Tim Parks, of The New York Review of Books, is my favorite writer of Book-Meta. He has a gift for writing just two pages - but making them so pithy and probing that they set ideas buzzing in my mind for two months afterwards.
This week, let's hop onto a column of Tim Parks', and then dive from that into a pool of pondering, about:
How books (and movies and TV shows) give us stories and characters that we can all talk about;
How books show us different sides of human nature, and new worlds, so that we can learn and grow from reading them;
How we used to have a few books that everyone read, which was good and bad. Now we have many more colors and kinds of stories to choose from, but we've lost the common code and the shared worldview that the old Canon mapped out for us.
Starting Conversations
Here is the Tim Parks column from October which got me thinking:
The Books We Talk About (and Those We Don’t)
What is the social function of the novel? . . .
Conversation. A shared subject of discussion. Something complex for minds to meet around. This is particularly the case when we’re talking to people we don’t know well, people we meet, as it were, socially. Of course there are plenty of other topics available. The weather. Sports. Politics. But there’s only so much that can be said about cloud formations, not everyone sees the fascinations of baseball, and politics, as we know, can be dangerous territory. Novels—or films or television dramas for that matter—offer a feast of debate and create points of contact: are the characters believable, do people really do or think these things, does the story end as it should, is it well written? The way different people respond to Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, or J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, will tell you a lot about their personalities without anything personal needing to be said. Novels are ideal subjects for testing the ground between us.
There are so many things we can talk about. Some are safe topics of conversation (the weather), others might offend (sex) or start arguments (politics). Books are one of the few subjects that are pretty safe, yet also universal and deep enough to fuel a substantial conversation. The drawback is, so many people hardly read any books these days. But if you're with someone who does read a lot, then you have plenty to talk about.
There's a particular safety, or comfort, in talking about books: they contain engaging human dramas, and address big questions that we don't have to take personally. If I'm frustrated with life's pressures, or feeling low or angry at myself, I don't always enjoy getting on the phone to endure a friend or family member poking at my problems in a misguided effort to help me face them, or offering encouragement on a subject I'd rather just drop. But my closest brother and I share a lot of life experience and understanding, and also are voracious readers. So I can just say "blech - but I don't want to talk about it". Then we spend half an hour discussing what we've been reading, our reactions, and what it got us thinking about. Half an hour later I put the phone down, feeling more human and less burdened and alone.
All the main ingredients of novels are things that interest and move any thinking, feeling reader: Storytelling, Character, World-building, all the uses and play of Language and Meaning. These are the universal code of understanding: how we parse our experience, expand our views, and explain ourselves.
We can also find these ingredients in movies and TV shows. The best movies have always been fertile gardens of things to talk about, and the best TV shows are catching up with them. The Sopranos, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, House, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report (and others) are cleverer and more complex then most of the shows we watched in the 20th century. They have more craft and more heart, and they give us more worth examining, pondering and talking about. With one huge advantage over books: when a TV show takes the country by storm, you can mention it at a dinner party and everyone has a sense of what it's about. While very few books achieve that cultural ubiquity. All I can think of in recent years are Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code, and Fifty Shades of Grey - and I bet most Americans have never even opened those last two.
Movies can be a very Wow! experience, but most of them are gone in about two hours. Unless they haunt your consciousness for weeks afterwards, they don't involve your imagination as extensively as reading a novel does, they don't set up as many tangents and questions as a great writer can. Some classics do enter our shared cultural code in a way that opens them up as conversation pieces (e.g. The Wizard of Oz; Casablanca; The Good, the Bad & the Ugly; Star Wars; Thelma & Louise; Pulp Fiction; Brokeback Mountain).
Some of the recent TV shows I mentioned may rival the complex storytelling and raw humanity of great novels (The Wire? Breaking Bad?). They are more widely watched than any novels are read. But I think there are ways that novels play in our minds which they can't mimic, and ways that great writers leave things out, which open up the creative process for us to join in the imagining and exploring. The best novels have ways of deepening and engaging us that TV can't touch, I think.
.
Deepening Conversations, Expanding Our Selves
One could list any number of novels—Hard Times, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Native Son—that have provoked an intense level of public debate, usually because they combined a seductive plot with issues that mattered deeply to people in that particular time and place. A novel becomes a focus for such issues, provoking conversations perhaps only latent to that point, and these conversations then guarantee the work’s further success and the writer’s celebrity. Beyond a certain level of readability, however, the ultimate quality of the writing, or the “art” involved, is largely irrelevant, at least for this social function. A poorly written book, whether it be What is to be Done? by the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual Nikolay Chernyshevsky or E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, can stimulate intense general conversation far better than an extraordinary but taxing piece of writing—Beckett’s Trilogy or Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten—or even a genre work, that, however popular, raises no underlying issues: Simenon’s Maigrets, Fleming’s Bond books, le Carré’s spy stories.
