The Science of Storytelling

by Will Storr

  But such stories don’t only exploit outrage and tribal humiliation for their power. Many deploy a third incendiary group emotion: disgust. In our evolutionary pasts, the threat from competing groups wouldn’t come only from their potential for violence. They could also be carrying dangerous pathogens that our immune systems hadn’t previously encountered and so couldn’t defend us against. Exposure to carriers of pathogens – in faeces, say, or rotten food – naturally activates feelings of disgust and revulsion. Our tribal brains seem to have developed the cultural tic of thinking of foreign tribes in such a way. This, perhaps, is why children still commonly hold their noses as a way of derogating members of out-groups.

  Tribal propaganda exploits these processes by representing enemies as disease-carrying pests such as cockroaches, rats or lice. In Jew Süss, the Jewish people are portrayed as filthy and unhygienic and are shown teeming into a city as a plague. Even popular conventional stories exploit the power of disgust. Villains from Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort to Beowulf’s Grendel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface have disfigurements that fire these neural networks. In The Twits, Roald Dahl created a typically marvellous confabulation of the disgust principle: ‘If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.’

  It’s in these ways that story both exposes and enables the worst traits of our species. We willingly allow highly simplistic narratives to deceive us, gleefully accepting as truth any tale that casts us as the moral hero and the other as the two-dimensional villain. We can tell when we’re under its power. When all the good is on our side and all the bad on theirs, our storytelling brain is working its grim magic in full. We’re being sold a story. Reality is rarely so simple. Such stories are seductive because our hero-making cognition is determined to convince us of our moral worth. They justify our primitive tribal impulses and seduce us into believing that, even in our hatred, we are holy.

  3.10

  It’s sometimes assumed that we root for characters who are simply kind. This is a nice idea, but it’s not true. In story, as in life, kind people are wonderful and inspiring and oh so terribly boring. Besides, if a hero starts out in such perfect selfless shape there’s going to be no tale to tell. For the story theorist Professor Bruno Bettelheim, the storyteller’s challenge isn’t so much one of arousing the reader’s moral respect for the protagonist, but their sympathy. In his inquiry into the psychology of fairy tales, he writes that ‘the child identifies with the good hero not because of his goodness, but because the hero’s condition makes a deep positive appeal to him. The question for the child is not, “Do I want to be good?” but “Who do I want to be like?”’

  But if Bettelheim is correct, how do we explain antiheroes? Millions have been entranced by the adventures of Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, who embarks on a sexual relationship with a twelve-year-old girl. Surely we don’t want to be ‘like’ him?

  In order to achieve his trick of not having us throw his novel into a cleansing fire after the first seven pages, Nabokov has to go to sometimes extreme lengths to subconsciously manipulate our tribal social emotions. In a scholarly introduction written by an academic we immediately learn that Humbert is dead. Next we discover that, prior to his passing, he was in ‘legal captivity’ awaiting trial. This immediately deflates much of our moral outrage before we even get the chance to feel it: the poor bastard’s caught and dead. Whatever he’s done, he’s had his tribal comeuppance. We can relax. The craving subsides. Before the first sentence is even finished, Nabokov has begun slyly freeing us to enjoy what’s to come.

  When we meet the man himself our outrage is further punctured by his immediate acknowledgements of wrongdoing, calling Lolita ‘my sin’ and himself a ‘murderer’. It helps, too, that Humbert’s the opposite of disgusting, being handsome, well-tailored and charming. He’s darkly funny, dealing with the death of his mother in perhaps the most famous in-parenthesis aside in literature – ‘(picnic, lightning)’ – and describing Lolita’s mother as looking like ‘a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich’. We learn his hebephiliac tendencies were triggered by tragedy: when he himself was twelve, his first love Annabelle died, ‘that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since – until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.’

