Against Assassination

[Updated below]

So: James Wood.

No argument here that he can be an intelligent critic, but I nonetheless often find that his criticism reads like gibberish, simply because I strongly disagree with some of his guiding assumptions.  When he once again attacks hysterical realism and its crimes, I don't see the badass critic that others seem to, roaring through the postmodern wasteland on his hog and spitting truth, blood & dust at the feet of the local warlords.  Rather, I imagine a man squeaking down the sidewalk on a tiny red tricycle, pedaling like mad with his knees pumping up and down dangerously close to his ears.

In other words, it's unbecoming.

Wood has most recently baffled me with a statement reproduced in this article, titled "The elegant assassin" in honor of Wood's becoming the "most feared man in American letters."  (I assume the use of "man" is deliberate, as it dispenses with Mr. Shea having to address the most feared person in American letters.  Who would be Oprah, with apologies to Ms. Kakutani.)

As Conversational Reading notes, other men and women of letters contacted about Wood take pains to point out that he, as an Englishman, might be inadequate as a judge of American fiction:

John Leonard, a book critic at Harper's and television critic for New York magazine, said in an e-mail that while he's determined not to start an intramural sniping session among critics, given the market pressures hurting literary criticism as a whole, he is also "tempted to suggest that not appreciating either Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison suggests that maybe you are tone-deaf to the American language as she is written."

This theory seems a misdirection, but I include it as the set-up for this:

And the idea that [Wood] doesn't "get" America, in all its weird glory?

"Look, we all live in America. We are all aware of its weirdness. But how mimetic does fiction have to be about this weirdness -- how much does it have to reflect this weirdness? And how distinct is this weirdness from the weirdness of 20 years ago?" Amid postmodern tumult, "people are still dying around us, having children, making friends. Without wanting to make fiction domestic in a dreary, writing-workshop way, you do feel a lack of these experiences in fiction."

As Benny Profane once said: Wha?

*    *    *    *    *

Let's take this apart bit by bit.

"Look, we all live in America."

We can give Wood a pass here, I suppose, by assuming that he's just being folksy.  But certainly not everyone who reads him is American (that is, from the United States).  Very curious.

Moving on:

"We are all aware of its weirdness."

Flannery O'Connor certainly was.  I'm not so sure about my fellow Americans, though.  A large percentage of them believe in the existence of angels, and they all think they're as straight as six o'clock.

"But how mimetic does fiction have to be about this weirdness -- how much does it have to reflect this weirdness?"

Here we're obliquely approaching his critique of so-called hysterical realism, which the article defines as "books that attempt to convey the raucousness of contemporary life through outlandish proliferating plots, allegory, bizarre coincidence, and high irony."  Elsewhere, Wood calls them "novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very 'brilliant' books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being."

It strikes me that Wood has a Wordsworthian take on what a novel should be; i.e., (paraphrasing) that the novel is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings that comes from emotion recollected in tranquility.

It's not that he's against weirdness, per se, but with weird renderings of weirdness.  He explicitly favors the contemplative--a placid, tranquil presentation, with the powerful feelings and emotion reflected in the characters rather than in the aesthetic choices.  No mimetic weirdness in my narrative, thank you.

And there's nothing inherently wrong with his conception of the novel, nothing at all.  What rankles is that he's being pointedly rhetorical when he asks "[H]ow mimetic does fiction have to be about this weirdness -- how much does it have to reflect this weirdness?"

The implied answer is "It shouldn't", which gives the impression that any mimetic weirdness dooms a novel to failure (and might just be immoral, as we will see below).

I would hope that where a form as delightfully mutable as the novel is concerned it is meet to back away from questions of correct and incorrect methods, in favor of assessing how well the author executes those methods, or at least grappling with their effects.

"And how distinct is this weirdness from the weirdness of 20 years ago?"

I dunno.  This is a Zen koan.  Is today's weirdness yesterday's weirdness but also a completely different weirdness altogether?  Can one step into the same weirdness twice?

