Urban Tree

Theatre of the Absurd

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:58:00 +0000

Can theatre do anything about climate change? There is something so utterly perfect about this question, so completely of its time, that the article from which it comes, written by Steve Waters in the Guardian theatre blog, should be preserved in a time capsule, so that it may be studied by historians of the future.

Waters’ words express the very particular hubris of the political artist. Sure, climate change is already in the news every day; journalists, activists, politicians and experts are devoting themselves to it; sure, An Inconvenient Truth already reached millions of viewers, grossing nearly $50 million; but if only I, the immortal artist, would produce a play about it in a small London theatre, then things could really get moving. Waters even admits, incredibly, that part of him hopes that the effects of climate change will be really terrible, to demonstrate the importance of his play!

To have a vastly inflated sense of your own importance is one thing, but the delusions of artists like Waters are really the perfect storm of self-righteousness, opportunism and hypocrisy. When you write a play about climate change, you work will make no impact on the issue; but the issue, on the other hand, can be expected to have some impact on your ticket sales. Topical issue plays are written, at least in part, for the same reason that McDonald’s fills happy meals with tie-in merchandise from the latest blockbuster: not so the meals will sell the movie, but so the movie will sell the meals.

In order to lend authority to his claim that theatre “thrives on topicality,” Waters mentions that “academics are able to date Macbeth from allusions to the gunpowder plot.” If we ignore for a moment that this is only a theory (based almost entirely on Shakespeare’s use of the word “equivocation”), has anyone mentioned to Waters that the events of Macbeth occurred around 400 years before it was written? Maybe Shakespeare was topical and maybe he wasn’t; but clearly, the bulk of his sustenance came from another source.

College Writing for Dummies

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:52:00 +0000

A successful college essay is like a declaration of love: it doesn’t matter what you say as long as it sounds right. Once you’ve discovered a formula that works for you, you can use it again and again and expect similar success.

As well as being like a declaration of love, a good essay is also like a magic trick. When a magician says to you, “I’ll bet you don’t think I can make this elephant disappear,” you are liable to think that, yes, making an elephant disappear sounds pretty hard. It’s important to remember, however, that only the worst magician in history would set herself a problem to which she does not have the solution already. Likewise, you must set yourself a goal that appears impossible, but to which you already possess the answer.

So how do you fabricate an insoluble problem? What you absolutely must not do is withhold information until the end, which is equally unsatisfying in our genre as it is in the whodunit. (Of course, withholding information is permitted, even recommended; but you must pretend throughout that it simply doesn’t exist, or you will ruin the illusion.) Instead, think about the way that you present your question. The magician will not say, ”I’ll bet you don’t think I can distract your attention while I surreptitiously lower this elephant into a hidden cavity beneath the stage.” So frame your problem in terms very different from your eventual solution. You might find it helpful to locate a writer who disagrees with you, so that you may establish your problem in their terms before slowly destroying them point by point. This move is known as the Strangling Vine, or “Stanley Fishing”, to honour the most enthusiastic virtuoso of the form.

After stating your insoluble problem, it’s time to reveal your amazing answer. But wait, not so fast! You can’t just pull it from your sleeve, or we’ll know that you had it there all along! Your argument must appear to spring not from you, but from the ether, by magic. In writing we call our magic “truth”, but it amounts to much the same thing: secretly placing things in unseen locations, and then expressing surprise when you find them there. Locate sources to support your argument and hide behind them. Find sources that oppose your argument, but not too well. Then, in the concerned tones of one who was always rooting for them, and knows they tried their best, but has too much respect for them to spare their feelings, subtly imply that the authors are evil, stupid or insane.

If college writing is an art, it is kin to the Hollywood blockbuster or the video game: like General Patton, it will not tolerate a loser. As a college writer, you take the role of Culture Hero, your reader’s representative in a world of fantasy, the object of your quest nothing less than Truth itself. So just remember that, the next time you’re asked to analyse the imagery in “Ode to a Nightingale” or to take a position on free will versus determinism. Content is always secondary to the story of a victory hard-won.

The Shock of the Novel

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:31:00 +0000

The folks over at The Millions are making a strong bid for the title of “the VH1 of Books Blogs” with their countdown of The Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far). And I thought Sainsbury’s was jumping the gun when they put the Christmas aisle up at the end of August. There’s no detectable humour in the introduction, so I feel relatively safe in assuming that this is an example of our culture’s obsession with hierarchical list-making, rather than an ironic “critique” of it.

The sheer hubris of The Millions’ venture is remarkable. They could have played it safe, and gone with The Decade (So Far), or even The Century (So Far). But the Millennium? Pitting the literary output of the last nine years against almost everything we think of when we think of literature? If Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is the best we can find for number one, then all this list proves is that none of the books on it will likely be remembered in 1000 years at all. Perhaps Franzen can compete with the best of the Nineties’, maybe the Eighties’; but beyond that? It’s like forcing a child into a boxing ring because he can beat up his older brother.

Ours is a generation singularly in love with novelty. No doubt every generation before ours had a similar taste for the ephemeral distraction, but what culture has ever had access to such a limitless supply? VH1 already resembles the TV station in Idiocracy. As The Millions has demonstrated, our literate culture is far from immune to the same social pressures that benefit the The only requirement of novelty is that it should be superficially different from whatever immediately preceded it. Thus we, as a culture, throw accolades on punk because it is not disco, then on new wave because it is not punk. Years later, when we have long forgotten both the curiosity that incited each passing fancy and the saturation that brought it to an end, much of what remember fondly will likely alarm or embarrass us. Chances are high that what will continue to hold our interest will be works that we initially found offputting, confusing or dull.

This is not because people are stupid. In fact it is only natural. As in the famous story of the audience that was driven to riot by Stravinsky ’s Rite of Spring, we cannot hope to understand works of great complexity on the first try. Contrarily, the work that gives away all its secrets at once cannot hope to hold our attention forever. What is foolish, though, is to place too much stock in these early opinions, to appoint ourselves equal (or superior) to history, and to mistake an infatuation for true love. The editors of The Millions could conceivably update their list every month or so, assigning a place for each new darling of the publishing world as the Millennium progresses. The result would reveal plenty about the passage of literary fads, but little to nothing about literary quality.

