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Wednesday, November 25, 2009
“The Books at Hand”: James Wood, The “True Scholastic Stink,” and the Common Reader
I found Zadie Smith’s recent essay on essays and the novel tremendously frustrating for what I hope are some rather interesting reasons. The essay is frustrating in part because Smith confines her analysis of the history and current state of fiction to the titles and authors that come “off the top of her head,” even to the extent that this breezy shallowness causes her to ignore the highly relevant arguments from a much more deeply considered essay that she herself had written only one year earlier (one which received a great deal of notice). Elsewhere, I speculated that Smith might have been influenced or inspired by James Wood’s “A Note on Footnotes and Dates“ which prefaces his How Fiction Works, where he says,
As a teenager I was very taken by the rather fancy note to Ford Madox Ford’s The English Novel: “This book was written in New York, aboard the S.S. Patria, and in the port and neighbourhood of Marseilles during July and August 1927.” I cannot claim any proximate glamour, nor a similar feat of library-less memory, but in the spirit of Ford, I can say that I have used only the books I actually own—the books at hand in my study—to produce this little volume.
I read this as a rather absurd brag, a chest-thumping assertion of authority and erudition. But Daniel Pritchard pointed out in a comment that another (quite reasonable) way of reading it is to focus not on the author but on the audience—Wood may be not so much making a claim about what he can do as what his intended audience would like, or what they’re willing to tolerate. Or, as he says, “Mindful of the common reader, I have tried to reduce what Joyce called the ’true scholastic stink‘ to bearable levels.” (The link is to the page in Portrait where the phrase is used. Stephen and his friends are in fact referring to a more specific form of Aristotelian/Thomistic scholasticism and not to scholarly activity in general, but nevermind.)
So evidently, Wood’s disciplined confinement of his texts to those “at hand in my study” is a sort of favor to the common reader, but what kind of favor is it? If this is an attempt to address a preference on the part of the common reader, what preference is being assumed?
One way to read this is as simply a bit of populist posturing: “I, James Wood, may be pedantic, but I’m not an egghead.” Yet tucking footnotes and other more formal scholarly apparatuses away when producing a work aimed at a general audience is a fairly common practice even among eggheads, even to the extent that some (e.g., John Boswell, the Time on the Cross folks) have been sorely taken to task for doing so, as their popularizing comes more to look like trying to bury shoddy scholarship. At any rate, I’m not sure that we can completely chalk up Wood’s fear that footnotes and other things might scare the common reader away to an anti-academic populism; the idea that footnotes might derail the common reader is itself too common to be sufficient evidence against Wood.
More particularly, then: perhaps what is being dispensed with in his self-confinement to his “books at hand” is not so much footnotes as it is archival research, stuff that obligates you to walk out of your personal library and to somebody else’s (his employer Harvard’s, maybe) much bigger library. Now, the attitude that extensive, fastidious, and highly inefficient archival research might annoy or overwhelm the common reader might seem to be a natural extension or corollary of the Fear of Footnotes principle, but I am skeptical. For one thing, two genres which seem to be very popular among common readers—the biography and the historical novel—are not only praised for their depth of research, but an attitude of indifference or aversion to archival work seems almost alien to these genres—one expects that if a writer takes up one of these projects, they are also taking up (gladly, one hopes) the obligation of extensive, fastidious, and highly inefficient research.
Perhaps it is not research itself that Wood is saving the common reader from, but the natural consequence of a lot of boring research: a boring style. He could be saying something like, “I didn’t spend all my time in a dusty library, so I can actually talk to you in language you’ll understand and enjoy.” However, for reasons similar to those I gave to undermine the supposition of some natural antipathy to the inclusion of research, I’m not sure that this connection between dusty libraries and graceless styles is quite so immediately made, as there are ample and popular cases of erudition worn lightly—again, biographies and historical novels, but also technothrillers and hard sci-fi and even, to some lesser extent, spy thrillers are highly visible examples of research being embedded in highly captivating narratives and a variety of styles.
If not scholarly apparatuses or research or dull style that Wood is saving us from, maybe it’s simply the books that he has saved himself from: the books he has kept out of his personal library are the books he assumes the common reader also wishes to avoid. But then what books are these? Defined negatively, it is not just (as one might initially assume) aridly theoretical monographs and journals that Wood eschews, but also the vast majority of actual literature: not only does his book leave untouched many major authors, but also most of the secondary (and even some primary) works of the authors he does cover: one might quite reasonably question why As I Lay Dying is the only Faulkner novel he finds useful to his project, or why Mrs. Dalloway is not part of his consideration of Virginia Woolf (or of fiction in general).
