Book Review: James Wood’s How Fiction Works, by Nigel Beale (Director’s Cut)
Montaigne once said that there is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.
By this measure, James Wood's How Fiction Works is filled with excitement. Realists Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Spark and Woolf stand as the protagonists in one corner, against Rick Moody, Patrick Giles, Roland Barthes and William Gass, antagonists in the other. The former are held up as exemplars of all that is good in fiction, their works are meticulously examined and praised.
Known for his revealing use of opposition, Wood, in the closing rounds of this concise, expository work, savages the antagonists for their mockings and dismissals of realism, of what they call a dull, predictable genre, "just another convention reflecting the aspirations of petit bourgeois readers." This, says Wood, in one of the few expressed prevarications in the book, 'is more or less nonsense.'
In a chapter about character, Wood declares Gass's disbelief in Henry James's Mr. Cashmore "deeply, incorrigibly wrong." He especially rejects Gass's contention that character is just an assemblage of words, the novel a mere 'codex of bound pages.' "Gass's words pose as skepticism but in fact simply represent a dandyish flippancy, a refusal to be taught by literature about other people. To my mind, to deny character with such extremity is essentially to deny the novel ."
Perplexingly, instead of using direct quotation, Wood parodies Graham Greene to illustrate the use of those conventional novelistic devices Gass et al disparage — quiet point of view, telling detail, 'good' metaphor, free indirect style, generalization, reflection — using the 'real' John le Carre, from Smiley's People, to show us that elegantly finished, efficient contemporary realistic narrative, although nice writing, contains nothing out of the ordinary. "The passage is a clever coffin of dead conventions."
So Wood defines what Moody and others are criticizing, agrees with them that when style flattens into genre it becomes a set of lifeless techniques, but then whips and turns on them: "By blacklisting every conceivable convention, they effectively ban the writing of any fiction at all." The point to make about convention, he says is not that it is untruthful per se, but that it has an unfortunate way of becoming conventional. Love becomes routine, but falling in love is not nullified by this fact, he argues. Metaphors may die from overuse, but it would be 'insane' to charge metaphor itself with deadness.
In the rendering of 'truth', Wood agrees with Aristotle, that convincing impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The artist's burden then is not verisimilitude or reference, but mimetic persuasion. In order to convince us that something could have happened, internal consistency and plausibility become most important. Quoting Dr. Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare in defence of realism, Wood holds that imitation produces pain or pleasure, "not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind."
He then marshals George Eliot's argument that art is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with others; the nearest thing to life. And, as if to prove he's not fixated on feeling, approves of Woolf's opinion that when judging fiction's success we should not focus solely on its ability to evoke 'life,', as E.M. Forster does, but consider too how it can delight us with its more formal properties of pattern and language.
Realism, seen narrowly as one of many conventions, and all the internecine skirmishes it has propagated, seem in a wonderful metaphor, 'like a school of bright red herrings' to Wood, who prefers to define it broadly as truthfulness, by what he calls lifeness, "life brought to different life by the highest artistry". Far from being dull, and a 'politically and philosophically dubious,' genre,' lifeness,' says Wood, suffocating his opponents, is not one of many approaches, it's the breath which allows all schools and genres to breathe. Great realists, he says, are great formalists. This will become increasingly difficult, he says "for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable aging."
****
Though Wood is most alive when combative, he is also an intriguing and entertaining expositor. Throughout the book he answers, with telling detail, essential questions about the art of fiction such as: How do we know when a detail seems really true? Is realism real? What is successful metaphor? What is a character? Why does fiction move us? Wood asks as the critic, and successfully answers as the writer, turning the theoretical into the practical by reducing, as he says, Joyce's 'true scholastic stink.'
With characteristic panache, Wood fills this little book with clear eyed-observation, and synapse shaking metaphors. Details, for example are "pushed at us as if by the croupier's stick, in one single heap," that appear in a "tattoo of randomness."
The book is comprised of 123 blog-like entries, spread over ten chapters that deal with, among other topics, narrating, detail, sympathy, character, and truth. Whether it's demonstrating free indirect speech ("He looked at his wife. Yes, she was tiresomely unhappy again, almost sick. What the hell should he say?") or defining it (the husband's internal speech or thought has been freed of its authorial flagging, no quotation marks. We are close to stream of consciousness, and that is the direction free indirect style takes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Whether it's the specific: plucking the words 'stupid' 'embarrassed' and 'huddled' out of paragraphs and showing how they belong to both or either of the author or character, how the reader inhabits omniscience and partiality and confusion all at once; or the general: The history of the novel can be told through the development of free indirect speech and the rise of detail; literature makes us better noticers of life, Wood is there standing by the reader's desk throughout, attentive and instructive without being pedantic.
He describes in simple, intelligent prose what makes a novel great. Things like using language that suits the character and the social millieau; like selecting enough of the right kinds of detail, important and unimportant, to produce the life-like; like using specific detail to kill abstraction with a 'puff of palpability,' and quantity enough to replicate the inexplicable irrelevant surplus that exists in life.
Wood writes well on character: Jean Brodie, 'because of her very thinness is someone around whom we tend to construct a thicker interpretive jacket.' By reducing her to a series maxims, 'Muriel Spark forces us to become Brodie's students.' Iris Murdoch says that the creation of free and independent characters is the sign of a great novelist, and 'yet despite this knowledge is unable to create a character who is not herself.' It is here that Wood acts on his anxiety of influence, and so takes on E.M. Forster, dismissing his theory of round and flat characters as lacking subtlety and mistakenly privileging novels over short stories, since characters in short stories rarely have the space to become 'round.' By writing so well, and so effectively engaging this icon, Wood has surely established for himself and his version of Aspects of the Novel, a place on the reading lists of thousands of future English college classes.
Wood is at his expository best in a chapter entitled 'A Brief History of Unconsciousness'. In a brilliant analysis of how novelistic characterization begins when the theatrical soliloquy goes inward, he brings together three men: King David of the Old Testament, MacBeth, and Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov.
"In David's story the audience is in some important way irrelevant; in Macbeth's the audience is visible and silent, and soliloquy does indeed have the feeling not only of an address to an audience but a conversation with an interlocutor – us – who will not respond, a blocked dialogue; in Raskolnikov's story the audience – the reader – is invisible but all-seeing: so the reader has replaced David's God and Macbeth's audience."
Another highlight occurs in the chapter on language, when Wood analyses this "The day waves yellow with all its crops," a sentence from Virginia Woolf's The Waves. Wood is consumed with and moved by this phrasing. Its music, words and meaning are simple he says, and beautiful and strange. We know exactly and instantly what she means, and that it could not be put any better. The secret, says Wood, "lies in the decision to avoid the usual image of crops waving, and instead, to write the day waves: the effect is suddenly that of the day itself, the very fabric and temporality of the day, seems saturated in yellow." It is in passages like these, where Wood takes special care to understand and communicate what it is he loves, that one deeply appreciates his work and worth.
In the closing chapters, Wood again mauls Moody and those who attack conventional realism, with this killing repost that ends the book: "The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional. " Hard to put this any better.
That it faintly echoes what Forster says on the impossibility of generalizing about the novel, matters not. In fact it strikes me as quite appropriate. Just as Forster's Aspects of the Novel has remained pertinent through the generations, so Wood's How Fiction Works will unarguably excite readers, as both criticism and literature, for years to come.