Why is Literature

8/13/2019 Why is Literature

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Why Is Literature:

A Coevolutionary Perspective

on Imaginative Worldmaking

Paul Hernadi

English, UC Santa Barbara

Abstract Since prehistoric times literature has been serving two complementary

functions: to expand the cognitive, emotive, and volitional horizons of human aware-

ness and to integrate our beliefs, feelings, and desires within the fluid mentality re-quired forsurvival in thecomplex social environments of human organisms. Frequent

participation in protoliterary transactions may have made some early humans more

astute planners, more sensitive mind readers, and more reliable cooperators than

their conspecific rivals, thereby increasing their chances to become the ancestors of

contemporary men and women. Such a view of literatures role in the coevolution of

human nature and cultures helps explain its worldwide presence and perhaps even

some of its shared characteristics across cultural divides. Three features respectively

associated with the cognitive, emotive, and volitional dimensions of mental function-

ing appear to be universal and will be discussed in detail: (a) the verbalizing of seman-tic and episodic memory and of ego-centric and participatory orientation through

thematic, narrative, lyric, and dramatic modes of discourse; (b) the polarization of

literary entertainment into thrilling and gratifying types, inclining audiences toward

recognizable subvarieties of either crying or laughing; and (c) the motivating impact

Helpful comments on earlier versions of this article were made by Porter Abbott, CharlesBazerman, Edward Branigan, Donald E. Brown, Susanna Gilbert, Sabine Gross, DonaldGuss, Patrick Hogan, Joergen Johansen, Alan Richardson, Bert States, Francis Steen, andMeir Sternberg. I also want to thank Leda Cosmides and John Tooby for numerous illumi-

nating conversations while we were codirecting the two-year Evolution and the Social Mindproject, generously funded by the Office of Research at the University of California, SantaBarbara.

Poetics Today : (Spring ). Copyright by the Porter Institute for Poetics andSemiotics.


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of fictive stories about imagined characters on the will of actual people to change

themselves and their worlds.

The question why is literature? has the long shadow of another ques-tion cast all over it. That other questionwhat is literature?promptedmany disparate responses both before and after Jean-Paul Sartre ([]) devoted a long essay to it. Professors of literature vigorously dis-agree about how and even whether or not the question what is litera-ture? should be answered (see, for instance, Hernadi and Genette []). Given the multiplicity of ways literature has been intended, pro-duced, transmitted, stored, and mentally processed since prehistoric times,

it is hardly surprising that no definition commands widespread acceptance.1

But even if we resign ourselves to finding only loose family resemblanceamong literary phenomena, that very metaphor may well prompt us to ex-plore what kind of ancestry makes members of todays literary family re-semble each other and why certain clusters of similarities can be expectedto abide into the future.2 My way of doing that is to consider literature fromits oralemergence to its postliteratepresence (for instance, through moviesbased on the writingsof Shakespeare and Jane Austen) as part of the ongoingcoevolution of human nature and cultures.3

Let me state briefly where I am coming from and where I propose to takeyou in the end. For many centuries either matter or mindeither nature orspiritwas viewed as the ultimate principle of all being and becoming. Bycontrast, a good deal of recent humanistic inquiry favors a third principle

. Fictive representation and figurative or self-referential signification are perhaps the mostfrequently invoked criteria of literariness. In Hernadi and a book project nearing com-pletion, I add role-playing expression and indirect communication but consider all four as

only potential triggers of any actual literary experience.. Failing to detect a common conceptual denominator for board games, card games, ballgames, and other kinds of games, Ludwig Wittgenstein ( []: especially Sections and ) likened their interconnections to the complicated network of similarities that over-lap and crisscross among various members of a family with respect to their build, fea-tures, color of the eyes, gait, temperament, etc., etc. His neglect of the genetic relationshipsthat underlie resemblances within a family was pointed out by Maurice Mandelbaum (:, n. ), who also insists that generalizations about the arts need to supplement directlyexhibited resemblances with similarities in origin, similarities in use, and similarities in in-tention. In like spirit I submit that endeavors to define what literature is should be linkedto the cognitive, cultural, historical, and evolutionary study of literary experience, that is, to

the study ofhow,where,when, andwhyliterature is.. I do not mean to imply that motion pictures are nothing but recorded literature orcanned theater. While many movies can be considered recorded performances of literary

works, cinematography is a major new art form using images and sounds not solely for thequasi-literary purpose of evoking human interaction and mental life through emphasis onplot, dialogue, and character.


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Hernadi Why Is Literature 23

and stipulates what has been called the social construction of reality (seeBerger and Luckmann ). I recognize the worldmaking and self-makingpowers of language and other vehicles of culture yet also wish to heed, on

equal footing, the material conditions and personal responsibilities asso-ciated with the exercise of such powers.Therefore my present attempt to ex-plore literatures evolutionary reasons for being presupposes that the social,the natural, and the personal are intertwined dimensions of being human.Do not ask whether more or less than percent of you is determined by

your genes, scripted by your culture, propelled by your personality. Each ofus, as well as literature, is percent human: altogether natural, cultural,and personal.4

Literature before and beyond the Letter

Literature had been performed, heard, and watched long before it began tobe written and read. Even today a great deal of literature exists outside oftexts in live events and in audio or video recordings. Beyond a doubt, storieslike Odysseuss homecoming undergo major metamorphoses on their wayfrom oral presentation (by a lyre-strumming singer of tales impersonating

various characters) through handwritten or printed texts (with occasionalvisual illustrations) to (sometimes subtitled) movie versions. Furthermore,a large audience listening to Charles Dickens reading some chapters fromBleak House, a solitary reader of the same novel, and a family watching thetelevision series based on the book gain access to different kinds of literaryproduction. Ultimately, however, literature is as literature does when fleet-ing performances, inert texts, or the rerun footage of recorded sounds andimages enters the receptive minds of listeners, readers, or spectators.5 In anyevent I see no reason to tie our concept of literary worldmaking to littera,the

