The article summarizes Peter Brooks' new book "Seduced by Story" in which he argues that we have become overly reliant on narratives to understand reality. While stories once helped make sense of the world, Brooks believes they now dominate reality. He is concerned that constant exposure to narratives leaves people vulnerable to conspiracy theories. The article provides context on Brooks' past work championing narrative and discusses his new concerns that we uncritically accept stories without questioning sources or perspectives. It notes our tendency to conceive of our own lives as narratives and how storytelling has proliferated in various domains from politics to marketing to social media.

1. 3/1/23, 5:09 PM
Seduced by Story review: Peter Brooks on our fatal addiction to narrative - New Statesman
Page 1 of 5
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2022/12/seduced-by-story-the-use-and-abuse-of-narrative-review
Our fatal addiction to narrative
Once, stories helped us make sense of reality,
argues Peter Brooks – now they have devoured it.
Alice Robb
Frank Gross/Millennium Images
Forty years ago the literary theorist Peter Brooks made a name for himself
by championing a then-unfashionable argument: we understand ourselves
through stories. Narrative, he wrote in his landmark 1984 book Reading
for the Plot, is “the principal ordering force” by which we make meaning
out of our lives.
Brooks did not anticipate how fully the rest of the world – from politicians

2. 3/1/23, 5:09 PM
Seduced by Story review: Peter Brooks on our fatal addiction to narrative - New Statesman
Page 2 of 5
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2022/12/seduced-by-story-the-use-and-abuse-of-narrative-review
and doctors to psychologists, marketers and social media users – would
come to agree. In his new book, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of
Narrative, which he frames as a kind of mea culpa, the now 84-year-old
comparative literature professor writes that he “never envisaged nor
hoped for the kind of narrative takeover of reality we appear to be
witnessing in the early twenty-first century”
. Today, he complains, he
cannot even look at a box of biscuits or browse deodorant online without
encountering tales of ambitious young entrepreneurs and idealistic
families seeking preservative-free personal care products. “It was as if a
fledgling I had nourished had become a predator devouring reality in the
name of story,” Brooks writes. He’s been stewing on this since the year
2000, when he turned on the TV and saw George W Bush introducing the
members of his cabinet by sharing each of their “unique” backstories.
Brooks’s fear is that we are so over-saturated with story that we have
become undiscerning consumers, slipping too willingly into the familiar
rhythms of plot, even when scepticism – of where information is coming
from and of who is delivering it – would be more appropriate. Our constant
exposure to narrative, he writes, might even leave us vulnerable to trusting
conspiracy theories.
In 18th-century novels authors took pains to explain how they had come
to know the story they were telling, often including elaborate forewords in
which they claimed to have discovered a manuscript or a trove of letters in
an abandoned suitcase, or to be anonymously publishing a dangerous
confession. These framing devices – if not always plausible – at least
compelled the reader to think critically about the relationship between
author and story.
Over time, as the novel gained legitimacy, authors grew comfortable
plunging their readers directly into a fictional world, and eventually into a
fictional consciousness. But 20th-century modernist writers such as
Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner kept questions of epistemology at the

