A hero is selfless. A hero is courageous. A hero earns status. But heroes, in story and in life, have a final essential quality that we’ve yet to fully encounter. This is our oldest and most fundamental drive, probably originating back to when we were single-celled organisms. Humans are directed towards goals. We want things and we strive to get them. When unexpected change strikes we don’t just climb back into bed and hope it all goes away. Well, we might for a while. But at some point we stand up. We face it. We fight. For the nineteenth-century critic Ferdinand Brunetière this was the one inviolable rule of drama: ‘What we ask of the theatre is the spectacle of a will striving towards a goal.’ Fundamental to successful stories and successful lives is the fact that we don’t passively endure the chaos that erupts around us. These events challenge us. They generate a desire. This desire makes us act. This is how change summons us into the adventure of the story, and how an ignition point sprouts a plot.
Goal-direction is the foundational mechanism on top of which all our other urges are built. The basic Darwinian aim of all life forms is to survive and reproduce. Because of the peculiarities of our evolutionary history, human strategies to attain these goals centre on achieving connection with tribes, and on status within them. On top of these deep universals sits everything else we desire – our ambitions, feuds, love affairs, disappointments and betrayals. All of our struggles. All the stuff of story.
Humans have a compulsion to make things happen in their environment that’s so powerful it’s described by psychologists as ‘almost as basic a need as food and water.’ When researchers put people in flotation tanks and block their eyes and ears they find that, often within seconds, they’ll start rubbing their fingers together or making ripples in the water. After four hours some are singing ‘bawdy songs’. Another study found 67 per cent of male participants and 25 per cent of female participants so desperate to make things happen in a room that was empty of stimulus, except for an electric-shock machine, that they started giving themselves painful shocks. Humans do things. They act. We can’t help it.
Our goals give our lives order, momentum and logic. They provide our hallucination of reality with a centre of narrative gravity. Our perception organises itself around them. What we see and feel, at any given moment, depends on what we’re trying to get – when we’re caught in the street in a downpour, we don’t see shops and trees and doorways and awnings, we see places of shelter. Goal-direction is so important to human cognition that when information about it is absent we can enter a state of bafflement. The psychologists Professors John Bransford and Marcia Johnson asked people to remember the following passage:
The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups depending on their makeup. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo any particular endeavour. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run this may not seem important, but complications from doing too many can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. The manipulation of the appropriate mechanisms should be self-explanatory, and we need not dwell on it here. At first the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then one never can tell.
Most failed to recall more than a handful of sentences. But a second group were told prior to reading that the paragraph concerned the washing of clothes. The simple addition of a human goal transformed the gobbledegook into something clear. They remembered twice as much.
In order to encourage us to act, to struggle, to live, the hero-making brain wants us to feel as if we’re constantly moving towards something better. Assuming we’re mentally healthy, we’re pushed on into our plots by a delusional sense of optimism and destiny. One clever study asked restaurant employees to circle all the likely possibilities for their own future lives, before doing the same on behalf of a liked colleague. Many more circles appeared for their lives than for their co-workers. Another test found that eight in every ten participants believed things would turn out better for them than for others.
Goal-direction gives story much of its tension and thrill. As the protagonist pursues their goal we feel their struggle. As they grab for their prize, we experience their joy. As they fail, we cry out. The story theorist Christopher Booker writes of the alternating sensations of ‘constriction’ and ‘release’ that ebb and flow through well-constructed plots. If our tribal social emotions tell us who to root for, and whose demise to viscerally crave, these goal-related responses form the peaks and troughs of story’s rollercoaster, and they do so using a language millions of years older than words.
In life such emotions tell us what’s of value. They guide us, letting us know who we ought to be and what we should go after. When we’re behaving heroically, we feel we’re doing so because our actions are being soundtracked by positive emotions. Humans are by no means unique in this. The psychologist Professor Daniel Nettle writes that ‘when an amoeba follows a chemical gradient to reach and then ingest some food, we might say that it is acting on its positive emotions. All sensate organisms have some kind of system for finding good things in the environment and going after them, and the suite of human positive emotions is just a highly developed system of this kind.’