Latin word for letter. By harking back to an older tradition and invokingpoiesis, the Greek word formaking, I propose to stress creativity rather thantextuality and to pay particularly close attention to the cocreative mentalprocess that turns live presentations, written or printed pages, and the play-

. My half-serious attempt to quantify our threefold mode of being human plays a variationon a theme by the ethologist D. O. Hebb (: ), who characterized mammalian behavioras one-hundred-per-cent environment, one-hundred-per-cent heredity. In the last decadeor so, an increasing number of literary scholars has reacted to the disciplines current pre-

occupation with social context by approaching literature from an evolutionary vantage point(see, for instance, Carroll ; Storey ; Turner []; and the annotated bibliog-raphy of biopoetics in Cooke and Turner ). For my own views see Hernadi , whereI suggest that the biological, cultural, and personal dimensions of human life are intertwinedin our simultaneous being of, being with, and being toward the world.. For more on this subject see Hernadi ; : .


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back of celluloid or electromagnetic recordings alike into literary experi-ence.

The mental process in question involves what Sartre ( []: ),

referring to the reading of novels, called directed creation, the readersvoluntary lending of his or her mind to figments of someone elses imagi-nation. By suggesting that the examining magistrate in Dostoevskys Crimeand Punishmentwould not exist () without the readers hatred, lent toRaskolnikov, against him, Sartre only illustrates the need for the readersdreamlike collaboration with thewriter. But the spectators voluntary par-ticipation in something like interpersonal dreaming is likewise required ifhe or she is to perceive Hamlet in the onstage conduct or on-screen image

of an actor and yet remain sufficiently immobilized not to shout a warningto the ill-fated prince about the poisoned point of Laertes sword.6

In approaching the reading of literature as voluntary dreaming, Sartre() sketched a phenomenology of literary experience in terms of what cog-nitive theorists were to call decoupled mental representations (e.g., Leslie: ) or off-line thinking (see Bickerton : and for a linguistically oriented view). Those technical terms express well thecommon knowledge that certain types of mentationdreaming and trancecome readily to minddiminish or suspend the functioning of our sensoryapparatus. To some extent this holds also for our voluntary immersion intothe dreamlike virtual reality of literary experience.7As fascinated readers orspectators, we can ignore such stimuli as a toothache or the smell of burn-ing food until they reach a certain threshold.Yet literary immersion (unlikethe daydreamers self-cued simulation of virtual reality) is not altogetherdecoupled from concurrent perception. As cocreators of literary experi-ence, we must remain alert to pertinent stimuli directing our collaborativecreativity through stage, page, screen, or other triggers of on-line mental

representation. The imaginative worldmaking of literary experience thusunfolds in constant interaction with texts, live performances, or played-back recordings produced by other people.

. As Cosmides and Tooby (: ) put it: although fiction seems to be processed as sur-rogate experience, some psychological subsystems reliably react to it as if it were real, whileothers reliably do not. In particular, fictional worlds engage emotion systems while disengaging actionsystems( just as dreams do). In three books and numerous articles, Bert O. States exploredmany pertinent parallels between the dreaming brain and literary phenomena (see, for in-stance, States and ).

. Since literary transactions are typically entered and exited at will, daydreaming is a moreappropriate analogy than dreaming for the readers or spectators directed creation ofimagined worlds. Both daydreams and the mental performance of literary works permit thevoluntaryvirtual enactment of diverse hopes, fears, plans, and desires in emotively investedrehearsals that are cognitively acknowledged to be counterfactual and devoid of real-life con-sequences.


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Idle Pleasure?

The manufacture and marketing of books in industrialized print cultureshave understandably fostered quasi-economic notions of literary productionandconsumption(e.g., Macherey []). But the dynamics of literaryexperience are better captured by a pair of erotic metaphors: seductionlead-ing toconsummation. Textual arousal may of course range from the readersbliss of largely self-propelledjouissance (Barthes []) to being plea-surably manipulated by narratorial authority (Chambers ). Even onthe fully cocreative middle ground, the promise of literary delight entices usinto merely mental intercourse with the imaginations of other people. Fromthe biological vantage point of Darwinian evolution, therefore, literatures

pancultural seductiveness appears rather puzzling.On the one hand, pleasure and pain (along with less acute sensations

of comfort and discomfort) have often been the carrot and the stick steer-ing the ancestors of currently existing organisms toward behaviors that

were likely to lead to survival and reproduction. For example, you and Iwould not be here if our animal and human forebears had not been in-duced by alternative prospects of pleasure and pain to seek food, shelter,mates, and allies. Such a system of rewards and punishments even goes

a long way toward explaining the emergence of human curiosity. Otherthings being equal, those protohumans experiencing overaverage distressregarding ignorance and overaverage delight regarding attained informa-tion enhanced their biological fitness through being motivated to acquireoveraverage cognitive command of their natural and social surroundings.

On the other hand, no such advantage seems to underlie the craving forliterary experience and the accompanying willingness to expend materialresources (gifts for the bard, cash for books, videotapes, or theater tickets)to attain it. Avid interest in detective fictions riddle-like whodunits or inthe psychological novels gradual revelation of the real motives of virtualcharacters would no doubt suggest to a hard-nosed visitor from Mars thathumans are driven by cancerously overgrown curiosity to explore for explo-rations sake rather than for sound biological reasons. Indeed the Martian

visitor might conceivably deem any enjoyment of literary worldmaking as adeplorable by-product of our otherwise adaptive capacity for off-line think-ing. From his or her extraterrestrial perspective, widespread indulgence incounterfactual literary fantasizing could appear to threaten us with extinc-

tion even as the underlying urge to plan and reason on the basis of remem-bered and imagined rather than perceived stimuli continues to help inquisi-tive humans to colonize what John Tooby and Irven DeVore (: )dubbed the cognitive niche of the environment.


