The Establishment and the Novel

'Even one of Wood’s “favorite” critics of the novel, Roland Barthes, had the sense to note, “Why are we so slow, so indifferent about mobilizing narrative and the image? Can’t we see that it is, after all, works of fiction, no matter how mediocre they may be artistically, that best arouse political passion?” Wood, distinctly lacking Barthes theoretical acumen (Terry Eagleton notes the obvious in a review of HFW), finds Barthes to be “interesting but wrongheaded,” (generally?) and Wood who is likely to be half the essayist, or even literary critic, that Edmund Wilson demonstrated himself to be, remains locked in to his primary interest in fiction, its “special kind of aesthetic experience,” so locked in that this fixation gives him tunnel vision, causing misunderstanding about aesthetics, fiction, life. False notions such as this plaint are the least of it: “a flat style [is] unfit for permanent criticism – which lasts, after all, only if it, too, becomes literature,” a remark that is, first, false and, second, self-contradicting, given its mundane style.'

Tony Christini's "Fiction Gutted:  The Establishment and the Novel," a sustained and passionate critique of James Wood's How Fiction Works, is available at A Practical Policy.  Almost a small volume in itself, it can be read in separate sections or downloaded as a pdf file.

On "Consciousness" and the Novel

Next door at THE CHAGALL POSITION:

"The Viewer is Diverted," or, The Handke-Effekt

and

The Handke-Effekt II

Keepin’ it Real, the James Wood Way

These days if anyone were to insist that all “legitimate” paintings had to include the illusion of depth, three dimensions, and a vanishing point they’d be laughed out of school.  The only place where such a rule prevails is on the walls of motels, and even the popular press (for the most part, and barring seasonal moral panics) acknowledges that such sentiments are retrograde.  So why is the equivalent tolerated in the criticism of literature, or at least what passes for it, in the periodical press such as the New Republic, and beyond?  What accounts, when it comes to the reception of fiction, for this lag in cultural sensibility? 

One reason, I think, might lie in the different legitimizing functions that have been assigned to the two arts.  In the previous century – and especially after WW2 – the visual arts were successfully corralled into ratifying and reproducing an ideology of ceaseless technological modernization.  Developments in the visual arts could be co-opted by advertising – and if the line between them blurred, so much the better.  In this cultural division of labor, literature was assigned a more traditional and conservative role.  Something had to be there to assure us, however speciously, of our ostensible “humanity,” while universal inhumanity reigned.  The visual arts could afford their centrifugal advances as long as literature – and especially the novel – was there to act as a centripetal anchor, so that a center might appear to hold. 

******

In the Introduction to his first collection of reviews, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, James Wood makes his pitch for what he terms “realism,” which is apparently based on something prior to it known as “the real”:  

It is impossible to discuss the power of the novel without discussing the reality that fiction so powerfully discloses, which is why realism, in one form or another, has been the novel’s insistent preoccupation from the beginning of the form.  We respond, as readers of fiction, to a massive variety of realities.  Yet in all fiction those moments when we are suddenly swayed, suddenly moved, have to do with something we fumblingly call ‘true’ or ‘real’. 

Note that word, “moments,” which I’ve taken the liberty of underscoring here.  Wood is very much a critic of “moments,” of miniatures, his critical aesthetic amounting at times almost to kind of a pointillism.  What is at stake in his implicit reduction of reality, on the one hand, and literature on the other, to “moments”?  This is a question that I’ll explore in future posts; for now I want to take a look at his first example and the definition of the “real” and “realism” that is suggested there: 

One such moment occurs in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen Dedalus hears his father sing an old song [. . .] and then his father exclaims:  “Ah, but you should have heard Mick Lacy sing it!  Poor Mick Lacy!  He had little turns for it, grace notes he used to put in that I haven’t got.”  This moves us—why?  Because it is like life?  Certainly, for although it may not exactly resemble our lives, it brings to our heart a plausible loss, we have all felt our own version of “You should have heard Mick Lacy sing it!”  It is moving because an experience that Stephen Dedalus believes is original to him—wistfully hearing his father hear a sad air—is revealed, so gently, to be not original to him, and is actually a much fiercer and more complicated experience for his father.  Behind one reality lies a deeper, more private reality, which may be lost.