Video games plug directly into such core desires. Multiplayer online games, such as World of Warcraft and Fortnite, are stories. When a player logs on and teams up with fellow players to embark on a difficult mission, their three deepest evolved cravings are powerfully fed – they experience connection, earn status and are given a goal to pursue. They become an archetypal hero battling through a three-act narrative of crisis-struggle-resolution. Modern games are so ferociously effective at feeding these human fundamentals that they can become addictive, with ‘gaming disorder’ now classified as a disease by the World Health Organisation. One Welsh teenager, Jamie Callis, would spend up to twenty-one hours per day playing Runescape. ‘One minute you’d be chopping trees and the next you’d be killing something or going on a quest,’ he told his local newspaper. ‘You had clans of people, and that’s where you’d really have a family.’ Callis spent so much time conversing with his American and Canadian teammates that he began losing his Welsh accent. In South Korea, two parents became so engrossed in a multiplayer game that they allowed their three-month-old daughter to starve to death. The game that obsessed them, Prius Online, partly involved nurturing and forming an emotional bond with ‘Anima’, a virtual baby girl.
The psychologist Professor Brian Little has spent decades studying the goals that humans pursue in their everyday lives. He finds we have an average of fifteen ‘personal projects’ going at once, a mixture of ‘trivial pursuits and magnificent obsessions’. These projects are so central to our identity that Little likes to tell his students, ‘We are our personal projects.’ His studies have found that, in order to bring us happiness, a project should be personally meaningful and we ought to have some level of control over it. When I asked him if a person pursuing one of these ‘core’ projects was a bit like an archetypal hero battling through a three-act narrative of crisis-struggle-resolution he said, ‘Yes. A thousand times yes.’
Little isn’t the first to argue that the fundamental human value is the struggle towards a meaningful goal. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle tried to puzzle out the true nature of human happiness. Some posited a ‘hedonic’ form defined by pleasure and the satisfaction of short-term desires. But Aristotle contemptuously dismissed the hedonists, saying that, ‘The life they decide on is a life for grazing animals.’ Instead, he described the idea of ‘eudaemonia’. This is ‘living in a way that fulfils our purpose’, the classicist Professor Helen Morales said. ‘It’s flourishing. Aristotle was saying, “Stop hoping for happiness tomorrow. Happiness is being engaged in the process.”’
Recent extraordinary evidence that humans are built to live according to Aristotle’s concept of happiness as a practice rather than a goal comes from the field of social genomics. Results from a team led by Professor of medicine Steve Cole suggest health can improve – risk of heart disease, cancer and neurodegenerative disorders going down; antiviral response going up – when we’re high in eudaemonic happiness. It changes the expression of our genes. Studies elsewhere find that living with a sufficient sense of purpose reduces the risk of depression and strokes and helps addicts recover from addiction. People more likely to agree with statements such as, ‘Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them,’ have been found to live longer, even when other factors are controlled for.
When I asked Cole to define eudaemonia he said it was ‘kind of striving after a noble goal’.
‘So it’s heroic behaviour in a literary sense?’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Exactly.’
Humans are built for story. When we push ourselves towards a tough yet meaningful goal, we thrive. Our reward systems spike not when we achieve what we’re after but when we’re in pursuit of it. It’s the pursuit that makes a life and the pursuit that makes a plot. Without a goal to follow and at least some sense we’re getting closer to it, there is only disappointment, depression and despair. A living death.
When a threatening and unexpected change strikes, our goal is to deal with it. This goal possesses us. The world narrows. We enter a kind of cognitive tunnel and see only our mission. Everything in front of us becomes either a tool to help us achieve our desire or an obstacle we must kick aside. This is also true for protagonists in story. Without Brunetière’s will striving towards a goal being present in the scene of a story, there’s no drama, only description.
This narrowing should be especially present at a story’s ignition point. But this is exactly where many stories fail. In order to be maximally compelling, protagonists should be active, the principal causer of effects in the plot that follows. Textual analyses reveal the words ‘do’, ‘need’ and ‘want’ appear twice as often in novels that feature in the New York Times bestseller list as those that don’t. A character in a drama who isn’t reacting, making decisions, choosing and trying somehow to impose control on the chaos isn’t truly a protagonist. Without action, the answer to the dramatic question never really changes. Who they are is who they always were, but slowly, dully sinking.
What is a plot? If the second, subconscious layer of a story is the realm of character change, then what exactly is happening up there on the top?
The job of the plot is to plot against the protagonist. Its causes and effects always revolve around some sort of story event – an episode that brings the character into a new psychological realm. Once they’re in this hostile and alien place, their flawed theory of control is tested and retested, often to breaking point and beyond.
Sometimes story events are located near the start of a plot, with the rest dealing with its consequences: in King Lear, it’s the love test. Sometimes they arrive around the middle, with the plot building up to the story event and then showing its results: in On Chesil Beach, it’s the failed act of consummation that comes just after the midpoint. Sometimes the story event comprises almost the plot’s entire length: in Lawrence of Arabia, it’s the war.
