The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [62]
Whole shelves of stories and novels, parpaticularly in the nineteenth century and up to the present, are in fact essentially travelogues or tales exploration presented behind a plot involving fictional characters. For many Eu ropeans, for instance, the adventure novels of Karl May, and before him the fact-laden picturesque stories of Jules Verne, were essentially dramatic and memorable ways to present exotic information about South Seas, darkest Africa, or the Wild West. This genre persists today in many airport novels, as well as at a higher literary level in u lar sea adventures of Patrick O’Brian, which are read as much their detailed nautical settings as for their dramatic content. And it goes almost without saying that a major element of the appeal of modern cinema resides in its capacity to transport audiences to faraway places to locations in the distant past or future. Especially if they are exotic the viewer, the setting and background for a film can be vividly long after the characters and plot are forgotten.
This use of fiction as an information resource beyond its entertainment value goes back to the content of the earliest known oral traditions. The classicist Eric Havelock argued that providing cultural grounding and even technical knowledge was a major purpose of Iliad and the Odyssey for the early Greek tribes where these epics originated. This in turn explains the vehement objections to Homer Plato gives in such dialogues as the Republic. In the Homeric epics, as much of Greek mythology and later in comedy and tragedy, the gods human beings with all the human frailties writ large: they quarrel, scheme against each other, are bitterly jealous, make passionate ( adulterous) love, take cruel revenge on each other and on mortals, feed their massive appetites. Plato regarded the whole Greek literary tradition, but especially the Homeric epics that lay at its heart, as setting worst possible moral examples. That is why in the he and divine values and behavior.
If Plato’s worries seem eccentric to the modern reader, Havelock says, because moderns, lost in the color and beauty of the Homeric epics, do not realize the extent to which they functioned as an oral encyclopedia of customs, status designations, religious history, and even nautical advice for their original audience. We tend to imagine the Homeric rhapsodes as entertainers for their age, but Havelock argues that they essentially preservers of a “magisterial tradition”: teachers, in fact, providing lessons in how a priest ought to be addressed, how classes people—women and men, kings and warriors—ought to behave with respect to one another, how the social structure is maintained though agencies as the intervention of Nestor, how kings (and gods) petitioned for favor, how ritual sacrifices are to be carried out, how captured concubines are to be treated, and even how one should comport oneself at table. In an oral culture, Havelock argues, “much of social and deportment had to be ceremonial,” which explains the intricate descriptions of ritual behavior—essentially a practice of skilled technique for the early Greeks. The repeated references to what is “ or “proper” demonstrate the level of customary or moral instruction in the epics, and the narrative of the first book of the Iliad even gives specific instruction on docking a ship at harbor: furl the sail, lower mast, row to the beach, anchor the stern in deep water, disembark bow, and unload the cargo, and so forth. The bard, says Havelock, once a storyteller and also a tribal encyclopedist.”
Psychologist and literary theorist Michelle Scalise Sugiyama argues information transmission, including methods of problem-solving, a central adaptive benefit of imaginative storytelling for our ancestors, most