The shock of novelty dissipates fast, and the need to fill the silence it left can quickly become an addiction. If we must have top twenty lists, is it too much to ask that we focus on the past millennium for a little bit longer? Then at least we could think about the value of books that we’ve had the opportunity to digest. As Nabokov said, there are no good readers, only good re-readers. If we refuse to take the time to understand a work before chasing after the next big sound, we do a disservice both to the old and the new.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just bitter. My favourite book didn’t even get an honourable mention.

A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups: Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Fri, 15 May 2009 11:01:00 +0000

‘Great novels are great fairy tales,’ Vladimir Nabokov declared in Lectures on Literature, a work of criticism compiled posthumously from his Cornell University teaching notes. Such a statement might be deceptive, until you are familiar with what Nabokov took a ‘fairy tale’ to be. A devout stylist, Nabokov was perhaps the last great exponent of ‘art for art’s sake’. As writer and as reader, he formulated an aesthetic approach — influenced by the formalist school which was in vogue before his exile from Russia — that enabled him to satisfy his taste for style before all else. He was derisive of the politico-historical theories that had invaded American academia by the time he began teaching, and dismissive of any reader who delved into literature for morality or history, or even for emotion.

Nabokov treasured the details of style and visual description. For him, to read was to reconstruct the world of the author’s creation, to ‘notice and fondle details’, and to uncover the craft that formed it; which is why he famously said that the only true reader is a rereader. He recommended fostering an ‘aloofness’, a ‘scientific coolness of judgment’ with which the reader may perceive and appreciate the twists and turns of the author’s invented ‘fairytale’ world: ‘Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.’

Ada or Ardor, Nabokov’s last and longest novel, may be the ultimate expression of the author’s ideas (out of respect for him, I shall not say ‘theories’) concerning the nature of fiction. The 80-year story of a love affair between a brother and sister, the novel reveals its indifference to the requirements of reality from the outset, slowly introducing us to a ‘fairytale’ world, known (even by its uniquely self-effacing inhabitants) as Antiterra, in which all the features of our own world are present but skewed.

The alternate universe is a familiar trope in fiction, but whereas the other world ordinarily serves some social or political point (usually about Nazis), Nabokov’s anti-earth appears designed solely to appeal to Nabokov’s idiosyncratic interests. Thus we are introduced to an alternate America separated into three main parts: English, French and Russian (conveniently incorporating all of the author’s favourite languages, which mingle decadently through the characters’ speech). Electricity has been mysteriously banned, not only from use but even from discussion; modern conveniences must therefore be replicated by equally mysterious hydraulic means (in one scene, an incoming ‘dorophone’ call causes a minor plumbing malfunction). The rest of society is likewise trapped in a kind of belle époque order of aristocrats and valets and horse-drawn carriages.

Antiterra is no mere excuse for endless multilingual puns (‘…the poisoned point of Ardis. Arrowhead Manor. Le Château de la Flèche. Flesh Hall.’); it is Nabokov’s ultimate fairytale world, a mine of fondle-able detail (particularly, exhaustively, details of sex — after 300 pages or so, this reader had about as much fondling he could stand), a labyrinth of intellectual mysteries that demand rereading, and a mixture of past and present through which he pays homage to the great fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Beyond the curious details of life in this curious world — the geography, the warped literary history — there is the question of the narrative voice, which combines multiple layers of unreliability in a manner roughly familiar from Lolita. First we have the protagonist, Van, whose limited knowledge and perspective, particularly of Ada’s past, we share; above this, there is the narrator (who, it eventually becomes clear, is also Van, with marginal notes by Ada) who knows more than his young self, and occasionally reveals his greater knowledge, but whose perspective is also limited by subjectivity.

Imitation is another of Nabokov’s favourite things, and Flaubert, Proust, Pushkin, Chekhov all are echoed at one point or another. Strangely, over the work as a whole is cast the shadow of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Nabokov dismissed Joyce’s last novel as a failed experiment; but the theme of incest; the imitation of parents by their children; the uncertain, alternating identity of the narrator(s); the part played by the book itself in its own story; all recall Joyce’s work. There is even a chapter challenging Jung’s approach to the interpretation of dreams, effectively refuting the governing logic of the Wake. It’s almost as if Nabokov is trying to correct Joyce’s mistake.

If this all sounds rather cold and cerebral, it is a bit; an impression which is not eased by Nabokov’s style, which, with its anagrams and alliteration and puns often sounds more like a crossword puzzle than a work of literature. Although a stylist, Nabokov had not the freedom of style of his idol Joyce, and his narrators and characters consequently tend to sound like the same supereducated aesthete (even at the age of twelve and fifteen Ada and Van speak with the extended, pedantic syntax of lecturing professors). It may seem unfair to compare Nabokov with the most virtuosic stylist and, inevitably, find him wanting. But how can we not? He has already informed us that craft is the only commodity of value. In interviews and essays, he was endlessly listing authors and works in order of their greatness, and he cannot be excluded from a game that follows his own rules.

But through the allusions and dense speeches, great humanity shines forth. When Van learns of Ada’s numerous infidelities, he maintains control of his feelings only by replacing his thoughts of Ada with ‘a pantomime of rational thought’, acting numbly, automatically, while absurd thoughts of the psychology of ants and the act of donning shorts. When he is shot in a duel, the writing embodies his dissociation: as the signal is given to fire, Van’s attention is unaccountably taken by the sight of a girl and boy watching in the distance. ‘It was not the chocolate-muncher in Cordula’s apartment, but a boy very much like him, and as this flashed through Van’s mind he felt the jolt of the bullet ripping off, or so it felt, the entire left side of his torso.’

But the suicide of their half-sister Lucette, at once a beautiful piece of writing and the greatest window out of Van and Ada’s narcissistic twin perspective, stands as the book’s most poignant passage. After suffering one last rejection, she ‘tried to think up something amusing, harmless, and scintillating to say in a suicide note. But she had planned everything except the note, so she tore her blank life in two and disposed of the pieces in the W.C.’ Merging and dancing with Lucette’s confused and drug-addled mind, the language toys with her planned fate. She pours herself a glass of ‘dead water from a moored decanter’; after three vodkas her mind begins to ‘swim like hell’; until finally, after going ‘with hardly a splash through a wave that humped to meet her’, she loses sight of the ship, ‘an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph.’

In moments like this, one can certainly see the magic in Nabokov's fairy tale; but what is this magic? The writer, Nabokov tells us, ‘may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter.’ An implicit hierarchy can be detected in his terminology: the storyteller provides infantile ‘entertainment’, ‘mental excitement of the simplest kind’; while ‘a slightly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer’; but the great reader seeks to grasp ‘the individual magic of [the author’s] genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems.’

