There’s something you should know about Mr B. He’s being watched by the FBI. They film him constantly and in secret, then cut the footage together and broadcast it to millions as ‘The Mr B Show’. This makes life rather awkward for Mr B. He showers in swimming trunks and dresses beneath bedsheets. He hates talking to others, as he knows they’re actors hired by the FBI to create drama. How can he trust them? He can’t trust anyone. No matter how many people explain why he’s wrong, he just can’t see it. He finds a way to dismiss each argument they present to him. He knows it’s true. He feels it’s true. He sees evidence for it everywhere.
There’s something else you should know about Mr B. He’s psychotic. One healthy part of his brain, writes the neuro-scientist Professor Michael Gazzaniga, ‘is trying to make sense out of some abnormalities going on in another’. The malfunctioning part is causing ‘a conscious experience with very different contents than would normally be there, yet those contents are what constitute Mr B’s reality and provide experiences that his cognition must make sense of.’
Because it’s being warped by faulty signals being sent out by the unhealthy section of his brain, the story Mr B is telling about the world, and his place within it, is badly mistaken. It’s so mistaken he’s no longer able to adequately control his environment, so doctors and care staff have to do it on his behalf, in a psychiatric institution.
As unwell as he is, we’re all a bit like Mr B. The controlled hallucination inside the silent, black vault of our skulls that we experience as reality is warped by faulty information. But because this distorted reality is the only reality we know, we just can’t see where it’s gone wrong. When people plead with us that we’re mistaken or cruel and acting irrationally, we feel driven to find a way to dismiss each argument they present to us. We know we’re right. We feel we’re right. We see evidence for it everywhere.
These distortions in our cognition make us flawed. Everyone is flawed in their own interesting and individual ways. Our flaws help define our character. Who we are is how we’re broken. But they also impair our ability to control the world. They harm us.
At the start of a story, we’ll often meet a protagonist who is flawed in some closely defined way. The mistakes they’re making about the world will help us empathise with them. As the story gives us hints and clues about the causes of their errors, we’ll warm to their vulnerability and become emotionally engaged in their struggle. When the dramatic events of the plot coax them to change we’ll root for them.
The problem is, changing who we are is hard. The insights we’ve learned from neuroscience and psychology begin to show us exactly why it’s hard. Our flaws – especially the mistakes we make about the human world and how to live successfully within it – are not simply ideas about this and that which we can identify easily and choose to shrug off. They’re built right into our hallucinated models. Our flaws form part of our perception, our experience of reality. This makes them largely invisible to us.
Correcting our flaws means, first of all, managing the task of actually seeing them. When challenged, we often respond by refusing to accept our flaws exist at all. People accuse us of being ‘in denial’. Of course we are: we literally can’t see them. When we can see them, they all too often appear not as flaws at all, but as virtues. The mythologist Joseph Campbell identified a common plot moment in which protagonists ‘refuse the call’ of the story. This is sometimes why.
Identifying and accepting our flaws, and then changing who we are, means breaking down the very structure of our reality before rebuilding it in a new and improved form. This is not easy. It’s painful and disturbing. We’ll often fight with all we have to resist this kind of profound change. This is why we call those who manage it ‘heroes’.
There are various routes by which characters and selves become unique and uniquely flawed, and a basic understanding of them can be of great value to storytellers. One major route involves those moments of change. The brain constructs its hallucinated model of the world by observing millions of instances of cause and effect then constructing its own theories and assumptions about how one thing caused the other. These micro-narratives of cause and effect – more commonly known as ‘beliefs’ – are the building blocks of our neural realm. The beliefs it’s built from feel personal to us because they help make up the world that we inhabit and our understanding of who we are. Our beliefs feel personal to us because they are us.
But many of them will be wrong. Of course the controlled hallucination we live inside is not as distorted as the one that Mr B lives inside. Nobody, however, is right about everything. Nevertheless, the storytelling brain wants to sell us the illusion that we are. Think about the people closest to you. There won’t be a soul among them with whom you’ve never disagreed. You know she’s slightly wrong about that, and he’s got that wrong, and don’t get her started on that. The further you travel from those you admire, the more wrong people become until the only conclusion you’re left with is that entire tranches of the human population are stupid, evil or insane. Which leaves you, the single living human who’s right about everything – the perfect point of light, clarity and genius who burns with godlike luminescence at the centre of the universe.
