author, and (ideally) ends as a story in the mind of the audience, but in the middle, it’s just discourse; Just information waiting to be converted back into story through the prism of a conscious human brain.
So, if all narrative art is discourse - an effort to convey information from one human being to another - it should be evident, then, that every narrative medium must be tailored to one or more of our five senses. After all, our senses are the conduits through which we take in information about the world. But with five different kinds of sensory data that our body is capable of processing, and narrative mediums that cater to different combinations of all of them, is it really possible to come up with a single definition of narrative that encompasses all of them? Wouldn’t that, at a certain point, be like comparing apples to oranges? Well, neuroscience shows us that that is not the case at all. Even though there do exist specialized brain regions that are dedicated to processing specific kinds of sensory information, there is evidence to suggest that nearly any brain region is capable of processing any kind of sensory input.
Bor cites an experiment in which ferrets had their brains rewired such that visual input would be processed through their auditory cortex instead of their visual one. (2) It has also been documented that, in people who have been blind from birth, their otherwise-unneeded visual cortex can adapt to become the brain region where they process words when reading Braille, a means of communication that is conveyed entirely by touch (2). So, while our five senses might feel distinct to us, as far as our brain is concerned, all of that input is just data to be processed. That’s why our conception of stories as ‘information meaningfully connected across time’ is applicable to all five of our senses and any combination thereof, and to all discursive mediums currently known and heretofore undiscovered.
Now, as we explored earlier, our narrative worldview operates essentially on automatic pilot. While there is such a thing as self-directed cognition, our brain is nonetheless always forging new connections and accessing old ones on its own, on a subconscious level, whether we like it or not. And the fact that these connections occur automatically means that the very act of noticing something ensures a correlation between that thing and something from our past; There is, in other words, no way for us to perceive something new without tying it back to something we already know. This pervasive and inescapable correlation between our past and our present is a fundamental precept of narrative correlationism. And it is through this lens that we’ll be exploring in the next article the philosophical conundrum of subjectivity, and how that subjectivity influences both the way we experience narrative art and the way we create it.
SOURCES
(1) Mar, R.A. and Oatley, K. (2008). The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173-192. doi: 10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x. PMID: 26158934.
(2) Bor, D. (2012). Ravenous Brain (p. 68). Basic Books.