One cannot help but feel that this schema does a disservice, not only to the writers in the Lectures, but to Nabokov’s own work as well. His analogy with 'enchantment' is peculiar, because it appears to contradict the traditional appeal of magic: not to understand the skill behind the trick, but to fail to understand it. The real work of the magician, successfully disguised, is perceived by the audience as the apparently effortless display of a skill they know to be impossible: making a woman float or an elephant disappear. For a grown adult, who knows that a woman cannot float, an elephant cannot disappear, to be convinced by the evidence of her senses that the impossible has in fact occurred — that is the essence of true enchantment. For the connoisseur, to determine how the trick was carried out provides a particular pleasure of its own, but without that first deception it would be a hollow exercise.

Likewise, it is not our understanding of Nabokov’s craft that makes the finest passages of Ada memorable; it is our experience of their results. It is not Nabokov that we meet on that windy mountaintop; it is the characters — duelling Van, dying Lucette — that he has, through his invisible skill, brought to life before our eyes. In these moments, it is that first reaction, that of the heart, not the head, that recognition of an emotional life analogous to one’s own in the heart of another, which earns the author the title of enchanter.

Art and Reality in The Wire

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 04:17:00 +0000

I was a latecomer to The Wire. I’d been hearing for years about how it was ‘the most amazing show ever’, but people were saying the same about Battlestar Galactica, and, I mean, come on: it’s about robots or something. But when my wife and I finally started watching, we quickly became hooked. Now, obviously the world doesn’t need yet another person saying that The Wire is the best show of all time (so we’ll take that as read). But just what is it that makes it so good?

Jonathan Jones posted something on this topic on his Guardian blog the other day. According to Jones, the realism of The Wire is ‘in creative tension with its self-consciousness as art.’ Now, it could be argued that this statement is equally true of anything at all except (maybe) CCTV footage. The Wire did not invent the tension between realism and technique. In fact, the question of The Wire’s realism really highlights the inadequacy of the term ‘realism’ for discussing this problem — because, on close examination, The Wire is not a particularly realistic show. Jones is right to praise the inventive dialogue, but there isn’t a single aspect of the show which is not affected, and enriched, by that same inventiveness. The Wire may be the most the most intricately designed series in TV history. Is it ‘realistic’ that the internal concerns of the gangsters and the police should mirror each other so perfectly? That Pryzbylewski should become a teacher just in time for the season devoted to the school system? That Omar Little exists?

Reality is governed by randomness. But the reality of The Wire is governed by harmony. And thank god for that: there are quite enough TV shows governed by randomness. The Wire does not present to us a realistic vision of the city of Baltimore, but rather a scale model of the city, by which we may witness the motions of the inhabitants, reduced in complexity for ease of comprehension, in the same way that a mechanical orrery demonstrates the motion of the planets. We may learn a great deal about the workings of a real city from this mechanism, but the demonstration itself is anything but realistic.

But there is more to this harmony than mere education. If The Wire were just about Baltimore politics, it would be interesting, but it would not be art. Obviously The Wire is a very political show, and one can understand hy some, like Jonathan Jones, see its ‘real theme’ as ‘social, moral and political’ (‘just how did this shit get so fucked up?’, as Jones puts it). The poor liberal viewer is assaulted with a string of social problems about which to wring his hands — the drug war, the public school crisis — and even, occasionally, presented with real solutions, like Bunny Colvin’s ‘Hamsterdam’ experiment.

But how is it possible, then, that the show never feels preachy, or simply boring? This, I think, is thanks to its makers’ ability to bring out the emotional resonance of their social commentary. In the future, the real city of Baltimore may continue its decline, or it may improve; but the mechanical Baltimore just goes around and around, endlessly re-enacting the struggle of the individual against the forces of entropy. Every major storyline restates that theme, and in almost every case, the hero wins just enough to prevent catastrophe, but fails enough nothing ever improves. This shit was always fucked up, and it always will be. That the antithetical motives of social concern and aesthetic beauty co-exist in such happy harmony is perhaps The Wire’s greatest achievement.

Scenes from the End of Suburbia

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 23:07:00 +0000

Walking in my in-laws’ neighbourhood in Bothell, Washington, a satellite town orbiting northern Seattle, I came across an increasingly common feature of the local scenery. Hidden from the busy suburban street behind a uniform wooden fence, an entire housing development sits in an island of tranquility. One long street stretches perpendicularly from the main drag, and from it radiate three short stubs of road, their names advertised on shiny new street signs — ‘9th DR SE’, ‘20th DR SE’. Everything here is new. The sour smell of new tarmac still lingers over the freshly-paved road, and the white stripes of the pedestrian crossings glow in the sunlight. All is in place, in fact — the street lamps, bright yellow fire hydrants, large communal mailboxes — except the houses. It’s as if they simply vanished in the night.

The previous occupants of this particular site, my mother-in-law tells me, ran the area’s last remaining family farm. In fact, an aerial photograph of that farm can still be found — the modest house, the pasture, and its tin-roofed stables — on the website of the holdings company that razed it to make room for ‘Muriel’s Landing’, a residential community that fits 22 lots into the space where there was formerly but one. But then, here and elsewhere — this ghost-community is one of three to be found on that street alone — the money simply ran out. Projects all over town have stopped dead. Blocks of condos have been left half-built, the chipboard of their inner walls left to bleach and warp in the sun. The realtor’s webpage for Muriel’s Landing lies in a similar state of abandonment: ‘Coming Fall 2008’, it reads, ‘Construction starting in September, Pre-Sales Available Now!’ Below, four black boxes enclose the words ‘PHOTO COMING SOON’.

The city of Bothell (‘For a Day or a Lifetime’) has grown beyond recognition in the past decade. As the prices of houses and land continued to rise, developers responded by cramming larger and larger homes into smaller and smaller lots. A controversial change in zoning regulations, called ‘lot size averaging’, judges the legality of lot sizes on the average size over a whole development, instead of the individual lots. Thanks to this change, on the newest developments here, monstrous 3,000 square-foot McMansions — many of which are sitting empty — have been packed onto lots more than 25% smaller than code. The parcels on Muriel’s Landing actually stand at a luxurious 9,600 square feet each, which will no doubt be in their favour when the housing market finally recovers.

