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Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative
Brooks, Peter

1. Stories Abounding: The World Overtaken by Narrative
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we never envisaged nor hoped for the kind of narrative takeover of reality we appear to be witnessing in the early twenty-first century, where even public civic discourse supposedly dedicated to reasoned analysis seems to have been taken hostage. This narrative takeover—what it means, how to think about it, and how to provide a more intelligent account of what narrative is and does—motivates me here.
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Narrative, which the human child appears to discover before age three, is fundamental to our sense of reality and how it is ordered. We don’t simply arrange random facts into narratives; our sense of the way stories go together, how life is made meaningful as narrative, presides at our choice of facts as well, and the ways we present them. Our daily lives, our daydreams, our sense of self are all constructed as stories.
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Annette Simmons claims: “The really important issues of this world are ultimately decided by the story that grabs the most attention and is repeated most often.” 8 That seems truer with every passing day, as Twitter and the meme dominate the presentation of reality.
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the corporate person has understood, with a vengeance, that it must stake its identity, persuasion, and profits on telling a story, however bizarre or banal.
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According to Salmon, the new attention to narrative in philosophy and ethics and literary theory and history writing came to affect corporate management, and then the military, which needed positive narratives to undergird the dubious wars it was made to wage. Ronald Reagan, ever telling anecdotes—minimal stories—appeared to govern largely by story, at times confounding the real with films in which he had played a role.
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Why has the lyric, a compact and emotionally charged form of communication, been completely eclipsed by the more discursive and additive form that is narrative?
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the storification of reality
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Our present world of pervasive storying was under-written and, I believe, preceded by a well-recognized narrative turn in several serious fields of thought. History, which some decades back seemed to have set aside storytelling in favor of demographic and social analyses of selected moments and places, appears to have returned to full-throated storytelling.
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Narrative as explanation once seemed to belong to an older paradigm—one elaborated largely in the nineteenth century, the golden age of historical and evolutionary thought—but now it is back, as if to emphasize that the time-boundedness of human life is the crucial human problem.
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the past comes into existence only insofar as we tell stories about it. “There can in fact be no untold stories at all, just as there can be no unknown knowledge. There can only be past facts not yet described in a context of narrative form.”
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“facts on the ground” are not cognizable at all until we make them into a narrative, and that narrative and its meaning are not determined by the facts but shaped by our expectations of narrative coherence and meaning, which in turn can derive from our preformed beliefs about human behavior, motivation, morality, gender identity, and so on.
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Children learn far more through their narrative interactions with parents, caregivers, siblings, playmates. They tell one another stories about how things work and about what behaviors mean, including the arcane world of adult behavior. Children develop theories in story form about all sorts of things, very much including the world of adult sexuality, as Freud maintained, and as Charlotte Brontë and Henry James and Marcel Proust in their various ways dramatized. And of course myths are usually stories about something that cannot be explained through logical reasoning—origins, for instance, or the meaning of death. Story may be a necessary part of our cognitive interaction with the world because its mode of explaining takes place within time, and humans are time-bound in a way that they are not place-bound. Story is the logic of explanations and meanings that unfold in time, the logic of those who are mortal. When at the end of his long journey Proust’s hero discovers his vocation, he is called to write a book that will have the “shape of time.”
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The universe is not our stories about the universe, even if those stories are all we have. Swamped in story as we seem to be, we may lose the distinction between the two, asserting the dominion of our constructed realities over the real thing.
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the distinction between fabula and sjuzhet. Fabula is the story told, the events recounted, in their “natural” chronological order, whereas sjzuhet is the presentation of events in the narrative we read or listen to—events that may not fall in chronological order, that may be, will almost certainly be, rearranged, shaded, enlarged, minimized, distorted. Events are ordered, usually with some design and intention. Thus sjuzhet is not innocent: it is a take on a story, a perspective, an arrangement.
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the spread of an interest in narrative and its analysis to the American university in the 1970s and ’80s no doubt had something to do with the new cultural valorization of story and its power.
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The historian Carlo Ginzburg claims that modern “sciences of man” often operate with an “evidential paradigm” that involves knowing by way of clues, following the traces left by one’s quarry. This is a science of the concrete and particular that achieves its discoveries through putting particulars together in a narrative chain.
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the nineteenth century’s discovery that certain kinds of explanation—in geology, philology, and evolutionary biology, for example—necessarily work through narrative.
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One has the impression that storytelling can sometimes be an evasion. By claiming a kind of exemplary status by way of one’s story you excuse yourself from other forms of justification. Recall the claim of Annette Simmons: “Every problem in the world can be addressed—solved, made bearable, even eliminated—with better storytelling.” Do we really want to subscribe to that belief ? Doesn’t it mystify more than it solves?
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“Self is a perpetually rewritten story,” according to the psychologist Jerome Bruner; we are all constantly engaged in “self-making narrative” and “in the end we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives.”