Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot

Index

Introduction

THERE ARE MANY SORTS of surprises: events we didn’t anticipate, mismatches between our perceptual expectations and experience, and astonishing revelations that undermine deeply held beliefs. We can be surprised by a loud bang or by the punch line of a joke or by the results of an experiment. We can surprise others and—oddly enough—we can surprise ourselves. Surprises can be shocking, or they can be so mild we hardly notice them. They can be delightful. We often seek novelty for its own sake. But surprises can also be upsetting or distracting, and they take up precious cognitive resources. We rely on predictability to get things done. The kinds of surprises that I concentrate on in this book are, from this vantage, merely a small subset of a subset of the great wide world of surprise.

I call them well-made surprises: well-made by analogy to the nineteenth-century well-made play that mixed the precepts of Aristotle (by way of the Neoclassical French Academy) and the popular tropes of the Paris Boulevard theaters to create a heady and reliable formula for crowd-pleasing plots. But the phrase well made also fits because their ruling aesthetic is concerned with the degree to which the surprise in question has been cleverly constructed and set up beforehand. The tradition of the well-made surprise asks, has this revelation been built on an expertly crafted foundation? It places highest value on the satisfactions that come from the sense that the plot is a finely constructed mechanism, a well-oiled trap, with pieces that snap together tightly. A well-made surprise plot is one that aims to produce a flash reinterpretation of events together with the feeling that the evidence for this interpretation was there all along—the surprise should be not merely unexpected but also revelatory.

To build such a plot you have to point first in one direction, then turn around and point in another, while also producing the impression that the whole has been coherent and even inevitable. This is possible, I argue, because our brains conspire with stories to knit material together and produce an illusion—or perhaps let’s say impression—of continuity. This impression is an important ingredient in many of the satisfactions that plot can offer, but it is also crucial to the satisfactions of character development and to many other elements of narrative pleasure.

There has been quite a lot of interest over the past couple of decades in, more or less, the question of just what the point of fiction might be from a psychological and evolutionary point of view. This line of inquiry often takes as its subject the major preoccupations of literary fiction and connects them to a feature of the way we think, looking to cognitive science for explanations for why we read these stories. What do we get out of them? What in our biological inheritance explains their appeal? How, as William Flesch asks in the title of the first chapter of his book Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, could an interest in fiction have evolved? Why should people have such a powerful emotional response to nonactual events and actions (2007, 12)?

This body of work has made the case that fiction is compelling because it is both useful and rewarding and because it recapitulates the dynamics that we are evolved to care about. Fiction gives us vivid ways of making sense of our social world; it taps into the kinds of intelligence our primate brains evolved to handle the social complexity of living in groups, as Blakey Vermeule describes it (2011b, 30): our very highly tuned attention to the machinations of other humans within a social hierarchy. Gossip, shifting social alliances, and Machiavellianism are an incredibly powerful source of literary interest because [they are] an incredible source of human interest (30). Francis Steen and Stephanie Owens (2001) have argued in a related mode that fiction is evolution’s pedagogy, best considered by analogy to various kinds of chase play found in mammals of all kinds—a notion taken further and developed in depth in Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories (2009), which argues that art of all kinds is evolutionarily derived from play and has been crucial to our survival as a species. Many scholars of both cognitive science and literature have noted that fiction offers an opportunity to exercise and explore our skills of social cognition, giving us the chance to rehearse and experience emotions vicariously and perhaps even provide a direct boost to our empathic capacity (Mar et al. 2006; Kidd and Castano 2013). Altogether, this research has given rise to an emerging consensus that a major driving force in our emotional engagement with fiction is social in nature.

The present book takes up a slightly different project with respect to the relationship between literature and social cognition—and in a way, I hope, that will be of interest to people approaching that intersection from either of those directions or at an angle from farther afield. The story I want to tell here is about the part that some specific limits and quirks of our thinking play in helping to make stories work. I describe how mental contamination effects that are strongly implicated in thinking socially but that are also consequences of the decision making involved in all sorts of cognition, including memory and perception, can provide raw material for the satisfactions of plot. The entry point is a task of cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology. This is an attempt to open up the hood, as it were, to take a look at some of the machinery that drives certain kinds of plots. Then, having seen something of the gears and motors running underneath this particular sort of story, we can also ask whether knowing more about this apparatus ought to lead us to draw any new conclusions about the ethics and affiliations of stories that depend on it.