But for now, nature is restaking its claim. Here on Muriel’s Landing, the expanses of land on which new homes should stand are overgrown once more with weeds and yellowed grass, pasture for whatever grazing animals have littered the new pavement with detritus and excrement. Extending from the earth, thick orange pipes of electrical wires bow sadly in imitation of the long grass that surrounds them, and wooden posts to mark the intended positions of water and sewage lines now seem to serve as makeshift headstones, memorials to a planned but unaccomplished future. The funereal air is heightened by three broad, twisted trees, as yet unfelled, upon which scores of cackling crows have made their own temporary homes.

In the time that I was visiting the site, I was surprised to see first one, then another, and then a third car turn into the empty cul-de-sac and stop. But each time, the drivers merely reversed into the nearest of the dead-end streets and headed straight back out again, turning back the way they had come to correct their wrong turn.

Picture, courtesy of Google Earth Streetview, depicts development at Muriel’s Landing last summer. © 2009 Google.

The Life of Fiction: James Wood’s How Fiction Works

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 23:41:00 +0000

I.
Perhaps because critical theory has rendered the subject so fraught, it is unusual these days to see any literary critic dare define the nature of fiction itself. James Wood, however, is an unusual critic. An aesthete who emerged from academia at the height of the theory invasion, Wood has the air of a refugee. Like a dissident writer exiled from his homeland, he bears the mark of the culture he left behind, both in what he has rejected and what he has embraced.

Wood, who was recently took a new job as book critic for the New Yorker, is regularly referred to as ‘the greatest critic of his generation’, or in similar terms, by the likes of Cynthia Ozick and Norman Rush. Given such success, a book like How Fiction Works seems long overdue. Wood has previously published two collections of critical essays, but he has styled his new work rather differently: not as criticism per se, but as a primer on novelistic form, in the tradition of E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. The book is divided into chapters, each treating a single formal element, such as ‘narration’ or ‘detail’. Although it gives its name to only one of these chapters, in a sense detail is the unacknowledged focus of the book as a whole. Wood is a devotee of detail, whether it be the delicate touches that create our impressions of a character, the subtle balancing of omniscience and subjectivity in third-person narration (‘free indirect style’, for which he has an evident fondness), or the nuance of meaning created by the careful manipulation of word and phrase.

When one speaks of the detail of language, one is really speaking of style, and Wood is a superlative reader of style. His analysis of a short passage from Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, in which the narrator describes the ash at the end of a lit cigar, demonstrates Wood’s sensitivity both to language and to the perpetually uncertain nature of novelistic perspective:

The ash is noticed, and then Bellow comments: “It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man. For it was beautiful. Wilhelm he ignored as well.” … Bellow here seems to imply that Tommy notices the ash, because it was beautiful, and that Tommy, also ignored by the old man, is also in some way beautiful. But the fact that Bellow tells us this is surely a concession to our implied objection: how and why would Tommy notice this ash, and notice it so well, and in these fine words? To which Bellow replies, anxiously, in effect: “Well, you might have thought Tommy incapable of such finery, but he really did notice this fact of beauty; and that it is because he is somewhat beautiful himself.”

Wood draws out his other chosen themes with a similar acuity, including fascinating short histories of common features of the novel, such as the development of modern approaches to consciousness and the Flaubertian use of visual detail. Particularly impressive are the passages in which Wood reveals the depth of his insight by finding fault with some of the faulty platitudes of fictional form. In the chapter on character, for example, he gently but decisively demolishes E.M. Forster’s distinction between ‘round’ and ‘flat’ character, which ‘tyrannises’ readers and novelists with an ‘impossible ideal.’ ‘It is subtlety that matters,’ Wood argues, ‘subtlety of analysis, inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure—and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do.’

But Wood is not the only fine close reader in the literary world; what makes his criticism truly unique is his loyalty to an unusually consistent aesthetic ideal. Although How Fiction Works is structured as a basic formalist primer, Wood uses it also as a platform to unveil his own theory on the nature of fiction. This might represent his clearest debt to critical theory. Wood often demonstrates his familiarity with academic criticism in his reviews, and in this book he goes so far as to name two theorists as his ‘favourite twentieth-century critics’: the formalist Viktor Shklovsky and poststructuralist Roland Barthes. One might say that Wood has borrowed from theorists like these the ‘approach-based’ approach to criticism; but the particular approach that he uses is unlike any to have appeared in academia in the last fifty years. ‘We read fiction,’ he declares, ‘because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on—because it is alive and we are alive.’

For many, however, this unwavering critical stance makes Wood a controversial figure. Wyatt Mason of Harper’s Magazine has accused Wood of condemning celebrity, ‘critic-proof’ writers—the likes of John Updike, Toni Morrison and Don Delillo—in order to promote his own artistic agenda. For Wood’s detractors, his forthright dedication to his personal aesthetic exceeds the critic’s role to judge from a neutral position. He is frequently caricatured as a doctrinaire throwback to the 19th-Century: a well-known article in the journal n+1 called his style ‘the silhouette of an intellectual world that was once rumored to exist.’

Most accusations of elitism or dogmatism made against Wood are based on very weak readings of his work. Laura Miller, literary editor for Salon.com, wrote an article on Wood some years ago that hit all the customary bases: that he uses literature as a surrogate for religion, that he is too serious, that he is too English, that he wants everyone to write like Chekhov, and so on. Slurs like these have taken the aspect of religious mantras: whether they accurately describe anyone who really exists is of secondary importance to the feeling of comfort they provide to the writer. Nevertheless, Wood’s standards often seem unreasonably strict. Wood is a tireless promoter of literary realism, and his disfavor for diversions that fail to meet his realist requirements—either by being unacceptably unliterary, like the thrillers of Cormac McCarthy, or by being improperly avant-garde, like the postmodern absurdism of Thomas Pynchon—can appear, at times, stubbornly uncompromising, as if he is backing himself further and further into the narrowing cul-de-sac of so-called ‘literary fiction’.

II.
Wood is an analytical thinker at heart, and therefore a theorist by inclination. As the title indicates, he intends his book not merely to be a compilation of observations about fiction, but as an enquiry into fiction’s fundamental nature. ‘If the book has a larger argument,’ he writes in the introduction, ‘it is that fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.’ To say that fiction is artifice will cause no controversy, and at its best Wood’s book serves as an ingenious examination of some of the methods by which such artifice is created; but Wood’s latter claim, that fiction is rooted in verisimilitude, is considerably more divisive, and it is an argument to which Wood returns again and again throughout the book, to worry at its edges.

