James Wood is special. By this, I don’t mean to suggest that he is, without question, the finest critic of his generation. His sensibility is too prickly and particular for me to assign him to such a representative role. No, Wood is special because of his stature in the realm of present-day literary criticism. He is a widely read critic in a period that has few of them. In the scope of his influence, he recalls Edmund Wilson, Mark Van Doren, and Irving Howe (sans the latter’s commitment to left-wing politics); a one-man vanguard of critical authority. If not the finest, then certainly the most famous.
Wood is the author of three books of criticism—The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and last year’s grandstanding How Fiction Works—as well as a novel: the decently reviewed Book Against God. (He wryly calls himself a “spare novelist.”) His reviews—events in themselves—have appeared in a number of publications, including The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, and The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer.
In the last decade, his reputation was minted by his coinage and popularization of the term “hysterical realism,” first introduced in a review of Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth, in 2000. More recently, he virtually assured the success of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (winner of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Prize) with a generous review. He also joined Harvard University’s English department, taking the title of Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism—something of a coronation in the academic kingdom.
With all his authority, you would be right to agree with the claim made by School of the Arts student Aaron Cutler, in his prefatory remarks to a lecture given by Wood on Thursday evening: “He belongs to a long tradition, but James Wood is peerless.” The lecture, titled “Creating Fictional Character: Presences and Absences,” was part of an ongoing series hosted by the Creative Writing department, and Wood’s contribution to it was a remixed version of the chapter on character from How Fiction Works.
Following Cutler’s hastily delivered (and lovingly exhaustive) introduction, Wood spoke to a swollen audience in 501 Dodge. He seemed pleased by the turnout for the event, joking that he could “never get a crowd like this at Harvard.” (To which I wanted to reply: “Welcome to the humiliating world of professional writing.”)
The content of his lecture would have been familiar to anyone who read How Fiction Works. It hinged on the notion that many of us take up fiction to experience and, hopefully identify with, certain or other characters. We look for books that play to “our awareness that a character’s actions are profoundly important,” Wood said, even if the writing must attend to “the difficulty, or even the impossibility, of knowing other people.” The creation of character is, therefore, the most important task for a writer of fiction—as well as the most reliable measure of his success.
Wood continued to sort out the matter by explaining two approaches to the creation of character: that of super-realists, like E.M. Forster (whose Aspects of the Novel is surpassed by How Fiction Works), who “want character to be as big as life” and can’t accept the limitations of fictitiousness; and that of anti-realists, like John Barth, who maintain that character ought to be “as small as the words on a page.”
He turned to a host of apposite examples from various books—David Copperfield, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Eugene Onegin—to show how these attitudes were too absolute, and that the best writers claimed a more playful middle-ground. One such example came from Chekhov’s short story, “The Kiss,” which Wood described as the kind of character-creation that did a lot with a little and also managed to be quite affecting. (He choked up while reciting a favorite sentence.)
Wood closed with a discussion of three touchstones of realism—Pride and Prejudice, The Portrait of a Lady, and Revolutionary Road—whose treatments of character could be read as more self-conscious than they’re often given credit for. His point was that each of these novels was as concerned as any postmodern one with the difficulty of claiming to represent ‘real people’ through made-up stories. He went on to argue that their self-consciousness had been fiction’s overriding impulse since the time of Flaubert; and better this than the steadfast realist’s diktat that “life becomes the measure against which the creation of fiction is judged.”
The tone of the lecture was patient, with Wood adopting a professorial manner. He offered many, many examples to support his claims, and left a strong impression of just how well-read he was. (For more evidence of this, check out the bibliography of How Fiction Works; in composing which, Wood casually observes, “I have used only the books I actually own—the books at hand in my study.” Note that his catholic library includes Make Way for Ducklings, by Robert McCloskey.) While he did take a few shots at fellow critics like Harold Bloom (who has “a tendency to over-identify with certain characters”) and William Gass (a “formalist fatalist”), he generally kept his cool.
So Wood’s lecture was a study in careful difference-splitting—appropriate for a man whose criticism is divisive. For everyone who sings his praises, there is someone else who spells out his faults, or quips that he seems “to want to be his own grandfather.” All this suggests that readers are still paying attention; that they care about Wood’s opinions; that he matters to contemporary fiction. But is he in an enviable position, or an impossible one?
