In Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, literary theorist and professor Peter Brooks laments what he calls the “storification of reality,” an increasingly common phenomenon where, for example, journalists craft anecdotes to lure readers and corporations nestle “our story” pages into their websites. As Brooks expounds, there is a danger in converting all communication into narrative. Grasping at perpetual pathos results in situations where the best story, facts be damned, controls the conversation, and the cost of such social rewiring varies, from a loss of pertinent information to outright acts of violence, with January 6, 2021 noted as perhaps the most alarming recent illustration of “storification” in the United States.
Brooks seeks to argue not only for the separation of narrative from reportage in Seduced by Story, but also to reason storytelling’s importance in human development. Over six chapters, he sifts through examples of narrative capabilities and limitations, the transition from oral storytelling to print publication, and the ways in which society’s reliance on story for information gathering has tarnished its power as a tool. A sequel in spirit to Brooks’s own Reading for the Plot, which unpacked narrative plot to suggest how fiction reflects the patterns of the human condition, Seduced by Story reassesses some of Brooks’s original account, and along the way, the author includes both significant literary passages and scholarship from sociolinguists, folklorists, and psychoanalysts. The effort is noble, and Brooks’s passion for narrative is clear. His ideas resonate.
Much of Seduced by Story contemplates narrative as a teaching instrument, and while recalling Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Storyteller,” Brooks echoes Benjamin’s conclusion that narrative, in Brooks’s own words, “may be the best discursive and analytical tool that we have for transmitting what we know about life, and for constructing a life in time as something that has shape and meaning — to a point.” The truth is, as far as we know, we cannot witness what transpires on this mortal plane after our final breaths. Thus, it is impossible to comprehend the story arc (for lack of a better term) of one’s own lifespan. Yet the novel provides such access, and as Brooks contends, it acts “as the place of imagined lives that enable us to displace ourselves from our own.” He suggests that “represented persons give us an understanding of life, and of ourselves, that real persons cannot.” In other words, when divorced from the everyday and reimagined on the page, life’s nuances are absorbed with increased ease. Less baggage exists in a book than in the real world. Fewer barriers separate the reader from the lessons fictional characters offer.
There’s an inherent beauty in such thought, and Brooks does a fine job in reasoning narrative’s ability to shape humanity. There are limitations to this instrument, however, and the author reminds us that, ultimately, the reader must avoid blurring the line between fiction and reality. While “the ego learns its own shape by trying on others,” great writers recognize that there are “limits to the order that fiction can impose on life.” Not only is it essential that a reader separate reality from fiction, but authors intending to replicate a sense of realism must hone their craft to avoid straying from the known world. Remaining on the topic of death, Brooks makes an example of Paula Hawkins’s 2015 novel, The Girl on the Train, railing against the author’s decision for a character to recount her own murder in first-person point-of-view. “[Such a choice] violates the rules of perspective … set up by the novel itself,” Brooks writes, “and the larger rules of what you might call novelistic evidence.” Citing Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, Richardson’s Clarissa, and others, Brooks shows readers successful methods of working through character death on the page, as well as the suspension of disbelief required when entering fictional worlds.
Brooks has a point in calling out Hawkins, for at no other time in The Girl on the Train does a first-person perspective so blatantly corrupt reality. The narrative decision on Hawkins’s part is sloppy at best and deceitful at worst. Yet the method Brooks employs in his case against this particular novel turns excessive, devoting pages to diminish what amounts to roughly 100 words in a 300-page beach read. Outside of a fleeting reference to Hawkins’s contemporary Emily St. John Mandel, Brooks quotes one canonized work of literature after another. These passages are beautiful, sumptuous, and, yes, prove Brooks correct in his assessment: There are proper ways to usher the reader past a character’s demise. They also stack the deck in the author’s favor, and since there’s a good chance Hawkins’s novel will be long forgotten as decades pass, measuring it against some of literature’s greatest minds comes off as unwarranted, if not a tad cruel.
This flogging of The Girl on the Train brings up another of Seduced by Story’s issues: It isn’t hard to notice that the attention Hawkins receives outpaces that of nearly any other female author in the text. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is examined by Brooks in a charged chapter on the relationship between the teller of story and the listener, and Virginia Woolf’s essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” enters Brooks’s section on character. But the remainder of the book primarily relies on men for literary references. Of these, the majority are of the old, long dead, and white varietal, with samples from Jorge Luis Borges peppering the occasional page to break this trend. To call this underrepresentation of female authors and authors of color disappointing fails to capture the true frustration some might encounter when reading these chapters, for time and again, Brooks bypasses work by a spectrum of writers to instead draw water from the same old well.
Still, at the heart of Seduced by Story, Brooks proposes enough intriguing ideas concerning narrative to lift the book above its flaws. He associates fiction with a form of play “crucial to our survival because it is crucial to our capacity to understand our place in the world.” Our discursive capabilities hinge on narrative, and when storytelling slips into traditionally non-narrative realms, we dilute the power of this vital tool. The collection’s final chapter, “Further Thoughts: Stories in and of the Law,” details the exploitation of narrative in the court system, primarily by the Supreme Court of the United States, parsing majority opinions and minority dissents to illuminate the “storification of reality” covered in the book’s opening pages. It is a haunting conclusion to Brooks’s overarching argument, for it puts plain the ways the most powerful court in the nation can spin fact into story, and how each justice’s version of the truth depends on how widely he or she casts a narrative net at a given situation. “Attention to storytelling does in fact have a place in legal teaching,” Brooks writes, “but it’s generally relegated to the margins.” He advocates for a greater concentration on narratology in law school and other fields to better control the way narrative is integrated into such work. It is a smart suggestion, and despite Brooks’s short lapse into pettiness and blind spots, Seduced by Story is a smart book. The more we pay attention to the stories we encounter — on the page and out in the world — the more opportunity we have to engage with what it means to be human. That’s what life should be about, and thinkers like Peter Brooks exist to sound the rallying cry, hoping to cut through the proverbial static that dominates so much of our days.
[Published by New York Review Books on October 18, 2022, 172 pages, $17.95 paperback]