We Report, You Decide

According to James Wood at a lecture to creative writing students at Columbia (blogged about here):

"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.” ...

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."

Gass had an opportunity to respond in an interview before his own lecture there, and apparently punted:

SPEC: James Wood spoke to students in Columbia’s Writing Program a few weeks ago, on the centrality of character to the fiction writer’s work. Toward the end of his lecture, as he was discussing different attitudes re: character-creation, he referred to you as a “formalist fatalist.” (To be fair, he also criticized Harold Bloom for being too invested in certain characters, to the point of over-identification.) Do you think that this is a common perception of your approach to fiction? Is there anything that you would say to revise or correct it? And, for the sake of fairness, do you have any thoughts on James Wood?

WG: I’m surprise [sic] that he had time for me.  I do identify myself as a formalist (in my sense of the word), and I am proud to be an elitist (in my sense of the word).  My formalism has nothing to do with pre-established structures.  It holds that the key to esthetic experience does not lie in terms but in relations - ideally internal relations: i.e., not as an apple lies on a plate, but as H and O make water.  For me, character is defined linguistically: it is any recurring subject that is repeatedly modified by elements of the text which stand as predicates to it.  So David Copperfield is indeed a character in Dickens, but so is a movie poster or a mountain in Malcolm Lowry.   A perfectly organized book would end up as Hegel said the Absolute should: every word would ultimately modify or affect one and only one subject.  This is nonsense as far as the world goes but fiction is not the world. It’s important relations are internal the way they are in a Cezanne still life.  I don’t know what he means by fatalist.


Perhaps it is someone who has given up trying to be understood.  By the way, I don’t pick fights, except with the church.  I am sure his opinion is well considered and well informed.

That "I don't know what he means..." is a bit of a put down in the discipline of philosophy that non-philosophers often don't get. Then, Gass's use of the word "opinion" seals it. It's subtle, but it's a jab something along the order of 'He doesn't really KNOW what he's talking about; he hasn't really demonstrated or proven anything. I don't really take him that seriously. His is merely an opinion—to which he is, of course, entitled—but it isn't philosophically grounded." Believe me, to Gass, Wood is beneath contempt, held in low esteem.

Feel free to click on Gass or James Wood over in the right-hand column for my own thoughts on these two.

Ur-story: The Muddle's the Thing

[continued from previous post]

Much has been made of the use by Vladimir Nabokov ['VN'] (the dead writer, married to Vera, father of Dmitri, teacher of Thomas Pynchon at Cornell) of mirror subjects, or doppelgangers. In Pnin, he employs one Vladimir Vladimirovich ['VV'] who, it must be remarked (because it has so often been), bears considerable affinity with VN, to narrate the rather simple, sentimental story of Pnin. VV is a fictional character who is something like VN—but not to be identified with him. The details of VN's life and their similarity with those of VV are not at all relevant here. Nor is the question of who was the real-life model for Pnin—though much ink has been spilled doing precisely this. We are more concerned about how Pnin works.

VV, the narrator, presents Pnin as a compelling, sympathetic character whose story, though slightly comic, is relatively simple and uncomplicated: Pnin, 57 year old untenured professor of Russian at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, takes wrong trains because he uses out-of-date schedules. The idioms and nuances of English, his second or third language, confound him. He is absent-minded and myopic. He has heart seizures that send him into reveries about his past. He moves from rooming house to rooming house practically each semester. He lectures to his classes from printed texts, rarely looking up to acknowledge his students. He puts calls on library books he has already checked out (and which nobody else on the campus could possibly want). He has all his teeth pulled and enjoys the improvement. He is genial. He makes a near-heroic effort to adjust his old world manners to new world customs. He is an old school scholar (running down endless strings of obscure footnotes) in a pragmatic, career-oriented education system. He misses his ex-wife, the feckless Liza (with whom, we are led to believe, VV had an affair), and wants desperately to connect with her teenaged son, Victor—an incipient artist. Pnin is a former social acquaintance of VV. He, like many in his rootless, emigre community, is nostalgic about pre-civil war, Czarist Russia. He enjoys brief, cooling swims in summer. He is a gracious, generous host. He loses his job at Waindell College when his benefactor, Hagen, takes a better position at another college.

"[Y]ou'll be glad to know that the English Department is inviting one of your most brilliant compatriots, a really fascinating lecturer—I have heard him once; I think he's an old friend of yours."

Pnin cleared his throat and asked.

"It signifies that they are firing me?"

"Now, don't take it too hard, Timofey. I'm sure your old friend—"

"Who is old friend?" queried Pnin, slitting his eyes.

Hagen named the fascinating lecturer.

Leaning forward, his elbows propped on his knees, clasping and unclasping his hands, Pnin said:

"Yes, I know him thirty years or more. We are friends, but there is one thing perfectly certain. I will never work under him." (169-70)

We also learn along the way that Pnin was separated from his former youthful crush, one Mira Belochkin, by the Russian civil war and revolution. She, a Jew, was slaughtered at Buchenwald.

What do we know about VV, then? For all intents and purposes, Pnin disappears at the end of Chapter 6, and VV steps forward and takes over Chapter 7 to justify his narrative: "My first recollection of Timofey Pnin is connected with a speck of coal dust that entered my left eye on a spring Sunday in 1911." (174) He claims to have met Pnin socially a couple of times in and around old St. Petersburgh, though Pnin refutes this. As ex-pats, they met again in Paris. There, VV also met Liza, an incipient poet. She sends VV her poems. He tells her they are bad and she should stop composing. Later, VV reviews them in her room—"the cheapest room of a decadent little hotel"—and, apparently, they have a brief, torrid affair: "In the result of emotions and in the course of events, the narration of which would be of no public interest whatsoever, Liza swallowed a handful of sleeping pills." (181-82). A few weeks after that incident, Liza importunes VV for his advice on a rather pedantic marriage proposal by Pnin. She tells him: "I shall wait till midnight. If I don't hear from you, I shall accept it." (182) He shuns her seemingly desperate plea, and she marries Pnin. VV, it seems, is a bit of a cad. Later, Liza "told Timofey everything," and he pardoned her. (184) VV meets Pnin some years later, and Pnin insults him: "Now, don't believe a word he says... . He makes up everything. ... He is a dreadful inventor." (185) In the forties, VV and Pnin (now divorced from Liza) meet in New York, and all seems to have been forgotten. Later, VV accepts the English Department position at Waindell and, indeed, offers Pnin a job:

"When I decided to accept a professorship at Waindell, I stipulated that I could invite whomever I wanted for teaching in the special Russian Division I planned to inaugurate. With this confirmed, I wrote to Timofey Pnin offering him in the most cordial terms I could muster to assist me in any way and to any extent he desired. His answer surprised me and hurt me. Curtly he wrote that he was through with teaching and would not even bother to wait till the end of the spring term." (186)

When VV arrives at Waindell, after an evening of lampooning Pnin with another colleague, he crank calls Pnin and, the next morning, stalks him as he's leaving town. That is the last we see of Pnin and his dog, and that is the end of the book.

The two men have a long and complicated history. Both remember fondly their pre-war days in Czarist Russia. VV seems to have adapted to the American ways and language, while Pnin still retains his Old World manners. VV seems to have been more successful ("brilliant", "fascinating lecturer") as well. And then there's the matter of the woman. Yet, this does not explain why VN needed to interject VV into the narrative to tell the story of Pnin.

Or, to frame the question another way: Why does VN need to use this so-called post-modern technique? What purpose does it serve? Stylistic devices, it seems to me, need to have some rationale. It's like the twenty-minute drum solo in Iron Butterfly's "In-a-gadda-da-vida": sure, it's long and technically show-offy, but how does it contribute to the song? Is VN merely being self-indulgent, here? Showing off? Let's look:

We know VV is not entirely reliable. As I pointed out in the last post, he relates things he cannot possibly know. Even Pnin knows this ("He makes everything up.") And to drive the point home, we are told in the last paragraph of the book that VV is being told "the story of Pnin rising to address the Cremona Women's Club and discovering he had brought the wrong lecture." (191) Of course, we recall that the first chapter is about Pnin taking the wrong train to Cremona where, as he is about to rise to deliver his lecture, he has a vision about the past (including his parents, an aunt, a friend killed by "the Reds", and "shyly smiling, sleek dark head inclined, gentle brown gaze shining up at Pnin from under velvet eyebrows, sat a dead sweetheart of his, fanning herself with a Program. Murdered, forgotten, unrevenged, incorrupt, immortal..." (p.27) Of course, this is Mira.).