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 tend to meet at the start of story are, like most of us, living just like this – in a state of 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 novel The Remains of the Day, the Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro takes us into the warped and flawed neural realm of a proud head butler in a large stately home who’s known, simply, as Stevens. 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. The younger 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 Stevens’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.
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 depression, 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.
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.
As powerful a force as personality is, we’re more than just introverts, extraverts and the rest. Our traits work with our cultural, social and economic environments, as well as the experiences we go through, to construct a neural world for us to live in that is unique.
There’s little more thrilling, in a story, than suddenly encountering a mind that is utterly different to ours while being revealing of character and the story to come. The protagonist’s point of view orients us in the story. It’s a map of clues, full of hints about its owner’s flaws and the plot they’re going to create. For me, it’s the single most underrated quality of fiction writing. Too many books and films begin with characters that seem to be mere outlines: perfect, innocent human-shaped nothings, perhaps with a bolt-on quirk or two, waiting to be coloured in by the events of the plot. Far better to find ourselves waking up, on page one, startled and exhilarated to find ourselves inside a mind and a life that feels flawed, fascinating, specific and real.
Charles Bukowski manages this brilliantly in the opening paragraph of his novel Post Office:
It began as a mistake.
It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up on the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure. What a job, I thought. Soft! They only gave you a block or two and if you managed to finish, the regular carrier would give you another block to carry, or maybe you’d go back in and the soup would give you another, but you just took your time and shoved those Xmas cards in the slots.
A world away from blue-collar Los Angeles, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth opens in Cricklewood Broadway at the scene of the attempted suicide of 47-year-old Archie Jones, ‘dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate … scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage licence (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him … He wasn’t the type to make elaborate plans – suicide notes and funeral instructions – he wasn’t the type for anything fancy. All he asked for was a bit of silence, a bit of shush so he could concentrate … He wanted to do it before the shops opened.’
In most of the best contemporary fiction, objects and events aren’t usually described from a God-like view, but from the unique perspective of the character. As in life, everything we encounter is a component not of objective external reality, but of that character’s inner neural realm – the controlled hallucination that, no matter how real it seems, exists only in their head and is, in its own way, wrong. In fiction, it might not be going too far to say all description works as a description of character.
In an electrifying passage from his novel Another Country, James Baldwin shows Rufus Scott – a doomed African-American trying to survive in 1950s America – walking into a Harlem jazz club. Baldwin’s description of the saxophonist playing on the stage crackles with as much information about Scott, his world and his frustrated attempts at controlling it, as it does about the musician, who he perceives,
wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And again Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question Rufus heard, the same phrase, unbearably endlessly, and variously repeated with all the boy had … the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?
Culture is another route by which characters in life and fiction become the flawed and peculiar people they are. We often think of ‘culture’ as surface phenomena, such as opera and literature and modes of dress, but culture is actually built deeply and directly into our model of the world. It forms part of the neural machinery that constructs our hallucination of reality. Culture distorts and narrows the lens through which we experience life, exerting a potent influence on us, whether by dictating the moral rules we’ll fight and die to defend or defining the kinds of foods we’ll perceive as delicious. The Japanese eat hachinoko, a delicacy made from baby bees. The Korowai of Papua New Guinea eat people. Americans consume ten billion kilograms of beef a year, while in India, where cows are sacred, a vigilante might kill you for eating a steak sandwich. Orthodox Jewish wives shave their heads and wear wigs, lest any alluring trace of hair be glimpsed by dirty mortals. The Waorani of Ecuador wear almost nothing at all.
Such cultural norms are incorporated into our models in childhood, a period in which the brain is rapidly working out who it needs to be in order to best control its particular environment. Between the ages of zero and two, it generates around 1.8 million neural connections every second. It remains in this state of increased malleability – or ‘plasticity’ – until late adolescence or early adulthood. It learns, in part, through playing. Lots of animals enjoy these pleasurable, rule-based, exploratory interactions, including dolphins, kangaroos and rats. But our domestication, and the highly complex social realm we must learn to control, has elevated the importance of play in humans. It’s the main reason we have such greatly extended childhoods.