It’s a rather astonishing misreading of Joyce – not even a ‘strong’ misreading, but a flattening and a straitening, a sentimental reduction, and possibly a mendacious evasion.  Wood shrinks the scene, and by implication the informing sensibility of the novel as a whole, to the scale of Simon Dedalus himself, caught here indulging in a personal “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone” moment of the kind which Joyce consistently rejected.  In its essence the experience is more fiercely complicated than even Wood imagines, for Simon Dedalus maundering over “poor Mick Lacy’s” grace notes represents his participation in the larger Irish cultural myth of some irrecoverable heroic-romantic past which authors such as Joyce and Sean O’Casey depicted as a futile and besotted compensation for social and psychological paralysis in the present.  This father the novel repudiates.  Wood leaves out Joyce’s critical framing and urges on us instead a bit of sentiment worthy of Hugh Leonard’s Da.  He defangs the Joycean bite and restages the moment in Hummel figurines.

Of course, Wood might respond that his reading of the moment comes with a warrant signed by Joyce himself:  it is like that parallel scene in “The Dead,” when Gabriel Conroy observes his wife Greta listening to “The Lass of Aughrim,” oblivious to the ‘private reality’ the song evokes in her – Wood indeed makes the connection himself in the introduction’s next paragraph.  Maybe what we have here, then, is one of the problems that come with never getting beyond an aesthetic of (mere) moments.  Joyce’s first artistic breakthrough entailed the composition of small, isolated observations of Dublin life that he called his “epiphanies.”  But A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man transcends, as much as it includes, the “epiphany” method of Dubliners.  In the interests of his own reading, Wood aborts the dialectic of the very text he bases his sermon on.  

It’s an interesting and, I think, significant fact that Wood’s first published book begins with this act of misdirection – not only toward his variant of realism but away from modernism and the modernist Revolution of the Word.  His opening gambit is nothing other than the contravention of what is after all the trajectory of Stephen Dedalus’ Bildung and Joyce’s own development.  Premised on the rejection of all inherited fathers, biological and otherwise, Portrait represents or rather enacts the autotelic creation of the modernist novel out of the stuff of the supposedly ‘real’.  The real:  that concretion of stale custom, unconscious prejudice, and naturalized ideology, including of course the discourses and institutions of the family, the nation, the church (not to mention the discourses and institutions of the novel as Joyce inherited these from the nineteenth century).  I shall try to fly by those nets, announced Stephen.  Joyce rejects and repudiates ‘given’ patriarchal authority, the patriarchal authority of biological and social ‘destiny’ (and one might say of ‘realism’), in favor of (modernist) self-creation.  His protagonist’s name is Dedalus, after all, not Icarus.  But at a stroke James Wood undoes all this and restores the father, patriarchal authority, the family, all the ‘nets’ that Stephen flies by.  The reality of Wood’s realism is never innocent; his ‘real’ is always a sediment of ideology.  In Blakean terms, he is in the service of Nobodaddy.

Must be something in the Zeitgeist . . .

" . . . in How Fiction Works, James Wood has written an establishment polemic in the guise of aesthetics . . ."

A terrific discussion of Wood's ideologically tendentious conception of realism and reality by Tony Christini over at A Practical Policy, where Wood is placed - correctly, to my mind - in the critical camp of what used to be called the Cold War liberals, as a kind of latter-day Lionel Trilling.  

Before I read Christini's post I was unaware that Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic (and thus Wood's editor during his stint at that publication) had edited a volume of Trilling's essays.  Christini continues:

"then in 2004 [Wieseltier] promptly hatcheted the first prominent novel critical of the US invasion of Iraq. Even before release for sale by its publisher, Checkpoint, the proclaimed (yet self-nullifying) antiwar short novel from established writer Nicholson Baker, was denounced in 2004 by the New Republic’s literary editor Wieseltier in the New York Times, in easily one of the longest “reviews” the book received, as “This scummy little book,” which opened his review and set the tone of Wieselstier’s screed, a fraudulent and hypocritical defense of capitalism and subservient literature."

Wood's itinerary in the United States has been in the orbit of "liberal hawks" like Wieseltier, ostensible liberals who supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq (and - no coincidence - who generally tend to be big Zionists).  These include among their number not only Wieseltier at the New Republic but also Peter Beinart and, of course, owner and chief editor Martin Peretz, and now at the New Yorker there's his new boss, David Remnick, as well as George Packer.    