  When Humbert’s adult interest in girls of Annabelle’s age becomes apparent, he tries to cure himself with therapy and marriage. It doesn’t work. The story’s ignition point (just as it is for Charles Foster Kane and King Lear) is an inevitable consequence of his flawed model of the world: Humbert meets and falls in love with Lolita. We soon realise the girl’s mother despises her: not only has she given her daughter ‘the meanest and coldest’ room in the house, Humbert finds a personality questionnaire she’s filled in on her behalf. It indicates she believes Lolita to be, ‘aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate. She had ignored the thirty remaining adjectives, among which were cheerful, cooperative, energetic, and so forth. It was really maddening.’ She then packs her off, against her will, to a boarding school with ‘strict discipline’. By a variety of powerful and crafty means, Nabokov is manipulating our emotions such that we find ourselves somewhat rooting for Humbert.

  If Humbert is to have Lolita, her mother has to go. Will Humbert kill her? Nabokov knows he’s already asking a great deal from the reader. Our social emotions are only on Humbert’s ‘side’ in the most fragile way and certainly won’t stand watching him kill. So when her death takes place, it’s not directly Humbert’s doing. In perhaps his most audacious piece of manipulation, Nabokov has his protagonist unable to bring himself to commit the awful deed. Instead he relies on what he cheekily has Humbert describe as ‘the long hairy arm of coincidence’ to do it for him. She’s run over by a car.

  When Humbert finally gets his hands on Lolita, he’s randy but also conflicted, hesitant and guilty. We crucially discover she’s no longer a virgin, having already slept with a boy at summer camp. She’s presented, at least by our unreliable narrator, as unsympathetic – pushy, confident, manipulative and precocious – and because this is the behaviour we’re shown, it’s what we’ll subconsciously and emotionally respond to. Lolita comes to dominate Humbert before deciding to run off with a far more despicable man, Clare Quilty. Where Nabokov sympathetically manipulates our response to Humbert, he fully unleashes the disgust principle against this ‘subhuman’ predatory hebephiliac pornographer: we see the ‘black hairs on the back of his piggy hands’ and watch him ‘scratching loudly his fleshy and gritty grey cheek and showing his small pearly teeth in a crooked grin’. Then, in a thrilling act of altruistic punishment and costly signalling that we’re by now deeply craving, Humbert kills him.

  Our antihero finally departs the story having submitted voluntarily to his arrest. The very last thing he shares with us is a confessional memory from the period following his abandonment by Lolita. He’d pulled up in his car at the side of a high valley, at the bottom of which lay a small mining town. In its streets, he heard the voices of playing children: ‘I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.’ Humbert Humbert might have done a terrible thing, but Nabokov’s ability to manipulate our deepest tribal feelings about his sin, his soul, are tremendous.

  Similar manipulations take place on behalf of other antiheroes, not least the protagonist of the television series The Sopranos. Our first meeting with the Mafioso Tony Soprano occurs in a psychotherapist’s waiting room. We learn he developed a bond with some ducks and ducklings that regularly landed in his pool,
and suffered a panic attack when they finally left. He weeps when he speaks of them. Not only is Soprano sensitive and in pain, he’s relatively low in status. Far from being some all-powerful John Gotti, he’s the capo of a marginal New Jersey gang and, anyway, as he says to his new therapist: ‘I came in at the end, the best is over.’

  When we see Soprano beating a man, the victim is just a ‘degenerate fucking gambler’ who owes him money and insulted him: ‘you’ve been telling people I’m nothing compared to the people who used to run things.’ As the episode unfolds, Soprano secretly tries to help a non-mob friend in whose restaurant his much more horrible uncle has planned a hit. Soprano cares for his mother. When he takes her to a prospective nursing home and she becomes distressed, he suffers another anxiety attack. We then discover she’s plotting with his uncle to have him killed.