We’ve evolved different forms of play, from games to education to storytelling. Play, including storytelling, is typically overseen by adults who tell children what’s fair and not fair, what’s of value and not, and how we should behave, punishing and rewarding when we act in accordance, or not, to the models of our culture. Caregivers don’t merely read morally charged stories to their children, they often add their own narration, underlining the narrative’s message. Play is critical for the making of social minds. One study into the backgrounds of sociopathic murderers found no connection between them apart from an extreme lack of play, or a history of abnormal play such as sadism and bullying, in the childhoods of 90 per cent of them.
It’s in our first seven years that culture mostly gets built into our models, honing and particularising our neural realm. Western children are raised in a culture of individualism which was birthed around 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece. Individualists tend to fetishise personal freedom and perceive the world as being made up of individual pieces and parts. This gives us a set of particular values that strongly influence the stories we tell. According to some psychologists, it’s a mode of thinking that arose from the physical landscape of Ancient Greece. It was a rocky, hilly, coastal place, and therefore poor for large group endeavours like farming. This meant you had to be something of a hustler to get by – a small business person tanning hides, perhaps, or foraging or making olive oil or fishing. The best way of controlling that world, in Ancient Greece, was by being self-reliant.
Because individual self-reliance was the key to success, the all-powerful individual became a cultural ideal. The Greeks sought personal glory and perfection and fame. They created that legendary competition of self versus self, the Olympics, practised democracy for fifty years and became so self-focused they felt compelled to warn of the dangers of runaway self-love in the story of Narcissus. This conception of the individual as the locus of their own power, free to choose the life they wanted, rather than being slave to the whims of tyrants, fates and gods, was revolutionary. It ‘changed the way people thought about cause and effect,’ writes the psychologist Professor Victor Stretcher, ‘heralding in Western civilisation’.
Compare this pushy, freedom-loving self to the one that emerged in the East. The undulating and fertile landscape in Ancient China was perfect for large groupish endeavours. Getting by would have probably meant being a part of a sizeable wheat- or rice-growing community or working on a huge irrigation project. The best way of controlling the world, in that place, was ensuring the group, rather than the individual, was successful. That meant keeping your head down and being a team player. This collective theory of control led to a collective ideal of self. In the Analects, Confucius is recorded as describing ‘the superior man’ as one who ‘does not boast of himself’, preferring instead the ‘concealment of his virtue’. He ‘cultivates a friendly harmony’ and ‘lets the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection’. He could hardly be more different than the pushy Westerner emerging seven thousand kilometres away.
For the Greeks, the primary agent of control was the individual. For the Chinese, it was the group. For the Greeks, reality was made up of individual pieces and parts. For the Chinese, it was a field of interconnected forces. Out of these differences in the experience of reality come different story forms. Greek myths usually have three acts, Aristotle’s ‘beginning, middle and end’, perhaps more usefully described as crisis, struggle, resolution. They often starred singular heroes battling terrible monsters and returning home with treasures.
This was individualist propaganda, transmitting the notion that one courageous person really could change everything. These story outlines begin influencing a Western child’s emerging self surprisingly early. On being asked by researchers to spontaneously tell a story, one three-year-old girl in the US produced a perfect sequence of crisis-struggle-resolution: ‘Batman went away from his mommy. Mommy said, “Come back, come back.” He lost and his mommy can’t find him. He ran like this to come home. He eat muffins and he sat on his mommy’s lap. And then him have a rest.’
Stories weren’t like this in Ancient China. This was a realm so other-focused there was practically no real autobiography for two thousand years. When it did finally emerge, life stories were typically told stripped of the subject’s voice and opinions and they were positioned not at the centre of their own lives but as a bystander looking in. Rather than following a straightforward pattern of cause and effect, Eastern fiction often took the form of Ryu–nosuke Akutagawa’s ‘In A Bamboo Grove’, in which the events surrounding a murder are recounted from the perspectives of several witnesses – a woodcutter, a priest, a policeman, an elderly woman, the accused murderer, the victim’s wife, and finally from a spirit medium channelling the victim himself. All these accounts somehow contradict each other, with the reader left to puzzle out their meaning for themselves.
