James Wood enters the Fray: Attacks on-line sanctioned Ignorance
Here’s what Steven Augustine says in a recent comment responding to my initial James Wood post:
"…is Marcello, in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, a shallow arse, a trapped artist, a victim of or collaborator-in his subculture? Is the movie a paean to a certain kind of postwar, wistfully decadent beauty, or a savage attack on it? Is it about plenty or deprivation? I’ve seen it 30 times, probably, and will see it again. Versus some well-intentioned movie (with absolutely unambiguous themes and characters) like "Shine" or "Ray" or quot;The Talented Mr. Ripley," for which once is enough, thanks.
I’m saying that Uncle Jimmy is a middlebrow theorist using highbrow language to communicate his theories, and, aesthetically, he’s sort of a "The Talented Mr. Ripley" kind of guy. He has no real idea what to make of Godard, Fellini, Cassavettes, Visconti, Pasolini, et al (to extend the metaphor) and his *inability to grasp* the aesthetic becomes a (defensive) mission statement.
Wood’s disavowal of Wolfe is pretty funny, really, and an important forensic clue (a bit like, you know, closeted politicians who Gay-bash)."
Here’s James Wood’s emailed response:
I don’t want to argue with Steven Augustine about reality, because that is a wilderness of mirrors, but it might be sensible to try to counter his absurd idea that I am a "Mr Ripley" or "Beautiful Mind" kind of guy rather than a Fellini or Cassavetes kind of guy. It’s the ignorance I so dislike, sanctioned by that online free-for-all in which quick judgments, based on the thinnest acquaintanceship with the subject’s work, can be prodigally posted. Augustine may not know that one of my early pieces (1996) for "The New Republic "was an attack on a film called "Leaving Las Vegas," starring Nicolas Cage, which seemed to me the worst kind of sentimental kitsch dressed up as art film sophistication. (Cage spends a lot of time swigging gin from a bottle, while standing in the shower — this to show that he is… an ALCOHOLIC. Sting provides a weepy soundtrack, as I remember.) I used the favored Nabokovian term "poshlost" to attack the film, and explicitly lamented that there were not more real avant-gardists like John Cassavetes now around! David Denby, who had liked the Cage film, wrote to TNR to defend it.
In "How Fiction Works," there is exactly one reference to one filmmaker: it is an adulatory reference to Antonioni’s "L’eclisse" (in the chapter on character, paragraph # 63). In the chapter on realism at the end of that book, there appear two paragraphs, 115 and 116. I am talking about how realism has become
"a kind of invisible rule book, whereby we no longer notice its artificialities. One reason for this is economic. Commercial realism has cornered the market, has become the most powerful brand in fiction. We must expect that this brand will be economically reproduced, over and over again. That is why the complaint that realism is no more than a grammar or set of rules that obscures life is generally a better description of Le Carre or P.D.James than it is of Flaubert or George Eliot or Isherwood: when a style decomposes, flattens itself down into a genre, then indeed it does become a set of mannerisms and often pretty lifeless techniques.
The efficiency of the thriller genre takes just what it needs from the much less efficient Flaubert or Isherwood, and throws away most of what made those writers truly alive. And of course, the most economically privileged genre of this kind of largely lifeless ‘realism’ is commercial cinema, through which most people nowadays receive their idea of what constitutes a ‘realistic’ narrative."
By commercial cinema, I precisely mean something like "The Talented Mr Ripley" or "Shine," or films that people try to palm off as indie-ish, like "Little Miss Sunshine, " or "Juno."
In the next graf, I go on to say:
"Decomposition like this happens to any long -lived and successful style, surely; so the writer’s — or critic’s, or reader’s — task is then to search for the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced."
It is perfectly possible to agree with Roland Barthes that realism is a set of codes and conventions (for all writing is a set of such codes, after all) and
still try to defend that element in fiction — what I call "lifeness" — that eludes the nerveless grip of code. This is a defence both of that evanescence called ‘reality’ and of the artifice that makes it — and makes it up — and there is no contradiction in this doubleness: we read fiction with two eyes, as it were, one world-directed and one text-directed.
The review I just wrote about Joseph O’Neill’s superb novel,"Netherland," in "The New Yorker," praises the novel both for its deep and wise interest in life and lives, and for its high degree of artifice and style. That doubleness is entirely in keeping with my attacks on people like Tom Wolfe, John Irving, the more formulaic elements of John Updike, and so on, and in keeping with my praise, in essays and reviews, of writers like Cormac McCarthy (when he is not trying to write a genre thriller like "No Country for Old Men"), Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolano, Muriel Spark, Jose Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Philip Roth, Alan Hollinghurst, Milan Kundera, Norman Rush, V.S. Naipaul, Edward P. Jones, Michel Houellebecq, Anne Enright, David Means, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, Bohumil Hrabal, Harold Brodkey (I was an early and pretty isolated English champion of Brodkey’s), not to mention earlier writers like Henry Green, Italo Svevo, Giovanni Verga, Knut Hamsun, J.F. Powers, and many others.
