If you’ve ever watched a BBC TV show, you know that some writers love to torment their characters (looking at you, Steven Moffat). Sometimes I walk away from a film or a book wondering what the point of the torment was. Did Pierre really need to experience a volcano, hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, and nuclear warfare? Surely just one crisis would have gotten the point across. The question “Why suffering?” is a hard one, both in life and in story. The millennium-old tradition of angsty and sometimes macabre tragedies argues that there is something in suffering-filled stories that calls to the human nature.
As psychology and neuroscience have developed, especially in the last centuries, so has our understanding of how the brain interacts with story. When we encounter story, the experience is active and dynamic. Even the reading of a novel, less visually stimulating than a film or theatric performance, is far from passive. Our interactions with stories that showcase suffering affect us in a unique way. While characters’ suffering shapes and enriches their ability to experience life fully, our experience alongside them changes us, too.
Catharsis and Neuroscience
Catharsis in a literary sense was introduced by Aristotle, who used the term meaning “purgation” or “purification” in reference to the cleansing effect tragedies should have. He believed a good tragedy evoked such intense emotions of terror and pity that, at the end of a tragedy, the audience would be purged of those emotions. By the 1700s, German dramatist Gotthold Lessing had adapted the idea to mean an emotional release triggered in the spectator that should have a moral influence on the audience and catalyze virtuous action. He believed the intense feelings caused by a tragedy should affect the subsequent lifestyle of the viewer, not just their emotions in the moment.
This historical concept of catharsis is significantly affected by modern studies of neuroscience. In the 1990s a team of neuroscientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti discovered a concept called “mirror neurons,” a type of neuron firing in the brain that mimics what it sees. Storyteller Michael Harvey analyzed Rozzolatti’s work and summed up the concept: “when an observer sees someone act with intention, not only do they respond perceptively, as revealed by neuron activity, but also as if they themselves were doing the action.... If I see someone making a grasping hand shape, I will have a parallel neuron pattern fire in my brain. There is a strict motor-visual congruence in neurological terms.”[1] This has deep impact on the arts, especially the story arts. Jeremy Adam Smith, editor for the UC Berkely Greater Good Science Center magazine, published an article delving into some of the ramifications of mirror neurons on storytelling.
As we become involved in a story and its characters[, the] brain activity of both storytellers and story listeners starts to align thanks to mirror neurons, brain cells that fire not only when we perform an action but when we observe someone else perform the same action. As we become involved with a story, fictional things come to seem real in our bodies.[2]
This concept of fictional things seeming real extends beyond physical performances for theatre, dance, or film. Psychologist Normand Holland said our mirror neurons map movements of other people’s actions, but “not just movements. We map the goals of others’ actions onto our motor systems, and even the intentions and emotions accompanying these actions.... Most important for fiction, we map on hearing or reading the words describing an action.”[3]
Through the cathartic neurological impact of story, we experience both joy and suffering alongside the characters. Tragic stories, then, become part of a lens for how we understand suffering in our own experience. The novel Till We Have Faces and the musical The Fantasticks, works whose characters suffer greatly, exemplify why suffering in story is vital, both for the character and for the audience.
Till We Have Faces
C. S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces[4] retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of one of Psyche’s sisters, Orual. The first four-fifths of the book are Orual’s complaint against the gods, outlining the tragedies of her life and every instance in which the gods dealt with her cruelly. When her father abandons her sister Psyche a placating sacrifice to end a plague, the god Cupid takes Psyche to his palace and becomes her lover while hiding his identity. Orual tracks Psyche down, but Cupid’s palace and its splendor are invisible to Orual. Wondering if Psyche can be speaking the truth but fearing that she has gone mad or is being taken advantage of by an outlaw, Orual petitions the gods for some sign of what is true. When the gods will give her no sign, she forces Psyche to spy on her husband, destroying their marriage. Cupid sends Psyche into exile, and Orual closes the first section of her account with a summation of her complaint at the unknowability of the gods:
Now, you who read, judge between the gods and me. They gave me nothing in the world to love but Psyche and then took her from me. They brought me to her at such a place and time that it hung on my word whether she should continue in bliss or be cast out into misery.... They would give me no sign, though I begged for it. I had to guess. And because I guessed wrong they punished me. (248–249)
In the last few chapters, Orual is brought before the gods to have her complaint heard, but instead of her self-righteous complaint, she finds herself spewing words of jealousy:
Oh, you’ll say you took her away into bliss and joy such as I could never have given her, and I ought to have been glad of it for her sake. Why? What should I care for some horrible, new happiness which I hadn’t given her and which separated her from me? Do you think I wanted her to be happy, that way? (292)
As she hears her own words, Orual recognizes the façade of her complaint was only an insufficient cover to mask her own failings and shift the blame to someone else.
