The Strike, an experimental syntax novel by Harvey Thomlinson published January 2018.
The Strike is an experimental novel that takes the reader into a different state of consciousness through syntactical experimentation. When a protest breaks out at the electricity works in an ice-bound border town, a retired worker is drawn back into his past and a journey towards the woman he betrayed.
The strike affects a range of characters from hotel sex workers to cops, political fugitives, union bosses, matinee players, corrupt mayors, and border traders. The story grew out of a visit that Harvey made to a Sino-Russian bordertown during a moment of social breakdown that was never reported in the media.
The novel’s new use of syntax is a method Harvey’s used for years to create a kind of idioglossia that shakes up the synapses of readers in a way that can deliver new perspectives on the world and the nature of reality. The aim, though, may be understood as a traditional novelistic one of helping readers to feel the whole world of a novel and the meanings it contains.
Originally from the UK, Harvey is best known as a Chinese to English Literary translator who has translated the likes of Murong Xuecun and Chen Xiwo. Harvey’s translations have been published in New York Times, the Guardian and by publishers like Allen & Unwin. His own innovative writing has appeared in places like Exclusive Magazine (US) and Tears on the Fence (UK). The Strike gained some underground reputation as excerpts were featured in journals in the UK and US but now the whole novel will be available at last from Lucid Play.
Meanwhile Lucid Play has also acquired world rights to Harvey's novel-in-progress The Sentence which takes the experiments with syntax still further and is currently scheduled for publication in August 2018.
Publication Date: 24 January, 2018
Format: B-format paperback, 280 pages.
Category: Fiction.
ISBN 978-988-14105-3-5
To read more of Harvey's work: The Stand Magazine.
The Strike is an experimental novel that takes the reader into a different state of consciousness through syntactical experimentation. When a protest breaks out at the electricity works in an ice-bound border town, a retired worker is drawn back into his past and a journey towards the woman he betrayed.
The strike affects a range of characters from hotel sex workers to cops, political fugitives, union bosses, matinee players, corrupt mayors, and border traders. The story grew out of a visit that Harvey made to a Sino-Russian bordertown during a moment of social breakdown that was never reported in the media.
The novel’s new use of syntax is a method Harvey’s used for years to create a kind of idioglossia that shakes up the synapses of readers in a way that can deliver new perspectives on the world and the nature of reality. The aim, though, may be understood as a traditional novelistic one of helping readers to feel the whole world of a novel and the meanings it contains.
Originally from the UK, Harvey is best known as a Chinese to English Literary translator who has translated the likes of Murong Xuecun and Chen Xiwo. Harvey’s translations have been published in New York Times, the Guardian and by publishers like Allen & Unwin. His own innovative writing has appeared in places like Exclusive Magazine (US) and Tears on the Fence (UK). The Strike gained some underground reputation as excerpts were featured in journals in the UK and US but now the whole novel will be available at last from Lucid Play.
Meanwhile Lucid Play has also acquired world rights to Harvey's novel-in-progress The Sentence which takes the experiments with syntax still further and is currently scheduled for publication in August 2018.
Publication Date: 24 January, 2018
Format: B-format paperback, 280 pages.
Category: Fiction.
ISBN 978-988-14105-3-5
To read more of Harvey's work: The Stand Magazine.
Harvey's article at New York Times "China's Communist Party is Abandoning Workers"
Talking with Harvey Thomlinson About His Invented Language
Interview with Tantra Bensko
One of the most ground breaking and important new developments in innovative fiction writing I feel comes from the new syntax created by writer and publisher, Harvey Thomlinson. This new use of syntax is a method he's used for years to create a kind of idioglossia that shakes up the synapses of readers in a way that can deliver new perspectives on the world and the nature of reality. I was happy to be able to dialog with Harvey about this formally, which can be read below.
Excerpts of his unpublished novel have been published in magazines in journals in the UK, and now two are in Exclusive Magazine, with his commentary on them. http://exclusive3.weebly.com/flash-fiction.html I feel when this is published as a whole by some adventurous press ready to take the risk with a novel that is both experimental and dealing realistically with “real world” events in an engaged way, it will become one of the most analysed techniques in literary fiction. I feel linguists and psychologists, literary critics and professors will find this to be a stunning new revelation of possibility. You may wish to follow his website for new developments. http://thestrikeonline.com/
Harvey is most known as the translator of Chinese novelist Murong's A Novel of Chengdu, which was a finalist for the 2009 Man Asia Literary Prize. Harvey also runs Make-Do Publishing, which presents some of the best contemporary writing in Asia. Here follows our discussion.