In such stories, according to the psychologist Professor Uichol Kim, ‘you’re never given the answer. There’s no closure. There’s no happily ever after. You’re left with a question that you have to decide for yourself. That’s the story’s pleasure.’ In Eastern tales that did focus on an individual, the hero’s status tended to be earned in a suitably group-first way. ‘In the West you fight against evil and the truth prevails and love conquers all,’ he said. ‘In Asia it’s a person who sacrifices who becomes the hero, and takes care of the family and the community and the country.’
The Japanese form known as Kisho-tenketsu comes with four acts: in act one (‘ki’) we’re introduced to the characters, in act two (‘sho’) the actions follow on, in act three (‘ten’) a twist that’s surprising or even apparently unconnected takes place and in the final act (‘ketsu’) we’re invited, in some open-ended way, to search for the harmony between it all. ‘One of the confusing things about stories in the East is there’s no ending,’ said Professor Kim. ‘In life there are not simple, clear answers. You have to find these answers.’
Whereas Westerners enjoy having accounts of individual struggle and victory beamed into their neural realms, Easterners take pleasure from the narrative pursuit of harmony.
What these forms reflect is the different ways our cultures understand change. For Westerners, reality is made up of individual pieces and parts. When threatening unexpected change strikes, we tend to reimpose control by going to war with those pieces and parts and trying to tame them. For Easterners, reality is a field of interconnected forces. When threatening unexpected change strikes, they’re more likely to reimpose control by attempting to understand how to bring those turbulent forces back into harmony so that they can all exist together. What they have in common is story’s deepest purpose. They are lessons in control.
It takes time for a self, with all its flaws and peculiarities, to bend itself out of the universe. It begins with us recognising our image in the mirror. Our caregivers tell us stories about the past and the present, what’s happening around us and what we had to do with it. We begin to contribute to these little stories about ourselves. We realise we’re goal-directed – we want things and we try to get them. We grasp that we’re surrounded by other minds that are also goal-directed. We understand ourselves to be a certain category of human – a girl, a boy, working-class – of whom others have specific expectations. We have power and have done things. These pockets of story memory slowly begin to connect and cohere. They form plots that become imbued with character and theme. Finally, in adolescence, writes the psychologist Professor Dan McAdams, we endeavour to understand our life as a ‘grand narrative, reconstructing the past and imagining the future in such a way as to provide it with some semblance of purpose, unity and meaning’.
Having undergone its adolescent narrative-making process, the brain has essentially worked out who we are, what matters, and how we should behave in order to get what we want. Since birth, it’s been in a state of heightened plasticity that has enabled it to build its models. But now it becomes less plastic and harder to change. Most of the peculiarities and mistakes that make us who we are have become incorporated into its models. Our flaws and peculiarities have become who we are. Our minds have been made up.
Then the brain enters a state that’s valuable to understand for anyone interested in human conflict and drama. From being model-builders we become model defenders. Now that the flawed self with its flawed model of the world has been constructed, the brain starts to protect it. When we encounter evidence that it might be wrong, because other people aren’t perceiving the world as we do, we can find it deeply disturbing. Rather than changing its models by acknowledging the perspectives of these people, our brains seek to deny them.
This is how the neurobiologist Professor Bruce Wexler describes it: ‘Once [the brain’s] internal structures are established they turn the relationship between the internal and external around. Instead of the internal structures being shaped by the environment, the individual now acts to preserve established structures in the face of environmental challenges, and finds changes in structure difficult and painful.’ We respond to such challenges with distorted thinking, argument and aggression. As Wexler writes, ‘we ignore, forget or attempt to actively discredit information that is inconsistent with these structures’.
The brain defends our flawed model of the world with an armoury of crafty biases. When we come across any new fact or opinion, we immediately judge it. If it’s consistent with our model of reality our brain gives a subconscious feeling of yes. If it’s not, it gives a subconscious feeling of no. These emotional responses happen before we go through any process of conscious reasoning. They exert a powerful influence over us. When deciding whether to believe something or not, we don’t usually make an even-handed search for evidence. Instead, we hunt for any reason to confirm what our models have instantaneously decided for us. As soon as we find any half-decent evidence to back up our ‘hunch’ we think, ‘Yep, that makes sense.’ And then we stop thinking. This is sometimes known as the ‘makes sense stopping rule’.
