Peter Brooks

Lit Crit as an Export Commodity

There are plenty of reasons to be gloomy about the future of literary studies. For one thing, it’s not clear that much of anyone feels the need for literary criticism any more. To be sure, there is a need for book and film reviews as guides to consumers of entertainment. But one could argue that criticism as a serious activity arose with the notion of an avant-garde art, sometime in the late 18th century, and gathered force through Romanticism and Modernism. Literary criticism belongs to an epoch where the exchange of understandings about the meanings and implications of literary texts matters—where important societal self-understandings are represented and interpreted through the literary medium. This was still true for the Modernists, for whom attempting to understand what avant-garde art was up to mattered very much. The future of consciousness, one might say, hung on what the avant-garde was up to. “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language/And next year’s words await another voice.” But now I think we, as a culture, have more or less lost our belief in this function and power of literature. Less seems to be at stake in its understanding and exegesis. This is particularly so since the culture has become so predominantly visual, living in what one film theorist has called “the frenzy of the visible.” The museum blockbuster show attracts more attention than the book, and MTV more attention than either.

Yet we continue to attract students—very good ones—to the study of literature, and continue to populate a profession that many university administrators thought would be dead by now. There seems to be something in what we do that continues to give off the light of a dying star, if that’s the right metaphor. Especially since the glory days of literary theory, in the 1970s, students have sensed that there is something important going on in the reading and interpretation of texts—that what is at stake in literary study may be absolutely central to many other kinds of understanding, that literary study can be situated somewhere close to the heart of the “human sciences.” And in fact, the last couple of decades—when literary study has been most under attack by the cultural Right, dismissed as politically contaminated, impenetrably abstruse, and hopelessly trivial—have seen the penetration of ideas and methods from lit crit in other domains. Not only has lit crit itself broadened its understanding of its arena in becoming “cultural studies” (on which more later), other fields have looked to us in some envy and emulation, and have sought to import what we are doing into their practices. Not only neighboring disciplines such as history and anthropology have been affected, even more distant planets such as economics and law have felt the force of our gravitational field.

The exports of lit crit to other fields include a number of our familiar practices: feminist theory, deconstruction, psychoanalytic theory (re-appropriated from therapy and reintegrated into the hermeneutic enterprise), queer theory, discursive analysis. Witness for instance the strange destiny of “deconstruction,” once considered the most outrageously recondite and obscurantist instrument in the lit crit toolkit, a term that made critics from the cultural Right go bonkers. It fairly quickly moved into criticism of the visual arts, and especially architecture, where a handful of visible designers undertook to give the notion a kind of literal (and perhaps platitudinous) realization, in the form of “deconstructed” buildings. Now it has become common currency throughout the domain of the aesthetic, including the fashion world—a few years ago there were ads for deconstructed men’s suits, for instance. I am convinced the word is constantly on the lips of the creative team at MTV.

But let me take another example of an export commodity from lit crit, the notion of narrative and narrativity. In the wake of their great precursors, the Russian Formalists, structuralist narratologists of the 1960s and 70s took the universality and proteanism of narrative as a call to formalize the field of its study. Roland Barthes noted the ubiquity of those “signs of narrativity” produced whenever we say “once upon a time” or simply turn on the TV. The notion of “narrativity” postulates that there is a recognizable thing or operation we call narrative that, while not necessarily wholly independent of its expressive medium (in words or in film or ballet, for instance, in French or in Chinese) can nonetheless be abstracted from that medium—as in a “plot summary”—in ways that may very well destroy what we savor about any particular narrative but nonetheless do not make it unrecognizable. Stories (unlike poems) can be translated, they can be transposed to other media, they can be summarized, they can be retold “in other words” and yet still be recognizably “the same story.” Narrative, which the human child appears to discover around age three, is one of the large categories in which we understand and order the world.

The notion that narrative is part of a universal cognitive tool-kit seemed in the mid-60s a radical discovery. It’s now become one of the banalities of “post-modernism,” which has come to recognize the “narrative construction of reality,” in a phrase made popular by psychologist Jerome Bruner. We don’t simply deal in facts that we order in 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 day-dreams, our sense of self are all constructed as stories.

Political candidates now must tell the story of who they are; pharmaceutical companies want to tell us the story of their drugs; stockbrokers pitch the story of the stocks they have to sell. A public event—the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the crash of Egyptair 007-- at once leads to a reconstruction of its story, complete with plot outlines and diagrams and restagings. One could give numberless examples. Perhaps the starkest would be the Starr Report on President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, which chose to present its major findings in a section titled simply: “The Narrative.” We have become so habituated to narrative presentation that we tended not to note how it might have been otherwise: how the Report might have been presented as a collage of witnesses’ reports and legal argumentation, for instance. Starr’s choice to present “The Narrative” was a play for public acceptance of a certain formal construction of the events and their meaning. Had he chosen a more cubist approach, readers would have course have constructed their own narratives—they did in any event. The claim that there was one narrative was a preemptive strike.