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Like my virtual Martian, the cognitive theorist Steven Pinker regards thearts as evolutionary by-products rather than life-supportive adaptations.

According to Pinker (: ), aesthetic experience does not gear us

toward greater biological fitness but simply pushes pleasure buttons origi-nally evolved in the context of some other function. He even likens aestheticpleasure to our pleasure derived from the taste of foodstuffs containing for-merly scarce nutrients like fat and sugar.To be sure, the taste metaphor haslong played a crucial role in the history of aesthetics, and I am prepared todraw the implication of Pinkers delicious example, the strawberry cheese-cake, that too much literature may clog up our mental veins and arteries.

Yet the moderate intake of literary calories strikes me as an excellent source

of mental energy even today, when a potentially unhealthful oversupplyis on tap from millions of books and dozens of cable television channels.And I interpret the cross-cultural ubiquity of punning, rhythmic chanting,storytelling, and role-playing as strong support for the assumption that allhuman beings alive today have descended from folks who, generation aftergeneration, derived both pleasure and adaptive benefits from appreciatingsuch things as wordplay, lullabies, folktales, and the jesters impersonationof other people.

Needless to say, further support for such an assumption must come fromplausible arguments to the effect that frequent playful traffic in literaryflights of the imagination could actually assist our ancestors in their deadlygames of differential survival. In other words, answers are needed to thequestion of why natural selection not only permitted but even favored peri-ods of protoliterary time-out from such productive pursuits as hunting,gathering, farming, and fruitfully copulating. In the rest of this article Ioffer some admittedly speculative suggestions as to how the protoliteraryexperiences of early humans may have enhanced their biological fitness

their ability to survive and reproduceas individuals and as members offamilies and societies. In particular I interpret literary pleasures (whatevertheir present contributions to our personal and social well-being may be) asindicative of literatures past power to make its devotees more astute plan-ners and problem solvers, more sensitive and empathetic mind readers, andmore reliable cooperators than their conspecific rivals.8

. Such an approach was pioneered by the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, who links theprehuman evolution of the sense of beauty to the biological need for being trained in cognitive

classification through the pleasurable discernment of significant similarities and differences(: ) and who views dreaming, pretend play, initiation rites, and theatrical enact-ment as age-old methods of imaginative preparation for the real-life deployment of mentalfunctions (). Proceeding further and more systematically along similar lines, the evo-lutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby () make an exceptionally strongcase for the contribution of aesthetically rewarding activities to building adapted minds.


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The Coevolution of Virtual and Actual Environments

Let me start by suggesting that the enhancement by literature of our biologi-cal fitness is an important dimension of what the subtitle of a recent bookcalls the co-evolution of language and the brain (Deacon ).The basicmechanism underlying the reciprocal evolutionary impact between humananatomy and human language is relatively simple and can be outlined asfollows. The emergence and efficient use of grammatically organized lan-guage required large and complex brains, and such brains in turn were con-sistently selected for among members of a species in which grammaticallanguage conferred great adaptive advantages on its proficient users (seeBickerton and Pinker ).Things get more complicated as one con-

siders that larger brains need to be housed in larger skulls and that humanfetuses must thus pass through the birth canal less fully developed than theoffspring of other primates. This means that a good deal of brain growthand brain complexification had to take place in each of the last three thou-sand or so human generations under the cultural influence of the languagespoken to and around children.

There can be little doubt that some of the utterances heard by prehistorichuman children were functionally homologous antecedents of todays lulla-

bies, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and the likeverbal constructs exhibitingand encouraging playfully imaginative uses of the brain.Yet the protolitera-ture of prehistoric cultures grew out of nature only to begin to grow someof its branches right back into the trunk. As the biologist Richard Dawkins(: ) put it, Humans live not only in the real world but in a virtual

world, created inside our own skulls, and the virtual worlds of all indi-viduals brought up in a given culture amount to a virtual environmentthat is an important member of the set of environments in which geneshave to survive. In his latest book Dawkins (: ) goes even further

when he explicitly attributes a role in natural selection to poetic worldscreated by brains.9

Invoking Dawkinss (: ) general theory of memesunitsof cultural transmission that replicate themselves by spreading from brainto brainone could say that part of our actual environment comes intobeing thanks to the survival of the fittest memes making up our virtual

worlds. After all, we often manage to turn preferred counterfactual alter-natives into the way the world will be. At the personal level, we imagine

. Dawkins (: ) wrote: We move through a virtual world of our own brainsmaking. . . . Just as genes can be said to survive in deserts or forests, and just as they canbe said to survive in the company of other genes in the gene pool, genes can also be said tosurvive in the virtual, even poetic worlds created by brains.


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and compare possible futures as we plan our conduct for the next minuteor when we repeatedly weigh the pros and cons for long-term projects. Onthe larger historical scale, an apposite instance of the intertwining of nature

and culture is the millennial progression from the observation of birds andwishful flight dreams through the circulation of imaginative stories aboutflying humans, like Daedalus, to the eventual changes brought about byaircraft engineering in the physical universe. But the case for coevolutioncan be made more systematicand less reliant on the quickly spreadingbut still controversial meme of meme (see Blackmore )if one turnsfrom the contents to the modes and structures of imaginative worldmaking.

