by Will Storr
This division of the world into opposing forces of plucky David and almighty Goliath seems a signature manoeuvre of the hero-making brain. The broad narrative it tells of the world is that we’re moral actors, struggling against great, Goliathine odds for the good of our lives and perhaps the world. This is a story that gives our lives meaning. It pulls our eyes from the terrible void above and forces them into the urgent now.
The protagonist of Citizen Kane expresses just such a heroic narrative when he’s challenged by an antagonist. Although the film begins with the death of Charles Foster Kane, the ignition point for his drama is his inheritance of the family fortune. Kane’s models of the world are broken in such a way that he has a desperate craving for approval and attention. It’s these specific flaws that ignite his story, when he makes the surprising decision to focus on a failing newspaper his estate acquired in a foreclosure proceeding. On his arrival at the paper, his flawed models, now unleashed, begin to exert their influence. At first, it seems as if they’re not flawed at all – quite the opposite. He might be happy to be cavalier with the truth in pursuit of his mission (‘You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war!’) but he’s campaigning on behalf of the disadvantaged citizenry who, he argues, are being exploited by the captains of capitalism.
But then his wealthy, pro-capitalist former guardian – the aptly named Thatcher – confronts him, outraged at what he perceives as his newspaper’s ‘senseless attack on everything and everybody who’s got more than ten cents in his pocket’. When Thatcher reminds him he’s a major stockholder in one of the companies he’s been attacking, Kane’s hero-maker narrative rears up: ‘I am the publisher of the Inquirer!’ he says. ‘As such it’s my duty – I’ll let you in on a little secret, it is also my pleasure – to see to it that decent, hard-working people in this community are not robbed blind by a group of money-mad pirates because they haven’t anybody to look after their interests.’
2.8
A man’s new boss likes to joke with him and he doesn’t like it. It hardly seems like the stuff of great fiction. But it’s of critical importance to the man to whom it happens. It shakes the foundations of the butler Stevens’s beliefs about how the world correctly operates and who he should be in it. The model of reality he inhabits, inside his skull, comes under threat. When this unexpected change occurs, he tries to regain control over his external environment. He attempts a joke. In order to tackle the staffing problems his boss has created, he embarks on a road trip to Cornwall in the hope of persuading a talented former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, to rejoin his team.
We soon learn that Kenton possesses the warmth Stevens lacked, and yet another loss caused by his devotion to the ideal of emotional restraint was a potential romance with her. Much of the surface drama in The Remains of the Day is organised around Stevens’s road trip and our changing perceptions of his relationship with Kenton. But, in its depths, this isn’t what the story’s really about. Beneath the surface causes and effects of the plot, a deeper parallel process is going on. Stevens is changing. His model of the world is slowly and painfully breaking apart.
It’s easy to think that a story’s surface events – its twists, chases, explosions – are its point. Because we’re experiencing it through the eyes of the characters, we, like them, can become distracted by the drama of these thrilling changeful episodes. But none of them mean anything without a specific person for them to happen to. A shark tank has no meaning without a 007 to fall into it. Even crowd-pleasing tales such as James Bond’s rely on character for their drama. Those stories are gripping, not because of the bullets or high-speed ski chases in isolation, but because we want to know how this specific person, with this specific history and these strengths and these flaws will get out of it. They’ll usually only do so by stretching who they are, by trying something new, by making a some unprecedented effort – by changing. Similarly, a police-procedural drama can feel like a straightforward information-gap heavy mystery about a corpse, but its story usually revolves around questions concerning the motives of various suspects: the always fascinating whys of human behaviour.
