Category Archives: James Wood

TS Eliot’s first thoughts on Nightwood

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Faber

Alexander Chee pulled this out of the Faber archives and posted it on Twitter yesterday (I'm starting to think he's rooting around in my dissertation for inspiration!). It's TS Eliot's recommendation that Faber publish Nightwood.

Eliot sort of adopted Barnes, acting on her behalf to get the novel published, and contributing an introduction once it was.  The theory of course being that if someone with as exalted taste as TS Eliot endorsed Barnes's book, it would appeal to a more general audience. And who knows– maybe it would improve his street cred, too, as the father of modernism struggled to stay relevant with the cognoscenti in the late 1930s. (Kind of like if James Wood wrote the introduction to a really far-out experimental prose-poem published by Salt or Soft Skull, to show he really isn't a curmudgeon about anything that isn't Flaubertian realism.)*

Of course, more recent feminist critics have scoffed at Eliot's introduction, reading it as a condescending attempt to legitimize or control this uncontrollable carnivalesque text. (Out of curiosity, I wonder what James Wood thinks of Nightwood? Now that would be an essay worth reading.) If this is the case, I'm sure it was not Eliot's intention to do so; rather, his idiom is so different from Barnes's that the introduction seems a little absurd, given the kind of language that follows. And Eliot seems to be aware of this: "When the question is raised, of writing an introduction to a book of a creative order, I always feel that the few books worth introducing are exactly those which it is an impertinence to introduce." He then goes on to express his doubt that he has understood the novel– he says only that it took him "some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole," and that he believes it will appeal mainly to readers of poetry.

In my view, this is because the novel's language is at once so radical– just as Eliot himself was once perceived to be– and so deeply entrenched in the English literary tradition (not to mention the French and the German) that it calls for readers who are accustomed to truly paying attention to the language of what they are reading.  To say of a novel that it deserves to be read by those who read poetry is, I think, high praise. ( Andrew Seal further considers this aspect of Eliot's introduction.)

If you have not read Nightwood, may I urge you to order it immediately from Powell's or the Book Depository?

*Not that he is. He loved Rifka Galchen, didn't he? & etc. I personally don't care if he is or isn't.  And I do love TS Eliot– Prufrock, The Wasteland and the essays you have to read in grad school, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Ulysses, Order, and Myth." And, of course, if you are familiar with these essays, then it makes perfect sense that Eliot would have appreciated Nightwood.

Working

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Yesterday afternoon, out of curiosity and disbelief, I stopped by Bryant Park to witness James Wood play the bongos with John Jeremiah Sullivan's band Fayaway. It was a sight to see! But no one else in the audience seemed to find it as incongruous as I did. Wood acquitted himself well, with much concentration and the occasional tympanic flourish. He has quite the ear for a triplet, something you can't say about just anyone, which made me appreciate his criticism all the more. [Update: via Mark Sarvas, I learn that Wood suffered a tambourine-inflicted wound during one song. Let it be said that the injury did not in any perceptible way affect his performance.]

After the set, Peter Terzian took the mic and led a panel of writers (Joshua Ferris, Stacey D'Erasmo, Clifford Chase, Asali Solomon) in a set of readings from the new collection he's edited, Heavy Rotation– in which these and other writers (Wood, Sullivan, Benjamin Kunkel, Kate Christensen, etc.) discuss the albums which had the greatest formational impact on their lives.  The collection sounds great– you can read more about it here.  Caleb Crain has some photos up on his blog, here.  (I did see some people filming in the front row– I wonder if there's video available anywhere?)

Speaking of Caleb Crain, I came across his face-off with Alain de Botton today. Though I'm usually a fan of ADB (his Proust book and his architecture book to be more precise), this one– on the pleasures and sorrows of work– sounds deadly boring. In case you missed it, here's what happened: Crain reviewed ADB in the New York Times. ADB freaked out on Crain's blog, writing “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will
in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and
schadenfreude." People took note and wondered how ADB could make such a blunder in the same week as Alice Hoffman.  (Ed Champion did an interview with ADB in which he claims to have been unaware of L'Affaire Hoffman.) Then, ADB revealed that he intended his comments to be for Crain's eyes only, which begs the question of why he would leave a private message on a website, where– I know this is tough to comprehend but stay with me– other people can see it.

This hullabaloo over Alain de Botton’s comments is more interesting than the book, which seems to will itself to be a lyrical-philosophical-britannical updating of Studs Terkel. If you want to read about work, I recommend instead Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came To the End, which I picked up yesterday after hearing him read at Bryant Park. It’s so good–  a pitch perfect of the way we (i.e. contemporary, everyday, Joe Schmoe Americans) tell stories, tell jokes, and misunderstand each other.  Ferris captures the sense of quiet desperation in the work environment of a group of people working for a Chicago advertising firm– but he doesn’t condescend or push the pathos envelope.  He achieves this through the use of a choral narrator, a loose narrative structure, and a relentless determination to find the humor in absolutely everything, which is occasionally cruel, until you realize they’re laughing for their lives.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to work.