Tracing the prevalence of surprise endings in both literary and popular fictions and their reliance on cognitive biases will turn out to complicate two common moralizing frames. The first of these is the frequent move in cognitive science to cast these features of our minds in terms that draw on language of moral weakness and failure: the sins of memory (Schacter 1999, 2001; Schacter and Dodson 2001; Schacter, Chiao, and Mitchell 2003) and the curse of knowledge (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber 1989; Birch and Bloom 2007). The second is a view of surprise endings that dismisses them as gimmicky and shallow. This book contends that they are not at all the sole purview of light fiction and, further, that they are deeply entwined with issues of character and sympathy.

The questions of why and when people find it so difficult to recapture a state of not-knowing have drawn the attentions of cognitive psychologists, behavioral economists, and linguists. The same questions are also of direct interest to anyone who wants to create compelling stories. This difficulty is exactly what authors must overcome or work around if they are to represent earlier states of mind in ways that readers will find convincing and compelling. Writing after some major event has happened, how can you reconstruct the state of mind of the people who did not yet know it was on its way? Writing as an adult, how can you convincingly re-create the perspective of a child? Knowing the solution to your mystery, how can you tell how obvious or impenetrable it will be to your readers? These are difficult tasks because of the curse of knowledge. But, as we’ll see, the curse of knowledge is also a valuable resource for storytellers—because readers project information and draw inferences in predictable ways, authors can capitalize on these tendencies to create reliable and satisfying effects.

The Othello Inside You

A work such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), which was presented to its publisher and the public as a work of nonfiction but later revealed to be a fabrication, counts as a literary scandal. A good, honest (if you will) piece of detective fiction such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia (1891), on the other hand, is a different matter. It’s not a fake memoir, even if it faithfully mimics the form and trappings of memoir; it’s real fiction. But stories such as A Scandal in Bohemia can and do set about to deceive their readers in other ways, and an interesting thing about these sorts of deceptions is that they can count as either foul play or fair. As one mystery reader in an online discussion wrote, I want to have been fooled or tricked, not cheated. In fact I ENJOY being fooled, but not being cheated (Pfui 2014). This is a fine distinction but an important one for many readers. And both this kind of deception and its counterbalancing demands on fair play have come to seem to me to be crucially implicated in narrative pleasures well beyond the boundaries of detective stories, thrillers, and other genres known for their twist endings.

The theme of deception is certainly a classic one in Western literature, stretching back to Eve and the apple, if not earlier. One work in particular seems to me to provide an especially useful template for thinking about deception both as theme and as practice: Shakespeare’s Othello. As every student who’s been taught the play knows, the core of Iago’s diabolical genius is his ability to deceive not just with lies but also by seduction. Iago leads Othello to his tragic destiny by enticing him into deceiving himself. He plants the seeds of suspicion in soil so fertile that they need no further deception to grow and flourish. Once distrust takes root in Othello’s mind, even the most innocent acts and protestations on Desdemona’s part seem to him to be further evidence of her guilt. The textbook account teaches us, further, that the soil of Othello’s suspicion is fertilized by his sense of otherness as a Moor, a jealous temperament, and the insecurity of both his position and his self-regard.

All of this is correct, of course. But Othello’s greatest vulnerability may be, as Stanley Cavell has famously argued (1979), the trouble he has in grappling with the insurmountable epistemological problem of other minds. That is, his susceptibility to Iago’s influence stems from the distress he feels over how fundamentally inaccessible Desdemona’s subjective experience is. Cavell’s take on this state of affairs is that Othello is most of all terrified by and furious at the fact that Desdemona has thoughts and feelings to which he is not privy and which he cannot control. This frustration drives him to murderous rage: He cannot forgive Desdemona for existing, for being separate from him, outside (491). In Cavell’s reading, Othello’s response involves a catastrophic rejection of empathy. It so tortures Othello to contemplate Desdemona’s genuine, separate consciousness that he covers it over with a sort of frantic insistence on skepticism, in a desperate attempt, as Cavell says, to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle (493).

But another way of looking at Othello’s trouble is, as Katharine Eisaman Maus has pointed out (1991, 1995), not as an absence of empathy but rather a kind of empathetic excess … in which the inaccessibility of the other produces not solipsism but a dubious attempt to reconstruct an alien point of view from the inside (1991, 44). Specifically, Maus suggests, Unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the difference between one’s knowledge of oneself and one’s knowledge of other people, he is easily led by Iago to confuse the third-person narration he constructs for and imputes to Desdemona with a first-person narration imagined as self-evidently authentic. Thus as the play proceeds he becomes unable to distinguish between what is proper to him and what to Desdemona (45).