I do not mean to imply that Wood’s personal library likely does not contain Dalloway or Sound and the Fury; all I mean to imply is what was probably obvious at the outset, that Wood’s self-restriction to the “books at hand” is a sort of material synechdoche for “books I think about,” which is itself a way of saying “books I think are worth thinking about.” In other words, rather than being a proper treatise on the mechanics of fiction, How Fiction Works is written largely for the same reasons an 800-word review is: to share, exercise, develop, and test taste and literary judgment publicly. The book’s utility is not so much predicated on what it says about the work of fiction as it is on which fictional works it says anything about at all. The “favor” Wood is doing the common reader is, as we may have suspected, necessarily not a function of research but of taste—informed taste, but not over-informed.
But why is taste so important here? It is important because it sets what look like natural boundaries around what needs to be learned, what needs to be read, what needs to be known. The blather about “true scholastic stink” is, I think, a screen for this fairly utilitarian purpose—it’s a backwards way of asserting that there is some finite set of “books at hand” which will make you a sufficiently educated or erudite person, that education is a process with a terminus, and that you can reach it. (Previous versions of this include the Adlerian Great Books program, the St. Johns College curriculum, and the Harvard Classics.) The “common reader” is, for some (though certainly not for all—other people, like Woolf obviously, have other definitions), basically a person who wants to believe that they can reach a point of either completion or satisfaction in their learning about literature. As such, I don’t have much use for the concept, but clearly a lot of other people, including James Wood, do.
Comments
In my own review of How Fiction Works I objected to Wood’s decision not to do deep research for the book partly because I think a non-scholarly audience is being short-changed, even misled, by some of Wood’s hasty pseudo-conclusions on complex subjects. Shouldn’t writing for a general or ‘common’ readership distill rather than disdain expertise?
I’d like to return before I close to the “Sympathy and Complexity” chapter, because this is a topic close to my heart, one on which I have spent a lot of my own critical energy recently, and one I expected Wood to handle particularly well. “Perfunctory” is the best word I can think of to describe it. I’ve mentioned already his dehistoricizing assumption that “we” don’t read in order to receive moral benefits. I doubt this is always true in practice, especially in these ‘Oprah’ days, and I also question the separation he implies between moral and aesthetic readings. Here is a case in which even a little research outside “the books at hand in [his] own study” would have immeasurably enriched his discussion: Booth’s The Company We Keep, for instance, would have helped him complicate exactly that separation. And the conversation about how fiction might do “what [Bernard] Williams wanted moral philosophy to do” (135) has many participants besides Williams (Martha Nussbaum comes promptly to mind!). Further, not all novels avoid providing “philosophical answers” (here, he replicates Nussbam’s error in generalizing about “the novel,” but as a professional novel reader, he should know better). Here the hybrid character of How Fiction Works proves a genuine weakness, I think. This chapter is not a full, responsible, or authoritative inquiry into its subject. Of course, it does not pretend to be (remember, the book promises only “a writer’s answers” to “a critic’s questions"). But then how should we evaluate it? Doesn’t Wood do even his non-specialist audience a disservice by taking up complicated subjects on which there already exists a rich body of scholarship and offering his own fairly casual observations with the confidence of real expertise? What a much greater contribution it would be to distill that complex material and present it accessibly! To grab what’s at hand and say just what comes to mind bespeaks an enviable but also problematic degree of confidence. And while the non-expert reader is in no position to object, the expert reader is easily deflected with the excuse that she is not the intended audience…
Andrew’s well-turned post engages in an astonishing triple-jump of inference. Let’s watch it on replay.
Wood includes many works of fiction in his study and excludes many more. Wood also writes a prefatory note calling attention to these limits.
When Wood includes a novel in his study of fiction, we may infer that he is telling us, in effect, “this is a book I think about.”
From this, we may infer that the books Wood thinks about are books that are, according to Wood, “worth thinking about.”
From this, we may deduce that Wood believes these are the only books worth thinking about.
And from this, we realize that he is informing – and reassuring – his reader that these are only books anyone need think about.
Hence, Wood is promoting not just an end to reading, but an end to learning – an end to knowing (save knowing, on good authority, that all one knows is all that is worth knowing).
