The Novel: a survival skill

This book draws on positioning theory and systemic psychology to establish a new way of thinking about the relationship between a writer's life and his or her work and again the way that work is received differently by different individuals. It includes chapters on Dickens, Joyce, Hardy, Lawrence and Beckett. As such it undermines, but also complements traditional literary criticism and the various criteria used for evaluating a work of fiction. Drawing on ideas from systemic psychology, it 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 – the book considers 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’ behaviour, 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 book 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.