The Science of Storytelling

by Will Storr

  On the Monday morning following a large roast dinner, I am Captain Abstemious himself, determined, rigid, positively Victorian in my values. I will clean out my cupboards and sort out my life. But by 17:00 Wednesday evening, Captain Abstemious has vanished. In his place stands Billy Pillock Jnr who believes it’s pathetic for a man in his forties to worry about a bit of belly flub. He’s earned a bit of a treat, with the week he’s been having. And what sort of person are you anyway, beating yourself up over a mouthful of Roquefort? How joyless, how vain, how positively Victorian! The problem of self-control, I’ve come to think, isn’t really one of willpower. It’s about being inhabited by many different people who have different goals and values, including one who’s determined to be healthy, and one who’s determined to be happy.

  As well as having models of everything in the world, inside our heads, we have different models of self that are constantly fighting for control over who we are. At different times, under different circumstances, a different version of us becomes dominant. When it does, it takes over the role of neural narrator, arguing its case passionately and convincingly and usually winning. Beneath the level of consciousness we’re a riotous democracy of mini-selves which, writes the neuroscientist Professor David Eagleman, are ‘locked in chronic battle’ for dominion. Our behaviour is ‘simply the end result of the battles’. All the while our confabulating narrator ‘works around the clock to stitch together a pattern of logic to our daily lives: what just happened and what was my role in it?’ Fabrication of stories, he adds, ‘is one of the key businesses in which our brain engages. Brains do this with the single minded goal of getting the multifaceted actions of the democracy to make sense.’

  The truth of our multiplicity is revealed in a condition known as Alien Hand Syndrome. In these patients a behaviour that would usually have been suppressed takes independent control of a limb. The German neurologist Dr Kurt Goldstein recalled a woman whose left hand ‘grabbed her own neck and tried to throttle her, and could only be pulled off by force’. The American neurologist Dr Todd Feinberg saw a patient whose hand ‘answers the phone and refuses to surrender the receiver to the other hand’. The BBC told of a patient whose doctor asked why she was undressing. ‘Until he said that, I had no idea that my left hand was opening up the buttons of my shirt,’ she said. ‘So I start rebuttoning with the right hand and, as soon as I stopped, the left hand started unbuttoning them.’ Her alien hand would remove items from her handbag without her knowing. ‘I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on.’ Professor Michael Gazzaniga describes a patient who ‘grabbed his wife with his left hand and shook her violently, while with the right hand trying to come to his wife’s aid.’ One day Gazzaniga saw that patient’s left hand pick up an axe. ‘I discreetly left the scene.’

  Our multiplicity is revealed whenever we become emotional. When we’re angry, we’re like a different person with different values and goals in a different reality than when we feel nostalgic, depressed or excited. As adults, we’re used to such weird shifts in selfhood and learn to experience them as natural and fluid and organised. But for children, the experience of transforming from one person to another, without any sense of personal volition, can be deeply disturbing. It’s as if a wicked witch has cast an evil spell, magicking us from princess to witch.

  In his pioneering classic The Uses of Enchantment the psychoanalyst Professor Bruno Bettelheim argues that making sense of such terrifying transformations is a core function of fairytales. A child can’t consciously accept that an overwhelming mood of anger may make him ‘wish to destroy those on whom he depends for his existence. To understand this would mean he must accept the fact that his own emotions may so overpower him that he does not have control over them – a very scary thought.’

  Fairytales take those scary inner selves and turn them into fictional characters. Once they’ve been defined and externalised, like this, they become manageable. The story these characters appear in teaches the child that, if they fight with sufficient courage, they can control the evil selves within them and help the good to become dominant. ‘When all the child’s wishful thinking gets embodied in a good fairy; all his destructive wishes in an evil witch; all his fears in a voracious wolf; all the demands of his conscience in a wise man encountered on an adventure; all his jealous anger in some animal that pecks out the eyes of arch-rivals – then the child can finally begin to sort out his contradictory tendencies,’ writes Bettelheim. ‘Once this starts, the child will be less and less engulfed by unmanageable chaos.’

