How about your enemies? Do you run into them now and again?
My true enemies skulk in a deep Dostoevskian Underground called the Internet, and never see the light of day — that is their punishment for hating me so much; it matches the sin, as in Dante.
Illustration by Kyle T. Webster
James Wood
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Deresiewicz’s essay attacks you for what you don’t do. He desperately wants literary criticism to embrace culture, politics, and the world at large in the spirit of the New York critics. And he seems to suggest that your existence will somehow hinder that ...
Of course, there were plenty of things I didn’t agree with in that Nation review. What seemed most partial was the elevation of the New York critics of the 1950s, which means the elevation of a certain conjunction of literature and politics. I’m not at all hostile to that kind of criticism — I have read a lot of Trilling and Wilson and Kazin and Howe. I am very fond of Orwell, and have written a long essay about him. But you won’t find much in the way of stylistic analysis in Trilling or Kazin; and Wilson is notably weak when he writes about Chekhov or Nabokov. I am more of a formalist than these writers, and there is another tradition, which would take in Shklovksy, and Empson, and Jarrell, and Nabokov’s lectures, and Barthes, in which the text is closely read as a verbal artifact, above all. These are the critics that thrill me. When I read Kazin I am always saying to myself: “Okay, now get to the text, tell us something about the language, about the formation of the words. Do some literary analysis.” But he doesn’t.
But if I am a formalist, I am one who is always fighting his own tendency to formalism: The moralist in me is always recoiling from my own aestheticism, and judging it. The Kierkegaardian struggle of the aesthetic and the ethical. Such contradictions are surely what make critics interesting — think of Coleridge, a great hero of mine.
Ecumenicism seems important: among contemporary critics, I like a political critic like George Scialabba and a wonderful aesthetic critic like the poet Michael Hofmann ... and I could go on, because I think we are in a golden age for criticism at the moment.
You are accused at times of being too narrow in aesthetics, too frequently returning to the same names — Bellow, Chekhov, etc. Who are the exceptions to your perceived orthodoxy.
One of the important ways in which one has to struggle against one’s congealment as a critic, is precisely to search for exceptions. In my case, it seems very important to remind myself that the kind of largesse I extend to, say, a Gogol or Dickens, might also be extended to a Zadie Smith or a Jonathan Franzen. In other words, one mustn’t approve of dead, distinguished authors just because they are dead and distinguished. If one can like surrealism and ludic games in Gogol, then one should be able to appreciate the same in a good contemporary writer. It’s very easy for a historically minded critic like me to get overcanonical; and then one is simply wandering in a cemetery of Arnoldian touchstones.
You close How Fiction Works by reminding us that “the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention.” Which living authors do you feel are most appropriately and artfully embracing this challenge?
I am very interested and inspired by the works of, among others, Lydia Davis, Peter Handke, David Mitchell, recent work by Cormac McCarthy and [Kazuo] Ishiguro, and Michel Houellebecq.... As I said at the beginning, an author is always trying to break the forms. Look at how subtly daring V.S. Naipaul has been, for instance! He has created hybrid forms of autobiography and history and fiction (In a Free State, The Enigma of Arrival), has tried to blur the division between journalism and novel-writing. He always wants the novel form to do more, to take in more of the world. To my mind, his work is more open to the radicalism of the lived world than, say, David Foster Wallace’s, even though to most people Wallace looks like the radical, and Naipaul looks like an old racist conservative.
Will you return to fiction writing?
I hope to get to work on a second novel this summer — as I like to say, the reason for the existence of the second novel is simply so as to improve on the first.
HOW FICTION WORKS | By JAMES WOOD | Picador | 288 pages | $14 softcover (July)
Further reading from the Weekly Literary Supplement:
"Geoff in London, Interview in Absentia," by Tom Christie
"Henry Bay’s America: An Excerpt From The Enthusiast," by Charlie Haas
"Wet Metal: An Excerpt From Blame," by Michelle Huneven
"The Calm: An Excerpt From Silver Lake," by Peter Gadol
"Old World Meets New Age in Thriller Nowhere-Land," by Judith Freeman
"Publishing Your Novel Online," by Alan Rifkin
