by Will Storr
When you’ve broken a character you can begin to build their story. And they should be broken in a way that’s specific. Ishiguro’s butler’s mistake was specifically emotional restraint. That’s the grain around which his entire life, and the novel that tells of it, comes alive.
If origin damage in story most often occurs in youth, it’s because it’s in the first two decades of life that we’re busy forming ourselves out of our experiences. It’s when our models of reality are being built. (If you want to imagine how bizarre and berserk a person with unbuilt neural models of reality would be like, just imagine a four-year-old.) (Or a fourteen-year-old.) As adults, the hallucination we experience as truth is built out of our pasts. We see and feel and explain the world partly with our damage.
This damage can take place before we’re even able to speak. Because humans crave control, infants whose caregivers behave unpredictably can grow up in a constant state of anxious high alert. Their distress gets built into their core concepts about people which can lead to significant social problems when they’re grown. Even a lack of affectionate touch, in our earliest years, has the potential to hurt us forever. The body has a dedicated network of touch receptors optimised specifically to respond to being stroked. For the neuroscientist Professor Francis McGlone, gentle stroking is critical for healthy psychological development. ‘My hunch is that the natural interaction between parents and the infant – that continuous desire to touch, cuddle and handle – is providing the essential inputs that lay the foundations for a well-adjusted social brain,’ he has said. ‘It’s more than just nice, it’s absolutely critical.’
The brain’s models continue to form during adolescence. Our popularity or otherwise at school also warps our neural models, and therefore our experience of reality, forever. Our position on the social hierarchy during adolescence doesn’t merely alter who we are as adults superficially, writes the psychologist Professor Mitch Prinstein, it changes ‘our brain wiring and, consequently, it has changed what we see, what we think and how we act’.
Researchers asked people to watch videos of scenes that were busy with social interactions, such as film of a school corridor. They then tracked their saccades so they could see which elements the participant’s brains were attending to. Those with ‘past histories of social success’ spent most of their time on people being friendly – smiling, chatting, nodding. But those who’d had high-school experiences of loneliness and social isolation ‘scarcely looked at the positive scenes at all’, writes Prinstein. Instead they spent around eighty per cent of their time looking at people being unfriendly and bullying. ‘It was as if they had watched a completely different movie.’
Similar tests had people viewing simple animations of shapes interacting in ambiguous ways. Participants who’d been unpopular at school tended to tell a spontaneous cause-and-effect story about what was happening in which the shapes were behaving violently towards each other. Those who’d been popular were much more likely to experience them as joyfully playing.
This is how we go through our day-to-day lives. What we see in our human environments is a product of our pasts – and, all too often, a product of our own particular damage. We’re literally blind to that which the brain ignores. If it sends the eye to only the distressing elements around us, that’s all we’ll see. If it spins cause-and-effect tales of violence and threat and prejudice about actually harmless events, that’s what we’ll experience. This is how the hallucinated reality in which we live at the centre can be dramatically different to that of the person we’re standing right next to. We all exist in different worlds. And whether that world feels friendly or hostile depends, in significant part, on what happened to us as children. ‘At some level, without our being aware of it, our brains spend all day, every day, drawing upon initial, formative high school memories.’
Harmful childhood experiences damage our ability to control the environment of other people. And for us domesticated creatures the environment of other people is everything. All principal characters in story will engage in such struggles. It might seem as if certain kinds of fictional stories don’t concern such characters – Indiana Jones or heroes of boys-own war adventures, such as Andy McNab’s Bravo Two Zero, for example, focus on a protagonist’s attempts at controlling the physical world rather than the social. But even they will ultimately have to grapple with antagonistic minds, whether in the form of some villain or their own tumultuous, rebelling subconscious.
Because origin damage happens when our models are still being built, the flaws it creates become incorporated into who we are. They’re internalised. The self-justifying hero-maker narrative then gets to work telling us we’re not partial or mistaken at all – we’re right. We see evidence to support this false belief everywhere, and we deny, forget or dismiss any counter-evidence. Experience after experience seems to confirm our rightness. We grow up looking out of this broken model of the world that feels absolutely clear and real, despite its warps and fissures.
Every now and then, actual reality will push back at us. Something in our environment will change in such a way that our flawed models aren’t predicting and are, therefore, specifically unable to cope with. We try to contain the chaos but because this change strikes directly against our model’s particular flaws, we fail. Then we can become conflicted. Are we right? Or is there actually a chance we’re wrong? If this deep, identity-forming belief turns out to be wrong, then who the hell are we? The dramatic question has been triggered. The story has begun.
Finding out who we are, and who we need to become, means accepting the challenge that story offers us. Are we brave enough to change? Can we become a hero?
This is the question a plot, and a life, asks of each us.