Pnin is, at first face, a comical character, often the butt of jokes and lampoonings on campus. This is the way the world—especially the American world—sees him. VV invents stories about Pnin's inner life that show Pnin's endearing side. He shows Pnin's pain (as, e.g., about Mira); his pride (as, e.g., his proposal and dignified commitment to faithless Liza); his poignancy (as, e.g., when he connects with Victor, tosses out the soccer ball he'd bought for him when he realizes it would be inappropriate, and receives as a trophy a beautiful punch bowl which he nearly breaks in one of the few really suspenseful moments in the book); his passion (as, e.g., for the arcana of Russian culture). This takes an act of the imagination, and however unreliable it might be, is, perhaps, the only way one human can come to empathize with another. And, VN seems to be showing us, it is the lack of precisely this sort of sympathetic imagination that resulted in the unfathomable horrors that defaced the 20th Century:

"In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin—not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind (alas, recollections of his marriage to Liza were imperious enough to crowd out any former romance), but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consicousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible." (134-35)

Art and literature—i.e., The Imagination—are the best we have for overcoming our aloneness and our alienation, for transcending our own egos and entering into the experience of another.

According to James Wood, in How Fiction Works, "the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style." In this regard, he cites Pnin and shows how Nabokov sort of backs into a kind of FIS almost by accident in Wood's close reading of the book's description of a nutcracker as "the leggy thing." ("Nabokov is here using a kind of free indirect style, probably without even thinking about it." Section 20). Wood, here, misses the impact of VN's having VV mediate the narrative of Pnin's interiority. It doesn't matter whether VN gets out of the way and gets Pnin's words right. The unreliability of the narrator is key here—it means something—because VV is attempting something quite impossible: sympathetically imagining and portraying another person's thoughts and memories, entering the experience of another. He's going to get it wrong. [I'm planning a subsequent post comparing the free indirect style and the writer's notion of 'voice'.]

Pnin is mediated by VV's narrative, and VV is imagining another being, another mind. It doesn't matter if VN gets the language of Pnin right because we know VV doesn't (and can't) get it right. Here, in a very real way, VN's style is precisely the substance. VN is more of a master of the free indirect style than Wood can see. That is to say, Wood is just plain wrong here: VN employs the free indirect style to bring us the character of VV vainly trying to imagine the inner world of Pnin! [One thinks of such cliches as nesting Russian dolls, and 'riddle[s] wrapped in [m]ysteries inside enigmas'.] Wood is right only to the extent that VV's (not VN's) use of 'thing' represents a success at imagining the inner life of Pnin. VN is entirely successful at representing the language and thought of VV (which Wood utterly fails to see).

VV is necessary thus. It is his effort—the supreme spiritual effort, if you will, of attempting to imagine and understand and empathize with another person's interiority—that matters. And, for the record, it has nothing to do with faith or dogmatism.

The muddle's the thing.

Realisms

Mainly because I'm dense—a slow-learner, if you will—I want to try to get my head around a term that gets thrown around in discussing fiction and literary criticism (and in other contexts, too, but they're not the ones that concern me just now). And that term? Realism.

In his now infamous broadside against Zadie Smith's White Teeth, James Wood called out a trend he called 'hysterical realism.' By that, he seemed to indict the sort of fiction that allows too much of the noise of the world into its cocoon. You find it, presumably, in William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Nicholson Baker, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, William Vollmann, and others of its chief offenders. One thinks, too, of Tom Wolfe and his ilk. It's a 'the world is too much with us' sort of concept where the 'news of the world' takes precedence over the 'news of the soul.'

Smith riposted in the NYRB, in an article comparing two recent novels, Netherland and Remainder (both of which I've reviewed here), with a stab at something she labeled 'lyrical realism'.

Once you start qualifying a term like 'realism' you begin splitting into factions and you start losing focus on the substantive issue. Both Wood and Smith are arguing FOR realism, they just differ over which flavor of realism they prefer. Realism is a sort of catch-all term that can mean so many different things it has become virtually meaningless. Arguments shoot by each in the night without ever really touching because the antagonists hold two different views of realism. The debate often is really over what kind of realism or what meaning to give it.

Below, I've tried to sort out some of the things that go by the name 'realism'. The following is by way of anatomy, then, rather than polemic.

First, the term realism is used to describe a period or genre of literature. Thus, we might describe the works of Balzac or Dickens and their ilk as realism—19th Century, French, English, whatever. This category is generally for literary historians. On the genre view, realism is opposed to fantasy or allegory or myth. Or, we might say how much we admire Raymond Chandler's gritty noir realism, referring, for example, to the seaminess of the world he depicts and the sordidness of his characters. On this view, realism is opposed to a presumed sugarcoating of things in, for example, bourgeois fiction.

Another use of the term realism has to do with with the traditional view stemming from the work of Aristotle. It goes by other names such as Mimesis or verisimilitude. On this view, it is the world to which the text points that alone is real. This is the most obvious, most common usage of the term. It is analogous to what philosophers call the correspondence theory of truth, or the propositional form we find in Tractarian Wittgenstein. I believe the term 'hysterical realism' refers to an extreme adherence to this form: the perceptual world of table and chairs intrudes too noisily on the novel.

On yet a third view, it is capturing the character's consciousness of his or her own world that alone is real. The 'form of life' (to borrow and perhaps bastardize yet another Wittgensteinian term) the text embodies or portrays alone is real. The perceptual/psychological/emotional/ethical/social being whose expression just is the text alone is real. Stated another way, the form of life inside of whose head/being the text transpires is what is realistic. We may liken this to the philosophical coherentist view of truth. The character, on this view, has no purchase on any truth about the world. In fact, s/he may misperceive his/her world and that is what is realistic about the work. The character's attitude, or stance, with respect to the world is what matters. This is what is behind the privileging of 'free indirect style' by such public critics as James Wood.

It is between these two views that a significant polarity has arisen: the 'world is too much with us' school (The Recognitions is ur-text here, with a little 'u') vs. the 'navel [sic] observatory' school (contemplative narrative where everything takes place in the head, so to speak, of the character(s); the 'yes, Virginia, there is a soul or the remnants thereof' school; Augie March is the ur-text here).

These three views are not the only ones, however; though to hear some of the proponents you would think they had exhausted the richness of the term realism.

In an earlier post, I cited Maurice Shroder's view that the novel alone is the most realistic literary art form because "protagonists succeed only because they have let fall their illusions and their pride. Such a fall, in a novel, is a happy one, since it represents the completion of that educational process with which the novel deals, an education into the realities of the material world and of human life in society." Thus, realism is an essential characteristic, perhaps the essential characteristic, of the novel and describes the arc of the character's (whatever his attitude) coming to grips/terms with his/her world (however conceived).

A further view of realism holds that it is the reader's response to the text that alone is real. Roland Barthes exploded the myth of Balzacian realism in his monumental S/Z. As Barthes says, the reader is no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. There are many versions of reader response theory, but the point is that it is what the text implies alone that is real. Thus, all men are mortal; Gatsby is quite a man, but a man nonetheless; so, draw your own conclusions. Realism relates strictly to the communicative effect of the text. Philosophically, this flows from the deconstructionists' notion that the text is an empty signifier [where signifier + signified = sign]. It is, in effect, a sociological realism: what is real is the way the text is emblematic of [feminist, queer, Marxist, Darwinian, (insert your pet theory here)] theory, for theory alone is real.