The place of realism in fiction has always been an important part of Wood’s criticism. In a review of Toni Morrison’s Paradise, published in 1997, Wood claimed that, ‘since fiction is itself a kind of magic, the novel should not be magical.’ In other words, because to read a novel is an act of belief, a novel must not include anything which is unbelievable. The assurance of this remarkable assertion masks its incoherence: how could anyone today enjoy Homer or Shakespeare in any but the most abstract of terms? How could Wood himself explain the aesthetic pleasure he evidently derives from the Bible? Certainly there is no space in an aesthetic like this for Kafka or Beckett, both of whose work Wood endorses in How Fiction Works.

In the intervening decade, Wood’s defense of realism has grown considerable nuance, and Wood slowly develops it as he works his way through each chapter. He takes on a number of ‘anti-realists’ in the course of the book, culminating in the final chapter, entitled ‘Truth, Convention, Realism’, in which he mounts a direct assault on the theory of Roland Barthes. The crux of the debate lies in the ability of literary realism to achieve its purpose. For Barthes and his followers, fiction can never succeed in representing reality, and a realist who makes the attempt will merely produce a subjective illusion that naively reinforces bourgeois values. Rather than signifying reality, realism, for Barthes, signifies the intention to resemble reality, and results in nothing but a naïve illusion.

Wood’s response to this argument is subtle. While it is clear from Wood’s earlier essays that he had a fairly orthodox understanding of the word ‘realism’, in recent years he has developed a decidedly idiosyncratic definition, one which permits him to assimilate a greater variety of fiction into the category of ‘realism’ than seems intuitively plausible. Even the most unrealistic works of fiction, Wood claims, owe a debt to realism, because the emotional ‘truth’ of any story—what Wood refers to as ‘lifeness’—results from its likeness, literal or metaphorical, to real life.

Once we throw the term ‘realism’ overboard, we can account for the ways in which, say, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Hamsun’s Hunger and Beckett’s Endgame are not representations of likely or typical human activity, but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts. This, we say to ourselves, is what it would feel like to be outcast from one’s family, like an insect (Kafka), or a young madman (Hamsun), or an aged parent kept in a bin and fed pap (Beckett).

It is here that Wood’s real stake in this debate emerges. He is attracted to Barthes’ formalism, but whereas Barthes thought of style as an end in itself (he called literature ‘the adventure of language’), Wood sees ‘truth’—emotional truth, one might say—as the goal of fiction, and style as the means. With this quality he calls ‘lifeness’, Wood founds a theoretical basis for evaluating the content of fiction in emotional terms.

But the argument by which Wood relates this emotive quality to realism is little more than a sleight of hand. ‘Lifeness’, just like ‘realism’ and ‘how things are’, still requires that fiction refer to reality, in other words that it be like reality. The greatest flaw in this argument is its obvious partisanship: ‘Realism of this kind—lifeness—is the origin,’ Wood claims. ‘It teaches everyone else; it schools its own truants: it is what allows magical realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers, to exist.’ Wood provides no explanation, apart perhaps from the desire for variety, for an author to choose a metaphorical approach to the representation of ‘life’, like Kafka, Beckett and Hamsun, rather than approaching it literally, like James, Flaubert and Chekhov. More alarmingly, perhaps, it disconnects the novel from the entire history of storytelling that preceded it: why must the novel be realistic when Homer, the Bible, and Shakespeare are not?

Wood claims that the falsity Barthes sees in realist fiction is present only in derivative novels made up of dead conventions. ‘Convention itself,’ he says, ‘like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying. So, the artist is always trying to outwit it. But in outwitting it, the artist is always establishing another dying convention.’

That is why the complaint that realism is no more than a grammar or set of rules that obscures life is generally a better description of le Carré or P.D. James than it is of Flaubert of Isherwood: when a style decomposes, flattens itself down into a genre, then indeed it does become a set of mannerisms and often pretty lifeless techniques... And of course, the most economically privileged genre of this kind of largely lifeless ‘realism’ is commercial cinema, through which most people nowadays receive their idea of what constitutes a ‘realistic’ narrative.

But in claiming sympathy with Barthes’ position, Wood has inadvertently transformed it: Barthes argued that realist authors were at fault for falsely claiming to be able to represent reality, but Wood is indicting thriller writers for failing, unlike realists, to represent reality well enough. The reference to commercial cinema is symptomatic of Wood’s failure to perceive the depth of his disagreement with the anti-realists. It is very unlikely that the audience to the average Hollywood movie would describe the experience as particularly realistic; to the contrary, if one were to point out a cliché or a plot hole the likely response would be that ‘it’s just a movie.’ In other words, the audience recognizes the film’s lack of verisimilitude, even as they derive emotional pleasure from it.

For Wood, ‘literary fiction’ is the capacious storehouse, ‘the origin’, from which writers of genre fiction pilfer all their stories’ vitality; but a number of prominent recent novels have demonstrated that the exchange can run both ways. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (which Wood reviewed favorably in The New Republic) draws a beautiful meditation on the human condition from the story of a group of clones bred to be organ donors. This story is not only science fiction, it is cliché science fiction: The Island, an idiotic action blockbuster directed by idiotic action director Michael Bay (and released in the same year as Ishiguro’s book), had the exact same premise. The two works are not, of course, of equal value, but there is nothing inherently idiotic in the premise of The Island, only in its execution. In other words, Ishiguro did not take a meaningless story and invest it with emotion; he took a situation already rich with significance and revealed its most affective possibilities.

Wood’s rejection of genre fiction is closely tied to his dismissal of what he calls ‘the essential juvenility of plot.’ The reader will search in vain for a chapter on plot in How Fiction Works, and Wood barely discusses the matter at all (in an interview he has called this his ‘deliberate extravagance’). It is a shame, considering Wood’s perspicacity in the case of other faulty truisms of narrative, such as the ‘round’ and ‘flat’ character, to see him thoughtlessly embrace the equally specious notion that there is a device called a ‘plot’ which novelists improve their work by deleting. But plot is no more than the pattern of a story’s events, and it is no less important in literary fiction than it is in a thriller. In To the Lighthouse, for example, Virginia Woolf crafts passages of great emotional life, but it is the structuring irony of the trip to the lighthouse—prohibited in the first part and imposed, years later, in the last—which forms the foundation of the book’s emotional power.

