Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative

In this short and contentious book, Brooks exalts what he calls “narrative takeover,” the ways in which, owing to the power of the modern novel, we have been given one and only one means of understanding the world and ourselves: narration. A large claim, it is asserted with considerable force: Narrative seems to have become accepted as the only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs.He also states that the “plethoric” spread of narrative has come to control the writing of history itself: “History, which some decades back seemed to have set aside storytelling in favor of demographic and social analyses of selected moments and places, appears to have returned to full-throated storytelling.” Although Brooks occasionally moderates the force of such claims (“Do we really want all our understandings to be expressed in narrative terms?”), and although he would not deny that many human affairs are regulated by entities other than narration—courts of law, treaties, even stop signs and warnings on drug labels—the rhetorical ambition of his opening claim reverberates through the book. His estimable skill, honed over the years, in describing and cherishing the modern novel, is always in operation. Without the novel, this devoted reader says, we would be lost: “the novel has become the overwhelming dominant form of our modernity.”To his credit, Brooks acknowledges that such an argument, to prove persuasive, must contend with opposing views taken by other writers who have looked closely at narration. Owing to his generosity in argument, he makes the philosopher Galen Strawson stand as their representative. Strawson, unlike Brooks, sees narration as multiform and unstable. No matter the force we might employ in fixing narrative reality, “you shouldn't expect to get it right, or let it dictate your stance to the future.” Some of us, he notes, believe the life we live to be steadily consistent, coherent, and logical in its progression; others see the same thing, life itself, as comprising discontinuous segments linked by no logic or coherence but only occurring over time. The one is no more reliable than the other. Narration is a protean contrivance varying in its uses and value, person to person. But for Brooks, it is one thing, magisterial and consistently informative. Particularly as found in fiction, and primarily in the modern novel, it is, he says, our only means of self-understanding: “Living is blind. Fiction alone provides a recovery of meaning from passing time, and fictional beings are crucial to the project because their eyes allow us to see the meanings of temporal change.” With the works of Marcel Proust and William Faulkner as supreme examples of narrative truth, Brooks asserts that “the novel as optical instrument alone restores vision.”One feels here the pressure of Brooks's hand upon the scales of history. Surely in ages past, long before the rise of the novel, human beings were not bereft of paths leading to vision and inward understanding. Greek tragedies, the four Gospels, Shakespearean tragedy—each provided a narrative that could, and often did, lead to exalted states of self-awareness.Nor should one fail to note that the reading of novels, powerful though it may be, is an activity practiced today by only a small fraction of the human community. As for those without novels, the remaining majority, they have had and will have rich access to self-awareness. They are living and are not blind.