A more analytic view is that it is the text alone that is real. William Gass is the most vocal proponent of this view. The reality of the text just is the words on the page. The text thinks the world. Once published, the text becomes a historical object capable of not only being acted upon (as in reader response theory) but in acting upon the world. One thinks here of feedback loops in cybernetic theory. Not only does art imitate life, life, too, at times imitates art. It is not the world which the text depicts, nor the character's attitude toward that world that is real; to get at what is real, don't focus on what is represented, rather focus on the picture itself and its aspects. I'd better let Gass speak for himself:

"..the consciousness contained in any text is not an actual functioning consciousness; it is a constructed one, improved, pared, paced, enriched by endless retrospections, irrelevancies removed, so that into the ideal awareness which I imagined for the poet, who possesses passion, perception, thought, imagination, and desire and has them present in amounts appropriate to the circumstances—just as, in the lab, we need more observation than fervor, more imagination than lust—there is introduced patterns of disclosure, hierarchies of value, chains of inference, orders of images, natures of things. ...It remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create (since not all books are bent on that result), but by appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about..."[Wm. H. Gass, "The Book as a Container of Consciousness," in Finding a Form, pp. 348,351]

"[T]he philosophical analysis of fiction has scarcely taken its first steps, Philosophers continue to interpret novels as if they were philosophies themselves, platforms to speak from, middens from which may be scratched important messages for mankind; they have predictably looked for content, not form; they have regarded fictions as ways of viewing reality and not as additions to it. There are many ways of refusing experience. This is one of them.

So little is known of the power of the gods in the worlds of fiction, or of the form of cause, or of the nature of soul, or of the influence of evil, or of the essence of good. No distinction is presently made between laws and rules of inference and conventions of embodiment, or their kinds. The role of chance or of assumption, the recreative power of the skillful reader, the mastery of the sense of internal life, the forms of space and time: how much is known of these? ... No search is made for first principles, none for rules, and in fact all capacity for thought in the face of fiction is so regularly abandoned as to reduce it to another form of passive and mechanical amusement. The novelist has, by this ineptitude, been driven out of healthy contact with his audience, and the supreme values of fiction sentimentalized. William Gass, "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction," in Fiction and the Figures of Life, pp. 25-26

"To see the world through words means more than merely grasping it through gossipacious talk or amiable description. Language, unlike any other medium, I think, is the very instrument and organ of the mind. It is not the representation of thought, as Plato believed, and hence only an inadequate copy; but it is thought itself. ...Literature is mostly made of mind; and unless that is understood about it, little is understood about it." William Gass, "Finding a Form" pp. 34-36 in Finding A Form.

Finally, there is something we might call the Platonic view: it is the ideal Form to which the text aspires (call it the Good, the Beautiful, the Just, the True) and which it attempts to embody that alone is real. Realism (often mislabeled 'idealism') is seeing through the text to the Ideal Form it seeks to embody. To the extent the text liberates us from the world of the senses (i.e, shows us the way out of the Cave) and leads us into the ideal world of Forms, it is Realistic.

Well, that pretty much exhausts my anatomy of the uses of the term realism. There may be more. I suppose there are any number of hybrid types—ethical realism, theological realism, moral realism, journalistic realism, etc., etc. If so, as they relate to fiction and literary criticism, please enlighten me.

From this brief foray, I think we can safely say that what the various views of realism have in common is an attempt to describe the complex relation/interaction between the text and the world.

My own view of realism, however non-practical for the practice of criticism, is probably closer to, though not coextensive, with Gass's: It is reality alone which is real and it is this reality which produces the text, just as nature somehow produces consciousness. The text is a model of consciousness, linguistic in form. It not only represents an awareness of the reality that produced it, it is an awareness of the reality that produced it. The evolution of consciousness is aligned with the continual perceptual probing of the world and retreating from it: it is adaptive. Texts are, likewise, an adaptational form. Texts are evolving probings of and retreats from the reality from which they flow—whether it is the human agent that pens them and the humanity of which s/he is a part or the noisy, intrusive physical world they are made to mirror. The text is part and parcel of reality, a feature of it that must be taken into account—especially to the extent that it is 'aware of' reality—by all subsequent texts. For Gass, the text thinks the world. To my mind, it is the self-reflexive world that thinks the text, and any realism about texts must take this into account. The text is Foam.

Of course, my view is relatively unformed (and possibly unprecedented—I don't know) and will require much further thought and research to articulate. As I continue to review novels on this site, I plan to try to apply it—if possible.

I am left, however, with one last question: if these views are the forms of realism, what, we might ask, is its opposite? That, as they say, is a question for another day.

Death With Cello

Let's say you read Jose Saramago's Blindness and it left you breathless, its relentless bleakness letting up only in the final page with maybe a ray of hope for humanity. Then you went to see the movie, found it a more than competent realization, devastating in fact. And along the way you had read his The Double and enjoyed it, though wasn't completely grabbed by the premise.

Now you find Saramago has a new novel translated into English: Death With Interruptions. Naturally you're wondering whether you should allocate your most valuable capital resource—TIME—to read it. There's a good chance you're going to love it. Then you read this: James Wood's review in a recent New Yorker. He calls it a "thought experiment":

“Death with Interruptions” is a small-ish, toothy addition to a great novelist’s work. It efficiently mobilizes its hypothetical test case, and quickly generates a set of sharp theological and metaphysical questions about the desirability of utopia, the possibility of Heaven, and the true foundation of religion. ...

He is in some ways the least fantastical of novelists, because he so relentlessly persists with his fictional hypotheses, following them through to large, humane conclusions. His new novel gradually becomes less and less conceptual, and increasingly affecting, without ever becoming in any conventional sense realistic, or even plausible. ...

In his new novel, Saramago again asks us to reflect on the storyteller’s godlike powers. When Death’s letter is published in the newspapers, a grammarian is consulted, and notes its “chaotic syntax, the absence of full stops, the complete lack of very necessary parentheses, the obsessive elimination of paragraphs, the random use of commas. . . .” Death writes like José Saramago. As Death watches the cellist drink, Saramago writes that she looked at the water “and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed.” The reader wonders: if Death cannot imagine thirst, can she possibly imagine death? And can the novelist? One answer that Saramago offers—it is the wide, universal, antique truth toward which his complex fiction has been travelling—is that if we neither recoil from death nor religiously long to vanquish it, but, rather, accept the old actuality that in the midst of life we are in death, then death surrounds us like life, and to imagine death is really to imagine life.

I felt this was one of the best written reviews I've ever read from Wood and proves again why, love him or loathe him, when he is on he is a must read. It tells me precisely what I need to know: solid contribution to the work of a great novelist, humane, imaginative, profound. As well, it provides important quotes from the book. I want to read this novel.

Then, I read this: D.T. Max's review of the same book in the back pages of the New York Times Sunday Book Review section.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is a confusing gift. The glamour, the affirmation, the open invitation to publish — these are not always healthy for a writer. One hoped José Saramago, the Portuguese author who became a laureate in 1998 at the age of 75, would emerge unaffected. He is a writer of great discipline who became well known only in his 50s. But the skinny novel “Death With Interruptions,” following on the heels of the equally uncertain “Seeing,” suggests he is not immune. ...His work today feels by comparison begrudging and also a bit unfocused.

Ouch! I'm instantly put off it. Then he asks:

So does the cellist represent the power of art? Or is he the working class and death the International Monetary Fund? Or maybe he’s just a guy who got lucky with the wrong girl? Saramago’s not saying. Indeed the feel of this book is really the sound of no sound, of the unsaid and the unsayable and the too tired to say. Maybe this is just Saramago growing old. Writing novels is hard work. Or maybe even this committed novelist has thrown up his hands at modern life.

Wood's review provides an interpretation and context for the novel within the writer's oeuvre, literature in general (Dostoevsky), and, surprisingly, in philosophy. Max's review summarizes the plot in a literal manner—especially the second part—and laments that the novel does not easily yield up its meaning. So what's a boy to do?

Frankly, Wood's review is the more persuasive. I will read the book, but I will probably read what Wood calls "perhaps his greatest book, “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” (1991)" first. As for Max's review, I find myself with a similar dilemma in a story I'm preparing for submission. The story, like Chekhov's "The Darling" and Barthleme's "The School" is a serial story. The structure of the piece repeats with only slight variations, setting up certain expectations in the reader which are then surprisingly sprung. Dickens's A Christmas Carol is another example. I keep going back and forth with the ending: whether to close it off in a systematic sort of way consistent with the preceding sections and let the meaning be obvious or to allow the ending to open up into an enigma which recasts everything that precedes it. The first round of drafts opted for the former; the current run have taken the latter route. Max appears to have some impatience with writing where the meaning is not nicely tucked up for him, wrapped in a bow, and presented for his immediate delectation. Wood seems more at home with, for lack of a better term to hand, the 'negative capability' of the work. As do I. Thanks, Mr. Wood.