Most of these essays are collected, in two books, and may easily be consulted before being tempted to comment on them.
One may not agree with that critical project, but to claim that it simply yearns for the innocent days of 19th-century realism, or that it is really a fifth columnist’s attempt to glorify the babyish writing of a Tom Wolfe, is simply not to have read a word I have ever written, however fast the eyeballs have been scanning various literary websites, with their alluring ‘excerpts’ from some recent review or essay of mine.
James Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, and author of two collections of literary essays, The Broken Estate, and The Irresponsible Self, and most recently a work of literary criticism, How Fiction Works. His one novel is entitled The Book Against God.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:49 AM
[...] James Wood vs. Steven Augustine. I hope to have more to say on Wood’s review of O’Neill later, once I have thought more about why it rubs me the wrong way. It is not, in this case, Wood’s customary championing of realism above everything else, but rather the manner in which he articulates his position. Some of the generalizations that Wood has unearthed from O’Neill’s book (”This is attentive, rich prose about New York in crisis that, refreshingly, is not also prose in crisis”) are as troubled as the assumptions frequently attached to litbloggers: that they generalize and make obvious points about literature. In the paragraph I am citing, there is the illusion here of careful dissection that comes with the strained voice of sophistication (”one lovely swipe of a sentence”), rather than a passionate and more specific dissection. I suspect this is a case where what Wood writes is different from how Wood thinks. But some hard editor should have demanded more clarity. I wouldn’t go as far as Augustine to declare Wood “a middlebrow theorist using highbrow language to communicate his theories.” But I can certainly see why Augustine can come away with this conclusion. [...]
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:12 PM
Dear James,
Thank you for your clarification/contribution. I hope it will persuade Steven to respond in kind instead of with his usual dismissive, misinformed flippancy, at least when it comes to your work.
Your two-eyed reading metaphor put me in mind of London Fields, a novel thick with style and narrator intrusions, but captivating enough, containing enough lifeness to invite loss in its world. Although intense connection with character is paramount in my valuation model, this book is great in large part because of the intrusions, and would suffer without, for example, the narrator’s wry commentary on Nicola Six ’s tryst with God:
He had slept with her once, and once only: she did that to show Him what he would be missing for ever and ever. In bed, Nicola had made him do the act of doubledarkness: the doublebeast with only one back. Then never again. God cried on the street outside her apartment. He telephoned and telepathized. He followed her everywhere. His gaze imparting that fancy blue nimbus. God got Shakespeare and Dante working as a team to write her poems…
Not terribly experimental, and perhaps not that good an example of textual artifice, 100 Years of Solitude might be better, but still, a reminder we are reading a novel;…and yet one that doesn’t diminish the connection with the main players; rather it serves as a most welcome addition to a hugely entertaining piece of work.
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:12 PM
“It is perfectly possible to agree with Roland Barthes that realism is a set of codes and conventions (for all writing is a set of such codes, after all) and still try to defend that element in fiction — what I call “lifeness” — that eludes the nerveless grip of code. …we read fiction with two eyes, as it were, one world-directed and one text-directed.”
I applaud Mr. Wood’s acknowledgement of the ‘doubleness’ of his approach fiction. And I recognize his attempt to distance himself from the aesthetic conventions of much commercial fiction. Whether this makes him, as Mr. Augustine suggests, “middle brow” I am not prepared to say.
My own reading of How Fiction Works over at Wisdom of the West concluded thus:
“the devil is in the details. My own impatience with Wood’s effort in this thought-provoking book has to do with his failure to show how the details, beyond providing a means to understand characters, add up in fiction to make a compelling story. Roughly, stories provide something for us. Whether it is organization, order, form, structure, meaning, closure, WISDOM, or whatever I’m not prepared to say. But neither is he. This is why we keep reading stories and why they keep moving us. Sure, the brush-strokes are nice, the details (essential or superfluous) persuading us of the lifelikeness of the illusion (of the character)—and the raging debate here is whether the critic should focus chiefly on the way in which the illusion is presented (Gass) or on the illusion itself and its congruence with reality perceived or imagined (Wood). But stories wrap up, even Chekhov’s; they end. And they begin as well. From our reading of Wood, however, we have no way of understanding how they get from the latter to the former. That is to say, how fiction really works.”
By focusing on this doubleness, Wood necessarily makes an implicit comparison between the illusion of reality as presented in and by the text and the ‘reality’ that makes sense to (has meaning for) Wood himself. The solipsism of this critical position is obvious. Wood does not enter into the world of the text and thus take the text on its own terms, but only on terms that somehow jibe (or don’t) with his own pre-conceived views of the world and the way things (texts) are.
Best,
Jim H.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:31 PM
Hi Jim,
You’re losing me a bit in the last paragraph. Could you please clarify?