It is perhaps his impatience with plot that led to the failure of Wood’s novel, The Book Against God. The story, buoyed by Wood’s characteristically fine writing, pulses intermittently with great sparks of life (one can picture his delight at describing a coffee maker as ‘the catarrhal machine’), and occasionally rises to emotional peaks of great poignancy, particularly in the beautiful final chapters. In the penultimate chapter, the protagonist, Thomas Bunting, spends the evening with his estranged wife as part of his ‘marital probation’; after dinner she plays a record, without explaining her choice. For some time Tom listens carefully to the music, but his attention is gradually drawn to the barely audible sound of the pianist breathing in the background.

Yet there was another sound, not musical. Something like a man sniffing. It was the pianist breathing!—heavy, almost impatient, as if he were wrestling with the music to secure its great medial serenity. The pianist was breathing quite hard through his nose as he wrestled with this sweet sound. It was the sound of hard work, but it was also the sound of existence itself—a man’s ordinary breath, the give and take of the organism, our colourless wind of survival, the zephyr of it all.

Tom is captivated to the point of tears. ‘It’s the pianist breathing,’ he says. ‘That’s what you wanted me to hear.’ But he is wrong: she had assumed he would recognize the piece of music that she had played on the night they first met, and his error ruins the evening. This is a great moment, and in a short story it would have worked magnificently; but a novel cannot run on beautiful passages alone. Every moment cannot be a climax, and without a structuring device like Woolf’s Lighthouse, the intermediary sequences of Wood’s novel lack a sense of momentum, and become dull and essayistic. The absence of a discussion of plot in How Fiction Works does not seriously mar the quality of Wood’s observations. Indeed, he frequently gives special attention to unacknowledged functions of plot, such as when characters are revealed through the evidence of their actions. But in a book about the craft of fiction it is a costly extravagance, an omission that makes an unfulfilled promise of the title.

III.
It should be fair to say at this point that Wood’s theory of the novel is not without its limitations. His partisanship for realism and his distaste for what he considers ‘plot-driven’ narratives seriously reduce his vision of the possibilities of fiction. Because of this, he will almost certainly never be the kind of critic who helps change the face of literature, in the way that Edmund Wilson did by defending Joyce and Hemingway. But there is more than one kind of critic, and Wood’s kind, never without value, is perhaps particularly vital to us today. We live in an iconoclastic age, in which canons have lost their authority and each new book is proclaimed the next big thing. Every new writer seems to want to be the next James Joyce, to ‘push the boundaries of fiction,’ as if this, following formalists like Barthes, were an end in itself. Heidi Julavits of The Believer spoke for these writers when she chastised critics like Wood for disparaging certain books as ‘overly ambitious’—as if the presence of ambition, of whatever kind, should be enough to earn its author praise.

Wood does not push fiction’s boundaries: he searches instead for its gravitational center. He is, in effect, not so much a practical critic as he is a practical critical theorist, perhaps the last of his kind. With his eye for form he distinguishes great technical achievement from the stylistic chaos of the ‘overly ambitious’, and the advice he gives in this book will no doubt prove of great value to budding writers. The historian in him continually returns to find more pleasure and more depth in great works of the past, preserving our grasp on a tradition of great beauty in fiction. But more fundamentally, with his appeal to the concept of ‘lifeness’ Wood draws us closer to an understanding of the nature of that beauty: that mysterious quality, at once indefinable and unmistakable, which allows a great work of fiction to glow with the same emotional intensity as the most profound of lived experience. It may be that Wood has been too narrow in his definition of this quality, but we should be grateful that he is there to defend its necessity.

If Wood can appear to us sometimes as an overbearing teacher, it is only because he makes us work hard, as writers and as readers. In a culture that mollifies us always with the promise of short cuts and easy answers, he reminds us of the effort and genius that go into producing fiction of lasting quality. Whatever great work of the future the next Edmund Wilson unveils to the public, it will likely bear little resemblance to literary realism. But to outlast its publicity, it will have to match the greatest of realist fiction in technique and emotional resonance. It must still come alive, in other words, rather than merely excite us, like so much ambitious new fiction, with the glamour of its newness. Wood reminds us that to tell a story that stirs and delights, to explore the beauty that derives from the life of fiction, is a noble ambition in its own right.

Sins of the Father: P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:46:00 +0000

Paul Thomas Anderson has an abiding interest in guilt. All of his films revolve in one way or another around its characters’ struggle with their consciences, but in his latest film he has surely expanded this theme into its ultimate iteration: There Will Be Blood wallows in guilt; bathes in it; dives, sinks and ultimately drowns in it. While There Will Be Blood perhaps lacks the range of emotion experienced in Magnolia and Boogie Nights, it more than makes up for it in depth. In oil man Daniel Plainview (played with a characteristic mix of caricature and subtlety by Daniel Day-Lewis), Anderson has created a figure of masculine weakness to rival Mr. Ramsay or Charles Foster Kane: a proud, stubborn egoist with a streak of vanity, and an impenetrable emotional distance that conflicts unattractively with a powerful hunger for affection. Scarcely off-screen for the film’s 158-minute duration, Daniel reveals his ugly secrets to us with a paradoxical mixture of intimacy and ambiguity.

The film sees Anderson return to a central theme of his earlier films, Sydney (or Hard Eight) and Magnolia: that of a flawed paternal figure, whose child acts both as witness to and victim of his failings. We recognise the moral territory we’re in when a rival oil man leans down to Daniel’s 12-year-old son, H.W., and warns him to sign a contract with his father: ‘Make sure you don’t get swindled, boy: get half of what your dad is making!’ In perhaps the fulcrum point of the film, Daniel is forced for commercial reasons to confess his sins and take baptism. Sheepishly approaching the altar, Daniel endures with obvious humiliation the exhortations of his nemesis (the erratic young preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), whom Daniel beat and humiliated some time previously) to confess his sins. But as the ritual continues (Sunday slapping his face with evident satisfaction), Daniel is swept up by it: ‘I abandoned my boy!’ he cries, and from the look on his face it appears suddenly to dawn on him that such is the case; by the end he is crying out for the sacrament. But has the experience changed him? Will it prompt a reformation? Nothing in this world is so simple. But for that moment of recognition, one can never be sure for how much of the scene Daniel’s confession is even sincere.