Not only do our neural-reward systems spike pleasurably when we deceive ourselves like this, we kid ourselves that this one-sided hunt for confirmatory information was noble and thorough. This process is extremely cunning. It’s not simply that we ignore or forget evidence that goes against what our models tell us (although we do that too). We find dubious ways of rejecting the authority of opposing experts, give arbitrary weight to some parts of their testimony and not others, lock onto the tiniest genuine flaws in their argument and use them to dismiss them entirely. Intelligence isn’t effective at dissolving these cognitive mirages of rightness. Smart people are mostly better at finding ways to ‘prove’ they’re right and tend to be no better at detecting their wrongness.
It might seem odd that humans have evolved to be so irrational. One compelling theory has it that, because we evolved in groups, we’re designed to argue things out lawyer-style until the optimal way forward emerges. Truth, then, is a group activity and free speech an essential component. This would validate the screenwriter Russell T. Davies’s observation that good dialogue is ‘two monologues clashing. It’s true in life, never mind drama. Everyone is always, always thinking about themselves.’
Because our models make up our actual experience of reality, it’s little wonder that any evidence which suggests they are wrong is profoundly unsettling. ‘Things are experienced as pleasurable because they are familiar,’ writes Wexler, ‘while the loss of the familiar produces stress, unhappiness and dysfunction.’ We’re so used to our aggressive model-defending responses – they’re such an ordinary part of being alive – we become inured to their strangeness. Why do we dislike people we disagree with? Why do we feel emotionally repulsed by them?
The rational response, when encountering someone with alien ideas, would be to either attempt to understand them or shrug. And yet we become distressed. Our threatened neural models generate waves of sometimes overwhelming negative feelings. Incredibly, the brain treats threats to our neural models in the much same way as it defends our bodies from a physical attack, putting us into a tense and stressful fight-or-flight state. The person with merely differing views becomes a dangerous antagonist, a force that’s actively attempting to harm us. The neuroscientist Professor Sarah Gimbel watched what happened when people in brain scanners were presented with evidence their strongly held political beliefs were wrong. ‘The response in the brain that we see is very similar to what would happen if, say, you were walking through the forest and came across a bear,’ she has said.
So we fight back. We might do so by trying to convince our opponent of their wrongness and our rightness. When we fail, as we usually do, we can be thrown into torment. We chew the conflict over and over, as our panicked mind lists more and more reasons why they’re dumb, dishonest or morally corrupt. Indeed, language provides a stinking rainbow of words for people whose mental models conflict with ours: idiot, cretin, imbecile, pillock, berk, arsehole, airhead, sucker, putz, barnshoot, crisp-packet, clown, dick, divot, wazzock, fuckwit, fucknut, titbox, cock-end, cunt. After an encounter with such a person, we often seek out allies to help talk us down from the disturbance. We can spend hours discussing our neural enemies, listing all the ways they’re awful, and it feels disgusting and delicious and is such a relief.
We organise much of our lives around reassuring ourselves about the accuracy of the hallucinated model world inside our skulls. We take pleasure in art, media and story that coheres with our models, and we feel irritated and alienated by that which doesn’t. We applaud cultural leaders who argue for our rightness and, on encountering their opposite, feel defiled, disturbed, outraged and vengeful, perhaps wishing failure and humiliation on them. We surround ourselves with ‘like-minded’ people. Much of our most pleasurable social time is spent ‘bonding’ over the ways we agree we’re right, especially on contentious issues. When we meet people who have unusually similar models to us, we can talk to them nonstop. It’s so blissful, reassuring ourselves like this, that time itself seems to vanish. We crave their company and put photos of them – arms across shoulders, smiles in beams – on our fridges and social-media feeds. They become friends for life. If the circumstances are right, we fall in love.
It’s important to note, of course, that we don’t defend all our beliefs like this. If someone approached me and argued that the Power Rangers could beat the Transformers in a fight, or that every bipartite polyhedral graph with three edges per vertex has a Hamiltonian cycle, it would have little effect on me. The beliefs we’ll fight to defend are the ones which we’ve formed our identity, values and theory of control around. An attack on these ideas is an attack on the very structure of reality as we experience it. It’s these kinds of beliefs, and these kinds of attacks, that drive some of our greatest stories.