Of course, different kinds of story have different levels of emphasis and psychological complexity, but plot without character is just so much light and sound. Meaning is created by just the right change-event happening to just the right person at just the right moment. An opulent ball at the splendid home of the Marquis d’Andervilliers would be of only passing interest if it wasn’t happening to the middle-class, status-obsessed and chronically unfulfilled Madame Bovary, who marvels at the wealthy guests’ complexions that are the kind that ‘comes with money’ and ‘looks well against the whiteness of porcelain’ and which are ‘best preserved by a moderate diet of exquisite foodstuffs’, while she notices, grimly, that her dreary husband’s trousers are ‘too tight at the waist’. The ball has meaning only in its effects on Madame Bovary. No matter how bedazzling the events of a plot might be, all story is ultimately about character.
A character’s struggle, as we’ve discovered it so far, has been between themselves and the external world. They inhabit a model of the world, inside their skulls, that they experience as reality. Because that model is flawed, their ability to control the real, external world is harmed. When chaos strikes, their model will begin to break down. They’ll slowly lose control and this will bring them into further dramatic conflict with the people and events around them.
But all this is complicated by the fact that characters in story aren’t only at war with the outside world. They’re also at war with themselves. A protagonist is engaged in a battle fought largely in the strange cellars of their own subconscious mind. At stake is the answer to the fundamental question that drives all drama: who am I?
CHAPTER THREE:
THE DRAMATIC QUESTION
3.0
Charles Foster Kane was a man of the people. He might have inherited a fortune, but he’d decided to reject the life of the mercenary rich. Instead, he chose to be an ally of the downtrodden, even as it went against his own financial interests. As editor of The New York Daily Inquirer, he fought for their rights relentlessly. In a bid to serve them even better, he ran for Governor of New York. Who could criticise such a selfless and noble man?
As it turns out, his oldest friend could. In the immediate aftermath of Kane’s political campaign we find him alone and sorrowful, pacing his campaign office which is still hectic with streamers and posters and emptiness. He has lost. And then in staggers his best pal Jedediah Leland who, it soon becomes apparent, has been out with his sorrows for a few too many drinks. When Kane ruefully acknowledges ‘the people have made their choice’, Leland cuts him off. ‘You talk about the people as if you owned them, as though they belonged to you,’ he says, slurring slightly. ‘Goodness. As long as I can remember you’ve talked about giving the people their rights, as if you could make them a present of liberty. As a reward for services rendered. Remember the working man? You used to write an awful lot about the working man. But he’s turning to something called organised labour. You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your working man expects something as his right, not as your gift. When your precious underprivileged really get together … I don’t know what you’ll do. Sail away to a desert island, probably, and lord it over the monkeys.’ Kane tells him he’s drunk. ‘Drunk?’ Leland replies. ‘What do you care? You don’t care about anything except you. You just want to persuade people that you love them so much that they ought to love you back.’
Who was Charles Foster Kane really? That was the challenge that editor Rawlston made to his staff of storytellers at the beginning of Citizen Kane. Was he the man his old friend perceived: self-interested, delusional, desperate for approval and attention? Or was he the person his own hero-making brain told him he was: brave, generous and selfless?
Who is this person? This is the question all stories ask. It emerges first at the ignition point. When the unexpected change strikes,
the protagonist overreacts or behaves in an otherwise unexpected way, we sit up, suddenly attentive. Who is this person who behaves like this? The question then re-emerges every time the protagonist is challenged by another or compelled to make a choice.
Everywhere in the narrative that the question is present, the reader or viewer will likely be engaged. Where the question is absent, and the events of drama move out of its narrative beam, they risk becoming detached – perhaps even bored. If there’s a single secret to storytelling then I believe it’s this. Who is this person? Or, from the perspective of the character, Who am I? It’s the definition of drama. It is its electricity, its heartbeat, its fire.
Harnessing the energy of the dramatic question means understanding that the answer is not easily found. This is because, even at the best of times, most of us don’t actually know who we are. If you were to ask Kane who he was, he’d surely say he was noble and selfless, the opposite of his old friend’s drunken accusations. He’d mean it too. But, as the screenplay carefully shows, he’d be wrong.
