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JESSE MATZ: It’s my pleasure to welcome you to our conversation this morning with James Wood. I’m going to say a few words by way of introduction and then I’ll be asking James a set of questions which I hope will stimulate a larger conversation finally, about fiction today and the work of the critic, forgiveness, Jonathan Franzen, academic writing, and what’s necessary to read and to write the novel today.

James Wood is author of three books: a novel, The Book against God, and two books of essays, most recently, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel and The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. These two books of essays collect pieces published previously in journals including the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and the New Republic, where James is also an editor. He regularly publishes reviews in these and other places, and currently he’s a visiting lecturer in the Department of English at Harvard University.

On one of the last Sundays of each year, the New York Times looks at what it calls “The Year in Ideas.” All of the hot, influential, ingenious ideas of the year are listed and rightly applauded. In 2002, among such things as the robotic vacuum cleaner, online personals, Pokemon Hegemony, and the featherless chicken, was a term from literary criticism. And this was astonishing, of course, because literary criticism’s featherless chickens haven’t been seen anywhere near the real world of ideas in some time. The term was “hysterical realism.” It referred to a tendency in contemporary fiction toward certain overheated excitements and excessive centripetality, a cartoonish or too restless extremism. The term was James Wood’s, and it did indeed become a kind of robotic vacuum cleaner. I won’t work that metaphor here but let me just say instead how thrilling, really, how thrilling was the moment of the term’s coinage and how it makes a good introduction to James Wood even if he is himself beyond sick to death of the term.

In The Irresponsible Self, hysterical realism brings out the flaws in Zadie Smith specifically, but it also leads Wood to the warmest appreciation of her gifts.  And here’s the thing: to a vital enhancement of them. The term and the review were key to Smith’s better development as a writer. So what we have here is the critical scene at its very best. The critic transforms public discourse and actually improves the writing of his day, becoming a great critic and a leader in the year’s hot ideas, in the act of something really like prophecy.  So there is this matchless contingency throughout the essays published in both books, but the books also have vast historical and theoretical breadth.  Where else in literary criticism do targeted readings of recent words radiate into broad literary histories? For example, the way the Comedy of Forgiveness defines the novel and encourages the innovation of what we take to be its characteristic forms. Or of the “not-quite belief” that defines the effect of realism in the novel. How realism engages a form of faith, how the novel we know developed its discretionary magic not entirely skeptical about the religious kind of belief. It’s rare for criticism, especially the usual academic kind, which we’ll discuss maybe in a moment, rare for it to get nearly this far in either direction. Our literary engagements are rarely so immediately pressing and our histories are never this impressively literary. And it’s really to James Wood that we should look now for direction. So, some quick first introductions here for those of you who have not yet read James Wood. And now, very quickly one last such introduction, especially for those students among you who’ve not yet read him but now will.  

In your darkest future, beneath the light at your bedside, there’s a pile of books. And while it may look like a pile of books you might have brought from the bookstore here at the start of term, if you look more closely, you’ll see that it’s covered with dust. It’s not been disturbed for some time because it’s been stacked heedlessly, without help; it’s an unreadable pile you’ve found, separating now from the life of the mind. And that’s because it took its dusty shape without the help we get from the critic, whose perfect judgment we trust and follow.  

Read what and how Wood does, and darkness won’t dim your future reading.  Moreover, model your reading life on what you hear today and see if you won’t find answers to the kinds of questions that seniors especially find themselves asking as they think about literature after college: how to read so much and so well that you become an authority wholly on your own terms; how to become so incisively critical that everybody quotes you, and yet stay creative enough to publish fiction that everybody loves; how to write, edit, teach, and read--all in the service of the books themselves. These are some of the things we might find out today, if we can ask the right questions. That’s what we’ll turn to now: these questions. I wonder if I can first ask James about this term that he must now hate, this hysterical realism. Not about what it means and everything, but what it’s been like to see a term that he’s coined become so much promiscuous public article, or a matter of public currency. I wonder also if it’s true what they say about Zadie Smith’s reaction to it, if this got you involved in a dialogue, a constructive one.

JAMES WOOD: Ah, well, thank you, Jesse, by the way for that, uh, sort of platonic introduction. (laughs) Surely, if anything will be learnt this morning it’s I fear not from your questions but from my answers. Therein lies the rub. Hysterical realism is one of those things that floats away from you, of course. You come up with it quickly in a piece, or perhaps not so quickly. I was reviewing Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, and it seemed to me, I got to the end of the book, six hundred pages or so. It was a funny, lively, exciting book in many ways, but I was struck that I was having an experience not unlike the experience of reading a number of other contemporary novels, large contemporary novels. 