Much of the conflict we see in life and story involves exactly these model-defending behaviours. It involves people with conflicting perceptions of the world who fight to convince each other of their rightness, to make it so their opponent’s neural model of the world matches theirs. If these conflicts can be deep and bitter and never-ending, it’s partly because of the power of naive realism. Because our hallucination of reality seems self-evident, the only conclusion we can come to is that our antagonist, by claiming to see it differently, is insane, lying or evil. And that’s exactly what they think of us.
But it’s also by these kinds of conflicts that a protagonist learns and changes. As they struggle through the events of the plot, they’ll usually encounter a series of obstacles and breakthroughs. These obstacles and breakthroughs often come in the form of secondary characters, each of whom experiences the world differently to them in ways that are specific and necessary to the story. They’ll try to force the protagonist to see the world as they do. By grappling with these characters, the protagonist’s neural model will be changed, even if subtly. They’ll be led astray by antagonists, who’ll represent perhaps darker and more extreme versions of their flaw. Likewise, they’ll learn valuable lessons from allies, who are often the embodiment of new ways of being that our hero must adopt.
But before this dramatic journey of change has begun, our protagonist’s neural model will probably still be convincing to them, even if it is, perhaps, beginning to creak at its edges – there might be signs that their ability to control the world is failing, which they frantically ignore; there might be portentous problems and conflicts which rise and waft about them. Then something happens …
Good stories have a kind of ignition point. It’s that wonderful moment in which we find ourselves sitting up in the narrative, suddenly attentive, our emotions switched on, curiosity and tension sparked. An ignition point is the first event in a cause-and-effect sequence that will ultimately force the protagonist to question their deepest beliefs. Such an event will often send tremors to the core of their flawed theory of control. Because it goes to the heart of their particular flaw, it’ll cause them to behave in an unexpected way. They’ll overreact or do something otherwise odd. This is our subconscious signal that the fantastic spark between character and plot has taken place. The story has begun.
Typically, as their theory of control is increasingly tested and found wanting, the character will lose control over the events of the story. The drama they trigger compels the protagonist to make a decision: are they going to fix their flaw or not? Who are they going to be?
The cultural model that the butler Stevens had, in The Remains of the Day, was nineteenth-century British. It contained core beliefs about the value of dignity and emotional restraint. His model told him that these attributes were the best way to control his environment – that if you behaved with dignity and emotional restraint you would be safe and ultimately rewarded. This theory of control defined him.
And it had been true, in one place and time. But, when we first met Stevens, all that was changing. The power of the British aristocracy that he and his father served, and to which he owed these values, was fading, as was the power of Britain itself. For Stevens, the main practical consequence of these epochal shifts was that his new employer at Darlington Hall, Mr Farraday, was not an English Lord but an American businessman. This was an unexpected change that would challenge the very foundations of who Stevens was. It’s a classic ignition point.
As the story starts, Stevens is struggling to meet the challenge of Farraday’s not being able to afford the full complement of fourteen staff. Trying to keep the house running with just four people leads him to make ‘a series of small errors in the carrying out of my duties’ that vex him. But the arrival of his new boss triggers another problem, one that seems to preoccupy Stevens even more: Farraday’s ‘unfamiliarity with what was and what was not commonly done in England’. Specifically, that his employer enjoys ‘conversation of a light-hearted, humorous sort’ and has a ‘general propensity to talk with me in a bantering tone’.
This bantering makes Stevens profoundly uncomfortable. It’s a direct attack on his identity, his beliefs, his theory of control. Bantering isn’t what respectable people did. It isn’t how you got on. It isn’t dignified. It invites not emotional restraint but emotional warmth, and that way lies chaos.
On the one occasion Stevens tries to make a joke, it fails humiliatingly. He proves reluctant to change his core beliefs and his brain, as brains do, provides him with powerful excuses not to.
It is quite possible that my employer fully expects me to respond to his bantering in a like manner, and considers my failure to do so a form of negligence. This is, as I say, a matter which has given me much concern. But I must say this business of bantering is not a duty I feel I can ever discharge with enthusiasm. It is all very well, in these changing times, to adapt to one’s work to take in duties not traditionally within one’s realm; but bantering is of another dimension altogether. For one thing, how would one know for sure that at any given moment a response of the bantering sort is truly what is expected? One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate.
