How trusting should we be of a fictional story?

A passage from Alice Robb.

In Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, Peter Brooks complains that

"he cannot even look at a box of biscuits or browse deodorant online without encountering tales of ambitious young entrepreneurs and idealistic families seeking preservative-free personal care products.

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Brooks's fear is that we are so over-saturated with story that we have become undiscerning consumers ... even when scepticism — of where information is coming from and of who is delivering it — would be more appropriate. Our constant exposure to narrative, he writes, might even leave us vulnerable to trusting conspiracy theories.

In 18th-century novels authors took pains to explain how they had come to know the story they were telling, often including elaborate forewords in which they claimed to have discovered a manuscript or a trove of letters in an abandoned suitcase, or to be anonymously publishing a dangerous confession. These framing devices — if not always plausible — at least compelled the reader to think critically about the relationship between author and story.

Over time, as the novel gained legitimacy, authors grew comfortable plunging their readers directly into a fictional world, and eventually into a fictional consciousness. But 20th-century modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner kept questions of epistemology at the forefront, incorporating unreliable narrators and implicating 'the reader in games of hide-and-seek'. In Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! the drama centres on how information is unspooled ... Readers had to stay alert as they teased out the intricate relationships between narrator and author, between teller and tale.

— "Our fatal addiction to narrative," Alice Robb, New Statesman, Dec 16, 2022

Contrast that, Brooks goes on (according to Robb), with "Paula Hawkins's 2015 novel The Girl on the Train" in which "one character narrate[s], in a realistic register, her own experience of dying."

Also, from James Rozoff:

"A 4th generation of people raised on television — the ultimate amplifier of consumer values — has entered adulthood. There are few people now alive who have not been immersed in the values projected by the marketers of conspicuous consumption from the moment they were born. There is no art, no music, no programs, no storytelling, that is not dependent upon corporate approval, at least none capable of garnering a sizable audience. Should an artist gain a certain amount of followers, they will either be coopted or marginalized."
— James Rozoff, "All Barriers To Corporate Capitalism Have Been Removed", Dec. 18, 2022

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Read my stories on Medium:

"How Do You Decide What to Include in Your Narrative?"
"It's Not Stated as Fact — But People Think It's True"
"Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories"