(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Parks is a British author and translator.
The globalisation of literature has led to the homogenisation of novels: the market rewards books that transcend local concerns and speak to major social issues that resonate universally, and authors who write in a style amenable to rapid translation (Parks 2014, 76, 82, 190).
A positive implication is that reading a current, popular work enables you to “join an international conversation”. For literature to perform this social function a group of people must “find a single recently published book” that they have all read, and the market makes certain titles highly available (Parks 2019, 192, 195–6). Hence, discussions tend to involve the current, popular novel, further popularising them. Contemporary novels can excite us in a particular way when they represent a reaction to a world for which we have a basis for comparison. Ideally, we ask questions of them such as (p. 31):
how is it that someone sharing my world wrote this book that I perhaps find strange and difficult? What are they trying to tell me about it, about the way I perceive it? Is it a useful difficulty? Could I too, perhaps, react to our times in this way, and would it make sense if I did so?
Will a book written to “travel” be sufficiently strange and speak to us in this way? Any “consensus on aesthetics” is breaking down, so global best-seller status “is rapidly becoming the only measure of achievement that is undeniable” (p. 209). Instead, Parks suggests, we should “hold on to the idea that what matters about a book for the reader is our experience reading it, not the number of copies it has sold” (ibid.).
International literary prizes don’t fare much better as proxies for literature selection because globalisation has uncoupled them from national literatures, suggesting “that it’s the reputation of the prize that counts, not nurturing writers in a given community” (Parks 2014, 3). Their aim is impossible because “a work of art is intimately bound up to the cultural setting in which it was created”: it “means more, and more intensely, in the world that produced” it (Parks 2019, 61). Hence, a negative implication of books being expected to have “universal appeal” is that it robs communities of books which speak in their voices to their specific concerns (Parks 2014, 76).
We tend not to be aware how far our reading is “driven by publicity and availability”, so need to consider how these factors shape the titles we choose (pp. 67–8). An insidious effect is how they narrow mainstream literary choice while purporting to provide increased diversity. An English translation of a new book from a foreign country does not necessarily expand our world view if written for translation and oriented toward discussing global issues. Perhaps we can respond to these pressures by seeking authors from different cultures whose works are not entirely understandable to us, and learn to sit with incomplete comprehension: aware that we’re reading as a stranger, listening in?
We can also defend ourselves against these forces and our tendency to have too much respect for the printed word by refusing to treat books as revered objects (Parks 2019, 2). The best way to improve as a reader is to read “with a pen in the hand, ready to mark the pages at any moment” (p. 105). We should physically engage with the book by: making “three or four comments on every page, at least one critical, even aggressive”, putting “a question mark by everything you find suspect” and underlining “anything you really appreciate” or that you don’t believe (p. 4). “Becoming aware of how you might instinctively wish to change a text…is both to understand the book better and to understand something about yourself” (Parks 2014, 39). Ebooks aid this approach “by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object” (p. 23). They offer “a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us”: they’re “a medium for grown-ups” (ibid.). Whatever the medium, Parks encourages us to question and interact with the text directly, helping us absorb more from the text and providing notes that can be revisited later. This is also a symbolic act of challenging the notion that the author’s work is beyond critique.
Using books like this reflects Parks’ belief that “reading is an active skill, an art even”, so “there must be techniques and tools that everyone can use or try” (Parks 2019, 105). He describes the kind of questions he poses when reading. Firstly, “what are the qualities or values that matter most to this author, or at least in this novel?” (p. 106). “What is the emotional atmosphere behind this narrative?”; what are the consequences (p. 107)? He often changes his mind about the values the story is organising itself around, but the attempt to identify them gives him something to focus on (ibid.). He explores the “connection between these force fields — fear/courage, belonging/exclusion, domination/submission—and the style of the book, the way the plot unfolds”, asking: “How is the writer trying to draw me into the mental world of his characters through his writing, through his conversation with me?” (ibid.). A crucial question: “Is this a convincing vision of the world?” (p. 109). Are the concerns raised real or “just been brought together to “do literature”?” (p. 110). Our responses are conditioned by where we’re “coming from” and our position on “the issues that matter most for the author” (Parks 2014, 46, 106; Parks 2016, xi). Asking these questions “gives direction to the pen in our hands”, offering us “something to think about and a way into the text” (Parks 2019, 108).
