Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives (review)

Marshall Gregory's new book has its roots in influential studies of ethics and literature published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly Wayne C. Booth's The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988) and Martha C. Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990). As a scholar who has collaborated with Booth, Gregory seems unconcerned to differentiate his assumptions and claims from these earlier studies, even though he is clearly doing something new. In addressing the book to a broad, general audience rather than critics or academic professionals, he is appealing to a culture obsessed with narrative to think reflectively about how the stories we encounter daily in such a variety of forms shape our ethos. Gregory's passionate conviction about the topic's relevance is apparent on every page. In its directness, lucidity, personal humor, and warmth, Shaped by Stories will indeed engage a wide variety of readers. Since the book establishes this tone and approach without oversimplification, it also provides a fine introduction to the subject for academics in fields besides literature who plan to incorporate fiction or film into their teaching of ethics.

The book explores the connection between the narratives we read (or view, or listen to) and the characters we develop in ways the Victorians would have taken for granted. Our more skeptical age needs to be shown just how this works, and Gregory does so by arguing that narratives compel our initial assent to their ethics (even if we choose later to resist), that they do so with aesthetic strategies intricately bound to ethical vision, and that we would be well served to engage as a culture in "vigorous ethical discourse about who we want to become and about the kinds of influences that help or hinder our progress" (195). As Gregory himself admits, these claims are not novel. Critics of all ages have promoted such arguments—Matthew Arnold most famously in the Victorian period—but more attention has been devoted to the making of assertions than to actual demonstrations of the claims through analysis.

The book undertakes this analysis after paving the way for it in the early chapters' intriguing discussions of ethical agency, the ethics of real and vicarious experience, and the fostering of social affiliation through narrative. A paradoxical point about reading becomes central to Gregory's balanced view: being alone with a narrative prepares one for embracing life in all its social and ethical dimensions. If there is one thing the book clearly opposes and judges it is mere escapism or the assumption that narrative can be entertaining only. If we read so as not to feel alone, "we also read to be alone, to feel the pulse and the progress of our own interior imagination, to live in that special place within ourselves where our vicarious experience of others' lives is yet a solitary and reflective activity" (17). Being alone in this sense is not escapist but productive. One of the thought-provoking comparisons Gregory makes among kinds of narratives—film, television, and print—is that we regularly pause for reflection when reading, whereas it is unusual to stop a DVD to ponder the narrative unfolding before us. The book is compelling in its denunciation of stories that pander to fantasy or invite us to assent to popular clichés and "participate in the prejudices of culture" (194). That said, Gregory also does not come across as elitist in his assumptions or his examples and references, which include television programs and movies as well as literary fiction.

Gregory does, however, choose literary texts for his most careful analysis. Including the texts of two short stories—Katherine Anne Porter's "The Grave" (1935) and James Thurber's "The Catbird Seat" (1942)—enables him to show very specifically how each narrative structures desire, provokes hopes and anxieties, and creates an ethical trajectory through plot. Gregory's aesthetic analysis of Porter's story...