To be more serious: narrativity has also become part of the conceptual apparatus of a number of fields of thought and research traditionally held to be governed by logic, syllogism, or mathematical formula. Psychoanalysis increasingly is conceived as seeking “narrative truth.” D.N. McCloskey has argued that economics is essentially a narrative discipline—“Economists are tellers of stories . . . It is no accident that the novel and economic science were born at the same time,” he tells us—and physicist Steven Weinberg claims that convincing narratives govern the spending of millions of dollars in scientific research. The Yale Department of Graphic Design last spring held a conference wholly devoted to narrative, which it sees as the essence of its enterprise. “Law lives on narrative,” we read in a recent book by Anthony Amsterdam and Jerome Bruner, Minding the Law.

Let me in the few moments remaining say a further word about the place that “narrativity,” imported from literary study, has come to occupy in its new legal habitat. As I understand it, the idea of narrativity entered legal studies by way of a call to pay attention to “oppositional narratives” or “counter-majoritarian narratives,” stories from those traditionally marginalized or excluded by legal reasoning and procedure. Narrative on this view offers the only way to gain a hearing for kinds of experience—that of rape victims, of poverty victims, of minority groups, of certain religious communities, for instance—that the legal system, its language and rules of standing and evidence, tends to silence. These persons and groups must be allowed to speak in their own voice, to claim the right to hearing in the manner of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who holds the Wedding Guest with his “glittering eye” and forces him to hear his tale through to its conclusion.

This understanding of narrative proposed a radical unsettling of legal discourse as usual. Yet it offered a naïve positive valuation of storytelling, which surely can be used to support the worse as well as the better cause, to propagate majoritarian as well as oppositional ideologies. What has only just begun to take hold in legal thinking, I believe, is Amsterdam and Bruner’s point that the law’s traditional assumption that it adjudicates by “examining free-standing factual data selected on grounds of their logical pertinency” needs to be superseded by a recognition that “both the questions and the answers in such matters of ‘fact’ depend largely upon one’s choice (considered or unconsidered) of some overall narrative as best describing what happened or how the world works.” This is truly radical, indeed heretical thinking within the legal establishment.

That establishment does not reflect upon or use “narrativity” as a concept in analyzing the cases presented to it—and I think it ought to. Take an obvious and troubling example: the case of rape, which poses crucially the question, whose story is it? I have worked with a well-known case from Baltimore, Maryland, Rusk v. State (in the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland), and then State v. Rusk (in the Court of Appeals of Maryland). Rusk was convicted at trial; the conviction was reversed in the first appellate court, then reinstated in the higher court. In the decisions on each level, there was a majority and a minority opinion starkly opposed to one another. Thus we have four different retellings of what we know is the “same” story—the story of what happened between a man and a woman one night in Baltimore, the story then constructed at trial—with dramatically different results, results that send Rusk to prison for seven years or else release him. How can these four stories, based on the same “facts”—and none of the principal events of what happened that night was in dispute—have different outcomes? The answer, I think, is that the narrative “glue” is different: the way incidents and events are made to combine in a meaningful story, one that can be called “consensual sex” on the one hand or “rape” on the other. In each case, the blanks (what Wolfgang Iser would call the Leerstellen) of the story are filled in according to each of the judges’ general understanding of human behavior and intent. The differing outcomes in the retellings of the Rusk cases offer a dramatic instance of how narratives take on design, intention, and meaning. Narratives do not simply recount happenings; they give them shape, give them a point, argue their import, proclaim their results. And the analysis of narrative—narratology, if you will—has something important to say to the legal profession on these questions.

A recent Supreme Court opinion suggests the law’s narrativity may on occasion become visible under the bar of its repression. In Johnny Lynn Old Chief v. US (1997), Justice David Souter speaks of the need for what he calls “narrative integrity” in presentation of evidence. Souter writes:

Evidence thus has a force beyond any linear scheme of reasoning, and as its pieces come together a narrative gains momentum, with power not only to support conclusions but to sustain the willingness of jurors to draw the inferences, whatever they may be, to reach an honest verdict. This persuasive power of the concrete and particular is often essential to the capacity of jurors to satisfy the obligations that the law places on them. . . . A syllogism is not a story. (117 S.Ct. 644, 653-54)

Souter’s recognition that the presentation of evidence works not only by legal syllogism but also by story is significant. It is as if he had been reading in narratology (he may have been; he seems to be the most erudite of the current Justices). Yet you look in vain in Westlaw and Lexis for another judicial opinion that picks up on Souter’s concept. It remains an exception. Nonetheless, it suggests how what we do can penetrate into other spheres, and come to bear on vital issues: quite literally, vital—matters of life and death.

We have no control over the uses made of the goods we export, and they can appear in mindless forms. {cf. our President} So we are tempted to let the flag follow trade, and set up our own colonial outposts within the law, or psychoanalysis or economics. This kind of interdisciplinarity then promotes the rise of the peculiar imperialism that marches under banner of “cultural studies.” We are all more or less doing cultural studies at present, and the expansion of our purview—of the number of texts and cultural artifacts that we can talk about —is mostly positive. It indeed takes us back to the beginnings of our discipline, when the study of rhetoric and poetics equipped citizens for mastery of all public discourses. What I think we need to affirm and adhere to, though, is that which we know how to do best, and that which gives value to what we export to other fields. That is, in broadest terms, the practice of reading—reading that is close, even slow, informed, disciplined, that always brings us—“us” meaning those we teach as well as our colleagues—back to the text. It is our understanding of the textuality of cultural discourses of all sorts, including the law, including economics—that gives our work value to others, and we should not forget that.