(Roughly) Daily

The estimable Terry Eagleton on the equally estimable Peter Brooks‘ Seduced By Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative…

Forty years ago, Peter Brooks produced a pathbreaking study, Reading for the Plot, which was part of the so-called narrative turn in literary criticism. Narratology, as it became known, spread swiftly to other disciplines: law, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology and so on. But a problem arose when it began to seep into the general culture – or, as Brooks puts it, into ‘the orbit of political cant and corporate branding’ [and importantly, your correspondent would observe, into journalism]. Not since the work of Freud, whose concepts of neurosis, the Oedipal and the unconscious quickly became common currency, has a piece of high theory so readily entered everyday language. The narratologists had given birth to a monster: George W. Bush announced that ‘each person has got their own story that is so unique’; ‘We are all virtuoso novelists,’ the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote. What Brooks glumly calls ‘the narrative takeover of reality’ was complete…

Everyone these days is on a journey, which can lend some provisional shape to lives without much sense of direction. Humanity was also on a journey in medieval times, but it was a collective expedition with an origin, well signposted stages and a distinct destination. The Enlightenment notion of progress was more open-ended: to imagine an end to human self-perfecting was to deny our infinite potential. This creed was inherited by some 19th-century thinkers – ironically, since the dominant model of development at the time was evolution, which is random, littered with blind alleys and lengthy digressions and heads nowhere in particular.

If you can carve your own path to the grave these days, it is because grand narratives of this kind have crumbled and can no longer constrain you. Journeys are no longer communal but self-tailored, more like hitchhiking than a coach tour. They are no longer mass products but for the most part embarked on alone. The world has ceased to be story-shaped, which means that you can make your life up as you go along. You can own it, just as you can own a boutique. As the current cliché has it, everybody is different, a proposition which if true would spell the end of ethics, sociology, demography, medical science and a good deal besides.

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One of the great clichés of modernism is that art imposes order on an anarchic reality. In Brooks’s view, narrative invests our lives with a shapeliness they would otherwise lack. But the world comes to us not as raw material to be sculpted but as already organised, in however rough-and-ready a way. There may be no grand narrative immanent in history, but that isn’t to say situations don’t have a certain structure which is independent of the ways we articulate them. That there was once a revolution in France isn’t just a tidy way of arranging the world. One of the traditional functions of fiction was to give voice to stories that were somehow inherent in reality. This conception was thrown into crisis by modernism, rather as a faith in the inevitability of human progress was challenged around the same time by the First World War. Among other things, modernism is a crisis of narrativity. Telling a story is becoming harder and harder. But there is no point in making things even more difficult for yourself by adopting the Nietzschean position that reality lacks all form until we ourselves breathe one into it.

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For a slim volume, Seduced by Story covers an impressive array of topics: oral narrative, the function of character, the role of narration in law, storytelling’s affinity with child’s play, what narrators know and don’t know, those raconteurs who calculate the act of narrating into their stories and those who refuse to be authoritative. In the end, however, there is a touch of desperation about demanding so much of fiction and narrative while acknowledging the ease with which they are abused. It isn’t that Brooks thinks fiction can save us, as I.A. Richards believed poetry could; it’s rather that he can think of nowhere else to turn. Story and poetry are important, to be sure, but not that important. Literary types, unsurprisingly, have often overrated their power, loading them with a pressure to which they are unequal. The hope that value and insight are to be found mainly in art is a symptom of our condition, not a solution to it….

The use and abuse of narrative: “What’s Your Story?” from @EagletonTerry in @LRB. Both the book and the article are eminently worth reading in full.

And see (also from Eagleton): “Conspiracies are the price of freedom“: Conspiracy theories are the insecure person’s defense against a confusing world with too many competing narratives. Conspiracy theories allow believers to claim a position of relative strength: They alone know what is going on. This hidden truth is always sinister, not because conspiracy theorists need more to fear, but because they need an explanation for the fear in which they already live. (via @TheBrowser)

* Philip Pullman

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As we ponder plots, we might note that today is National Rationalization Day.

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