Amid postmodern tumult, "people are still dying around us, having children, making friends."

True.

"Without wanting to make fiction domestic in a dreary, writing-workshop way, you do feel a lack of these experiences in fiction."

Clearly, Wood and I do not live on the same planet.  Again, here he is dismissing both hysterical and social realism and expressing what he wants to see from the novel:

It ought to be harder, now, either to bounce around in the false zaniness of hysterical realism or to trudge along in the easy fidelity of social realism. Both genres look a little busted. That may allow a space for the aesthetic, for the contemplative, for novels that tell us not "how the world works" but "how somebody felt about something" - indeed, how a lot of different people felt about a lot of different things (these are commonly called novels about human beings).

Now, I simply don't see--or foresee--hordes of DeLillo and Rushdie acolytes crowding purveyors of "feeling" out of the bookstores, but then again I doubt Wood is concerned with the raw numbers.  Rather, his continued struggle against the hysterical seems like the despairing stage whispers of a quaking moralist.  And this is not to diminish him, either; he truly fears that something vital is being irrevocably lost as the young Turks turn away from the richness of character in favor of books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.

And so we shall a look at one last Wood passage, from "Hysterical Realism" (and re: White Teeth, Zadie Smith, and her ilk):

This is not magical realism. It is hysterical realism. Storytelling has become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure and drive themselves on. The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then, objections are not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality — the usual charge against botched realism — but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself. It is not a cock-up, but a cover-up.

[Emphasis added]

The invocation of morality will not do.

Wood here lodges a moral objection against the hysterical realists--he asserts the perpetration of a Robin Hood scheme, wherein the HRs rob from the richness of realism to give to their own poor genre, where the "crisis of character" is not met head on but evaded with false vitality.

And, again, I'm certain he means every word of it, but no less certain that when a critic starts passing moral judgments on an author's aesthetic choices, his zeal has outstripped his intelligence and he's of no use or consequence to me as a reader, at least on the subject at hand. 

His puffed-up preferences are not moral imperatives.

I happen to disagree with Wood, but in invoking moral objections he's already denied me equal textual footing for a rebuttal.  Certain metatextual questions remain in play: We can talk, for example, about whether or not Robert Lowell should have incorporated his ex-wife's letters into his work, but I fear I'm not willing or able to sustain a moral argument for or against Pynchon's decision to include a talking dog and a mechanical duck in Mason & Dixon rather than more conventional, rounded human characters.   To engage a moral argument about such things is to be led down the primrose path by Wood, where we will engage in narrowing the novel instead of celebrating its manifold possibilities.

Also bothersome is the indictment of the reader that follows that of the author.  I like and admire the fiction of DeLillo, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, et al.  Does that make me morally suspect in Wood's eyes?  Perhaps aesthetically bankrupt?   Or simply ignorant?  He certainly does not shy away from pejoratives such as inhuman, and it's naive to think that they're meant only to sting the architects of hysterical realism and not the readers and advocates of same.

If the role of the elegant assassin is to seek out aesthetic sinning, then proceed to hate the sin and the sinner(s), frankly I'm not interested.

Markson's weirdness interests me.  Nabokov's weirdness interests me.  Murakami's.  Elkin's.  McCarthy's  Beckett's.  Wallace's.  Pynchon's.  O'Connor's.

Also interesting are those special stretches of the bookcase where the calm, deliberate, character-rich stories are shelved.  There's nothing too weird about them, except that some critics claim that real, honest-to-God human beings live there.

I've looked for them, but all I find is paper and ink.

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Addendum:

Being a bit paranoid (heh), I downed a nice stout and spent some time tonight revisiting "A Reply to the Editors," James Wood's rebuttal to the gentlemen at n+1, to see if there was anything written there that would make me reconsider my stance above.

Not so much.

