Character Notes on the Self (1) - by Rowena House

Re-reading John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story the other day, I came across his discussion of ‘the Self Expressed as a Character’ which I’d meant to follow up on before. 

Noting ‘there is no monolithic concept of Self in the history of stories’, Truby identifies four main traditions:

• The mythic Self, where a single personality is searching for their destiny, discovering and enacting their deepest capabilities.

• The Self comprising many, often conflicting needs and desires, where the character exhibits a strong urge to connect to others, perhaps even to subsume another person. He cites Ibsen and Chekhov among the writers who created this type of character.

• The Self that plays a series of roles demanded by society at the time. He gives Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as examples.

• The Self ‘so unstable, porous, malleable, weak, and lacking in integrity that it can shift its shape into something entirely different’, strikingly in Kafka’s Metamorphosis but see also vampires and werewolves.

It seems to me that the ‘many, often conflicting needs and desires’ tradition these days blends with stories that explore how inner drives conflict with the roles demanded by society, now and in the past. Gender expectations versus girls’ and women’s need for self-fulfilment is one obvious example.

 

In this week’s New Scientist, author Caroline Williams’ article Internal Affairs about our inner voices added this to the mix:

‘Early theories of consciousness suggested that we each have one “self”, with distinct likes, dislikes and motivations. Yet while we generally feel like one coherent person, many psychologists now consider the singular self to be an illusion. Instead, they argue that we are made up of many selves, each with a different set of motivations and standards. This means that our inner chatter may be a result of the different roles that form our sense of self.’

So contemporary psychology suggests, like Ibsen and Chekhov, that we are divided into many selves. 

Today’s post, then, is the start of a collection of notes about the Self which I’ll return to when I come across alternative points of view from different times and places, seeking insights and applications for storytelling. At some point, presumably, conclusions will emerge.

To kick things off, here’s a link to Wikipedia with comments on scientific, sociological, philosophic and religious aspects of the Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self . 

And here’s an edited opening snippet from that webpage: ‘The Self is an individual as the object of its own reflective consciousness … (it) is necessarily subjective.’

By this definition, the Self is ‘I’ looking at ‘me’ non-objectively while feeling as if the two are the same.

Wikipedia continues, ‘Psychiatric conditions where such "sameness" may become broken include depersonalization, which sometimes occurs in schizophrenia: the self appears different from the subject.’

So, some people who feel ‘I am not me’* have a psychiatric condition. Yet Caroline Williams says many psychologists ‘consider the singular self to be an illusion’. Which begs the question: how can ‘I’ feel like different versions of ‘me’ at the same time, or is there an inherent conflict here?

Yes! Shouts an inner voice. Or voices. No wonder being human is stressful.

Another nugget from Wikipedia, which is likely to be familiar to fiction writers: ‘The Self in Jungian psychology is the “archetype of wholeness”’ not seen directly but observed through ‘cohesive wholeness-making’ actions.

Just think of all those protagonists overcoming conflicting desires and needs in order to fight a Final Battle, then acting out their newly won ‘wholeness’ in the Resolution, without a nagging inner voice to be heard. 

It would seem that Jungian-style storytelling is a rather skewed form of wish-fulfilment if the many selves theory is right.

Less familiar territory, for me at least, is the concept of a ‘spiritual Self’, the individual searching for meaning in the sacred. Since the work-in-progress explores religion and witchcraft in the seventeenth century as well as notions of us and them, AKA the Self and the Other, spirituality isn’t something I can avoid.

Here is one definition of spiritual identity: ‘A persistent sense of Self that addresses ultimate questions about the nature, purpose, and meaning of life, resulting in behaviours that are consonant with the individual’s core values.’

It’s from an article by Chris Kiesling, Marylin Montgomery, Gwendolyn Sorell and Ronald Colwell called Identity and Spirituality: A Psychosocial Exploration of the Sense of Spiritual Self, published in Developmental Psychology in 2006 (42(6) pp 1269-1277). 