Episodic storytelling is built from a chain of story events. In sitcoms a story event typically occurs at the start of an episode. We then watch the characters wrestle with its ramifications and being offered the opportunity to change (they don’t, which is the source of much of their humour), only for everything to be tied up at the end. In television drama, a story event often arrives at the end of an episode, which is the ‘cliff-hanger’ that keeps us bingeing. Contemporary long-form television is frequently structured around one overarching story event – Breaking Bad’s Walter White’s transition to a drug dealer; Transparent’s Mort Pfefferman’s transition to Maura – with each episode centring on related sub-events.
The secret of long-running soap operas such as the BBC’s The Archers, which has aired nearly 20,000 episodes since 1951, is that story events occur frequently and characters are offered the opportunity to change, and sometimes do in subtle ways. But there’s rarely a final resolution to the process – no definitive answer to the dramatic question of who that person really is. The testing events just keep coming and coming, much as they do in life.
The precise pattern of surface causes and effects that comprises the ‘ideal’ plot is a question brilliant scholars from Aristotle onwards have spent centuries attempting to answer. The pursuit of the perfect plot traditionally involves theorists gathering a number of successful myths and tales together and running their divining rods over them in an attempt to detect their hidden blueprint. Their findings have been hugely influential. They shape today’s landscape of popular storytelling.
For the mythologist Joseph Campbell, a story starts with a hero receiving and, at first, refusing a call to adventure. A mentor comes along to encourage them. Somewhere in the middle they’ll undergo a ‘rebirth’, only to rouse dark forces that pursue them. After a near-deadly battle, the hero returns to their community with learnings and ‘boons’.
The Hollywood animation studio Pixar is home to some of the most successful mass-market storytellers of our age. ‘Story artist’ Austin Madison, who’s worked on blockbusters including Ratatouille, Wall-E and Up, has shared a structure he says all Pixar films must adhere to. The action starts with a protagonist who has a goal, living in a settled world. Then a challenge comes that forces them into a cause-and-effect sequence of events that eventually builds to a climax that demonstrates the triumph of good over evil and the revelation of the story’s moral.
Thirty years of study led Christopher Booker to assert the existence of seven recurring plots in story. He calls them: Overcoming the Monster; Rags to Riches; The Quest; Voyage and Return; Rebirth; Comedy; and Tragedy. Each plot, he argues, consists of five acts: the call to action, a dream stage in which everything goes well, a frustration stage at which fortunes turn, a descent into nightmarish conflict, and finally a resolution. Following Jung, Booker outlines a character transformation he believes ubiquitous. At the story’s start the protagonist’s personality will be ‘out of balance’. They’ll be too strong or weak in the archetypal masculine traits of strength and order, or the archetypal feminine traits of feeling and understanding. In the happy resolution of the final act, the hero achieves ‘the perfect balance’ of all four traits and finally becomes whole.
In his fascinating book on story structure Into the Woods, John Yorke argues for a hidden symmetry in story, in which protagonists and antagonists function as opposites with their rising and falling fortunes mirroring one another. Partly inspired by Gustav Freytag’s nineteenth-century analysis of Ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama, he argues for a ‘universal’ plot design that centres around a midpoint peak. This he describes as a ‘big, epochal, life-changing moment’, occurring ‘exactly’ halfway through ‘any successful story’, in which something ‘profoundly significant’ takes place that transforms it in some irreversible way.
And so it goes on … on and on and on. Syd Field argues for a three-act sequence of set-up, confrontation and ‘climax and resolution’; Blake Synder for a fifteen-point ‘beat sheet’ revolving around a midpoint and ending with a dramatic finale presaged by a ‘dark night of the soul’; John Trudy insists upon no fewer than twenty-two separate plot points.
What to do with all this confusion and complexity? The good news is that the understanding that plot is there only to test and change the protagonist serves to simplify and make sense of many of these seemingly disparate theories. While the broad outline of Western storytelling consists of those three acts – crisis, struggle, resolution – analysts have long found it useful to break plots down a little further, into five. John Yorke traces this practice as far back as 8 BC, quoting the Greek poet Horace: ‘Let no play be either shorter or longer than five acts, if when once seen it hopes to be called for and brought back to the stage.’
For me, the standard five-act structure isn’t the only way to tell a story. It is, in fact, the narrative equivalent of the three-and-a-half-minute pop song, perfectly tooled to hold attention. It’s ubiquitous in mass-marketing storytelling because it’s the simplest way of showing a character’s flawed theory of control being broken, changed and rebuilt. In its ‘happy ending’ form it goes like this:
Act I: This is me, and it’s not working
The protagonist’s theory of control is established. Unexpected change strikes. The ignition point draws them into a new psychological world.
Act II: Is there another way?
