distribution for not - Life and Work YUP distribution for not - YUP LIFE AND WORK WRITERS, READERS, AND T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N S BETWEEN THEM ❁ distribution for not T I- M P A R K S YUP 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. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e- mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Gotham and Adobe Garamond types by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United Statesdistribution of America. Library of Congress Controlfor Number: 2015951353 ISBN 978- 0- 300- 21536- 6 (cloth : alk. paper) not A catalogue record -for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 YUP (Permanence of Paper). 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 distribution 81 Samuel Beckett for 102 Georges Simenon 124 not Muriel Spark - 138 Philip Roth 150 J. M. Coetzee YUP 163 Julian Barnes 174 Colm Tóibín 183 Geoff Dyer 194 Peter Stamm 206 Graham Swift 219 Dave Eggers 233 Haruki Murakami 247 C O N T E N T S Peter Matthiessen 260 Stieg Larsson 271 E. L. James 286 Acknowledgments 299 Credits 301 Index of Names 303 distribution for not - YUP 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 objectivedistribution existence. Things can be demonstrated. Your reaction tofor 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. Yetnot 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 exclusionYUP 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 I N T R OD U C T I ON 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 thedistribution people, though they never read what the acolytes write, are happy with that. The very fact of all this worshipful industry confirms forfor the mere consumer of literature that his habit is noble and important.not 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 ReviewYUP 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 I N T R OD U C T I ON 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 Storiesdistribution proved particularly useful. Ugazio considers the construction of identity in terms of a number of “semantic polarities” (fear/courage,for good/evil, success/failure, be- longing/exclusion) and suggestsnot 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 matterYUP 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 I N T R OD U C T I ON illnesses, or again with the tensions and ambiguities we find in creative art. Without becoming schematic, I began to explore the possibility of using this kind of approach to experience as a way of reading nov- els and getting a sense not just of what they are about but of why readers react to them as they do. Let me give a simple, or rather sim- plified, example. All Thomas Hardy’s novels present characters who take risks in career and above all love, seeking to free themselves from the limitations of their origins and the constrictions of social conven- tion. The language is packed with references to fear and courage, rashness and cowardice, boldness and timidity. Wisdom is always seen as a form of caution. Increasingly, novel after novel, the pro- tagonist’s struggle toward freedom is more and more severely, even grotesquely punished. So Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure have tended to be read, as is convenient for liberal thinkers in the twentieth century, as attacksdistribution on Victorian bigotry, but as D. H. Lawrence pointed out, Hardy seems to be deliberately loading the dice against his characters asfor if he needs to prove to himself that any courageous attempt notto achieve personal freedom is doomed to failure. Courageous in- themselves, in the subjects they tackle, his novels seem to suggest that courage is a mug’s game. And in fact, if we look at Hardy’sYUP life, a desire for freedom and with it a need to see himself as courageous is constantly contrasted by a crippling fear of exposure, criticism, and public disapproval. The novels allow him to be brave on paper while remaining cautious in his actual life, always in church though quietly atheist, never actually betraying his wife while constantly planning to do so.