by Will Storr
Hang on, that can’t be right. You must be wrong about something. So you go on a hunt. You count off your most precious beliefs – the ones that really matter to you – one by one. You’re not wrong about that and you’re not wrong about that and you’re certainly not wrong about that or that or that or that. The insidious thing about your biases, errors and prejudices is that they appear as real to you as Mr B’s delusions appear to him. It feels as if everyone else is ‘biased’ and it’s only you that sees reality as it actually is. Psychologists call this ‘naive realism’. Because reality seems clear and obvious and self-evident to you, those who claim to see it differently must be idiots or lying or morally derelict. The characters we meet at the start of story are, like most of us, living just like this – in a state of profound naivety about how partial and warped their hallucination of reality has become. They’re wrong. They don’t know they’re wrong. But they’re about to find out …
If we’re all a bit like Mr B then Mr B is, in turn, like the protagonist in Andrew Niccol’s screenplay, The Truman Show. It tells of thirty-year-old Truman Burbank, who’s come to believe his whole life is staged and controlled. But, unlike Mr B, he’s right. The Truman Show is not only real, it’s being broadcast, twenty-four hours a day, to millions. At one point, the show’s executive producer is asked why he thinks it’s taken Truman so long to become suspicious of the true nature of his world. ‘We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented,’ he answers. ‘It’s as simple as that.’
We certainly do. As wrong as we are, we rarely question the reality our brains conjure for us. It is, after all, our ‘reality’. As well as this, the hallucination is functional. Each one of the tiny beliefs that make up our neural model is a little instruction that tells our brain how the outside world works: this is how you open a stuck jam jar lid; this is how you lie to a police officer; this is how you behave if you want your boss to believe you’re a useful, sane and honest employee. These instructions make our environment predictable. They make it controllable. Taken in sum, the vastly intricate web of beliefs can be seen as the brain’s ‘theory of control’. It’s this theory of control that’s often challenged at the story’s start.
In his celebrated novel The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro takes us into the warped and flawed neural realm of James Stevens, a proud head butler in a large stately home. We learn that his core beliefs about the world and how to control it came from his father, Stevens Senior, who was a butler of prodigious talent. Stevens is passionate about his calling and muses about the ‘special quality’ that made his father, and butlers like him, so great. ‘Dignity’, he decides, the key to which is ‘emotional restraint’. Just as the English landscape is beautiful because of its ‘lack of obvious drama or spectacle’, a great butler ‘will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing’.
Emotional restraint is why the English make the best butlers. ‘Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race are capable of.’ They, and the Celts for that matter, ‘are like a man who will, at the slightest provocation, tear off his suit and his shirt and run about screaming.’ Emotional restraint is the pivotal idea around which his neural model of the world is built. It’s his theory of control. If he adheres to it, he’ll be able to manipulate his environment in such a way that he’ll get what he wants, namely, the reputation of a brilliant butler. This flawed belief defines him. It is him. It’s characters like Stevens, who inhabit their flaw with such concentrated precision, that often prove to be the most memorable, immediate and compelling.
Ishiguro’s book softly yet brutally exposes the ways in which Steven’s flawed perceptions of reality have harmed him. Its most crushing scenes play out one evening, as Stevens is captaining an important function at the house. Upstairs, his elderly father, finally broken by a lifetime of service, has just come around after suffering a collapse. A preoccupied Stevens is persuaded to see him. Perhaps sensing the gravity of his situation, Stevens Senior breaks through his own ironclad armour of emotional restraint and expresses a hope that he’s been a good father. His son can only respond with an awkward laugh. ‘I’m so glad you’re feeling better now,’ he says. His father tells him he’s proud of him. Then he pushes the point, ‘I hope I’ve been a good father to you. I suppose I haven’t.’
‘I’m afraid we’re extremely busy now,’ his son replies. ‘But we can talk again in the morning.’
Later that evening, Stevens Senior has a stroke. He’s on the edge of death. His son is coaxed up to see him again and, again, insists he must return to his duties. Downstairs his boss, Lord Darlington, senses something’s wrong. ‘You look as though you’re crying,’ he says. Stevens quickly dabs the corners of his eyes and laughs, ‘I’m very sorry, sir. The strains of a hard day.’ When his father dies, shortly afterwards, Stevens is again too busy to attend. ‘I know my father would have wished me to carry on just now,’ he remarks to a maid. And there’s little doubt he’s correct.
The brilliance of this sequence – its psychological truth – is that this is not a memory of shame and regret, for Stevens, but one of victory. In fact, it’s his pitch for being held in the pantheon of the Britain’s greatest and most dignified butlers. ‘For all its sad associations,’ he says, ‘whenever I recall that evening today, I find I do so with a large sense of triumph.’ The hallucinated model Stevens had of reality was built around the value of emotional restraint. That was the core of his brain’s theory about how a person should control the world. And, as far as he was concerned, he’d aced it.