And Andrew does this without a single reference to what Wood actually says about fiction or the examples he includes in his study. For instance, Andrew insists that by including or excluding a book, Wood is making some claim about its quality or the book’s claim upon us or the common reader. Again, Andrew does this without evidence and (I assume) knowing full well that Wood’s virtual “library” includes examples of books he hates (Terrorist), great books that he feels go off the rails (Atonement), and books that he feels both created and poisoned modern fiction (anything by Flaubert or Nabokov). Indeed, the entire book is an argument about—and sometimes against—Flaubertian realism. But Andrew ignores Wood’s argument or approach in favor of one page’s putative stylistic effect—a move that would make Wood himself proud.
In other words, rather than being a proper examination of how How Fiction Works works, Andrew’s post is written largely for the same reasons as most academic blog entries: to share, exercise, develop, and test one’s image of academic authority publicly (this time under the guise of an “I embrace multitudes” humility).
The post’s utility is not so much predicated on what it says about Wood as it is on what kinds of critical writing are worth doing at all (“proper treatises” as opposed to exercises in personal or literary judgment, no matter how well-read). The “favor” Andrew is doing the Valve reader is, as we may have suspected, necessarily not a function of research (he provides no evidence, only inference) but of taste—taste for a certain approach to fiction and the scholarly life.
I did like the post, so I hope it’s okay that I ran with it. I hope I nailed the landing.
Rohan,
I keep forgetting to cite your wonderful review, which really made me feel I wasn’t crazy (or at least that there was room for skepticism of the non-Contra-James-Wood variety)--I’m glad you corrected my oversight!
Peter,
I just saw your comment, and I have to go to do Thanksgiving activities, so I apologize for what will have to be a delayed response.
However, I do want to say that, unlike the corralling nature of the type of taste Wood constructs (an action which quite obviously needs to include a few negative examples--I don’t see how pointing to the presence of books he dislikes in his library disproves any of what I said), I find, as I’m sure you expect, the project of “shar[ing], exercis[ing], develop[ing], and test[ing]” the value of academic work to be of great use, both to the academic and to a general audience. That is, at least as I understand it, at least one of the purposes of this blog. I am confused as to why you find it of little or dubious value, or why it’s such a scandal to reveal that it is the motive behind my post. I don’t see any moment in the post where I attempt to cloak or disavow such a motive, so why the big, sarcastic reveal?
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for your reply, which offers me a chance to admit that my own comment went farther than it should. I read what I took to be a rather ungenerous “we know who we are and who we aren’t” post and responded in a blatantly ungenerous way.
So I’ll try to be more direct and conversational. Do you really want to lump Wood’s work in with the these-are-the-only-things-worth-reading crowd? And do want to do so based almost entirely on some anti-academic throat-clearing (at a site that was initially dedicated, in many respects, to anti-academic throat clearing)?
You make much of—or say that one might reasonably make much of—Wood’s ignoring major writers and works? But on what grounds do you make anything of these absences, especially for a book that (as far as I can see) makes no claims for such completeness. No Dalloway. No Absalom. No Rabbit. No Herzog. Yes, but what of it? Your post implies that something fishy is going on here, but refuses to say what it is. Instead, you seem to look at us knowingly and say, “Now isn’t that interesting.” (Is it really that Wood is telling his common reader, “No worries, there’s only one Faulkner novel worth your time”? Is reducing Bellow to one novel really Wood’s attempt to get people to read fewer works by his favorite writer?)
I mentioned Flaubert and Nabokov (and others) not simply to point out isolated counterexamples to your great-books claims. I did it because Wood’s love/hate relationship with Flaubert and Falubertian realism is at the heart of all his work—and central to How Fiction Works overall. And I think you can only make your large-scale inferences when you ignore this fact (making Bovary just another book-one-ought-to-have-read, in Wood’s mind).
Let me close by saying that I really meant it when I said I liked your post. In fact, it was kind of brilliant. But it was so air-tight—so hermetically sealed—that it made me want to pry apart its pieces a bit.
Best, Peter
Peter,
I think I probably should have stressed the “satisfaction” angle in defining the common reader as “basically a person who wants to believe that they can reach a point of either completion or satisfaction in their learning about literature.” What I mean is that there is an emphasis on identifying a set of books which, once read, provide not a minimal competence in terms of world literature but a sense of satisfaction, that after one has read those, more reading is simply more. Books which fall outside of that set aren’t read to “fill in the gaps” but to reinforce what has been learned by reading those “great books.” In fact, there are no gaps--the tradition or “conversation” as the Great Books types like to describe it is already complete, and once you’ve mastered the conversation, then you don’t need to talk to anyone else or listen to anyone else. You’ll want to, probably, but not because you need to; you do simply because you like the author, or you like the experience of reading. So yes, the absence of Mrs. Dalloway and Absalom, Absalom is significant because it stresses the representivity of certain works for larger wholes--one doesn’t need to talk about Dalloway if one has already discussed To The Lighthouse and Woolf’s criticism. There are obviously always limits to what novels one can address, but Wood’s constant citation of the same texts to make his points makes me think it isn’t the constraints of time or space that drive Wood’s selections as the idea that there are natural choices about which novels to talk about because those novels together form a complete whole.