Wood is very interesting when in high rhetorical mode, but that's not to say that he's convincing.  There are any number of amusing pomposities to dissect if you're feeling mean-spirited and small--"...I've always been fond of Turgenev's remark about Belinsky..."--but I appreciate that Wood's trying to fight for a little breathing space and as such will give him a wide berth.

It is worth noting that, in one odd passage, Wood establishes for himself a fond place in the hearts of his critical subjects.  If he has been hard on Morrison, DeLillo, Pynchon, Amis, et al.:

[T]hose writers have at least felt reviewed by a critic who is vigilantly watching their style; who considers fiction the most important occupation they could be performing; who is always urging such writers: "Write better!"

They must find that comforting, indeed.

This Reply sees Woods issuing forth a fog of words, partially obscuring a critical stance that attentive readers had already assessed quite clearly in reading his previous pieces.   Cutting through the fog, one sees that nothing has changed even as the highbrow references and clauses have piled up.

Of particular interest to me, Wood provides this defense:

I am assumed to be a "moralist," but I like best to lose myself in the rich prose of a Bellow or a Melville or a Henry Green; probably no critic of contemporary fiction is more drawn to style and the enjoyment of style.

I admire the rhetorical cushion shot as much as the next person, but also have to point out that this apology doesn't choose to rebut the "moralist" charge.  Perhaps he's simply a moralist with a predilection for rich, stylish prose; these traits are not mutually exclusive.

But I couldn't care less if the label moralist applies--it's Wood's misuse of moral criteria vis-a-vis the contemporary novel that bothers me.

And, to that end, here's Wood later on in the Reply:

The difficult task of the contemporary novelist, I think, is to connect the inner life of our culture with the inner life of the human and to describe both vividly (to connect the "intimate" with the "present"); to achieve this evocation while not hiding from the reader that this connection has become problematic both in life and for the artist; to describe what "moral seriousness" might look like in a world in which this kind of language seems ghostly and antique; to write this up in a language that is at once artistically pure and recognizably human; and to fulfill this very modern challenge while holding to the older idea that the novel, or all forms, offers the greatest chance of providing this fulfillment.

[Emphasis added]

What can one say?  For a non-moralist, Wood is curiously ready with explicit moral criteria: moral seriousness, artistically pure, and so on.

There's much more fodder for debate in this Reply--at one point, Wood stumps for what he calls "mimetic persuasion" and writes that there is "no reason that the defence of this kind of mimesis should harden into a narrow aesthetic..."  This does not stop him, soon thereafter, from setting forth a rather narrow three-point rubric for fiction that, among other things, dismisses historical fiction (absurdly) as "merely science fiction facing  backwards." Above, he had also expressed a desire for novelists to reclaim "aesthetic autonomy" by abandoning the idea that fiction is one among equals with and to "journalism, cultural analysis, theory, nonfiction narrative, film, and so on."

This is his idea of a non-narrow aesthetic?

I respect that Wood is grappling with the Big Questions, but, again, his solution is to scale them down to size by first sorting by his own preferences and then justifying these preferences morally (in part).  He seems to be comfortable in challenging major authors to write better, by which he means that they should countenance broad abstractions such as moral seriousness and artistic purity when making aesthetic choices.

It's not a case of contemporary novelists failing the test; the test fails contemporary novelists.

Comments

[Dan Green]

Great post. As you would probably guess, I agree with every word of it.

[Rake]

DG: Thanks.

You are aware that I sneak in in the dead of night while you're sleeping and steal your ideas.

[R Ellis]

Excellent analysis. Thanks for putting it to words. My heart sank when I heard that Wood is going to be haunting my subscription to the NYer.

[Shane]

A thorough pummeling if ever I've read one.

[danup]

I'm sure tying the whole believes-in-angels crack with Noted Catholic Flannery O'Connor was intentional, but--if you'll excuse me--god only knows what the intent was.

[Rake]

Ah, let's not ruin it by wasting words on intent.

