Friday Column: James Wood's Two Modes

What a funny coincidence that just as I thought to comment on James Wood's book of criticism The Irresponsible Self, Small Spiral Notebook decides to run a column on him. So now, you get two looks at Wood for the price of one.

To read Wood's most recent collection of criticism, The Irresponsible Self, is to wonder if all this talk about Wood's greatness hasn't gotten a bit overheated. Granted, Wood's writing is a cut above what you're likely to encounter in popular book reviews today, but one begins to wonder whether it's Wood's greatness or the majority's mediocrity. Certainly Wood is an erudite and well-read literary critic, but, well, why shouldn't all respected critics be erudite and well-read? Is this really such rarefied territory? Moreover, reading Wood's essays one after the other, one begins to note a certain sameness to--his repeated assertion that characters "who believe in themselves" are most real, his borderline hobby-horsical idea that Tolstoy's characters are only described when they're doing something, his slamming of postmodernist works for sloppy prose.

To be fair, a book-length collection isn't the best way to take in a series of 3,000-word reviews. Ideally, each essay in a book of criticism would build on the one before to create a thematic arc, or to at least provide some sort of logical structure and progression. This would keep each piece fresh. Although Wood does provide an introductory essay meant to bring together a number of pieces in The Irresponsible Self, overall the book has no unity. Inevitably, this wears on a reader's appreciation of the material; maybe it's not the best thing to issue a book of collected magazine articles every few years.

Some trends do emerge in The Irresponsible Self, and I think one of them is especially pertinent to our discussion of Wood. As I read this book, I began to discover a demarcation in what Wood does well as a critic and what he doesn't do so well. I began to realize that Wood is rather good on technical matters—showing how a paragraph of prose is built, explaining why a joke is funny, teasing out the structure of a novel. What he's not so good on is the imaginative inhabiting of characters and symbols in a novel. I found his interpretations of characters and metaphors somewhat basic.

An example of each. While discussing the prose of Issac Babel, Wood unfurls this little nugget:

His writing is startingly discontinuous; in a typical Babel paragraph, each sentence seems to disavow its role in the ordinary convoy of meaning and narrative, and appears to want to begin the story anew.

I like this. This is perceptive, and, as any good critic should, Wood doesn't simply let this idea stand alone. He builds on it to develop a deeper appreciation of what makes Babel's style his own.

Contrast this with Wood's take on Fyodor, the father from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor is a loathsome creature (the book revolves around the mystery of which of his sons killed him), and Wood picks up a section in which Fyodor enters a monastery dining room full of people and plays "the buffoon, because all of you, to a man, are lower than I am."

What does Wood make of this? Fyodor, Wood believes, "needs other people in order to confirm himself." Not only that; "Fyodor longs . . . to punish himself because he hates himself," which he does by lashing out at other people. This isn't bad for a starting point, but as a look into a character's psychology, this doesn't tell us very much.

I think Wood's inability to read characters very deeply relates to his hatred of aestheticism. To return to his critique of Babel, Wood says that Babel's exaggerated style is "uncomfortably close to mere phrasemaking," that it is "perilous," that it is, finally, "the cousin of aestheticism." I must admit, whenever I see Wood condemning a poor author for "aestheticism," the first thing that enters my mind is Stalin walking out on Lady Macbeth and condemning poor Shostakovich for "formalism."

Why condemn writers for "mere phrasemaking"? Aren't beautiful stretches of prose lovely things in and of themselves? For Wood, no. Prose that is beautiful, but that carries no clear connection to the elaboration of a realist environment, is bad. Although I have yet to see Wood elucidate a clear defense of his anti-aestheticism, I get the idea that he dislikes it because aestheticized writing carries no "moral" content.

To get an idea of this, take this gloss on Flaubert: Wood first quotes Flaubert's description of a smoke-belching train, the smoke like "a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away." Wood admits that this is good writing, but that "nevertheless a stylist is being a stylist." What's wrong with this? Well: "Flaubert's train, as soon as it becomes style, becomes somewhat superfluous, and not least because metaphor, even the greatest metaphor, tends to insist on the accidental: we are meant to notice that X happens to resemble Y."

Now, Wood is undoubtedly a smart man who loves literature, but this is just plain stupid. The whole power of a metaphor, the whole point of it, is to bring together unconnected items, thereby allowing readers to project their imagination into a work. Flaubert's train is the opposite of superfluous—it's just these kinds of things that let readers develop their own interpretation of a novel. Wood contrasts Flaubert's wanton appropriation of reality with Tolstoy's respectful attitude toward it: "reality is not the novelist's toy in Tolstoy but his characters' necessary food."

I believe this relates back to Wood's rather simple reading of Fyodor. I don't think Wood believes there is much value in metaphors like Flaubert's because as a reader he doesn't appreciate what use they have in a novel. Wood is comfortable dissecting how an author attaches character traits to realistic people, but when an author tosses in an enigmatic metaphor, Wood finds it too fuzzy, and therefore meaningless. I think, perhaps, if he were better at imagining his way into the psychology of a work, he might better understand the value of metaphors like Flaubert's.

