to one brilliant detail. It’s an urgent voice on the radio: ‘And listen to this. Now, during the Fall Clearance, you’ll find Robert Hall’s entire stock of men’s walk shorts and sport jeans drastically reduced!’
Both believable and crushing, it serves to intensify our feelings, at exactly the right moment, of the suffocating and dreary housewifey corner that April has found herself backed into. Its timing also implicitly defines and condemns what Frank has become. He used to think he was bohemian – a thinker! – and now he’s just Bargain Shorts Man. This is an advert for him.
The director Stephen Spielberg is famous for his use of salient detail to create drama. In Jurassic Park, during a scene that builds to our first sighting of Tyrannosaurus rex, we see two cups of water on a car dashboard, deep rumbles from the ground sending rings over their liquid surface. We cut between the faces of the passengers, each slowly registering change. Then we see the rear-view mirror vibrating with the stomping of the beast. Extra details like this add even more tension by mimicking the way brains process peak moments of stress. When we realise our car is about to crash, say, the brain needs to temporarily increase its ability to control the world. Its processing power surges and we become aware of more features in our environment, which has the effect of making time seem to slow down. In exactly this way, storytellers stretch time, and thereby build suspense, by packing in extra saccadic moments and detail.
There’s a park bench, in my hometown, that I don’t like to walk past because it’s haunted by a breakup with my first love. I see ghosts on that bench that are invisible to anyone else except, perhaps, her. And I feel them too. Just as human worlds are haunted with minds and faces, they’re haunted with memories. We think of the act of ‘seeing’ as the simple detection of colour, movement and shape. But we see with our pasts.
That hallucinatory neural model of the world we live inside is made up of smaller, individual models – we have neural models of park benches, dinosaurs, ISIS, ice cream, models of everything – and each of those is packed with associations from our own personal histories. We see both the thing itself and all that we associate with it. We feel it too. Everything our attention rests upon triggers a sensation, most of which are minutely subtle and experienced beneath the level of conscious awareness. These feelings flicker and die so rapidly that they precede conscious thought, and thereby influence it. All these feelings reduce to just two impulses: advance and withdraw. As you scan any scene, then, you’re in a storm of feeling; positive and negative sensations from the objects you see fall over you like fine drops of rain. This understanding is the beginning of creating a compelling and original character on the page. A character in fiction, like a character in life, inhabits their own unique hallucinated world in which everything they see and touch comes with its own unique personal meaning.
These worlds of feeling are a result of the way our brains encode the environment. The models we have of everything are stored in the form of neural networks. When our attention rests upon a glass of red wine, say, a large number of neurons in different parts of the brain are simultaneously activated. We don’t have a specific ‘glass of wine’ area that lights up, what we have are responses to ‘liquid’, ‘red’, ‘shiny surface’, ‘transparent surface’, and so on. When enough of these are triggered, the brain understands what’s in front of it and constructs the glass of wine for us to ‘see’.
But these neural activations aren’t limited to mere descriptions of appearance. When we detect the glass of wine, other associations also flash into being: bitter-sweet flavours; vineyards; grapes; French culture; dark marks on white carpets; your road-trip to the Barossa Valley; the last time you got drunk and made a fool of yourself; the first time you got drunk and made a fool of yourself; the breath of the woman who attacked you. These associations have powerful effects on our perception. Research shows that when we drink wine our beliefs about its quality and price change our actual experience of its taste. The way food is described has a similar effect.
It’s just such associative thinking that gives poetry its power. A successful poem plays on our associative networks as a harpist plays on strings. By the meticulous placing of a few simple words, they brush gently against deeply buried memories, emotions, joys and traumas, which are stored in the form of neural networks that light up as we read. In this way, poets ring out rich chords of meaning that resonate so profoundly we struggle to fully explain why they’re moving us so.
Alice Walker’s ‘Burial’ describes the poet bringing her child to the cemetery in Eatonton, Georgia, in which several generations of her family are interred. She describes her grandmother resting
undisturbed
beneath the Georgia sun,
above her the neatstepping hooves
of cattle
and graves that ‘drop open without warning’ and
cover themselves with wild ivy
blackberries. Bittersweet and sage.
No one knows why. No one asks.
When I read ‘Burial’ for the first time, the lines at the end of this stanza made little logical sense to me, and yet I immediately found them beautiful, memorable and sad:
Forgetful of geographic resolutions as birds
the far-flung young fly South to bury
the old dead.
It’s these same associative processes that allow us to think metaphorically. Analyses of language reveal the extraordinary fact that we use around one metaphor for every ten seconds of speech or written word. If that sounds like too much, it’s because you’re so used to thinking metaphorically – to speaking of ideas that are ‘conceived’ or rain that is ‘driving’ or rage that is ‘burning’ or people who are ‘dicks’. Our models are not only haunted by ourselves, then, but also by properties of other things. In her 1930 essay ‘Street Haunting’ Virginia Woolf employs several subtle metaphors over the course of a single gorgeous sentence:
How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of lights, and its long groves of darkness, and on the side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all around them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of the train in the valley.
Neuroscientists are building a powerful case that metaphor is far more important to human cognition than has ever been imagined. Many argue it’s the fundamental way that brains understand abstract concepts, such as love, joy, society and economy. It’s simply not possible to comprehend these ideas in any useful sense, then, without attaching them to concepts that have physical properties: things that bloom and warm and stretch and shrink.
Metaphor (and its close sibling, the simile) tends to work on the page in one of two ways. Take this example, from Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World:
