Tim Parks - Where I'm Reading From

In short, there is a tension between reader and text that the translator experiences in a special way because, rewriting the text in his own language, he has to allow that tension to happen again for a new group of readers. Becoming aware of how you might instinctively wish to change a text and eliminate the tension is both to understand the book better and to understand something about yourself.

“I LOVE THE new DeLillo.”

“And I hate it.”

It’s a familiar conversation: like against dislike with no possible resolution. Or alternatively: “I can’t see why Freedom upsets you so much. I didn’t like it either, but who cares?” Interest against disinterest; as when your wife/brother/friend/colleague raves about some Booker or Pulitzer winner and you feel vaguely guilty. “Sure,” you agree, “great writing, intriguing stuff.” But the truth is you just couldn’t find the energy to finish the book.

So, is there anything we can say about such different responses? Or must we just accept De gustibus non disputandum est ? The fact is that traditional critical analysis, however brilliant, however much it may help us to understand a novel, rarely alters the color of our initial response. Enthusiasm or disappointment may be confirmed or attenuated, but only exceptionally reversed. We say: James Wood/Colm Tóibín/Michiko Kakutani admires the book and has given convincing reasons for doing so, but I still feel it is the worst kind of crowd-pleaser.

Let me offer a possible explanation that has been developing in my mind over a decade and more. It’s a central tenet of systemic psychology that each personality develops in the force field of a community of origin, usually a family, seeking his or her own position in a pre-existing group, or “system,” most likely made up of mother, father, brothers and sisters, then aunts, uncles, grandparents, and so on. The leading Italian psychologist, Valeria Ugazio, further suggests that this family “system” also has “semantic content”; that is, as conversations in the family establish criteria for praise and criticism of family members and nonmembers, one particular theme or issue will dominate.

In my family, for example, the quality that mattered most was never courage or independence, success or community spirit, but goodness, usually understood as renunciation. My father was an evangelical clergyman and both parents were involved in the Charismatic Movement. Every person, every political issue, was understood in terms of good and evil. In another family, appraisal might revolve chiefly around, say, the courage and independence someone has shown, or the extent to which another person is timorous and dependent. In such a family it’s a fair bet that one member will have shown a remarkable spirit of adventure while another rarely takes risks of any kind.

That is—according to Ugazio’s theory—family members tend to manifest the qualities, positive and negative, around which the group’s conversations revolve. So it was that at a certain point in his adolescence, my brother made a great show of being “evil” in the terms my parents understood the word: he grew his hair long, drank, smoked dope, locked himself in his room with cute girlfriends, and even told us, with a fair parody of a malignant grin, that he was demonic. As the youngest of three, I found my own adolescence shaped by constant parental pressure to choose between my “bad” brother and “good” sister who played the guitar in church and dressed with exemplary propriety.

Each developing family member, this theory suggests, will be looking to find a stable position within the polarized values the family is most concerned with. Persons who for some reason find this difficult, perhaps drawn emotionally one way and intellectually another, might eventually develop symptoms of psychological unease; they cannot figure out where they stand in the group; which, in a family, might not be far from saying that they don’t quite know who they are.

In her remarkable book Semantic Polarities and Psychopathologies in the Family: Permitted and Forbidden Stories (2013), Ugazio offers examples of this process from celebrated novels: all members of the Karamazov family, she points out, can be understood by placing them on the good-evil axis: the wicked Dimitri, the saintly Alyosha, and the more complex and untrustworthy Ivan who oscillates between the extremes. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles , on the other hand, the characters are fearful or reckless, patient or courageous, pusillanimous or bold. Of course they have other qualities too; they are complex, fully-drawn people, but it is their position along the fear-courage axis that is decisive as the plot unfolds. Moral issues in Thomas Hardy’s work usually present themselves in the form: Do I have the courage/recklessness to break this conventional moral rule?

When writing reviews I have occasionally used this kind of approach to help me get a fix on a writer. Reading through scores of Chekhov’s stories recently, I became aware that the key issue throughout was belonging: Do I belong, the characters ask themselves, to this family/institution/social class, or don’t I? Am I excluded from this relationship, am I merely trapped in this marriage? Most of the central characters display an ambivalence about whether they want to be part of the group or not: or rather, they want to be part, but then feel diminished by this belonging. They need to feel superior to the group or relationship as well as being in it; they need to escape, but if they do, they are immediately anxious to return.

So far so good. But let’s take the argument a little further than Ugazio does. Systemic theorists (or “positioning theorists” as more recent jargon would have it) see people as constantly taking the position developed within the family out into the larger world. Some of them go so far as to say that identity is no more (no less!) than the position one consistently adopts, or seeks to adopt, in each new situation. As a result, misunderstandings may occur—at work perhaps, or in a newly formed couple—between people who have grown up with quite different criteria for assessing behavior and establishing a position in relation to it. Hence expressions like: “I don’t know where she’s coming from”; “He really doesn’t get it, does he?”

Could not something of the same failure of two psyches to mesh occur between writers and readers? Or alternatively, might not the psyches of writer and reader mesh all too powerfully, but in quarrel rather than harmony?

For example, not only does a writer like Chekhov focus constantly on issues of belonging and escape, but he does so in such a way as to invite our sympathy for the complex behavioral strategy that he personally always adopted: an attitude of generous involvement with others that nevertheless safeguards absolute independence and allows him to retain a certain separateness and superiority. Many of Chekhov’s stories, about people trapped in relationships on the one hand, or excluded from their peer groups on the other, might be read as warnings to himself (the author) not to change this strategy. Not all readers will connect with this.

Or we might consider D.H. Lawrence. In Sons and Lovers the moral veto that Miriam places on sex before marriage is “unmasked” by her boyfriend, Paul, as merely fear finding an alibi in moral convention. In an extremely bold move Paul declares fear to be the evil, not sex. Victorian morality is turned on its head; for those in love, Paul insists, making love is a moral imperative. Fear is a betrayal of life. While writing this novel, Lawrence ran off with a married woman, encouraging her to abandon her husband and three young children. Reading Lawrence’s strange Study of Thomas Hardy , we can see that he was intensely locked into Hardy’s imaginative world; the two of them shared the same need to find a position on issues of fear (one thinks of a poem like Lawrence’s “Snake”). But what he hated in Hardy was that his characters so often choose not to be courageous, or when they are bold and defy convention the gesture is presented as merely reckless and they are destroyed by it. He must always “stand with the average against the exception,” Lawrence complains.