James Wood's collection of four lectures, under the auspices of Brandeis University, is a wonderful exploration of the relations and interpenetrations of life and art (the nearest thing to life). A Harvard professor and
New Yorker staff writer, Wood brings the intimidating clarity. Like the best critics he inspires one to read further, and explore far, even as the hash of his ideas can send sparks flying. In the first piece, he starts with every kid's most annoying question—"Why?"—and spins that into a meditation on life and death. "It is our first and last question," he writes, "uttered with the same incomprehension, grief, rage, and fear at sixty as at six." He looks for answers to this lifelong irresolution in Dostoevsky, Cervantes, D.H. Lawrence, Knut Hamsun, Italo Calvino—in literature generally, when he characterizes fiction as a useful game of "not quite," a kind of rehearsal. In the next two pieces—"Serious Noticing" and "Using Everything"—he goes deeper into techniques of fiction. He lauds the well-chosen detail (using Chekhov and Henry Green as examples) to the point nearly of anthropomorphizing. "For details represent those moments in a story where form is outlived, canceled, evaded. I think of details as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them." In the last piece, Wood roots around with ideas of home and loss, and the various experiences of emigrants, exiles, and expatriates. A British citizen, Wood has lived in the US since 1995. In one telling detail (speaking of the power of the detail) he notes that his children are American. Here he focuses on work I don't know, such as W.G. Sebold's
The Emigrants. One way I know I like a book of criticism is when I come away from it with lists of things to be read immediately. I got a look at Chekhov's "The Kiss" before reading Wood's discussion of it, and there are more things I hope to get to. Wood has a reputation as a memoirist or personal essayist as well as a literary critic. I can see how you get to that—he's explicit (though almost too delicate for me) about including the frame of his own life, which is inevitably how we all view both life and the nearest thing to it. Wood is just extraordinarily honest about acknowledging it. Great stuff.
In case it's not at the library.
Thanks for your enthusiastic appreciation of James Wood's writings, Jeff. I always enjoy his New Yorker pieces, whatever the subject, as they're full of stimulating ideas, presented in the form of a confessional ("explicit . . . about including the frame of his own life," as you note.) I believe that's the same rhetorical combination that got me obsessed with Lester Bangs's writings so many years ago. And, as it happens, Wood has also authored some authoritative pop-music criticism, in his "The Fun Stuff" essay celebrating Keith Moon's drumming, which ran in the November 29, 2010, New Yorker. I'd saved that issue just for Wood's piece, and got it out to re-read in response to your post. It's very technical about the intricacies of drumming, as Wood confesses to experience as a musician in both classical and rock formats and knows whereof he speaks, but at the same time he praises Moon for breaking all the rules and going wild on his drums. Keith Moon has always been my favorite British Invasion drummer (saw him live on the Who's 1969, '70, and '71 tours), and James Wood gives me all the reasons why in "The Fun Stuff" -- I see he published a 2012 collection of essays with the same title, so the piece is available there too. Can explain, after all. -- Richard Riegel
ReplyDeleteThanks Richard -- Wood's appreciation of Keith Moon definitely sounds like something worth tracking down!
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