Touch the firehose of ds106, the most recent flow of content from all of the blogs syndicated into ds106. As of right now, there have been 92466 posts brought in here going back to December 2010. If you want to be part of the flow, first learn more about ds106. Then, if you are truly ready and up to the task of creating web art, sign up and start doing it.

Storytelling 101: The end of the animal

Posted by
|

no-animals-were-harmedThe rest of Jonathan Gottschall’s book The Storytelling Animal is concerned with providing evidence for the argument that he started in the beginning of the book—that all storytelling emanates from our need to practice problem-solving, and that this relationship to imaginative—and imagined—conflict is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.

To this end, Gottschall defines story this way:

Story=Character + Conflict + Attempted Extraction

It’s a pretty solid definition, I think. We can quibble with what the words “character” and “conflict” mean—who determines what counts and what doesn’t count as a character, for example? But, overall, for five words? Totally solid definition.

But for me—and I don’t think I really realized this before I started re-reading The Storytelling Animal and blogging about it—story involves even fewer disparate elements.

For me, story is defined as something—anything—that insists on some kind of relationship between chronology and causation.

The simplest version of this equation is illustrated in the Kuleshov Experiment.

In this experiment, Lev Kuleshov put a moving image—a shot of Tsarist matinee idol Ivan Mosjoukine looking blankly at the camera—before another moving image—a shot of a bowl of soup. Then we cut back to Mosjoukine, then we cut to a new shot—of a coffin with a body in it. Then Mosjoukine again, then a lady reclining on a couch.

In each shot, Mosjoukine’s expression morphs, switching from hunger to sadness to lust without ever actually changing. It’s the same footage. And yet, in its subtleties, Mosjoukine’s expression seems a response to the image that comes right after.

We build, immediately, automatically, in our heads, a story. He hasn’t eaten; he wants the soup. He knows—or doesn’t know—the body; her death is tragic. He is repressing an urge to rush to the woman; what holds him back, though, we never learn.

Character, here, is present only in the sense that it’s a human being. But there’s still a story, there’s some relationship held in tension between the elements. What causes electricity between these elements, really, is tension and time. Is there something holding him back from eating the soup? Is he married, or is the woman reclining married? Is the grief he feels for the dead personal or universal?

More abstractly, though, the Big Bang—everything was small and then it expanded—that’s a story. The entirety of the thing we call “science”—that’s a  meandering, world-spanning story. Your chemistry textbook isn’t always a page-turner, but it’s filled with stories—how ions are made, what happens when an atom splits, what happens when matter changes its state.

The word “story” doesn’t just contain the collection of books labeled “fiction” and “non-fiction.” It encompasses the sciences—natural and social—not just the humanities. If something happens and then something else happens—whether it’s interesting or not—that’s a story.

That’s maybe what most interesting about Gottschall’s book, which is that even though Gottschall does an admirable job pointing out multiple perspectives on any particular issue, and he’s simultaneously very honest and persuasive regarding his own opinions, the book is still making certain arguments about what makes a “good story” instead of what constitutes a “story.”

Story is such a powerful thing that its power can’t be measured by such value judgments (ditto Galactus’s strength and endurance).

The “good” and “bad” judgments depend on technology, craft, and context. And for that, there’s no rule big enough to encompass everything that we point to when we point to “story.”

Next up, Wired for Story by Lisa Cron.

Add a comment

ds106 in[SPIRE]