The old theory of control is tested by the plot and it begins breaking down. There are rising emotions of excitement, tension or thrill as a new way forward is sensed, learned and actively experimented with.
Act III: There is. I have transformed
Grim tension grips as the plot fights back. The protagonist counter-attacks using their new strategy. In doing so, they transform in a way that feels profound and irreversible. But then the plot strikes again with unprecedented power.
Act IV: But can I handle the pain of change?
Chaos spirals. The protagonist’s lowest, darkest point. As the plot’s attack becomes relentless, our hero begins to question the wisdom of their decision to change. But the plot won’t leave them alone. We realise they’ll soon have to decide, who are they going to be?
Act V: Who am I going to be?
Tension builds at the approach of the final battle. A peak moment of ecstasy accompanies the protagonist finally achieving complete control over the plot. The chaos is vanquished and the dramatic question is answered definitively: they’re going to be someone new, someone better.
Fresh insights into plot have recently become available thanks to the arrival of ‘big data’. One compelling analysis of story structure was carried out by publishing executive Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers of Stanford University’s Literary Lab, whose algorithm was set to work on 20,000 novels and taught itself to predict a New York Times bestseller with an accuracy of 80 per cent. Fascinatingly, the resulting data supported the life’s work of Christopher Booker, whose seven basic plots did, indeed, emerge. What also emerged was an indication of what people are most curious to read about. The ‘most frequently occurring and important theme’ of bestsellers was ‘human closeness and human connection’, an apposite interest for a hyper-social species.
Archer and Jockers were especially interested in the novel Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James, whose 125-million-selling success baffled many in the publishing industry. Some assumed it was successful because of its BDSM subject matter, but a textual analysis revealed that sex wasn’t actually its dominant theme. ‘The novel is not so much outright erotica, but is instead a spicy romance that has the emotional connection between its hero and heroine as its central interest,’ they wrote. What actually drove the action was ‘the constantly recurring question of whether or not Ana will submit’. The plot was powered, as all plots should be, by the dramatic question: who was Ana going to be?
When Archer and Jockers laid out the plot of Fifty Shades of Grey on a graph, it turned out to take an intriguing form. It made a roughly symmetrical pattern of constriction and release that travelled across five peaks and four valleys, each of which came regularly. It was strikingly similar to another novel that seemed to come from nowhere and into sales of dozens of millions: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. ‘The distance between each peak is about the same, and the distance between each valley is about the same, and finally, the distances between peaks and valleys are about the same,’ they wrote. ‘Both novels have mastered the page-turner beat.’
Is there a more creatively freeing way of looking at plot than as a follow-it-or-fail recipe? When you consider literary, modernist and arthouse storytelling alongside more commercial forms, it seems to me the only true plot fundamentals are that a story event on the surface triggers subconscious character change beneath. ‘Some paint dried’ isn’t a story, it’s a synonym for boredom. But ‘Graham watched some paint dry and reflected on his life’ is the unwatered seedling of a modernist short story.
Beyond this, a plot should serve to orchestrate a symphony of changes. It’s change that obsesses brains and keeps them engaged. There’s the top level of cause-and-effect in which the story event and its ramifications play out. There’s the second subconscious level in which characters are altered in surprising and meaningful ways by what’s happening above. There’s the change in tribal emotions that tells us who to love and who to hate, and change in goal-direction emotions of constriction and release that form the narrative’s peaks and troughs. As well as this, the characters’ understanding of their situation can change. The characters’ plan for achieving their goal can change. The characters’ goal can change. A character’s understanding of themselves can change. A character’s understanding of their relationships can change. The reader’s understanding of who the character is can change. The reader’s understanding of what’s actually happening in the drama can change. The secondary major (and even tertiary) characters can change. Information gaps can be opened and teased and closed. And so on.
Which forms of change are deployed, and when, is a creative decision that depends partly on the nature of the story event and the kind of story that’s being told. Police-procedural drama, for example, depends heavily on changes in the reader’s understanding of what’s really happening, which tend to dance exhilaratingly around what the Detective Inspector knows. Much of the change in The Remains of the Day, meanwhile, takes the form of the reader’s understanding of Stevens, a character to whom nuance and colours (many of them dark) are progressively added during his road trip, often with the use of flashbacks.
If this second form of change is more profound and memorable it’s because it more directly connects with that elemental dramatic question. Who is Stevens? Who’s he going to be? The answer doesn’t stop changing until Ishiguro’s very final page.
