The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [72]
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Modern technologies for creating and enjoying fictions are a long way from sitting around a Pleistocene campfire listening to the storyteller’s tale. However, these technological developments don’t mean as much as might imagine. The first ancient innovation in storytelling was probably the decision of a single creative storyteller to imitate various voices different characters in a narrative. Later on, dramatic acting, with different people taking the parts of characters, would have been a natural development. Moving forward some thousands of years, the next great innovation for fictional entertainment would have been the invention of writing. To be able to write down a story frees it from the limits the invention of writing that the growth of literature in our modern sense was accelerated by Gutenberg’s printing press. Reading and acting were therefore the essential means of telling stories in literate cultures from before The Epic of Gilgamesh through the nineteenth century, and with movies on into the twenty-first. Nonliterate cultures continued rely—as they had for many thousands of years—on telling and acting their means of enjoying fiction.
Because film and video loom so large in our experience today, it is easy to overestimate their importance. People who are enchanted by movies electronic media but are strangers to traditional live theater usually have little idea of the visual spectacle theatrical production could offer audiences as far back as the Re naissance, let alone after the introduction electric lights in the nineteenth century. Visual extravaganzas did begin with Hollywood but very likely amazed audiences in Paleolithic caves, with firelight and cave echoes providing their special effects.
Fans today also overrate the contribution of video games to storytelling as an art form. Video games are complicated and visually arresting forms of make-believe that allow viewers to jump onto the stage participate in the action. This is regarded by video-game enthusiasts earthshaking advance. In a way, it is less an extension of storytelling than a regression to its precursors. While the themes and content video games may be complex and adult, the logic of viewer participation the story reverts back to the child’s tea party with teddy bears. Video games are first and foremost games, with rules for participants and attention-maintaining quality of uncertain outcomes. They somewhat resemble fiction, but so do chess, poker, and Monopoly, by giving players defined creative role in a rule-governed, imaginative world. Video games do not produce a new kind of make-believe entertainment, much improve on the older kinds of games and fictions, except by addition of intense visual or virtual-reality effects. (Someday, a video-game version of King Lear may allow players to step into the action, even to save poor Cordelia if they play skillfully enough. What ever the this will not be an enhancement of Shakespeare.)
Some 2,500 years before the first stop-action King Kong made up a model of the Empire State Building, Aristotle argued that Greece—was despite its popularity the least important aspect drama. The most important aspect was an arresting plot, which was hardest thing for a dramatist to achieve—ahead even of interesting characters and the poetic use of language. In cinema today, it is still story told that makes the greatest films. In this respect, little has changed since our ancestors sat around a fire listening to a storyteller. Hollywood engaged