Joel P. Christensen, Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025) x+234 pp. £20.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780300269239
Fifteen years ago I wrote a review for the BSLS of three books that sought to make profound claims about epic, narrative and living things. Two of them – Jonathan Gottschall’s The Rape of Troy (2008) and Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories (2009) – offered readings of the Iliad and the Odyssey respectively. In Storylife, Joel Christensen too turns to Homer to consider fundamental questions about narrative and biology. Where Gottschall and Boyd read Homeric epic to vindicate versions of evolutionary psychology, Christensen’s concern is with the biology of stories themselves.
Christensen’s argument ‘that narrative functions analogously to a living thing’ (88) resembles an enormous, all-encompassing Homeric simile in its own right. In the first chapter, the text of an epic poem is likened to DNA which only achieves its expression epigenetically through audiences who ‘“decode” the words just as proteins and other influences shape gene expression’ (37). Chapter 2 draws parallels between ‘the development of complex organisms from single-celled life’ (58) and the undirected, accretive processes by which the Homeric epics as we have them were formed from their component parts within an oral tradition. In the third chapter, Christensen weighs up parallel and convergent evolution as models for understanding the relationship between Homeric and Mesopotamian epic. In the fourth chapter, he proposes that we might consider stories as viruses that can have negative as well as positive impacts. This argument is developed in Chapter 5, which asks ‘What happens to us when we are hosts to stories?’ (145) Finally, in his Conclusion, Christensen proposes that we should not consider his governing analogies as mere analogies at all:
Understanding narrative as being like a living thing can help us better conceptualize our relationship with it. But imagining that narrative is alive puts us in a position to be better stewards of the lives we live alongside it. (180)
At this moment the tenor of his own Homeric simile – narrative – becomes metonymically, not merely metaphorically, connected to the vehicle – biological life – albeit through an act of imagination.
In his Conclusion, Christensen declares ‘I have used examples of language and narrative from Homeric epic and Archaic Greek poetry to argue that we should think of stories as living things’ (179), yet he also admits earlier in the book that much of his argument ‘is possible without using biological metaphors’ (141). In reviewing Boyd’s book, I raised the question of whether the insights in his fine reading of The Odyssey were dependent on his more contentious evolutionary theory of aesthetics. The same goes for Christensen’s readings in Storylife. He is a wonderfully astute and learned critic of Homer, with a discerning eye. His careful unpacking of the epithet ‘swift-footed’ to show that it implies Achilles’s limitations as much as his capabilities, his demonstration of how the type-scenes that amass across the epics build up character and structure, his tracing of a sustained critique of kleos or fame that runs throughout the Homeric epics – these are just a few of the many thoughtful and thought-provoking insights into Homeric epic to be found in his book. What is not so clear is that any of these insights rely on, let alone confirm, his overarching analogy between stories and living things.
Christensen remarks, ‘For me, the test of an analogy’s efficacy is whether I understand something differently – if not better – than I did before’ (56). It would be churlish not to accept that Christensen’s analogies have helped him to develop aspects of his own understanding of Homer, or to deny that I understand Homeric poetry in some ways differently – and certainly better – than I did before I read his book. Yet in spite of this apparent vindication of their efficacy by Christensen’s own measure, his analogies frequently distract from what is otherwise an excellent critical analysis of his primary sources. It is not clear what concepts such as ‘a narrative’s ecosystem’ (38-39) or its epigenetic expression offer over the more familiar terminology of historical context or reader response. Although Christensen’s main analogies are all drawn from biology, they are not otherwise closely connected. In the absence of a single governing idea, the rigour of his readings of Homer feels diluted, not reinforced, especially when both the vehicle and the tenor can change within the same argument. In Chapter 2, for example, the ‘cell’ is ‘the word-phrase combination’ (64) but also the type-scene, while both the rings of a tree and the spiral shell of a snail are invoked as analogies for epic’s characteristic ring structure.
In Chapter 4, stories are identified both with viruses and with invasive species. Although Christensen does not cite The Selfish Gene, his claim that ‘Story exists in order to continue existing’ (146) closely resembles Richard Dawkins’s concept of the meme as the unit of culture that is driven, like the gene, by its own logic of replication. The classic criticism of memetics – that it fails to identify any particulate equivalent to the gene – applies likewise to Christensen’s analysis. He may refer to ‘a narrative entity’ (120), but it is never clear what exactly he has in mind. Homer initially serves but ultimately foils his ends in this. As the textual witnesses to an unknowable tradition of oral poetry, the Iliad and Odyssey stand in at once for the individual literary work, a multitude of lost tales, a body of myth, and narrative per se. In so doing, they blur the lines between these discrete forms and ideas. Whatever the merits of Christensen’s analogies as thought experiments or pedagogical exercises, they fail as an argument for considering stories to be alive, or even as a prompt for imagining them as such, because it is never clear what the organism or species itself would be.
In spite of the failure of what it considers to be its principal argument, Storylife remains a powerful book, and not only for its insights into Greek epic. Christensen is rightly animated by the function of narrative within society today. In particular, he is attentive to the negative consequences of stories. Storylife is haunted by the ghost of Kleomēdēs the Astupalaian, an ancient Greek boxer who was accused of cheating after killing a competitor in the ring. Kleomēdēs returned home, only to attack a local school, killing many of the children. When he vanished from a chest he was supposedly hiding in, the Delphic oracle informed the Astupalaians that he should be honoured as the last of the heroes. As Christensen remarks, it is barely possible to read this story today without being reminded of the school shootings that have blighted the United States. For Christensen, the close reading of Homer reveals a deep scepticism towards the idea of the hero that can help us reflect critically today on a culture poisoned by masculinist and racist entitlements and grievances. These violences are themselves, he suggests, produced and reinforced by stories, so he proposes that they can be counteracted by placing more ‘complex, ambiguous, multicultural, and diverse’ (191) stories at the heart of our education systems. Whether or not you consider this process to be equivalent to inoculation against a virus, Christensen is surely right that, in an age of resentment, rampant prejudice and disinformation, we need ‘to develop the tools to engage with story intentionally rather than passively allowing it to shape us’ (191). Storylife attentively enacts just such an approach, with results that are intellectually stimulating and ethically compelling in equal measure.
John Holmes, University of Birmingham