Tantra:
Your writing style is adventurous, particularly your sentence structures. People so easily take for granted the usual way of writing, grammatically, and Experimental Fiction has the opportunity to shake that up. One of the fascinating aspects of innovative writing is stretching our minds to think new ways, and language is intricately involved in how we think. I feel your use of syntax creates a new language, and it has been proven that people can less their chances of Alzheimer’s if they speak two languages. Your work seems to me to have the ability to make our minds more agile and our experience of the world youthful and fresh.
Harvey, here are some quotes Clifford A. Pickover that I think speak to what you’ve accomplished. I’m curious to hear about your goals and methodology of making the new language structure. These relate to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that language structure affects how we see the world.
“Paul Kay, the linguist we discussed who is interested in color and language, agrees with me that language shapes the way we compartmentalize reality. “There is a wealth of evidence showing that what people treat as the same or different depends on what languages they speak.”’ 22
“Today, 438 languages have fewer than 50 speakers. {written in 2005} “With each language gone, we may lose whatever knowledge and history were locked up in its stories and myths, along with the human consciousness embedded in its grammatical structure and vocabulary. . . .” 33
“If language and words do shape our thoughts and tickle our neuronal circuits in interesting ways, I sometimes wonder how a child would develop if reared using an “invented” language that was somehow optimized for mind-expansion, emotion, logic, or some other attribute. Perhaps our current language, which evolved chaotically through the millennia, may not be the most “optimal” language for thinking big thoughts or reasoning beyond the limits of our own intuition.” 77
From Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves: Sushi, Psychedelics, Parallel Universes, and the Quest for Transcendence by Clifford A. Pickover, Smart Publications, Petaluma California 2005
I see what you write as a kind of invented language that expands our minds.
Harvey:
My experimental novel The Strike uses a linguistic strategy which aims to subvert expectations about the correspondence between syntactic and semantic structures. Standard syntactic templates imply conceptual relations, such as sequence, or causality, and as Peter Kay says, these shape the way we ‘compartmentalize reality.’
The Strike is set in a depressed factory town in the far North East of China. The goal of what I call “existential syntax” is really a traditional novelistic one of helping readers to feel the whole world of a novel and the meanings it contains.
Tantra:
Can you describe the process when your sentence methodology first dawned on you, your first inklings of how it would work, your goals with it, and how it developed along the years?
Harvey:
A few years ago, during a chaotic period in my life in Mexico, I began to experiment with writing short pieces of a few paragraphs, and also rewriting chapters of pulp fiction books which I had picked up from second hand English bookstores in Oaxaca and Mexico City.
The Strike was an attempt to expand this to a novel-length fiction. The story is set in a rotting factory town in the far north east of China, where the people protest after their government decides to sell the local electricity plant.
The text generally works with purposeful combinations of phrases, rather than some Burroughsesque random cut up. There was no single method, more a spirit of ‘bold, persistent experimentation,’ but a consistent goal was to destabilise the sentence, the “bolus of meaning,” according to Fregel.
Sentences like the following use a strategy of disrupting the semantic relations that are embedded in syntactical entities.
“Although the world wasn’t breathing she ate a boiled egg before setting forth her husband’s feet were warm and hairy.”
“With her hair pinned in a scraggly bun she saw everything riding through the dark night of history to pass the time there were supermarket adverts on the walls.”
“Somehow she was afraid that she might see something like death in his eyes he cleared more space for her.”
Tantra:
Can you talk about your terminology “existential syntax”? Do you connect it with Existentialism?
“Existential syntax” doesn’t really connect on a theoretical level with Existentialism, except by analogy. It is my term for a set of experiments that share the goal of moving beyond conventional syntax and the term Conventional syntax shapes the way we perceive reality by encoding conceptual relations, particularly temporal relations, or causality.
Phenomenology (of which existentialism was one branch) was partly concerned with describing experience without obscuring the description through misused concepts – hence the analogy.