Parallel Modes of Discourse and Cognition

Four discursive modes are widespread, perhaps indeed universal, amongliterary traditions around the globe. All four modesI discussed them else-

where as the thematic, narrative, lyric, and dramatic (Hernadi : )easily cross the lines between oral and typographic cultures: todaysprinted aphorisms, novels, poems, and plays, for instance, find close par-allels in the performed proverbs, stories, songs, and role-divided ritualsof all or almost all known past and present nonliterate societies.10 Need-less to say, the modes of verbal worldmaking often function in combina-tion with each other and with nonverbal modes of evocation. For example,many thematic points have been made in the narrative guises of fablesand parables, from Aesop and the Bible to Jean de La Fontaine, FranzKafka, and beyond. Likewise, the lyric expression of the Choruss shiftingmoods and the dramatic interaction of the characters were integrated withmusic and dance into ancient Greek tragedy and comedy long before post-Renaissance librettists and composers produced their operas and musicals.

. Here as elsewhere in this article I do not claim to base such generalizations on exten-sive cross-cultural comparisons because, regrettably, none seem to have been undertaken toupdate or otherwise supplement the three-volume survey of the growth of literature byH. Munro Chadwick and N. Kershaw Chadwick dating back to and reprintedin . Nor can I deny the possibility of counterexamples to my generalizations, and I ameager to consider any that come to my attention. Since, however, most recent literary andanthropological studies tend to stress differences rather than shared features among periodsand cultures, much would have been made of an entire tradition lacking, say, socially sanc-tioned proverbial advice (see Hernadi and Steen ) or, to jump ahead in my argument,

observable sadness and hilarity elicited by different kinds of storytelling or role-playing. Buteven if some percent of all extant past and currently existing cultures should fail to havepersuaded some researchers about the existence in their midst of a particular near-universalliterary phenomenon, I would be tempted to investigate why this is so rather than rush to theconclusion that the widespread occurrence of the phenomenon in question is a mere accident.For a discussion of a large number of human universals, see Brown .


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As mixable cardinal colors of verbal worldmaking, the thematic, nar-rative, lyric, and dramatic modes of literary discourse correspond to fourkinds of ways in which words discharge primarily problem-solving func-

tions11

whenever people formulate opinions, provide retrospective reports,give concurrent expressive accounts of ongoing experience, or engage in theinterpersonal give-and-take of conversations.12 The reason for the salienceof the same four modes of discourse in both worldmaking and problem solv-ing is, I believe, their alignment with four basic cognitive modalities. Informing or embracing opinions wecategorizeexperience; through selectiveretrospection wenarrativizeit; by attending to its flux we continually monitor

what is happening in, to, and around us; and by verbally interacting we situ-

ateour experiential stance within a framework of multiple subject positionsattributed to other people.The operations I have just labeled categorizingandnarrativizingare often contrasted in cognitive psychology as the workings ofsemantic versus episodic memory (see Tulving ), and my terms monitor-ingand situatingroughly apply to mental processes distinguished by studentsof cognition as the ego-centric awareness of individuals versustheir mind-reading attribution of beliefs, feelings, and desires to other self-propelledagents (see Whiten ).

Todays adults in all cultures expertly avail themselves of all four basicdiscursive structures (categorical formulation, retrospective report, concur-rent expression, alternating conversation) and all four kinds of cognition(semantic overview, episodic recollection, subjective orientation, and theparticipatory embedding of the self in a polycentric social world of selves).

As a matter of fact, we tend to take all such competence for granted andcertainly give no credit for it to our and our ancestors past encounters withthematic, narrative, lyric, or dramatic triggers of literary experience. Yetboth the prehistoric coevolution and the life-historical codevelopment of

human cognitive and discursive competences owe a great deal to imagina-tive worldmaking for the following reason.

. Jrgen Habermas ( []: ) contrasts world disclosing and problem solv-ing as polar capacities of discourse held together within the functional matrix of ordinarylanguage but specialized in art and literature on the one side and science, morality, and lawon the other. Speaking of the world-disclosing (welterschliessende) capacity, he also uses phraseslike world-constituting (weltbildende) and world-creating (welterzeugende), near-synonymsfor worldmaking, the term adopted here with modifications from Nelson Goodman ().. I am not suggesting that all verbal acts of all times and places can be reduced to just

four homogeneous categories. Indeed, at least two subtypes of each discursive mode comereadily to mind: opinions can be conveyed as prescriptive advice or as descriptive findings;retrospective narratives can claim to rely on personal memory or some indirect source of in-formation; lyric expressions can appear to give voice to what is now being experienced eitheras happening within or as happening around a person; and conversations can range fromintimate two-way exchanges to verbal interfaces among numerous people.


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Our disposition to talk about much more than just what happens to bethe case affords splendid opportunities to hone the complementary talk-ing and thinking skills of humans. Such talk (including fictive storytelling

and other potential triggers of literary experience) can obviously prolifer-ate unencumbered by referential constraints. But it remains subject to agreat deal of selective sifting and winnowing. Just as jokes without effec-tive punch lines do not spread far, oral traditions will not keep all adages,tales, songs, and rituals in continued circulation. Thanks to such culturalselection among huge numbers of discursive mutations, early humans couldacquire and maintain a quality-controlled repertoire of protoliterary ex-emplars of pertinent categorizing, streamlined retrospecting, sensitive self-

monitoring, and multiperspectival situating. It stands to reason that indi-viduals whose mental skills were especially practiced in literary transactionswould tend to put the best available literary structures to particularly effec-tive general cognitive and communicative use as well. Other things beingequal, these individualsnot necessarily the prehistoric poets but ratherpeople with overaverage propensity to retain and adroitly reapply memo-ries of literary experiencewould thereby enhance their chances for suc-cess in survival and reproduction.

