Thursday
Imagine the following blissful scenario. I build a roaring fire in our wood stove, treat myself to a glass of eggnog laced with a shot of whiskey, and settle down with a book about…narratology.
“Narratology?!” I hear you say.
To be more specific, I settle down with Yale Professor Peter Brooks’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative.
Actually, I don’t only read literary theory before said wood stove. Last week, in preparation for my talk on Charles Dickens’s Christmas stories, I settled down with A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Christmas Storms and Sunshine.” I’m not always a dry academic.
Still, I must admit that I’m enthralled with Brooks’s book, which touches on many of my own concerns. You’ll be hearing some ruminations on the book in forthcoming posts, but today I focus on one of the dangers that fiction poses. We live in an age, Brooks observes, where story is threatening to overwhelm reality. Concerned by how large swathes of our population are surrendering to QAnon conspiracy theories and claims about a stolen election, Brooks writes,
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.
Brooks is particularly concerned by how authoritarians impose constructed realities upon populations. To make his point, he looks at the famous Jorge Luis Borges short story, “Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”
The story is about a world that has been invented and snuck into pirated copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. As Borges explains the caper, the project to invent an imaginary place is pushed and financed by an atheist American millionaire who, while not believing in God, “wanted to demonstrate to this nonexistent God that mortal man was capable of conceiving a world.”
Unfortunately, in the story this fiction is so compelling that it starts to take over reality. Writing in 1947, the narrator notes that humans are easy marks for believing in Tlon since they have had recent practice in succumbing to the totalizing ideologies of communism and fascism:
Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlon, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws—I translate: inhuman laws—which we never quite grasp. Tlon is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.
Tlon proceeds, therefore, to disintegrate the world of adherents, just as QAnon, Trumpist fabrications, and other authoritarian fantasies have done so in our own time. The narrator elaborates what’s involved in people submitting:
Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) “primitive language” of Tlon; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty—not even that it is false.
Brooks’s recurrent theme is that we must always remember that fiction is fiction. What Borges describes, by contrast,
is what happens when stories become myths: when their status as fictions, ficciones, is forgotten and they are taken as real explanations of the world, as something other than “as if” constructions, as the object of belief. On the basis of such fictions become myths we erect theologies. Very much including political theologies.
And then, in what works as a commentary on much contemporary political reporting, Brooks adds,
But even without that fearful and all too present outcome, we may find ourselves inertly accepting the notion that all is story, and that the best story wins.
In other words, if the political press does no more than report contending stories—as opposed to truth checking those stories—then it has surrendered to fiction. We would do well, Brooks says, to listen to Borges, who
put us on warning that we must remain critical of the all-encompassing claims of story. We need to oppose critical and analytical intelligence to narratives that seduce us into the acceptance of dominant ideologies. We need as listeners and readers to resist a passive narcosis of response.
In the book I have just completed, I differentiate between literature that speaks only to the passions (the heart) and literature that speaks to head as well as heart (and I add spirit as well). That distinction, I contend, is what differentiates great lit from not so great lit. Brooks is getting at something similar although he focuses more on the reader making ethical decisions (head decisions) than on the quality of the work itself.
But more on this in future posts. For the time being, it is noteworthy how dangerous unbridled fiction can be. Indeed, Brooks opens his book with a cynical line from Game of Thrones: “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.” The observation is delivered by the dwarf Tyrion as he elevates Bran the Broken to the throne. We Americans have witnessed in our own recent history how far an unscrupulous man can go by relying upon nothing more than the fictions he tells.