SEDUCED BY STORY
The Use and Abuse of Narrative
by Peter Brooks
A rigorous exploration of narrative, from its usage in classic literature to its misuse in contemporary discourse.
In 1984, Brooks published Reading for the Plot, in which he argued that we live in “an episodic, sometimes semiconscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue” and have situated ourselves “at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.” Decades later, the author senses a problem that warrants this follow-up book: In our world of 24-hour media, narrativity has run amok. Weary of “the storification of reality,” Brooks seeks a way forward that recognizes facts and storytelling as two separate concepts. “The universe is not our stories about the universe,” he explains, “even if those stories are all we have. Swamped in story as we seem to be, we may lose the distinction between the two, asserting the dominion of our constructed realities over the real thing.” Now, he laments, “story…has entered the orbit of political cant and corporate branding.” To better understand this new engagement with storytelling, the author proposes an “analytic unpacking of the claims for narrative.” These whirlwind essays span centuries of literature, from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747) to Paula Hawkins’ thriller The Girl on the Train (2015). Brooks extrapolates ideas of narrative veracity, character, speaker, and audience, all while conscientiously maintaining his collection’s accessibility. Even readers who are not yet familiar with Proust or Faulkner will find stable footing in these essays despite their many erudite digressions throughout the canon. In the final piece, the author shifts from novels to the legal world and chillingly recounts how the Supreme Court can disparately interpret its cases by widening or constricting the “narrative circle” of a particular situation. He closes with a plea: “We need, more than ever, the reflective knowledge that the humanities can provide, very much including analysis of the dominant stories of our economics, our ethics, our politics.”
An enlightening challenge to readers curious about literary theory and its real-world applications.