Emotive Responses to Literature and the World

Needless to say, it takes more than practice in imaginative cognition to makesignificant human impact on the physical world. Our emotions and voli-tions also play important roles in the intertwining of actual and virtual en-

vironments, and I now turn to the next player, emotion, in the ongoingcoevolutionary interplay between nature and cultures.13

In many ways our cognitive stance toward imagined worlds is similar to

our cognitive stance toward historically reconstructed or personally experi-enced worlds. For example, we tend to apply the same kind of folk psy-chology to the behavior and motivation of Othello, Napoleon, and ournext-door neighbor. Equally striking are the parallels between our emotiveresponses elicited by admittedly fictive events and by events believed eitherto have occurred in the past or to be occurring at present. Furthermore our

. Some issues raised in this section and the next are more fully addressed with illustrativereferences to particular literary works in Hernadi , especially chapters and . While

my present views have been influenced by recent studies of emotion in anthropologicallyinformed psychology (see, for instance, Griffith ; Cosmides and Tooby ; and numer-ous contributions to Ekman and Davidson , Lewis and Haviland , and Lewis andHaviland-Jones ), I continue to speak of mood, feeling, and emotionnot distinguisheduniformly even by expert specialistsin the everyday and sometimes almost interchangeablesenses of the words.


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feelings triggered by what may, did, or does happen to a person with whomwe empathize are analogous to feelings triggered by what may, did, or doeshappen directly to us. Indeed it is thanks to our capacity for empathetic pro-

jection that parallel subvarieties of two familiar behaviorslaughing andcryingcan express both self-oriented and other-oriented emotions.14

Much room exists for cultural and individual variation in just howlaughing, crying, and their many varieties and combinations lend emotiveurgency to both on-line and decoupled cognition, including the partiallydecoupled deliverances of imaginative worldmaking. In the Western tra-dition of high literary culture, for example, comedies like ShakespearesTwelfth Nighttend to combine festive joy and farcical derision as they make

us cheer with some characters and jeer at others, while a tragedy like Sopho-cless Oedipus the Kingcombines melodramatic pity and the fear and aweof religious or secular mystery plays by making us both sigh for and gasp

with people populating the virtual world of the stage. Other cultures clearlyfavor different types of gratifying and thrilling entertainment, but enter-tained individuals in most cultures tend to display an analogous variety ofdistinctly merry and distinctly somber states of mind.

It is possible that contemporary human laughing and crying evolvedfrom a single way of manifesting enhanced emotive vitality.15 But alreadyin prehuman stages of evolution, the respective expressions of negative andpositive emotions seem to have split apart for communicative purposes.Whining-like sounds among mammals and corresponding distress signalsamong birds no doubt stem from the vital need of offspring for parentalattention, while a plausible explanation for chimpanzee laughter in re-sponse to tickling or playful chasing (see, for instance, Provine ) is that itreinforces friendly cooperation in grooming or exercise. Humans, of course,do not simply cry or laugh. We tend to express such varied emotions as

sorrow, pity, fear, serenity, joy, and derision by such varied behaviors as sob-

. A more complete typology of self-oriented and other-oriented emotions might also con-trast the emotive responses that biblical passion plays, realistic docudramas, and equivalentnon-Western dramatizations of the mythical or historical past respectively elicit from literal-minded and literarily minded audiences. In addition, empirical studies would probably findsignificant similarities and differences among both self-oriented and other-oriented emotionsaccording to whether they are triggered by a live event, a text, or the playback of a previousrecording.. Pending further medical research, certain shared neurological causes of pathologic

laughter and crying (Shaibani, Sabbagh, and Doody ) may even serve to explain suchfamiliar crossover phenomena as tears brought to eyes by great happiness and the so-callednervous laughter of some grieved or scared people on the verge of crying at a funeral orin some stressful situation. But unlike rising blood pressure, which has remained a hard-to-observe uniform effect of a great variety of physiological causes, numerous forms of cryingand laughing have become informative outward expressions of different mental states.


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bing, sighing, gasping, smiling, cheering, and sneering. Even in the absenceof audible or visible symptoms, introspection typically tells us toward whichkind of expressive manifestation our emotions are beginning to move us.

To be sure, both the pie of emotions and the pie of their observable mani-festations could be sliced differently. In part for this reason the two sets ofcategories I just proposed are open to the charge of being unscientificallyderived from folk psychology, which in turn is often assumed to be blind-sided by culture-specific conduct and language-dependent semantics. Self-critical caution is advised on all such counts. In principle, however, I ampersuaded by P. N. Johnson-Laird and Keith Oatleys () defense both offolk theory concerning emotions and of the translatability of emotion

terms: you cannot be as wrong about the inherently subjective experiencethat you are feeling sad or glad as you can be about the purportedly objec-tive observation that the Earth is flat, and verbal communication about how

we feel is possible across different languages and cultures. Furthermore, ex-perimental cross-cultural research indicates that certain basic emotions,including sadness and happiness, can be read off photographed humanfaces across cultural divides (see Ekman and Friesen ).

Let me postulate an evolutionary process through which the varied spec-trum of human crying and laughing gradually emerged from rudimentaryanimal expression and communication. Increasingly brainy and increas-ingly socialized primates needed to become ever more accurately informedabout their own feelings and about the feelings of their close associates.Thus when some protohumans and early humans happened to possess over-average ability to display and recognize different expressions for differentemotions, they were poised to reap adaptive benefits and to transmit theirgenetic potential for distinct kinds of laughing and crying to an overaveragenumber of likewise sensitive offspring. So far, so good. But why didand

still dolaughing, crying, and a few closely related emotive expressions(e.g., being visibly awestruck) so universally accompany the literary evoca-tion of virtual worlds by storytelling and impersonating make-believe? Whydo many if not all cultures proffer both gratifying and thrilling entertain-ment designed to make different kinds of audiencespeople assembledaround the campfire or in the movie theater and even solitary readerslaugh or cry?

