By Somdev Chatterjee
IN an experiment described by Dr. Ramachandran in The tell-tale brain, rats were repeatedly shown one of two images – either a square or a rectangle. Every time it was shown a rectangle, the rat was also given a piece of cheese. After a while, it began to prefer the rectangle. No surprises so far. But when the rat was shown a rectangle which was more elongated than the first one, it began to prefer the elongated rectangle even to the original one.
Why does this happen? It is because the rat has learnt to prefer the property of rectangularity. How does a rectangle differ from a square? It is elongated. So the more elongated (and therefore more rectangular) the figure is, the more the rat will be attracted to it.
Dr. Ramachandran points out that the same principle explains our responses to portraits, caricatures and cartoons. How would an artist bring out the essence of a person, say Indira Gandhi? If you take her face and subtract the average woman’s face from it, what you have left are the features in which Mrs. Gandhi’s face differs from the norm. It is these that make her recognizable as Mrs. Gandhi. The most obvious of these is her prominent nose. What an artist might do is to subtly enhance those features, so that the portrait looks even more like Indira Gandhi than Indira Gandhi herself. If you take this too far, of course you get a cartoon.
Could this phenomenon (which Dr. Ramachandran calls a peak shift) be one of the reasons why we are drawn to animated films? An animated Disney princess can be made more feminine than any human actress by enhancing those features by which a woman’s face differs from that of a man. Can you ever hope to use a real animal to convey the innocence of Bambi? The essence of any character can be brought out more strongly in an animated film without having the features of a human or animal actor stand in the way. This is not only applicable to the look of the characters, but also their gestures, posture and behaviour. The same principle applies to storytelling as well. Many genres like mythologicals, science fiction and fantasy use hyperbole as a matter of course. We speculated in the previous chapter that the reason why we accept these ‘unrealistic’ genres is because we recognize the basic categories of the environment like goals, obstacles, etc. in them. But it could be that we like these genres more because they deviate from reality. Storytellers in these genres can use the principle of peak-shift in their design of character and situation to a much greater extent than those working within the straightjacket of realism. If a story of a human fighting a lion is good, then a story of a demigod fighting a ten-headed monster is better, because it captures the essence of heroic struggle against dangerous adversaries. Or take the most common plot of romance stories. A naive young woman meets a powerful man fighting inner demons. He could be a neurosurgeon, a soldier or a billionaire. The woman faces social or physical danger from this man but ultimately heals the troubled and tempestuous soul by the application of the magical balm of feminine love. This is the plot of scores of Mills and Boon romances. But all those stories are limited by one constraint: the characters are human. They may be extraordinary almost to the point of being incredible, but they still cannot transcend the limitations of biology. So if you want to transcend those limitations as a writer, what can you do? You identify the features that make the human hero of romance different from the average man: power, capacity for aggression, strong internal conflict, irresistible desire for the heroine. Then you create a world where you can multiply these qualities tenfold. Instead of a rich, powerful man, take an aristocratic vampire: he is a rich, immortal predator, and has powers that no man can dream of. The hero of the typical romance desires the heroine romantically. Make your vampire hero lust for the blood of your heroine. And yet of course the vampire hero loves her and so will never do anything to hurt her – how’s that for internal conflict? Bella gets to be with a supernatural being who desires her intensely but is not a slave to his desire, and is powerful enough to be able to protect her from any danger; and Stephanie Meyer sells over a hundred million copies of her books. But of course she did not discover the power of this plot, or the benefits of setting your story in the supernatural realm. Beauty and the Beast predates Twilight by two and a half centuries, and is itself indebted to similar motifs in folktales and literature going back millennia.
Excerpted with permission from “Why Stories Work: The Evolutionary and Cognitive Roots of the Power of Narrative”
Paperback – 29 April 2023. Author: Somdev Chatterjee
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