And that’s to say, I had been completely unmoved. There had been no transformation of feeling. And it sent me thinking about why that might be, what the central lack might be.  And it seemed to me that it had something to do with character and the human. I then began to think of Smith’s novel in relation to a number of other large books: Underworld by Don DeLillo, Pynchon’s recent book Mason and Dixon, David Foster Wallace’s large book Infinite Jest, and so on. Was there some kind of genre here in which the cartoonish was displacing the real? In which the machinery of plot was also blocking out in some way a greater simplicity? I also thought perhaps there was an interesting borrowing from Dickens: It seems to me that if you look at a book like Underworld, it is in fact a sort of quite old-fashioned social novel like Bleak House--it tries to account for the connectedness of society at various levels. But, and here was the thing that struck me, strongly in relation to DeLillo, perhaps less acutely in relation to Smith, was that the connectedness was entirely conceptual. It was asserted by DeLillo and it exists on the level of paranoia and ideology and so on. “This is how we will account for the last fifty years of American life.” There was no human connectedness at all. There were lots of different characters; none of them had any real life with each other. The really striking difference from Dickens, say.

And I thought, “This might be a way of reading a book like Smith’s, which doesn’t exactly line up with DeLillo’s book, but perhaps there is something here which is, which seemed an extension of magic realism.  “Magic realism’s last gasp,” you might say.  So, that’s what I was thinking about with the term “hysterical realism.”

JM: Do you think that you’ve found that your coinage of the term has done something to stop the tendency at all? It could be hard to assess that, I suppose, to some degree.

JW: You ask about Zadie Smith; she’s an unusually masochistic writer.  And she actually didn’t need me to prod her, she was already disowning her first book, saying that it was something written by a juvenile, a sort of crazy tap-dancing--I’m sorry, I can’t remember the exact phrase. But she did indeed reply to me, saying that she felt that “hysterical realism” was an uncomfortably precise term for the kind of thing that she was doing. She then followed her first novel with a book that seemed to me to owe a great deal to the sort of Dave Eggers' McSweeney’s crowd. It was full of typographical games, numbered jokes, little boxed read-outs and so on. The third novel, just out, seems to me to really make good on her substantial talent. It’s actually a sort of old-fashioned, what you might call a sort of postmodern old-fashioned book. Postmodern because it has an explicit indebtedness to Howard’s End, but essentially old-fashioned in that it concentrates quite fiercely on the domestic of two families and so on. It’s a good book, I think.

JM: Great. Now, there are many other ways, of course, in which you’re critically linked to contemporary debates. For example, there’s that many-sided debate taking shape around Jonathan Franzen now and what he has said about the status of the novel today. He has spoken out against difficult, experimental postmodern writing, if I get it right, calling for something “more accessible” that could be “more popular” and to his mind “more honest.” And then there’s Ben Marcus, who has called him on the carpet and called him a hypocrite, really, if I have that right, saying that what Franzen really wants to do is just limit the range of fiction wrongly to suit his temperament, to suit his purposes. Now before that, you criticized Franzen for making no sense really, for saying he wanted fiction to become more purely aesthetic but for having no real commitment to or even understanding of what aesthetic fiction would entail.  Where do you find yourself at this point among these positions about realism and experiment in the novel?

JW: Where I find myself is that they seem to be based on a misunderstanding of realism.  I think you’re right to pick up on what is the central rift at the moment in contemporary American writing. Between some old-fashioned realism and a sort of post-modernism that’s represented by a writer like Ben Marcus, but one could think of many others. Lydia Davis, Paul Auster, perhaps. I don’t think there should be a struggle at all. I can see why it’s come about. There are a number of interesting reasons. One of them might have to do with an anti-intellectual strain in American realism. Which is further reinforced by creative writing programs, or at least traditionally was further reinforced by creative writing programs. I mean I had--I was talking to someone just quite recently about this--a graduate student who also studied writing at Iowa. And he was explaining his hostility to the traditional notion of realism. And I asked him about this hostility. And he said that, well, you have to understand at Iowa, when you got there you were essentially told by the late Frank Conroy that there was really only one book a novelist should bother with and that was Madame Bovary and everything else, you know, you could learn your craft by that.  So, clearly sort of institutionalized artisanal set of rules, perhaps reinforced by, I would say, sort of masculinist anti-intellectualism. The kind, say, that surfaces in a really, really good writer like Richard Yates: an exceptional craftsman, very fine writer, but someone who, when he was at Iowa, in the seventies, was denouncing Roth and Bellow for being too intellectual, denouncing even poetry. I mean, the novelists wouldn’t have anything to do with the poets: It’s absurd! So, that might be the deep reason for a suspicion on the experimental side of realism. 