A gripping plot is one that keeps asking the dramatic question. It uses its story event to repeatedly change and gradually break the protagonist’s model of who they are and how the world works before rebuilding it. This requires pressure. These models are tough. They run to the core of the character’s identity. If they’re going to crack, the protagonist needs to hurl themselves at the drama. It’s only by being active, and having the courage to take on the external world with all its challenges and provocations, that these core mechanisms can ever be broken down and rebuilt. For the neuroscientist Professor Beau Lotto it’s ‘not just important to be active, it is neurologically necessary’. It’s the only way we grow.
When the data scientist David Robinson analysed an enormous tranche of 112,000 plots including books, movies, television episodes and video games, his algorithm found one common story shape. Robinson described this as, ‘Things get worse and worse until, at the last minute, they get better.’ The pattern he detected reveals that many stories have a point, just prior to their resolution, in which the hero endures some deeply significant test. For one final, decisive time, they’re posed the dramatic question. It’s the moment they have to decide, once and for all, whether or not to become someone new.
In archetypal storytelling, especially as it emerges in fairytales, myths and Hollywood movies, this event often takes the form of some life-or-death challenge or fight in which the protagonist comes face-to-face with all they most dread. This occurence on the surface is symbolic of what’s taking place in the second, subconscious layer of the story. Because the story event has been designed to strike at the core of this character’s identity, the thing they need to change is precisely that which is hardest. The flawed models they’re required to shatter run so deep that it takes an act of almost supernatural strength and courage to finally change them for good.
This, for me, is the point at which much contemporary storytelling collapses into its formulaic worst. I frequently find myself engaged with a film or long-form television series, only to switch off fifteen minutes before the end, so obvious will the events of this closing sequence be. I wonder if the problem is that the requirement for a final ‘battle’ is sometimes taken too literally.
Properly written characters, with effective internal drama, don’t need to rely on overblown and hyperactive drama to satisfy. Take the devastatingly effective final act of the Palme d’Or-winning Paris, Texas, by L.M. Kit Carson and Sam Shepard. The film, which tells of a shattered family, opens on its protagonist Travis – lost, mute, heartbroken and desperately ill – wandering through the Texas desert. After his physical collapse, he’s picked up by his brother, who’s been raising Travis’s son, Hunter, since Travis split with his wife four years previously. We watch as Travis slowly rebuilds his relationship with his boy. When he discovers the approximate whereabouts of his wife – Hunter’s mother, Jane – they go on a road trip to find her.
Eventually, we discover why the marriage fell apart: Travis’s sexual jealousy and paranoia about his beautiful and much younger partner led to controlling behaviour. They grew apart. Travis became more abusive. But, despite this dark history, they still love each other. Will the family finally be reunited? The film shows Travis on the phone to Jane, giving the details of the hotel room in which he and her long-lost boy are staying. We then see mother and son meet and embrace. But where’s Travis? The closing scene shows him driving into the sunset, alone and in tears.
This quiet but extremely effective ending isn’t prefigured by any explosive final battle that results in Travis’s decision to walk away from all that he loves. There’s no shouting, recriminations, thrown furniture, chases through airports, bitter ‘I love you’s or tortuous ‘To be or not to be’ indecision. There’s simply the dramatic question being answered conclusively. Who is this flawed character? After all his mistakes and trials, who did Travis decide to become? Someone who had the self-knowledge to admit he could never be the husband and father he had to be, but who nevertheless had the selfless courage to sacrifice his own wants for his family’s needs. He was, after all, a good man.
Travis’s ‘final battle’ might have lacked external fireworks, but in the second subconscious realm of the story, he’d been fighting dragons. The psychologist and story theorist Professor Jordan Peterson talks of the mythic trope in which a hero makes final battle with a dragon that’s hoarding treasure. ‘You confront it in order to get what it has to offer you. The probability is that’s going to be intensely dangerous and push you right to the limit. But you don’t get the gold without the dragon. That’s a very, very strange idea. But it seems to be accurate.’
That gold is your the reward for accepting the fight of your life. But you only get it if you answer story’s dramatic question correctly: ‘I’m going to be someone better.’
How does a story end? If all story is change then it naturally follows that a story ends when the change finally stops. From the ignition point onwards, the protagonist has been in a battle to reimpose control over their external world. If the story has a happy ending the process will be successful. Their brain’s model of the external world, and its theory of control, will have been updated and improved. They’ll finally be able to tame the chaos.
Control, as we’ve already discovered, is the ultimate mission of the brain. Our hero-making cognition always wants to make us feel as if we have more of it than we actually do. When study participants were faced with a machine that issued rewards at random, they concocted elaborate rituals with its levers, convinced they were able to control when it paid out. Another test found participants given electric shocks could withstand more pain simply by being told they could stop it at will. Random and uncontrollable shocks, meanwhile, led to psychological and physiological decline.
