Born Liars by Ian Leslie Page B

known about Söze’s identity, his past, or even what he looks like – those that meet him have a habit of dying horrible deaths. In their investigations the detectives rely on the testimony of Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint (played by Kevin Spacey), a lowly con-artist with a pronounced limp, who has been granted immunity from prosecution in return for telling what he knows of Söze’s story.
    Verbal describes how he and a small group of career criminals were blackmailed by Söze, through Söze’s lawyer Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), into destroying a large drug shipment belonging to Söze’s rivals, during which operation all but Verbal and one other man were killed. He also tells the investigators what he knows of Söze’s life; of his beginnings as a low-level drug dealer in his native Turkey, and of how, after the Hungarian mafia kill one of his children, he wreaks terrible revenge on them and becomes a faceless, fearsome one-man force of destruction. Verbal’s tale directs the police to a man called Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne); apparently the real Söze.
    In the movie’s famous final sequence, however, it is revealed to Verbal’s interrogator – and to us – that Keyser Söze is none other than Verbal Kint. Verbal’s story was an elaborate lie, an improvised concoction of strung-together details snatched from his immediate surroundings, including the crowded bulletin board in the office where the interrogation took place. As the investigator stares at the board, he recognises random words and phrases from the story he has just been told, and feels the cold rush of revelation. He drops the coffee cup he has been sipping from during the interrogation. In slow motion, we see it fall to the floor and smash. The manufacturer’s logo, printed on the bottom of the cup, reads KOBAYASHI .
    Like the appropriately nicknamed Verbal, confabulating patients make up their stories using whatever comes to hand. As with the woman who told of her holiday in the Falklands, their stories are conjured up instantaneously – an interlocutor only has to ask a question, or say a particular word, and they’re off, like a jazz saxophonist using a phrase thrown out by his pianist as the launch-pad for a solo. A confabulating patient might explain to her visiting friend that she’s in hospital because she now works as a psychiatrist, that the man standing next to her (the real doctor) is her assistant, and they are about to visit a patient. Chronic confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jamming together words in nonsensical but suggestive ways: one patient, when asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, answered that she had been ‘suicided’ by her family. These patients are like novelists as described by Henry James: people on whom ‘nothing is wasted’ though, unlike novelists, or liars, they are entirely at the mercy of their material.
    Both Verbal Kint and the Falklands woman are exercising one of the core processes of the creative imagination. In A Treatise on Human Nature the philosopher David Hume writes:
    To form monsters, and join incongruous shapes and appearances, costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects . . . But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted . . . In short, all the materials of thinking are derived either from our outward or inward sentiment: the mixture and composition of these belongs alone to the mind and