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The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of "the literary" has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognized as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is skeptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading.
The Novel: A Survival Skill is the fruit of a lifetime's search for a different, more immediate, but again systematic and serious way of talking about literature. Developed over many years, it offers a completely new account of the relationship between a writer, his or her work, and the reader. As such it radically undermines traditional literary criticism and the various criteria used for evaluating a work of fiction. Drawing on ideas from systemic psychology, Tim Parks suggests that both the content and style of a novelist's work, the kind of stories told and the way in which they are told, form part of a more general strategy or simply habit of communication that the novelist has learned within his or her family of origin. The reader reacts to these in very much the same way he or she would react to the same communicative strategy in a real life encounter, different readers reacting differently depending on their own backgrounds and habits of communication.
Looking at the different value structures that can dominate in any family--good/evil, independence/dependence, success/failure, belonging/exclusion--this book looks at how a number of major writers position themselves within these value structures, how this positioning is manifest in their writing, and how readers have responded to this depending on their own positioning in the same semantics. Thomas Hardy, for example, a man eager to believe himself courageous but terrified of the consequences of any socially "unacceptable" behavior, constructs stories which are courageous in their willingness to debate difficult issues, but which constantly suggest that any attempt to behave courageously is condemned to disaster. Hardy, as it were, imprisons himself in a world where it is folly to take risks. He is thus exceedingly conservative in his life, while at the same time able to think of himself as courageous in his writing. The Novel: A Survival Skill looks at the way different readers in different periods respond to this depending on their own position with regard to fear, courage, social convention and so on.
- Sales Rank: #1126702 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-16
- Released on: 2015-09-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.20" h x .50" w x 7.70" l, .45 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 208 pages
Review
"Tim Parks is a wildly inconsistent writer, but every now and again he produces an unmissable book, and The Novel: A Survival Skill, his journal through the coercive emotional strategies of Joyce, Hardy, Dickens and others, is biographical and psychoanalytic criticism of the best kind." --Edmund Gordon, The Times Literary Supplement
About the Author
Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks studied at Cambridge and Harvard before moving permanently to Italy in 1981. Author of three bestselling books on Italy, and fifteen novels, including the Booker short-listed Europa, and most recently Painting Death, he has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi. While running a post-graduate degree course in translation at IULM University, Milan, he writes regularly for the LRB and the NYRB. His non-fiction works include, Translating Style, a literary approach to translation problems, Medici Money, an account of the relation between banking, the Church and art in the 15th century, and four accounts of life in contemporary Italy, Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education, A Season with Verona and Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Erudite, accessible, revelatory, absorbing and utterly compulsive!
By Lady Fancifull
As soon as I heard that Parks (whom I think is a particularly fine writer on philosophical matters) had written a book re-evaluating literary criticism of the novel, I was instantly sold and frothing at the mouth, anxious to lay my hands on a copy. And so delighted it find it as an offer for review from Amazon Vine
I finished this a few days ago, in a whirl of underlining, notes-to-self and fizzing with excitement. Was it as wonderful as my expectations were telling me. Oh yes, and far more
I don’t know whether it is zeitgeist, or what, but for an increasing while I’ve been aware that my appreciation of novels has little to do with anything I was taught about ‘lit-crit’ and its coolness in my long ago sojourn in academia. Instead, what obsesses me is ‘the voice’ of the author. And the relationship that voice has with me, as reader. ‘Voice’ for sure has something to do with style, but what I am feeling for is something behind the use of language and its ability to make me see fresh. (what I think of as ‘poetic sensibilities’ – the eschewing of cliché, the ability to wake me into the world and engage properly) What I want is to be in some way arrested by the writer, spun round to face them, and have an engagement with their particular humanity. I’m wedded to ‘the arts’ as being awakeners, being transformative – what I want is to be CHANGED in some way, to engage in relationship with the work of art, so that curiously, it feels as if I have entered into a dynamic response, something which is discriminating mind, affected and affecting heart, visceral gut instinct, and, overall, something transpersonal. I’m after a response which is absolutely subjective, my response. Having total validity to me alone, because of who I am, and the way in which the particular writer, like any other particular individual, speaks, or does not speak, connects or does not connect with me. My interest is in the relationship – this writer, this reader – how and why will this particular connection happen. And how and why might other readers connect with this writer. ‘Objective’ assessment is less interesting to me – in some ways, this is always an illusion the observer is always a part of the experiment, at least at a quantum level.