There Will Be Blood is a symphony of guilt, whose first movement appears to last an hour or more. Anderson, virtuoso of the three-hour film, proved his ability to draw the tension of a single act to breaking-point in Magnolia, which has a sequence around the third quarter that should earn the film a warning label for pregnant mothers and the elderly. But to place such a episode in the film’s first act shows considerable daring, and it is hard not to sigh with relief when he pulls it off. The arduous, unidirectional progress of the first hour mirrors the single-minded determination of the protagonist. As we cast about for possible directions for the story to go, it seems only logical that Daniel’s son (adopted after the death of his biological father in one of Daniel’s early wells) will end up dead, simply because he is the only thing that Daniel seems to care about except for the discovery and extraction of oil. What eventually happens, however, is both unexpected and perfect: at once less appalling and more challenging, it provides a glimpse into Daniel’s dark heart that prepares the ground for the film’s more emotionally complex second half. The front-heavy structure also creates the impression of a plot spiralling in ever-decreasing circles: instead of the traditional rise in action, Daniel Plainview’s fate rolls out, with only brief, promising feints, in a continuous downward slope.

Unusually for a film so centrally concerned with the theme of guilt, the viewer is constantly left wondering if Daniel himself actually feels guilty, or even if he feels anything at all. This question strikes the heart of the film’s most vexing ambiguity: one is never entirely certain that Daniel really possesses a shred of humanity at all. Anderson has named The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as a reference, but whereas Bogart’s character in that film is unquestionably destroyed by his growing greed, Daniel Plainview appears to emerge fully formed in the film’s opening moments, the story’s major interest lying not in the development of his character, but in a constant fluctuation between revelation and obfuscation. By the film’s end, Daniel effectively denies that he was ever a complete human being with a conscience and a heart. Are we to believe him? I have no idea. The question is irresolvable, and it is this ambiguity that will, I believe, prove the source of this film’s enduring fascination.

Pinning down Godot

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 07:57:00 +0000

HAMM:
We're not beginning to... to... mean something?
CLOV:
Mean something! You and I, mean something!
(Brief laugh.)
Ah that's a good one!
—Endgame by Samuel Beckett

While in negotiations to take the part of Pozzo in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Ralph Richardson asked the writer if Godot, the absent figure for whom Estragon and Vladimir perpetually wait, was a symbol for God. Beckett replied ‘that if by Godot I had meant God I would [have] said God, and not Godot. This seemed to disappoint him greatly.’ Beckett was exasperated throughout his life by his commentators’ attempts to attribute symbols and meanings to his plays. Despite Beckett’s (often vociferous) denials, the trend continues: the Wikipedia entry for the play includes a section devoted to different interpretations, including everything from political allegories to homosexual subtexts.

When it comes to ‘appreciating’ great works of art, our culture seems to suffer from a strange cognitive dissonance. In ordinary circumstances—that is, when we’re actually sat in the theatre or we have the book in our hands—I doubt that there are many of us that have trouble simply enjoying themselves. Few would surely claim that Waiting for Godot is not a funny and moving play. But as soon as the work is to be considered as something important and valuable, being funny and moving suddenly becomes inadequate. In order to be important and valuable, it must mean something. But what does it mean to ‘mean something?’ And why is it so important anyway?

In practice, ‘meaning’ in this context seems to refer almost exclusively to abstract symbolism of one kind or another: ‘Godot’ equals ‘God,’ ‘Pozzo’ equals ‘the British Empire,’ and so on. There is something perverse about applying this kind of symbol hunting to a work of art. As an approach to art, it has a remarkable capacity for rendering the amusing dull and the transcendent drab. Like a steamroller, it crushes the colour and infinite variety of art into a homogenous grey plane of political disputes and biographical minutiae. (Here’s another recent example.) But it is perhaps this homogenising tendency that ultimately makes it so appealing. After all, to approach a work of art as an aesthetic object requires a great deal of sensitivity: the reader must essentially reinvent her critical framework for each text, intuiting the substance and technique of each specific author. But the symbolic-didactic approach requires no such thing: instead of tailoring her approach to suit the work, the critic can hammer at the work until it fits her approach. And in the blink of an eye, art—once the protected reserve of the emotional experience—is conquered by the over-confident rational mind.

But as Beckett said, if he wanted to talk about God, why wouldn’t he just do so? Why is the simple transposition of one thing (God) for another (Godot) seen as so clever and important? It seems to me that Godot represents something far more mysterious than mere God: he’s the MacGuffin. This was Alfred Hitchcock’s name for an object in his films that all the characters want but is of no real importance. The MacGuffin—a microfilm, a statue, a secret message—is a blank slate on which the audience places its own significance. The protagonist’s struggle for the object is thus universalised in a way that would be impossible if he were chasing after something specific. Like Hitchcock, Beckett strived to create universal experience, and I think this is why he fought these symbolic associations so strenuously.

The symbolist, seeking to rationalise Godot, says, ‘this play is about God,’ smiles at his own cleverness, and never thinks about it again. To rationalise the play is to kill it, to rob it of everything that made it interesting in the first place. It is the Cliffs Notes approach to literature: great for producing essay responses, but terrible for anything else. Waiting for Godot is not an argument; it is an experience. It is true that faith in God and biblical imagery are evoked during the course of the play, but that doesn’t mean that the play symbolises Man’s relationship with God: in fact it means the opposite, that Man’s relationship with God symbolises the play.

The word ‘symbol’ is confusing here; instead we might requisition T.S. Eliot’s phrase, ‘the objective correlative.’ To say that Pozzo symbolises the British Empire, for example, is to create an abstract association, like that between the colour red and the command to stop. It is not intrinsic, but conventional. In contrast, Vladimir’s theological musings and the tramps’ endlessly postponed meeting with Godot both produce the same paradoxical feelings about one’s essential pointlessness and existential hopelessness: they are objective correlatives of the same emotion. (It may be pointed out that my definition of the effects produced by these objective correlatives is rather vague and unimaginative; this is true, but it misses the point: no definition would be satisfactory, because if you could simply put the effect of Waiting for Godot into words then the play would be redundant.)