3. 3/1/23, 5:09 PM
Seduced by Story review: Peter Brooks on our fatal addiction to narrative - New Statesman
Page 3 of 5
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2022/12/seduced-by-story-the-use-and-abuse-of-narrative-review
forefront, incorporating unreliable narrators and implicating “the reader in
games of hide-and-seek”
. In Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! the drama
centres on how information is unspooled; the central mystery – of why
Henry Sutpen killed his sister’s fiancé – takes on different layers of
meaning as character after character enters, each with his own challenge
to the family lore. Readers had to stay alert as they teased out the intricate
relationships between narrator and author, between teller and tale.
Brooks is troubled, meanwhile, by the success of Paula Hawkins’s 2015
novel The Girl on the Train, a psychological thriller that, to Brooks’s
dismay, violates its own rules by letting one character narrate, in a realistic
register, her own experience of dying. Brooks worries that readers’
embrace of the novel in all of its “sloppiness” is symptomatic of a laziness
bred by our immersion in story.
Content from our partners
Surrounded as we are, it is inevitable that we turn the narrative lens on
ourselves, conceiving of the events of our own lives as plot points,
components of a hero’s journey. I barely knew who I was when, at 17, I was
asked to arrange the facts of my life into a story so compelling that it
would win over a college admissions committee; to find some through-line
in my choices of after-school activities and high school courses and turn
myself into a sympathetic character. I rarely draw on whatever I learned in
physics or geometry, but my first exercise in self-branding turned out to
be one of the more relevant lessons – helping me prepare to post “stories”
about my life on Instagram and, eventually, to write a memoir (contributing
to the genre in whose proliferation Brooks finds more evidence of the
“dominant narrative paradigm”). At least I have the excuse of being a
writer; according to Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast “The Storytelling
Craze”
, the number of job-seekers identifying as “storytellers” on LinkedIn
rose from none in 2011 to half a million in 2017. Meanwhile, everyone on
TikTok has “main character energy”
.

4. 3/1/23, 5:09 PM
Seduced by Story review: Peter Brooks on our fatal addiction to narrative - New Statesman
Page 4 of 5
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2022/12/seduced-by-story-the-use-and-abuse-of-narrative-review
But, as Brooks (drawing on Kierkegaard) reminds us, we are handicapped
as narrators by our ignorance of how the story ends: it is not until the
moment of death that life’s “meaning becomes apparent”
. Only then – an
event that resists reporting – might we finally, fleetingly, understand the
significance of various twists and turns. According to Brooks, portraying
the death of fictional characters – including their final epiphanies and
regrets – is one of the major projects of fiction, from Samuel
Richardson’s Clarissa to Balzac’s Old Goriot and Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich. (The
impulse found cruder expression in popular 17th-century pamphlets,
distributed by London prisons, which claimed to capture the thoughts of
criminals in the days and hours before their executions. Based on dictation
allegedly given to the prison chaplain, the confessions typically featured
last-minute proclamations of faith.)
It is not because Brooks has lost his faith in the power of narrative that he
wants to resist the “storification of reality”: on the contrary. He is only
urging caution. We need stories, he writes, to protect us from the
unmanageable “chaos of reality”
. And even if he wanted to abolish them,
he wouldn’t stand a chance: inventing stories is fundamental, intuitive.
Children begin making up fictions around the same time they start to form
words. Brooks cites the psychologist Paul Harris, who argues that playing
make-believe is a crucial developmental stage, allowing toddlers to
explore the world and even exert control over their own imaginative
domain. Harris suggests that they derive a type of pleasure similar to that
enjoyed by the novel-readers and TV-watchers they may grow up to
become: they dwell in a state of “half-belief” – a dream they have willingly
tricked themselves into.
It may be evidence of the “hyperinflation of story” that when Brooks asks
why “other forms of presentation and understanding have been largely
abandoned in favour of telling stories”
, I couldn’t think of what those forms
might be – until he mentioned logical modes like argument, and lyrical
ones like echo and rhyme. I would have liked some elaboration, although

5. 3/1/23, 5:09 PM
Seduced by Story review: Peter Brooks on our fatal addiction to narrative - New Statesman
Page 5 of 5
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2022/12/seduced-by-story-the-use-and-abuse-of-narrative-review
the examples he does offer – pointing out, for instance, that 20th-century
advertisers competed to write the catchiest jingles, rather than the
narrative arcs we now see in commercials – are compelling.
Ultimately, Brooks is less interested in proposing alternatives or in
speculating about how we got here – was it the rise of academic attention
on narrative? Post-Freudian analysts’ insistence on the therapeutic value
of “getting your own story right”? – than in reminding us that fiction is not
reality, and life is not a story, that “telling and living are not the same
thing”
.
Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative
Peter Brooks
New York Review Books, 176pp, £14.99
[See also: The restoration of the coffeehouse]