Othello serves as an excellent parable of two important human experiences that are at the heart of the book I set out here to write: first, it is a fable of the difficulty of distinguishing between what is proper to one point of view and what is proper to another, and, second, it is a fable of how narratives can deceive via seduction. I hope to convince you that in life, as in Othello, the two phenomena are not just common but also commonly connected. Iago capitalizes on the former to achieve the latter, leading Othello to build for himself the story Iago wants him to build, to ascribe the wrong significance to all manner of things, so that when he realizes the truth, a whole edifice must fall down around him.

In the case of Othello, while the character is completely in the thrall of his misconception, the audience knows better. Elsewhere, though, authors often undertake the delicate project of playing the part of Iago for the audience, with the additional tricky goal of managing that feat without incurring the audience’s ire. An interesting example of this kind of balancing act can be found in John Lacy’s play Sir Hercules Buffoon, first staged in 1684 and home to, as Juan Antonio Prieto Pablos (2005) has argued, possibly the earliest instance of audience deception in English drama. The odds that you have encountered this play yourself are slim, so let me sketch it briefly. The title character is a roguish prankster whose comic exploits serve as the backdrop for a more serious story of deception, a plot instigated by the villainous Sir Marmaduke Seldin. Sir Marmaduke has been named the guardian of his two heiress nieces and has decided to steal his late brother’s fortune by doing away with them and having his own daughters, Mariana and Fidelia, take up their identities and claim their inheritance. The audience sees both sisters agree to the scheme, which is to begin with sending the true heiresses to Norway, where they will be left to die in the wilderness. Mariana and Fidelia, in the guise of their cousins, then seek husbands. Mariana’s remorse begins to show in act 4, when she meets and falls in love with the honorable Lord Arminger. She declines his proposal of marriage, with a confession:

Mar. I am not the heiress, but Sir Marmaduke Seldin’s own daughter; and the true heiresses, my dear and lovely kinswomen, are—

Arm. Are what? Where? Speak!

Mar. Murdered! What opinion have you of my virtue now, my Lord? (Lacy 1684, 281)

She explains further: Our cruel Father forc’d our consents to that more cruel murder, and had we refused, we had infallibly met our own deaths (281). Arminger, in response, is very properly horrified. For all that either he or the audience knows at this point, Mariana’s account of events and her own part in them is wholly accurate. But both Arminger and the audience are in for a surprise: Mariana next reveals for the first time that, like Snow White’s woodsman, she and her sister proved tenderhearted in the breach. They arranged for servants to rescue the heiresses as soon as Sir Marmaduke was persuaded that the cousins had been dispatched according to his orders. Restoration theater is full of lies and liars, but Buffoon is striking for including characters whose lies serve to deceive not only other characters but the audience as well.

Lacy was one of the most popular comic actors of the English Restoration, and in addition to several adaptations of earlier work to fit his notions of what would play most successfully with his audiences, he also wrote three original farces, of which Buffoon was his last. In general, all of his writing was much more popular with audiences than admired by literary critics or many of the more serious-minded playwrights of the era. (Prieto Pablos [2005, 67] cites Dryden and Shadwell as two particularly fierce detractors.) He is not much read or performed now, but farce in general, and Lacy’s work in particular, met with tremendous success onstage in its time; and whether or not you wish to count it as a merit or fault of Lacy’s productions, there is little dispute that he wrote his plays to pander—or, more kindly, to appeal—both to actors and to audiences and that he succeeded wildly in this aim. These are plays built to be crowd pleasers, showing, as the eminent Adolphus William Ward put it, what kind of entertainment so experienced a comedian thought most likely to suit the tastes of the public for whom he catered (1899, 449). That is why it’s so interesting that Buffoon should undertake what seems to be such a risky and outré maneuver—as Prieto Pablos writes, What makes Lacy’s play a remarkable and rare instance of deception is that a substantial part of the plot involves misleading the spectators into assumptions that are not only difficult to accommodate in the generic context of the play but will eventually prove false. This is a resource that verges on the breach of one of the main principles of fictional communication (the author must provide a ‘truthful’ rendition of the events and situations) and has therefore been used sparsely and with extreme caution by playwrights and fiction writers (66).