I would say that there are, to add to that, that there’s a misunderstanding of realism itself. If you look at someone like Rick Moody and the way he writes about the realist novel, it’s clear that he thinks of realism as a sort of genre. Once dominant in the nineteenth century, now kind of absurdly formulaic, with its, you know, rising epiphanies and patches of fine writing and well-made humanist moments and so on. That seems to me completely wrong, and instead of thinking of realism as a genre, it makes much more sense to think of it as the central language of the novel, the thing that would connect Defoe and Austen to Naipaul, say. And obviously the thing, if you’re writing in English that actually comes ultimately from Shakespeare: not at all a genre, but the central language. 

And one way of thinking about it might be--I don’t say this in a qualitative way--I’m just thinking in terms of the centrality. If we imagine, say, a world in which the only kind of novel was Pynchon’s Vineland, that would be an appalling place to live in; it would be a monotonous, hysterical, paranoid universe. If we imagine a world in which the only novel available was A House for Mr. Biswas, we would be in a place able to accommodate tragedy, comedy, sympathy, compassion, and so on. It would be a much more ample, generous kind of existence. Well, I have clearly been qualitative, but you see what I am saying. I’m just talking about this central language. So I don’t think there needs to be quite the struggle that there is currently. You don’t need to go on the literary blogs to see that this is a really fierce debate and I’m often put in the old-fashioned camp. I don’t feel as if I’m in an old-fashioned camp. I agree with Ben Marcus that Franzen is not only incoherent, but dismayingly middle-brow. I don’t see why he has to set up these terms in which Joyce, I guess he and Dale Peck would agree, that Joyce has somehow hijacked literary comprehensibility and we’re all terrified, according to Franzen, of the idea that literature could be easy to read. I don’t think we have to fall into that.

JM: What then is the role of experiment today? If realism is mainly in its languages or language. Is it a linguistic thing, or ought it to be experiment, or . . .

JW: I think that’s a very good question, because there is, of course, linguistic experiment going on. The novel, perhaps, even more than poetry, does seem to hit a barrier, doesn’t it, in a way, say, that music and art don’t because of the importance of communicability: a barrier beyond which you can’t really go in an avant-garde fashion. 

Ben Marcus’ first book of not exactly stories, sort of bewildering puzzles and fragments, would seem to me to hit precisely that barrier. But there’s also going on, alongside experiment in language, what one could call a sort of avant-gardism of content. How else to explain a very traditional writer like the English novelist Alan Hollinghurst without looking at the extraordinary revolution in what it represents for Hollinghurst to see the world entirely from the eyes of a gay man. I mean an extraordinary opening-up of what the novel can do, it seems to me. I thought his last book was really a great novel actually, the one that won the Booker Prize. Though it . . . he couldn’t find a publisher here. It was published by Bloomsbury, a UK publisher that now operates in America, but he was told the material was too English. That tells you something.

JM: That phrase you just used, “what the novel can do.”  Can I ask about that in another sense: Is there anything that today you think the novel is for, specifically?

JW: Yes. I think it’s for a lot. One of the phrases I’m very fond of is the famous one that comes in Henry James’ letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, where he defends essentially his idea of what the modern novel can do against his idea of the limitations of the historical novel. The phrase he comes up with is this compound phrase “the present palpable intimate.” I think it’s still something which I hold fast to. Present, because obviously, the novel needs to be set in the contemporary world, has its traffic with the contemporary. Palpable, because it’s full of concreteness and density and all the rest. And the intimate, above all for me, the intimate, which I don’t think needs to be limited to the domestic. That’s the mistake that perhaps an experimentalist might assume, that “The intimate must mean only domestic settings.” But, the expiration of the “present palpable intimate” along with what I would call, what you might call a sort of “circularity” of the novel form. I mean by that that we’re surrounded by discourses that are very efficient at analyzing a contemporary sign world, the world of the spectacle. 

