Reading for the Plot

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)