The power of narrative

The storification of reality

Killian Quigley

Seduced by Story: The use and abuse of narrative

by Peter Brooks New York Review Books

US$17.95 pb, 176 pp

One of the more addictive podcasts I heard in 2022 was BBC Radio 4’s The Coming Storm, a history of the QAnon conspiracy theory and its connection to the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021. In a late episode, host Gabriel Gatehouse ponders the disturbing implications of his topic for how we think about narratives, and about the role narratives play in all our lives. ‘In a democracy,’ he says, ‘the winner is not always the one who has the best ideas. The winner is the one who tells the best story – and QAnon, this tale of a looming battle between good and evil, that’s the stuff of myths and legends.’

It is not news that stories matter – for identities, knowledges, and cultures as much as for politics. The Coming Storm’s great insight will therefore strike many of us as partly trivial. Still, Gatehouse’s worry points to a growing consensus that we inhabit historically fractured narrative worlds, where the varied tales we hear and tell may be growing increasingly, even violently, incommensurable. Right or wrong, this view exemplifies what the critic and novelist Peter Brooks terms the ‘narrativist position’ in contemporary thought, a dominant tendency to understand life and culture as not just reflected in stories but constituted by them. Where this tendency comes from, and whatever are its merits, are the subjects of Brooks’s compelling, if ultimately frustrating, new book.

Brooks begins Seduced by Story: The use and abuse of narrative with two premises. The first is that from popular art to political propaganda to corporate branding and everywhere in between, story and storytelling have become public culture’s prevailing energies. Brooks sees this development as ‘the storification of reality’, and he recounts awakening to it while listening to George W. Bush introduce the members of his first Cabinet. ‘Each person has got their own story that is so unique,’ pronounced the new president of his appointees, ‘stories that really explain what America can and should be about.’ At once numbingly bland and alarmingly ideological, this is the sort of calculatedly fuzzy ‘storying’ that troubles Brooks and that, he convincingly shows, should trouble the rest of us as well.

Seduced by Story’s second opening premise is that the ‘narrative takeover’ of the societal mainstream has esoteric origins. Over the last few decades of the twentieth century, numerous academic fields turned toward ‘narrativity’ as a crucial (and previously undervalued) analytic in not only literary studies but psychology, sociology, anthropology, and so on. What makes Brooks’s account of this phenomenon unusually interesting is the fact that he was pivotally involved in it. With books like Reading for the Plot: Design and intention in narrative (1984), Brooks built an influential career arguing that stories are key features of how we all experience ‘human temporality’ and strive to articulate ‘meaning in general’. This new book is, therefore, a kind of personal as well as intellectual reckoning with narrative turns and what may be their less salubrious legacies.

Hope consists, for Brooks, in making us better critics. In popular media as in novels, stories that fail to live up to fundamental principles of narrative credibility – or that flout such principles altogether – deserve our contempt. For something more integral, Brooks looks to literary fiction that functions not only to ‘absorb’ its audiences but to prompt ‘reflection’ on ‘how stories come to us and work on us’. Pre-eminent among the creators of such metafictions are Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, and, above all, Henry James, each of whom takes the problem of understanding the world through storytelling as the ultimate theme of the stories they tell. Brooks calls this the problem of ‘narrative epistemology’, and his favourite subjects are those that dramatise its difficulties with persuasive force.

Brooks’s deepest concern is not that we overrate the ‘cognitive value’ of stories but that we fundamentally misconstrue that value. The idea that narratives are spontaneous expressions of unfiltered worldly knowledge is a seriously naïve one. It becomes profoundly dangerous when exploited by powerful interests – politicians, partisan media outlets, and corporate PR squads, say – who treat story as though it were immune to critical scrutiny. Here, Brooks writes, is where our superlative prose fictions show their extraordinary and enduring worth. Far from presuming to boil life’s meanings down into smoothly consumable form, these are stories that stage and restage the ‘vertiginous drama’ that our search for such comprehension actually entails.

This is an argument on behalf of a specific and – Brooks would have us recognise – uniquely novelistic type of realism. Evidence arrives from the psychological sciences, which teach us (among other things) that invented characters afford their readers perspectives on life and self that ‘real persons’ may not. It bears iterating that for Seduced by Story, these insights do not reach us as neatly assimilable data but as unstable, ‘tricky’ knowledge that issues from the dynamic circumstances of a narrative’s being shared and received, or what Brooks memorably calls ‘the living situation of storytelling’.

Storytelling’s situations are lively, and Brooks is dead right both to remind us of this truth and to sensitise us to its occlusion. But if Seduced by Story succeeds in alerting us to the fact that story is rampaging, ‘unanalyzed’, throughout ‘contemporary reality’, in the end the book is not equal to its subject’s phenomenal scope. A final chapter, ‘Further Thoughts: Stories in and of the Law’, offers some preliminary notes toward a literary theory of legal narratives while ironically implying – in its furthering – that these are basically extraneous to story’s true home in the novel. One imagines Bush declaring, in smug response to Brooks’s entreaties, that the tales he deploys just aren’t fictions – and so what? We need a good answer, and we await it still. g