So now we’re talking about life, the universe and everything. 

Sometimes you know you’ve just opened a can of worms, but also that you can’t keep the lid on it any longer. Why now? I blame Truby, and not just because of his discussion about the Self in literature.

Elsewhere in The Anatomy of Story he suggests we only write stories that may change our lives. It’s a high bar, but if we clear it, we’ll never waste time on nonsense or dross. Researching the Self, the Other, and humankind’s historic search for the meaning of life kinda fits that bill.

Enjoy the sunshine. 

* Apologies for journalistic short-hand. I expect there’ll be quite a lot of it in these notes. Soz.

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The Tale of the Sellotape Snail (& The Power of Story) by Tess Berry-Hart

It’s late summer.  I’m wandering around the garden – I call it a garden, but it’s really more of an enclosed yard, bounded with ancient hedges and whiskery hawthorn where the sun never reaches, and spiders, slugs and other animals lurk in the perennial dusk.  My three-year old son is crouched in a corner like a frog, knees almost level with his ears, talking and gesticulating excitedly to himself. As I pass him, a dull squidgy crunch echoes underfoot.

“NOOO MUMMY!” Benjy’s horrified voice erupts from behind me. “You’ve TRODDEN on the SNAIL!”

I lift my foot.  Underneath my shoe is a greeny-grey globule, peppered with shards of smashed black and brown shell, out of which a colourless ooze trickles dismally.

Benjy peers at it anxiously. “You’ve hurt him, Mummy.  You’ve hurt him really bad.”

Quickly I take a leaf and scrape the snail carcass onto the wall.  Benjy scrambles up to see. The smashed gastropod lies pitifully in the sunlight. Desperately I wish a passing bird would swoop down and carry it off, but no such luck.

“Mummy, you need to Sellotape him. He’s got a hurt on his shell.”

I turn and look at Benjy. Huge blue eyes look back at me trustingly. He’s on safe ground here. Mummy knows how to patch a book together with Sellotape, stitch buttons back on shirts and Velcro onto trainers. For him this is just another adventure but frankly, kid, this is beyond me, and even the most experienced surgeon.

“Mumm-MEE!”  Benjy sees the look on my face, and realises the situation’s serious.  He’s starting to escalate.  Then I see – joy of joys – another speckled shell nestling in the shadowy crevice of a brick wall.

“Sellotape! That’s a really good idea, sweetheart.  Why don’t you go into the house and get me a roll?”

Benjy turns and bolts into the house for the craft box – he knows where it’s kept – and quickly I flick Snail 1 into the bushes and switch it for its mightily surprised body-double Snail 2. Moments later Benjy arrives, waving the Sellotape roll, and I bite off a large piece and stick it ostentatiously onto the new snail.

“There we are, sweetie.”

Benjy peers at it suspiciously – the substituted snail is darker in colour and even to his three-year-old eyes the transformation from shattered road accident to gleaming new model is, frankly, excessive – but as two little horns start to emerge from its shell and wave around reprovingly, a smile lights up his face. “Well done, Mummy, he’s all better now!”

Later I’m putting him to bed when a little voice emerges from the shadows.

“Mummy?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Can you tell me the story of the Sellotape Snail?”

I can see the questions forming in his little brain. What had happened to the snail? Had he done the right thing? Would the snail be all right? If the snail was – or was not – all right, what were the implications for him as a little boy in a huge wide world filled with random and sometimes incomprehensible events? The idea of a story simply finishing – to a child who simply exists in the moment and has only the loosest understanding of time – is inconceivable.