Cui Bono?

[No, not that Bono.] Today, we aggregate:

• The Washington Post brings the war crimes evidence closer to the source:  "The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public."


• Cui bono:  Joseph E. Stiglitz, whose article on the true costs of the American wars we've previously mentioned, has a new article in the most recent Vanity Fair entitled "Reversal of Fortune":  "Ideology proclaimed that markets were always good and government always bad. While George W. Bush has done as much as he can to ensure that government lives up to that reputation—it is the one area where he has overperformed—the fact is that key problems facing our society cannot be addressed without an effective government, whether it’s maintaining national security or protecting the environment. Our economy rests on public investments in technology, such as the Internet. While Bush’s ideology led him to underestimate the importance of government, it also led him to underestimate the limitations of markets. We learned from the Depression that markets are not self-adjusting—at least, not in a time frame that matters to living people. Today everyone—even the president—accepts the need for macro-economic policy, for government to try to maintain the economy at near-full employment. But in a sleight of hand, free-market economists promoted the idea that, once the economy was restored to full employment, markets would always allocate resources efficiently. The best regulation, in their view, was no regulation at all, and if that didn’t sell, then “self-regulation” was almost as good."


• Another call for perhaps a new Bretton Woods-type regime: "Financial liberalisation [that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation] has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a "virtual parliament" of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and "vote" against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.
  
  Investors and lenders can "vote" by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.
  
  ...in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths"."  [Never forget that after the devastation he'd wrought in U.S. foreign policy, Paul Wolfowitz was appointed by Pres.* Bush to head of the World Bank.  Gives one pause in the context of the current crisis, does it not?]


• Now for something completely different (or is it?):  James Wood in his current New Yorker article, "Verbage:  The Republican War on Words," hits on a topic we raised in an earlier post: "In recent elections, the Republican hate word has been “liberal,” or “Massachusetts,” or “Gore.” In this election, it has increasingly been “words.” Barack Obama has been denounced again and again as a privileged wordsmith, a man of mere words who has “authored” two books (to use Sarah Palin’s verb), and done little else. The leathery extremist Phyllis Schlafly had this to say, at the Republican Convention, about Palin: “I like her because she’s a woman who’s worked with her hands, which Barack Obama never did, he was just an élitist who worked with words.” The fresher-faced extremist Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, called Obama “just a person of words,” adding, “Words are everything to him.” The once bipartisan campaign adviser Dick Morris and his wife and co-writer, Eileen McGann, argue that the McCain camp, in true Rovian fashion, is “using the Democrat’s articulateness against him” (along with his education, his popularity, his intelligence, his wife—pretty much everything but his height, though it may come to that)."
  
  [When a candidate runs a campaign based on the principle that government is part of the problem, not part of the solution (that would be GW Bush), then when that administration proves incompetent (Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, Wall Street, the economy, etc., etc.) we shouldn't be surprised. So, when a candidate runs a campaign attacking the media "filter" and the articulation of policy positions, we should expect an administration that governs more by fiat than consensus (as Bush has, as well. But, as Wood points out, we've hit new highs (or lows, as it were) here.). If they lie about what they're doing in the campaign, then they'll lie about what they're doing once they're in power.]


• James Wood and I, along with our provocative host Dan Green and whole host of others, got into a wrangle about Dostoevsky over at The Reading Experience. Dan started it off with this little nugget: "Dostoevsky is, in my opinion, such a terrible writer. He's a religious dogmatist and a reactionary conservative who uses fiction as, in Wilson's words, "demonstrations of the areas which have to be explored if one is to make sense of any of the great questions of philosophical theology." Unsurprisingly, most of Dostevsky's novels tell us that, once we've "explored" these areas, we would be well advised to become. . .religious dogmatists and reactionary conservatives." And a storm of comment ensued. Check it out. BTW: Here's the article that got Dan going in the first place.

That's enough for now. There's so much more.

Transportation Authority

One of our long-time web favorites, Denis Dutton over at Arts & Letters Daily, points us to this article in Scientific American: "The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn." Read it. Go ahead, and come back.

First, some quotes:

Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions?

The answers to these questions seem to be rooted in our history as a social animal. We tell stories about other people and for other people. Stories help us to keep tabs on what is happening in our communities. The safe, imaginary world of a story may be a kind of training ground, where we can practice interacting with others and learn the customs and rules of society. And stories have a unique power to persuade and motivate, because they appeal to our emotions and capacity for empathy.

...

Because there are so many diverse forms, scholars often define story structure, known as narrative, by explaining what it is not. Exposition contrasts with narrative by being a simple, straightforward explanation, such as a list of facts or an encyclopedia entry. Another standard approach defines narrative as a series of causally linked events that unfold over time. A third definition hinges on the typical narrative’s subject matter: the interactions of intentional agents—characters with minds—who possess various motivations.

However narrative is defined, people know it when they feel it. Whether fiction or nonfiction, a narrative engages its audience through psychological realism—recognizable emotions and believable interactions among characters.

“Everyone has a natural detector for psychological realism,” says Raymond A. Mar, assistant professor of psychology at York University in Toronto. “We can tell when something rings false.”

But the best stories—those retold through generations and translated into other languages—do more than simply present a believable picture. These tales captivate their audience, whose emotions can be inextricably tied to those of the story’s characters. Such immersion is a state psychologists call “narrative transport.”

...

“One might have expected natural selection to have weeded out any inclination to engage in imaginary worlds rather than the real one,” writes Steven Pinker, a Harvard University evolutionary psychologist, in the April 2007 issue of Philosophy and Literature. Pinker goes on to argue against this claim, positing that stories are an important tool for learning and for developing relationships with others in one’s social group. And most scientists are starting to agree: stories have such a powerful and universal appeal that the neurological roots of both telling tales and enjoying them are probably tied to crucial parts of our social cognition.

As our ancestors evolved to live in groups, the hypothesis goes, they had to make sense of increasingly complex social relationships. Living in a community requires keeping tabs on who the group members are and what they are doing. What better way to spread such information than through storytelling?

...

“If you’re training to be a pilot, you spend time in a flight simulator,” says Keith Oatley, a professor of applied cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto. Preliminary research by Oatley and Mar suggests that stories may act as “flight simulators” for social life.

...

In support for the idea that stories act as practice for real life are imaging studies that reveal similar brain ac tivity during viewings of real people and animated cha­racters. In 2007 Mar conducted a study using Waking Life, a 2001 film in which live footage of actors was traced so that the characters appear to be animated drawings. Mar used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan volunteers’ brains as they watched matching footage of the real actors and the corresponding animated characters. During the real footage, brain activity spiked strongly in the superior temporal sulcus and the temporoparietal junction, areas associated with processing biological motion. The same areas lit up to a lesser extent for the animated footage. “This difference in brain activation could be how we distinguish between fantasy and reality,” Mar says.

Nothing really new to report here. This is a summing up of several scientific points of view seemingly converging around a consistent hypothesis. Fair enough—and a good starting point.

If you've been following our own thoughts on this subject, you've watched as we walked through James Wood's recent book: How Fiction Works, concluding that he gave short shrift to the centrality of story in the operation of fiction. You've also read our own first investigations into the (dare we call it) universal importance of what we're calling "Ur-story" to fiction. The studies cited by the Scientific American study identify three basic narrative patterns that, they say, account for roughly two-thirds of the most respected narrative traditions:

As many as two thirds of the most respected stories in narrative traditions seem to be variations on three narrative patterns, or prototypes, according to Hogan. The two more common prototypes are romantic and heroic scenarios—the former focuses on the trials and travails of love, whereas the latter deals with power struggles. The third prototype, dubbed “sacrificial” by Hogan, focuses on agrarian plenty versus famine as well as on societal redemption. These themes appear over and over again...