Wood is not nearly so explicit about this position as, say, Leavis or Adler or Arnold or Eliot--in fact, he has tried to pull himself away from Arnold to some extent. But mainly his differences are expressed rather than practiced--the role he has assumed (with lots of encouragement, but nevertheless his choice) is that of Supreme Gatekeeper, the man who decides whether writers are joining The Conversation properly.
You’re right about Flaubert being central to Wood’s work and something I should address, but I think that the “half-against” way Wood works on Flaubert is really only a very clever way of managing this conservatorial project--by setting up Flaubert as the wellspring for everything both good and bad in the novel since Flaubert, Wood is able to collect all the sundry “bad” writers in what look like coherent categories ("hysterical realism,” novels of “information"). Wood probably doesn’t think of his treatment of Flaubert as fulfilling this function, but it certainly does the job, and that is how it comes out in the wash.
I’ve never found Wood all that insightful a reader of literature, but people keep on insisting on his importance, so I must be missing something.
Like Andrew, I find his bashing of academic scholarship wrongheaded. But I’m bothered by it for a different reason: namely, Wood is dishonest. His work is utterly informed by academic scholarship, but he hides the seams and joints in his own thinking. He takes advantage of the intellectual opportunities offered by scholarship while deriding them before a popular audience.
However, I don’t follow Andrew’s argument about this whole end-point or satisfaction of reading. Wood here is clear, and I basically agree with him. Most of us don’t have the time or the inclination to read everything, to read for a totality of knowledge. Most of us still read for entertainment and/or for cultural capital. Wood is giving his readers a body of works that are worth their limited free time, either because these novels will offer deep, enduring pleasures or because these novels will give them the bragging rights of having read them.
If I can go in another direction, the thing that strikes me about Wood’s satisfaction with his own library comes out by comparison with something I once heard Moretti say about the relationship between kitsch and culture: citing (to disagree with) Adorno’s attack on Veblen, he argued that we shouldn’t see a “high” cultural form--say a Henry James novel--as a stand-alone object of aesthetic achievement, and then conclude that pulpy dime-novels, kitsch, or other forms of “low” cultural writing are simply poor versions of the same thing, efforts that lack the same achievement as a great aesthetic object. Instead, he made the provocative point that the high aesthetic novel is more of an epiphenomena of a mass commodity culture than the transcendence of it: far from a Darwinian battleground (in which the critics job is to weed out the weaker novels by ignoring them), literary culture is something like an ecology, in which the great novels feed and are dependent on the great mass of “lesser” novels.
What a thing like Woods’ “my library” does is produce a very hermetic sense of the literary (based on whatever standard of value); there’s something tremendously liberating, I think, in explicitly dis-recognizing the distinction between the things you put in the library and the things you keep in other rooms of the house, or outside it.
Aaron, I cannot directly argue against Moretti here, as I lack a stable of research assistants to do my “wide reading” for me. In any case, though, I’ve read and continue to read plenty of popular fiction, and I think Moretti’s just wrong here.
It’s not that Clive Cussler is a bad version of Henry James, though. It’s that Henry James is an amazing version of Clive Cussler. The difference between the two is the difference between Michael Jordan and a decent college basketball player.
The sports analogy is useful beyond just the question of quality. All basketball players use the same basic set of moves and strategies. All novelists use the same basic set of moves and strategies. All novelists work with plot structure and cause and effect (even folks like Robbe-Grillet are deeply invested in plot); all work with direct and indirect characterization; all fashion settings; all draw on diction, imagery, figurative language, tropes, etc.; all knit themes and motifs throughout their work; all seek to create significant atmospheres; all engage their subjects from particular points of view and with a particular tone.
The toolkit of a James Joyce or an Alice Walker or a Stephen King is not all that different. It’s the level of precision and grace in the execution, along with the scope and design of the plan, that separate *Ulysses* from *The Color Purple*.
Luther,
Sorry for not responding to your earlier comment, but if I may, I’ll add my two cents about what Aaron’s talking about.