Here’s my take:
We all have our life experiences/preconceived views of the world which necessarily affect the way we read/understand/experience what various characters in fiction say and do, which makes the book different for each one of us. So there is the degree to which we connect with and lose ourselves in the world of the novel on the one hand,which I think determines in many ways how good the book is, and there is our knowledge that this isn’t the same as ‘real’ life experience, because of the various textual or authorial tricks and effects that are used. Amis bringing God into the equation, or indeed, himself…
re your comment on story: I think this is a good point, but isn’t story tied closely to character, largely determined by what the author has his/her characters do? How they react, consistently or otherwise, to certain events? Their behavior triggers behavior in others…
Thanks,
NB
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:17 PM
Hi Nigel,
The point I’m driving at (however circumspectly) is that there is—and probably always has been—an on-going battle over the text: whose is it? Is it what the ‘author’ (however defined) intended or is it what the critic/reader makes it out to be? Some assert there is an ideal interpretation of a given text out there coincident with the author’s creative vision and the critic’s job is to suss that meaning out (the New Critics eviscerated this position). Others claim the author is irrelevant, dead even; the author delivers the work whole into existence and it is what is and must be taken at face value, explored and exploited without regard to any external references (here I lump Gass and Barthes). A further view holds that the text is what we, as readers or critics, make of it; it is our playground and we bring our own meanings to the bear.
To my reading, Wood is in the camp of this last position. The text is what he makes of it. And the ‘he’ in this instance brings his own world-view into the reading with all its nuances and limitations. The text does not control its own reading, the critic does. Thus, nothing new (that is to say, nothing that cannot be digested) can enter the world of this critic.
This is the flaw in much of what passed for so-called ‘post-modern’ criticism—whether of the Marxist, feminist, queer theory, etc. flavor. Everything is always about them! Mr. Wood, as he says, keeps one eye firmly fixed on something he calls “reality”, but that “reality” is entirely subjective—not subject to revision or ‘differance’. This is not to say Mr. Woods does not have a capacious “reality” or is not subject to persuasion. It is to say, however, that his view devalues both the text and the author in favor of his own preformed worldview. A metric personal to Mr. Wood. The critics take the high-ground.
As for your second point: I spent 10-12 posts over at http://wisdomofthewest.blogspot.com trying, first, to read through his book and recap what he did, but, second, to get a sense of what he didn’t do. My sense was that he gave short shrift to such things as plot, story, narrative. He glossed over how these mechanisms that keep us turning pages and coming back again and again really work.
Thanks for this forum, Nigel. Maybe, the net is not all ignorant knee-jerk spoutings after all.
Best,
Jim H.
May 24th, 2008 at 9:21 AM
James Wood has confirmed with me that he sent the email.
May 28th, 2008 at 10:28 AM
(Apologies for the post above—this one should be cleaned up.) I did finally respond to this post and comment on what I perceive as a tendency for writers to lean toward focus on the interior and exterior world, both historically and currently.
This is well put, and I can only think that the modes you set up can’t be fully separated: there isn’t an ideal interpretation but there are better and worse ones, and no interpretation can fully encompass a great book. That, perhaps, is one test of a great book: can the criticism encircle it, or does it forever evade the criticism? My theory regarding the impossibility of separation might sound like a splitting-the-baby copout, and yet in so much of literature tendencies don’t divide evenly or neatly, a subject I deal with in my post linked to above.
May 30th, 2008 at 4:11 AM
[...] Wood wrote a typically fascinating piece to Nigel Beale defending “lifeness,” or sophisticated realism. As mentioned in my recent [...]
June 2nd, 2008 at 1:39 PM
Jim H: Thanks for your comments. I did read through your Wood posts, but I plan to return to spend more time with them, because, as mentioned, I think you have a point.
June 3rd, 2008 at 3:10 AM
Jake, I agree with your measure of a great book. Perhaps Wood can’t really encircle "Netherland" and that’s why he’s unsure about what makes it good. But eight pages into the Tom Wolfs and Zadie Smiths and I’m at a loss…what is all this that’s not yet life but beautiful, clever turnings of the things that good smart television insists is life? It may have started with Steinbeck, who wrote good books in Hollywood formula, but then Hollywood cashed in on his literary upgrades to the formula, and since then no other great writer has attempted to upgrade, if not undo, the branding. So, Hollywood has since been upgrading itself, building upon fixed super themes of how we talk, dress, love our friends and children–how we make our world in terms of these things.
These self-imposed upgrades have been influential. The Ms Smiths can easily fit in an episode of “The Sopranos” in between the dead chapters of Moby Dick, but this does something to them: They don’t feel the guilt. And then they defend themselves in their books. Give a dude a Brooklyn accent and describe his do-rag with a cleverness and they won’t know the difference between him and the crack dealer on NYPD Blue. Well, at least Wood knows it.
June 9th, 2009 at 5:32 AM
Wow… What a bunch of clever so and so’s. I wish I could quote from obscure art house films and trash modern art and trivia. Alas, I am but a lowly postman bearing my load come wind, rain and heatwave with what little dignity I can muster whilst using the edge of the kerb to clean doggy poo from the crevice between the sole and heel of my regulation issue steel toe-capped DM walking boots, my only respite being, incidentally, the very trivia you denigrate. Now, I hope that’s real enough for y’all…