Life and Work: Writers, Readers, and the Conversations between Them

321 Pages·2016·1.172 MB·English

by  Tim Parks

Life and Work
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L I F E A N D WO R K
WRITERS, READERS, AND
THE CONVERSATIONS
BETWEEN THEM
❁
T I M PA R K S
New Haven and London
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of
Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College.
Copyright © 2016 by Yale University.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction vii
Charles Dickens 1
Feodor Dostoevsky: Crime or Punishment 24
Thomas Hardy 48
Anton Chekhov 67
James Joyce 81
Samuel Beckett 102
Georges Simenon 124
Muriel Spark 138
Philip Roth 150
J. M. Coetzee 163
Julian Barnes 174
Colm Tóibín 183
Geoff Dyer 194
Peter Stamm 206
Graham Swift 219
Dave Eggers 233
Haruki Murakami 247
CONtENts
Peter Matthiessen 260
Stieg Larsson 271
E. L. James 286
Acknowledgments 299
Credits 301
Index of Names 303
vi
Introduction
How to write about literature? Or rather, how to write about
reading and writing? Would that be the same thing?
At school and university our teachers taught us how to talk about
literary texts but not about our experience of reading them. We were
given the tools to analyze rhythm and assonance and imagery and
metaphor, to spot ambiguity and polysemy, lexical fields and ono-
matopoeia, but never invited to pin down the exact nature of our
response to the work. The text has an objective existence. Things can
be demonstrated. Your reaction to it is personal. It is not the same as
my reaction. It might not be the same today as it will be tomorrow.
Best not to talk about it. Yet when we read, we do so for our personal
response, and if literary criticism is so little read, it is because it has
so little to say to the ordinary reader.
This exclusion of our personal response went hand in hand with
a disdain for biographical information about the author. The critic is
not supposed to reflect on the relationship of a writer’s life to his or
her work. The expression “biographical fallacy” was coined: it was a
mistake and an insult to the sacred powers of the imagination to re-
duce a text to a series of elements taken from the author’s life. Yet
literary biographies, unlike literary criticism, are widely and avidly
read, and not in order to discover which bits of David Copperfield or
Middlemarch came from which experiences. Readers want to know
vii
INtRODuCtION
who this person is whom they have met through his or her novels.
The meshing of life and work in literature is infinitely more complex
than a mere identification of where this or that idea might have come
from.
So critical orthodoxy eliminated both writer and reader and fo-
cused on the text. This way it was safe from the muddle of psychology,
from subjectivism, from mere chatter. It was free to be serious, solemn
even. Considered aside from both maker and consumer, the text as-
sumed a near sacred importance, as though it had value and substance
of its own, regardless of any traffic with mere human beings. Para-
doxically, the “objective,” “scientific” approach was supported by an
unspoken mysticism that placed literature beyond our immediate ex-
perience of it. A breed of acolytes grew up: those who ministered to
the work, indeed, to the Word. And they are still around. As a rule
these professors keep their backs turned toward the people, and in
general one can only suppose that the people, though they never read
what the acolytes write, are happy with that. The very fact of all this
worshipful industry confirms for the mere consumer of literature that
his habit is noble and important.
Twenty years ago I had the good fortune to be invited to contrib-
ute to the New York Review of Books, then some years later to the
London Review of Books. As a result I have now written perhaps a
hundred literary essays. Clearly the New York Review and the London
Review are not publications where one writes the kind of academic
assessments I had been taught to concoct at university. Given the
proper decorum, personal responses and even some reflection on the
author’s relation to the work are permitted. From the start, however,
the challenge was how to prove the tradition wrong; how to give
form to a discussion of the whole experience of reading without fall-
ing into the merely personal, above all the merely speculative.
viii
INtRODuCtION
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the New York Review
is that one rarely writes about a single novel, but about an entire
oeuvre, or at least a number of works by the same author. So the re-
viewer has the experience of entering into another’s world of thought
and feeling over an extended period of time. Developing as they do
from book to book, style and content suggest a pattern of communi-
cation typical of this author, as if the writing of novels were part of,
or at least in relation to, the author’s behavior in general. In that case,
a reader’s reaction to that pattern might not be unlike his or her reac-
tion to this kind of behavior in general, whether in books or out.
Developing this line of reflection, I established the habit of al-
ways reading a biography or autobiography of the author under con-
sideration, or any biographical material I could find. I also began to
draw on recent work in systemic psychology and positioning theory.
Valeria Ugazio’s book Semantic Polarities and Psychopathologies in the
Family: Permitted and Forbidden Stories proved particularly useful.
Ugazio considers the construction of identity in terms of a number
of “semantic polarities” (fear/courage, good/evil, success/failure, be-
longing/exclusion) and suggests that in each family of origin one
criterion of value will tend to be hierarchically more important than
others in the way people talk about and assess each other. As a result,
it becomes a matter of urgency for each individual in the group to
find a stable and comfortable position in relation to this dominant
polarity. Is it, for example, more important in this family to be
seen as independent and courageous, or as pure and good, or as a
winner? Wherever and for whatever reason an individual is unable to
find a stable position—perhaps he or she wishes to be good but si-
multaneously yearns for transgression, or desires intensely to belong
but then feels diminished by inclusion in the peer group—this can
lead to the kind of conflicts and oscillations we associate with mental
ix