“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying ‘wolf, wolf’ came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels. Literature was born on the day when a boy came crying ‘wolf, wolf,’ and there was no wolf behind him.”
~ VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Lies are funny things. The smaller they are, the bigger the consequences. Lie to your boss or your spouse about being late because you were stuck in traffic, and they’ll never trust you again. Lie to your drinking buddies about your exploits with a certain cute blonde who occasionally comes to the bar, and you’ll find your stock slipping to record lows among the group. But tell an outrageous whopper about a mythical race called Hobbits, one of whom has found a magic ring that its owner, a supernatural being of great power, wants back enough to make war on the races of men, dwarves, and elves and lay waste to a continent, tell it in writing over a series of books, and it seems people will compete for the right to turn it into movies and knock each other down to throw obscene amounts of money at you just for the right to read and view these lies, and buy souvenirs of the experience. Why is that? That’s what I’m going to explore this week.

People, it seems, are hard-wired to fall into a good story. For how many millennia have people, lacking all but the most rudimentary form of society, sat around a camp fire enthralled by the spell woven by a master storyteller? This continues to this day, practiced by primitive societies as well as modern city-dwellers on a camping trip. The novel is a fairly recent addition to the pantheon of storytelling, but far from being buried by the competition arising with the advent of motion pictures and television, not to mention the modern onslaught of e-everything, from the internet to the i-phone, it thrives and grows more popular than ever.

After careful consideration, I believe this is because the narrative was of vital importance to our proto-human ancestors. Most anthropologists agree that the road that elevated us from hunter-gatherers at the mercy of the elements and more powerful predators began when we became fully able to communicate with one another, to store information, and transmit it in usable form to future generations. How would those talented elders have gone about that? Imagine a handful of the group’s teenage boys on the threshold of manhood who need to be taught to follow the spoor of an antelope. One veteran hunter tells them, “Look for A, then B, then C. . .” and so on, like a laundry list. Another gathers them in a circle and begins to regale them with the epic story of Grog, the mighty hunter, who went on a grand adventure, did A, and B, and C, and came home with the antelope that fed the clan all through the winter. Who are those kids going to absorb the lesson from?

I think the willingness, and maybe even the need, to fall into a skillfully woven narrative has been with us from the dawn of speech, and it is fully ingrained in our genes. Those whom the gene has skipped are the dullest people you know. They become bean counters and shovel technicians, and there is no spark of life’s joy in their eyes. If you try to share with them the book that has held you enthralled from cover to cover, they look at you with an expression of condescension, and say, “I only read professional journals.” Yeah, and they’re on the short list for the Most Interesting Person in the World award, aren’t they?

So, that’s my take. I think we love to engage with a rollicking good yarn and some of us love to tell them because it has been vital to our survival for so long it couldn’t be changed without changing our fundamental humanity. Doubt it? Then why do some works achieve Classic status, and others become Cult favorites? Of all the books published every week, why do some break out of the pack to become best-sellers? Why do some resonate with you, and not others? Want to see a practical, modern demonstration of this principle in action? Let’s shift media for a moment.

1938. New York. Orson Welles stages a radio presentation of his father’s classic science fiction story, War of the Worlds. Panic grips North America. Police dispatchers are inundated with calls from terrified citizens seeking protection from the Martians. Families flee from cities, running to where, who can say, to escape an invasion from outer space. The Canadian military is mobilized to block three bridges from the U.S. to prevent the passage of anyone displaying a Martian passport. Ten years later, it’s repeated in Lima, Peru. When the panicked crowds filling the streets finally tumble to the fact that it’s a hoax, they set fire to the radio station. The last man on the air pleads for police and fire services to come rescue him, but no one comes; the police are mobilizing to fight the invaders. Engulfed in flames, he jumps three stories into a hostile mob that attempts to throw him back into the building before cooler heads prevail, and drive him to a hospital. He was lucky; six people died in that building. Are we done yet? Hardly. In 1962, a rock and roll station in Buffalo, New York recreates the broadcast with results similar to the original. I am told that there was a disco version a decade after that.

But modern audiences are too sophisticated to fall for something like that nowadays, right? Right? I offer three words on that subject: Blair Witch Project. For those too young to have participated, this film was made with hand-held cameras filming unknown actors in eerie lighting conditions. It was purportedly about a group of student filmmakers who went into an old-growth forest area on the eastern seaboard to make a documentary about a witch who was supposedly burned there back in the day. The movie began with two stark sentences on the screen:

“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. This footage was found one year later.”

There followed a visceral psychological horror-thriller that consisted mostly of young adult actors exhibiting the condition of being paralyzed by terror, and didn’t even have a guy in a rubber suit. The film was a blockbuster success, but more to the point, the filmmakers were questioned by police concerned with how they had acquired this film, the name of the individual who had found it, the exact location of the discovery, and all the sort of things police want to know when someone disappears. I heard the director being interviewed on PBS in conjunction with the approach of Halloween, and he said that the production company continues to this day to receive e-mails and tweets asking whether the remains of the students have ever been found. That is a powerful piece of storytelling, not a word of which was true. It is one thing to turn on the radio and hear reports of an invasion from outer space. You tune to another station, and if they’re playing talk or music as usual, you can figure maybe it’s entertainment. A movie about a few kids you never heard of disappearing somewhere is harder to vet, and its ready acceptance by millions is a clear statement on our willingness, our eagerness to buy into a good story.

I would love to know what you think is the reason that people are so ready to throw themselves into an obviously fictional narrative. I think this would be a fun discussion to have, and of course, if we learn anything that improves our own understanding of the mechanism, that could lead to even better stories, and that would benefit author and reader alike. So join the discussion, tell me what you think. The only day I consider wasted is one during which I don’t learn anything, so to borrow from another well-loved piece of fiction, “Go ahead, make my day!”