And yet, rare though this element may have been in early-modern English theater, since then, it has proved not to have been used so very sparsely, after all. And it is perhaps not too risky, either—like Othello, we all have minds that tend to travel down predictable paths, and if we can be encouraged toward those paths, we may take them with surprising readiness.

Overview of Chapters

I begin in Chapter 1 with a recurring storytelling predicament: how to surprise audiences in a way that seems inevitable, or at least credible, in retrospect. This chapter lays out in brief several examples of stories that perform this feat through deceptive character viewpoints. I suggest that the reliability of this strategy reflects a way of thinking that cognitive science has described in terms of a curse of knowledge—a tendency that seems to be a feature of both how we think about other people and how we think about the past. The science on this phenomenon has tended to focus on cataloging errors people make in solving problems or making decisions, but, I argue, its place and status in storytelling, sense-making, and aesthetic pleasure deserve much more attention. These connections are then explored in some detail in the context of Pip’s development and the portrayal of his ethical shortcomings as they emerge through surprise twists in Great Expectations (1861).

Chapter 2 goes deeper into the story of the scientific exploration of the curse of knowledge and related effects. Popular representations of cognitive science tend to emphasize one or the other of two opposed views: either that human cognition is primarily a wonderful machine, and the job of cognitive science is to explain how we perform so many fantastic feats with that cunning apparatus; or that human cognition is primarily a chaotic mess of imperfect and irrational hacks, and the job of cognitive science is to expose the fundamental flaws in the way we think. The discussion here takes up a more complicated position: our apparent failures of understanding also enable some of our greatest successes. This chapter also introduces relevant research on source monitoring and attribution errors in memory, in which people turn out to make surprising mistakes in keeping track of when, where, and from whom they encountered information, and it takes up in more detail the moralizing rhetoric that often creeps into the portrayal of all these phenomena in both popular and scientific discourse.

Chapters 3 and 4 set out to describe and explain an array of specific methods and motifs that characterize the construction of well-made surprise. These chapters sketch out a cognitive poetics of surprise, with attention to linguistic form, tracing how individual elements contribute to specific effects. Chapter 3 undertakes a detailed exploration of four major strategies that recur in the construction of narrative surprise. This section develops a fuller explication of the controlling logic of the well-made surprise and its consequences for the stories that follow it. Chapter 4 then focuses even more closely on one specific linguistic pattern—the use of referring expressions—and its role in the poetics of surprise. This section culminates in a reading of how these features of referring expressions are picked up and used to explosive effect in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853).

From there, the final section of the book—Chapters 5 through 8—explores further implications of these dynamics for the rhetorical and ethical impact of the literature that makes use of them. Well-made surprises are a special variety of what Aristotle called anagnôrisis—often translated as recognition—which he considered the mark of a particularly well-constructed tragedy. Chapter 5 looks at the satisfactions and frustrations that recognition admits. It takes up the example of Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) to explore how novels of information build the dynamics of the curse of knowledge directly into the development of character. This reading brings us back to questions of how the pleasures of surprise frequently depend on and are subject to the satisfactions of character. We then trace the narration and production of recognition through two different sides of the trope: insight and acknowledgment. Finally, we return to the atypical recognition scene that disrupts the midpoint of Villette, which turns up some interesting connections among narrative unreliability, the curse of knowledge, and surprise.

Chapter 6 discusses implications of the curse of knowledge for accounts of unreliable narration. Chapter 7 then extends this analysis to cases in which more than ordinary narratorial unreliability is at issue, in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation (1974). These readings explore the deep dependencies connecting surprise, sympathy, sense-making, and the development of character. The concluding chapter then connects these readings and arguments to some recent and compelling work on how narratology can help us navigate the thickets of misunderstanding that intertwine with the seductions of satisfaction in law, interpersonal relations, and even works of academic argumentation such as the one before you.

