James Wood

Audio

Ramona Koval: Welcome to The Book Show.

James Wood: Thank you.

Ramona Koval: Can we begin by explaining your professorship? It's of the practice of criticism. Is that different from criticism?

James Wood: Not really. The university uses that category to enable people who are practicing the subject in the world to teach at the university. In other words, I don't have a PhD, I'm a working critic. But I think essentially the department of English where I'm based assumes that I do the same kind of thing in the classroom that the scholars do. Perhaps the difference is that I try to connect fiction to life in a way that doesn't automatically occur to academics.

Ramona Koval: So you don't consider yourself a scholar?

James Wood: I don't actually. I always say that the definition of the difference between a scholar and a working critic or a literary journalist or whatever I am is that the scholar reads all the secondary material and actually likes doing it. I personally find reading criticism a bit of a slog, although obviously for personal reasons I enjoy writing it.

Ramona Koval: The idea of you being a 'world class praiser' of the work you love, this is far removed from an idea of a disdainful critic holding work at bay, isn't it. The question I guess is; is passion a prerequisite for the kind of criticism you do?

James Wood: Yes, I can't imagine a critic who wasn't passionate about the form, and you can see that even a negative passion in an art critic, say, like Robert Hughes, or music critics that one can think of who have denounced certain pieces of music, there's still a passion driving that negativity, and it may be the case that I've committed some of that negativity myself but it's always been in the service of a great love of the art.

Ramona Koval: So like someone saying 'this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you'?

James Wood: Exactly.

Ramona Koval: You're serious about literature but you're also playful, and in this book you say, 'Am I the only writer utterly addicted to the utterly foolish pastime of amassing instances in which minor characters in books happen to have the name of writers?' I think you might be, but tell me about this particular obsession.

James Wood: It's just something I started noticing about 10 or 15 years ago. I think it was when I first read Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt and I realised that there was a character in there called Horris Updike and I thought this is very strange, and then I was reading...

Ramona Koval: Of course he wouldn't have known about John.

James Wood: No, no, of course, it's completely accidental, that's the fun of this. So you get Brecht the dentist in Thomas Mann, and Heidegger appears in a Joseph Roth novel, totally unconnected to people we think of as possessing those names, but it's fun. And I wrote this book really for the sort of reader I was at 20; very keen to write, obsessed with the technicalities and mechanics, but also the effects and beauties of fiction, somewhat academic (I was a student at university reading English) but not in any way devoted to an academic approach, probably almost the opposite, more devoted to a writerly approach. And I don't remember at 20 the existence of many books like this, so I thought why not? Why not try to write something that has a certain playfulness, is not academic, though has its scholarly elements, and tries to look at fiction from within, from inside, the way a writer might.

Ramona Koval: Let's give listeners an example of the kinds of riffs you have. You've got this sentence, it's a nice sentence: 'Ted watched the orchestra through stupid tears." Let's ponder that sentence. Tell us about how we should think about that sentence.

James Wood: I start the book by talking about third person narrative because there's this idea, a popular idea I think, that third person omniscient narrative of the kind you get in Jane Austen and Tolstoy and so on is old fashioned in part because it's so stable and omniscient and that really if you want to strike against that you should be writing first person narration; more unreliable, more personal, more vocal and so on. I just tried to show actually that third person narration is incredibly flexible and has its own kind of unreliability too, and one of the things I talk about is the way that third person narrative tends to wrap itself around the character who's being described. All writers do this, I think, instinctively and they don't necessarily use the accepted critical term for it, which is 'free indirect style', they just call it third person writing or close third person or intimate third. But they understand what I'm talking about.

In this case, 'Ted watched the orchestra through stupid tears', the interesting word there obviously is 'stupid'. We immediately ask why is it there, whose word is it. We don't think it's exactly the novelist's word because it would be peculiar for the novelist to decide that the tears were stupid. Instead what we do (and the writer is surely aware of this) is we slide the word away from the novelist toward Ted himself. It seems as if it's Ted's word. And then we begin to think, well, why would Ted want to ascribe stupidity to his tears? And then we begin to...as we often do in examples like this, if you turn it into first person and you voice it, you imagine Ted sitting there in the concert listening to Rachmaninoff or something and saying to himself, 'It's too stupid that I'm crying to this, it's ridiculous, isn't it,' we realise that actually it's about embarrassment and about the suppression of emotion and a certain shame perhaps even that he is crying.