“Syntax in Experimental Literature: a Literary Linguistic Investigation” a dissertation by Gary Thoms, written in 2008, breaks down Beckett's How It Is, among other things. This novel has a lot of similarities to yours in his particular systematic toying with syntax. Thoms refers to his arrangements of juxtaposed fragments within sentences as “chunking.” This is something you do in your own way. Thom says:
“This is characteristic of Beckett’s attitude to writing: while he believed that language was inadequate for true expression, he felt that the goal of writing was not to free itself from language entirely, as with Burroughs and Cage, but to misuse it with intent.”
You also have your way with words. The world has already experienced Beckett's deliberate misuse of syntax, which plays with time, and is said to be the voice of the eternal present. How would you say your book moves the literary dialogue forward into new ground?
Beckett’s writings are one of the greatest achievements of the literary avant-garde. In terms of formal features of language, the prose of The Strike certainly makes use of what you call chunking, as well as other “Beckettian” techniques such as deletion and elision, and as with Becket there is often a choice of parsing the text into different sets of phrases.
However the Strike also introduces new syntactic patterns. Some experts argue that experimental writing can never truly access linguistic form, because readers simply apply their knowledge of standard syntax to form the most likely reading. This is no doubt largely true, but I wanted to see whether new templates could be established.
Tantra:
And where you see it moving next?
Harvey:
Experimental fiction seems to have lost its ambition to influence a wider literary culture and the whimsical postmodern ethos still dominates, 40 years on. I think that probing at what lies behind “language” is a very important task for a writer, because to return to the point you made earlier, of the large part that language plays in shaping our reality.
At the same time, experimental writing should not be some kind of hermetic game for writers but should aim to create literary forms that deliver a more thrilling aesthetic experience for readers, a sense of something big being at stake.
Interview with Tantra Bensko
One of the most ground breaking and important new developments in innovative fiction writing I feel comes from the new syntax created by writer and publisher, Harvey Thomlinson. This new use of syntax is a method he's used for years to create a kind of idioglossia that shakes up the synapses of readers in a way that can deliver new perspectives on the world and the nature of reality. I was happy to be able to dialog with Harvey about this formally, which can be read below.
Excerpts of his unpublished novel have been published in magazines in journals in the UK, and now two are in Exclusive Magazine, with his commentary on them. http://exclusive3.weebly.com/flash-fiction.html I feel when this is published as a whole by some adventurous press ready to take the risk with a novel that is both experimental and dealing realistically with “real world” events in an engaged way, it will become one of the most analysed techniques in literary fiction. I feel linguists and psychologists, literary critics and professors will find this to be a stunning new revelation of possibility. You may wish to follow his website for new developments. http://thestrikeonline.com/
Harvey is most known as the translator of Chinese novelist Murong's A Novel of Chengdu, which was a finalist for the 2009 Man Asia Literary Prize. Harvey also runs Make-Do Publishing, which presents some of the best contemporary writing in Asia. Here follows our discussion.
Tantra:
Your writing style is adventurous, particularly your sentence structures. People so easily take for granted the usual way of writing, grammatically, and Experimental Fiction has the opportunity to shake that up. One of the fascinating aspects of innovative writing is stretching our minds to think new ways, and language is intricately involved in how we think. I feel your use of syntax creates a new language, and it has been proven that people can less their chances of Alzheimer’s if they speak two languages. Your work seems to me to have the ability to make our minds more agile and our experience of the world youthful and fresh.
Harvey, here are some quotes Clifford A. Pickover that I think speak to what you’ve accomplished. I’m curious to hear about your goals and methodology of making the new language structure. These relate to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that language structure affects how we see the world.
“Paul Kay, the linguist we discussed who is interested in color and language, agrees with me that language shapes the way we compartmentalize reality. “There is a wealth of evidence showing that what people treat as the same or different depends on what languages they speak.”’ 22
“Today, 438 languages have fewer than 50 speakers. {written in 2005} “With each language gone, we may lose whatever knowledge and history were locked up in its stories and myths, along with the human consciousness embedded in its grammatical structure and vocabulary. . . .” 33
“If language and words do shape our thoughts and tickle our neuronal circuits in interesting ways, I sometimes wonder how a child would develop if reared using an “invented” language that was somehow optimized for mind-expansion, emotion, logic, or some other attribute. Perhaps our current language, which evolved chaotically through the millennia, may not be the most “optimal” language for thinking big thoughts or reasoning beyond the limits of our own intuition.” 77
From Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves: Sushi, Psychedelics, Parallel Universes, and the Quest for Transcendence by Clifford A. Pickover, Smart Publications, Petaluma California 2005
I see what you write as a kind of invented language that expands our minds.
