The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down

Gottschall recycles many of his previous claims about the power and danger of narratives in this tedious and self-contradictory sequel to The Storytelling Animal. Contending that “all narrative is reductionist” and that storytelling is humanity’s “essential poison,” Gottschall cherry-picks dozens of examples to build his case, noting, for instance, that Plato’s Republic “condemned storytellers as professional liars who got the body politic drunk on emotion,” and that Tommy Wiseau’s notoriously bad 2003 movie, The Room, fails to convey its misogynistic message because it doesn’t generate “narrative transportation.” In Gottschall’s view, historical storytelling “frequently amounts to a kind of revenge fantasy, where the malefactors of our past can be resurrected, tried, and convicted for violating moral codes they frequently hadn’t heard of.” But he downplays contemporaneous evidence of people risking their lives to, for instance, resist the Nazi Party and end slavery in the American South, and he doesn’t acknowledge any social and cultural histories that do not “wrench real-world facts into line with the most powerful grammar of fiction.” Though his sharp sense of humor entertains, Gottschall’s overly broad and reductive argument falls flat. This study is more provocative than persuasive. (Nov.)