The power of story to modify expectations of behaviour or help children through transition periods and outline for them what to expect has developed rapidly over the last twenty years since Carol Grey developed the concept of social stories. Social stories – simple written stories, illustrated with pictures or in comic strip form – are often written for children with autism or behavioural issues so that they can learn about events, reactions and the emotions of other people as well as themselves. According to primary school reading specialist Tiffany Jean-Baptiste: “As adults, it’s very easy for us to understand why things happen, but for children it’s not so clear. Social stories explain, in a very supportive way, what the situation is, why the situation is the way it is, what the child is expected to do, and how people will feel if they do the right thing or the wrong thing.” So for example, Lydia, who is having trouble sitting down in class, would read: “My name is Lydia. I have trouble sitting down in class. All my friends come to school to learn. If I don’t sit down then they can’t learn and they will get upset with me. If I sit down then they will be happy with me and I will be happy too.”

In the traditional sense of stories then, children also learn empathy towards others and details about experiences that they have never had; it’s a safe way of rehearsing events in case a similar situation should ever happen. Deep inside us we all have a psychological need for story – for our own narratives and sense of meaning in life; the literary devices of sympathetic hero, the challenge, the struggle and resolution/ return are all part of our deep innate need to empathise and learn.  According to Peter Guber, writer and producer (The Kids Are All Right, Bernie, Rain Man, The Color Purple), "stories are not just a form of entertainment, they’re the highest form of consciousness." Stories are the reason that we have survived as a species, because they make us understand ourselves in a way that pure information and logic cannot. Stories are easier to remember than facts, and give us the framework to understand our world. Stories aren’t an accessory to real life, they ARE real life. The power of story is “unlocked by our [brain’s] ability to form mental representations of our experiences. Mental representations allow us to simulate events, to enjoy the experiences of others, and to learn from them, without having to endure all experiences ourselves.”

Amazingly, according to Guber’s informative article, it appears that storytelling is not even simply a social or a literary device, it’s actually the way our brains function. In general, the brain is packed with small localised processors – governing motor control, different emotions, cognitive representation, vision, etc – but with no “central command post”. Instead, events are experienced at the neural level as discrete segmented pieces of information. A processor in the left hemisphere of the brain interprets all these millions of pieces of sensory data and is our “built-in-storyteller”, forming rationalisations on external events based on interpreting the information and synthesising it into a story. It generates explanations using actions, perceptions and memories, resulting in the sense of psychological unity and a subjective sense of oneself as a person. We create ourselves through stories – we literally become our own stories using our brain’s own narrative.

So, with sufficient prompting from Benjy, a tale emerges.

“AJ the snail – (yes, I know) – was on his way to visit his three cousins behind the Terrible Trees. He was very tired and he sat down for a rest. Then one of the Big People came, whose name was Mummy The Snail Smasher, and trod on him.  AJ’s shell was broken and he was very sad and cried because it hurt. But Benjy the little boy had seen his accident and wanted to help him get better. So Benjy ran all the way to get some Sellotape and put it on AJ’s shell to mend it. AJ was very happy because he could go and visit his cousins, and Benjy was very happy too because he had made a new friend.”

So it is that the Tale of the Sellotape Snail, along with The Day I Got Lost At The Supermarket For Five Minutes and My Little Brother Daniel (Breaks My Jigsaws) are still favourite bedtime stories for Benjy, just as much as The Gruffalo and The Way Back Home.

And the next time someone asks me why I make up stories for a living, I shall tell them that making up stories is in fact the highest form of consciousness!

Have you ever used the power of story with your little ones? (or indeed, your not-so-little-ones?) Let me know how!

The Greatest Story Ever Told by Tess Berry-Hart

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” - Phillip Pullman

“And what do you do?” asks the polite professional lawyer in the group of polite professional people at my polite professional neighbour’s Christmas party.

“Me?  Oh, I'm a writer,” I answer, equally politely.

“Oh, really?”  A wave of heads turn in my direction, polite smiles become suddenly more interested.  “What kind of writing?  Journalism?  Novels?”

“Well, I write stories for children and young adults,” I begin confidently, but oops, I'm losing them already.  Smiles have taken on a glazed quality and I'm starting to be relegated to the category in their minds that houses lolloping bunnies, plucky hobbits and talking lions.  I follow up quickly with a couple of my adult plays and novels but I can see in their eyes that my status has already been set.  Children’s stories! – how quaint.

