Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Two readers were not so taken with last week’s account of a talk by James Wood, nor with the man himself. Wrote one, “I consider myself an intelligent fellow, with a fair amount of interest in ideas and literature, and I cannot stand James Wood. I don’t think his chatter comes near what a real artist works on when he writes a novel or
story.” This reader was not impressed with Woods’ ruminations on authorial voice and its necessary intrusions into first-person narration:
Does Wood really imagine that a writer thinks, “how do I… also manage to have my own style?” Doesn’t your “own style” take care of itself if you
solve the narrative problems of your story? For example, in The Sun also
Rises, does Wood believe that Hemingway had one way he could write the book
if he was just “talking like Jake” and didn’t have his “own style”, which he
then rejected in favor of a way he could do both? Doesn’t Hemingway’s “own
style” come precisely from how he imagines his narrator talks?
Yes and no. A writer like Hemingway achieves a greater degree of verisimilitude in his writing–his characters talking like “real” people–so it’s easier to overlook the presence of the author’s voice behind the narrator’s. But in a book like Henry James’s What Maisie Knew or, indeed, Vernon God Little, the author makes use of a larger vocabulary and more writerly expressions than his character could be expected to use. In Maisie the disjunction is so pronounced that it’s hard not to take the novel as, in part, an exploration of the limits of verisimilitude. It’s also a rebellion against the strict limits imposed on authorial voice by more naturalist strains of realism, and a blow for authorial liberty. It’s hard to turn from such a novel to something even as comparatively seamless as Hemingway and not start looking for the seams.
The difference between Hemingway and James (especially late James) is that for the former, character resides in voice–in the characters’ own language–and is best expressed through it. For the latter, the exposition of character requires a self-consciously literary language above and beyond the character’s own voice. You can see the author’s lips move, and you’re meant to. Wood, I think, is drawn to the latter type of writer–even bad examples of the type like D.B.C. Pierre. Last week I mildly called Wood’s positive review of Vernon God Little “surprising.” What I really meant was “unaccountable.” In the light of the talk on Bellow, though, you can perhaps begin to account for it: it starts to look less like a genuine response to the novel, and more like a rehearsal of a line of thinking that has been occupying Wood in his work on better writers.
This reader also questioned Wood’s reference to characters’ “confused consciousness,” which was, well, confusing.
Are we to presume that you can write a novel and include didacticism if the mouthpiece has a clear, “unconfused” consciousness? Or does Wood assume that the creation of a character automatically creates a “confused consciousness” if that character is used to communicate ideas? Here, as elsewhere, Wood veers away from the truly interesting issues involved and commits a cardinal literary sin: falling in love with his own phrases.
It was in the Q&A, off the cuff, that Wood used this phrase, and he used it interchangeably with “average consciousness,” which seemed closer to what he actually meant. It’s the reporter’s fault! This reader recommends Milan Kundera’s Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed as books “that deal more pointedly with some of the same issues.”
Another reader makes a point about Wood that had never occurred to me before, but that I agree with: he’s much better at detraction than applause.
I thought you were a bit tame and lenient with James Wood; because he is so obviously better, and more severe and demanding, than almost anyone else, he does not receive some of the criticism he deserves. His negative writing is, to my mind, by far his best; he is much weaker in praise, too often allowing his own religious preferences to become his central subject, and equally often expounding on various elements of voice and narrative, in both cases with obscured judgment. So, for example, the obviously ridiculous recent Booker novel receives praise for its voice, or Bellow gets applause for his language and religious anguish that evoke Melville. In neither case is there an examination of the inwardness of character or the fidelity to human complication that Wood so often uses as yardsticks to cudgel, quite rightly in my view, the likes of DeLillo and Pynchon.
Right, insightful, and well-said.
UPDATE: Stephany Aulenback, filling in for Maud seamlessly as ever, posts a long excerpt from Dale Peck in defense of negative reviewing.
Diane Ravitch updates The Language Police in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:
In my book “The Language Police,” I gathered a list of more than 500 words that are routinely deleted from textbooks and tests by “bias review committees” employed by publishing companies, state education departments and the federal government. Among the forbidden words are “landlord,” “cowboy,” “brotherhood,” “yacht,” “cult” and “primitive.” Such words are deleted because they are offensive to various groups–feminists, religious conservatives, multiculturalists and ethnic activists, to name a few.
I invited readers of the book to send me examples of language policing, and they did, by the score. A bias review committee for the state test in New Jersey rejected a short story by Langston Hughes because he used the words “Negro” and “colored person.” Michigan bans a long list of topics from its state tests, including terrorism, evolution, aliens and flying saucers (which might imply evolution).