It is clear that the expression of feelings through laughing or crying (and

even through smiling or sighing) is not without cost. It must be paid for,so to speak, by a temporary decrease of readiness to engage in any otherphysical activity, including fight or flight. It is all the more fortunate that weseldom have to take any immediate action when laughing and crying dis-charge their expressive and communicative functions during safe periods of


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literary entertainment. Imaginative storytelling and role-playing thus givehumans relatively harmless opportunities to acquire and improve their ca-pacity for generating and recognizing distinct expressions for significant

emotions. Furthermore, literary worldmaking facilitates emotive engage-ment with a larger variety of circumstances than a person is likely to en-counter in the actual course of his or her life. As a result, people often ex-posed by individual inclination or cultural custom to gratifying and thrillingliterary entertainment would have a good chance to become more subtlereaders of their own emotions and of the emotions of others than peopledeprived of such literary experiences.

Complex human situations stir powerful emotions that can guide or mis-

guide our actions without forcing us (as would unequivocal biological dic-tates of the kind most nonhuman organisms follow) to embark on a particu-lar course of conduct. Emotions are spontaneous evaluations of situationsbut remain subject to additional, more deliberative kinds of evaluation. Forexample, it is possible to feel bad about feeling good while or shortlyafter watching a violent or pornographic movie. In view of such complexi-ties, small wonder that we needed to become proficient in cognizing how wefeel and in signaling to others either the same information or, since we aremarkedly Machiavellian primates (see Byrne and Whiten ), whateverinformation we do want them to have about our feelings. Eliciting nuanced

variations of laughing and crying, literature has long helped humans re-fine their skills for obtaining and disseminating information about emotionsand thus become better adapted to the mind-reading, mind-revealing, andmind-concealing requirements of their lives.

Self-Assertive Desires and the Will to Self-Transcendence

Stories, plays, and other vehicles of imaginative worldmaking make us con-template fictive frustrations and fulfillments. But they do not propose onlyto entertain us with their offer of thrill or gratification. The alternative

worlds evoked by literature also tend to awaken in us the will either tochange the world around us or to change ourselves by adjusting our per-sonal being to its transpersonal surroundings. These two kinds of aspira-tions can prompt humans to embrace self-transcending commitments topolitical goals or religious principles, even at the expense of neglecting their

corporeal well-being or very survival.The question arises, How did members of the human species evolve acapacity to espouse self-transcending, altruistic projects? Evolutionary bi-ology in the strict sense offers only the first step toward a persuasive answer.Summarizing research by W. D. Hamilton, R. L. Trivers, and others about


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a large number of species, Dawkins ( []: ) linked individualaltruism to gene selfishness: a gene present in a particular organism willsometimes assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. On this

view, natural selection favors the propagation of genetic patterns that worktoward an evolutionarily prudent degree of individual altruism. For ex-ample, an animals behavior in taking a percent risk of dying to avert a percent risk to a full siblings life tends to benefit genes with a percentchance of being present in both bodiesprovided of course that the assistedsibling is at least as likely to reproduce in the future as the potential martyr.

In view of the evolutionary logic of such calculations (not made, ofcourse, by the individuals involved but implemented by natural selec-

tion at the level of the gene pool), fifth cousins hardly need to apply. Yethumans often engage in altruistic behavior regardless of kinship, and thisis true despite the fact that their hope for later reciprocation often endsup being thwarted by clever cheats, who quickly turn those who will notact as retaliating grudgers into deplorable suckers (). I believeliteratures role in the emergence of todays widespread unrequited altru-ism among genetically unrelated humansas manifested, for example,through anonymous blood donations and risky attempts to save strangersfrom drowning or burningwas quite significant and can be described asfollows.

The human infants very premature birth necessitates an exception-ally long period of parental and societal care. Much of that care involves

verbal interactions and the frequent use of such personal pronouns (ortheir equivalents in other languages) as youandI. The cultural gestation ofhuman children in the collective womb of a lingual society makes each indi-

vidual explicitly aware that only he or she can refer to a particular body andmind in the first person singular. At the same time the analogous selfhood

of other people capable of saying I becomes a likewise palpable reality(see Hernadi : ). Humans are thus afforded a unique opportunityto acquire a high degree of (potentially selfish) self-consciousness.

During a certain phase of coevolution, which may have lasted tens ofthousands of years, our culturally promoted self-consciousness no doubtpresented a serious problem to nature. The deep-seated animal instincttoward risk taking for the sake of offspring and other close kin began nolonger to suffice for ensuring the survival of altruistic human genes through

so-called kin selection. For one thing, humans tended to live in largergroups than the typical primate band of close relatives; for another, eachlingually socialized human had a profound awareness of the existentialdivide between me and both you and them, that is, between self andothers. Since, however, the social interdependence of early human indi-


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viduals was even greater than the social interdependence of nonlingualprimates, continued survival urgently required of individual humans whatnature could no longer deliver: simultaneous concern for self and for the

shifting groups of potential allies and adversaries in the mutual interest ofsome ofus, that most Protean pronoun (see Hernadi : on thegrammar, rhetoric, and logic of saying we).

It appears that culture had to begin to look after natures stepchildren bycirculating stories focusing not so much on the entertaining triumph or de-feat of individual Suckers, Cheats, and Grudgers as on the larger picture ofadmirably achieved or deplorably failed social cohesion and environmen-tal harmony. While some myths, legends, and fables continued to portray

divine, human, or animal rogues and tricksters as likable role models forself-assertion, othersthe prehistoric antecedents of utopian Romance anddystopian Satire (see Frye : especially and )began topromote self-transcendence by extolling altruistic heroes and disparagingselfish villains as unequivocally positive and negative exemplars of inter-personal conduct.