That’s been one of the enormous benefits, it seems to me, of the last thirty-forty years.  What the novel can do, you might define it in circular terms: it justifies itself by making an inquiry which only it can do. It doesn’t need to, I think, be infused with, and this is one of the things I don’t like about Franzen, for instance. I don’t think it needs to borrow the language, the languages of theory or cultural studies. It will make its own formal justification. So I would, yeah, I think there’s a limitless amount that the novel can do, especially in this world almost entirely dominated by film, especially by the rapid editing of film, the one-and-a-half minute scene and so on.

JM: It’s very refreshing to hear you say, especially now, in the face of things like film and the proliferation of these other discourses. So, it sounds like you think maybe the role the novel can play or its power is not something that’s endangered.  Some people will speak gravely about a bleak future for it.

JW: Yeah, I don’t see why it should be. There is this obvious difficulty that it lives somewhat in the shadow of, and here I would concur with the experimentalists, it lives in the shadow of that enormous period of its great success and centrality in the nineteenth century. And I don’t see any way in which that could possibly be recovered. But I’m not at all pessimistic about its future.

JM: I think one thing that everybody would like to know is if there are any majorly undervalued writers today: people we should be reading that we don’t know about. And what about them makes them vital as far as you’re concerned?

JW: Well, as I say, I mentioned Hollinghurst, who no doubt will be known to some of you and not to others. An American writer who I think is somewhat underappreciated because he doesn’t write very much but who I like a lot is Norman Rush. I think he’s had his share of praise and his first novel, Mating, won, I think, the National Book Award. But he produces a novel about every eight or nine years. The last one, Mortals, came out two years ago. But he’s, I think, an extraordinary American writer: political, intelligent, highly verbal. I mean, the style exists at a high level of polish. And until, quite recently, unusual among American novelists for not being that interested in America. All of his fiction has been set outside of America, which can be refreshing in itself, given the sort of --you know, there’s a nice phrase of Bellow’s from an essay he wrote in the sixties in which he talks about how, we’re all, he says, something like medieval, renaissance patrons commissioning their own portraits. We actually love to read portraits of ourselves because we’re so in love with the idea of the complexity of our culture. I think you can see something like that going on with this obsessive presentism that you get in contemporary fiction. That is, I think, an element of the hysterical realism that I was talking about. 

So yes, a novelist like Rush, who’s written three books about Americans in Botswana, is an oddity. But I think he will be remembered.

JM: Do you think in terms of greatest writers? Do you ever single people out in your mind as those most likely to emerge as the greatest writers of our time, or is that not a congenial habit of thought?

JW: I was actually just thinking about this yesterday and thinking that, a writer who in some ways temperamentally I’m not especially drawn to but who I think has undeniable talent and brilliance, would be someone like David Foster Wallace who, I think, anything could happen with him. Rather as, in a younger version is the case with Zadie Smith, who after all is only twenty-nine. It would seem, it seems hard to imagine that Foster Wallace won’t continue to be a centrally important talent over the next twenty or thirty years, and I was thinking dismayingly, because I’ve written, I wrote a mixed review of Infinite Jest and then I bundled him into the hysterical realism package. And I was thinking dismayingly as I walked through the airport actually, last night it occurred to me: people like me always look like fools in the end. (Audience laughs) Look at the history of criticism. It’s no good, you can’t, there’s no point in just keeping your finger in the dike. There’s a sort of historical inevitability about the kind of experiment that Foster Wallace is doing, for sure.

JM: Well, here’s something safer maybe: Who is timeless? Who are the writers you find yourself re-reading and re-re-reading?

JW: Do you mean contemporary or . . .?

JM: Possibly contemporary, but maybe older?

JW: Well, it won’t come as a surprise to you, Jesse, and to those of you who have read my reviews, to know that I do re-read Saul Bellow a great deal. I don’t think one needs to make any special claims for him at this point. Though, I was surprised at his death and I think he would have been surprised by the extraordinary variety of contemporary testament there was. I mean, it came from all areas; it wasn’t just fogeys like me. Dave Eggers wrote a surprising thing in Slate about Bellow. In England, I was surprised by the range of writers, poets, who felt that he had been an important presence. But I read and re-read Seize the Day and Herzog and I think: they’ll obviously be central works. 