“But we all tell stories, don’t we,” I begin jovially, in what my husband would term my instructively-speaking-to-a-three-year-old tone.  “Our reality, our economy, our social structures are all governed by stories, aren’t they?”

Deep nods and a strained kind of silence greet this; though a couple of people look a little as if they’re trying to work out if I'm insulting them in some covert fashion.

“And whether you subscribe to the idea that there’s only seven stories in the world or not, it’s amazing how these stories get replayed over and over in media and advertising isn't it?  The small company who fights back from the edge of extinction.  The underdog who wins through on the X Factor.”

Oh dear, the mention of X Factor – the professional version of Godwin’s Law after which any proponent can lose her credibility.  And I haven’t even watched it in years!

A chorus of agreement, though with no discernible words, follows this, and mercifully our hostess comes to our rescue with a tray of mince pies.  People break up into twos and turn to each other with noticeable relief.  “Have you heard about X?”

I take refuge in a mince pie, and think.  Why should we be afraid of confronting our stories?  We adults absorb stories as voraciously as if we were children.  The middle-aged lawyer creates a story to the judge and jury about why they should believe his client’s version of events.  The saleswoman on my left creates stories that we will look better, feel happier and be more successful if we buy her product.  And don’t even get me started on the advertising director opposite.

Stories are all around us, shaping our world and our outlook – and let’s face it, stories are not all capitalist cynicism.  Good stories are centuries old, and they’re around for a reason.  We NEED the story that we can succeed in whatever we do against insurmountable odds.  We NEED the story that the bad guys will get punished and the good guys triumph.

Stories are acutely important for learning.  They are the models by which children see the world and learn from it.  Telling my son a story to deliver a message is ten times more effective that merely telling him the message.  When I see him playing, I can see that games are stories in action.  He’s already channelling the “rescuing hero” story, the “quest” story and the “overcoming the monster” stories all by himself.

Where does the power of story come from?  As psychologists Melanie C Green and Timothy C. Brock note in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the mechanism of “transport” – using detail and emotional affect to involve the reader – is essential for a narrative.  Highly transported readers find fewer false notes in a story than less transported readers, they evaluate protagonists favourably and show many other similar story-consistent beliefs.  Interestingly, corresponding beliefs tend to be generally unaffected whether the reader knows a story is fact or fiction.  I can know that a cream will not make me look younger, but I’ll buy it anyway.

And we’re at a Christmas party after all.  Christmas is a great story.  Though I'm an avowed atheist, I love Christmas!  The human story of birth in humble adversity; the strong baddie that searches to kill the saviour of mankind, the call to adventure, the exiled and returning hero, the love that lays itself down for another; the elements are all there.  And beyond the advent of Christianity, I feel the pagan solstice of Yule as instinctively as one born in the Northern Hemisphere can; the affirmation of life in the midst of snow, the fire lit against the cold and darkness, the shadows on the wall of the cave that mystics interpret, making sense of the sun and the stars, winter and summer, life and death.

Along with other wonderful stories passed down from times immemorial –The Flood, the Apocalypse, the Exodus – the story means something to us because in a sense (whether you are a believer or not) stories ARE real.  Stories hold a deep psychological purpose, about our relationship to the universe and to Time. Stories give us hope, they give us meaning.  In my book, the greatest story ever told is that of life; that we exist, and we do.

Around me the conversation has moved on, and now they’re talking about the recovery. (Belief in the market’s one of the best stories around at the moment!)  I don’t have much to add to this so I gather my things together and start to slide unobtrusively towards the exit, when I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s the polite lawyer.

“I thought it was interesting,” he says breathlessly, “what you said about stories back there. It really made me think.”

My heart warms to him.  “Why thank you,” I say.

“I've got to get my niece a Christmas present, and your book sounds ideal.  Would I be able to get a signed copy?”