When bungling the details of the Holocaust (who needs history?), he treats the reader to grammatical errors. He does not know the difference between a metaphor and a simile. He promises a paradox in his title, but none is forthcoming. This is unfamiliar territory for Gottschall. Literary terms such as “irony” do what Gottschall claims that no one before him has done: They allow us to distance ourselves from our stories by cataloging their devices. Gottschall cannot be expected to recognize that. Psychology may not have much to say about stories, but it does have a name for that move: “displacement.” The operative literary term would be irony. Gottschall dismisses uncomfortable realities by claiming that others do so. Again and again he does what he thinks he is criticizing: treating as evidence what supports his story, and ignoring the rest. Right after a pungent section characterizing history as the useless projection of the present upon the past, he cites a book of history, because it says what he wants it to say. ![]() When it suits him, Gottschall cites examples taken from the very disciplines that he has dismissed. They spoke in questions, riddles and parables, meant to refresh minds and souls. His portrayal of Jesus and Socrates as tellers of stories is exactly wrong. Gottschall does mention history and journalism, but only to dismiss them as elements of our culture’s storytelling “machine.” In this bonfire of the humanities, Gottschall frees himself from knowing what novels say, disciplines demand or traditions offer. Philosophers have been hard at work on story that goes unacknowledged. His notion that stories tell us arose out of the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s. Gottschall demonstrates the power of stories by falling for his own. Defending this version, he ignores others who have made arguments very similar to his own, and dismisses whole disciplines and professions that offer counterarguments to his views. Yet in this book Gottschall tells just such a story about himself: a heroic scholar whose original insight challenges our preconceptions, leading a charge against an enemy tribe of terrifying left-wing academics. These are perfectly sensible points, made decades ago by Hannah Arendt. What might seem like innocent narrative tension can mean the rallying of one tribe against another. In “The Story Paradox,” he explains that stories filter what we should hear into what we want to hear. The universal story hard-wired into our brains is, says Gottschall, one in which everything gets worse until it gets better. And everyone is the same kind of storyteller, Jesus and Socrates and all the rest. In other words: We don’t tell stories, they tell us. ![]() Gottschall, a research fellow at Washington & Jefferson College, tells us that “for as long as there have been humans, we’ve been telling the same old stories, in the same old way, for the same old reasons.” We live in “unconscious obedience to the universal grammar” of stories. He concludes from this that no one has ever undertaken his subject, the “science” of how stories work. He sets a memorable scene of a morning spent in the lounge of a college psychology department flipping through the indexes of textbooks. It is a “considerable bother,” says Jonathan Gottschall, to write a book he lightens the task by writing about himself and excusing himself from extensive research. THE STORY PARADOX How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down By Jonathan Gottschall
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