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February 3, 2004
OGIC: A good critic knows when to shut up
Last week I was lucky enough to be tipped off about a very ill-publicized Chicago talk given by James Wood, literary critic for the New Republic, London Review of Books, and more. Sadly, I got the word too late to read the book he was discussing, Saul Bellow's 1956 novella Seize the Day. I'm a fan of Wood's, but who isn't? If there's much of a dissenting camp on his excellence, it's a quiet one. My tipster OFOB and I were genuinely excited.Only about twenty-five people showed up, most of them armed with marked-up copies of the slim text. We listened to Wood deliver a talk that was an interpretation of the novella, an appreciation of Bellow, and a brief for the primacy of literary form, in ascending order of generality. Unlike some of us, Wood speaks exactly as fluently as he writes, but without any brittle veneer, by which I mean that his talking sounds like talking, not writing. Yet the man is a font of seamless quotations--words spilled from his mouth in tidy, dense aperçus, ripe for plucking and jotting down. Which I did compulsively.
Englishmen are really rallying around Bellow and the idea of the American Original lately, which is potentially an interesting phenomenon. First there was the Martin Amis piece in the Atlantic pitting Bellow against James for American Giant honors (no link available). That piece seemed to be as much about a crushlike attraction to the especially American qualities of a writer like Bellow as about discriminating among American writers. Now comes Wood gushing about "the Melvillean rush of Humboldt's Gift," Bellow's "lissome particularity" and "extraordinary rhythmic discontinuities" (unachievable by an English writer, he claimed), and his "at once deeply American and deeply antique" prose. It was a convincing bit of rhapsodizing about a writer I of course admire but have never quite loved.
Wood outlined a formalist reading of what he characterized as "a fanatically detailed, patterned, and controlled novella," and moved from this to a religious/metaphysical reading. The larger point was about ideas and form: for Wood, the novel form, "greedily borrowing" from every other discourse it can get its hands on, but forging a kind of expression all its own, "deals with ideas in a way only it can deal with them. It's all about the form."
In fiction written in free indirect style (where third-person narration implicitly reflects the point of view or emotional state of a character), Wood said, characters are "porous scouts" who absorb the details the author wants them to notice. "No ordinary character notates the world as delicately as Tommy in Seize the Day. We allow novelists this compromise or fudging. We engage in a compact with Bellow or Joyce: he must have his fancy phrase; we enjoy it; so we lend it to, for instance, Leopold Bloom's consciousness."
Wood defended the didacticism that tends to crop in a writer like Bellow. His defense of the presence of the writer's voice in his narration and characters reminded me of his positive review of Vernon God Little, which had surprised me a bit when it came out last November. In that review and in his talk, Wood is fascinated by the negotiations and compromises authors enter into when they undertake to represent a character's consciousness, and the question of what becomes of their own voice: is it behind the character's or narrator's voice? Beside it? The only certain thing is that it's never absent. This comes from the review:
First-person narrations are always delicate tricks, the delicacy being the balancing of the likely--"is this how this person would sound"?--with the literary: "how do I, the author, also manage to have my own style?"
"Balancing" is the key term here. Wood welcomes the author's direct voice into fictional narrative, and doesn't look for complete verisimilitude (a straw man, anyway). This is the talk again:
We have a choice when we read writers who are themselves didactic--which Bellow is. To what extent are they being wholly novelists, and to what extent are they using a confused consciousness to communicate their own ideas to us? Richard Poirier dismissed Herzog because he thought it was authorial philosophizing delivered through a character's confused consciousness....Characters contaminate and modify ideas. Ideas are inextricable from the form. (This is what T.S. Eliot was getting at in his remark about James's mind being so fine no idea could violate it.)
He was very persuasive, but there's something faintly defensive about all of this, too, a bit of anxiety that novels might be left out of the realm of "ideas," à la Bill Keller. For all of the protestations of the unique importance of literary form, you can detect an ever-so-slight concession to a philistine attitude that, for the purposes of this post, is represented by a Bill Keller sock puppet--a utilitarian attitude that wants its ideas cleanly extractable and ready-to-use. This part of Wood's talk stood in tension with something very striking he said early on. He read to us a sentence from Seize the Day describing an old man's "big but light" elbow, and another noting "the long phrases of the birds." He called these virtuouso moments that are "finally not amenable to criticism, their effect unaccountable--and the kind of moment that makes literature." I just loved this moment in the talk, seeing one of the best and most fluent critics I know say, essentially, "this is beautiful, I can't tell you why, and anyone who says they can is faking it."
Posted February 3, 2004 1:04 AM