Stevens’s neural world was warped and twisted and yet, just like Mr B, he saw evidence all around him that it was entirely accurate. After all, hadn’t his model of reality and its theory of control worked? Hadn’t his belief in the sacred value of emotional restraint given him his career, his status and protected him from the pain of losing his father? Ishiguro’s novel is an exploration of the truth of that flaw and its ramifications – how, as Salman Rushdie has written, Stevens was, ‘destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life’.
The mythologist Joseph Campbell said that ‘the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections.’ It’s this imperfect person we meet in story and in life. But unlike in life, story allows us to crawl into that character’s mind and understand them. For us hyper-social domesticated creatures, there’s little more fascinating than the cause and effect of other people, the ‘why’ of what people do as they do. But story offers more than just this. Locked inside the black vault of our skulls, stuck forever in the solitude of our own hallucinated universe, story is a portal, a hallucination within the hallucination, the closest we’ll ever really come to escape.
2.1
When designing a character, it’s often useful to think of them in terms of their theory of control. How have they learned to control the world? When unexpected change strikes, what’s their automatic go-to tactic for wrestling with the chaos? What’s their default, flawed response? The answer, as we’ve just seen, comes from that character’s core beliefs about reality, the precious and fiercely defended ideas around which they’ve formed their sense of self.
But who we are, in all our partiality and weirdness, is also partly genetic. Our genes begin to guide the way our brains and hormonal systems are wired up when we’re in the womb. We enter the world semi-finished. Then, early life events and influences work in combination with genes to build our core personality. Unless something terrible happens to psychologically break us, this personality is likely to remain relatively stable throughout our life, changing only modestly and in predictable ways as we age.
Psychologists measure personality across five domains, which can be useful for writers doing character work to know. Those high in extraversion are gregarious and assertive, seekers of attention and sensation. Being high in neuroticism means you’re anxious, self-conscious and prone to d
epression, anger and low self-esteem. Lots of openness makes for a curious soul, someone artistic, emotional and comfortable with novelty. High-agreeable people are modest, sympathetic and trusting while their disagreeable opposites have a competitive and aggressive bent. Conscientious people prefer order and discipline and value hard work, duty and hierarchy. Psychologists have applied these domains to fictional characters. One academic paper included the following examples:
Neuroticism (high): Miss Havisham (Great Expectations, Charles Dickens)
Neuroticism (low): James Bond (Casino Royale, Ian Fleming)
Extraversion (high): The Wife of Bath (The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer)
Extraversion (low): Boo Radley (To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee)
Openness (high): Lisa Simpson (The Simpsons, Matt Groening)
Openness (low): Tom Buchanan (The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Agreeableness (high): Alexei Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Agreeableness (low): Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë)
Conscientiousness (high): Antigone (Antigone, Sophocles)
Conscientiousness (low): Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole)
These ‘big five’ personality traits aren’t switches – we’re not one thing or the other. Rather, they’re dials, with us having more or less of each trait, our particular highs and lows combining to form our own peculiar self. Personality has a powerful influence over our theory of control. Different personalities have different go-to tactics for controlling the environment of people. When unexpected change threatens, some are more likely to jump to aggression and violence, some charm, some flirtation, others will argue or withdraw or become infantile or try to negotiate for consensus or become Machiavellian or dishonest, resorting to threat, bribery or con.
This, then, is how unique and interesting fictional characters generate unique and interesting plots. ‘It is from character,’ writes the psychologist Professor Keith Oatley, ‘that flow goals, plans and actions.’ As we interact with the world in our own characteristic way, so the world pushes back in ways which reflect it, setting us off in our own particular cause-and-effect journey – a plot specific to us. A disagreeable neurotic sending out grumpy, twitchy causes into the world has to deal with the negative effects that fly back. A feedback loop of grumpiness emerges, with the neurotic convinced they’re behaving reasonably and rationally only to be tossed, once again, into an oubliette of hostility and disapproval. One extra episode of paranoia or irritation per week will trigger enough negativity in other people that they’ll find themselves living in a neural realm that’s entirely different from the average smiley high-agreeable. It’s in these ways that tiny differences in brain structure can add up to massively different lives and plots.
Personality can predict what kinds of futures we might have too. Conscientious people tend to enjoy greater than average job security and life satisfaction; extroverts are more likely to have affairs and car accidents; disagreeable people are better at fighting their way up corporate ladders into the highest-paying jobs; those high in openness are more likely to get tattoos, be unhealthy and vote for left-wing political parties while those low in conscientiousness are more likely to end up in prison and have a higher risk of dying, in any given year, of around 30 per cent. Although women and men are far more alike than they are different, there are gender differences. One of the most reliable findings in the literature is that males tend to be more disagreeable than females, with the average man scoring lower in agreeability than around 60 per cent (and, in some studies, 70 per cent) of women. A similar personality gap is found for neuroticism, where the average man scores lower than around 65 per cent of women.
