Storytelling: Pleasure Machine or Species Booster?

"Is This How Literature Began?" Chauvet Cave Painting, 30-32,000 years old.

In today's New York Times, Adam Kirsch and Dana Stevens consider the question: "Should literature be considered useful?" According to Kirsch, literature is not useful in any physical sense, for "The life that literature really equips us to live is not the one Wordsworth derided as devoted to 'getting and spending,' but the second life of inwardness and imagination." Stevens,on the other hand, muses that literature, and story-telling, are, as Kenneth Burke put it, "equipment for living." And it is this equipment for living that set the human species apart from all other species on earth. "I couldn’t tell you exactly what shelf in the utility closet that equipment for living occupies," Stevens confesses, "but I suspect none of us storytelling apes would survive for long without it." The binary implied by the title of this post is problematic, since literature can be and is used in so many different ways. To find out how Kirsch and Stevens dance around the question, click here.

Stevens quotes from a poem W. H. Auden wrote about the poet W. B. Yeats following Yeats's death in 1939. According to Stevens, the line in the poem "“Poetry makes nothing happen,” when read in context, actually makes the case that poetry "enables . . . the survival of human culture." The video below reveals that context: