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Wednesday
Given that I have been praising (with only a few reservations) Peter Brooks’s recent Seduced by Story: On the Use and Abuse of Narrative, what do I make of his contention that “art is of no obvious use”? After all, both my blog and my life project are given over to documenting as many instances as I can find of people using literature to better their lives.
Indeed, Brooks’s statement is even stronger than the above because he frames it as a truth that everyone agrees with: “Since art is of no obvious use,” he writes, “an adaptive biological explanation doesn’t help much…” In other words, he doesn’t buy use theories of art, such as that we turn to it because it pragmatically helps us with cognition and social adaptation.
To say that literature is of no obvious use ignores that all those instances where it proves very useful. Many of Charles Dickens’s novels were written to call attention to the social evils of his day and some helped bring about significant change. And then there’s Aristotle arguing that tragedy helps develop good citizens, Sir Philip Sidney, contending that poetry inculcates virtue, Bertolt Brecht writing “epic theatre” designed to galvanize the working class, and many other theorists weighing in with their own ideas about literature’s effects.
In Brooks’ defense, he is a narratologist who is seeking to identify the deep purpose of all narrative, not just this or that author. And I will grant that some works are more focused on being of use (to quote Cider House Rules) than others. I’ll go further and acknowledge that it can be almost impossible to generalize about practical impact since responses to a work will vary from reader to reader. In fact, various readers will take away very different things from a novel like Oliver Twist.
In any event, Brooks ultimately concludes that art—and narrative—have the same purpose as play. So stories are useful after all, only they are useful in the way that play is useful. Quoting the German poet Friedrich Schiller, Brooks says that art belongs to the “play drive”:
Play, Schiller emphasizes, allows humans to fulfill their nature: “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.” That makes art the fullest realization of what it is to be human.
Fictional narrative, Brooks goes on to say, “is an exercise and emblem of human freedom in that it tells about the world in ways that may prove illuminating and even useful” (italics mine). In other words, the question is not whether stories are useful or not—Brooks has almost grudgingly admitted that they are—but how they are useful.
Narrative is useful, Brooks elaborates, in its “refusal to accept belief systems, its insistence on the ‘as if.’”
And why, we may ask, is this refusal important? To explain, Brooks looks at the importance of play in child development. Children, he says, use pretend as a way of dealing with an environment that threatens to overwhelm them. Quoting Playing and Reality by the noted pediatrician and psychologist D.W. Winnicott, Brooks notes that the “‘potential space’ between me and not-me in which the infant plays is the very precondition of adaptation to the world.” Without play, he warns,
we risk being overwhelmed by an inhuman world. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot writes in his Four Quartets. And Wallace Stevens says, in his Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: “From this the poem springs: that we live in a place/ That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves/ And hard it is in spite of blazoned day.”
Brooks is careful to add that literature is not “a turning away from the world.” Rather, like the infant’s play, it is
an attempt to find a space in which the human mind can deal with reality, speak of it, reshape it imaginatively, ask “what if” questions about it.
In Brooks’s discussion, I am reminded of a conversation that Alice has with her literal-minded older sister in Through the Looking Glass. This is the sister who, in the first of the Alice books, we see reading practical books, leading Alice to wonder, “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?” This sister is also bemused by Alice’s fictions:
And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favorite phrase “Let’s pretend.” She had had quite a long argument with her sister only the day before—all because Alice had begun with “Let’s pretend we’re kings and queens;” and her sister, who liked being very exact, had argued that they couldn’t, because there were only two of them, and Alice had been reduced at last to say, “Well, you can be one of them then, and I’ll be all the rest.” And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone.”
The Alice books make Brooks’s point nicely. Lewis Carroll used nonsense stories and poems to push back against what he regarded at his overly materialistic, pragmatic, no-nonsense society, upending humorless convention with delicious satire and parody. The immense popularity of the Alice books indicate that the public was hungry for his vision. Even though he was a math professor, he would have criticized our overemphasis on the STEM disciplines and our failure to honor the arts.
Obviously, given my own love of the Alice books, I don’t disagree with Brooks that literature is like play. I only note that that’s not all literature is about.
