Another masterful interview conducted by Eleanor Wachtel, characterized by her patented questions about the parent child relationship, this time with James Wood. Many of the issues discussed on this blog are covered. Greys are blackened. Incisive Qs, As and similar clarification are also found here.
My rough combined summary:
Early, intense desire to write creatively. Writerly interest in explaining fiction from the inside.
Role of the critic: ‘the correction of taste’ A passionate redescriber for the common reader. One who brings the text alive for readers, many of whom may never encounter the text; who tells the story again. Who says to the reader: I’ve had this amazing experience in this alternate world, and I want to share it with you; so ‘a passionate redescription, making the text live again in new language on a new page.
Critics want to share things they’re excited about, one way or another. Wood’s 3000-4000 word New Yorker pieces enable him to take a third path, between the journalistic review and the academic treatise, one along which he can provide context, and take things apart; analyze style.
Wood chose grub street instead of academia because of a ‘romantic wish to earn a living by the pen.’ Excitement about being paid by the word.
Free indirect speech: natural narrative that bends around character, away from the author. Quotation marks are removed, as is he said, she said/thought. David Lodge’s example: Cinderella looked at the clock, midnight. Time to go. The author’s words effortlessly drift toward and become Cinderella’s words. Jane Austen leaves formality, uses dashes and short sentences, and puts the reader into the agitation of her heroines’ heads. Almost stream of consciousness. The narrator is nonetheless still in control. Blurring of character and author allows for irony: ‘The big bird was too proud to reply.’ It’s actually a boat shaped like a bird, but the mallard in the story doesn’t understand this.
We get the hang of the unreliable narrator as we continue to read a work. The pattern is particularly evident when we re-read. This is the fun of Wodehouse. Jeeves always cleans up after Bertie who we come to realize is always unreliable.
The unreliable unreliable narrator - the out-and-out liar - is rare, perhaps non-existent. The ‘wilder’ unreliable narrator can be found in Hunger, Notes from the Underground, The Loser, Confessions of Zeno: we are here dealing with a level of insanity. (Eleanor challenges Wood here on Zeno. He responds that all examples are challengeable). Who’s in charge, as Amis once put it, the author or the stylish character?
Evangelical household in his youth: Literature provided a place for him to think about this form of Christianity instead of accepting it on blind faith. The sense that literature could bring alive an issue, where both sides could be argued. This was lacking at home. Fiction served as a way of picturing and dramatizing. Parents didn’t have any great appreciation of the novel. His love of it resulted from rubbing up against them. Wood does think perhaps that the love, passion and zeal he feels for the novel, the capacity for, and strength of these feelings, may be a familial inheritance.
A friend’s mother died. Literature provided him little consolation. It does however provide two things according to Wood: Company. With Tolstoy for example we are in the presence of someone who has seen and lived a lot. And the deliciousness of feeling that the world is being described accurately and precisely. The right words have been found for the right things. This ‘privileged language’ makes Wood a better noticer of life. The novel has tutored me. Life is full of telling detail. Literature is the great engine of selection. Orwell’s brilliant observation of a condemned man avoiding a puddle on his way to the firing squad.
Literature also makes us better citizens. More empathetic. The Death of Ivan Ilych for example is assigned medical students in the States because of how accurately it depicts a sense of dying and being alone. Tolstoy can put you in another’s place. Augments our lived experience. (I’d add that it deepens our capacity to feel. Enables us to get more from our experiences).
Wachtel mentions Harold Bloom. His idea that we read characters to cultivate ourselves, understand others. Freud read Dostoevsky to read his patients.
Character. Henry James doesn’t fill in every aspect of Isabel Archer’s character. He leaves it up to the reader. I can’t do it all. I can only do what I do with words. You have to participate. We know people in life imperfectly too. This is good fiction because it respects the limits of the knowable.
Two things decided Wood against belief: the impossibility of prayer being answered, and the existence of pain and suffering in the world.
Plot versus Character: Wood didn’t want to call his book How Fiction Works. He favoured George Eliot’s line: The Nearest Thing to Life. This said, he doesn’t like being manipulated by heavy plotting. By the neat wrapping up of things. It’s contrived and unrealistic. Tolstoy wrote without use of coincidence or Hardy’s terrible past coming back to haunt the present. He has a fondness for fiction where not much happens. Ian McEwan should loosen his plots, avoid the pull of writing mass market thrillers.
Realism versus the Avant Garde: Much of the antagonism between the two is expressed on the Internet. Those who say anything contra Delillo or Pynchon are immediately labelled reactionary. Each side tends to caracature the other. Wood attempts to expand the idea of the ‘real’ in How Fiction Works by examining the creation of true experience, regardless of how an author might produce it. He also attempts to steal some of the avant garde’s ground. Looks at how life is brought to life by artistry on the page, without necessarily demanding verisimilitude or ‘credibility.’
His own novel: The Book Against God: Accused of demanding nothing less than masterpieces from others, and yet, as the critics said, he fails to produce one himself. Wood felt it lacked a spacial, formal 3D sense. Focused more on sentences, scenes, and vivifying the odd character. It was overly essayistic. ‘The reason first novels exist, is so that second ones are written.’ Many writers fail to get into the mind of their characters. Updike’s Terrorist is cited. The challenge is to pursue your themes subtly, without showing your hand too obviously. It is a mistake to have characters formally present them.
As a critic he’s hardest on writers who don’t write to the best of their abilities. His current interest lies in finding new writing that he can really like. Finding books and authors that will bring him delight.
Just as he has brought delight to many of us.
Philip Burne-Jones
NB
Louis le Brocquy