Our self-transcending response to the virtual worlds evoked by more re-cent, more realistic, and ethically more complex forms of Romance andSatire gravitates in one of two directions. Prompted by the literary experi-ence of imagined alternatives to the actual world, we can either strive tomake incremental changes in our social environment or oppose virtuallyall contemporary standards and practices from the cosmic vantage pointof justice, beauty, and truththose imagined perfect alternatives to theordinary all-too-human ways of doing, making, and meaning (see Hernadi: especially ). While we seldom act on such promptings immedi-ately after a particular literary experience, it is clear that literature, by elicit-ing powerful cognitive and emotive responses, also appeals to our will. Just

as it contributes to the transformation of beliefs into structured worldviewsand the transformation of feelings into lasting attitudes, literature helps toturn diffuse desires for self-assertion and self-transcendence into tangibleintentions or even large-scale projects. Ultimately therefore the illumina-tion and pleasures derived from literary worldmaking and the problem-solving motivation behind science, morality, and the law (Habermas []: ) remain interlinked in the changing lifeworlds of everydayhuman existence.

Beyond doubt a delicate balance of self-assertive and self-transcendingtendencies is required for the thriving of individuals in societies. This maybe why the demand of poetic justice that the selfishly wicked be punishedand the altruistically virtuous be rewarded has been sometimes satisfiedand at other times flouted in mythical and postmythical literature alike.


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But in todays globalized economy and precariously technologized ecology,both the reckless self-assertion of several billion increasingly interdepen-dent humans and their misguided self-surrender to the common good

as defined by power-hungry local leaders would be fraught with unprece-dented dangers for humanity as a whole. Thus we need to work toward evermore reliable means of establishing if not harmony at least sustainable poly-phony among the diverse forces operating in human individuals and theircultural and natural environments.

In this pursuit, monitoring how currently prevalent types of literary ex-perience affect human cognition, emotion, and volition is a task too im-portant and too complex to be left to single-minded would-be censors of

all sex and violence in imaginative worldmaking. It is probably true thatgraphic representations of virtual violence, especially in movies or on tele-vision and the Internet, can lead to copycatting acts of actual violence. Itseems to me, however, that most literary experience tends to restrain orsublimate rather than intensify selfish human inclinations toward aggres-sion, malice, freeloading, and the like. Having been told the story of SnowWhite, few of us want to be like her evil stepmother, and having read or

watchedAnimal Farm, few of us resolve to emulate George Orwells pigs.

Intertwined Diversity

So far I have discussed three coevolutionary contributions of imaginativeworldmaking as if emotion, cognition, and volition were separate facultiesof the soul. 16 To be sure, humans need to be capable of selectively focusingon how they feel, what appears to be eliciting that feeling, and what mightbe done to prolong or change it. Yet only in constant interplay with eachother can emotion, cognition, and volitionour feelings, beliefs, and inten-

tions or desiresperform their mediating role between sensory stimuli andmotor responses. Far from being divided into three cell blocks of a prisonthat is ultimately controlled by automatic reflexes, our mind functions asan intricate system of refractive prisms and self-reflective mirrors.17

. Kant ( []: ) considers emotion, cognition, and conation as three powers ofthe soul (Seelenvermgen), to one of which all mental capacities can be reduced and whichcannot be derived further from a common basis. In the last two hundred years facultypsychology of this kind has had its ups and downs, but more up-to-date versions of it have

reappeared recently in fruitful theories of mental modularity (see Fodor : ; Barkowet al. ; Hirschfeld and Gelman ).. One recent model for the interaction of a larger variety of mental processes (perceptions,sensations, basic emotions, cognitive emotions, thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions, actions,and reactions) can be found in Wellman ; see especially Figures ., ., and . on pages, , and and the accompanying arguments.


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I do not claim to know what kind of neurological evidence would cor-roborate or undermine the folk psychological intuition that human emo-tion, cognition, and volition are both distinguishable and intertwined di-

mensions of the mind.18

But I think that the intuition is basically correctand that evolutionary psychology, as amended by the archaeologist StevenMithen, can help us traceThe Prehistory of the Mind().

In numerous coauthored articles and in The Adapted Mind (Barkow,Cosmides, and Tooby ), the psychologist Leda Cosmides and the an-thropologist John Tooby have presented a closely argued case for the evo-lutionary emergence of the modular mind. Building on recent studiesby numerous psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, primatologists, brain

researchers, and other cognitive scientists, Tooby and Cosmides invoke theimage of a Swiss-army knife to explain why the diverse cognitive tasksfaced by our ancestors required the adaptive specialization of certain men-tal modules.19 Like the eye or the hand, our mental modules (say, for spa-tial orientation, social interaction, grammatical language, etc.) are highlyspecialized structures that evolved over many thousand generations evenif, again like bodily organs, they can shift their domains of application ac-cording to changes in the environmental circumstances of our species (seeSperber ).20

Mithen (: ) is sympathetic to such an evolutionary and modu-lar approach. But he proposes a significant modification, largely basedon the sizes of skulls and the nature of artifacts found at excavation sitesrepresenting different periods of human prehistory.The archaeological evi-dence permits Mithen to admire the toolmaking, hunting, and coalition-building skills of Homo erectusand particularly our Neanderthal cousins.

. In theory at least, cognitive science is imperialistic enough to wish to address the emo-

tive and volitional dimensions of mental functioning along with such functions of cognitionproper as perception, memory, reasoning, and (some would add) imagination. But the follow-ing two lists of terms, several of which are often used interchangeably or as near-synonyms,indicate the urgent need for conceptual fine-tuning in the study of emotion (feeling, affect,sentiment, mood, temperament, attitude) and volition (impulse, wish, desire, inclination, mo-tivation, intention, will, purpose, project). Needless to say, analytic distinctions among and

within the cognitive, emotive, and volitional specializations of the mind should not eclipseour awareness of its synergetic functioning.. In a selective listing of their sources,Tooby and Cosmides make reference to some twenty

works by researchers who study color vision, visual scene analysis, speech perception, con-ceptual development in children, mental imagery, psychophysics, locomotion, language ac-

quisition, motor control, anticipatory motion computation, face recognition, biomechanicalmotion perception, emotion recognition, social cognition, reasoning, and the perception andrepresentation of motion (Barkow et al. : ).. Just what kinds of mental modules humans possess, how many of them get geneticallytransmitted, and whether they occupy distinct parts of the brain are hotly debated issues,many of which are addressed in current empirical research.