An Ideological Itinerary II

If James Wood didn’t exist, the publishing industry would have to invent him. 

Early in Don DeLillo’s novel, Libra, there’s a scene where a rogue faction of CIA officials, unhappy with the outcome of the Bay of Pigs operation, meet clandestinely to plot an assassination attempt on Kennedy which they hope will spark the administration to renewed aggression against the Castro regime.  For their plot to work they must “script a person or persons out of ordinary pocket litter,” i.e. create a paper trail that will suggest the existence of a left-wing, pro-Castro assassin who doesn’t really exist.  As they begin to speculate on the identity such a person would need to have – what kind of background, what kind of psychological motivations, etc. – the reader realizes that their description fits perfectly the Lee Harvey Oswald whose life story is being narrated in the novel’s alternate chapters.  The similarity – the identity – between Oswald and the plotters’ assassin is entirely coincidental at one level and inevitable at another, because DeLillo is able to convince us of its being an expression of something deeply, inexorably, pathologically American.  As they must, the two plotlines converge, and we know what happens when they do.   

I was reminded of this while tracing James Wood’s ideological itinerary, and not only because DeLillo is one of Wood’s favorite novelists. I like to imagine the publishing industry – excuse me, I mean the media and entertainment mega-conglomerates for whom publishing is a sideline – getting together some time in the late-80s or early-90s to plot out their strategy for consolidation and “synergy” and so forth and wondering what they can do to further rationalize and commodify literature while still maintaining its cachet as something that ostensibly “transcends” the market.  They come up with a plan, Operation ‘Literary Fiction’, which involves reducing the novel to just another of the marketing categories that they already use for “genre fiction” such as mysteries, sci-fi, romance, celebrity bios, etc.  But how will they get away with it?  Won’t it be too crass and obvious?  They’ll need help to put this one over, so they begin to “script a person out of pocket litter,” i.e., create a paper trail that will suggest the existence of an ideal literary critic who doesn’t really exist.  They already own all the magazines and newspapers as well as the publishing companies, so planting the articles shouldn’t be a problem . . .

But of course they won’t have to plant any articles, because even as they speak, on the other side of the Atlantic, a former choir-boy from Durham, little Jimmy Wood, is coming to feel that the Guardian has served its purpose as a stepping stone.  Go west, young man . . .

James Wood is the ideal critic for the era in which the novel comes to be defined by its marketing category; it is Wood, preeminently, who puts the fetishism back into the commodity.  On the one hand, there’s a great leveling behind the scenes – “literary fiction” is just more product that needs to be moved, preferably in superstore bulk – but selling it is part of a system of “distinction” that depends on the appearance of hierarchy, so that customers get to consume status along with, say, the latest Claire Messud or Ian McEwan novel.  Wood’s criticism stabilizes the hierarchy of genres by guaranteeing the literariness of “literary fiction”; his imprimatur allows the novel to appear to have transcended mere marketing.  His reviewing functions as a kind of nominating process, in which select works of contemporary “literary fiction” are nominated into the pantheon of great literature that his essays about “classic” texts have already enshrined.  Thus, to take just a few examples, Monica Ali, Marilynne Robinson, Jeffrey Eugenides, and of course McEwan get to share the dias with Virginia Woolf, Chekhov, and Shakespeare.  Those stacks of Ian McEwan’s Saturday that you see on that Barnes and Noble table have hovering over them a halo that forms the blurb, “This Is Not A Commodity” —James Wood.  And it’s 10% off!  

The system will only work, however, if our hypothetical critic is seen to be fussy, highly-selective, as liable to reject – and reject strongly, unequivocally, in the manner of an excommunication (“this is not a novel”) – as to approve.  Moreover, the rejections need to be occasionally controversial – bucking popular trends (“hysterical realism”) or dismissing already-established reputations (Updike) – just as his benedictions should sometimes take us by surprise (Houellebecq).  