Our own exploration attempted to reconcile these themes (as well as that of comedy!) to the basic thesis of the Ur-story series of posts, to wit: that all fiction is grounded in the all-too-human response to the burgeoning consciousness of one's own mortality—the heroic quest, the romance, comedy. 'Models of consciousness' we called them. We also brought the Ur-story thesis to bear on the foundation of Judeo-Christian religion.

Nigel Beale, over at Nota Bene Books, has posted a couple thoughts on this matter here, here, and here apparently defending Wood's approach to the topic by siding with Forster over Aristotle.

We don't necessarily buy into Forster's distinction between story and plot—summarized as time-sequence vs. causality. For a good discussion, see Scott Esposito's take on Aspects of the Novel here at Conversational Reading. We find 'story' to have an altogether more noble place in the novel: indeed, it is the substance of the novel. Character without action is static. The novel is dynamic: it is a character in action—whether it is deciding on a course of action or refusing to do so. In choosing or in acting the character is revealed. This is the story. And the character's decision or action is motivated by who he is and this arises from his story, which we maintain has to do with his response to the human condition of mortality, aloneness, and loss. Thoughts, descriptions, characteristics, tags, ticks: these things do not make a character. What defines a character is what he does. Story, to us, is something much more than Forster's time sequence.

This is not to say plot is unimportant. The novel does not operate in a vacuum. No choice is made without some lead up and no choice is without consequences. The plot, as Forster maintained, does operate on the cause-and-effect level. And when a the writer has a character 'in story', plot is often neglected: that is to say, often it is enough in literary fiction to give the internal motivations for a character's action—plot be damned. In fact, plot is hard for the literary writer whose main concern is character and character development. Plot is easier to do in the genre novel—where the character's existential concerns are often irrelevant or peripheral. Window-dressing, at best, that slows down the pace. In the so-called character-driven novel, weaving thematically-consistent external motivating factors into the weft of the story (i.e., plotting) stretches the writer beyond the "method" approach, the "journalling" or whatever the current argot is for inhabiting the fictional mind-space of the character. The reader must see the character in action. In this sense, we diverge from Forster. His "the king died and the queen died" is not a true story. When you get to "the king died and the queen died of grief" you are getting closer to story. Plot, on our view, is more "how" than "why". Thus, if the queen threw herself upon her dagger or flung herself from her tower or challenged the dead king's usurper or led her people into a futile battle or refused to eat or strolled naked upon the cold night parapets or inexplicably fell into a coma or fomented a rebellion by sleeping with every commoner or foreigner she met or brought ruin upon the kingdom and eventually herself by squandering its treasury or... (we could go on), you have the rudiments of an interwoven story and plot—how she acted out in response to the king's death which, in turn, brought about her own demise. The act itself—say, leaping from the tower—causes her death: that is plotting. But the desperation that lead to that leaping is her story. Why leap? Why not passive-aggressively have a courtier push her? What does the action reveal about her inner turmoil? This is the kind of question story raises and, hopefully, answers.

The informative, instructive, socializing, aspects of fiction identified in the Scientific American article make no sense in the context of a static character. The character must be seen to act, and the reader must understand what drove her to decide to act in precisely the way she did: what did she know, what prompted her, what was her emotional arc. If she is merely reactive, an effect, determined, passive, at the whim of the plotting, she will be wholly uninteresting. Something about her must set her and her responses apart. This is the story. And story is what keeps us reading.

An Event

Marilynne Robinson's new novel, Home, appears to be out.  Two in-depth reviews make me want to read it:  James Wood's in The New Yorker and Rachel Cohen's in the new Bookforum.

Criticism Near and Far

Our journey finds us today musing over the nature of criticism. Our launching pad: Guy Davenport's "Narrative Tone and Form" in The Geography of the Imagination:

"Narrative voice (tone, attitude, confidence) is as characteristic of its epoch as any other style. We do not, however, live in an epoch; we live between epochs. Literature, once a river defined by banks, is now a river in an ocean. Johnson and Voltaire read, or looked into, everything that came from the presses. A scholar's learning nowadays is certified by the ignorance with which he surrounds his expertise. It is therefore almost impossible to tell if the twentieth century has a style variously perceived by a variety of sensibilities, or the greatest diversity of styles known to cultural history."

"Flaubert has learned to make things articulate." [Does he use 'articulate', here, as verb (such that 'things speak') or an adjective (such that the things tell us something)? Probably the latter. Either way, he's succinct and correct.]

"The style of Kafka is a marriage of Flaubert and the folktale. The beginning of Amerika is good Flaubertian prose, restrained and objective, right up until the second sentence, which describes the Statue of Liberty. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven. That is the most brilliant imaginative touch in modern literature." [I'm buying.]

"I see a pattern here: a movement from assuming the world to be transparent, and available to lucid thought and language, to assuming (having to assume, I think the artists would say) that the world is opaque."

"The radical change in twentieth-century narrative is of form. There has been a new understanding that literature is primarily literature and not a useful critique of manners. And there has been a vigorous search for new patterns to the novel."

And he proceeds to discuss the architectonics of the contemporary novel, citing O. Henry's lost Cabbages and Kings and Paul Metcalf's Genoa. (This is a topic we'll reserve for another day, hoping to bring Gass and some others into the mix.)

Then we find this, an essay by Morgan Meis over at The Smart Set. He is an editor at one of our favorite venues: 3 Quarks Daily (though sometimes I feel I need at least 5 or 6 to sustain me). Meis draws the distinction between two 'styles' (let's call them) of criticism: distanced and close-in. The Kantian tradition calls for distanciation, top-down, objective evaluation of the work of art based on a set of stated criteria; we suspend our emotional involvement in the story for the sake of arriving at an aesthetic judgment. The other trend lacks rules and addresses each work on its own merits: "Another way to say this is that each work of art generates its own set of rules. The only way to deal with any individual work, then, is to read out that set of rules, to discover something about its own internal logic. A criticism that wants to step away, to achieve distance in order to apply a set of external rules and to make judgments, ends up stepping away from the only criterion available: the criterion there within the work." Close and far. These are the choices Meis confronts. He opts for the close-in view.

The problem with Meis's view of closeness gets you a department of, say, Madonna Studies alongside your basic Bach Studies, or comparative comic books alongside Gide and Camus and Sartre. We at WoW have nothing against relativism per se; in fact, our usual attitude is something on the order of 'the more the merrier.' How then to deal with the problem of standards, objectivity? In our last couple posts we've framed the issue somewhat differently: Is criticism the bacteria in the stomach of the leech or is it in the business of delimiting the presentation of consciousness in the work of art?

To take Meis's dilemma at face value, we think Davenport was on to something. None of us is a Johnson or a Voltaire. Or a Coleridge or Pater. Or even a Wood or Kermode (see Frank's delighted review of James's How Fiction Works here). We are exposed to vast amounts of 'art' (often disguised as entertainment or advertisement) every day. There is so much of it we have to limit our own consumption—hell, I can't even read every so-called 'great' novel coming down the pike. So we pick and choose the things that entertain us, the things we like. Each of us is a critic, of sorts, and can say that we like something or we can identify with it in some way. And if we don't like it, we can vote with our feet or our remote control or our pocket book. Our opinions are what they are maugre our degree of ignorance. Each of us has standards; they simply haven't yet been articulated. Perhaps it is the critic's task to articulate the standards at play in the enjoyment of the specific work of art before her and to compare it with like-minded works and differentiate it from others based on the standards at play. This assists the lover of, say, "Die Hard" or The DaVinci Code (book or movie, take your choice) or "Sleepless in Seattle" or The Nanny Diaries (book or movie) in locating other works he might find enjoyable. This is the function of, say, the music genome project and its website, Pandora, in the field of music: identify certain attributes (instrumentation, beats per minute, poetic lyrics, melodic, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle eight-chorus structure, etc.) of a given piece of music and then locate and suggest others that share some portion of those same attributes. This is primarily a descriptive function. After all, there are good commercials and bad ones, good pop songs and bad ones, good thrillers, romances, chick-lit and bad ones, good commercial TV shows, movies, plays and bad ones, etc. They succeed or fail on their own terms. Viewers, readers, listeners get out of these works what they bring to them. There is, thus, a certain solipsism, uncritical self-affirmation to Meis's view.

