Realism, James Wood, and the importance of identifying what is Great.
Lengthy well written review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works in The Australian (via readysteadybook, via 3quarks), Delia Falconer (great name for a reviewer) which, along with most I’ve read, criticizes the book as much for what it doesn’t say as for what it does. Here’s a response to some of the points made:
Wood, in thrall to the grand idea of the novel, is always on the lookout for fiction as a combination of perfect transcendent moments that show life, as he puts it in an essay on Chekhov, as "a beautiful, milky complication" .
‘In thrall to the grand idea…’ is a bit pejorative: My take is that novelists who facilitate transcendent experiences in the reader, regardless of how they do it, are the ones who deserve to be called great. Wood, in providing useful evaluative criticism, identifies the authors who do this for him, and attempts to explain how they do it. How Fiction Works is the result. He emphasizes what works, and shouldn’t, I don’t think, be faulted for not providing a comprehensive summary of the novelistic genre, this isn’t, I don’t think, his objective.
Although fiction requires a different kind of belief to religion, a kind of collaboration in the games it plays, this is its power, according to Wood: it creates a parallel, and democratically entered into, sense of "the real". For Wood the best novels, although he does not quite come out and say this, seem to create an approximate reality so intense and morally driven that they may temporarily mend the world as a godless "broken estate".
Not sure if they ‘mend’ the world, but they do provide us with alternative visions and versions of it; with profound experiences in it. In this sense novels do perform a kind of magic.
If Wood doesn’t "get" the overall trick of an author’s writing he tends to dismiss it. This was most evident in his notorious Guardian review (reworked in The Irresponsible Self) of "hysterical realism", a term Wood has coined to sum up the work of a whole slew of contemporary novelists that includes Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon.
Wood roundly criticises these writers for over-stuffing their books with useless information and for cartoonish plotting that he maintains is driving the storytelling impulse into the ground.
While another critic might see the impulse towards jam-packed, baroquely hyperreal novels as a legitimate and thoughtful, albeit varyingly skilful, response to our postmodern world (a mimetic reflection of the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication, say, or an attempt to "wake up" a form whose traditional gestures are now the cliched staples of Hollywood cinema), Wood could only read this new "genre" as a kind of perversity or, worse, a showing off. (He has chastised DeLillo elsewhere for turning the novelist into "a kind of Frankfurt School entertainer, fighting the culture with dialectical devilry".)
This episode exposed a fundamental weakness of Wood’s criticism: the fetish status it accords to the "real". It is clear, reading Wood’s wider oeuvre, that he has a deep-rooted impatience with books that go outside a certain psychological verisimilitude; nor does he care for writing that usurps the critic’s job by incorporating elements of commentary into a more self-conscious narration. Instead Wood places the naturalistic realist writing of Anton Chekhov and Gustave Flaubert at the centre of his pantheon; writing in which the authorial presence never breaks the tranquil surface of the book.
What I find so bracing about Wood’s criticism is exactly what this critic condemns it for: He’s opinionated. He tells us what he thinks is good and bad, often with a style and insight superior to that found in the works he evaluates. Far from simply ‘dismissing’ ‘the overall trick of an author’s writing when he doesn’t ‘get’ it (whatever that means), he provides us with his considered judgment of what constitutes value, and detailed criticism of what does not. He furnishes us with a yardstick against which all works may be measured.
…distances himself from that author at the beginning of How Fiction Works with a snide comment about the lack of "inkiness" in The Art of the Novel.
If you’ve read the book, you’ll know that little ink was spilled on it: mostly Q and As, and glossary.
An inability to imagine a better novel than Flaubert’s accounts for the old-fashioned and sometimes pompous edge for which Wood is often taken to task, and for his strange inability to distinguish between postmodern writers as different as DeLillo and Rushdie.
Clearly there is no ‘inability’ on Wood’s part. The only inability is that of most ‘postmodern’ writers to produce great work. As for distinguishing differences: Interesting that Falconer would point to Rushdie and DeLillo. Wood’s essays on these two in The Irresponsible Self showcase some of his finest, fieriest, most brilliant criticism. He doesn’t just ‘dismiss’ them. He coolly, methodically dismantles and destroys them.
On Underworld:
"Bright lights are taken as evidence of habitation. The mere existence of a giant cheese or a cloned mouse or several different earthquakes in a novel is seen as meaningful or wonderful, evidence of great imaginative powers. And this is because too often these features are mistaken for scenes, as if they constituted the movement or the toil or the pressure of the novel, rather than taken for what they are – props of the imagination, meaning’s toys. The existence of vitality is mistaken for the drama of vitality."
