A Bit of James Wood

Whatever else he may be, he gets this sort of thing mostly right:

At present, contemporary novelists are increasingly eager to "tell us about the culture," to fill their books with the latest report on "how we live now."  Information is the new character; we are constantly being told that we should be impressed by how much writers know.  What they should know, and how they came to know it, seems less important, alas, than that they simply know it.  The idea that what one knows might – to use Nietzsche's phrase – "come out of one's own burning" rather than free and flameless from Google, seems at present alien.  The danger is that the American fondness for realism combines with this will-to-information to produce a hyperliteralism of the novel:  you can see this in Tom Wolfe....

By "hysterical realism" I have meant a zany overexcitement, a fear of silence and stillness, a tendency toward self-conscious riffs, easy ironies, puerility, and above all the exaggeration of the vitality of fictional characters into cartoonishness.  The dilemma could be put dialectically:  the writer, fearful that her characters are not "alive" enough, overdoes the liveliness and goes on a vitality spress; suddenly aware that she has overdone it, she tries to solve the problem by drawing self-conscious attention to the exaggeration...But the self-consciousness, far from healing the wound, merely makes it bloodier.

[...]

My second critical preoccupation flows from the first:  there is a generalized overemphasis on a certain kind of intelligence in fiction – now habitually and tellingly renamed "smartness."  We are now so convinced of the terrifying complexity of our culture that we tend to flatter those writers who grapple with it at all, certain that they must be very brilliant just to be attempting it.  But Proust rightly said in Contre Sainte-Beuve that to say of a novelist "he is very intelligent" is no different from saying "he loved his mother very much."  ("Reply to the Editors," n+1 number three)

All well and good, perhaps, but the broad strokes run aground in numerous fashions.  Can you spot them all?  For one thing, David Foster Wallace pulls it off, all this badness, and makes it rather good (not everyone is DFW, and quite a few people should stop trying to be, but nonetheless, he does it).  For another, Wood maybe risks endorsing a somewhat balding nostalgia merely, unless he has come to grips elsewhere  (I've no idea) with the implications for both the literary 'subject' and the 'author' over the course of the last thirty years of literary theory.  There have been some profound developments, after all, and there are some good reasons, I think, why people don't write just like Dickens anymore.

Comments

[Susan]

The problem with Wood's notion of great fiction is that it's so embedded in the nineteenth-century realist novel. So he praises Monica Ali's Brick Lane while tarring White Teeth with the hysterical realist brush. I've not no great urge to defend Zadie Smith; but Brick Lane is Operation Boredom on a Stick. Not to mention that it's deeply embedded in highly problematic notions of the individual and the power of positive thinking. I agree with Wood that we want life and vitality in fiction (though I'm also aware those terms are very Leavisite). But I'm much less convinced that we find these qualities in tiresome rehearsals of 19th century realism. Give me a bit of funny and clever any day, whether Thomas Pynchon or Jane Austen.

[John]

Actually, Wood's complaint in some other articles is that people *do* still write like Dickens; he's given to lamenting the over-influence of Dickens on post-war Anglophone fiction. He's also somewhat annoyed, or at least he was in his earlier days, that some people still write like Flaubert: in a foregrounded style that is so precise that it constrains the free intelligence of the characters themselves. For him, the key is the image of freedom granted when the writer allows the character to forget that he or she is in a book, to escape from the dynamics of a Flaubertian style or a Dickensian narrative system. It's not simply nostalgia, but a polemic extending back into the nineteenth century, taking up one part in its debates as well as ours (it was either James or George Eliot who wrote of *Our Mutual Friend*, "Who speaks for nature in these pages?" and went on to say in quite Woodian (insert Beavis and Butt-head laugh) terms that Dickens would be brilliant if only he'd pay more attention to how people felt on the inside). If I may be allowed a self-plug, this freedom is of course not free:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/commonplacebook/117338.html

[CR]

The dilemma could be put dialectically: the writer, fearful that her characters are not "alive" enough, overdoes the liveliness and goes on a vitality spress; suddenly aware that she has overdone it, she tries to solve the problem by drawing self-conscious attention to the exaggeration...But the self-consciousness, far from healing the wound, merely makes it bloodier.

I dunno. I think the warp and woof that Wood warbles here is that of our world as well, certainly of my life, (drunkenly) nightly exaggurating myself into a sort of vitality, and then feeling awkward and self-conscious about it in the morn. And I don't think it's just me.