Harvey:
My experimental novel The Strike uses a linguistic strategy which aims to subvert expectations about the correspondence between syntactic and semantic structures. Standard syntactic templates imply conceptual relations, such as sequence, or causality, and as Peter Kay says, these shape the way we ‘compartmentalize reality.’
The Strike is set in a depressed factory town in the far North East of China. The goal of what I call “existential syntax” is really a traditional novelistic one of helping readers to feel the whole world of a novel and the meanings it contains.
Tantra:
Can you describe the process when your sentence methodology first dawned on you, your first inklings of how it would work, your goals with it, and how it developed along the years?
Harvey:
A few years ago, during a chaotic period in my life in Mexico, I began to experiment with writing short pieces of a few paragraphs, and also rewriting chapters of pulp fiction books which I had picked up from second hand English bookstores in Oaxaca and Mexico City.
The Strike was an attempt to expand this to a novel-length fiction. The story is set in a rotting factory town in the far north east of China, where the people protest after their government decides to sell the local electricity plant.
The text generally works with purposeful combinations of phrases, rather than some Burroughsesque random cut up. There was no single method, more a spirit of ‘bold, persistent experimentation,’ but a consistent goal was to destabilise the sentence, the “bolus of meaning,” according to Fregel.
Sentences like the following use a strategy of disrupting the semantic relations that are embedded in syntactical entities.
“Although the world wasn’t breathing she ate a boiled egg before setting forth her husband’s feet were warm and hairy.”
“With her hair pinned in a scraggly bun she saw everything riding through the dark night of history to pass the time there were supermarket adverts on the walls.”
“Somehow she was afraid that she might see something like death in his eyes he cleared more space for her.”
Tantra:
Can you talk about your terminology “existential syntax”? Do you connect it with Existentialism?
“Existential syntax” doesn’t really connect on a theoretical level with Existentialism, except by analogy. It is my term for a set of experiments that share the goal of moving beyond conventional syntax and the term Conventional syntax shapes the way we perceive reality by encoding conceptual relations, particularly temporal relations, or causality.
Phenomenology (of which existentialism was one branch) was partly concerned with describing experience without obscuring the description through misused concepts – hence the analogy.
“Syntax in Experimental Literature: a Literary Linguistic Investigation” a dissertation by Gary Thoms, written in 2008, breaks down Beckett's How It Is, among other things. This novel has a lot of similarities to yours in his particular systematic toying with syntax. Thoms refers to his arrangements of juxtaposed fragments within sentences as “chunking.” This is something you do in your own way. Thom says:
“This is characteristic of Beckett’s attitude to writing: while he believed that language was inadequate for true expression, he felt that the goal of writing was not to free itself from language entirely, as with Burroughs and Cage, but to misuse it with intent.”
You also have your way with words. The world has already experienced Beckett's deliberate misuse of syntax, which plays with time, and is said to be the voice of the eternal present. How would you say your book moves the literary dialogue forward into new ground?
Beckett’s writings are one of the greatest achievements of the literary avant-garde. In terms of formal features of language, the prose of The Strike certainly makes use of what you call chunking, as well as other “Beckettian” techniques such as deletion and elision, and as with Becket there is often a choice of parsing the text into different sets of phrases.
However the Strike also introduces new syntactic patterns. Some experts argue that experimental writing can never truly access linguistic form, because readers simply apply their knowledge of standard syntax to form the most likely reading. This is no doubt largely true, but I wanted to see whether new templates could be established.
Tantra:
And where you see it moving next?
Harvey:
Experimental fiction seems to have lost its ambition to influence a wider literary culture and the whimsical postmodern ethos still dominates, 40 years on. I think that probing at what lies behind “language” is a very important task for a writer, because to return to the point you made earlier, of the large part that language plays in shaping our reality.
At the same time, experimental writing should not be some kind of hermetic game for writers but should aim to create literary forms that deliver a more thrilling aesthetic experience for readers, a sense of something big being at stake.