It doesn't come from a text, I invented it, but I use it because it's a very...it seems a good example of the amazing compression that you can get in this kind of narration. The explanation I gave goes on and on and on, but you don't need it, it's all just put into five or six words.

Ramona Koval: It is fantastic, isn't it. You say if the writer had said: 'It's stupid to be crying at this silly piece of Brahms, he thought.' Well, okay, we get the picture, but it's so much less than 'Ted watched the orchestra through stupid tears', isn't it.

James Wood: Yes, it really is, and a lot of fiction does proceed in this way. I mention a famous example at the beginning of Joyce's story The Dead which begins: 'Lily the caretaker's daughter was literally run off her feet.' Your listeners will remember that Joyce is describing the beginning of a big party, so Lily is running around getting everything ready, and Joyce, by using that cliché 'I'm literally run off my feet' essentially puts us straight into Lily's perspective and Lily's voice without, again, needing to flag it blatantly.

Ramona Koval: Because you know she's not literally run off her feet.

James Wood: Right, exactly, so what it does, again, is it's this weird thing, it's this doubleness whereby on the one hand we're put into the character's voice, and yet the author hasn't relinquished his grip, so it's still moving along inside the author's syntax and inside formal third person. So we're getting two signs in a moment like that, we're getting Joyce and we're getting Lily and both are coexisting on the page and that's what I like so much about this kind of narration.

Ramona Koval: Just continuing this idea of...you mentioned Joyce, let's mention the late John Updike, and you say it's useful to watch good writers make mistakes, and this is where John Updike comes in. Tell me about this moment that you've quoted from John Updike's novel The Terrorist.

James Wood: Yes, it's right at the beginning of the book where he's describing an 18-year-old Muslim walking down a street in a New Jersey town, and it's in third person narration, but essentially what he wants us to do is get inside Ahmed's head. So he proceeds via third person free indirect style, the way any writer would. But it seems to me that unlike the Joyce example I think he doesn't have enough faith in the technique itself actually to do the work. He's too unsubtle, and what he starts doing, rather like someone flooding an engine, he floods Ahmed's voice and mind with a characteristically Updike-ian way of writing and thinking. That might not matter so much 100 pages into the novel, and let's agree that most writers do a little bit of it always since writers have a tendency to sound like themselves, but it matters a lot at the beginning of the book because he's trying to establish the quiddity of this person; who is this 18-year-old Muslim? So it's a pretty disastrous moment of not having enough faith in the thing and going wrong.

Ramona Koval: Yes, and he also puts a bit of explanation into the thoughts of this young man. For example, he said, 'What evidence beyond the Prophet's blazing and divinely inspired words proves that there is a next?' He's talking about a next world, a next life. 'What infinite source of energy would maintain opulent Eden, feeding its dark-eyed houris, swelling its heavy-hanging fruits, renewing the streams and splashing fountains in which God, as described in the ninth sura of the Qur'an, takes eternal good pleasure?' I mean, he's got a reference in there, just in case! But why would this character be thinking about where this thing was located in the Qur'an if he's just walking down the street having a bit of a think? He would know that, wouldn't he, or he wouldn't care anyway.

James Wood: He'd know it. Like I say in the book, it's like describing...it's as if a Muslim writer described a Christian walking along the street thinking to himself about the Lord's Prayer and saying, 'As described in the fourth line of the Lord's Prayer.' I mean, no one would think like that, it would be implicit in your body of knowledge. It's a good example of a writer not only not trusting enough in the ability of the technique to get him through it, but I think of probably having done a bit too much research and just wanting to get that down on the page.

A novelist, say, like Peter Carey...I'm thinking of him because I just did a thing yesterday evening on stage with him in New York talking about fiction...a novelist like Peter Carey is perhaps less intellectual, less literary, I suppose, in a sort of self-conscious way than Updike, but if you look at his fiction (his last novel is a very good example) he has a real craftsman's faith in just this kind of third person narration. He knows when to leave alone and simply let it move itself.

Ramona Koval: Yes, in that last book he's written...I remember having a conversation with him about this, he has bits of songs and bits of things moving in and out of the characters' heads without any explanation and he doesn't say 'oh that's because of the pop song at the time that...' He doesn't need to. And for those people who don't get it...well, they kind of get it because they know this must be something that's floating through the character's head, but there's no great arrows or neon signs saying 'look at this, look at this'.