Setting aside the issue of whether one can identify and, then, describe the attributes of a great work of literature (and, believe me, this is a whopper of an issue) (or, for that matter, of film or piece of music or painting or dance), we believe there's more to the critical function than mere description. Description stops at the level of identification and subjectivism: "I liked that book because I could identify with the protagonist and could sympathize with her. It resonated. It touched me where I live. It reminded me of that other book I liked." Beyond that, though, is the matter of interpretation. Is this part and parcel of the critical function? We believe it is. What's more, this is the area in which we found James Wood's How Fiction Works most lacking. But what, precisely, is interpretation? What criteria, if any, can we expect any reliable interpretation to have?

It's fair to expect any interpretation first to do the work of description Wood lays out in his book—Meis's option. This is the necessary minimum. Any interpretation must plausibly incorporate these elements; it must be compatible with them. In the great novel all of the elements of fiction should work toward a coherent end and that interpretation will be most powerful which utilizes more of these features in framing its view. There are also some critical norms. They are not set in stone. They change over time and from culture to culture. The descriptive enterprise doesn't tell us whether a work is good or great with respect to, say, the tradition or the canon or serious contemporary standards—it only tells us if it succeeds on its own terms. For example, we might say a Madonna pop-song is a really good example of a pop-song and succeeds because it's listenable, danceable-to, and has a good beat. But, where does it fit in the tradition of musics that include, say, Gregorian chants, Bach oratoria, Beethoven's late quartets, etc.? This question applies in analogous form equally to The Firm and Invisible Cities, The DaVinci Code and Midnight's Children.

But what are those extratextual critical standards? Is it, as Wm. Gass has postulated, the Test of Time? If they are in constant flux, how can we nail them down? And once we've done so, how do we weave our descriptive work in with them? Harder still: How do we deal with the sui generis novel?

This is by no means our last post on this issue.

Ur-Story (Divertissement)

I want to take a slight, though relevant detour from this Ur-story theme post series. I want to respond to the latest review/essay by James Wood in this week's The New Yorker while it is still current. Beyond silently screaming "How could you?" (review a non-fiction book in the annual "Fiction" issue—ask Michael Orthofer and Levi Asher and Scott Esposito), I felt Wood's essay touched on some issues I've been raising here.

His essay, "Holiday in Hellmouth", ostensibly a review of Barth D. Ehrman's new book, God's Problem, is more of a personal essay, almost a testimony as to how Wood himself came to reject religion because of its inability to deal with the problem of evil ("thinking about theodicy still has the power to change lives. I know this, because it was how I began to separate myself from the somewhat austere Christian environment I grew up in") and a discussion of some of the problems he's having now with the issue ("Why does God not now establish paradise on earth...And what is the purpose of these eighty or so years we spend on earth not having the tears wiped away from our faces?"). It seems that whenever the world needs the intervention of a benevolent deity to alleviate its suffering—tsunami, volcanoes, cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, concentration camps, genocide, the atrocities of war, etc.—the deity takes a vacation from answering prayers, and that's sufficient reason to disbelieve.

"If he no longer believes, of course, suffering should not be theological 'problem.' But the rebel is stuck, as Dostoyevsky knew well, in an aggrieved nostalgia for belief. For the believer, theodicy is merely 'the problem of evil'; for the rebel, theodicy is also ' the problem of theodicy,' and protest, even rage, is the loudest tone."

Wood claims he reached the same point as that put forth in Ehrman's book when he was a kid totting up the pluses and minuses of belief in a deity and uses Ehrman's review as a platform to assert his own particular opinion.

Before he gets into the substance of the book putatively under review, Wood patronizes the "rough power" of Ehrman's "bawls [of] horror and hatred" and "full-throated anger" as nostalgic and adolescent: "I can hear it like a boy's breaking voice..." Then he chides Ehrman for failing to "connect[] Bibilical passages with the larger philosophical or literary traditions" in a book which bears the subtitle: "How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer." Ehrman did not set out to do Patristics or philosophy or, heaven forfend, literary criticism (practical or otherwise).

About two-thirds of the way through the piece, Wood finally gets down to the business of telling us what Ehrman's book does accomplish: "He separates three large strands in the Biblical writings: the idea that suffering is a punishment for sinful behavior; the idea that suffering is either ultimately redemptive or some kind of test of virtue; and the idea that God will finally vanquish evil and establish his kingdom of peace and harmony." Fair enough, and you can see where our own interpretive post intersects with and diverges from Wood's review (and even Ehrman's view).

Wood spends, by my count, five paragraphs explicating the themes of Ehrman's book (insufficient, after his patronizing introit, to induce me to investigate the book any further), then jumps back to his own point of view on the subject, riffing on some of our old favorites: Marilynne Robinson and Dostoyevksy. When Wood concludes...

"But one could also say, more skeptically, that Christianity needs the concept of Heaven simply to make sense of all the world's suffering—that, theologically speaking, Heaven is 'exactly what will be required.' In the end, Heaven, it seems, is the only tenable response to the problem of evil."

... it seems obvious it is Wood's point of view on display, not Ehrman's. But, what's more, it's not at all clear how this relates to the Ehrman book and his views at all: Is it a summation? A criticism? Relevant?

We've said our peace about heaven and the ascension thereto. And we've shown what, at root, one has to believe if one is to call himself a Christian. Wood seems to agree with us that the problem of free will presupposes an impossible ontological continuity of the individual (and that's one of the many reasons we really enjoy his eloquent, engaging essays and reviews), but our postings are on a silly, little personal blog. Wood thrusts his view in the face of a discrete, scholarly look at the Bible's treatment of a perennial subject, demeaning the reviewee as well as his book because he had different ambitions for his project than Wood would have preferred and because he didn't hold the same views as Wood does now (one must assume because Ehrman's own views aren't sufficiently clarified) and because he failed to address Wood's own personal issues. It's not clear Wood learned anything from Ehrman's book other than perhaps a few grudging, scholarly Biblical factual details (nor is it clear that we could if we read the book), and, plainly, the Biblical point of view doesn't faze him a bit. We eagerly await Wood's Leibnizian tome on the topic.

Perception, Emotion, Consciousness

[Insert Emotion Here]

We have, then, the following levels and types of emotions:

1. Emotions toward characters: (a) sharing the emotion of a character by identification, (b) reacting to the emotion of a character.

2. Emotions toward the 'implied author,' the sense of life embodied in the text as a whole: (a) sharing that sense of life and its emotions through empathy, (b) reacting to it, either sympathetically or criticially. These emotions operate at multiple levels of specificity and generality.

3. Emotions toward one's own possibilities. These, too, are multiple and operate at multiple levels of specificity and generality.

All of these emotional responses (with the exception of those that involve a rejection of the work) are built into the work itself, into its literary structures. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions p. 242.

The creation of a fictional character is not simple. As noted in our previous post, it involves inhabiting and portraying the consciousness of a fictive being through the use of empathy and imagination. But the portrayal of simple perception is insufficient: human consciousness has an emotional content drawing from, among other things, memory, aspiration, and attitudes. The written depiction of perception must also bring this emotional content into play—whether through metaphor or simile or other form of figurative language or outright assertion. Fictional characters must be portrayed as inhabiting their bodies (as perceptual mechanisms) and as having a passably human range of emotional responses to their world (which Nussbaum does not address).

Failure to bring perceptual content into play—a flaw we've noted in the analyses of both James Wood and Jill Lepore—renders fiction a mechanical thing, an intellectual exercise; no different in form than history. Distant. Imprecise.

Failure, at the next level, to imbue perception with emotional content is a prescription for sterile fiction.

The Death of the Novel?

If you will recall, we broke into our close reading of James Wood's How Fiction Works to remark the passing of Alain Robbe-Grillet. We felt the connections were obvious—especially that crack about each generation creating its own 'realism' all the while denouncing previous 'realisms'. Another reader, Stephen Marche, comments on the puritanical connections over at Salon. Short version: R-G = too radically austere; JW = too 19th Century. Marche argues for that lively tradition drawing on such diverse sources as Defoe, Sterne, et al.

