If not quite the "erotics" of art that Susan Sontag called for in
Against Interpretation, these richly reflective, often brilliant
essays certainly open some promising post-structuralist paths in
that direction. Brooks (French, Yale) wants to move beyond the
static taxonomies of narratology (the types, conventions, and
semantic bases of stories) to study "what impels [narrative's]
movements of transformation, and thus its engagement with human
memory and desire and its status as a form of thinking." What, in
other words, drives the teller to shape his tale and the reader to
pursue its meaning? The creation and the quest for plot, Brooks
maintains, arise out of our desire to impose patterns of order on
temporality. An obvious enough idea, but Brooks fuses it with some
powerful speculative insights: Sartre's notion that all stories are
fictions written backwards, Walter Benjamin's dictum that death is
the sanction of everything the storyteller says, and above all
Freud's exploration of Thanatos in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
According to Freud's "masterplot," narration is a repetition of
events, through which the death instinct works in the text,
pressing on toward the quiescence of the ending. But repetition
also delays the final release, the love-death of the pleasure
principle, by wandering off into all sorts of complex detours.
Brooks balances this high-flying theory with some fine
down-to-earth examples: close readings of Stendhal, Balzac,
Flaubert, Conrad, Faulkner, etc. The rather narrow range of texts
chosen makes sense, since Brooks' focus is almost exclusively
modernist. Within that territory, his Freudian scheme works
beautifully, but Brooks' students had better come to class
prepared. (His chapter on Absalom, Absalom! is especially
demanding.) Dense, difficult, and rewarding. (Kirkus Reviews)
A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to
readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how
the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose
a new meaning on life.
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