Then, going far back I have a particular love of Chekhov, which I hope I’ll be able to reveal tonight and of Tolstoy too. I won’t go on, because . . .

JM: I wonder if we can talk a bit about criticism. About the future of criticism, or more specifically, what we should do about the gap that’s long been opening up between academic and journalist criticism. I don’t want to say journalistic criticism, because that sounds pejorative, as does academic criticism. These terms make each other sound terrible. What keeps academics from getting a real hearing? What should change, do you think, to enable academic critics once again to get a wider audience? Or is there anything on the other side that journalist critics need to learn from their academic counterparts?

JW: Yeah, I think that’s a very good, a very good question. Well, the students among you perhaps aren’t particularly familiar with the history of criticism in the twentieth century.  There clearly was a time up until say, the end of the fifties, up until the end of the new criticism, when criticism and creative work, fiction and poetry, went hand in hand and actually sort of needed each other. The new criticism is the obvious example. But it’s hard to talk about modernism without talking about the importance of the criticism produced by those writers themselves. Eliot would be an obvious example, or even a man of letters like Edmund Wilson, who was around to produce the first review of Hemingway in America, the first review of The Wasteland and so on. His championship, say, of Finnegan’s Wake was, I think, very important in the States. Then obviously what you get, and I don’t think theory is at all the culprit here, what you get after the war and in the sixties is probably the inevitable professionalization of criticism and a gradual separation, in which academic thought goes one way, the writers go another way, and you can see this now in universities where the two camps keep--not always, I don’t think so in a place like Kenyon--but they keep their distance. As if they might sort of infect each other. Often they’re actually sort of housed in separate buildings, just in case the viruses might (laughs) mingle in the air. 

That seems to me a shame, so when you ask what might be done to bridge this gap, it’s not simply that both camps might attend better than they do to the educated common reader, but that also, I think, academic criticism might better attend to creation, to the business of what it means to be a creative writer.  Whether that would, I can’t say, whether that would involve, say, a greater attention to intention, to crediting a writer’s intentions.  Which, after all, is to credit the made-ness of something, I mean its status as an aesthetic artifact, or whether it might also be to attend strongly, more strongly, to the evaluative, to what you could call the aesthetic success. I mean, if you think about it, the one thing that writers, the first thing that writers are interested in is “Is something good or not, does it work or not?” If you say to a writer, “I think you should read X,” then the question is “Is she worth it? How good is she? Is he a good writer?” It’s not obviously the first thing that would occur to an academic. Maybe because it’s already been canonically settled. You don’t go around thinking to yourself, how good is the Portrait of a Lady? I mean, it’s there, you teach it, you’ve been teaching it, it’s a great work. 

Maybe because of a theoretical aversion to what can seem like connoisseurship or impressionism of the old school, you know, the sort of John Bailey-esque kind of thing of patting a work on the head for its good qualities or putting a thumbs down for its bad qualities.  That can be a sort of lazy exercise.   But, for my mind, that’s something where if academic criticism were able to rethink its task as a sort of handmaiden to the emergence of creative literature.

JM: I wonder if you have any ways you’re conscious of of keeping your evaluations from becoming too impressionistic, or from becoming too impressionistic for you. Clearly, you do a good job of filling this gap; you’re the one who fills it, maybe. So if this is the problem, to bridge this difference, I wonder if there’s something you keep in mind when you do it.

JW: I think one way you can do it, that’s to say, how do you avoid simply being a judging machine? And I think it’s one of the real problems about having a career in journalistic criticism, to use that phrase. The danger is simply that you’ll be there for thirty or forty years and someone will bring a tray of goodies, or baddies, and put them in front of you and say, “Write the New Roth, here you go, want your judgment. The new Rushdie.” You have to avoid that in some way, obviously the deepest possible kind of historical vision will be an important aspect of avoiding the merely impressionistic, so that you can take a Rushdie novel and try to connect it to strains in magic realism, swerve away from realism and so on. 

And then, I think not to be afraid of, let the reader catch up a bit.  Not to be afraid of using some academic rigor, philosophical rigor if necessary to discuss the ideology of a book, the form of a book, whatever you need.

JM: To come back to another point that you raised, this question of the relationship between the creative and the critical, it’s odd that we tend to think about these things as being distinct and obviously ruinous to criticism when we think of them as being distinct. But I do notice a tendency for, for example, new or young writers that I have in some of my classes to think if they become too critical it will destroy their creative capacities. I wonder if you have any thoughts about the relationship in your mind or in your own writing between your creative and your critical capacities.