The voice I read it in was strange to my ears. There was given to me a certainty that this, at last, was my real voice. … At last the judge spoke. “Are you answered?” he said. “Yes,” said I.
The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered.… I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? (292-294)
After a lifetime of suffering, Orual is shattered enough to look at herself honestly. Through this eloquent ending, Lewis shows the reader that until we know ourselves and our own brokenness, the gods cannot answer us. If Orual had not suffered such perceived injustice at the hands of the gods, she would never have seen herself unmasked. Till We Have Faces posits that suffering strips a mask and lets us finally come face to face with God.
The Fantasticks
The world’s longest running musical, The Fantasticks,[5] tells the story of young lovers Matt and Luisa. The first act takes place in September, when life seems rosy. The narrator, El Gallo, opens the show singing,
Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow…
Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender that
Dreams were kept beside your pillow. (35)
Into this setting come Matt and Luisa, madly in love because their fathers have faked a feud to manipulate their children into marrying. The fathers hire El Gallo to stage a kidnapping of Luisa so Matt can “save” her, mend the imagined breach between families, and get on with marrying her. All goes according to plan, and act 1 ends with the family in a beautiful, loving tableau.
Act 2 opens on the same tableau, but summer is about to end. The fathers reveal their meddling, and Matt and Luisa are horrified. They part ways, Matt going off to see the world and Luisa falling for El Gallo’s feigned love. When they meet again at the end of act 2, both have suffered greatly; Matt is battered from the cruelty of his travels and Luisa has lost her most prized possession to the man who pretended to love her. Watching them, El Gallo says,
There is a curious paradox
that no one can explain.
Who understands the secret
of the reaping of the grain?
Who understands why Spring is born
out of Winter’s laboring pain,
or why we must all die a bit
before we grow again?
I do not know the answer;
I merely know it’s true.
I hurt them for that reason,
and myself a little bit too. (106)
As Matt and Luisa come together in reconciliation, El Gallo closes the musical singing,
Deep in December it's nice to remember
although you know the snow will follow
Deep in December it's nice to remember
without a hurt the heart is hollow. (109)
In these lines we find the crux of the show and an eloquent argument for the necessity of suffering in story: “without a hurt the heart is hollow.” The love Matt and Luisa shared in act 1 had all the passion of youth, seen in the wild metaphors Matt composes for her while assuring her that she is “better far than a metaphor can ever, ever be”(43). But the love they rediscover in act 2 is tempered with the pain they have suffered and the naïve innocence they have lost. When they reprise their love song, the grandiose metaphors are left out in favor of the simple assurance, “You are love. Better far than a metaphor can ever, ever be”(109). As December descends on them, Matt and Luisa realize love is stronger when it has walked through suffering, and to love without effort is not really to love at all.
The Fantasticks and Till We Have Faces show characters whose suffering points them into a better way of living. Orual’s anger with the gods finally removes her artifice so they can answer, Matt and Luisa’s personal suffering tempers their love with meaning, and all are now able embrace the future more wholly and more truthfully. And thanks to the neurological response of our brains interacting with the stories, our "cathartic" experience of their stories can temper our own attitudes, too.
As we enter into these stories emotionally and neurologically, we open ourselves up to suffer alongside the characters and to grow alongside them. My understanding of love and pain is permanently affected by these stories because I have not just heard them, but experienced them. And as Orual, Matt, and Luisa have inched closer to the good life, I have inched along with them. As Smith said, these “fictional things come to seem real in our bodies.” Here in the mingled power of story and catharsis we find the necessity for suffering in the stories we tell and the lives we live. Even as the suffering of characters leads them deeper into truth, deeper into the good life, our participation in their stories draws us into the good life alongside them.
[1] Michael Harvey, “Mirror Neurones and the Science of Storytelling,” (Michael Harvey storyteller, January 30, 2020), https://www.michaelharvey.org/new-blog/2019/12/29/storytelling-mirrors-in-the-brain, para. 2–3.
[2] Jeremy Adam Smith, “The Science of the Story,” Berkeley News, August 25, 2016, https://news.berkeley.edu/berkeley_blog/the-science-of-the-story/, para. 22.
[3] Norman Holland, Psychology Today, August 17, 2011, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/is-your-brain-culture/201108/stories-and-the-mirror-inside-you, para. 2.
[4] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: a Myth Retold (Grand Rapids, MI: B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1978).
[5] Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, The Fantasticks (New York, NY: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1993).
Callie Johnson works as Editorial Assistant at Kelli Sallman Writing and Editing with a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts and Creative Writing from Calvary University. She previously interned with Kelli for two years, working as proofreader and copyeditor on several manuscripts. Her strange obsessions include kerning, East Coker, and the sound of cows chewing.