  Of course, the idea of multiplicity has limits. We don’t transform completely, like Jekyll and Hyde. We have a core personality, mediated by culture and early life experience, which is relatively stable. But that core is a pole around which we’re constantly, elastically moving. How we behave, in any given moment, is a combination of personality and situation.

  In well-told stories, characters reflect this. They’re ‘three-dimensional’ or more. They’re both recognisably who they are and yet constantly shifting as their circumstances change. A scene in John Fante’s Ask the Dust captures this well. The novel tells of young Arturo Bandini’s unrequited love for waitress Camilla Lopez. In one dark and dynamic sequence, the character of Bandini comes alive in all his convincing multiplicity when he visits Camilla at the Columbia Buffet, where she works.

  Watching her laughing with some male customers Bandini bristles with jealousy. He politely beckons her over, telling himself, ‘Be nice to her, Arturo. Fake it.’ He asks to see her later. She tells him she’s busy. He ‘gently’ requests she postpone her engagement. ‘It’s very important that I see you.’ When she declines again, his angry self rears up. He pushes his chair back and shouts, ‘You’ll see me! You little insolent beerhall twirp! You’ll see me!’ He stalks out and waits by her car, telling himself ‘she wasn’t so good that she could excuse herself from a date with Arturo Bandini. Because, by God, I hated her guts.’

  When she finally emerges, Bandini tries to force her to leave with him. After a tussle she escapes with a barman. Bandini is left in a stew of self-hatred.

  Bandini, the idiot, the dog, the skunk, the fool. But I couldn’t help it. I looked at the car certificate and found her address. It was a place near 24th and Alameda. I couldn’t help it. I walked to Hill Street and got aboard an Alameda trolley. This interested me. A new side to my character, the bestial, the darkness, the unplumbed depth of a new Bandini. But after a few blocks the mood evaporated. I got off the car near the freight yards. Bunker Hill was two miles away, but I walked back. When I got home I said I was through with Camilla Lopez forever.

  In this passage, Fante shows Bandini in all his contradiction and multiplicity. One moment he loves her, the next he hates her. One moment he’s swollen with arrogance, the next he’s a skunk and a fool. His decision to stalk her is an urge that plumes out of his subconscious. When it suddenly dissipates, he doesn’t question the madness of his own sudden reversal.

  This is a man riding the tumultuous forces of his own hidden brain. He’s only barely managing to keep his illusion of self-control intact. It’s hard to read this scene without recalling those alien hands discharging unrepressed wills, unbuttoning, throttling and grabbing for the axe. It’s structurally effective because of its adherence to cause and effect, with one event leading to another unexpected event which leads to another, and so on. It’s meaningfully effective because it keeps asking and answering that essential dramatic question: who is Bandini?

  3.2

  Nobody can agree which tree is the most photographed in the world. Some say it’s a Cypress in Monterey, California, others a Jeffry Pine in nearby Yosemite and others still a Willow in Lake Wanaka, New Zealand. Even if you’ve never seen them, you can probably guess what these trees look like. They stand alone in endless vistas of water, sky or rock.

  Millions of brains have been attracted to the hidden and half-hidden truths that emit from these solitary trees. They triggered something in the
photographers’ subconscious which responded by giving their owners a pleasurable hit of feeling. Lonely, brave, relentless and beautiful, those who stop and snap are not taking pictures of trees, but of themselves.

  What these photographs reveal is that human consciousness works on two levels. There’s the top level on which occurs the drama of our day-to-day lives – that meeting of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell which is narrated by the hero-making inner voice. And then, beneath that, there’s the subconscious level of the neural models, a stewing night ocean of feelings, urges and broken memories in which competing urges engage in a constant struggle for control.

  The stories we tell also work on these levels. They operate ‘in two realms’, writes the psychologist Professor Jerome Bruner, ‘one a landscape of action in the world’, the other a landscape of the mind in which the ‘protagonists’ thoughts and feelings and secrets play themselves out’. On the plot’s conscious top layer we experience the visible causes and effects of the drama. Then there’s the story’s subconscious that heaves beneath the visible. It’s a place of symbolism and division, in which characters are multiple and contradictory and surprising, even to themselves.

  Some of the most moving moments in story come when the second subconscious layer erupts into the first. Jill Soloway’s TV drama Transparent brought me to tears when the character Josh Pfefferman suddenly revealed himself in a way that surprised even him. The series tracks the ramifications of a family patriarch’s decision to transition to a woman, from Mort to Maura. Josh, Maura’s son, is jovial, wry and essentially decent. He’s a record company executive and thoroughly modern, always wanting to be supportive of Maura’s journey.

  But things start slipping for Josh. Towards the end of the second series, he’s driving with some band members and starts uncharacteristically ranting: ‘Look at this traffic! They time it out so you can’t get anywhere. It’s a fucking conspiracy.’ He honks his horn at other drivers. ‘Fucking go, you piece of shit! They’re fucking boxing me in!’ He’s losing control. The woman beside him insists he pulls over. Josh is hyperventilating.

  Sometime afterwards, he calls to see his mother Shelley only to discover she’s out. Her new boyfriend Buzz lets him in. ‘Nothing’s adding up,’ Josh confides to Buzz. ‘I thought stuff would add up by now, but everything’s slipping through.’ Buzz, with his grey ponytail and hippy shirt, is of a different generation to Josh. His model of the world comes from an earlier time. He suggests Josh is in ‘shock’ about the ‘loss’ of his father. Josh pushes back. Buzz doesn’t get it, nobody has died. ‘You think I miss Mort?’ he asks, irritated.

  ‘What do you think?’ says Buzz.

  ‘Well, it’s like politically incorrect to say that you miss someone who has transitioned, so …’

  ‘This isn’t about correct, Joshua, this is … This is about grieving. Mourning. Have you grieved and mourned the loss of your father?’

  ‘Him? Like losing him? No, I’m … I don’t know how to do that.’

  There’s a moment of silence. Josh crumbles into the arms of the older man and sobs.

  In well-told stories, there’s a constant interplay between the surface world of the drama and the subconscious world of the characters. The bedlam that takes place on the top often has seismic subconscious ramifications for who the character is beneath. As the psychologist Professor Brian Little writes, ‘All individuals are essentially scientists erecting and testing their hypothesis about the world and revising them in the light of their experience.’ As these subtle revisions in who they are take place, on the subconscious second level, the answer to the dramatic question changes. And as their character changes this, in turn, alters their behaviour on the surface level of the drama. And so and so on.

  This is how plots develop as they should – from character. At the ignition point, when the drama starts flying at them, their subconscious model of the world receives its first serious crack. They’ll try to reimpose control. These attempts will fail. They might even make the situation worse. With their neural model of the world increasingly foundering, they enter a subconscious state of panic and disorder.

  As their models fracture and break down, previously repressed wills, thoughts and versions of self rise up and become dominant. This can be seen as the brain’s experiments in novel ways of controlling its environment. They might find themselves behaving in ways they weren’t expecting, as Arturo Bandini did when he unexpectedly turned stalker. These unexpected behaviours might cause them to learn something about themselves, as Josh Pfefferman did when he collapsed sobbing.

  Some of the most memorable scenes in drama allow us to watch the dramatic question battle itself in the mind of the character. In such scenes, the character appears divided and in a state of internal conflict. What they’re saying, for example, might contradict how they’re behaving in ways that show they’re manifesting as two different versions of self at once. We can’t quite tell what they’re going to do next. Who they are is changing before our eyes.

  And so the plot moves on, in all its depth, truth and unpredictability, each new development coming from character. Inch by inch, scene by scene, characters and plot interact, each altering the other. Throughout the plot, as the character confronts the fact that they’re failing to control the world, they’re gradually forced to readdress their deepest beliefs about how it works. Their precious theory of control comes under question. Beneath the level of consciousness, they’re compelled to repeatedly ask themselves that fundamental dramatic question: who am I? Who do I need to be in order to make this right?

  This is the process that drives Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson’s cinematic masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia. An approximate definition of Lawrence’s flaw would be something like vanity that manifests as rebellion. He’s rather insolent and self-important. This is how he controls the world of people around him. It’s how he makes himself feel superior – in one early scene, he showily extinguishes a lit match with his bare fingers. When we meet him he’s a lieutenant in the British Army during the First World War. He fails to salute his superior, General Murray, who complains, ‘I can’t make out if you’re bloody bad-mannered or just half-witted.’

  ‘I have the same problem, sir,’ replies Lawrence with a supercilious lilt.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Lawrence is sent to the Middle East on an intelligence mission. The ignition point comes when he’s journeying through the desert to begin his work and his local guide is shot dead by an Arab leader, Sherif Ali, because he drank from his well. This unexpected change connects specifically with Lawrence’s flawed theory of control, which is based around rebelliousness and vanity. He reacts in an unexpected way. His flaw causes him not to flee or grovel for his life but to grandiosely berate the killer: ‘Sherif Ali! So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel – as you are.’ Gone is the insolent wally of the previous scenes. The dramatic question has been posed.

  After Lawrence experiences a brutal attack on the Arabs by their enemies, the Turks, his rebellious vanity rises again. He becomes engaged in the Arabs’ fight and suggests they all trek through the hellish Nefud desert and launch a surprise attack on a Turkish stronghold. On the journey, Lawrence’s rebellious vanity kicks up when, against everyone’s advice, he insists on making an insanely dangerous journey back into the desert to rescue a lost Arab. When he returns with the man, the Arabs ecstatically cheer him. Once again, the first layer of drama affects the second layer of subconscious. His theory of control – that you got what you wanted with vain rebelliousness – has been proven right. And so he becomes yet more vain and rebellious. He’s accepted into the tribe. In a deeply symbolic moment, Sherif Ali, the man who shot his guide, burns his western clothes and dresses him in ‘the robes of a Sherif’. When Lawrence leads the Arabs on a successful assault on the Turkish stronghold, his vanity soars even more.

  And yet, ben
eath the level of the surface drama, things have started cracking. Just before the successful assault, Lawrence had been compelled to execute a man in order to prevent factions of his Arab force attacking one another. After the assault, he accidentally leads his men into quicksand. One of them dies. These experiences disturb him. When he finally makes it out of the desert, to the shores of the Suez Canal, a motorcyclist on the opposite bank spots him. Curious about this strange white man in Arab robes emerging from the desert, the motorcyclist shouts across the water: ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ As the question fills the baking air, the camera freezes on Lawrence’s troubled face.

  Who is he? Is he the man his flaw of rebellious vanity tells him he is? Is he extraordinary? Or is he just ordinary? This simple question underpins every gripping scene of the film. So far, he’s proved to be mostly extraordinary. His theory of control has worked. His vain rebelliousness has led him to success after success. We cheer when he berates the killer Sherif Ali! We applaud when he rescues the fallen soldier! We roar when he wins his battle! But if this was all there was to the story, it wouldn’t have won seven Academy Awards.

  The pressure of the drama is beginning to crack Lawrence’s model of the world. Adherence to his theory of control might be leading him to great victories but it’s also causing him deep subconscious distress. Our first real clue about these dark changes that are happening to him arrives when he comes in from the desert and General Murray promotes him and asks him to go back. Lawrence refuses. ‘I killed two people,’ he explains. ‘I mean, two Arabs. One was a boy. That was yesterday. I led him into quicksand. The other was a man … I had to execute him with my pistol. There was something about it I didn’t like.’