I think your sports analogy is very apt, but I think that where we can bring Aaron’s idea of ecology is that Michael Jordan didn’t become Michael Jordan merely by being preternaturally physically gifted or by perfecting his moves through constant practice; he became Michael Jordan by learning how to beat decent college kids and then decent NBA players and then NBA stars all the damn time. His success wasn’t just a function of his pure talent or of a perfection of a craft, but of his learning to compete successfully on every level.
I think we can say something very similar about Henry James. He was an extraordinary talent and ridiculously devoted to the honing of his craft, but he was also really great at figuring out how to compete successfully against his rivals and to elevate the (Jamesian) novel itself to increase the margin between his work and dime novels or other popular forms of fiction. In that way, James is more than an amazing version of Clive Cussler; he’s a writer who is also amazing at creating demonstrations of the fact that he’s an amazing version of Clive Cussler.
W/r/t your first comment, I actually don’t think he’s so blatantly utilitarian to say “these books provide the best return-on-investment in terms of cultural capital.” I do think it’s the totality of knowledge that he’s offering his readers, but what he means by that is simply that there is a closed conversation that has been carried on by a limited set of writers through the years, and that we just need to listen in to that (by reading a representative selection of their works) to be able to contain this conversation within ourselves. This is why he can permit himself to remain within his library (or his own head) without feeling an itch to figure out if someone has done something with fiction or thought about it in a way that he hasn’t accounted for--he “knows” the conversation, and he knows that there aren’t other speakers that he hasn’t heard from yet.
But Andrew, if it were merely a matter of James being good at spinning his brand of fiction into the premium choice for the discerning fiction consumer, I don’t think we’d still be reading James. We’d have gotten beyond his own amour propre and have reconsidered the true and enduring quality of his work.
Instead, no one could have a rational conversation about the relative quality of James and pulp fiction when it comes to characterization, psychological acuity, and emotional drama. Those are James’ strengths, and they are not typically strengths of popular fiction.
Of course, James has his weaknesses. But even his weaknesses are not in relation to crap literature. Compared to an expert plotter, like Dickens or Austen, James’ fiction is dreadful. But compared to, say, Dan Brown, even James’ plots are constructed with more care.
Back to Woods, though: no, he never comes out and declares that his work is offering cultural capital or—perhaps more accurately—Hirschean cultural literacy, but I think that’s part of the mission (and why he’s so successful). Nowhere does Woods claim that he’s accounting for the entirety of The Conversation about literature, either (I mean, he’s only talking about novels, which means he has nothing to say about thousands of years of literary art). What he does offer is a coherent set of aesthetic and formal principals that “make fiction work.” I don’t think he mistakes coherence for totality of perspective. What Woods does understand, however, is that the literary critic is not a scientist and does not have to account for the totality of all possible examples (i.e., all novels). He selects his examples to illustrate what he values in art, with the hope of teaching us to value it too.
I think we can productively view both James and Jordan as having been able to “lock out” future competition in fairly similar ways insofar as both established themselves as the standard by which future efforts would continue to be judged. I can’t imagine how long it will be before the next non-center basketball superstar will be compared to someone other than Jordan as the pinnacle of basketball skill, flair, and success. It’s not like in ten years, LeBron will be the new standard. Even if he were to eclipse Jordan in points or titles or endorsement dollars or global influence (all of which are extremely unlikely), the fact that he will have done so while very self-consciously measuring himself against Jordan will allow Jordan to remain the gold standard for all-around basketball excellence. I think James, w/r/t the type of novel he produced, occupies a similar position--even ambitious writers today still test their mettle against him--how self-consciously Jamesian is The Line of Beauty? Or, the more obvious example, Colm Toibin’s The Master?
To switch to Wood, I don’t think I’ve explained myself very well. By totality, I don’t mean the whole literary output for the past however-many-hundred years. I mean that Wood has an idea of literary history as a drama with a few key protagonists (Austen, Flaubert, Chekhov) with whom a slightly larger group interact (or converse), in some cases antagonistically. Outside of this action is a mob, but this mob is irrelevant. It has no effect on the plot of the drama or on the characters.
Getting to know these characters and their lines (and getting to know first of all who is in the cast) is the purpose of this brand of criticism. And it is in distinction to the other common idea of the critic: the identifier of quality, someone who might envision Literature not as a genre but as a mountain range, with the objective being the naming and mapping of the peaks. Here, the critic is less interested in the role of the peaks (peaks only have positions, not roles) or the relationship between peaks (except maybe in a scalar sense--how far apart they are, which one is higher).
I think Wood is definitely at work on the first kind of critical project; someone like the late, great John Leonard seems to me to have been the second kind.