I'm quoting this paragraph because it's where I most disagree with Tim Parks' views. But Parks is looking at one particular plane, as he acknowledges:
Beyond a certain level of readability, however, the ultimate quality of the writing, or the “art” involved, is largely irrelevant, at least for this social function. A poorly written book . . can stimulate intense general conversation . . .
Parks is examining which books galvanize a
broadly shared social conversation. I want to consider this question, and also a second point: how do books
deeply engage our minds, hearts and personalities? How do books help us change and grow?
I believe this is one of the special charms of books - which movies, TV shows, and other art forms rarely achieve. People reread their favorite books, and find a part of themselves living between those covers, whether they be The Bible, The Lord of the Rings, Jane Austen or Kurt Vonnegut. William Faulkner reread Don Quixote every year. When a novel is both great and a personal favorite, we weave it into our inner world, so that it grows alongside ourselves, and we find different angles and hues each time we revisit it.
Marrying part of yourself to a favorite book is a very inward and personal experience: not easy to explain or to measure and chart. But if you've read this far, my more general idea probably makes sense to you: Novels can draw us in, engaging our hearts and minds, so that we live and stretch ourselves a little before we put the book down. Perhaps you've already read how, a year ago, psychologists tested this theory. The results, from Scientific American:
Emanuele Castano, a social psychologist, along with PhD candidate David Kidd conducted five studies in which they divided a varying number of participants (ranging from 86 to 356) and gave them different reading assignments: excerpts from genre (or popular) fiction, literary fiction, nonfiction or nothing. After they finished the excerpts the participants took a test that measured their ability to infer and understand other people’s thoughts and emotions. The researchers found, to their surprise, a significant difference between the literary- and genre-fiction readers.
When study participants read non-fiction or nothing, their results were unimpressive. When they read excerpts of genre fiction, such as Danielle Steel’s The Sins of the Mother, their test results were dually insignificant. However, when they read literary fiction, such as The Round House by Louise Erdrich, their test results improved markedly—and, by implication, so did their capacity for empathy. . . .
Literary fiction, by contrast, focuses more on the psychology of characters and their relationships. “Often those characters’ minds are depicted vaguely, without many details, and we’re forced to fill in the gaps to understand their intentions and motivations,” Kidd says. This genre prompts the reader to imagine the characters’ introspective dialogues. This psychological awareness carries over into the real world, which is full of complicated individuals whose inner lives are usually difficult to fathom. Although literary fiction tends to be more realistic than popular fiction, the characters disrupt reader expectations, undermining prejudices and stereotypes. They support and teach us values about social behavior, such as the importance of understanding those who are different from ourselves.
Great books, when they enchant our souls, do this and much more. They show us new ways of thinking, they teach our tongues to dance dozens of new steps with language, they blow the roofs off our minds and rain upon us visions of different people and worlds. I remember how, in my childhood, book after book set my mind ablaze with magical adventures, far beyond my own experience: Greek myths, Narnia, Middle Earth, Outer Space, millennia yet to come . . . they showed my imagination new colors to hunger and hope for.
I'm limiting this too much to my personal experience. It just happens that I've been most enchanted by fantasy, and most challenged and engaged on many levels by deep novels. Perhaps you were more drawn to humor or mystery, or the perfect gemlike writing found most often in short stories; perhaps there are poets who played obliquely on your heart strings; or perhaps you love non-fiction, feasting on facts and theories drawn clear and definite. This study that handed the laurels to "Literary fiction", above all other kinds of book, was only looking for one dimension of soul-stretching: projection into others' voices, and learning empathy. There are different deep nourishments to be found in Montaigne, Darwin, Keats, Kant or Kierkegaard.
So we should extrapolate this mind-feeding and personal growing into many other directions. Reading a variety of good books, for years on end, adds up to one of the best educations time and money can give you. Talking about all these books with the friends who understand you brings more layers of engagement into play.
The Guardian's article on the Reading/Empathy study took a more literary perspective, and got closer to the special magic I find in novels, in how they involve us in their creative work:
"What great writers do is to turn you into the writer. In literary fiction, the incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to understand the minds of others," said Kidd. . . .