We’re all fictional characters. We’re the partial, biased, stubborn creations of our own minds. To help us feel in control of the outside world, our brains lull us into believing things that aren’t true. Among the most powerful of these beliefs are the ones that serve to bolster our sense of our moral superiority. Our brains are hero-makers that emit seductive lies. They want to make us feel like the plucky, brave protagonist in the story of our own lives.
In order to make us feel heroic, the brain craftily re-scripts our pasts. What we actually ‘choose’ to remember, and in what form, warps and changes in ways that suit the heroic story it wants to tell. When, in the laboratory, participants split money with anonymous people in ways that they themselves considered unfair, they were found to consistently misremember their own selfish behaviour, even when offered a financial incentive to recall the truth. ‘When people perceive their own actions as selfish,’ the researchers concluded, ‘they can remember having acted more equitably, thus minimising guilt and preserving their self image.’
Our sense of who we are depends, in significant part, on our memories. And yet they’re not to be trusted. ‘What is selected as a personal memory,’ writes Professor of psychology and neuroscience Giuliana Mazzoni, ‘needs to fit the current idea that we have of ourselves.’ This isn’t simply a matter of strategic forgetting. We rewrite and even invent our own pasts. Work by Mazzoni and others has shown that memories can be detailed, vivid and emotional and yet entirely invented. ‘We often make up memories of events that never happened,’ she writes. Memories are ‘very malleable, they can be distorted and changed easily, as many studies in our lab have shown’.
For the psychologists Professors Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, the most important memory distortions ‘by far’ are the ones that serve to ‘justify and explain our own lives’. We spend years ‘telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villains, an account of how we came to be the way we are’. By this process, memory becomes, ‘a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings’.
But the hero-maker lie goes far beyond memory. The psychologist Professor Nicholas Epley catches it in action when he asks his business students whether they’re inspired to pursue careers in industry for heroic ‘intrinsic’ reasons – doing something worthwhile, pride in achievement, the joy of learning – or more suspect ‘extrinsic’ ones – pay, security and fringe benefits – and then say the same for their contemporaries. They give matching results every year. They show, writes Epley, ‘a subtle dehumanisation of their classmates. My students think all of these incentives are important, of course, but they judge that the intrinsic motivators are significantly more important to them than they are to their fellow students. “I care about doing something worthwhile,” their results say, “but others are mainly in it for the money.”’
The hero-maker begins with our automatic and mostly subconscious emotional hunches. Say we have models of the world that include racist or sexist beliefs – that give us subtle sensations of ‘no’ when we encounter black people or white people or women or men. Because we start out convinced we’re a good person, then it only logically follows there must be a good reason for our negative feelings. So the hero-maker goes on a mission to find them. And it does a good job. It’s convincing. After all, who better to fool us – to know exactly what to say to beguile us into believing our most incendiary and partisan instincts are morally justified – than our own mind? If we’re a good person, the money we stole from our boss must be because they’ve been exploiting us. If we’re a caring person, our political efforts to degrade the NHS must be an altruistic desire to increase efficiency or patient choice. At least that’s my take on that situation. That’s the moral truth that feels as inarguably real to me as rocks and trees and double-decker buses, because it’s made out of the same stuff as those things. I’m blind to any other reasonable argument – I can’t perceive them – because they’re not part of my perception.
Everyone who’s psychologically normal thinks they’re the hero. Moral superiority is thought to be a ‘uniquely strong and prevalent form of positive illusion’. Maintaining a ‘positive moral self-image’ doesn’t only offer psychological and social benefits, it’s actually been found to improve our physical health. Even murderers and domestic abusers tend to consider themselves morally justified, often the victims of intolerable provocation. When researchers tested prisoners on their hero-maker biases, they found them to be largely intact. The inmates considered themselves above average on a range of pro-social characteristics, including kindness and morality. The exception was law-abidingness. There, sitting in prison, serving sentences precisely because they’d made serious contraventions of the law, they were only willing to concede that, on law-abidingness, they scored about average.