  The author Patricia Highsmith indulges in similar manipulations. In Ripley’s Game, the sociopathic con artist Tom Ripley is handsome, eloquent and cultured, just like Humbert. And, like Humbert and Soprano, he’s in conflict with a much more evil villain, Reeves Minot. Like Soprano, darker, more powerful forces are ranged against him in the form of the Italian mafia. And so on. If we have the alarming realisation that we’re actually rooting for these characters, it’s because we’re being cleverly manipulated into doing so by everything that’s happening around them. They might be sex criminals, con artists and gangsters, but the world that’s created for them to battle against is such that we overlook their deviancies in spite of ourselves.

  There’s a sense in which all protagonists are antiheroes. Most, when we meet them, are flawed and partial and only become truly heroic if and when they manage to change. Any attempt to find a single reason why we find characters root-worthy is probably destined to fail. There isn’t one secret to creating empathy but many. The key lies in the neural networks. Stories work on multiple evolved systems in the brain and a skilled storyteller activates these networks like the conductor of an orchestra, a little trill of moral outrage here, a fanfare of status play over there, a tintinnabulation of tribal identification, a rumble of threatening antagonism, a tantara of wit, a parp of sexual allure, a crescendo of unfair trouble, a warping and wefting hum as the dramatic question is posed and reposed in new and interesting ways – all instruments by which masses of brains can be captivated and manipulated.

  But I suspect there’s also something else going on. Story is a form of play that we domesticated animals use to learn how to control the social world. Archetypal stories about antiheroes often end in their being killed or otherwise humiliated, thus serving their purpose as tribal propaganda. We’re taught the appropriate lesson and left in no doubt about the costs of such selfish behaviour. But the awkward fact remains that, as we experience the story unfolding in our minds, we seem to enjoy ‘playing’ the antihero. I wonder if this is because, somewhere in the sewers far beneath our hero-making narrators, we know we’re not so lovely. Keeping the secret of ourselves from ourselves can be exhausting. This, perhaps, is the subversive truth of stories about antiheroes. Being freed to be evil, if only in our minds, can be such a joyful relief.

  3.11

  If Joseph Campbell is correct in saying the only way of describing a human ‘truly’ is by describing their imperfections, how might a storyteller describe you? That is, what are the identity-forming beliefs you cling to and define you that are wrong and often harm you? What’s your version of the butler Stevens’s emotional restraint? This, in all likelihood, will not be a straightforward question to answer. The reason such flaws are pernicious is that they’re often invisible to us. They’re a component part of our controlled hallucination of reality. Worse, when they do become noticeable, our sly hero-making brains work to make them seem as if they’re not flaws at all, but virtues. We fight to defend them.

  For me, I suspect it might be a foundational belief that other people are dangerous. I have a theory of control that says in order to remain safe humans should be avoided wherever possible. As I’ve grown older, and more adept at being social, I’ve developed a range of selves I wear in public like masks so I can function. But I’ve also retreated further into myself. My crafty brain tells me the decisions that have brought me to where I am have been brilliant. It’s wonderful I live such a relatively peaceful life, cocooned in the country with my wife and dogs. ‘Hell is other people, yeah?’

  But, sometimes, I’m not sure. In my thirties, I’d occasionally pine for friends but whenever I got the chance to make any, would pull away. I no longer pine. As the world has quietened around me, I’ve come to know pleasant solitude and bitter loneliness as two expressions of the same face. One can become the other in a flash. I feel myself becoming odder. I sense it in the wary eyes of the postman and people I meet when out walking. I worry about my wife and I getting old, childless and isolated. But what to do? My neural models have been organising themselves in this direction for decades. In order to break them apart, and change the flawed, core belief they’re founded upon, something properly dramatic would have to happen.

  I can tell a convincing tale of how my flawed model of the world came to be. Tests on the big five personality scale have me low in extraversion and high in neuroticism. These genetic tendencies were exacerbated by a difficult childhood home-life. I tried to find what I was missing at school but my desperation just alienated and irritated. Then alcohol happened, and drugs. Giving them up meant not socialising and that turned out to be surprisingly seductive. What I’d always wanted was noise and people. What I’d needed, it seemed, was the opposite. That’s the neat, neocortical cause-and-effect origin story I have of myself.