So…….long preamble, what does this have to do with Parks?
What used to be called “Biographical Fallacy” is a dismissive view of literary analysis which connects the writer and his/her life to their works. Lit-crit has focused more on different strands – ‘in the world’ strands – criticism from a Marxist perspective, a feminist perspective, for example, or on microscopic textual analysis.
Parks began to sing seductively and compelling to this reader, setting out his approach to a different, enhanced ‘biographical’ way of engaging with the writer, the work, the reader, and all connections between them
“The novel, then, is not some magically separate art object entire unto itself, but something plucked from the flow of a life. The reader encounters the author through what he has written and a relationship is established, one that will not be entirely distinct from the kind of relationships the author seeks in his life, or that readers form in theirs”……………….”When we open a novel, as with any encounter, we move into an area of risk”
Parks’ approach to lit-crit is connected with systemic psychology, family dynamics, and heavily influenced by a friend of his, Italian psychologist Valeria Ugazio. The two discuss each others’ fields, and clearly there is a lot of intellectual cross-pollination.
What Parks does, with four major authors he examines – Joyce, Hardy, Lawrence, Dickens, is to look at formative influences, family dynamics, and, as it were, the story, the super-objective (as well as subtext) of emotional tone and dynamic engaged in. A kind of family food, in other words, which will be expressed through the individual writer and reader. So, for Joyce, there is a winner/loser competitiveness, for Dickens, belonging/unbelonging and, for both Hardy and Lawrence, different approaches along the polarity of fear and courage.
Parks also puts himself under this microscope, and had me jumping joyously precisely because I identified a dynamic of my own – the sense of good/bad and worthy/unworthy becoming ever more refined. He talks feelingly about the idea of reading itself being (or needing to be) worthy and transformative. Parks was a ‘son of the manse’ as it were, so brought up in an idea of the power of the word. Or at least The Word. This invests language and literature with huge power. Parks was aware of ‘good literature’ and ‘bad literature’ – and found in literature, he was particularly attracted to where the certainties of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ characters and stories were not presented black or white, but
“books that returned life to the great confusion I always felt it was”
I didn’t grow up in any sort of overt religious space, but I did grow up in a home where the transformation and the transpersonal connectivity had been absorbed from a kind of pan-religious view and art was become the place where transformation happens.
“it did seem to me that novels were the kind of space where one needed to be free to explore the most difficult things,….It is precisely when we intensely disagree with a book, or when we feel that a character is acting in a way that is quite incredible to us – that we should begin to wonder whether this is mere incompetence (quite possible of course) or whether it alerts us to a whole different way of conceiving of the world and positioning oneself in it”
Each reader, of course, will find their own point of resonance in this book, what Parks is asking the reader to do IS to explore themselves, to reflect and actively engage as they read.
For me, there was gold, not glitter, on every page.
I have one criticism, not enough to reduce any star rating – it is all (with a small nod to Virginia Woolf) an examination of the ‘male literary giants’ However, as the author, a man, perceives his world through his masculine embodiment, and is of course stressing that the reader should be aware they are responding out of their own individual (embodied, of course) being, it feels dishonest of me to ‘expect’ the engagement with writers to be with those embodied as female. Parks explored writers who spoke strongly to HIM.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Can't recommend it highly enough
By Laura Hendrie
A book full of surprises and fresh ways of thinking and worth every page. Can't recommend it highly enough.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Read this book!
By Torrey Townsend
Absolutely incredible. This book has changed the way I look at writing and reading. Parks has amazing powers of perception, and the way that he is able to articulate his highly meaningful and provocative insights quite frankly blows my mind. If you are into literary criticism, if you are interested in interrogating mainstream conceptions of art, literature, and narrative, this book will be extremely rewarding. I can't do justice to how important I think this book is. If you like it, "Where I'm Reading From" is also great.
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