To lose our sense of control is to suffer the loss of the sense of ourselves as an active heroic character, and this leads to anxiety and depression and worse. Desperate to avoid this, the brain spins its compelling, guileful and simplistic story of heroic us. ‘A critical element to our well-being is how well we understand what happens to us and why,’ writes psychologist Professor Timothy Wilson. Happy people have reassuring narratives of self that account for why bad things have happened to them and which offer hope for the future. Those who ‘feel in control of their lives, have goals of their own choosing and make progress towards those goals are happier than people who do not’.
Brains love control. It’s their heaven. They’re constantly battling to get there. It’s surely no coincidence that control is the defining quality in the hero of the world’s most successful story. The star of the majority of religious sagas is ‘God’. He can do anything. He knows what’s coming, He knows what’s happened and He has unrestricted access to everyone’s most private gossip.
Our craving for control explains why the endings of archetypal stories are so deeply satisfying. In tragedies such as Lolita, the protagonist answers the dramatic question by deciding not to become someone better. Rather than discovering and fixing their flaws they embrace them yet further. This causes them to enter a catastrophic spiral of model-defending behaviour that loosens their control over the external world more and more, leading to inevitable humiliation, ostracisation or death. Such an ending transmits the profoundly comforting signal, to the reader, that divine justice truly exists and is inescapable, and that there’s control in the chaos after all.
Stories such as Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark take advantage of our wired-in lust for control by deliberately and cruelly not satisfying it. When her money is stolen by the selfish policeman, the selfless immigrant Selma Ježková’s attempts at regaining control over the external world cause her to spin yet further into disarray. The plot ends with her death by hanging in a prison. This is not what we want. In refusing to fulfil our tribal desire for justice and restored control, Von Trier leaves his audience in a state of devastation. By doing so, he powerfully makes his political comment on the treatment of the vulnerable by the United States.
The ending of Damien Chazelle’s screenplay La La Land both satisfies and subverts our need for control. His romantic comedy follows two protagonists, one of whom is desperate to become a famous actress, the other a famous jazz musician. When the plot poses each of them the dramatic question, they ultimately choose their ambitions over each other. In the wonderfully effective ending we’re happy to discover their dreams came true and yet sad they lost each other in the process. The ending works because the dramatic question is answered decisively and it feels true to who the characters are, and yet the viewer is left drowning in lovely, longing bitter-sweetness. They achieved control and lost it too.
The butler Stevens’ story ends by promising us, subtly but surely, that his ability to control reality will transform. Extended flashback sequences in The Remains of the Day show us the melancholy consequences of his loyalty not only to the value of dignity in emotional restraint, but also to his former employer, Lord Darlington, who emerges as an anti-Semite and Nazi appeaser. Events on Stevens’ road trip to Cornwall, where he’s to meet with his former housekeeper Miss Kenton, cause various knocks to his internal model of the world, but he remains stubbornly true to it.
When he finally meets Miss Kenton she admits she was once in love with him. On hearing her confession, Stevens admits to the reader that his ‘heart was breaking’. He nevertheless fails to share his feelings with Kenton herself, even as her eyes brim with tears. His model of the world, and its theory of control, has it that to show anything but dignity in emotional restraint is to invite chaos. He simply cannot do it.
The story’s closing paragraphs take him to Weymouth pier where crowds have gathered in what remains of the day to see the electric lights turned on. Finally, Stevens concedes he was wrong about Lord Darlington who, he admits, made ‘mistakes’. He reflects that his position of servitude demanded loyalty to whatever view of the world Darlington chose. ‘What dignity is there in that?’ he asks.
Moments later, he’s surprised to realise the people chatting behind him are not friends or family members but strangers gathered to watch the lights. ‘It is curious how people can build such warmth among themselves,’ he says. Wondering how it happens, he concludes it’s likely down to the ‘bantering skill’ that his new American employer enjoyed so much but which he’d given up trying to master. ‘Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically,’ he says. ‘After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in – particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.’
In the book’s final page Stevens makes a commitment to change that might be trivial to anyone else but for him means wrestling dragons. His internal model of the world has been recognised as wrong and the reader is left in the lovely glow of the implication that his ability to control the external world will be improved and, as a result, he’ll receive the golden treasure of transformation. The ending of his story is a happy one.
An archetypal happy ending can be found in the closing paragraphs of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Set in a psychiatric institution in 1950s, the novel is narrated by the native American patient Chief Bromden, whose model of the world is, like Mr B’s, pathologically delusional.