The hero-maker delusion is implicated in more misery, fury and death than is possible to calculate. Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot believed they were right, as did Hitler, whose last words before shooting himself were said to be, ‘The world will be eternally grateful to National Socialism that I have extinguished the Jews in Germany and Central Europe.’ Indeed, the brains of even the lowliest Nazis automatically generated reasons why what they were doing was morally correct. In the Holocaust’s early stages, ordinary middle-aged Germans were recruited to efforts to exterminate Jews. One, a 35-year-old metal worker, remembered, ‘it so happened that the mothers led the children by the hand. My neighbour then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that, after all, without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live without their mothers.’
Researchers have found that violence and cruelty has four general causes: greed and ambition; sadism; high self-esteem and moral idealism. Popular belief and clichéd stories tend to have it that greed and sadism are dominant. In fact, they’re vanishingly small. It’s actually high self-esteem and moral idealism – convictions of personal and moral superiority – that drive most acts of evil.
In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the antagonist Amy Elliott Dunne is motivated, in part, by her pathologically high self-esteem. She’s driven to frame her husband for her murder not because of his affair, precisely, but because of what his affair would do to her perceived reputation. On discovering his infidelity, she writes in her diary,
I could hear the tale, how everyone would love telling it: how Amazing Amy, the girl who never did wrong, let herself be dragged, penniless, to the middle of the country, where her husband threw her over for a younger woman. How predictable, how perfectly average, how amusing. And her husband? He ended up happier than ever. No. I couldn’t allow that … I changed my name for that piece of shit. Historical records have been altered – Amy Elliott to Amy Dunne – like it’s nothing. No, he does not get to win. So I began to think of a different story, a better story, one that would destroy Nick for doing this to me. A story that would restore my perfection. It would make me the hero, flawless and adored. Because everyone loves the Dead Girl.
A hero-maker narrative based on moral superiority is convincingly captured in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, which is set in Mexico during the persecution of the Catholic Church. When a murderous police lieutenant examines a photograph of a wanted priest, the emotion comes first: ‘Something you could almost have called horror moved him’. Next comes the self-justifying memory, followed instantly by a hero-maker narrative that ties it all together so that the killer is reassured he’s a moral actor:
he remembered the smell of the incense in the churches of his boyhood, the candles and the laciness and the self-esteem, the immense demands made from the altar steps by men who didn’t know the meaning of sacrifice. The old peasants knelt there before the holy images with their arms held out in an attitude of the cross: tired by the long day’s labour … and the priest came round with the collecting-bag taking their centavos, abusing them for all their small comforting sins, and sacrificing nothing at all in return … He said, ‘We will catch him.’
A character’s conviction in their rightness and superiority is precisely what gives them their terrible power. Great drama often forms itself around a clash of competing hero-maker narratives, one belonging to the protagonist, the other to their foe. Their respective moral perceptions of reality feel utterly genuine to their owners and yet are catastrophically opposed. These are neural worlds that become locked in a fight to the death.
As irrational as we can be, it’s important not to infer from all this that we’re incapable of ever thinking straight. Of course, reason has power, people can think sensibly and minds can change. It’s relatively rare, though, for people to shift significantly on the beliefs around which they form their identity, such as Ishiguro’s butler Stevens’s convictions about the value of emotional restraint. It’s these brave souls we mythologise in story.
One such real-life hero is the former ‘eco-terrorist’ Mark Lynas. He belonged to a ‘radical cell’ of the anarchist environmental group Earth First and would hack down experimental genetically modified crops in the night. Earth First told a kind of David and Goliath story about the world, in which the overwhelming forces of industrialism were bringing about, ‘environmental apocalypse. Big corporations and capitalism in general were destroying the earth.’ Mark’s struggle was against the monstrous machines of profit. ‘We were protectors of the land and the inheritors of the natural forces,’ he said. ‘We were the pixies.’
But when he discovered that the science of genetically modified food didn’t confirm what his neural models had been telling him, he went through a painful public conversion. As he did, his brain scripted a new story of the world, one in which he could still feel heroic. He’d once perceived the green movement as the brave, scrappy underdogs. But the more he looked now, the more little David took the form of Goliath. ‘Just take the numbers,’ he said. ‘Greenpeace, the whole international group, is a $150m outfit. Bigger than the World Trade Organisation, and much more influential in terms of determining how people think. And there’s very deep networks of money and power and influence there too.’
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.’
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?