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Those species, he concedes, could come a long way with their Swiss-armyknife mentality of distinctively specialized technical intelligence, naturalhistory intelligence, and social intelligence (). But Mithen argues

that the cognitive framework of anatomically modernHomo sapiens sapiensmust have acquired a great deal of cognitive fluidity ( and passim)among its various modules to become capable of producing the big bangof human culture between thirty and sixty thousand years ago ().

The sequential logic of Mithens prehistory, that cognitive specializationmust precede cognitive integration, lends itself to application beyond cog-nition in the strict sense. Indeed I propose considering cognition alongsideemotion and volition as three mental supermodules that first emerged

from undifferentiated information processing between sensory intake andmotor output and then merged back into an enriched mental matrix ofinteractive beliefs, feelings, and desires. According to such a scheme, someprotohumans found themselves capable of adjusting to changing circum-stances of their lives by selectively turning appropriate amounts of biologi-cal energy into rudimentary feelings, beliefs, or desires. As a result theysurvived and reproduced with greater statistical frequency than their lessdiscriminating rivals. Later on, the increasingly complex social environ-ments of our more fully human forebears began to render some premedi-tated actions more adaptive than involuntary knee-jerk reactions. Naturalselection thus began to favor individuals whose feelings, beliefs, and desirestended to engage in conscious mental negotiation with each other, therebyreplacing reflex-ruled animal behavior with the liberating possibility of re-flective personal agency in some areas of human life.21 In short, our sepa-rate capacities to feel, think, and desire seem to have historically evolvedas hominid or late prehominid specializations that, in the well-temperedmind of anatomically modern humans, tend to become integrated with

each other.Changing circumstances in the lives of individuals and in the histories

of societies no doubt call for different kinds of integration and different de-grees of subordination among feelings, beliefs, and desires.There is nothing

wrong, for instance, with occasionally focusing first on how you feel, nexton what state of affairs appears to cause you to feel that way, and finally on

what you might do to sustain a pleasurable (or alter a displeasureable) stateof affairs. But people with insufficiently developed imagination to experi-

ence their feelings, beliefs, and desires in a penumbra of virtual alternativescan get stuck in a particular gear, so to speak, for an extended period oftime. They will channel their awareness in a single direction until efficient

. See Hernadi on the evolution of our sense of freedom and personal responsibility() and on the interface of emotion, cognition, and volition ().


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emotive, cognitive, or volitional specialization becomes counterproductivelopsidedness.

In contrast to such mental monotony, our responses to literatures simul-

taneous imaginative appeal to feelings, beliefs, and desires intertwine theemotive, cognitive, and volitional dimensions of the mind into the sustainedcounterpoint of dynamic equilibriums. While many aspects of workadaymentation are primarily tied to eithercognitionoremotionorvolition, theintegrative experience exemplified by literary transactions overcomes thedisadvantages of this type of mental specialization without surrenderingits considerable advantages, hard-won in millions of years of evolutionaryadaptations. The novel reader or moviegoer is far from regressing to the

newborn infants undifferentiated protoconciousness or to the physiologi-cal simplicity of a lizard, whose unpleasant feeling of chill surely remainsundistinguished from any belief about the time of day or any desire(let alone intention) to move from the shade into the sun. The emotive,cognitive, and volitional aspects of a literary response (say, toHamletor theCinderella story) remain analytically distinguishable as such even as ourintertwining them within the voluntary dreams of directed creation pro-

vides pleasurable mental practice for this kind of integration to be achieved,again and again, in later episodes of ordinary experience.22 Thisiswhy,fromtheir earliest occurrences on, literary transactions could be serving both setsof functions: to expand the cognitive, emotive, and volitional horizons ofhuman awareness (as discussed in the three previous sections) and to inte-grate our beliefs, feelings, and desires within the fluid mentality requiredfor survival in the increasingly complex social and cultural environmentsof human organisms.

Cautionary Conclusion

Having sung the praise of literature, I wish to add a few sobering words inconclusion. I have suggested that the current worldwide presence of liter-ary mentality indicates that our distant ancestors chances for survival werepromoted by engaging in protoliterary transactions. If my views are correct,many pancultural literary phenomena bear the marks of coevolutionaryadaptations by several thousand generations of humans to their changingactual and virtual environments.23 But as circumstances change, past suc-

cess retains little predictive value regarding the future course of evolution-

. Friedrich Schiller ( []), John Dewey (), and numerous other commentatorson esthetic matters praised the capacity of the arts to unify our often lopsided or inchoatesensibilities and thus to show the way toward integrating subsequent ordinary experience.. In Hernadi I touch on some of the ideas further developed in the present article butalso place additional pancultural features of literary phenomena in an evolutionary context.


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ary history, and literature may cease or may have already ceased to makesignificant evolutionary contributions. Only the future will tell whether thefriends of literature can succeed in sustaining mental orientations and cul-

tural conditions that are hospitable to literary worldmaking. All we and ourdescendants can do is promote the poetic making and directed cocreatingof virtual worlds that are diverse enough for at least some of them to re-main selectable to play life-enhancing roles in as yet unforeseen phases ofthe ongoing coevolution of human nature and cultures.

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Why is Literature