On the Evolutionary Substrates of Narrative

Abstract

Narrative is regarded as universal to all human cultures and peoples. As Roland Barthes put it in an often quoted statement: in its “almost infinitive diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative” (Barthes 1966/77: 79). This assertion still reflects the commonsense view today, and narrative has also been included in Donald E. Brown’s catalogue of human universals (Brown 1991: 132). Whether this means that there is a biologically rooted ‘narrative instinct’ is controversial, however. Universality alone is not sufficient evidence that a particular behavior is rooted in a discrete psychological mechanism that evolved to produce exactly this sort of behavior; the narrative ability could just as well be an evolutionary by-product resulting from the interaction of several cognitive abilities that originally evolved for different purposes. Indeed, the fact that there is considerable diversity in narrative form and structure suggests that narrative is not an organ-like faculty shaped by biological selection but a complex cultural behavior – a contingent universal that simply “exploits” (Williams 1966: 13) a number of abilities and thus manifests itself again and again in similar fashions across cultures (Mellmann 2012: 33f.). If that is so, this raises the question of what these abilities might be that enable narrative as a human behavior.