If Kane was to argue he was noble and selfless, it would be because he’d been listening to a voice in his head – one that was telling him all the ways he was morally right. It’s not only psychotics like Mr B who hear such voices. We all do. You can hear yours now. It’s reading this book to you, commenting here and there as it goes. Flawed characters, in life and story, are often badly led astray by this inner voice, which is generated by word and speech-making circuitry that is mostly located in the brain’s left hemisphere. This voice is not to be trusted.
This isn’t simply because it’s relaying all those flattering hero-making half-truths to us. The narrator can’t be trusted because it has no direct access to the truth of who we really are. It feels as if that voice is the thing that’s in control of us. It feels as if that voice is us. But it’s not. ‘We’ are our neural models. Our narrator is just observing what’s happening in the controlled hallucination in our skulls – including our own behaviour – and explaining it. It’s tying all the events together into a coherent tale that tells us who we are, why we’re doing what we’re doing and feeling what we’re feeling. It’s helping us feel in control of our thrilling neural show. And it’s not lying, exactly. It’s confabulating. As the philosopher of psychology Professor Lisa Bortolotti explains, when we confabulate ‘we tell a story that is fictional, while believing that it is a true story.’ And we’re confabulating all the time.
This disturbing fact was exposed in a series of famous experiments by neuroscientists Professors Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga. Their studies answered a strange question – what would happen if you planted an instruction into a brain and somehow hid it from the narrator? Say, for example, you managed to insert the instruction WALK into a person’s mind. And that person started walking. Without the narrator telling the brain’s owner why they were walking, how would they explain what they were doing? Would they be like a zombie? Would they just shrug? Or what?
Because most of the circuitry that the narrator relies upon is in the brain’s left hemisphere, they’d need to find a way of getting information into the right side and keeping it there, hidden away from it. This would mean recruiting so called ‘split-brain’ patients – epileptics who, as part of their treatment, had had the wiring that connected their hemispheres cut, but who lived otherwise normal lives.
So that’s what they did. They showed a card saying WALK to a split-brain patient such that only their left eye saw it. Because of the way the brain’s wired up, this information was sent into the right hemisphere. And, because the wiring between their hemispheres had been cut, that’s where it stayed, hidden away from the narrator.
So what happened? The patient stood up and walked. When the experimenters asked him why, he said, ‘I’m going to get a Coke.’ His brain observed what was happening, in his neural realm, and made up a cause-and-effect story to explain it. It confabulated. It had no idea why he’d really stood up. But it instantly invented a perfectly credible tale to account for the behaviour – a tale that its owner unquestioningly believed.
This happened again and again. When a woman’s silent hemisphere was shown a picture of a pin-up girl she giggled. She blamed it on their ‘funny machine’. When another woman’s silent hemisphere was shown a video of a man being pushed into a fire, she said, ‘I don’t really know why, but I’m kind of scared. I feel jumpy. I think maybe I don’t like this room. Or maybe it’s you. You’re making me nervous. I know I like Dr Gazzaniga, but, right now, I’m scared of him.’
The job of the narrator, writes Gazzaniga, is to ‘seek explanations or causes for events’. It is, in other words, a storyteller. And facts, while nice, don’t really matter to it: ‘The first makes-sense explanation will do.’ Our narrator has no wired-in access to the neural structures that that are largely (or wholly, depending on who you ask) controlling how we feel and what we do. Because the narrator exists separately from the circuits that are the true causes of our emotions and behaviour, it’s forced to rapidly hash together any makes-sense (and usually heroic) story it can about what we’re up to and why.
It’s because of such findings, writes Professor Nicholas Epley, that ‘no psychologist asks people to explain the causes of their own thoughts and behaviour anymore unless they’re interested in storytelling’. It’s why a neuroscientist colleague of Professor Leonard Mlodinow said that years of psychotherapy had allowed him to construct a helpful story about his feelings, motivations and behaviour, ‘but is it true? Probably not. The real truth lies in structures like my thalamus and hypothalamus, and my amygdala, and I have no conscious access to those no matter how much I introspect.’