[Steven Augustine]

Wood's attack on "hysterical realism" was, in fact, an attack on Don DeLillo, padded with decoys (eg Zadie Smith) and motivated by the literary envy of an ambitious-yet-not-masterful writer towards the author of a masterpiece.

From the snide maneuver of lumping grandee DeLillo and sophomore Smith into the same category, to the amazing black-is-white gambit of ridiculing DeLillo's hair-raisingly (post-9/11) accurate formulation that terrorists are shaping the discourse the way novelists once could, Wood gives himself away by leaving radium-dust fingerprints all over the scene of the crime.

Let's compare scope, structure, invention, thematic consonance, emotional resonance, mimetic puissance and the sheer value of epiphanies-per-pagecount in "Underworld" ...to "The Book Against God". For starters.

Reading what Wood, in a review of "Cosmopolis", wrote: "(protag)Eric Packer is an idea, a satirist's smudge..." I actually snorted, and sneered, out loud, "Unlike, say, that well-rounded character-study Lemuel Effing Gulliver, right?"

Such willful obtuseness in an otherwise (relatively) rational critic bespeaks a grudge. A wound. All those clouds of erudition Wood is capable of kicking up are an admittedly brilliant misdirection from a very private matter.

That Wood, as a Puritan Scold, seems, in some quarters, to be granted more "authority" than the (decadent) novelists whose texts he depends on for material, says more about our moralistic, terror-traumatized culture than his gifts as an illuminator of texts. Not that he's not quite often a pretty good read.

[Daniel]

I agree completely. Wood is a mediocre stylist with a narrow critical vision – although he gets us all to argue about him & his pronouncements, which is not a bad thing.

[Amon Phelps]

I stand with Wood. Why read Delillo when you can read Michael Herr, Hunter S. Thompson, and many others. Why get second-hand Chandlersque takes on American weirdness, when you can get reports on the real thing. And the real thing is so much weirder and more interesting, and the writing of its best recorders is so much better than Delilo's. As for Toni Morrison, she is, as a writer, not worth considering. If that's American music, God help us.

[bh]

I'm not sure your understanding of Wood's moral objection is what he's actually saying. It's not about Lowell's technique or Pynchon's talking dog. An example of an aesthetic style that "seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself" is one that is based in modern advertising: those images of yuppie couples on white sofas using laptops, smiling female call center representatives wearing headsets, and young people holding cell phones and jumping for joy against a brightly colored background. Is any of this weird to you, America? If you have a learned sense of the history of visual imagery, or technical understanding of how such images are crafted, maybe the features of realism are clearly put together to create something that feels new. An accusation like "unconvincing possibilities" seems to address a fairly specific cultural phenomenon, and it's certainly unfair and reactionary to generalize to all the aforementioned authors. But aren't there any similarities between the ways in which we consume media/advertising images and the way we digest stylistic attributes of certain types of literatures? In the event that they share the same methodology, should one remain insusceptible to moral judgment? Plus, do other cultures just, like, not "get" us? Or will the world change soon enough..?

I'd argue the merits of individual writers like Delillo against Wood any day, but why all the sweat and personal offense? Can we indulge in the rhetoric of counter-"attack" and pummeling" a bit more? Maybe add the subhead "WE WILL NOT FORGET"?

[Steven Augustine]

"...why all the sweat and personal offense?"

Wood harps on DeLillo, readers of DeLillo harp on Wood; of such stuff is bookchat made. Until a fatwa is actually issued, no harm done...

[Rake]

Re: Michael Herr, Hunter S. Thompson, et al. To read them instead of the so-called hysterical realists lies in personal preference, and I'm not going to argue with that. Still, I don't think you're going to get Wood to go along with you, as in his Reply he's explicit about keeping reportage / journalism / narrative nonfiction quite apart from the novel. I'm not qualified to speak to Herr, but Thompson was clearly inventing (i.e., employing the tools of fiction) as much as he was reporting "the real thing" from Weird America.