JW: Yeah, well it may have destroyed mine (laughs), but I don’t think it needs to destroy anyone’s. It was a strange thing when my novel came out to read this implication in review after review. This weird idea. If you think of it in terms of, suppose you’ve been living in France for ten years or something. It would be strange to assume that that would--you wouldn’t necessarily assume that you would then emerge speaking fluent French--but it would be strange to assume that because you’d been doing that that you necessarily wouldn’t speak any French. If you think analogously, it's sort of odd to assume if you’ve been swimming in fiction for twenty to twenty-five years and thinking about it and writing about it that that would be a disqualification to writing it at all. I don’t see why there should be a split between the critical and creative functioning. 

I mean, think of someone like Henry James, in which clearly enough, a super-vigilant consciousness accompanies always the creative effort of producing those fictions, such that the verbal surface of the criticism, at least for me, is pretty much indistinguishable from the verbal surface and verbal depth of the fiction. I get equal pleasure from reading a short story by James or an essay on Maupassant or Flaubert or whoever it is. Again, if we think about criticism not as either a journalistic thing or as an academic thing, but as a creative thing, then of course, we’re properly inserted, aren’t we, into the great lineage of criticism which, from Johnson and Coleridge and Virginia Woolf and James and Elliot and so on is actually a coupling of the two faculties.

JM: Right, so being a critic of it shouldn’t hurt, but what about being a teacher of it?  This is something that you’ve been doing relatively recently--you come at literature in different institutional settings and through different roles. Have you found that teaching fiction has made you think differently about either writing it or being a critic of it? 

I should say, this should probably be my last question and then once you’ve answered this one, maybe we should open things up to a larger discussion.

JW: You know, I can’t say it has. I can only say that I’ve benefited greatly from being able to take fiction at a slower pace than--everything is so rushed in journalism, you know how it is. You’ve got to do the new Naipaul and you think, it would be really nice to be able to re-read A House for Mr. Biswas, but you have to do the review in two weeks’ time and maybe you get halfway through Biswas and then you have to start writing. To be able, then, to say I’m going to take Biswas and spend three weeks teaching it at 150 pages a week or whatever it is. A month thinking about it is an extraordinary benefit. Not one, as I say, that is open very often to the professional reviewer. I can’t see that there’s any harm in it. The slight addendum would be something I don’t do, which is the teaching of creative writing and that’s a different can of worms.

JM: Well, thank you very much for answering my questions. Let’s see what questions other people have. I should say I’ve been asked to repeat peoples’ questions because we’re recording this and it seems that your questions won’t be picked up by the microphone, so I apologize for parroting you after you ask your question. Yeah? 

Guest: You mentioned the importance of honing criticism as a creative force. How do you suggest students and potential writers go about doing this?  By reading the critics or trying to develop their own criticisms? It’s clear it’s not enough to just say I do or don’t like this.

JW: Yeah, absolutely.

JM: Oh, I’m not sure I can repeat that. You know what I’m going to do, I’m just going to go over here. Can you repeat your question?

Guest: Certainly. How do writers make themselves better critics? (Audience laughs)

JW: Admirable self-editing there. I could learn from you actually and be a lot less wordy in speech. Well, as I say, the first important thing is to remember that academic criticism per se is a relatively recent invention. You know, literary studies as a discipline, as many of you know in this room, doesn’t really get going until about 1900 anyway in universities. And as a professional, the discipline takes even longer to establish itself. So what you have until that moment is criticism done by writers: Dr. Johnson, Coleridge. I am especially fond of Coleridge; I think Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare, or almost anything by Coleridge. Coleridge’s Marginalia, the marginalia alone fills volumes and is still an ongoing project. But, almost anything by Coleridge I think you’ll benefit from. I have a particular fondness for Virginia Woolf. It’s interesting to look–-Hugh Kenner was always very snobbish about Woolf in his book about the decline of English literature, A Sinking Island. He says that Woolf was a “Bloomsbury dilettante” and wasn’t a critic. Well, maybe not in an academic sense, but if you look, and again, this is an ongoing project, the essays are, three volumes now, being sorted by volume because she wrote so much. I’m very fond of Woolf’s criticism. It’s the kind of criticism that will make you, help you to become a better writer and a better writer of criticism. She was writing at a time largely for the TLS, when all the contributions were unsigned. If you think about what that means to a stylist, it means that you have to sign yourself in your style. When Woolf wrote those pieces, her group knew who it was, who was writing, and eventually, a larger readership I guess came to know her voice too. So, you see the importance of voice and of style there.

