Free Your Radicals
How I Won a Nobel Prize, and how to harness your characters’ ideologies
If you’re new here, read this quick primer on the Story Energies, a new way to talk about storytelling.
An ideology is a story. One that tells us what to care about, who to cheer for, what the right thing to do is and why we should do it. An ideology provides us with a whole system of beliefs, of ideas and ideals, and these beliefs in turn can give our lives meaning—our jobs can become satisfying, our sacrifices worthwhile, our parenting rewarding. Believing in things can push us to do things we mightn’t otherwise want to do—they can propel us into acting like a good partner, or team member, or citizen. But our ideologies—especially when we follow those beliefs to their extreme conclusions—can also make us do things that many other people think are reckless, violent, abhorrent…
In How I Won a Nobel Prize, the 2023 novel by Julius Taranto, a rich and powerful man, B.W. Rubin, believes in a version of individual freedom where, for example, a professor should feel free to sleep with his consenting students. He believes ends often justify means. And he has set up a university (the Rubin Institute) on an island off the coast of Connecticut and invited people (mostly men) who have been ‘cancelled’ to come and live on it with him, and feel free to do their science or write their novels or whatever it is they excel at without fear of being ‘persecuted’ for not living up to what he might describe as the rapidly evolving moral hysteria that has been closing its fist upon academia and Western culture more broadly for far too long.
Helen, our narrator, is a brilliantly talented grad student working with Perry, a Nobel-laureate physics professor. They feel they are getting pretty close to cracking a problem related to high-temperature superconductivity—a development that could bring about miraculous advances in technology and energy conservation, which could in turn avert our impending climate catastrophe and save the world. Unfortunately for Helen, Perry has a fling with another young subordinate, is ejected from Cornell, and takes up a position at B.W.’s Institute. Given that her career and maybe even the future of humanity is at stake, Helen decides to go with Perry to the island, and drags along her reluctant partner Hew.
I don’t want to spoil too many of the book’s surprises—if you haven’t already read it, I recommend that you do so soon, particularly if you enjoy complicated moral questions, detailed elucidations of quantum mechanics, or elaborate dick jokes—but one thing it does really well is to harness the energy that competing ideologies can bring to a story.
Taranto gives each character an ideology—or, perhaps, each ideology a character—puts them on the same island together, and lets the story play out.
B.W. marks one extreme. He has his libertarian principles, and disdain for anyone who doesn’t share them. He’s ruthless, and ambitious, and deliberately provocative. He gives his abstract ideas concrete form in the Institute, and especially its campus’s main building—a phallus-shaped skyscraper that thrusts upward from the island, the tip of which forms his private penthouse.
Perry is less strident than B.W., but he does believe in his right to hook up with his subordinates, and is happy to avail of all the other advantages and privileges he is accorded at the Institute.
Hew is one of those left-leaning Millennials who see the Institute as an abomination. He hates being there, but also gets a kind of thrill from witnessing the campus’s injustices and excesses, its decadence and debauchery. He’s always on his phone, tuned in to the latest scandal playing out on social media. He believes in a more just world, and in our responsibility to try to make our world more just.
At a protest in Philadelphia, Hew meets ‘the anarchists’, who lie on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from B.W., in that they hate every thing that he stands for.
Helen doesn’t really want to get involved in the culture wars. She thinks that Perry shouldn’t use his power to sleep with students, and also that some of Hew’s indignation at others’ moral failures is a performance, which doesn’t really help anyone. Mostly, she wants to be able to focus on her work—this, the value of scientific research, is at the core of her belief system, and all politics, left and right, pales in significance.
But things keep happening, which distract Helen from her work, and which impel her to engage in the political conversation. She wants to get along with both her lover and her mentor, but she is caught in the middle, and the middle is no longer a comfortable place. She keeps feeling the need to defend herself from both sides. And as those sides keep moving further apart, at some point she will have to pick one?
In my last post, I wrote about worries, and how a character’s preoccupations can be windows onto their soul. In some ways, an ideology is the opposite to a worry. If I am sure about what I believe in, then I have no need for worries. I know exactly what I should do and why it is justified.
Ideologies are, however, famously difficult to put into practice. Life is rarely black and white, and worries can thrive in its grey spaces, its nuance and contradictions. This happens all the time for Helen, who finds herself being dragged in opposite directions by Hew and by Perry, and forced to articulate her own positions on political and moral questions. Even Hew, who feels sure what is right, worries that he’s not doing enough to bring about change.
But it’s when we are ready to put our worries aside, when we are bolstered by the strength of our convictions, that ideologies can really prove their worth in a story—when our characters’ beliefs propel them into action…
So what can we learn from How I Won a Nobel Prize? How can we draw on ideologies to generate Story Energy for our stories?
A character’s ideology is part of the Potential Energy that they can bring to a story. A character’s beliefs open up all sorts of possibilities for conflict and drama, whether that character is confronted by the flaws in their thinking, or whether they choose to act upon their principles in order to impact the world around them.
I often advise students to go deep, when they’re writing. To lean into the gaps in their knowledge and understanding, to get elbow-deep in specifics, to sift and scrutinise the subtleties of a particular situation. I think this is often good advice! But ideologies open up different possibilities for a story. Instead of looking to nuance and complexity to dive into, embrace the simplicity, the single-minded blinkered vision. Most reasonable beliefs have an extreme, unreasonable kernel embedded within them. And if you put that belief under enough pressure, that kernel can explode…
If we are developing or revising a story, thinking about our characters’ ideologies—and how we can push them to extremes, and radicalise the people—can help us enhance their potential for our story. If our character believes in something, we can look for ways to make that belief more extreme or radical, and so perhaps propel them into actions they wouldn’t have normally considered.
It’s certainly possible for our beliefs to have a limited impact on our lives’ stories—when we passively doom scroll or channel surf or take a pill to help us sleep at night. But if we get up and get moving—go to the meeting, join in the protest, charge the baton line—then suddenly things can get interesting.
We’ve talked a lot here about making our characters different from one another, and making them believe in different things. Anyone who has a family member with divergent voting preferences can tell you that the complexity of these tightest of bonds can lead to increased…
… tension. Every Cold War should have its Cuban Missile Crisis. When you bring opposing viewpoints closer together, your stories can get much more compelling. At some point, someone is going to have to blink…
What about you? Have you read How I Won a Nobel Prize? What are you feeling radical about? Let me know in the comments!
Cover image: Woman with Flower Head, by Salvador Dali