The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief
James Wood Jonathan Cape, 318pp, £16.99
The office of public critic has never been an
easy one to execute. Still, until very recent times, it clearly existed. We knew
we needed uncommon super-readers to serve us common readers. We counted on
great figures, often both writers and critics, who seriously devoted themselves
to the common pursuit of true judgement and the correction of taste; who set
out to explore the limits of the imagination, and purify the language and the
thinking of the tribe. Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Sainte-Beuve all
performed and elaborated the great and necessary office. So, in more modernist
times, did Virginia Woolf, Pound, Eliot, and then Leavis,
Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling. And behind them lay the great magazines, the
reviews of critical surveillance: Edinburgh and Quarterly, Criterion
and Scrutiny, Dial and Partisan Review.
Today
it is largely over; we have almost entirely lost such figures and such magazine
venues. We live - we're proud to do so - in a non-judgemental, an equalising, a
levelling, a willingly and articulately self-dumbing age. We won't say elite; we're ideologically
under-critical. Criticism has left the public arena for the closets of the
university; and there it has become something else. Disliking judgement in the
old sense, it has now become literary theory: tribalised,
compartmentalised, heavy with professionalised discourses, a variant of
philosophy subservient to all the fashionable ideologies. The contemporary
criticism kit, of post-Marxism, post-feminism, post-colonialism, new
historicism, race and gender reading, can be ordered from any local campus.
Newspaper criticism has mostly become journalism, part of the great game of
listing and merchandising that passes now as "culture". We have just
a few large players - shall we say George Steiner, John Carey, Peter Kemp,
Peter Ackroyd - who perform as public critics used
to: as ideal proxies, ultimate intelligent judges and readers, displaying what
we might surely expect of a critic: literary learning, comparative standards, a
power of intelligent judgement, a primary belief in the worth of the literary
arts.
Lately,
we have had James Wood, who - in a variety of British and American newspapers
and magazines (the Guardian, the New Republic, the New Yorker) - has spaciously and transatlantically performed the office as it has not been
performed for some time. It's of great advantage to himself
and the rest of us that he doesn't come heavily drilled in all the conventional
contemporary literary theoretics. A serious religious
education and a fast transition straight from Cambridge to the Guardian have
given him intellectual stamina and public access, and it's as a newspaper
critic and essayist he has made his mark.
His
religious education, considered in the long last essay in this collection, is
evidently a crucial matter. Wood writes from a standpoint of secularised
religiosity, sees literature as the nearest thing that these secular days have
to belief, tells us fiction lives most strongly in the
shadow of a religious doubt. For Virginia Woolf, he explains, the novel acts
religiously but performs sceptically. He, as critic, seeks to do likewise. So
this sequence of 20-plus essays is subtitled "essays on literature and
belief", and Wood writes with unusual care and solemnity - as if he
requires from literature a good deal more than most.
He
is capable of being intensely annoying (not least when, during his Guardian
tenure, he adopted to excess the folkloric notion that nowadays Americans
know how to write novels and the English don't). The reader of this book will
need a fair tolerance; Wood is opinionated, sometimes to extreme degree. The
fact remains he is a true critic: an urgent, impassioned reader of literature,
a tireless interpreter, a live and learned intelligence, good writing company.
He has adopted the essay as his own; he uses it to write, in the way
the serious writer does. That's to say, he drives his ideas hard; he hungers
for metaphor, and often ends up in ungainly stylistic poses; he frequently
risks becoming absurd. Writing on Virginia Woolf, he remarks: "To describe
literature critically is to describe it again, but as it were for the first
time . . ." He adds that thus the critic's language, itself metaphoric,
often comes into conflict with the original. The same may be said of Wood,
whose style and interpretations are all quite decidedly his.
The
essays drawn together here cover a very wide span. From a piece on Sir Thomas
More (occasioned by Peter Ackroyd's biography), we go
to a selected number of the 19th-century novelists (Gogol, Flaubert, Melville), then to key writers of the early 20th: Thomas
Mann, Virginia Woolf. As befits a busy reviewer of current books, he offers us
important essays on contemporaries, including Iris Murdoch, Updike, Roth,
Pynchon, Martin Amis, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, W G Sebald.
The
Wood test is not an easy one, but at best it displays true critical sensitivity
and insight. Take, say, the essay on Jane Austen - of whom we hardly need
another study. Yet Wood, who as a critic is generally warmer to fiction's bias
toward representation than he is to its counter-universe of irony, clearly
finds Austen's own irony salvaged by her manner of performing it, and he has
interesting things to say about that fact. Her books, he notes, are modern,
interiorised; and they are not therapeutic but hermeneutic. Her heroines are
also novelists - as it were, reading the same text as the author, possessing
observation, a mobile inner consciousness, even the power of happiness: the
same clandestine happiness possessed, he suggests, by Austen herself. This is
good. But the essay on Gustave Flaubert is anxiously
dry, and far less understanding.
So
it goes on. A fine essay attacking the critical extravagance of Anthony
Julius's book on T S Eliot's anti-Semitism is followed by a totally (and
wonderfully) unfair piece on George Steiner: an essay that takes such pleasure
in its clever dismissals, its intricate underminings,
its observation of the great Steineran trope that it
quite loses the truth of Steiner's huge intellectual importance. A learned and
well-informed piece on Iris Murdoch comes to a conclusion exactly opposite to
the one I would have drawn from the same evidence. There is a cunningly
brilliant study of the anxieties of Martin Amis, a British writer who, in
attempting to assimilate the vernacular energy of contemporary American
fiction, has devised a remarkable prose but who has failed to lose, Wood says,
that uneasy British instinct for broad burlesque. Perhaps the writer who comes
out best is the haunting W G Sebald, whose mournful
reticence is part of his power.
In
general, comedy, irony and magical extravagance disturb Wood. In the matter of
Julian Barnes, is it necessary to rebuke him, yet again, for his Englishness,
for not quite perceiving how British fiction is cursed by its mannered
constraint, its failure to relax, linguistically, emotionally in front of the
chaotic human landscape - as does, say, the fiction of Willa Cather? But in
some ways such transatlantic comparisons are evidently beginning to run their
full course. In reviewing some of the most ambitious of the Americans on their
own soil, Wood has come to observe many of the same flaws of language or
imagination he noted in their British contemporaries. Thomas Pynchon is clearly
a writer of high importance, yet doesn't some of his recent rompishness
possess an almost Amis-like or Barnesian flaw? And if
the critics are right to see in Pynchon and DeLillo a
"paranoid style", isn't paranoia at some
level an abdication of fiction? What of Toni Morrison and her magical realism -
doesn't the magic take us beyond the realistic limits of the novel, allowing
her as a writer to oppress her characters with her own essence?
Wood
is never easy to please; he goes in for sharp and intensive interrogations, and
is not above shifting the goalposts of realism when it suits him. The
autobiographical frankness of parts of this book raises curiosity further; why
does this invigilating, displaced religious intelligence need literature so
much? The texts Wood reads and worries over push him into acts of serious
intelligence, and he has made his positions matter. Yet what matters most is
that, even in our own uncritical times, we do have a strong and serious debate
about literature - especially our own literature, the best of the writing
emerging now. And that Wood strongly and genuinely gives us.
Published on 12 February 1999
© New
Statesman 1913–2008
By James Wood Jonathan Cape
http://www.newstatesman.com/199902120051
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