Think, erm, it has something to do with the world in which I live. Symptomatic rather than idiosyncractic. New Economy malaise of the creative worker - "Be what you are! But only in an incredibly more marketable form!...

Wood lacks an ear for modernism, the performative. Especially the late smouldering stuff that very much does it for me... Google up his review of Coetzee's Disgrace and maybe you'll see what I mean. (Last semester, my class of first-years couldn't stop laughing at just how badly he'd missed the point of the book...)

John - where does Wood admire the free indirect. I'd like to take a look at that...

[CR]

First paragraph was supposed to be italicized, of course.

[John]

CR, his first book, *The Broken Estate*, has essays on Chekhov and Woolf among others in praise of free indirect, and in later essays he chastises Updike and Morrison for not using free indirect. The second book probably has some stuff along those lines too, but I don't remember it that well.

And here's the end of the *Brick Lane* review (the one in which Wood pines for the good old days when adultery was a grave sin for women):

"But the bulk of the book is occupied by the unforgettable Nazneen; she is Ali's quarry, and the great prize of the prose is the way it subdues itself to her fears, her ignorance, her triumphs, and finally her comprehension. The novel's ending is wisely ambiguous. Nazneen does not escape her fate, or even necessarily resist it, but she understands it. Life has been her Morley College."
http://www.powells.com/review/2003_09_11.html

(God forbid anyone escape or resist...)

[Matt]

John, you're right about Wood on Dickens, but in this article anyway, he thinks DiLillo in the "symptomatic" _Underworld_ retains the "Dickensian detail" and "interconnectedness," only:

"unlike Dickens, at the level of the human there are no real connections at all, because there are no human beings in DeLillo's book, no one who really matters and whose consciousness really matters to himself. Thus the paranoid connectedness DeLillo claims to find in American society of the last fifty years is almost utterly conceptual. DeLillos has said that he writes novels about "the inner life of the culture." But can you write novels about the inner life of the culture and not write about the inner life of characters? Aren't the two precisely *intimately* connected?"

So maybe it's his concept of the human being that needs a litle help? And what if I were to confess to being torn, wanting to buy a sentence or two of description but not the underlying assumptions?

Granted, he has already displayed his rather unoriginal colors happily enough with his preceeding take on "our postmodern generation." Everything to do with "Theory's Empire" ad naseum, these renewed debates on postmodernism, as we make another cultural pass it seems (after several wars, and far too many "books") at understanding. Maybe this time we'll finally get beyond the rigid/incomprehending condemnation/knee-jerk hysterical defense/block polarity..

[Matt]

I'm with you, Susan. Blaming the funny and clever for everything else, well it smacks a bit of those peculiar politicians who used to chant how "it's cynicism that is destroying our country."

[John]

Matt:

For me, *Underworld* is symptomatic of a happy condition, the fact that we can still produce such a great novel. DeLillo describes what it's like to be human in circumstances that feel inhuman; for christ's sake, that's the point. If we could all feel free to act decisively and tragically in our own stories, however deterministic, on the promptings of our vast consciousnesses, then DeLillo probably wouldn't write anything at all. Wood's overt posture is one of discomfort in this culture, but I suspect he's far more comfortable in it than DeLillo, or else he'd understand him better.

As for our postmodern times, such as they are, Wood is more the symptom than DeLillo, and a somewhat uninteresting symptom at that. He reacts to this admittedly ungainly thing he calls hysterical realism simply with the desire to go back, to import (his very narrow vision of) the past directly into the present, to keep alive a style that belongs to another era and can't really express the life of this one.

[Matt]

Thanks John. Well I can't argue with any of that. Also, that was a good post, the one you linked.

One wonders if we're approaching the stage where it becomes possible to look back on a lot of this "easy irony" that Wood correctly diagnoses (though again, some did it very originally and well), as a step on the way to something else, as a transition stage of sorts. To which the correct response is of course not--as soon as the transition gives off the faintest whiff of becoming stale--"Damn the transition!" but rather, more productively, "What comes next?"

As a side note, did anyone else find it amusing that Wood seems to think Dostoevsky's "ideas of the self are still more radical than anything dreamed up by, say, Thomas Pynchon." He's in good company there, what with the so-called 'return to Dostoevsky.' Nabokov is truly rolling in his grave. And for the wrong reasons.

[John]

Matt,

a return to Dostoevsky wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, provided one doesn't return to a boring iteration of D. (he of the existential despair beloved of the kids and despised, straw-man-wise, by Nabokov; or he of the dialogic imagination who is fair and balanced about the opinions circulating in his novels (I haven't really looked too hard at the Bakhtin, I'm only making fun of the caricature of it ones sees in essays all over the place)).

