A tempting critical target…
In our web-exclusive article this week, writer and critic Daniel Miller looks at the glittering career of arch-critic James Wood and asks whether his work—which for almost a decade has set the tone of the debate surrounding contemporary fiction in the US and Britain—may be falling from its ascendancy in the face of a rising enthusiasm for less realist and more experimental forms. Wood is one of the few really big beasts left in the critical jungle, and this has always made him a tempting target for those seeking to prove their mettle: something that’s been especially true, as Miller notes, since his elegant volume of critical tenets, How Fiction Works, appeared in 2008. But, Miller argues, there’s something more substantial to the current backlash than mere envy, spite or attention-seeking. With Zadie Smith’s critical voice starting to come into its own on the pages of the NYRB and Wood’s opponents massing their ranks on the pages of the Nation and elsewhere, we may be seeing a larger shift in sensibilities, much as we did in 2000 and 2001, when Wood’s own assaults on “hysterical realism” captured the mood of a moment and became required reading for self-respecting literati. Time for a change: or merely a sideshow in the world of letters? Let us know your own thoughts below.
Share
Comments
Print
Add Comment
It’s interesting how arguments which have been made for years among bloggers suddenly gain intellectual respectability when they appear in the pages of NYRB and The Nation. As I wrote in a Contra James Wood post on February 3:
“As welcome as Smith’s article was, I have the feeling that it was distilled from a largely unacknowledged tutorial at sites such as This Space, The Reading Experience, and Ready Steady Book, among others. Whatever its origins, it showed that she had shaken off the case of Stockholm Syndrome that had once upon a time prompted her to thank Wood for putting the screws to her first book, and had marshaled her forces to critique, however implicitly, her critic.”
Miller is welcome to the Stockholm Syndrome quip, by the way. It’s always gratifying to have readers.
I agree with Edmond.
And would add that Smith’s so called daring, original, ambitious essay (as I wrote in a Nota Bene Books post):
“…praises what requires criticism, and criticizes what deserves praise, erects straw men in order, simply, to blow them over, and presents arguments, which, when valid, are so for the wrong reasons. Her thinking is convoluted and self contradicting.”
Deresiewicz’s review is filled with insults,culminating with the lame criticism that Wood, because he focuses on the literary, is somehow less than great. Evidently, in order to warrant Mr. D’s approval, literary critics must also be great sociologists, political scientists, and economists.
Miller, in an article that gives us little, concludes that on the basis of two weak, poorly argued essays, James Wood’s ’school’ of criticism will somehow ‘quietly’ ‘dry up’ (a reference he borrows from Deresiewicz’s desert). This is ludicrous.
As I wrote… As I wrote…
As a side note, gentlemen, I can’t help thinking that your shared unwillingness to acknowledge that Wood (Mr. Caldwell) or Smith and Deresiewicz’s respective essays (Mr. Beale) possess any merit whatsoever is a little ungenerous and perhaps self-defeating.
I recognize that I myself am a tired, witless hack (I try, of course, but what can you do?) but these other parties are at least worthy of respect, even if – especially if – their positions are felt to be problematic.
To call Smith’s thinking “convoluted and self contradicting” strikes me as unfair and obtuse. Deresiewicz’s essay is characteristically acerbic, but his central argument – that because literature is a social production, really great criticism involves paying attention to its social context – doesn’t seem to me lame. And as for Wood – well, if we can agree on nothing else, surely we can agree that he’s right about Keith Moon.
Just to clear up a mistake in the article: “Netherland” was not Joseph O’Neill’s debut. He had previously published two novels and a non-fiction book. (Unless you meant that James Wood had described O’Neill’s actual debut — “This Is The Life” — as “masterly.”)
I thank Mr. Silverman for the note, which correctly identifies a mistake on my part.
No problem. I should have also added that I enjoyed the piece. A nice distillation of the present situation.
No, come on. You’ve forced this into a story. The (gulp) “velvet-gloved brawler” William Deresiewicz wrote a negative review of Wood’s book. Smith wrote a harsh but interesting review not of Wood but of Netherland – and a review furthermore that sketters off into support for old fashioned MFA pomo-ism by the end, that no one buys, and is more a marker of the time she spent in the wilds of Brooklyn with the McSweeney’s boys than anything else. This equates to “genuine carnage”? Maybe in the pitch you wrote, but not in the real world I don’t think.
How can the coincidence of these two things possibility be made into a turn of the tide against Wood? Did you even read How Fiction Works? Do you have anything to say about it? Do you even remember the critical counter-attack after his “hysterical realism” claim – which makes what you’ve found here appear rather slim? Or what happened up release of his novel?
You’ve manufactured something basically incoherent here. Surprising Prospect can’t do better, but it’s just the website I guess.
Ah yes, the real world. I’ve been there.
Interested readers are directed to further shots at Wood from:
Colson Whitehead in Harpers:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/0082377
And Walter Kirn’s “sour mouthful of spit” (© Nigel Beale 2008) in the New York Times back in August:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/books/review/Kirn-t.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin
I agree with Nigel and Edmond.
No I don’t. Let’s just acknowledge that these two titans of the litblogosphere see themselves as the most original and incisive voices in literary criticism today — or perhaps we could say semi-literate criticism. It’s even possible, they contend, that their more original and incisive work is being ripped off, not just by hacks, but by Zadie Smith herself. Hey, y’all, it’s the invention of hysterical delusionism. Let’s call JamesWood.
Let’s see, you read Contra James Wood, so you must be aware, at least, of by far the most in depth critique of How Fiction Works: Fiction Gutted – The Establishment and the Novel. http://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/fg-one/
Not to mention the additional critiques of the articles by Deresiewicz and Smith, and others…
I can’t help noticing the weird American-kabuki prudery in all the above-mentioned attacks on–not the critiques of–Wood. Programmatic criticism is and remains the third rail in American literary discourse. That Wood writes with the whiff of the programmatic has succeeded in creating an irreal hysteria.
Isn’t it just possible that Wood doesn’t desire the realist uniformity that is always attributed to the JW straw man? Isn’t it likely that he sees himself as free to state things as strongly as he can, confident that the exceptional in fiction will prove him wrong without also rendering his criticism useless?
Wouldn’t it be the absolute measure of arrogance for Wood to behave as though he MUST offer constant and specific dispensation to those who would disobey him? If he did this, there would be howling.
It is far easier to attack his supposed proscriptions of your literary freedoms than to actually exercise those freedoms.
Not being an American Wood doesn’t know to devote slavish paragraphs backing away from the points he wants to make, genuflecting before the politely modest uncertainty we so prize here.
The what-do-I-know and the throwing up of hands that is the sentimental ending of nearly every contemporary thing I read?
That many of you gentlemen would apparently prefer.
By the way, the Zadie Smith essay has been consistently depicted as a one-sided prizing of McCarthy over O’Neill. Re-read the damn thing. The preference is clear, but the essay is far more measured than has been said. Measured tones are tough to master but useful, I think.