That Little Extra

"Truth, Convention, Realism": This is the title of the last chapter of How Fiction Works by James Wood. Here, he takes on the argument that "realism" in fiction is simply another genre one of whose chief proponents, he says, is the novelist Rick Moody.

Wood, too, is impatient with what he calls "commercial realism"—"intelligent, stable, transparent story-telling," the sort of conventional writing that gives us sufficient details to convince us that what is going on in the novel is really happening. Indeed, "[c]ommercial realism has cornered the market, has become the most powerful brand in fiction. We must expect that this brand will be economically reproduced, over and over again...when a style decomposes, flattens itself down into a genre, then indeed it does become a set of mannerisms and often pretty lifeless techniques." (p. 175) It does not give us "the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced." The conventionally realistic novel can be translated into film with little or no loss of content. Styles are interchangeable. Voice is absent.

He wants to draw a distinction between conventional fiction and realism as he would like to see it. Certainly, conventional fiction uses the techniques of realism as derived from Flaubert, but they are flat, efficient, merely utilitarian. Dead. Something more is needed.

Wood takes a quick detour from the thread of this argument to quarrel some more with Barthes and Gass. They move from the argument against convention to the charge that "fictive convention can therefore never convey anything real" (p. 176). Wood feels this move is unwarranted. It is never a question of reference—after all, fiction, by definition, has abandoned all claim on reference. Rather, it is what Wood calls "mimetic persuasion": "it is the artist's task to convince us that this could have happened. Internal consistency and plausibility then become more important than referential rectitude And this task will of course involve much fictive artifice and not mere reportage." (p. 179) This, I presume, is a shot at Tom Wolfe's 'billion-footed beast'.

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry. And it cannot be a genre; instead, it makes other forms of fiction seem like genres. For realism of this kind—lifeness—is the origin...the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable ageing. (pp. 186-87)

The novelist is forever seeking after new forms to capture the substance of life. That, it seems to me, is the novel's vitality. It is also trying to capture or portray something about human life—call it meaning, truth, reality, lifeness, or whatever. My own qualm (as someone with philosophical training) with the use of such words as 'truth' (see also here) and realism in relation to fiction aside, Wood is on to something here. It is the "studiedly irrelevant" detail that works for him, such as Orwell's watching a condemned man walking toward the gallows swerving to avoid a puddle.

There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is aways more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. ...the margin of surplus itself feels like life, feels in some curious way like being alive. (pp. 68-69)

Again, the devil is in the details. My own impatience with Wood's effort in this thought-provoking and book has to do with his failure to show how the details, beyond providing a means to understand characters, add up in fiction to make a compelling story. Roughly, stories provide something for us. Whether it is organization, order, form, structure, meaning, closure, WISDOM, or whatever I'm not prepared to say. But neither is he. This is why we keep reading stories and why they keep moving us. Sure, the brush-strokes are nice, the details (essential or superfluous) persuading us of the lifelikeness of the illusion (of the character)—and the raging debate here is whether the critic should focus chiefly on the way in which the illusion is presented (Gass) or on the illusion itself and its congruence with reality perceived or imagined (Wood). But stories wrap up, even Chekhov's; they end. And they begin as well. From our reading of Wood, however, we have no way of understanding how they get from the latter to the former. That is to say, how fiction really works.

Dialogue

JW: "The penultimate chapter in my new book, How Fiction Works, is entitled "Dialogue".

JH: "Great. I've been particularly anxious to hear what you have to say on that critical topic."

JW: "It's a pretty short chapter, actually."

JH: "Oh, I see."

JW: "I do like good dialogue."

JH: "Okay. I believe you. Can you give me a brief summary then?"

JW: "Yes."

JH: "Ahem. Well would you?"

JW: "Sure. Here goes: 'Henry Green writes good dialogue. He never intrudes on his characters' speeches by using excess explanatory words like "he said knowingly", or "she sputtered angrily", or "he explained", etc. Like a good dramatist, he lets the words speak for themselves, often doing double duty in the narrative."

JH: "That's it? Isn't there anything else?"

JW: "Well, V.S. Naipaul writes good dialogue, too. Except when he doesn't."

[Crickets]

"Sailing in atmosphere"

Today, we look at "Language", the antepenultimate chapter of James Wood's How Fiction Works. Words must be well-chosen, unexpected, stylish. Bellovian. Still, with style, the poet in the writer threatens to overwhelm the point-of-view in character. Language, then, must be fitting and pretty—though never prettified.

Wood makes a stab at defining the nebulous concept "voice" (footnote 53, p. 150): "It is partly by shifts in register that we gain a sense of a human voice speaking to us... Likewise, by dancing between registers a character sounds real to us... Movements in diction capture some of the waywardness and roominess of actual thinking..." By employing a mix of erudition and vulgate—a "mélange" he calls it of different levels of diction—"[b]y insisting on equalising [sic] all these different levels of diction, the style of the sentence works as style should, to incarnate the meaning, the meaning itself, of course, is all about the scandal of equalising different registers." (pp. 151-2) In this last, he is speaking specifically about a passage from Roth, but it has applicability across the board.

Wood's definition is insufficiently robust to account for the "voice" that animates and takes over so much of what passes for popular literary fiction, e.g., The Lovely Bones, Vernon God Little. It is more than mixing levels of diction; it has to do with attitude and sentiment and it reflects the form, plot, and even story of the narrative. In fact, from Wood's depiction it's not entirely clear what he feels about "voice" in this broader sense—if anything. Yet, this "unique voice" is what literary agents and editors are eager to lap up and foist on the public.

Next, he moves to a discussion of metaphor. "Metaphor is analogous to fiction, because it floats a rival reality. It is the entire imaginative process in one move. ...Every metaphor or simile is a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story." (p. 153) This, of course, is all well and good, but it begs the questions: how does metaphor work? and what, precisely, does it mean "to work"?

"Metaphor which is 'successful' in a poetic sense but which is at the same time character-appropriate metaphor—the kind of metaphor which this particular character or community would produce—is one way of resolving the tension between author and character..." (p. 159) Okay. I guess we all saw that one coming. Not a real stretch. And not very informative either, though he provides a number of good examples in context.

I think we can agree that good fiction makes good use of figurative language. Figurative language (such as simile, metaphor, etc., etc.) falls under the rubric of "rhetoric". Rhetoric (the subject of another nonfiction book I've been working on) is traditionally opposed to logic, though both are means of persuasion; logic relying on the appeal to reason and argument, rhetoric to the senses, to emotion, and to the sentiments and mores of the community. Metaphors, in other words, provide narrative color and, as in any good work of art, shouldn't clash. Metaphors et al., to my mind, are useful in fiction to persuade us of the "reality" of the character.

Here again, Wood falls victim to his own schema. This is where his analysis stops. He says fiction 'works' when the metaphors (the figurative language, the rhetoric) seem organic to the character's own POV and not the author's. And he provides a number of sweet examples of metaphors and shows how they work. That's fine and a good and important lesson for fiction writers and prospective critical readers, as far as it goes. But it fails to see through the curtain of figurative language and recognize the essential illusion of fiction. It misses the forest for the trees and is why Wood can give no account for story, plot, and form and their place in understanding the function of fiction.

"What is it like to be a bat?"

"Sympathy and Complexity" is the title of the seventh chapter of James Wood's How Fiction Works. Wood tells us fiction works by allowing us to put ourselves in another's shoes (as the cliche goes) and to ask complex moral and philosophical questions. He refers us to the work of two contemporary philosophers, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams.

Nagel, in a famous 1974 essay "What is it like to be a bat?," argues that because bats are so radically alien from us, we cannot very well imagine what it would be like to be one. This is en route to arguing that 'consciousness' or 'mind' cannot be reduced (as we attempted in our previous post) to mere neuronal activity. Wood uses a rather glib recounting of this argument as a straw man which he promptly swats down with a quote from J.M. Coetzee's alter ego, Elizabeth Costello, to the effect that that is, after all, simply what it means to be a novelist. It is a deft, but pointless move. He leaves his 'ghost' again to ramble about in his fictional 'machine', neither of which concept, as we've noted in previous posts, he fully examines.