And I think the third thing I would say, this absolutely goes through Coleridge and Woolf and James, is the importance of thinking metaphorically and of writing metaphorically: of using metaphor as in a sense the way to speak fiction and poetry’s own language to it, back to it. To swim in the fluid that it also swims in.

JM: Other questions?

Guest: I wanted to restate the question about great writers. And I noticed that you answered more in terms of personal predilection or concrete examples. But I was wondering whether there are criteria of greatness and when you read novels and authors whether you think in terms of “Oh yeah, I can see this guy is hitting it big” or something like that and what are your criteria for that judgment? Can you see who is going to last or not?

JW: Well, I don’t think one actually does read contemporary fiction like that. I mean, it would be strange if one did. I think I would have become a very sort of ossified creature if I were reading, say, Foster Wallace or Alice Munro and thinking “Yeah, here is a great writer.” I mean, some of that is just the enforced language of the critic and I can assure you it does become tiresome sometimes, always to have an opinion about something. So, I don’t think there’s any need to be ashamed of personal predilection, nor is there any reason to be ashamed of the subjectivity of what we do. I mean, of the lack of apparently objective criteria. 

I don’t mean by that that we simply inhabit a relativistic universe in which it’s not permissible even to speak that language. I mean that, obviously enough if you have criteria their status is difficult to prove. My idea of greatness will doubtless be different from yours. Again, help here, particularly to the young writer, is to see what other writers have said. Why shouldn’t we respect their judgments if they’re themselves working in this area and seem to have highly developed sensibilities themselves? I mean, it’s interesting to know what Flaubert thought of Moliere or what Woolf thought of Arnold Bennett and so on. We should set considerable store by those judgments.

JM: We have time for one last question.

Guest: I’m interested in your attempt to define realism, and I’d like to understand it better.  If I understand correctly, what you’re saying, against those who would say that realism is a kind of genre, you want to say no, it’s the central language of fiction and you could say that a successful fiction is a variation on the theme of realism. So, to understand that better, though, I’d like to know what realism is not. It seemed that, you said that even in a way it goes back to Shakespeare. So what then would successful literature be that’s not realism? And more interestingly, why not? Would Wallace Stevens, would lyric poetry be realism and if not, why not? Would Beckett be realism and if not, why not? And how does that help us to understand what you mean by realism?

JW: I think that’s exactly right. I’m glad you brought up Beckett and lyric poetry. I mean, it’s slightly difficult to talk about poetry in those terms just because of the weight of the notion of realism. What I’d want to do is stretch out the notion of the credible to include the human. So, obviously enough, if you look at the wide expanse of what’s been done in fiction, we don’t have to hew to the idea of the rounded character. I love, say, W.G. Sebold, who doesn’t really provide that kind of pleasure. I’m very fond of Beckett too, who I think again doesn’t really provide that traditional pleasure. And yet, it’s hard to think of reading Stevens or Beckett or Sebold or Jose Saramark (sic) or whoever you want to choose and not think of a human voice communicating with us. I mean, you can’t read, say, Krapp’s Last Tape or Endgame or a late work like Company. I mean, Company’s as reduced as literature can be: a man lying on his back. And yet, it’s palpably a human voice. A human voice, a human, near the end of life in some distress, recollecting moments which are actually largely Beckett’s own autobiographical moments, somewhat darkly inflected. So, some connection with, above all, the human, seems to me crucial, and that obviously is what one gets so overwhelmingly from Shakespeare.

JM: Doesn’t realizing that make realism seem too small to contain what you’re – it feels like that’s not where the argument--

JW: Yeah, I would agree that’s not where the argument is. The word itself is a distraction and at some point, you’ve so inflated the term that you need just to throw away the balloon; it’s just burst and you need to chuck it away. And maybe you need to think differently in terms of sort of, I don’t know, some kind of constitutive category which literature--several elements, which, the human, freedom, consciousness--these are just things that interest me. I mean, consciousness might be a way of thinking about it. It would be hard to imagine a literature that moved us without some appeal to consciousness.

JM: Thank you very much. Can we all thank James Wood?

(Applause)

JESSE MATZ is an associate professor of English at Kenyon College.


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