Excerpts
Excerpt 1. The Strike
Mrs Zhang was depressed purple leaves scattered along austere avenue because the wind was strong few of her friends were in the park. She came here every morning although this winter was severe to do her exercises required suffering. Walking with her bag of vegetables east of the crematorium there was always a wilderness.
All their group's chat that early morning rusted pagoda turned around the strike. Mrs Liu had heard from her nephew at the Bright Moon electricity plant they reached and stretched. A bird started amid frozen winter foliage Mrs Zhang looked worried remembering long ago violence by the Suifen river.
According to Mrs Liu as the earth moved round the sun the Bright Moon workers had already marched to People’s Square.
Later Mrs Zhang almost flew up seven flights of stairs to warn her husband of many decades Old Yu in the kitchen the television marked time. After moving to this new apartment two years ago light probed weakly from the balcony spring festival ribbons still fluttered.
Old Yu have you heard what’s happening?
These days she didn't know whether he heard things eating soup noodles in their small kitchen they lived often as not.
Excerpt 2. Waking
She was Xu Yue lay on her side to stay asleep the sheets had crawled up her thighs a day yet to penetrate. When her eyes opened she couldn’t breathe sometimes they turned up the heating so high she saw chairs with spaces inbetween.
Across the morning her legs stretched remotely sensations stirred last night’s clothes piled on the bed. Because it was Saturday there was no hurry to move a dirty plate on the floor unless she wanted to. She stayed there lazily enjoying the soft pillow in her mind dusty light sparkled like emotions.
Time pressed these dim paint walls flat as thoughts a dead moth. Across the scratched old dresser she saw emptied out clutter from her bag at the same time her roommate seldom stayed over.
After a while she stood up and stretched with faint hopefulness the gap in the red curtains let in the pale sun.
The light shimmied throughout the twenty-third floor she remembered her nervous client last night at the Far East Hotel. After rejoining the ladies at Jade Heaven they’d all finished a bottle of snake wine laughing at her description of the stranger's anxious behaviour the night had flown by.
She looked out across the misty sea of winter-weathered apartment blocks half a galaxy from her village she lit a first cigarette.
Mrs Zhang was depressed purple leaves scattered along austere avenue because the wind was strong few of her friends were in the park. She came here every morning although this winter was severe to do her exercises required suffering. Walking with her bag of vegetables east of the crematorium there was always a wilderness.
All their group's chat that early morning rusted pagoda turned around the strike. Mrs Liu had heard from her nephew at the Bright Moon electricity plant they reached and stretched. A bird started amid frozen winter foliage Mrs Zhang looked worried remembering long ago violence by the Suifen river.
According to Mrs Liu as the earth moved round the sun the Bright Moon workers had already marched to People’s Square.
Later Mrs Zhang almost flew up seven flights of stairs to warn her husband of many decades Old Yu in the kitchen the television marked time. After moving to this new apartment two years ago light probed weakly from the balcony spring festival ribbons still fluttered.
Old Yu have you heard what’s happening?
These days she didn't know whether he heard things eating soup noodles in their small kitchen they lived often as not.
Excerpt 2. Waking
She was Xu Yue lay on her side to stay asleep the sheets had crawled up her thighs a day yet to penetrate. When her eyes opened she couldn’t breathe sometimes they turned up the heating so high she saw chairs with spaces inbetween.
Across the morning her legs stretched remotely sensations stirred last night’s clothes piled on the bed. Because it was Saturday there was no hurry to move a dirty plate on the floor unless she wanted to. She stayed there lazily enjoying the soft pillow in her mind dusty light sparkled like emotions.
Time pressed these dim paint walls flat as thoughts a dead moth. Across the scratched old dresser she saw emptied out clutter from her bag at the same time her roommate seldom stayed over.
After a while she stood up and stretched with faint hopefulness the gap in the red curtains let in the pale sun.
The light shimmied throughout the twenty-third floor she remembered her nervous client last night at the Far East Hotel. After rejoining the ladies at Jade Heaven they’d all finished a bottle of snake wine laughing at her description of the stranger's anxious behaviour the night had flown by.
She looked out across the misty sea of winter-weathered apartment blocks half a galaxy from her village she lit a first cigarette.