A textbook writer sent me the guidelines used by the Harcourt/Steck/Vaughn company to remove photographs that might give offense. Editors must delete, the guidelines said, pictures of women with big hair or sleeveless blouses and men with dreadlocks or medallions. Photographs must not portray the soles of shoes or anyone eating with the left hand (both in deference to Muslim culture). To avoid giving offense to those who cannot afford a home computer, no one may be shown owning a home computer. To avoid offending those with strong but differing religious views, decorations for religious holidays must never appear in the background.
A college professor informed me that a new textbook in human development includes the following statement: “As a folksinger once sang, how many roads must an individual walk down before you can call them an adult.” The professor was stupefied that someone had made the line gender-neutral and ungrammatical by rewriting Bob Dylan’s folk song “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which had simply asked: “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?”…
Read the whole thing here.
“I was fourteen, a precocious child, sensitive as a burn.”
Isaac Rosenfeld, Passage from Home
Not really, but I did write 5,000 words worth of my Balanchine book yesterday (including what I think is a really good section on Apollo), then went to see Terrence McNally’s new play, The Stendhal Syndrome, at Primary Stages’ new 59th Street theater (about which more next Friday). As a result, I don’t have much to offer this morning, and probably won’t have much to offer for the rest of the day, either–I’m just about to wrap up a chapter, after which I’ll be having a late lunch with Old Hag
and Cinetrix, followed by another theatrical preview in the evening. Arrgh. Yikes. Apologies.
More tomorrow, probably, I hope….
I reviewed the Aquila Theatre Company’s production of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, which opened last night, in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. I had some serious problems with the guest stars, Olympia Dukakis and Louis Zorich, but for the most part I enjoyed myself:
Still and all, the play’s the thing, and this show, for all its imperfections, begs to be seen. At a time when Broadway has been reduced to recycling the faded ditties of has-been rock stars, it is good to sit in a darkened room full of strangers, immersed in the words of a poet born before Shakespeare, before Giotto–even before Christ. How is it possible that a play written 25 centuries ago should still be capable of moving a New York audience to applause? To watch the Aquila Theatre Company’s “Agamemnon” is to be reminded of what a miraculous thing it is to be human.
In addition, I praised a new book on drama, Notes on Directing, which is also one of my current Top Five picks:
“Notes on Directing” is often dryly funny, as befits a book about the theater: “23. Assume that everyone is in a permanent state of catatonic terror. This will help you approach the impossible state of infinite patience and benevolence that actors and others expect from you.” But while some of its plain-spoken maxims are stage-specific (“115. When a scene isn’t clicking, the entrance was probably wrong”), I suspect that readers of the Journal will be struck by the extent to which many of them are no less applicable to the world of business. Directing a play, it turns out, is best understood as a species of management
V. fun. Nobody flashed anybody. They just now went off to go get drunk. Me, I came back home to write about Balanchine. It’s tough being old and stodgy.
Some parts of the above are true….
Beatrice responds to the latest Book Babes column, pointing out that it is possible to write useful reviews of “airport books”:
My first retort is that just because your reviewers can’t think of anything to say doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be said…
Popular media can and does tell us a lot about ourselves as a culture. A good reviewer could easily find tropes of masculinity, or articulations of conservatism, in Tom Clancy, just as Anne Rice’s oeuvre has a lot to say about shifting attitudes towards gender and eroticism. Mysteries and thrillers reflect social attitudes about crime and punishment; George Pelecanos uses the genre as an effective instrument to talk about race relations as well.
I would only add that there is another, even more vital role to be played by smart reviews of dumb books: sending us into delirious fits of righteous laughter. Let me refer you to one of my all-time favorite reviews, which happens to fall into this category. It’s Lorin Stein writing two summers ago on The Emperor of Ocean Park in The London Review of Books:
Stephen L. Carter has written the kind of novel in which the bad guys say “very well” when they mean “OK”; in which the hero calls a visit from old friends “a delightfully rambunctious affair” and his rocky marriage a “tumultuous mutuality”; in which “homes” are “spacious,” jealousy “flames afresh” and eminent legal scholars spend dinner parties debating the existence of God. It is also the kind of novel–I am about to spoil the ending–in which the hero uncovers a vast conspiracy at the highest levels of government, resists the advances of a slinky assassin, faces down a gun-toting Supreme Court judge, and ends up getting promoted. The Emperor of Ocean Park is, in other words, an “airplane book,” as opposed to a “beach read”: it’s trash, but it’s Business Class trash, relentlessly high-toned, tastefully furnished and driven by a Rube Goldberg-like love of complication, minus the suspense.
American reviewers, partly out of deference to Carter’s serious polemics on race, religion and American politics, have tended to treat The Emperor of Ocean Park as a serious novel, which it is not; or as a thriller, which is simply unfair. When an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court looms up out of a dark and stormy night, semi-automatic at the ready, and tells the hero, “don’t play games with me .
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