James Wood: Absolutely, and remember that quite a bit of that book is written from the perspective of a child. Certainly at the beginning...if you could put it alongside the Updike it would be interesting because right at the beginning he has to say, essentially, 'I'm going to put you in the middle of the life of a little boy who is completely confused about everything.' Something, interestingly, that Henry James did about 100 years before when he writes What Maisie Knew, he puts you in the mind of a confused little girl. This kind of narration is perfect for that precisely because as in 'Ted watched the orchestra through stupid tears', you're not telling the reader everything, you're essentially saying 'you come and inhabit this character's confusion and I'll keep it confused, I won't unravel the confusion for you because that is the state I want to evoke.'

Ramona Koval: We're talking about His Illegal Self, Peter Carey's book.

James Wood: Yes.

Ramona Koval: You say that novelists should thank Flaubert because Flaubert is very important in the development of modern storytelling and the use of different time signatures. This is fascinating, tell us why novelists should thank Flaubert.

James Wood: Flaubert essentially lays down a kind of narration that is still going on nowadays, and when I talk about different time signatures I mean particularly...we just mentioned someone walking down a street, and in some ways you might say that is now, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries, that is now the very model to us of what it is to be in a novel, is to be walking down a street thinking something. Flaubert in Sentimental Education, 1869, really establishes this combination of dynamic and habitual detail, selected and pushed together to look as if it all belongs to the same time signature, and also crucially to look as if it wasn't really selected at all by the artist but is simply hitting the character in a kind of tattoo of the random. There's an obvious connection between Flaubert and Joyce's Ulysses, but I think still writers proceed in that manner.

And if we think of the basic grammar of realism which is now cinematic, if we think of a camera doing a setup shot at the beginning of a film, panning across a square or a street, it's essentially Flaubertian because what we elect not to notice anymore is that everything has been selected and set up, that actors have been hired by the hour for the day and so on and told to walk across the square at a certain moment, someone has been told to open a door, a certain sound has been put on the audio tape, and the rest of it. What the camera is palming off is that this is simply a slice of life, this is what it's like and these things are just happening randomly and happening all at the same time. I think Flaubert is the person who invents that on the page.

Ramona Koval: He says, 'At the back of the deserted cafes, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles, the newspapers lay unopened on the reading room tables, in the laundresses' workshops the washing quivered in the warm drafts.' So you're saying some of those things are instantaneous, some of things like the newspapers are just sitting there and that takes quite a long time, but these moments are mixed up with each other. I always wonder about this yawning because when you see people yawn you want to yawn too, and I just thought it's always good to have a bit of something like...you're reading about a yawn, you kind of feel that you could yawn too. But you can't, I suppose, use 'yawn' in every paragraph when you want to connect with the reader. I wonder how much physiology goes on in writing, the idea of trying to...

James Wood: That's interesting, I hadn't thought about that, it's probably quite right.

Ramona Koval: It's probably quite wrong actually, but anyway...

James Wood: I don't know though, the yawn, if you're thinking of it as a modern...admittedly it's 1860s but 1840s is where the novel is set...but if you think of it as a modern city, then he's also describing stuff before it's quite got going. It's true that there are little oasis of peace amid the city and someone yawning would be exactly that.

Ramona Koval: It puts the reader in a comfortable position, like 'you're here too', you know, you can be here, you can feel comfortable, I'm going to tell you a story about something or show you things. This thing about noticing and 'thisness' and details...you say we do want details. I know I want details too because when I read a book that is set nowhere and...it just really depends whether it's just a pondering in one person's mind...but in the hands of a lesser writer, I do want something to anchor to, I don't want to trust just a kind of...I want there to be some sort of connection and concreteness. You talk about it being 'thisness', and you say we do want detail, don't we.

James Wood: Yes, I think so. One of the examples I use in a footnote is from Lawrence's famous story The Odour of Chrysanthemums, which begins: 'The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full wagons.' The thing I mention is that Ford Maddox Ford, when he was the editor of a journal that took that story, knowing nothing about Lawrence, read it like any editor would and immediately knew from the first sentence that this is a novelist who knows his material, knows his community and has a real ear for precision, and located that precision in 'Number 4', bothering to innumerate the locomotive.

I think it's not just the...obviously these things anchor us, but also that fiction, like poetry at its greatest, does teach us to see things anew and see things better, and I know that from my own experience because I'm not a very good noticer. For instance, I have fairly poor visual sense, I'm slightly colour-blind and I tend to miss things in paintings that better eyes see and I tend not to notice trees and flowers and people's hands and so on, and over the years fiction has made me...it's been a sort of course in detection for me, it's made me better at being alert to all those things, seeing how a leaf moves, seeing how someone moves his hands or her hands. And I'm genuinely grateful to it for opening up the visual world, and of course not just the visual world because we think of so many authors who are terrifically good at undercurrents, at the invisible detail, as it were.