CHAPTER FOUR:
PLOTS, ENDINGS AND MEANING
4.0
A hero is selfless. A hero is courageous. A hero earns status. But heroes, in story and in life, have a final essential quality that we’ve yet to fully encounter. This is our oldest and most fundamental drive, probably originating back to when we were single-celled organisms. Humans are directed towards goals. We want things and we strive to get them. When unexpected change strikes we don’t just climb back into bed and hope it all goes away. Well, we might for a while. But at some point we stand up. We face it. We fight. For the nineteenth-century critic Ferdinand Brunetière this was the one inviolable rule of drama: ‘What we ask of the theatre is the spectacle of a will striving towards a goal.’ Fundamental to successful stories and successful lives is the fact that we don’t passively endure the chaos that erupts around us. These events challenge us. They generate a desire. This desire makes us act. This is how change summons us into the adventure of the story, and how an ignition point sprouts a plot.
Goal-direction is the foundational mechanism on top of which all our other urges are built. The basic Darwinian aim of all life forms is to survive and reproduce. Because of the peculiarities of our evolutionary history, human strategies to attain these goals centre on achieving connection with tribes, and on status within them. On top of these deep universals sits everything else we desire – our ambitions, feuds, love affairs, disappointments and betrayals. All of our struggles. All the stuff of story.
Humans have a compulsion to make things happen in their environment that’s so powerful it’s described by psychologists as ‘almost as basic a need as food and water.’ When researchers put people in flotation tanks and block their eyes and ears they find that, often within seconds, they’ll start rubbing their fingers together or making ripples in the water. After four hours some are singing ‘bawdy songs’. Another study found 67 per cent of male participants and 25 per cent of female participants so desperate to make things happen in a room that was empty of stimulus, except for an electric-shock machine, that they started giving themselves painful shocks. Humans do things. They act. We can’t help it.
Our goals give our lives order, momentum and logic. They provide our hallucination of reality with a cent
re of narrative gravity. Our perception organises itself around them. What we see and feel, at any given moment, depends on what we’re trying to get – when we’re caught in the street in a downpour of rain, we don’t see shops and trees and doorways and awnings, we see places of shelter. Goal-direction is so important to human cognition that when information about it is absent we can enter a state of bafflement. The psychologists Professors John Bransford and Marcia Johnson asked people to remember the following passage:
The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups depending on their makeup. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo any particular endeavour. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run this may not seem important, but complications from doing too many can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. The manipulation of the appropriate mechanisms should be self-explanatory, and we need not dwell on it here. At first the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then one never can tell.
Most failed to recall more than a handful of sentences. But a second group were told prior to reading that the paragraph concerned the washing of clothes. The simple addition of a human goal transformed the gobbledegook into something clear. They remembered twice as much.
In order to encourage us to act, to struggle, to live, the hero-making brain wants us to feel as if we’re constantly moving towards something better. Assuming we’re mentally healthy, we’re pushed on into our plots by a delusional sense of optimism and destiny. One clever study asked restaurant employees to circle all the likely possibilities for their own future lives, before doing the same on behalf of a liked colleague. Many more circles appeared for their lives than for their co-workers. Another test found that eight in every ten participants believed things would turn out better for them than for others.
Goal-direction helps give story its thrill. As the protagonist pursues their goal we feel their struggle. As they grab for their prize, we experience their joy. As they fail, we cry out. In life and in story our emotions tell us what’s of value. Our emotions guide us, letting us know who we ought to be and what we should go after, using a language millions of years older than words. When we’re behaving heroically, we feel we’re doing so because our actions are being soundtracked by positive emotions. Humans are by no means unique in this. The psychologist Professor Daniel Nettle writes that ‘when an amoeba follows a chemical gradient to reach and then ingest some food, we might say that it is acting on its positive emotions. All sensate organisms have some kind of system for finding good things in the environment and going after them, and the suite of human positive emotions is just a highly developed system of this kind.’
Video games plug directly into such core desires. Multiplayer online games, such as World of Warcraft and Fortnite, are stories. When a player logs on and teams up with fellow players to embark on a difficult mission, their three deepest evolved cravings are powerfully fed – they experience connection, earn status and are given a goal to pursue. They become an archetypal hero battling through a three-act narrative of crisis-struggle-resolution. Modern games are so ferociously effective at feeding these human fundamentals that they can become addictive, with ‘gaming disorder’ now classified as a disease by the World Health Organisation. One Welsh teenager, Jamie Callis, would spend up to twenty-one hours per day playing Runescape. ‘One minute you’d be chopping trees and the next you’d be killing something or going on a quest,’ he told his local newspaper. ‘You had clans of people, and that’s where you’d really have a family.’ Callis spent so much time conversing with his American and Canadian teammates that he began losing his Welsh accent. In South Korea, two parents became so overwhelmingly engrossed in a multiplayer game that they allowed their three-month-old daughter to starve to death. The game that obsessed them, Prius Online, partly involved nurturing and forming an emotional bond with ‘Anima’, a virtual girl.
