Friday
While I continue to enjoy Peter Brooks’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (see my earlier post on it here), I find myself somewhat frustrated by its narrow ambition. When the Yale comparative lit scholar shows literary fiction at work, he focuses on what it reveals about the nature of fictionality whereas literature for me is about much, much more.
Brooks’s study is nevertheless important because he shows how we as a society are being taken over by stories. If we are to fight back against this, Brooks believes, we must understand how narrative works. This is the purpose for his book.
In showing how fiction works upon us, Brooks examines certain great works of literature that are particularly insightful. More on this in a moment. First, however, let’s look at what worries Brooks. With stories ascendent, Brooks fears that they are pushing out other forms of knowing. The emotional rush of story can overwhelm logic, judgment, and data analysis, products of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, politicians who traffic in popular fictions often command more influence than is healthy. As Brooks puts it,
[T]here is no guarantee that fictions will further human flourishing. We do not need to look far back in history to see what happens when certain fictions gain the status of dominant and all-explaining myths. Especially, perhaps, those myths that arise from resentment, from the sense of social exclusion or powerlessness. The unscrupulous seekers after power—who currently appear to outnumber those who seek power to do justice—promote and possibly themselves believe myths that enable their takeover and their exercise of totalitarian power.
In his conclusion, Brooks requotes the Game of Thrones passage that opens the book: Tyrion asserts, “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.” Or as Brooks puts it,
Lawful regimes crumble before the too-good story. Populations become largely submissive.
Brooks’s warning against fiction reminds me somewhat of a caution that appears in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy. Sidney contends that poetry is the most powerful vehicle for teaching virtue, but after making an impassioned case for the many ways it does so, he is forced to make a rather significant concession. Since no use of words “can both teach and move [towards virtue] so much as poesy,” he states, the opposite must also be true: a poetic use of words could also potentially move people towards vice. Or as Sidney puts it, “by the reason of [poetry’s] sweet charming force, it can do more hurt than any other army of words.” This danger, in fact, is why Plato banished poets from his rational utopia.
Because Sidney is defending poetry, he must qualify his endorsement. It is not poetry itself that is at fault, he writes, but those who misuse it. Sidney therefore contrasts poetry that is abused with poetry that is “rightly used.” He says that just as a physician can use his knowledge of physic to poison or to cure, just as a preacher can use God’s word to breed heresy or raise people up, just as a man can use a sword to kill his father or defend his prince, so one can use poetry for bad or for ill purposes.
But people like, say, Donald Trump are not going to be swayed by appeals to use fiction rightly. Our past president wields stories only to serve his own narcissistic purposes. The question, then, is how we are to resist the onslaught of his narrative and that of other manipulators. Brooks recommends training students as fiction skeptics. We should all become amateur narratologists.
There’s a double movement involved in Brooks’s recommendation: At the same time that we “celebrate the human capacity to imagine, to creative other worlds,” we should at the same time foster “a more critical attitude” toward narrative fictions. While fictions are good because they help us cope with a dark and chaotic reality, we must remain “on our guard against their capacity for ruin.”
In his training program, Brooks argues for the kind of literature program he set up decades ago at Yale, which was one in which literature students study fictionality itself. As I recall, key works in the course included Don Quixote—which is about a man deluded by chivalric romances—and Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories, which time and again explore how stories work.
Other useful works mentioned by Brooks are Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and the novels of Henry James and Honoré de Balzac. Lucy Snow in Villette, for instance, struggles against attempts by others to impose limiting fictions upon her. At the heart of James’s works, meanwhile, are nefarious attempts to manipulate others through the use of narrative.
While I don’t disagree with Brooks’s interpretations, which I find compelling, I part company with him in thinking that Introduction to Literature should be, first and foremost, an introduction to narratology. Before students are taught to distrust fiction, they must be encouraged to read it. They must first learn that literature provides profound insight into their most pressing issues and that the better the literature is, the more profound will be the insights it can provide.
In my own writing and teaching, I make distinctions that don’t (I believe) interest narratologists, such as the difference between great lit and pop lit (or, more accurately, not-so-great lit). The first, I contend, appeals to the intellect, the emotions, and the spirit whereas the second elevates the emotions above all. In other words, rather than having students study how fiction can be abused, I want them reading literature that helps them become wiser, more empathetic, and more spiritually grounded. Having developed head, heart, and soul, they will have the foundation they need to detect abuses.
Put another way, once students, through great literature, develop an expansive vision of human possibility, they will not be satisfied with shallow and manipulative fictions. Deep people don’t settle for trashy stories, whether from authors or politicians. Their very contact with sublime art enables them to see through bullshit.