When we meet him, he believes reality itself is controlled by a strange hidden mechanism he calls the Combine. His theory of control has it that he has no control at all. Bromden doesn’t talk, he just sweeps repetitively in the corner and listens. His model of the world is challenged and rebuilt by the arrival of the charismatic and rebellious McMurphy, who ends up being cruelly lobotomised. In an exceptionally moving ending, Bromden mercifully euthanises the friend who helped him heal. He then tears a heavy control panel out of the ground, hurls it through a window and leaps into the moonlit sky, leaving us with the words, ‘I been away a long time.’
Back at the story’s start, Bromden appeared to be in hospital again, perhaps caught as an AWOL or having fallen ill once more. But the story ends where it does because that’s the blissful, fleeting instant in time in which Bromden has complete control over both levels of story: over the external world of the drama and the internal world of who he is. For one blissful, perfect moment, he has control over everything. He has become God.
The perfect archetypal ending takes the form of ‘the God moment’ because it reassures us that, despite all the chaos and sadness and struggle that fills our lives, there is control. There’s no more reassuring message for the storytelling brain. Having been picked up in act one, and hurled around the drama, we’re put back down again in the best possible place. The psychologist Professor Roy Baumeister writes that ‘life is change that yearns for stability’. Story is a form of play that allows us to feel we’ve lost control without actually placing us in danger. It’s a rollercoaster, but not one made from ramps, rails and steel wheels, but from love, hope, dread, curiosity, status play, constriction, release, unexpected change and moral outrage. Story is a thrill-ride of control.
To live in a hallucination trapped inside a skull is to feel, in the words of neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith, like ‘the invisible actor at the centre of the world’. We’re that single point of focus at which everything meets: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, thought, memory and action. This is the illusion story weaves. Writers create a simulacrum of human consciousness. To read a page in a novel is to move naturally from visual observation to speech to thought to the recollection of a distant memory, back to visual observation again, and so on. It is, in other words, to experience the consciousness of the character as if we were them. This simulacrum of consciousness can become so compelling it nudges the reader’s actual consciousness backwards. When we’re lost in story, brain scans suggest the regions associated with our sense of self become inhibited.
As the story sends us on its thrilling rollercoaster of control, our bodies respond accordingly, experiencing its events: heart rate goes up, blood vessels dilate, changing activations of neurochemicals such as cortisol and oxytocin have powerful effects on our emotional states. We can become so replaced by the storyteller’s simulated model-world that we miss our train stop or forget to go to sleep. Psychologists call this state ‘transportation’.
Research suggests that, when we’re transported, our beliefs, attitudes and intentions are vulnerable to being altered, in accordance with the mores of the story, and that these alterations can stick. ‘Research has demonstrated that the transported “traveller” can return changed by the journey,’ write the authors of a meta-analysis of 132 studies of narrative transportation. ‘The transformation that narrative transportation achieves is persuasion of the story-receiver.’
And to sometimes momentous effect. The historian Professor Lynn Hunt argues that the birth of the novel helped precipitate the invention of human rights. Prior to the eighteenth century, it was unusual for someone to think to empathise with a member of a different class, nationality or gender. God put us in our rightful place, and that was simply that. But then authors of popular tales such as Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747–48) and Julie (1791) ‘encouraged a highly charged identification with the characters and, in doing so, enabled readers to empathise across class, sex and national lines’. In Pamela, for example, they read the eponymous sixteen-year-old maidservant’s account of being sexually harassed by her employer. ‘I SOBB’D and cry’d most sadly. What a foolish Hussy you are! said he: Have I done you any Harm? – Yes, Sir, said I, the greatest Harm in the World.’ These early novels were enormously popular, with one contemporary source writing, ‘you cannot go into a house without finding a Pamela.’
During the nineteenth century, slave narratives brought white readers into the lives of those trapped in bondage in the southern states of America. Books such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass sold by the tens of thousands and gave abolitionists a mighty weapon, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin was said to have helped precipitate the American Civil War. In the 1960s, the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dragged its readers through the experiences of an ordinary prisoner in one of Stalin’s gulag camps, shocking the Communist citizens of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile Hitler’s followers so feared the power of books that they burned them, as did the supporters of Augusto Pinochet and the Sri Lankan mob who took part in the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1981.
Transportation changes people, and then it changes the world.
We all inhabit foreign worlds. Each of us is ultimately alone in our black vault, wandering our singular neural realms, ‘seeing’ things differently, feeling different passions and hatreds and associations of memory as our attention grazes over them. We laugh at different things, are moved by different pieces of music and transported by different kinds of stories. All of us are in search of writers who somehow capture the distinct music made by the agonies in our heads.