The psychologist Professor Brian Little has spent decades studying the goals that humans pursue in their everyday lives. He finds we have an average of fifteen ‘personal projects’ going at once, a mixture of ‘trivial pursuits and magnificent obsessions’. These projects are so central to our identity that Little likes to tell his students, ‘We are our personal projects.’ His studies have found that, in order to bring us happiness, a project should be personally meaningful and we ought to have some level of control over it. When I asked him if a person pursuing one of these ‘core’ projects was a bit like an archetypal hero battling through a three-act narrative of crisis-struggle-resolution he said, ‘Yes. A thousand times yes.’
Little isn’t the first to argue that the fundamental human value is the struggle towards a meaningful goal. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle tried to puzzle out the true nature of human happiness. Some posited a ‘hedonic’ form defined by pleasure and the satisfaction of short-term desires. But Aristotle contemptuously dismissed the hedonists, saying that, ‘The life they decide on is a life for grazing animals.’ Instead, he described the idea of ‘eudaemonia’. For Aristotle happiness was not a feeling but a practice. ‘It’s living in a way that fulfils our purpose,’ the classicist Professor Helen Morales said. ‘It’s flourishing. Aristotle was saying, “Stop hoping for happiness tomorrow. Happiness is being engaged in the process.”’
Recent extraordinary evidence that humans are built to live according to Aristotle’s concept of happiness as a practice rather than a goal comes from the field of social genomics. Results from a team led by Professor of medicine Steve Cole suggest health can improve – risk of heart disease, cancer and neurodegenerative disorders going down; antiviral response going up – when we’re high in eudaemonic happiness. It changes the expression of our genes. Studies elsewhere find that living with a sufficient sense of purpose reduces the risk of depression and strokes and helps addicts recover from addiction. People more likely to agree with statements such as, ‘Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them,’ have been found to live longer, even when other factors are controlled for.
When I asked Cole to define eudaemonia he said it was ‘kind of striving after a noble goal’.
‘So it’s heroic behaviour in a literary sense?’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Exactly.’
Humans are built for story. When we push ourselves towards a tough yet meaningful goal, we thrive. Our reward systems spike not when we achieve what we’re after but when we’re in pursuit of it. It’s the pursuit that makes a life and the pursuit that makes a plot. Without a goal to follow and at least some sense we’re getting closer to it, there is only disappointment, depression and despair. A living death.
When a threatening and unexpected change strikes, our goal is to deal with it. This goal possesses us. The world narrows. We enter a kind of cognitive tunnel and see only our mission. Everything in front of us becomes either a tool to help us achieve our desire or an obstacle we must kick aside. This is also true for protagonists in story. Without Brunetière’s will striving towards a goal being present in the scene of a story, there’s no drama, only description.
This narrowing should be especially present at a story’s ignition point. But this is exactly where many stories fail. In order to be maximally compelling, protagonists should be active, the principal causer of effects in the plot that follows. Textual analyses reveal the words ‘do’, ‘need’ and ‘want’ appear twice as often in novels that feature in the New York Times bestseller list as those that don’t. A character in a drama who isn’t reacting, making decisions, choosing and trying somehow to impose control on the chaos isn’t truly a protagonist. Without action, the answer to the dramatic question never really changes. Who they are is who t
hey always were, but slowly, dully sinking.
4.1
What happens next? This is the question brilliant scholars from Aristotle onwards have spent centuries attempting to answer. What does the protagonist have to do in order to lead reader and viewer on a maximally satisfying story? The pursuit of the perfect plot traditionally involves theorists gathering a number of successful myths and tales together and running their divining rods over them in an attempt to detect their hidden patterns. Their findings have been hugely influential. They shape today’s landscape of popular storytelling.
For the mythologist Joseph Campbell, a story starts with a hero receiving and, at first, refusing a call to adventure. A mentor then comes along to help them change their mind, then into the plot they go. Somewhere in the middle, they’ll cross a transformational threshold, only to rouse dark forces that’ll pursue them. After a near-deadly battle, the hero returns to their community with learnings and ‘boons’.
Thirty years of study led Christopher Booker to assert the existence of seven recurring plots in story. He calls them: Overcoming the Monster; Rags to Riches; The Quest; Voyage and Return; Rebirth; Comedy; and Tragedy. Each plot, he argues, tends towards five structural movements: the call to action, a dream stage in which everything goes well, a frustration stage, a descent into nightmarish conflict and finally a resolution. Following Jung, Booker outlines a character transformation he believes ubiquitous. At the story’s start the protagonist’s personality will be ‘out of balance’. They’ll be too strong or weak in the archetypal masculine traits of strength and order, or the archetypal feminine traits of feeling and understanding. In the happy resolution of the third act, the hero achieves ‘the perfect balance’ of all four traits and finally becomes whole.