  Is this confabulation true? Probably, some of it. How much I’ll never know. I’m sure we all have such stories though. In our therapeutic age we’re conditioned to seek soothing just-so stories, in our pasts, that explain the origin of our damage. Although this seems to have become more habitual in twentieth-century fiction, it’s been happening for centuries, not least in Shakespeare’s account of the origin of Cassius’s psychological damage in Julius Caesar – his murderous obsession coming into being in his youth in the choppy waters of the river Tiber.

  The story of Citizen Kane is itself a hunt for origin damage. Rawlston’s newsmen are charged to discover who this man was, who’d inherited a spectacular fortune and yet chosen to run a newspaper, attempted to go into politics and then died alone and unhappy in ‘the world’s largest pleasure ground’ surrounded by a ‘collection of everything so big it can never be catalogued’. Most specifically, they’re sent to uncover the mystery of the last word he ever spoke: rosebud.

  During the search, one of Rawlston’s men reads the memoir of the guardian who’d raised Kane from boyhood. Its pages reveal that his mother gave Kane up to a wealthy guardian, Thatcher, against his father’s will. She believed she was doing the right thing because his father beat him. But Charles’s father also believed he was doing the right thing, his hero-making narrator insisting the beatings were for the boy’s own good. Despite the corporal punishment, young Charles was essentially happy. We’re shown him full of life, joyfully playing soldiers in the snow. When Thatcher takes him away, he attacks him with a sledge.

  In the film’s final frames, the information gaps that opened-up at the story’s start are finally closed. We discover that, written on that sledge was the word ‘rosebud’. The glass snow globe Kane dropped and smashed when he died contained a house resembling that of his parents. In being wrenched away from that home, a void was created that he spent his life trying to fill with the love of the masses and all the material possessions he could buy. But the hole was too big. It was during that moment with the sledge that the damage took place to his models that, in turn, created the ignition point and plot of his story. This revelation answers the fundamental dramatic question of who is he? and thereby leaves the viewer moved and satisfied.

  The origin damage suffered by the butler Stevens took place against the background of his childhood. He was
raised to believe in Britain’s greatness when the nation was still inarguably powerful. But there was one moment, in his past, that seems especially formative. He hears a story about his father, a head butler, and how he dealt with a particular visitor he ‘detested’ – an army General whose unprincipled and irresponsible actions during the Second Boer War led directly to the death of his eldest son, and our narrator’s brother. When the General arrived at the house without a valet, Stevens Senior volunteered to look after him. As he tended to him in ‘intimate proximity’, throughout his four-day visit, the General proved arrogant and rude. But even as he boasted of his military accomplishments, Stevens Senior betrayed not a twitch of the turbulent emotions he had to endure. This dignity in emotional restraint became an idealised model of self, in Stevens’s mind. It was incorporated into his theory of control. The story told him who he had to be in order to be welcomed into the status game of butlers and climb to its pinnacle.

  It seems characteristic of many successful stories that their authors reduce origin damage to specific moments. It doesn’t do to be general and say, for example, ‘it’s because their parents didn’t love them enough,’ because such vague thinking can only lead to more vague thinking. In reality, of course, origin damage is often a matter of grim erosion, commonly taking place over months, years and repeated bloody incidents. But it’s my experience when teaching these principles that, if we’re creating stories, specificity is essential. It helps to pin a character’s damage down to an actual event and imagine it thoroughly, even if these scenes are left out of the play, screenplay or novel that follows, as they often are. It’s only once the writer knows when it happened, how it happened and what flaw the incident created, they can begin to truly know their character. That belief comes to define them. Their self-reinforcing brains begin to see evidence supportive of it everywhere.