The terrible and fascinating truth about the human condition is that none of us really know the answer to the dramatic question as it pertains to ourselves. We don’t know why we do what we do, or feel what we feel. We confabulate when theorising as to why we’re depressed, we confabulate when justifying our moral convictions and we confabulate when explaining why a piece of music moves us. Our sense of self is organised by an unreliable narrator. We’re led to believe we’re in complete control of ourselves, but we’re not. We’re led to believe we really know who we are, but we don’t.
This is why life can be such a vexing struggle. It’s why we disappoint ourselves with behaviour that’s mysterious and self-destructive. It’s why we shock ourselves by saying the unexpected. It’s why we find ourselves telling ourselves off, giving ourselves pep talks or asking, ‘What the hell was I thinking?’ It’s why we despair of ourselves, wondering if we’ll ever learn.
In stories, the dramatic question has the power to unfold so unexpectedly and endlessly because the protagonists themselves don’t know the answer. They’re discovering who they are, moment by moment, as the pressure of the drama is applied. And, as the plot turns, they’re often surprised by who they turn out to be. Every time you read something like ‘she heard herself say’ or ‘he found himself doing’, these forces are likely at play. Characters – and readers and viewers – are being shown fascinating new answers to the dramatic question.
Often, characters are such a mystery to themselves that they seem in complete ignorance of the truth of their own feelings and motives. In The Idea of Perfection, Kate Grenville brilliantly exposes the gap between a character’s confabulation and the reality of who they are in an encounter between married Felicity Porcelline and her local butcher, Alfred Chang. Felicity is convinced that Alfred’s in love with her. She feels so awkward about the situation that she’s taken to dawdling outside his shop until another customer arrives that she can enter with. One evening, when Felicity turns up after hours to ask a favour, she finds herself alone with him. The scene that unfolds causes us to doubt Felicity’s confabulation of who, exactly, desires who.
When Felicity first spots Alfred she feels a ‘a little pulse of something … like apprehension, or stage-fright, but it was not those’. Her narrator provides an immediate confabulation to explain this ac
ute sensation: ‘It was knowing he was in love with her.’ Felicity’s eyes prowl Chang’s face and body, noticing an opening in his shirt. ‘She could actually see a crease of honey-coloured stomach and his neat little navel.’ As they talk, she finds herself calling him by his first name. ‘She had never done it before and she did not know why she had done so now. It would only encourage him.’ When he hoists his trousers up, she sees ‘a bulge just there. They were frayed just there, too, around the zip. She looked away, naturally, but could not help noticing. It was really very badly frayed. She heard herself giggle.’ She makes herself ‘smile slightly, the way she knew smoothed out the skin of her face in a nice way’. Commenting on his family photos, she surprises herself. ‘They’re lovely photos, she heard herself gushing. So … intimate. That was not really the word she had meant. Intimate. It did not sound quite right. She hurried on, before the word could become large in the silence.’
At this stage, it would be an unbelievable shock to Felicity to learn that she ends up in bed with Alfred. But it wouldn’t surprise you or me. That ‘little pulse of something’ she felt on spotting him was her own lust. Like Jedediah Leland in his coruscating view of his old friend Kane, we can clearly see answers to the dramatic question to which Felicity herself is blind. The scene works so brilliantly because the answer keeps changing, paragraph by paragraph, line by gripping line.
3.1
For years I’ve struggled with cravings and addictions. In middle age, I battle with food. Because the culture I’m immersed in is obsessed with bodily perfection and youth, and because that culture is in me, I find myself engaged in a hopeless quest to make my stomach appear as it did when I was eighteen. What I’ve discovered, as I’ve waged these tedious wars against myself, is that who I am seems to be in constant flux.