Ramona Koval: You say you confess to an ambivalence about detail in fiction. You say, 'I relish it, consume it, ponder it, hardly a day goes by in which I don't remind myself of Saul Bellow's description of Mr Rappaport's cigar; the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency.' Can that be true? Can hardly a day go by? Have you thought of it today?

James Wood: Well, maybe I was exaggerating a little bit. I was thinking of something that the English academic Christopher Ricks once said to me which is that the test of whether a writer has really stayed with you is does a detail of that writer come unbidden into your mind as you walk down a street? There we go walking down a street again. And certainly this cigar ash, 'the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency', comes up pretty often for me. Maybe more often comes up Joyce's great thing about the buzzing tines of the fork, just because one uses a fork a lot more than sees or smokes a cigar.

But yes, detail...the ambivalence I have about detail is that one way of talking about the rise of the novel is the rise of the amount of detail in novels, and a devotion to it that gets close to the fetishistic. I think it's fetishistic in Flaubert, for instance, and somewhat fetishistic in Nabokov and perhaps Updike also. And there are moments when I want those writers (if one can say this) to notice a bit less.

Ramona Koval: Yes, 'get on with it'?

James Wood: Get on with it, which is why I mentioned the thing that I was so pleased to find in Nabokov's letters where Edmund Wilson says to him, 'You must read Henry James,' and Nabokov in his usual way says, 'I can't be bothered with Henry James, there's nothing in him.' And Edmund Wilson says, 'No, come on, you must have a look.' So he reads Henry James and then Nabokov comes back in a thoroughly Nabokovian way and says, 'I don't think Mr James is a very good writer because he describes a cigar having a red tip. Well, cigars don't have red tips.' Now, if you see it from James' point of view, cigars have red tips and there's no need to go into it any further.

In other words, there isn't any need to do a Bellow or a Nabokovian job on it, you just say it has a red tip and you move onto something that interests you more. For Nabokov, who has a sort of painterly aesthetic, every single detail...if you're going to bother to notice any detail and put it on the page you have to lavish your attention on it. And I suppose I feel that that aesthetic can be somewhat...it has its beauties, of course, immense ones, but it can be a bit claustrophobic, and there are lots of ways of noticing that aren't visual at all.

Ramona Koval: Let's talk about character because you say a great deal of nonsense is written about character and there's rather a contagion about moralising niceness about characters; did I like the characters or did I find someone I was sympathetic with? Tell me about that.

James Wood: Yes, thinking about character it occurred to me that we live at a time when people either believe too much in character or not enough in it. The people who believe too much in it are the sort of people who write in Amazon reviews that they threw the book across the room because they couldn't identify with the character or they didn't like the character or the character didn't grow, and so on. They have ideas of what characters should be...

Ramona Koval: It's a kind of Oprah Winfrey...you have to get to some point of changing something, or move or regret or confess...

James Wood: Yes, it's that kind of thing, that obsession with redemption. In fact it's very unreal because most people don't have very much redemption in their lives and most people don't change very much. There's a case to be made for an extremely static banal character as being the truest thing. So there are people who believe too much in character and then there are people who believe not enough in it. That's less widespread, but there have been movements in the novel, certainly since the war, now joined I guess by philosophy and literary theory to some extent, which very much try to move against the idea that there can be such a thing as a character in a novel, that indeed we should deconstruct the whole idea and get rid of it because the self isn't stable and character is just a set of inky marks on a page.

Ramona Koval: But then why would we read anything?

James Wood: Ah, well, not surprisingly that's generally proposed either by theorists and philosophers or by writers who want to write a certain kind of fiction which enacts their own theory...

Ramona Koval: Are we talking William Gass here?

James Wood: I am to some extent, yes, although I think Gass is a more interesting and better writer than some of those avant-gardists, but yes...and so I thought it might be worthwhile (drearily enough) to strike a middle line between loving too much and not loving enough fictional character, and to try to talk about the reality of fictional character, how insights into the self move us, how they apply to our own lives and so on and so forth, but also to be perfectly alert to the made-ness of literary character. And that's why I try to talk about flat characters being as interesting or perhaps more interesting than so-called round characters.