When we read fiction, we are not searching to find out what it is like to be any other sort of animal than the human one. Even John Hawkes in his marvelous Sweet William: A Memoir of an Old Horse, told entirely from the POV of an old racehorse, is engaged in the ultimate humanist question: "What is like to be a human being?" and "What does it mean to be human?" This, after all, is where our true sympathies lie. There are many other—and less interesting—examples. The point being: in fiction, we do not read to understand what it is like to be some sort of radically different being, we read to understand what it is like to be human. And that is something we share in common.

[It bears noting here that Nagel's 1974 understanding of neurophysiology is radically different from a more contemporary understanding. Again making it puzzling why Wood chooses him as an example.]

Wood brings in Bernard Williams to highlight the moral subtlety and complexity that novelists have brought to our understanding of what it means to be an individual human being. He states: "Of course, the novel does not provide philosophical answers (as Chekhov said, it only needs to ask the right questions). Instead, it does what Williams wanted moral philosophy to do—it gives the best account of the complexity of our moral fabric."

Here, Wood's humanism seems properly placed, if, like Williams's, highly individualistic in bias—though I can't be sure yet whether he has taken out a promissory note with respect to the place of 'morality' and 'moralizing' in fiction that, in the cashing, would lead us to further serious disagreement about the aims of fiction, no matter its precise mechanisms. Wood provides examples from Ian MacEwan and Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf.

Fiction works by allowing us to get a feeling for what it would be like to be in another specific 'character's' shoes in the middle of a particular situation, to truly sympathize with his/her individual plight as he/she responds and acts given his/her specific capabilities and limitations, and to get a grasp of the [moral] complexity of being just such a human and at the mercy of competing principles and desires. Stated this way (with an appropriately agnostic skew on 'character' and bracketing the concept of morality for the time being), I find myself, as writer, quite in agreement.

The Ghost in the Wood(s)

In "A Brief History of Consciousness," the sixth chapter of How Fiction Works, James Wood traces the evolution of fictional characterization from King David in the Old Testament to Shakespeare's Macbeth to Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. The differences lie in their respective audiences: David—the god, to whom the psalms and prayers are addressed; Macbeth—the audience, to whom the soliloquies; Rasky—the readers, to whom his interior is revealed over the course of the book. It is, in other words, a descent into subjectivity.

I return to Wm. Gass. In his book Finding a Form, in the essay "The Book as a Container of Consciousness" he explains:

..the consciousness contained in any text is not an actual functioning consciousness; it is a constructed one, improved, pared, paced, enriched by endless retrospections, irrelevancies removed, so that into the ideal awareness which I imagined for the poet, who possesses passion, perception, thought, imagination, and desire and has them present in amounts appropriate to the circumstances—just as, in the lab, we need more observation than fervor, more imagination than lust—there is introduced patterns of disclosure, hierarchies of value, chains of inference, orders of images, natures of things. ...It remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create (since not all books are bent on that result), but by appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about...[pp. 348,351]

The notion of "character" is at the bottom of Wood's inquiries in this book. He believes they have some 'reality', some 'truth' somehow. Clearly, he doesn't believe that fictional characters are flesh-and-blood entities and he doesn't believe we should judge them by whether we would want to have them as friends—that may be the case with memoir and autobiography, those popularity contests that now predominate the booklists. Obversely, he doesn't believe they are merely 'men made out of words'; their reality is more substantive somehow.

Maybe, they're zombies. Maybe not, since zombies, by all accounts, seem to have bodies. They're more akin to ghosts: identities without bodies. Disembodied consciousnesses. These are the sorts of things you have to believe in if you hold any sort of religious belief. The idea of the 'soul' as some sort of eternally-existing individuated entity is fundamental to the religious delusion. The 'soul delusion' necessarily precedes the 'god delusion'.

If, like this blog, you take an agnostic approach to such matters, you find yourself in disagreement with a fundamental philosophical position of Wood. The mechanistic view of 'soul' or 'mind' is that there is no such thing absent the 'body' or the 'brain'. They are functions of complex neuronal activity, which itself is a function of genetic attributes, etc., etc. And it is the utmost hubris to assume either of the former [soul, mind] exists absent the platform provided by the latter [body, brain]. By analogy, it would seem folly to assume that the consciousness or the character or the reality or the truth of fiction—as Wood would have it—can exist apart from the form of fiction or apart from the textual words in which they are presented.

I don't want to get too analytical here, but I think it bears exploring. Now, we can say of the current President of the U.S.: "George Bush has beady eyes." All good fiction readers know how to interpret the connotations of such a statement and may or may not agree. And anyone who knows what beady eyes look like can then go to a picture of President Bush, or indeed examine the man himself, and determine for themselves whether it is true. There may be disagreement in the interpretation, but we have a way of testing that statement's truth or falsity, or at least a common ground for argument.

However, if I say of the fictional Thane of Caldor "Macbeth has beady eyes," there's no real way to verify or falsify that statement—short of a pronouncement to that effect in the Shakespearean text. The only thing we can know about Macbeth is what we are given. But, that begs the question of realism here. What is it, in fact, that we are given?

What we are given is something like a model. This model is presented to us in the same words and language we would use to describe a real flesh-and-blood person's character. It's just that the flesh-and-blood part doesn't exist. The language fools us. Indeed, it deludes us (however usefully). It makes us believe this character is real and elicits responses from us as if this character were real. We see the character in action, we see the character carrying out his/her routines, we see the character responding to certain situations, we see the character making certain decisions. Often, depending on the book's POV, we see the character's limitations, we understand his/her current state of knowledge, we recognize his/her flaws. And, with certain exceptions, we see the changes the character goes through over a period of time (or their refusal to change). That is art.

And the question of how this art works is the question Wood is proposing to answer in his book. Yet, I don't see how he can quite accomplish what he sets out to do if he truncates his analysis at the purported middle-ground of 'realism' or 'truth'. His analysis does not give us an account of the forms of fiction, of narrative (in the technical sense), of dialogue, of action, of story, of plot, or, for that matter, of dramatic structure. He stops short of showing us how these tools and techniques work together to achieve this illusion of reality, this illusion of character, this illusion of truth to which he stubbornly clings.

Character: Once Again Into the Breach

"There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character." James Wood starts off his central chapter with this bit of hyperbole. But we buy it because it's JAMES F'in WOOD fer chrissakes! And we read on. "We can tell a great deal from a character by how he talks, and whom he talks to—how he bumps up against the world." Do tell.

Wood, in How Fiction Works carves out an interesting middle-ground for his view of character:

A great deal of nonsense is written every day about character in fiction—from the side of those who believe too much in character and from the side of those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are : we should get to 'know' them; they should not be 'stereotypes'; they should have an 'inside' as well as an outside, depth as well as surface; they should 'grow' and 'develop'; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us. ...In other words, artists should not ask us to try to understand characters we cannot approve of—or not until after they have firmly and unequivocally condemned them. On the other side, among those with too little belief in character, we hear that characters do not exist at all.

And he goes on to insult again that bête noire of "aestheticism", William Gass.

So, Wood says, fiction works somewhere in the space between "I didn't like that book because I just couldn't identify with the main character" (the point of view I satirize in my review of Bernhard's The Loser), and "I didn't like that book because it wasn't really well enough written."

How? "My own taste," he says "tends towards the sketchier fictional personage, whose lacunae and omissions tease us, provoke us to wade in their deep shallows."

Understanding and defining fictional character is akin to understanding and defining the manifold and polymorphous human self. This seems to be Wood's point, though he is nowhere quite so explicit.

So the vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence and even plain plausibility—let alone likeability—than with a larger, philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are profoundly important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters.

Vitality, complexity, opacity of motive: these are the values Mr. Wood holds dear with respect to character. Reader—and more particularly writer—take heed!

Btw: if you haven't read the book or the on-line article and are wondering why Monty Python and The Office top the posts about character, Wood traces a certain sort of self-theatricalizing British character he loves from Shakespeare "...and on into the superb pantomimic embarrassments of Monty Python and Ricky Gervais's David Brent." There is a method in't.