My review of Tim Parks’ novel Dreams of Rivers and Seas appeared in The Guardian on Saturday, August 9, 2008

Tim Parks prefaces Dreams of Rivers and Seas with a message to his prospective readers: “Those familiar with [the anthropologist and linguist] Gregory Bateson and his work will realise that I have used elements from his life and writings to create the character of Albert James . . . Readers who want to find out about [Bateson's] remarkable work should certainly not consult these pages, which are entirely fictional.”

Albert is already dead when the story opens, but his character dominates every page. Although he had lived frugally in Delhi with his doctor wife, he was a world-renowned epistemologist, a great mind who thought differently from the rest of us. His conversation was a brilliant melange of concepts and ideas drawn from biology, anthropology, kinesics, proxemics. He conceived “delicate self-correcting cultural ecologies”, but was incapable of speaking or writing a plain word. In the margin of an article on cybernetics and invertebrates, his son finds scribbled: “Drink every evening ceremonial substitute for thing that hasn’t happened – but what thing?”

If this seems to promise a difficult, trying read, let me reassure you at once. The book is a rapidly unfolding mystery that hints at suicide, murder and madness, and builds to a wrenching climax. Parks cleverly limits us to glimpses of Albert’s bizarrely fecund mind through the irritation, incomprehension and admiration respectively of Helen, his cool widow, John, his suffering son, and Paul, his would-be biographer.

Helen and Albert were each other’s lives. They had lived all over the world, in Africa, New Guinea; Helen working long days selflessly without pay in shabby clinics where the poorest came to die, Albert accompanying her everywhere, observing patterns, gestures, rituals. But in Delhi, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

John, on the threshold of adult life yet dependent on parents who treat him as an inconvenience, is a moving mixture of self-assertion and puppyish need. He loves and is proud of his famous father, but hurt by his apparent indifference. John is all confusion. Why, when prostate cancer can be held at bay for years, did his father die so suddenly? Does his girlfriend – or, for that matter, his mother – really love him? What is the meaning of the unfinished letter from his father, posted by a mysterious stranger, which speaks of dreams of rivers and seas? Why was his father studying spiders’ webs when he died? Why did he always speak in riddles? John, assailed by Delhi-belly and attacks of a more sinister kind, must simultaneously cope with his loss

The riddles are intended for us as well, and the search for answers compels us to confront the pathological nature of the modern world, in which leaders pay lip-service to religious fairytales while the truly sacred is trampled. Certainly this is true of the novel’s portrayal of India. Parks demonstrates a canny knowledge of modern Indian politics: the darkness behind the superpower fantasy, corrupt politicians, violent police, hundreds of thousands of farmer suicides. He notes the media’s obsession with celebrity and trivia, its disparagement of dissident intellectuals such as Arundhati Roy and Pradip Krishen.

Parks’s impressions of India are authentic and unsentimental. Only in the realm of sex does he succumb to the temptation to be exotic; almost everyone in the book either has, or soon will have, slept with almost everyone else. However, the novel’s real territory is the mind. As it moves to its denouement, the straightforward narrative starts to be jarred by odd shifts of tense from past to present and back again, often several times within a page. In a writer as fastidious as Parks, this cannot but be deliberate; he means to unsettle the reader and one soon comes to understand why.

The key is the growing turmoil in John’s mind. When he asks about Albert’s study of spiders’ webs, his mother instead talks of his father’s work on how artificial perfumes mimic and mask natural pheromone signals, causing unease and confusion. “The lady’s smell invites but her behaviour rebuffs.” There could hardly be a better metaphor for their own behaviour towards their son, or a clearer example of the conflict between message and behaviour that Albert’s original, Gregory Bateson, called “double bind” and identified as a cause of schizophrenia in children. Ironically, neither Albert nor Helen recognises the emotional violence they have inflicted on their son, the outsider in their perfect marriage.

The clue at the beginning of the novel constantly nags at us. Readers who don’t know Bateson should not look here for information about his life and work. Where then? Parks often refers to the web, in one place even giving Google results. A search quickly finds John Brockmann’s centennial lecture on Bateson, who is quoted as saying, in the opaque style of his fictional counterpart: “Epistemology itself is becoming a recursive subject, a recursive study of recursiveness. So that anybody encountering the double bind hypothesis has the problem that epistemology was already changed by the double bind hypothesis, and the hypothesis itself therefore has to be approached with the modified way of thinking which the hypothesis had proposed.”

This is exactly the position in which we, as readers, find ourselves. To get the most from this haunting and accomplished novel, we must go back to Bateson before returning to James; after that, it is hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins, but the book begins to shine with previously hidden patterns. The finale, when it comes, is unexpected and terrifying. Dreams of Rivers and Seas is a book that has already repaid a second reading; I am sorry not to see it on the Booker longlist.

Tim Parks writes about Bateson in The Guardian

Batesonian aphorisms

“All experience is subjective.”

“Epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?”

“It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.”

“It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.”

“A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.”

“Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.”

“There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.”

“Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction. Double description is better than one.”

“It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.”

To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time.

“There are no monotone “values” in biology.”

“Number is different from quantity.”

“Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next.”

“The map is not the territory and the name is not the thing named.”

“Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.”

“The source of the new is the random.”

“In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.”

“Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores, and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and in the plains.”

“Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.”

“It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.”

“What is true is that the idea of power corrupts. Power corrupts most rapidly those who believe in it, and it is they who will want it most. Obviously, our democratic system tends to give power to those who hunger for it and gives every opportunity to those who don’t want power to avoid getting it. Not a very satisfactory arrangement if power corrupts those who believe in it and want it. Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man ‘in power’ depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he ‘causes’ things to happen . . . it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation. But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.”

“Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.”

“No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.”

Double bind

In 1956 in Palo Alto Gregory Bateson and his colleagues Donald Jackson, Jay Haley and John Weakland [Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J. & Weakland, J., 1956, Toward a theory of schizophrenia. (in: 'Behavioral Science', vol.1, 251-264)] articulated a related theory of schizophrenia as stemming from double bind situations. The perceived symptoms of schizophrenia were therefore an expression of this distress, and should be valued as a cathartic and trans-formative experience. The double bind refers to a communication paradox described first in families with a schizophrenic member.

Full double bind requires several conditions to be met:

* a) The victim of double bind receives contradictory injunctions or emotional messages on different levels of communication (for example, love is expressed by words and hate or detachment by nonverbal behavior; or a child is encouraged to speak freely, but criticised or silenced whenever he or she actually does so).

* b) No metacommunication is possible; for example, asking which of the two messages is valid or describing the communication as making no sense

* c) The victim cannot leave the communication field

* d) Failing to fulfill the contradictory injunctions is punished, e.g. by withdrawal of love. The double bind was originally presented (probably mainly under the influence of Bateson’s psychiatric co-workers) as an explanation of part of the etiology of schizophrenia; today it is more important as an example of Bateson’s approach to the complexities of communication.

Quotations from various sources, ‘Double Bind’ courtesy of Wikipedia