As a person low in extraversion and high in neuroticism, writing to you from the corner of a darkened room in a cottage that lies at the end of a crumbling path, deep in the Kent countryside, I can attest to the extent to which traits can guide fates. The butler Stevens would’ve been attracted to his life of service in part because of his personality, which seems unusually high in conscientiousness and low in openness and extraversion. He’d have inherited these traits from his much-admired father because personality, of course, is significantly heritable. Charles Foster ‘Citizen’ Kane, meanwhile, was low in agreeableness, low in neuroticism and high in extraversion: he was monstrously ambitious, lacked self-doubt and craved the approval of others. It was these three qualities, more than any others, that defined his personality and dictated the decisions which formed the plot of his life.
2.2
Storytellers can show the personality of their characters in almost everything they do: it’s in their thoughts, dialogue, social behaviours, memories, desires and sadnesses. It’s in how they behave in traffic jams, what they think of Christmas and their reaction to a bee. ‘Human personalities are rather like fractals,’ writes the psychologist Professor Daniel Nettle. ‘It is not just that what we do in the large-scale narratives of our lives – love, career, friendships – tends to be somewhat consistent over time, with us often repeating the same kinds of triumph or mistakes. Rather, what we do in tiny interactions like the way we shop, dress or talk to a stranger on the train or decorate our houses, shows the same kinds of patterns as can be observed from examining a whole life.’
Human environments are rich with clues about those who occupy them. People make ‘identity claims’ to broadcast who they are. This could be through displaying certificates, books, tattoos or meaningful objects. Identity claims betray how these people want others to think of them. People use ‘feeling regulators’, motivational posters, scented candles or items that make them feel nostalgic, excited or loved. Extroverts who feel energised by bright colours are more likely to decorate their homes or dress accordingly, while introverts prefer the hush of muted tones. ‘Behavioural residue’ is what psychologists call the things we accidentally leave behind: the stashed wine bottle, the torn-up manuscript, the punch dent in the wall. The psychologist Professor Sam Gosling advises the curious to ‘look out for discrepancies in the signals that people send to themselves and others’. Broadcasting one version of self in their private spaces and another in their hallways, kitchens and offices can hint at a tortuous ‘fractionating of the self’.
In her novel Notes on a Scandal, Zoë Heller makes brilliant use of home environments to feed our neural models of its two central characters. When the narrator Barbara Covett (low in openness and agreeableness, high in conscientiousness) visits the home of Sheba Hart (the opposite) we’re treated to a rich insight into their contrary personalities. Covett recalls that, on the rare occasion she has visitors to her flat she cleans it ‘scrupulously’ and even grooms the cat. And yet she still experiences ‘the most terrible feeling of exposure … as if my dirty linen, rather than my unexceptional sitting room, were on display’. Not so Sheba. When Barbara enters her living room she sees in it a ‘bourgeois confidence’ and a ‘level of disorder … I could never tolerate’. There is ‘tatty, gigantic furniture’, ‘her children’s stray underwear’, ‘a primitive wooden instrument, possibly African, which looked as if it might be rather smelly’. The mantelpiece is ‘a gathering point for household flotsam. A child’s drawing. A hunk of pink Play-Doh. A passport. One elderly-looking banana.’
The environment triggers, in Barbara, a reaction that surprises her: the clutter makes her envious. This, in turn, sparks a melancholy thought that illuminates her character further and also relies on the way personality helplessly leaks into the spaces we occupy.
When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence. You know with painful accuracy the provenance of everything you touch and the last time you touched it. The five little cushions on your sofa stay plumped and leaning at their jaunty angle for months at a time unless you theatrically muss them. The level of the salt in your shaker decreases at the same excruciating rate, day after day. Sitting in Sheba�
��s house – studying the mingled detritus of its several inhabitants – I could see what a relief it might be to let your own meagre effects be joined with other people’s.
In this vivid and touching passage we hear the howl of the lonely in five plumped cushions and salt.
Our habit of leaving revealing clues in our environment is why journalists prefer interviewing subjects in their homes. When Lynn Barber met the formidable architect Zaha Hadid, she was let into her ‘bare white penthouse’ by a publicist prior to Hadid’s arrival. The flat, in which she’d lived for two and a half years, had ‘all the intimacy of a car showroom’, wrote Barber.
It is extremely, dauntingly, hard. There are no curtains, carpets, cushions or upholstery of any kind. The furniture, if that’s the right word, consists of slippery amorphous shapes made of reinforced fibreglass and painted with car paint … Her bedroom is fractionally more inviting in that it does at least have a recognisable bed, a small oriental rug, and a table with all her jewellery and scent bottles laid out, but that’s about it.’
Rooms, she wrote, ‘are supposed to provide clues to personality, but this seems to be a statement of impersonality’. Of course, Barber’s vivid and telling descriptions richly fed our models of Hadid’s mind. We began to know who she was before she’d even walked in.