Ramona Koval: You talk about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and you say that that Muriel Spark's character of Miss Jean Brodie is one of the most loved in literature, but one of the least fleshed out.

James Wood: Yes, that's absolutely right, and I think that's because the novel...it's a spare novel of 100 pages. The novel, in effect, says to the reader; 'Do you know who Miss Brodie is?' And Spark's extraordinary ability in that book is to conjure the portrait of a character who is really vivid and has all sorts of knowable attributes but who actually disappears between the paragraphs, she's not there. She's a teacher but we never see her leave school and go home, she's simply performance.

So what Spark does there is she makes us become her pupils. We know her only as her pupils know her, in school, as a performance. We don't actually know Miss Brodie at all, she's an absence. And I'm quite drawn to novels that instead of saying to the reader, 'I'm going to make you know this character inside out, from top to bottom,' instead say, 'How do we know who a person is? Maybe we never really get to know who people are at all.' My own experience is that it's unknowability and mysteriousness that characterises most of our relations with other people. So I like novels that tackle that head-on.

Ramona Koval: You said something that I found really interesting and I'd never thought of it. You said, 'A secret to the powerful metaphor is counterintuitive, to select the opposite to the thing you're seeking to compare.' I love that. Can you explain that a bit?

James Wood: Yes, most people think of metaphor as being 'X is like Y', so you try to map something visually onto something else, there's a likeness established. So you might say 'the tiles on the top of the roof look like an armadillo's back' or something, you try to make a plausible likeness. But of course what's remarkable too about simile or metaphor is that it's often very violent and it often proceeds by, in effect, yoking together things that aren't very alike and forcing us to see a similarity where we'd never seen one before, and that may often involve a dissimilarity rather than a similarity.

One of my favourite examples (I don't think I mention it in the book) is a lovely line from DH Lawrence and he describes snow coming down with a 'soft panther-like tread'. First of all it's just remarkable because it would take a long, long time for you to think of a panther, but also a panther is a hot-blooded creature of the tropics, of warm places, and pairing that with freezing snow (he's talking about a northern Hebridean island) is the bizarrest thing, but it absolutely works. As soon as you've read the sentence, it makes sense and I forevermore think when I see snow (and believe me, in Boston I get a lot of it)...when I see snow just beginning to come down, I think of that soft, panther-like tread.

Ramona Koval: Because it makes the snow colder, doesn't it, to imagine the poor panther in it.

James Wood: It does actually, and it's absolutely right about the soft...I suppose as Lawrence was writing it...and this is something I like to do when I think about text is try to imagine what's going through the writer's mind...but I suppose Lawrence might have been thinking cat-like, feline, which probably we do sometimes think about when we think about snow, the soft tread of a cat. And then he probably rejected that because it wasn't good enough, it was too ordinary, and quite literally leapt toward the panther instead. It's wonderful.

Ramona Koval: Yes, I wonder whether you would have said 'leapt' if he hadn't been using a panther?

James Wood: Exactly!

Ramona Koval: You developed this book, and you imagine these young writers that you're teaching, the 20-year-olds, and you're directing your ideas towards them, but can readers read better if they understand how fiction works? Is it just writers who need to know how fiction works? Do readers need to know too?

James Wood: I aim the book very much not at just writers but...in fact I think in some ways writers might be cagey, might be wary of reading it because I think they sometimes feel that it's a burden to know too much and that they should let their unconscious take them where it will. But in some ways I was thinking more of readers than of writers, and yes I do think it will help (it should help anyway) readers to know more about the mechanics of things.

As a young boy I had quite a good training in music and sang a lot and I play the piano and the trumpet, and I have a better sense than more people of how music works, of the formal business of notation and keys and all that sort of thing, and I'm pretty sure it enhances my appreciation and understanding of the form without destroying the mystery. I think it actually just increases the mystery.

Ramona Koval: Yes, as I've said, analysing the mechanics for me always took the magic away at school.

James Wood: Yes, maybe because the teaching wasn't right.

Ramona Koval: That's what I think too, and if I'd had you as a teacher I may have embraced it at a much earlier stage. I'm embracing it now though, I must say.

James Wood: I'm delighted.

Ramona Koval: James Wood, thank you so much for being on The Book Show today.

James Wood: Pleasure.

Ramona Koval: The book we've been speaking about is called How Fiction Works and it's published by Jonathan Cape.

James Wood

Literary critic, The New Yorker, and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism, Harvard University

How Fiction Works by James Wood, Jonathan Cape (2008)