"Some writing is what you call 'writerly', you fill in the gaps and participate, and some is 'readerly', and you're entertained. We tend to see 'readerly' more in genre fiction like adventure, romance and thrillers, where the author dictates your experience as a reader. Literary [writerly] fiction lets you go into a new environment and you have to find your own way," Kidd said.
Transferring the experience of reading fiction into real-world situations was a natural leap, Kidd argued, because "the same psychological processes are used to navigate fiction and real relationships. Fiction is not just a simulator of a social experience, it is a social experience."
The best book I read last year was
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. It was certainly the book that challenged and deepened me, that most tested my empathy and expanded my sense of America and of our shared humanity. It's not an easy read, but it's a rewarding one, on many levels. Morrison puts a lot of deliberation and darkness into her work: she's showing us all the American stories we too readily ignore, about the often hard and tangled experiences of blacks, women, countryfolk, poor people and criminals. In doing this, she is both right and righteous. But thank god she has so much poetry in her heart, and crafts such magnificent novels. She puts enough magic and mystery in her tale that the journey more than repays our work.
.
Sharing Conversations: the Stories that All of Us Know
But whatever the content or quality of a novel, in order for a general conversation to take hold, people, or enough people, have to have read it. It is no good if everybody is reading brilliantly provoking, perhaps electrically interesting, but quite different books. How often have we been involved in conversations, at a party maybe, where four or five people ask what others think of this or that novel, only to find that no one else has read it? Even, or perhaps especially, among people who read a lot it is often difficult to find a single recently published book that we have all read. The conversation founders, literature fails to bring us together, no debate is provoked. Or to find a book to talk about we have turn to one of the blockbusters or media-hyped works of the day, something one almost feels authorized to talk about whether one has read it or not: Underworld, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Interview with a Vampire, My Struggle. Regardless of quality, regardless even of sales, since Knausgaard’s are nowhere near on a level with the others, these are books that have been as it were chosen for the conversation, perhaps precisely because it’s often embarrassingly difficult to find a book we’ve all read to settle on. Instead of the conversation occurring ‘naturally’ as with Tristram Shandy, or Tess of the d’Urbervilles, it is to a certain extent thrust upon us.
(If you're curious about the
Tristram Shandy and
Tess of the d’Urbervilles references, go read
the whole Tim Parks column, which has a paragraph on why each of those was talked about in its day, and eight more paragraphs that I didn't quote here.)
In the Dark Ages, between the Fall of Rome and the Renaissance, there weren't many books. But there were two story cycles that every educated European knew: the stories of The Bible, and Greek Myths. So while there were less sources to inspire other writers, troubadours and artists, there was at least a code of memes that everyone shared. If you compared someone to Icarus or to Job, your audience understood what you meant.
These stories provided a gallery of portraits and morals for literature after the Renaissance. Chaucer, Shakespeare and everyone after used them as signposts. Then Chaucer and Shakespeare, Milton and others in turn added their own people and plots to the common trove. These, along with the best preserved Latin authors, are what every schoolboy learned.
This communion (these "Stories that All of Us Knew") was one of the best features of the traditional Dead-White-Male, Anglocentric Western Canon. And losing this shared code, that all readers knew and had already thought about at length, is one of the few regrets I have in our new, more interesting and colorful (but also more cacophonous and contested), Canon. It's marvelous that we recognize Woolf, Morrison, Murasaki, Musil, Pynchon, Gide, Beckett, Munif, Achebe, Garcia Marquez, Cather, Baldwin, Wright, Hurston, Bulgakov, Atwood, Kawabata, Rhys and Erdrich as great novelists. But who among us has read books by even half of those authors?
Posterity is a long game. As the centuries process there will be some sorting, and out of this colorful parade a pantheon will emerge, to be considered the greatest writers of the 20th century. But there probably will never be a Canon like the Victorians model - so concise that every educated reader shared a few dozen books in common, and writers knew them practically by heart.
We'll still have our comets passing by, our Dan Browns (and, happily, our J.K. Rowlings too) that everyone can talk about. It's impossible to predict just what will grab everyone's attention, how much we'll be reading books, or watching shows, or immersing ourselves in high-tech gear that stimulates more of our senses, that perhaps tickles our hearts and minds more directly. Humans will always crave entertainment and vicarious adventure. I hope we keep hooking into something that doesn't just spoon-feed us, some medium that instead invites us to stretch our own personalities to understand further, and to collaborate in creative endeavor - as a great novel can.