It seems to me that Dostoevsky is a fine model for any novelist. He gets in plenty of hysteria all right, but it's embedded in a close, sweaty, malodorous heterocosm, neither naively our world nor a pure fantasy construct, but a strange little place in which events and discussions can progress which obviously refer out to our own world, but not in some kind of vulgar direct way. The relationship between what's said in the text and what the text means, politically or religiously, is bound up dialectically with the entirety of the text itself. No division between the aesthetic and political! (Not in good art anyway.) (And take that, The Reading Experience!) Sorry to be a pain in the ass, but I wrote a post about this too:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/commonplacebook/89487.html

As for D's more radical conception of character, I'm not entirely sure I see a really tremendous distance between D and Pynchon on this, or DeLillo for that matter. I think they're working in much the same post-Romantic tradition.

So who else is calling for a return to the big D?

[Matt]

John,

Al Gore was, I think, along with some other big-shot conservative (or was it only Ken Starr), in graduation speeches this season. The "so-called" was thus an exaggeration (politicians posturing as if on the cusp of literary affairs, is probably not the best measure of such things).

I think there is a way in which 'literature' resists (and politics as well, at least in the most petty and vulgar sense) but one has to read (to attempt reading) alongside Blanchot and Lacoue-Labarthe and others (in my humble opinion, you know) to tease out the true implications for this.

[John]

Al Gore is a strange man. And Ken Starr, well. (Incidentally, I don't think you can find it online anymore and it's never been reprinted, but James Wood once wrote an analysis of The Starr Report about the narrative techniques it shares with the great 19th century novels of adultery. I think Wood rather admired it in a wry sort of way.)

Blanchot: where to begin?

[Matt]

Oh, I'd suggest the long fiction.

And the short. The literary criticism is often more about Blanchot (his philosophy) than anything else (the writers in question for instance). The newest Blanchot Reader is superb.

[Matt]

On second thought, maybe it was Tolstoy.

Yes, I think it was. Sorry for the confusion; a world of difference, I know.

[Matt]

Belatedly noted, I should have nodded to these older posts/discussions on James Wood here, here and here.

[anonymous]

Similar thoughts on the James Wood piece by Matt Cheney today here. Management: And related here.

[Matt]

An excellent article by Asad Raza (on James Wood and Flaubert):

"Unspoken lies an uneasy feeling that thirty years ago, style that wears itself like a merit badge and world-weary, paternalistic maleness should have been enough to guarantee lionization. We were groomed to rule, but somewhere along the way the kingdom shrunk from Western culture to a sub-principality of Oprah-land [...]

So literature, then, or at least a particular idea of it, seems to have become a narrative of decline whose retelling celebrates one's refinement and sensitivity, one's belief in what is of true value, and one's allegiance to the superiority of an imaginary time before theory, before globalization, before now. It's as comfortable as a wool sweater. One can see why Flaubert excites reviewers such as Wood: here is the one writer whose famously toilsome life of writing was rewarded with immortality. Premature obsolescence becomes posthumous greatness. He is the human allegory of the value of art beyond and in opposition to economic value. (Not for nothing does Bourdieu identify Flaubert as the key figure of the nineteenth-century French aesthetic field.) Praising Flaubert's style, his adaptation of descriptive prose into a vehicle for a deliciously ambiguous form of seeing the world, allays not Bloom's anxiety of influence, the need to kill the poetic father, but the anxiety of inheritance, the need to see oneself as the true heir of the revered father. It's a telling reversal, in that a vital artistic tradition should be much more eager to dethrone than rethrone canonical forbears. It is a form of reading Flaubert's will, and finding one's own name as the beneficiary of all that (cultural) capital.

All of which is a shame, because on the matter of literary style, Wood is very good. Like Hugh Kenner before him, he has a talent for the producing something literary out of talking about literature. And he is also illuminating on his authors, in the case of Flaubert identifying the strange contradiction between his constant satirizing of the bourgeois life and his deep immersion in it. (It's precarious realism, satire perched on the edge of mimesis, and you want to cheer as Flaubert keeps keeping his balance.) But Wood stops there, as though he were the only person still having this conversation, like a jellyroll archivist. The last critic, indeed. But lots of people are talking about Flaubert, only in ways that are also informed by whole schools of thought that swam right past Wood."