Finally, this critic should ideally be English. Let’s face it, there’s a big fantasy right now, in the American cultural imaginary, about being spanked by a Brit.  You see it, for example, on display in the popular reality-TV show, the Supernanny, in which each week Jo Frost sets another brood of kids in order by spanking their too-permissive parents. There’s an Animal Planet version of the concept, too, with a British dog-trainer instead of a nanny.  Maybe this craze got its start a few years back with that prime-time game show The Weakest Link, which featured a dominatrix known as Anne Robinson in a long black-leather SS jacket dismissing contestants with snarky put-downs, including her catch-phrase:  “Jonathan Franzen, you are the weakest link – goodbye!”  The current avatar of this trend, of course, is Simon Cowell, of American Idol fame.  But why should popular culture get to have all the masochistic fun?  Why can’t there be a high-culture version, too?

James Wood is a Simon Cowell for Americans who read.

James Wood's mental universe in six metaphors:

1)  “Novel writing has an entrepreneurial element:  to invent a central story which can function simultaneously as a plausible action and as an emblematic or symbolic one is akin to inventing a new machine or product, a patent that will run and run.” 

(Good writers are like plucky entrepreneurs.) 

2)  “Unreliable narration is almost entrepreneurially efficient:  once the novelist has set up his stall, he can syndicate his technique in chapter after chapter.” 

(Ditto.)

3)  “Realism produces surrealism; it funds its own defaulters.”  

(Realism is like a bank.) 

4)  “Realism is a lenient tutor; it schools its own truants.”  

(But sometimes realism needs to be like a schoolmaster, too.) 

5)  “It is precisely what the novel-form exists for, how it justifies its difference as a genre, earns its genre-salary.”  

(The novel is a white-collar employee.)

6) "Aesthetics, I believe, does not really exist - it is always a form of criticism - and so all aesthetic arguments need to stop at local stations.  The discussion of specific works is the only valid aesthetics."  

(Criticism is a kind of trainspotting.)

An Ideological Itinerary

James Wood's rise to preeminence as a literary journalist has unfolded in the context of two distinct but related historical periods.  The first is the “post-ideological” 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.  This was the era of the continuation of Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal politics under the rubric of the 'Third Way' – Tony Blair’s 'New' Labour in Britain and the hegemony of Clinton and the ‘centrist’ DNC over the Democratic Party in the United States.  Neoliberal politics under the guise of the ‘end of ideology’ called for a culture-critic with a neoliberal view of ‘humanity’ cloaked as aesthetic autonomy:  cue the irresistible rise of James Wood.  Chief literary critic at the Guardian by 1992 and installed at the New Republic by 1996, Wood was a perfect reflection in the field of culture of these developments – always ready to slam left-leaning critics (see his ‘reviews’ of George Steiner and Edmund Wilson, for instance) and "tedious" aesthetic radicalisms (for which the nouveau roman stands as arch offender) in the name of a vacuous and mystificatory humanism that dovetailed nicely with the End of History.  Artistic avant-gardes are now as passé as the political kind; there is only the ‘realism’ of TINA: There Is No Alternative.  

But Wood also successfully makes the transition to the next historical period, for which 9/11 stands as the turning point.  It’s not that surprising, of course, because ultimately the two ages aren’t that different either, the latter merely ‘baring of the device’ (fangs? thumbscrews?), you might say, of the former.  The End of History morphs into the bad infinity of the permanent War on Terror.  What is called for now is smug moralism and smarmy superiority, priggishness and sanctimony and more than a little fundamentalism – which is why Tony Blair was so well-qualified for making the transition from the first period to the second.  Likewise Wood, who is in so many ways the ultimate Blairite critic and even a transposition of Tony Blair into the realm of letters (even after Blair outstayed his welcome in Britain he enjoyed very high approval ratings in the U.S.).  Ever true to his times (in the name of ‘eternal’ human nature!), Wood is always exposing threats to the purity of the novel, policing and strengthening its borders (see how often he pronounces his foes’ works to be ‘not novels’), exposing heretics and enemies with the interrogatory beam of his vigilant surveillance.  

His ditching of the New Republic for the New Yorker last year and publication of the "magisterial" How Fiction Works in this confirm that he's an imperialist for our times.  

I'll be having more to say about How Fiction Works in the coming weeks and months, but in the meantime I'd like recommend the two best reviews of it I've read so far, the first by Daniel Green -- the web's best critic of Wood's work -- at Open Letters Monthly (make sure you also visit his blog, The Reading Experience) and the second by Walter Kirn at the New York Times Book Review.