Reviewers vs Critics

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I've been meaning all week to post a follow-up to my comments on James Wood and the difference between reviewry and criticism, and when I saw that they had been picked up by Conversational Reading I realized I had better clarify myself tout de suite.

When I wrote on Sunday that “it's a mistake to take [Wood] for a literary critic, when he is a fine specimen of a book reviewer,” I went over that sentence several times to be sure it was free from any kind of judgment as to which occupation is superior to the other.  But as close as they may seem, a literary critic and a book reviewer do not have the same purpose.  They may share overlapping skills, but their roles are distinct.  A book reviewer does just that– reviews books.  Serves as a sort of gatekeeper.  A book reviewer may have no training or a PhD. It’s all about the way he responds to a text: this is good, this is bad, this is mediocre, this is more or less why. 

A literary critic is kind of like John Nash in that film “A Dangerous Mind.” You know the scene where he is brought in to decode magazines and newspapers for the CIA, and he looks at a whole wall of text, relaxes his eyes a little, and meaning begins to emerge from the sea of words? That’s what a literary critic does– finds connections, makes meanings, reads closely and then widely, and then closely and so on.  The literary critic is not primarily interested in whether or not the text under consideration is “good.” Although not necessarily an academic, the critic will usually have
solid training and a knowledge of history, philosophy, and cultural
studies, as well as literature.

There is also a difference of audience.  A book reviewer writes for a general audience while a literary critic writes for a more specialized one.  By definition, then, the book reviewer is looking for the book to do more than just exist– it must measure up somehow.  This is where conflict usually arises over Wood's supposed disdain for experimental fiction. 

As I said, there can be overlap.  A literary critic can work as a book reviewer.  A book reviewer may train to be a literary critic.  Some of us are bakers and some of us are chefs–  it’s two different skill sets.  I think that Wood excels at reviewry, and falls short of criticism.  I should point out, though, that I say this without having read his book on laughter– just the essays and How Fiction Works. Maybe HFW is just unsuccessful on its own terms and Wood will surprise us with something better in the future. I wouldn’t put it past him– I think he’s a phenomenally good reader.

An explanation of how Dorrit Cohn, Gérard Genette & Co have taken criticism beyond “free indirect discourse” will have to wait for another day.

Fiction works, but do parodies?

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Colson Whitehead's "takedown" of James Wood's How Fiction Works– in the form of a piece for Harper's called "Wow, Fiction Works!" is funny, and well-drawn, but a bit toothless, if you ask me.  The main thing to quibble with in Wood's opus is not Wood's supposed elitism (does liking Flaubert and seeing through hysterical clap-trap make you an elitist?), nor is it Wood's unabashed, quavering joy at a well-constructed sentence.  It's that the literary criticism Wood is doing is waaaaaay out of date, as far as literary criticism goes. It's not Wood's taste that is passé, it's his method.  Narratologists like Dorrit Cohn and Gérard Genette have apprehended and communicated nuanced distinctions and deployments of voice that go way beyond the starting notion of "free indirect discourse," and Wood's attempts to understand how fiction gets at "the real" end up basically no closer to understanding it than when he began. His readings are sound, but the minute he gets away from paying local, close attention to the text to trying to understand how they relate to one another, he is in trouble.

Don't get me wrong– it's a pleasure to read Wood, and I revel in his opinions and his prose.  But it's a mistake to take him for a literary critic, when he is a fine specimen of a book reviewer.

Woodian footnote

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James Wood has the most amazing footnote spanning pages 52 and 53 in my edition of How Fiction Works:

14. It is from Anna Karenina, and it is a nice example of self-plagiarism.  In that novel, not one but two babies– Levin's and Anna's– are described as looking as if string is tied round their fat little arms. Likewise, in David Copperfield, Dickens likens Uriah Heep's open mouth to a post office, and Wemmick's open mouth, in Great Expectations– to a post office.  Stendhal writes, in The Red and the Black, about how politics ruins a novel in the way a gunshot would spoil a music concert, and then repeats the image in The Charterhouse of Parma.  Henry James wrote that Balzac, in his monkish devotion to his art was a 'Benedictine of the actual,' a phrase he liked so much he used it later about Flaubert.  Cormac McCarthy writes, in Blood Meridian: 'the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand,' and returns to that lovely verb seven years later in All the Pretty Horses: 'Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.' Why shouldn't he? Such things are rarely examples of haste and more often proof that a style has achieved self-consistency.  And that a kind of Platonic model has been reached– these are the best, and therefore unsurpassable, words for these subjects. 

Well! When this happens in my writing, I get exasperated and think I need new words. I see it as an example of the limitations of my vernacular, and an indication I need to get out of my little think-box. But if James Wood says it's alright, it must be alright! Consider my style to have achieved self-consistency. Maybe I should have my agent put that in her cover letters.