If we prefer storytellers with similar backgrounds and lived experiences to our own, it’s because what we often crave in art is the same connection with others we seek in friendship and love. It’s only natural if a woman prefers books by women or a working-class man prefers working-class voices: storytelling will always be full of associations that speak directly to particular perspectives.
Take this first sentence: ‘The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock.’ To this middle-aged Kentishman it’s a fine enough opener, but has little resonance beyond its surface facts. But readers with a similar background to its author, Toni Morrison, might know the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agency was one of the largest African-American owned companies in the United States, and one founded by a former slave. Morrison also hoped the reader would pick up on a sense of movement from North Carolina to Lake Superior that, she writes, ‘suggests a journey from South to North – a direction common for black immigration and in literature about it’.
But just because books by people like us can ring with greater personal meaning doesn’t mean we should stay in our silos. It doesn’t require a forbidding amount of historical or cultural knowledge to enjoy Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Psychologists have examined the effects of storytelling on our perceptions of tribal ‘others’. One study had a group of white Americans viewing a sitcom, Little Mosque on the Prairie, that represented Muslims as friendly and relatable. Compared to a control group (who watched Friends) they ended up with ‘more positive attitudes towards Arabs’ on various tests – changes that persisted when re-tested a month later.
Story, then, is both tribal propaganda and the cure for tribal propaganda. Atticus Finch, in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, advises his daughter that she’ll ‘get along a lot better with all kinds of folks’ if she learns a simple trick: ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’ This is precisely what story enables us to do. In this way, it creates empathy. There can hardly be a better medicine than that for the groupish hatred that comes so naturally and seductively to all humans.
And yet it’s sometimes argued that a storyteller who climbs into the skin of a person of a different gender, race or sexuality is guilty of a kind of theft – that of appropriating and unjustly profiting from another’s culture. Storytellers who attempt such feats of imagination have a heightened obligation towards truth, to be sure. But I don’t believe they’re the enemies of peace, justice and understanding. On the contrary, I fear it’s those who rage against them who’ll end up dividing us further. Smart people will always be able to construct persuasive moral arguments to defend their beliefs, but calls to keep strictly within the bounds of one’s group seem to me to be little more than chimpish xenophobia.
Story should not respect such boundaries. If tribal thinking is original sin, then story is prayer. At its best, it reminds us that, beneath our many differences, we remain beasts of one species.
The gift of story is wisdom. For tens of thousands of years stories have served to pass down lessons in how to live from one generation to another. The first to alter my perception of the world was Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. I was a boy of seventeen and out of control in the chaos of my first experience of love. We were together, this girl and I, but we weren’t happy. Why? ‘Love makes you happy?’ the elder Barnes asked me, tenderly, from the pages of his book. ‘No,’ he continued. ‘Love makes the person you love happy? No. Love makes everything all right? Indeed no.’
The problem, I read, is that ‘the heart isn’t heart-shaped’. We might picture it as a neat symmetrical shape, two halves forming a perfect whole, but Barnes’ narrator returns from the butchers with a real heart, cut from an ox. ‘The organ was heavy, squat, bloody, clamped tight like a violent fist … the two halves did not ease apart like I’d fancifully imagined.’
The heart isn’t heart-shaped. Five words that immediately soothed me and made sense of my adolescent torments. Five words that, twenty-six years later and married to another, still help me negotiate love’s unpredictable waters. The heart isn’t heart-shaped. A secret mantra I’ll hear in my head until the day that I or she dies.
The lesson of story is that we have no idea how wrong we are. Discovering the fragile parts of our neural models means listening for their cry. When we become irrationally emotional and defensive, we’re often betraying the parts of us that require the most aggressive protection. This is the place in which our perception of the world is most warped and tender. Facing these flaws and fixing them will be the fight of our lives. To accept story’s challenge and win is to be a hero.
The consolation of story is truth. The curse of belonging to a hyper-social species is that we’re surrounded by people who are trying to control us. Because everyone we meet is attempting to get along and get ahead, we’re subject to near-constant attempts at manipulation. Ours is an environment of soft lies and half smiles that seek to make us feel pleasant and render us pliable. In order to control what we think of them, people work hard to disguise their sins, failures and torments. Human sociality can be numbing. We can feel alienated without knowing why. It’s only in story that the mask truly breaks. To enter the flawed mind of another is to be reassured that it’s not only us.
It’s not only us who are broken; it’s not only us who are conflicted; it’s not only us who are confused; it’s not only us who have dark thoughts and bitter regrets and feel possessed, at times, by hateful selves. It’s not only us who are scared. The magic of story is its ability to connect mind with mind in a manner that’s unrivalled even by love. Story’s gift is the hope that we might not be quite so alone, in that dark bone vault, after all.