Spoiler Alert

Finally, I should not go any further without issuing a warning: this book is absolutely full of spoilers, loosed not just in the course of detailed analyses of single works but as tossed-off illustrative examples and asides. If explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog,¹ this book is a veritable freshman anatomy class. The corpses of brilliantly conceived plot twists (and a few not-so-brilliant ones) litter the ground, having been used to demonstrate a point about their organs or connective tissue. I apologize in advance for ruining any stories for you, but I hope most of them, like Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud (it’s a sled), will serve as jigsaw-puzzle pieces that help make the larger picture clear.²

1

Elementary Problems

THE ULTIMATE AIM of this book is to describe a feature of human thought that is typically understood in terms of hazard and limitation and to explore its potential as a source of creativity and pleasure. Our starting point is a recurring storytelling predicament: how to surprise audiences in a way that seems inevitable, or at least credible, in retrospect. This chapter lays out, in brief, a number of diverse but related examples of tricks and turns of plot that take up this challenge and that meet it with strikingly parallel gambits. I argue that the durability of these approaches reflects their reliance on a kind of thinking that cognitive science has described as a curse of knowledge—a tendency that is a feature of both how we think about other people and how we think about the past.

Recent work looking at stage magic from the perspective of cognitive science (e.g., Kuhn, Amlani, and Rensink 2008; Macknik et al. 2008; Demacheva et al. 2012) has shown that magicians’ techniques can serve as rich sources of information about the psychology of perception. The tricks they have painstakingly developed to mislead and delight their audiences are also beautiful laboratories of perceptual and cognitive psychology. They show us when and how people will reliably notice some things rather than others, where they will see things that aren’t present and miss things that are, and how they can be induced to believe they have been given free choice when only one option was ever available. This book is a foray into a similar project regarding not physical sleight of hand but the narrative magic of surprise. The machinery of surprise depends on leading us to reassess what we thought we knew in carefully orchestrated ways. How those reassessments unfold can tell us a great deal: about how language works, about perspective taking and intersubjectivity, about inferencing and self-reflection, and, what’s more, about how all of these things work together and what happens when they do.

The cognitive tendencies that this book will take together as aspects of cursed thinking are usually presented as errors that lead us astray. They also turn out to help produce many satisfactions of fiction. The patterns that let stories mislead us without seeming incoherent are also implicated in the dynamics of character development. How can stories present us with characters who change, grow, and even repudiate their earlier selves while sustaining our sympathy and producing an impression of continuity—of a single person who can develop and who surprises us, rather than a collection of inconsistencies? When we discover what a character turns out to be, we must in some way reassess what we at first took him or her to be. The mechanics of that process may suggest in turn some ethical consequences regarding how we assess both others and ourselves in everyday life.

Curses and Blessings

The curse of knowledge works like this: the more information we have about something and the more experience we have with it, the harder it is to step outside that experience to appreciate the full implications of not having that privileged information. Information that is at the forefront of our minds exerts a pull on our ideas of what other people will know or should be able to figure out. Once we know something (or think we do), it shapes our expectations of what other people are likely to know and do and even affects our memories of how we felt before we knew it. After we know the solution to a problem, it seems self-evident. Similarly, we think our own intentions are obvious and easily diagnosed from our behavior. The term curse of knowledge comes from economics, coined in a 1989 paper by Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber, but the basic idea—that it is difficult for people to fully set aside the things they know and believe when they are imagining what it is like not to know them—is also implicated in a variety of other famous psychological phenomena including hindsight bias, the spotlight effect, source attribution errors, and the illusion of transparency.

Meanwhile, circumstances that make us overconfident in our judgments and predictions or that result in intrusions of false information into our memories of events produce illusions of knowledge. Illusory knowledge can include wholesale false memories (with which we are less concerned here) but also various failures of gatekeeping, as when people remember some proposition but not the context—say, as part of a counterfactual conditional—that should prevent them from taking it as fact (Mandler 1980; Skurnik et al. 2005). Overconfidence effects (Oskamp 1965; Koriat and Bjork 2005) can also produce illusions of knowledge by giving people the impression that they know with certainty that some mere inference or prediction they have made is actually a definite fact.

The kinds of inferences associated with the curse of knowledge proper and those that produce illusions of knowledge both represent varieties of a general phenomenon I will call cursed thinking. They both involve mental contamination effects in which information we encounter in one context seeps into our representations of other perspectives, contexts, or domains. Scientific work on these aspects of human cognition has generally focused on cataloging the errors that people make in solving problems or making decisions. These mistakes are real and can make real mischief for our efforts to understand and be understood. But the same tendencies that cause us such trouble also play an important role in storytelling, story reading, sense-making, and aesthetic pleasure. These aspects of their operation have received much less attention. Let’s begin to balance the books by thinking about a dilemma and a clever