From Respected Figures in Literary Scene
"This unconventional text while reminiscent of the Dadaists word games, experimental poetry, and William Burroughs' work using cut-ups is, in the end, a unique entity unto itself. Don't expect traditional sentence structure or punctuation. A challenging but satisfying novel for those looking for something at the very cutting edge of different." Ray Fracalossy -- Tales from the Vinegar Wasteland
"The Strike, about underground protest in China, which is now OUT from from Lucid Play Publishing in the US. Harvey is best known as a translator of novels by rebellious Chinese writers like Murong Xuecun and Chen Xiwo. His own innovative writing has attracted attention for its adventurous writing style, particularly sentence structures. Harvey also runs Make-Do Publishing, a press which specializes in fiction from Asia." -- Asia Books Blog
"The term “writing” is an archaic thing. What should the new term be? THE STRIKE does not reveal that, but confirms that term “writing” needs to be trashed. We should not be “writing” but crafting tools like THE STRIKE to capture and develop readers that are not afraid to be challenged to think, and that are not willing to again be lulled into the usual dull unconscious pseudo-sleep that what the media calls “writing” leads to today.
Such is the goal of all “big media” today, not just writing, but; THE STRIKE, works as an effective tool to avoid that trap. Every sentence challenges the reader to step up, think, and stay awake. And at the end, the rewards prove to be much more than great. Words prove cheap when describing this book.
The best description lies in the experience, but here’s a taste; “Since his father had taught him as a child to write words until now he came to the river daily.” or, “The old world is falling apart.” Amen, quite true, but these excerpts are just crumbs. Oder the whole meal now; pick up a copy of THE STRIKE." --Jim Meirose, Le Overgivers au Club de la Resurrection
"'Most writers reveal characters’ thoughts and provide descriptions in isolation. For instance, one paragraph will revolve around a character’s feelings and then the next paragraph will describe the setting. Thomlinson, though, takes a more fluid approach, weaving together the external and internal in a single sentence.” -- Kate Findley, Tilt-a-Whirl
“Like that of Gertrude Stein, the writing in Thomlinson’s The Strike ruptures ordinary syntax to create a jarring reading experience.... What emerges is a compelling narrative inextricably connected to its creative telling, replete with a beautiful, poetic layer woven into the experimental syntax.” - Krysia Jopek, Maps and Shadows
"The Strike, about underground protest in China, which is now OUT from from Lucid Play Publishing in the US. Harvey is best known as a translator of novels by rebellious Chinese writers like Murong Xuecun and Chen Xiwo. His own innovative writing has attracted attention for its adventurous writing style, particularly sentence structures. Harvey also runs Make-Do Publishing, a press which specializes in fiction from Asia." -- Asia Books Blog
"The term “writing” is an archaic thing. What should the new term be? THE STRIKE does not reveal that, but confirms that term “writing” needs to be trashed. We should not be “writing” but crafting tools like THE STRIKE to capture and develop readers that are not afraid to be challenged to think, and that are not willing to again be lulled into the usual dull unconscious pseudo-sleep that what the media calls “writing” leads to today.
Such is the goal of all “big media” today, not just writing, but; THE STRIKE, works as an effective tool to avoid that trap. Every sentence challenges the reader to step up, think, and stay awake. And at the end, the rewards prove to be much more than great. Words prove cheap when describing this book.
The best description lies in the experience, but here’s a taste; “Since his father had taught him as a child to write words until now he came to the river daily.” or, “The old world is falling apart.” Amen, quite true, but these excerpts are just crumbs. Oder the whole meal now; pick up a copy of THE STRIKE." --Jim Meirose, Le Overgivers au Club de la Resurrection
"'Most writers reveal characters’ thoughts and provide descriptions in isolation. For instance, one paragraph will revolve around a character’s feelings and then the next paragraph will describe the setting. Thomlinson, though, takes a more fluid approach, weaving together the external and internal in a single sentence.” -- Kate Findley, Tilt-a-Whirl
“Like that of Gertrude Stein, the writing in Thomlinson’s The Strike ruptures ordinary syntax to create a jarring reading experience.... What emerges is a compelling narrative inextricably connected to its creative telling, replete with a beautiful, poetic layer woven into the experimental syntax.” - Krysia Jopek, Maps and Shadows