This of course relates back to the infamous review of White Teeth, which, read 10 years hence, feels nothing so much as mean-spirited. I must say that Wood's opening caricature of a "hysterical" novel is simply derogatory. In a good parody, one gets the impression that the parodist understands the source material that he's parodying. But in Wood's I can't be sure:

A parody would go like this. if a character is introduced in London (call him Toby Awknotuby, i.e., "To be or not to be"--ha!), then we will swiftly be told that Toby has a twin in Delhi (called Boyt: an anagram of Toby, of course) who, like Toby, has the same very curious genital deformation . . .

Of course, there are contemporary novels that are this bad, but most intelligent readers can identify them as such. A real postmodern work such as Wood is trying to parody doesn't fit this description because all the "clever" touches are more than mere cleverness—they are carefully constructed metaphors, descendants of Flaubert's billow of smoke. Within a good postmodernist work, all such instances of "zany" cleverness fit together to resonate on multiple levels. They contain the meaning that Wood's parody lacks, and what Wood seems to not understand ("this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality . . . but because it seems evasive of reality") is that in resembling systems that define our world, they're every bit as real and confronting of the "real world" as his beloved high Modernist character portraits. Wood is good at picking out how a novel's structure can be used to build characters, but he seems not to get it when that structure is used to evoke the societies and ideas among which characters operate.

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Comments

[Dan Whatley]

This is a perceptive take on Wood. Especially regarding his implied dismissal of metaphor, and his disinterest in the beauties of prose for its own sake. I missed that oversimplication of Fyodor; good catch to use for your point.

[sd]

i don't know if you can say there's a dismissal of metaphor on wood's part, implied or not. his essay on melville's metaphors is pretty spot on, as are some other disquisitions on metaphor that i read in wood's 'broken estate'. but i do find his dislike of the flaubert's train metaphor, and his explanation for it, BIZARRE. i also sense a kind of an unease on wood's part about aestheticized phrase-making. but his guardian uk review of anne enright (which was linked in critical mass site) praises her prose precisely for its beauty.

[matt]

Here, here. I enjoy Wood but his delicate sensibilities limit his breadth as a critic and his denunciations of "hysterical realism" are mostly facile. I think Laura Miller of Slate put it rather well.

"Wood's taste is so monkishly circumscribed, so painfully attuned to the most delicate of registers, that he winds up depicting the reading of new fiction as a strenuous effort to soldier through a few books without having your sensibility brutalized. Editorially, this is a bit like sending an agoraphobe off to write about adventure travel"

Wood wants truth but his conception of the novel and the novelist stand against the reality of the age. He upbraids De Lillo, Franzen, DFW et al for not telling us "how it feels", yearning for the days when "the foci was human and metaphysical". Yet, as you suggest, it is painfully clear that foci is no longer thus. The best post modern novels, in capturing the effluvia and dissonance of modern life, often tell us how people feel by telling what they don't or can't feel. If an author wants to resist the culture and give me a story about a guy and his fiancee on a ... um...grape ... farm, great. I'll read that. But if Stendhal's mirror explodes in downtown Manhattan, so be it. I'll read that too.

[Nigel Beale]

I agree with you on Flaubert. It is odd that Wood would criticize what to my mind is the best feature of his writing.

Here are a couple of my favourite short Flaubertisms:

"The universe, for him, was contracted to the silken compass of her petticoat. "

"Charles' conversation was as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody's ideas trudged past in their workaday dress, provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams"

I think you are being unfair,perhaps intentionally combative, though, when you call Wood's take on metaphor 'stupid' when you accuse him of a lack of understanding.

Clearly the man lacks no skills when it comes to analyzing fiction. I haven't yet read his books. I don't plan to read them cover to cover. Just dip into them, as I'd suggest these types of books are meant to be read...I'm very impressed with what I've read to date. His use of language is better than that of most of the contemporary novelists he reviews. Just look at the short quote you highlight...it's beautiful...his choice of the word convoy is masterful.

As for his review of White Teeth...he must have gotten something right given the response of its author.

I may fall out of love with Wood's prose 'cause it's early days yet...I may tire of his insight if it becomes repetitive...but for now I'm a big fan.

[Amateur Reader]

I don't uquite nderstand your argument about metaphor. Surely, in the context of a novel, a metaphor ought to have some point besides "bringing together unconnected items". Ideally, there must be some element that serves the novel as well. Maybe the metaphor reveals something about the character. Maybe a link is created to another part of the novel - the smoke like a feather in this scene links us to another scene where something is like a feather.

I admire the detached phrases Nigel Beale has pulled from "Madame Bovary". At the highest level of the art of the novel, each of these images and metaphors is also intimately embedded in the novel.

My prejudice is suffieciently pro-Flaubert that I suspect Wood has actually missed some image somewhere, and that the feathery smoke is not just free-floating stylistic indulgence.

[Scott]

Amateur,

I think offering the reader a point at which to imaginatively enter the novel does serve it.

What you say is true about metaphors, but I think they don't have to serve an obvious purpose (like exploring a character's mind or linking to another part) to be worthwhile. They might, for instance, contribute to the overall style, reveal something about the era, or perhaps become that loose thread that a reader keeps pulling at, ultimately discovering a new reading.