On Fury:
Fury, a novel that exhausts negative superlatives, that is likely to make even its most charitable readers furious, is a flailing apologia…
"…For this instability of voice, this anarchy of borrowed languages, infiltrates and infects the fabric of storytelling. A cartoonish and inauthentic voice produces a cartoonish and inauthentic reality.
"…true vivacity — which is not necessarily the same as mere lifelikeness — has no need to shout. It goes by, in Yeat’s words, with white footfall."
Sure, realism is the gold standard, and others are free to develop their own criteria for greatness, although all I’ve ever seen from anyone is a few vague notions of ‘experimentation,’ but still, the criticism of these two writers by Wood is ‘distinguished’ and distinguishable.
What I’d really like to see, instead of all this ‘conventional’, tiresome shitting on the model of excellence defended here, is an alternative model, one as well reasoned and argued as Wood’s is. Then maybe we’d have something to discuss.
What is it about jam-packed, ‘baroquely hyperreal’ novels that makes them legitimate and thoughtful? What makes them great?
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:37 AM
Realistic fiction, isn’t. That’s the problem to address. A critical stance founded on an unexamined trope. Woods doesn’t so much filter out a class of fiction, as a whole range of "realities" and the tropes that embed their representation.
July 3rd, 2008 at 1:12 AM
Jacob’s right. There is no need to defend some ill-defined "experimentation" here, there is just the requirement to point out that "realism" is miles away from reality. It is merely the habit of the style of the Victorian novel. So e.g. either Beckett’s minimalist theatre or the dense Trilogy both attempt to articulate something very real about what experience is, and what writing about experience means, and are profoundly, unnervingly "realistic" but come nowhere near to being "realism".
Nobody, in real life, acts as they do in a novel. Great works, in many different ways, write that knowledge – write their own critique of realism — into the very heart of the work.
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:50 AM
Thanks both of you for your comments.
’realism’ is miles away from reality.’
Yes, this is a self evident truth. And I agree with you. As I say above:
"My take is that novelists who facilitate transcendent experiences in the reader, regardless of how they do it, are the ones who deserve to be called great. "
I suppose this is a reader response point: discarding the term ‘realism,’ great works are the ones which change the lives of the reader, and continue to have this effect generation after generation. They have the same impact on life as ‘real’ experience does. It’s not necessarily the form or approach that the novel takes, but rather the degree to which it produces genuine feeling, reflection, change in those who read it.
That said, the novels that achieve this typically, almost universally, are ones which enable a significant degree of empathy; the ones which most closely replicate the feeling of life lived outside the pages of the book.
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:48 AM
Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo vs. Gustave Flaubert? No contest there – and I’m not even a big Flaubert fan. And it isn’t Chekhov’s "realism" that is his hallmark. It is his humanity.Regarding "realism" vs, "reality": A few years ago I wrote a long piece about painter Nelson Shanks’s portrait of mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. The usual hit on representational painting is that the artist is simply transcribing what’s there. But of course this isn’t true. Shanks’s portrait shows Graves singing in a recital accompanied by a pianist. The piano in this case was out of tune, the pianist was a violist (who did play the piano), and Graves was not on stage, but in a messy, cluttered studio. The scene portrayed in the painting is an imagined one. "Realism" uses "reality" as the standard by which to achieve verisimilitude.
July 4th, 2008 at 9:23 AM
"It is merely the habit of the style of the Victorian novel."–Any one in particular? Bleak House, maybe? Middlemarch? Vanity Fair? I do get tired of "Victorian novelists" being shorthand for "naive mimetic realists" when they experiment with such a diversity of styles and techniques. All of the novels I’ve named, just for instance, are profoundly aware of and articulate about the differences between their representations and reality. (Sorry, but this is becoming a pet peeve, as it is a recurrent cheap shot in these discussions.)
July 7th, 2008 at 4:06 PM
I have observed many people in real life act like people in novels, and vice versa. I’ve observed people in real life act like people in Beckett novels.
July 10th, 2008 at 5:53 PM
More on How Fiction Works and someone else’s review doesn’t…
In The Australian, a nominal review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works is really a discussion of Wood’s work more generally. It also shows why I shirked writing a deep review of How Fiction Works, as I I have more than a few quibbles:
If Woo…