Re: bh. A couple points:

"I'm not sure your understanding of Wood's moral objection is what he's actually saying. It's not about Lowell's technique or Pynchon's talking dog."

Lowell I brought in as an example, but Wood pretty clearly states a moral objection against the talking dog & mechanical duck and their ilk in Pynchon. They're included in a litany of recent crimes against the kind of characterization Wood prefers. So it's not all about the dog, but Wood presents the dog as a local symptom of the disease.

"An example of an aesthetic style that 'seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself' is one that is based in modern advertising..."

Sounds a little like what Foster Wallace was worried about in "E Unibus Pluram"; i.e., that the media has appropriated and corrupted and weakened postmodern tropes. I don't necessarily disagree, but for the moment I am concerned with what Wood is explicitly saying about the contemporary novel. I would also argue, as I suppose Wood would not, that it's possible and perhaps necessary for novelists to re-appropriate and critique the weirdness that the mass media has borrowed, or at least show the effects of same on what Wood calls "the inner life of our culture [and] the inner life of the human."

"But aren't there any similarities between the ways in which we consume media/advertising images and the way we digest stylistic attributes of certain types of literatures? In the event that they share the same methodology, should one remain insusceptible to moral judgment?"

As above, they can and do borrow from one another, which is why I think the novel is still suited and able to subvert and comment upon media and advertising effects, in large part because you can reflect these effects in a novel's character(s). I like character, too. What I disagree with is using moral criteria to make pronouncements about what kind of character/characterization is acceptable.

Wood, for example, decries "cartoonish" characters as unreal, overblown, and evasive. Could this be the case in a specific instance? Sure. But I think a cartoonish characterization can be intellectually and emotionally effective, and I find it no more of an "impure" convention than, say, a Joycean epiphany or an omniscient 3rd person narrator. Everything in a novel is a representation.

"I'd argue the merits of individual writers like Delillo against Wood any day, but why all the sweat and personal offense? Can we indulge in the rhetoric of counter-'attack' and 'pummeling' a bit more? Maybe add the subhead 'WE WILL NOT FORGET'?"

I don't understand the objection. Wood can critique authors and answer his critics, but I'm not allowed to critique or answer Wood?

In his Reply, Wood takes pains to debunk the idea that his reviews are "take-downs." Here, I agree with him. My reply is not meant to be a take-down, either, but a critical response. No one is arguing with the other's right to write or respond.

If you're detecting sweat, it's because I think Wood, though misguided on this subject, is intelligent and does not shy away from grappling with complex questions about the novel and how it works, and therefore an extended response is warranted.

And, yes, I take this a little personally, as I think Wood (purposefully or not) indicts the reader along with the novelist: "Read better!" I've tried to steer clear of personal attack, but this is between persons, is it not?

[R Ellis]

One is right to take it personally. Literature is a passionate business. Ought to be, anyway.

[G.L.Horton]

My objection to Wood as New Yorker critic is that the New Yorker has always been edited as if women are people, too, and entitled to take part in civilized conversation. This is a rare quality in a "serious" magazine, most of which are edited as if only men are entitle to create art or contribute to the Life of the Mind. Wood's critical stance would fit right in at the Atlantic or the TNR or NYRB, where the authorial and critical voice is male, and female readers are merely allowed to eavesdrop on their betters as they create Culture and establish a pecking order that seems intimately connected to the relative size of their peckers. Wood and his most admired authors Melville and Bellow inhabit an aggressively masculine world. Female characters are absent or paper-thin in the fiction; women writers generally noted only as examples of what's Wrong with Contemporary Fiction in the criticism . How are the New Yorker's many women readers going to react to the magazine turning its book section over to a critic who does not think he or the writers he reviews should address the female half of humanity?

[Jacob Russell]

"One is right to take it personally. Literature is a passionate business. Ought to be, anyway."

Yep. And damn funny when it gets too serious. Some people take offense at the sound of a good guffaw!