There’s a small hardware store in the East Village that feels magical because it seems to contain on its narrow shelves anything you could possibly want, just as you soon as you ask for it. Ice trays and tumblers, seeds and fertilizer, screws and socket wrenches? It’s all right here, next to the light bulbs, nails, batteries, washers, hinges, candles, sandpaper, shoelaces, and paint brushes.
I think that’s what James Wood’s library must be like. Though he says, in How Fiction Works, that he didn’t look further than the books he had at hand to help him write his examination of literary techniques in the novel, implying that it’s not beyond the layman to assemble a comparable collection of classics, Wood’s modest bookshelf must be touched with magic because its seem to encompass the entire history of literature, from the King James Bible and Shakespeare to all of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Conrad and Crane, Kafka, Dickens, David Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and Updike up to his 2006 effort, “The Terrorist.” I know this not because I kept a running tally. Wood, who wears his erudition lightly, did it for me in a helpful bibliography at the end of the book.
And now comes a new collection of essays, or rather, a reprint of a book originally published in 2000, The Broken Estate, which seems to contain, written between the lines of the various book reviews and essays, Wood’s early thoughts on the techniques that writers use to hold together “artifice and verisimilitude,” the themes he would later bring into sharp focus in How Fiction Works.
The Broken Estate looks at how novelists learned to reproduce reality in the context of the 19th century’s parallel trends of reading the Bible as a literary work and novels as semi-religious acts of creation. “I think that distinctions between literary belief and religious belief are important, and I am drawn to writers who struggle with them,” Wood says in his introductory essay. He goes on to write, “Around the middle of the nineteenth century, those distinctions became harder to maintain, and we have lived in the shadow of their blurring ever since. This is when the old estate broke. I would define the old estate as the supposition that religion was a set of divine truth-claims, and that the Gospel narratives were supernatural reports; fiction might be supernatural too, but fiction was always fictional, it was not in the same order of truth as the Gospel narratives. During the 19th century these two positions began to soften and merge. At the high point of the novel’s rise, the Gospel began to be read, by both writers and theologians, as a set of fictional tales—a kind of novel. Simultaneously, fiction became an almost religious activity (though not of course with religion’s former truth-value, for this was no longer quite believed in).”
Wood slams the 19th century critics who cut the Gospels down to size, while at the same time exploring writers who struggled mightily with their own acts of literary creation. It was a fight with God, over God, for God, by writers who produced, created out of nothing, simulacrums of real life. Wood writes perceptively, movingly about the lives and works of such diverse authors as Herman Melville, Anton Chekhov, and Knut Hamsun, and the essays on these three writers seem to touch an emotional core of this book.
Melville, perhaps one of the most religious American writers, was obsessed by the silence of God in the world, and turned to metaphor to help explain it. “I think that language and metaphor were a great torture as well as a great joy to Melville,” Wood writes. Melville came to understand that “language does not help us explain or describe God. Quite the contrary, it registers simply our inability to describe God; it holds our torment. Yet language is all there is, and thus Melville follows it as Ahab follows the whale, to the very end.” Wood seems to appreciate, to feel instinctively, the obsessive need that went into the creation of Melville’s heroic metaphors. They created a new path to reality in fiction, while simultaneously registering for Melville the personal unreality of God in the world.
In a later essay, Wood compares Thomas Pynchon to Melville unfavorably, to say the least. “Melville used allegory to hunt down truth, and in doing so he exploded allegory into a thousand pieces. Pynchon uses allegory to hide truth, and in doing so expands allegory into a fetish of itself. Melville raced with the danger of nothingness while running after truth. Nothingness was a wound in truth’s side.”
In other essays, Wood reinterprets Shakespeare’s life-defining soliloquies, rehabilitates D. H. Lawrence’s stylistic beauty, praises W. G. Sebald’s indecipherable facts, and savages John Updike’s lazy lyricism. Writing about Updike’s 1996 novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, Wood states, “Part of the difficulty here is Updike’s tranquil aestheticism, which so swells the textures of his books that it is hard for the reader to imagine any of Updike’s characters feeling metaphysically abandoned.” Wood believes that Updike’s prose often works against the development of truthful characters, because the prose drowns out any of the characters true thoughts with Updike’s own. “Updike cannot relinquish, he must reinsert himself.” “Essie is unable to imagine an alternative because Updike is unable to picture a reality more powerful than his own.” Wood is an excellent close reader, and in analyzing Updike’s abundant prose displays a remarkably acute ear, or eye, I should say.
When writing about Virginia Woolf, he talks about metaphor and criticism: “All criticism is itself metaphorical in movement, because it deals in likeness. It asks: what is art like? What does it resemble? How can it best be described, or redescribed? If the artwork describes itself, then criticism’s purpose is to redescribe the artwork in its own, different language.” Wood’s book, and his thoughts on writers, is full of wonderful, metaphorical, critical one-liners. Of Chekhov: “…watching a Chekhov character is like watching a lover wake up in bed, half awake and half dreaming, saying something odd and private which means nothing to us because it refers to the preceding dream.” On George Steiner: “He approaches each work as if leading a coup to restore a monarch to the throne.” Of Iris Murdoch’s love for Tolstoy and Shakespeare: “Murdoch returns fondly to these two, like someone returning to the city of her honeymoon.” And, on Anthony Julius’s book on T. S. Eliot: “He has written an unstable book about an unstable subject; reading it is like watching a maniac trying to calm a hysteric.”
I imagine Wood would be happy to read these lines in a contemporary novel, and they certainly make his points come alive. It’s interesting to read these essays because though they address writing and religion, they explore many of the ideas he would explore and codify about eight years later in How Fiction Works.
Tags: Criticism, James Wood, The Broken Estate
