Peter Brooks’ Seduced by Story: The Uses and Abuses of Narrative is one of the dark horses of 2022’s best books listings. But having read it I can see why it gets recommended. It reaches into the back of your mind, and asks you to examine what it is that you get from reading novels.
“There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.” says Tyrion Lannister at the end of Game of Thrones. Professor Brooks warns us particularly about the last bit of that: stories are everywhere in our lives, and propel commercial, legal, and political narratives. A convincing story told by an unscrupulous and dishonest politician can grip the imagination of its hearers and propel a nation down an unanticipated back alley. I first drafted this on January the sixth — need one say more? (Two days later the Brazilians confirm that truth.) Almost unnecessary for Professor Brooks to suggest that we need more work on our critical reactions to narrative.
Hardly surprisingly for an Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor Brooks deploys an astoundingly wide array of reference in support of his compact study: Balzac, Barthes, Borges, Brontë (Charlotte), Cardozo and other Supreme Court justices, Conrad, Constant, Defoe, Diderot, Doyle (Conan), Eliot, Faulkner, Flaubert, Freud, Hawkins (Paula), Hugo, James, Keats, Lafayette (Madame de), Maupassant, Poe, Proust, Richardson, Rousseau, Saki, Sartre, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Winnicott, Woolf, inter alia. I rather liked Friedrich Schiller’s telling me that art, including fictional narrative, comes from the urge to play, the Spieltrieb. Our author concludes that “fiction-making is a form of play that is crucial to our survival because it is crucial to our capacity to understand our place in the world.” The novel, once story had been released from its duty as myth and divine intercession, gives free rein to our playfulness, though it may be said to have its ultimate justification in more serious territory; in Professor Brooks’ formulation, “We have fictions in order not to die of the forlornness of our condition in the world”. Narrative enables us to learn about death, and this is one reason the author spends so much space debunking The Girl on the Train, in which a dead person gets to address us although the author isn’t adopting the stance of an omniscient narrator which might “explain” and justify this, as for example Tolstoy does in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
And why does the cover feature Paolo and Francesca in Ingres’ rendition? Well, they make a hell of a story, which Owlcation tells here. In his Divine Commedia Dante encounters them in Hell (Canto V), where Francesca seeks to mitigate their sin (as if it needed any mitigation when you know the details) by reporting, in yet another exemplification of the importance of narrative, that they were actually reading about Lancelot and Guinevere when the hotness of that tale lead them into osculation and more:
Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse; soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto. Per più fïate li occhi ci sospinse quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso; ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse. Quando leggemmo il disïato riso esser basciato da cotanto amante, questi, che mai da me non fia diviso, la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante. Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse: quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante". * A Galeotto can be read as a synonym for a pandar.
Making Book 
By coincidence, or is it coincidence?, the philosopher Galen Strawson, who is mentioned in Peter Brookes’ book, published this article in the online magazine Aeon just recently, taking a contrary point of view.
https://aeon.co/essays/let-s-ditch-the-dangerous-idea-that-life-is-a-story?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=56645347ce-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_12_20_04_46&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-56645347ce-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
I think I go with Brookes myself.
I tend to agree with Stawson. I don’t see my life as a coherent development culminating in the current manifestation of RJH. Much more it’s a random collection of flashes of memory, not as he says necessarily ordered in chronological sequence. As he suggests I dare say I could sit down and write a chronologically coherent story of my life, but I don’t experience it as such.
Perhaps Brooks is just telling us that fiction provides comfort to those of us who live in non-narrative chaos, by providing narratives of lots of lives, reassuring us non-narrativists that there really can be a coherent tale. Does this imply that narrativists shouldn’t need fictions?
I once attended a Strawson book event (NYRB also publishes his “Things that bother me”) and signed on in question time as a non-narrativist, so of course I have to keep the faith!
Yes, interesting stuff. I agree that we only remember fragments, but even the act of trying to describe those involves sketching in context and that quickly leads to some fuller account of why that then. And surely in the end we are formed by our genetic, environmental and personal histories, even if we can give a full account of them. Taking Strawson literally (or perhaps to extreme), we become new individuals each instant – so what would that say about ideas like personal responsibility? Or going back to literary life stories, are there any plausible ones that consist just of isolated and unrelated fragments with no implied or explicit connections?
But isn’t Strawson just saying everyone’s different? Doesn’t he believe that full-on narrativists have got to be wrong just as full-on anti-narrativists must be wrong when they either of them claim that this or that is the way things actually and always are. That there are actually two different personality traits which govern which camp you live in? He does indeed claim to see himself as a new person from time to time — but he doesn’t insist that we all have to be that way does he?
I didn’t respond to your last sentence I notice — “Or going back to literary life stories, are there any plausible ones that consist just of isolated and unrelated fragments with no implied or explicit connections?”
What about James Joyce’s Ulysses? Or for that matter The Odyssey? Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, which I’m reading at Brooks’ suggestion, seems to be another example. Of course, that’s not really what you mean I suppose — they do after all have the implied continuity that the person in each separate incident is named the same all the time, and is thus no doubt to be taken for the same person. And any novel has to consist of a collection of snapshots rather than a life-long movie.