ROWNEY MARSHAL RESPONSE TO:

 “ON THE ORIGIN OF STORIES: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction”

by BRIAN BOYD,

published May 2009, by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

 

Brian Boyd is ‘University Distinguished Professor’ in the Dept of English at the University of Auckland, specialising in Nabokov.

 

The above-named study’s book blurb summarises the content as follows:

 

   In the first half of the book

“Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories, how our minds are shaped to understand them, and what a difference an evolutionary understanding of human nature makes to the stories we love.

Art is a specifically human adaptation…it offers tangible advantages for human survival… derives from play, itself an adaptation widespread among intelligent animals…sharpened social cognition, encouraged co operation and fostered creativity.

After considering art as adaptation, Boyd examines Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ and Dr Seuss’s ‘Horton Hears a Who!’, demonstrating how an evolutionary lens can offer new understanding and appreciation of works of literature. What triggers our emotional engagement with these words? What patterns facilitate our responses? The need to hold an audience’s attention…is the fundamental problem facing all storytellers. Enduring artists arrive at solutions that appeal to cognitive universals: an insight out of step with contemporary criticism, which obscures both the individual and universal.”

 

PRESS REVIEW in New Scientist of 23^rd May 2009, pg 44.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227091.900-review-how-storytelling-shaped-humanity.html

 

ROWNEY MARSHAL RESPONSE Introduction:

 

I was delighted that anyone had written on this topic and found the study exciting, innovative and stimulating. However, some of Boyd’s analysis and conclusions differed from my own consideration of the subject, hence the response which I hope adds to the debate he has authoratively begun.

 

This is not an academic study, however. I have the cohones to engage, because, after decades of reading of both literature and science above the populist level for research, I have formed opinions , and because, motivated by a commitment in my scifi fiction to stay within parameters constrained by the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, and by an interest in furthering wonder at the cosmos by manipulating words not belief systems, I have a vested interest in developing an objective understanding of this subject.

 

ROWNEY MARSHAL RESPONSE Summary:

  

I start with refining some definitions:

Work as defined mechanically, emphasizing the time dimension, extended by Kauffman to include constraints and Marx to include the means of production, to initiate a cost-benefit analysis in societal groups.

Play as it differs in juvenile and adult populations, examining Boyd’s concept that play is rewarded rehearsal whilst also being free.

Types of play named as Diversion and distinguished from Rehearsal.

Comparing Rehearsal and Diversion with Work and allocating costs to each.

Feature of playing named as Immersion.

 

 

I continue with a discussion of audience investment of time in leisure pursuits and argue a special place for reading the modern novel format:

Place of work and play in society contrasting each with the audience investments.

Discrimination between audience investments in different art experiences, cost-benefits and features of human attentiveness, called Escapism and Exploration.

Audience attention and motivation constrained by energy and time limitations, in relation to selecting for non-survival activities and between types of activity for surplus time/energy.

Recent advent of literacy and impact on analysis of literature as rooted in conflated ‘arts’.

Tracing a modern niche for the behaviour of reading.

 

 

I add to Boyd’s study by differentiating between art maker and receiver:

Consideration of Boyd’s group selection pressures upon audience choices versus drivers for authors.

Constraints upon solo composers and their access to audiences as differing through time and societies.

Authorial characteristics of personality and the high investment/low return of composition as an endeavour that demands explanation.

Selection effects on solitary creativity, negative and positive reinforcements for the activity.

Inspiration concepts in creativity, recent work on brain modelling & configuration promoting possible creativity & traits required to sustain novel writing.

Special place for literary endeavour and specific characteristics of authors that support explorative fictionalizing, differing from other artistic labours.

Inaccessibility of readership implying self-sustaining motivation for the majority of writers, unable to achieve success in audience attention-grabbing.

Conclusion, writers need a separate explanation from audiences.

 

 

FULL RESPONSE ATTACHED AS PDF BELOW

 

 

 

ROWNEY MARSHAL

www.rowneymarshal.co.uk

contact@rowneymarshal.co.uk

If those two had separate heads to clash together I would. They make it sound so black and white, so limited to duality. Once the cosmic verbiage starts, disappearing up one’s own navel is almost inevitable.

The bottom line is that whatever Rowney Marshal’s public persona becomes, this is not a dialogue, it’s simply a couple of voices in the chorus, suddenly in danger of having to understudy the main role, without coaching or a script.

I have had lots of titles and retraining over the years. Keeping the peace between RM and BK requires many bridging characters, although for clarity of purpose, I prefer to think of us as Job Descriptions, although ordering the mental traffic is more like being a MC in a piccadilly of a circus, rather than a MD in an hierarchically structured firm. I have tried to argue for as few personalisations as I can get away with, and many characters remain only briefly as fictionalisations, keeping the bulk of the mental workforce professionals.

I have had names over the years, being a persistently-necessary complex. An elementary part of me started off as ‘God’, when I had quite a loud voice delivering commandments and a still small one that whispered constantly of failure to avoid original sin becoming. Faith failing instead, I got sublimated to avoid the pitfalls of repression (energising, demonising, obsessing) and dubbed ‘The Objective Observer’, which even I knew was not a job description, but a mission statement based on aims and objectives that were at best aspirational and never achievable. These days I’m not even the Minute Taker, more the producer of the occasional narrative highlights of too many histories to count.

And of course, that ‘I’ is only a pseudonym. But that’s part of the sanity ecology. If you don’t call all the personalities and characters ‘I’ and allow them all regulated and limited access to the vocal chords or written word, the body feels dissociated and as if it’s an actor in its’ own life, never real, always at one remove, and with no core ownership of the selfhood concept.

There are plenty of selves to choose from in a lifetime. Many only come into being by enacting a role until it becomes automatic and others are roles that can be set aside after exiting that particular stage. If the stage is inside your imagination, the multiverse is the only limit. So, I am happy to allow time to BK, RM, the one who communicates with animals, not to mention the one who met the elves and a host of more obviously  competent functionalities. The worst thing any of us can think of is the monotony of an internal monologue.

 So,  to keep the debate healthy and competitively diverse, investing ideas, traits, talents, characteristics etc with personality maintains an evolving neural ecosystem, empowered by the passion for survival every bounded self carries. A meta-‘I’ is unnecessary in a collectively autocatalytic emergent set, because if you think you’re God you’re really in trouble, since inevitably you’re making God in your own, temporally and spatially and species limited, image.

But a manager of all the nonsense this method of living throws up, that’s a role everyone needs --- ego, ergo sum.