Garrett Stewart Peter Brooks has executed a sustained venture in narrative theory and Freudian psychoanalysis, a book of stunning intuitive conviction and meticulous textual engagement, a study detailed, incremental, and exhaustive. With Freud again as explanatory touchstone, and with all of Brooks's supple analytic powers still on Almost the whole difference between the two projects lies latent in their subtitles. Aspiring to a theory of narrative's overall shape, the scrupulousness of the earlier study turned on the theoretical force of a structured intentionality in rather than of narrative, not lying behind it but impelling it from within, a virtual libidinal drive synchronized with the reading energies of the audience.
Such synchronization remains the hallmark of Brooks's superbly lucid and flexible deployment of Freud, but the field of interaction, the erotic mesh, is now more strictly localized—sometimes rather elusively.
We find the object of certain desires in narrative, his new subtitle suggests, not just in storytelling at large but, more to the point here, in the erotic bodies it so frequently displays and, rendering them semiotic, makes "readable. So far so good, since a diverse and slippery issue is worth no less attention than the kind of post-Aristotelian conception of plot as a quasi-erotic machination of desire that was Brooks's monolithic—but no larger—topic last time out.
The body has, of course, been much in the theoretical news of late: the body disciplined into sexuality and penalized Foucault , the body tremulous and privatized Frances Barker , the body pained and world-constitutive Elaine Scarry , the body feminized by subjection to the male gaze Laura Mulvey , the body troubled in its gender because constructed in its very sex Judith Butler , the body sensationalized by fictional manipulation D.
Brooks avoids both the melodrama and the preciosity that may invade some of these approaches—and especially the phraseological fallout that often clings to studies derivative from them. Brooks neither writes the body nor thinks the body: he studies its representations, often brilliantly. Stressing the parallel rather than revisionist development of his own "body work" over the last decade, he might also have claimed for his book a synoptic vantage—or at least retrospective advantage.