As our response to a text is conditioned in this way there is no single correct interpretation of a book. Instead, “literature offers us an immensely rich, ramified, and nuanced series of “conversations” or “encounters” in reaction to which we are constantly discovering and reconstructing our own identities” (Parks 2016, xi). To benefit from this situation we must be aware of our habits, and ready to negotiate, even to surprise ourselves—it may be “the books that very slightly shift an old position, or at least oblige you to think it through again, that become most precious” (Parks 2014, 50). Even if we don’t come to hold the book’s values, “it is fascinating, and useful, to appreciate that there are people who move in quite different worlds of feeling from our own” (Parks 2019, 54).
Sometimes it’s not that we don’t agree with a book but that we don’t understand it: “the characters, their reflections, their priorities, the way they interact, do not really add up” (p. 48). This may just be the result of a bad book, but it may reflect where we’re reading from: “where we find ourselves confronted with complete enigma… it is perhaps worth giving the author the benefit of the doubt, or coming back to the book after putting it down for a while” because “the book that initially seems plain wrong to us” could be “precisely the one that allows us to understand something new about other people” (pp. 53, 55–6).
Rereading in this way was the key to Parks understanding Ulysses (pp. 54–5). Likewise, when he first read The Waste Land, “it was hardly a reading at all” (p. 23). Many more lessons on and readings of it led his mind to conjure “a lock that allowed the poem to function as a key; it fitted into my mind, and something turned and swung open” (ibid.). This lock became easily adapted to other modernist poems to the extent that they would elicit a sense of déja vu. On this view our “mind is not devising a key to decipher the text, it is disposing itself in such a way as to allow the text to become a key that unlocks sensation and “meaning” in the mind” (ibid.). We should ask: what “is the experience, or disposition, that this text is seeking to unlock in us?” (p. 25). Rereading is a way for Parks to remember “the excitement of feeling that particular lock turn in my mind” by dipping back into a text to rekindle a particular connection, often reading a chapter or even just a few pages at random (p. 26).
However, Parks sees suggestions like Nabokov’s that “there is no reading, only rereading” as amounting “to an elitist agenda, an unhappy obsession with control, a desire to possess the text (with always the implication that there are very few texts worth possessing) rather than accept the contingency of each reading moment by moment” (p. 22). Reading is forgetting, for Parks: “not to pass some final judgement on the text, but to engage with what it has to offer to me now” (p. 21).
He also rejects the notion that completing a book is a virtue in itself: we should not “attach self-esteem to the mere finishing of a book” (Parks 2014, 16). This is understandable for bad books, but are there also “occasions when we might choose to leave off a book before the end…and nevertheless feel that it was good, even excellent, that we were glad we read what we read, but don’t feel the need to finish it?” (pp. 15–6). In Parks’ opinion, putting down a novel before the end “is simply to acknowledge that for me its shape, its aesthetic quality, is in the weave of the plot and, with the best novels, in the meshing of the writing style with that weave” (p. 19). “There is a tyranny about our thrall to endings”, so we should feel free to choose where a book ends (ibid.).
Nor does Parks view reading per se as a virtue. It is popularly conceived that there is “a hierarchy of writing with the likes of Joyce and Nabokov at the top and Fifty Shades of Grey at the bottom”, and that between them “there is a kind of Neoplatonic stairway”: a “pathway upward from pulp to Proust” (Parks 2019, 131, 135). Parks disputes that people progress in this way. He notes that “genre fiction prevents engagement with literary fiction, rather than vice versa, partly because of the time it occupies, but more subtly because while the latter is of its nature exploratory and potentially unsettling, the former encourages the reader to stay in a comfort zone” (p. 133). He’s not saying that genre fiction shouldn’t be read, just reminding us that we’re fooling ourselves if we read while imagining this stairway to exist (p. 136).
Simple, formulaic fiction is, however, a good fit for a reading environment subject to many distractions—often of a digital nature. We’re now “actually inclined to interruption. Hence more and more energy is required to stay in contact with a book, particularly something long and complex.” (p. 127). Books with long sentences or that require a great deal of context to be kept in working memory, are incompatible with this situation. How would our reading improve if we took the time we dedicated to it more seriously, even if that meant reading less?
Ultimately, Parks wants us to question our convictions about literature (Parks 2015, vii). Is it “undeniably a good thing, a liberal thing, a life-enhancing thing”? Is the act of reading “of its nature intrinsically positive and always and assiduously to be encouraged”? Do “human beings require a constant supply of stories to make sense of the world”? Is there “justifiable self esteem to be attached to the mere writing and reading of novels”? Is there “any ultimate “need” for their existence”?