But if that primitive resonance is not achieved, storytellers are failing to fulfil what is perhaps their primary function, which is therapeutic – to act as an echo chamber to our deepest fears and desires, and thus help to integrate them into a healthy personality.
In a telephone interview, he said: The reality is that Syrians are having to defend themselves in the most primitive ways.
Ive told Parker: "I thought it would be interesting if it were less precise, and just a little bit more spitty... more analog and more primitive, and I think, in that way, somehow more ominous".
"I began to see that the survival of primitive people and of the environment were inseparable," he wrote at the time.
It reflected a book-learned view of unregulated market power which failed to ring her alarm bells as Scargill's primitive notions of class struggle did, and was just as naïve.
Now, sexual dimorphism is, of course, most extreme in primitive societies, or animal gatherings – any loose collective where beating a competitor to death might be more effective, as a way of propagating your gene pool, than impressing mates with your ready wit.
If the court of appeal throws this case out, we might hope to focus similar tolerance on drug abuse, shop-lifting, antisocial behaviours and petty crimes for which imprisonment is such a primitive answer.
This is him at his best, playing with the medium and his audience just as he used to do with more primitive models of branding, marketing, myth-building and distribution.
The hotel closes on 5 October and reopens on 15 May 2012, 020-8133 3930, ibizarocks.com/hotel Standing in a wild, primitive landscape, Joshua Tree offered an escape for rock stars from the pressures of LA's scrutinising glare.
As the BBC political documentary-maker and author Michael Cockerell memorably observed: "When Margaret Thatcher first became Tory leader, she reacted towards TV like a primitive tribesman faced with a white man's camera: as if somehow it would take her soul away".
"It was such a yank of the rug out from under me, but I wrote it to find language for a very primitive emotional experience that might have resonance for others.
