Seduced by Story by Peter Brooks

Author:Peter Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Like Proust, Smith is alert to the movement between self and other that the imagination permits. He does not take Proust’s further step: that using a fictional person instead of “our brother” makes espousing his body and mind more complete, a substitution more than a simulation, and thus, paradoxically, a fuller realization of another kind of being in the world.

That is a potent argument in favor of fictions, a strong justification of our modern choice of the novel to represent everything we think we want to know, from past history to future dystopia as well as countless scenes of contemporary life. But we need also to recall what Proust tells us about the price paid for novelistic representation during the final pages of Time Regained—pages of a triumphant joy at his vocation at last discovered, but with a dark undercurrent that we should not neglect. The discovery of his vocation means, for Marcel, the renunciation of those he has loved, destined to become imaginary figures in the fiction. Persons are erased by the novelist. Marcel calls a novel a “vast cemetery where on most of the gravestones one can no longer read the names that have been effaced.”14 Cognition is incorporate with extinction and destruction: people must die for the novel to live. The death of the novelist, too, is part of the life of the fiction: he is like Scheherazade, who tells stories to ward off death. The world of fictional characters has no place for the “real” and the “living.” The power of novels to illuminate our lives depends on the alchemy that creates fictional beings as vessels of our consciousness. The novel, the instrument for seeing the world through the eyes of others, becomes in Time Regained an instrument for reading oneself with a renewed vision, turning, so to speak, the eyes of all those others on ourselves through the instrumentality of the novel.

What does this tell us about our quest to understand fictional characters and how we use them? I’m not sure I can offer anything definitive here, but I would suggest that our love of fictional characters and our willingness to spend time with them and to let them seep into our everyday “real” lives, and also our reluctance to let go of them once our reading of the fiction is over, our continuing conversation about them, maybe with them, is largely as Proust describes it: a wish to travel from star to star through the vision provided by new sets of eyes, by new optical instruments. This is in the best of cases, in the novels we value most, not a passive or escapist process but one that has a cognitive and critical function. Character in the novel gives us, in the old yet still fresh words of Matthew Arnold, a “criticism of life.”

The cognitive value of the fictional person—that person as cognitive instrument—both affirms our traditional sense of the “real life” of literary characters and paradoxically returns those characters to our own minds, now enlarged by their encounter with imagined persons.

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