To say that art’s purpose is to entertain is anathema to the scholar, ‘entertainment’ being associated with frivolous distractions like roller coasters or Mills and Boon. But there is more than one kind of entertainment. To be sure, this frivolous kind exists and holds the world in its sway: how else could one describe the pleasures afforded by American Idol or Big Brother? But the spiritual nourishment that one receives from a great work of art like Waiting for Godot (previously discussed here) is entertainment also, albeit entertainment of quite different and superior kind. Beauty and spiritual consolation: are these not sufficient reasons for a work of art to earn its place?

Image taken from Waiting for Godot directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and starring Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy, available as part of the Beckett on Film series.

A Holiday from Ourselves: literature and emotional well-being

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:40:00 +0000

Is the purpose of fiction to offer escape into a world of fantasy, or to confront harsh realities? This is a pretty shop-worn question. The traditional Manichean assumption is that light, disposable, low entertainments offer the former; while serious, important, high art does the latter. Obviously the truth must be more complex, but how does one prove it, and what is the function of escapism or harsh reality in literature in the first place? A fascinating article by Blake Morrison in Saturday’s Guardian sheds new light on the issue. In fact, ‘The Reading Cure’ doesn’t exactly focus on this issue at all: instead, it’s about ‘bibliotherapy,’ the experimental use of books and book groups to alleviate pain and mental distress. The programme, underway in Merseyside in the north of England, has apparently met with great success, with patients reporting a reduced experience of pain and psychiatric patients showing noticeable improvement.

One might be excused for being wary of the idea of literature as therapy: the injection of literature into the self-help culture has not always had happy results. When Joyce Carol Oates appeared on Oprah’s Book Club, she encountered for the first time and en masse a kind of reader that she had never before encountered, who treated books like ‘lifebuoys to be clung to.’

“Since I’m a literary person, I look upon books as texts that have been imagined and written. But the general reading public looks upon books as documents of reality, and so the people on Oprah would say, for instance, ‘I have a mother just like that.’ Or, ‘My father was just like that.’ Or, ‘This happened to me.’ They don’t seem to perceive - nor do they wish to perceive - that this is a novel…” There is nothing wrong with reading as therapy, but there is something perhaps painful to an author in seeing readers gobble up their books as an excuse to “basically talk about themselves”.

A populist at heart, I hate to join so many voices in rubbishing Oprah’s Book Club; but there is something fundamentally creepy about this approach to literature: it turns books into an emotional crutch, an addiction that must, like all addictions, inevitably imprison rather than liberate.

A whole genre of writing, often in the form of confessional memoirs, exists to exploit this kind of reader. Morrison refers to them as ‘misery memoirs,’ and describes them this way: ‘they invite readers to be prurient rather than to identify, exaggerate where no exaggeration is necessary, and are too clamorous to grant the space to contemplate and withdraw.’ What is fascinating about the Merseyside bibliotherapy programme is that it specifically avoids this kind of book: the emphasis is not on ‘improving’ content, but on literary quality. Nor are the chosen books particularly cheerful:

As Thomas Hardy recognised, “If a way to the better there be it exacts a full look at the worst.” Hence Davis's preference for classic texts which address existential concerns, not anodyne pep-ups.

Although, as Morrison notes, the scientific evidence for bibliotherapy’s efficacy is by no means conclusive, this programme appears to offer strong evidence that great literature offers both escape and reality, and not merely in tandem, but in a complex inter-relation. One patient puts it this way:

“Reading pushes the pain away into a place where it no longer seems important. No matter how ill you are, there’s a world inside books which you can enter and explore, and where you focus on something other than your own problems. You get to talk about things that people usually skate over, like ageing or death, and that kind of conversation - with everyone chipping in, so you feel part of something - can be enormously helpful.”

And a hospital official concurs:

“People who don’t respond to conventional therapy, or don’t have access to it, can externalise their feelings by engaging with a fictional character, or be stimulated by the rhythms of poetry.”

The ‘misery memoir’ forces the reader into debilitating solipsism, and the ‘feelgood book’ offers no real consolation. But the great work of literature offers a feeling of escape in which the reader is able to confront harsh realities with the illusion of distance. These harsh realities must of course be the reader’s own, or else there would be no interest (as David Mamet puts it in his excellent book, Three Uses of the Knife, who cares if Othello kills his imaginary wife?), but their apparent alterity gives the reader a feeling of safety that allows her to explore her own feelings all the more thoroughly. At the same time the experience is universalised, giving the reader the feeling that she is not merely reading ‘about herself,’ but about everyone. As Morrison says:

It’s often said that books “take us out of ourselves”, but in reality the best literature is surreptitiously taking us inside ourselves, deeper than we might have expected or chosen to go.

Or Mamet: ‘When remedy is exhausted, so is grief.’

Literary Blogs and the James Wood Neurosis 3

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 08:56:00 +0000

[Click for Part One]
Today’s literary culture—especially, it seems, on the Internet—parallels the culture at large in placing a high value on the mere act of having an opinion. To have an opinion—on anything—and to be free to express it seems to symbolise for many the fundamental freedoms of a liberal society. But to be a scholar takes more than being opinionated. Anyone can form an opinion; a book was recently released that promises to teach readers how to form opinions about books they haven’t read. It is the ability to defend one’s opinion—both to define it and to justify it—that separates the critic from the reader, the professional from the Amazon customer who scrawls, ‘Great read! 4 stars!!’ The inability to approach one’s opinion analytically leaves critics with only two options: relativism (the black hole of rational thought), or internecine war. In Internet discussions one sees plenty of both. Thus critical debate is replaced with the occasional skirmish between opposing fan clubs.

Critics should thank James Wood the way poets thank spring: it begins again with him. Of course he is not always right. But his greatest value to literary culture is not that he is always right, but that—to quote everyone’s high school maths teacher—he shows all his work. He uses no cheap rhetorical trickery, only a transparent chain of logical reasoning; and unlike sophistry, whose purpose is to quash debate and negate thought, the well-reasoned argument invites rebuttal. Like a scientist exhaustively detailing his procedure for his peers, Wood appears to say, ‘You don’t like my results? Repeat my experiment and prove me wrong.’ By doing so, he encourages us all to rise with him to a higher level of literary discussion: to discuss, to define, to risk one’s beliefs in the hope of reaching, through the give and take of rational debate, a more intimate knowledge of truth.

The insults, slurs and misrepresentations of these bloggers should be seen as attempts to reverse this process, to drag Wood down with them to the schoolyard. Ultimately this impulse is rooted in laziness. The Internet being, to all intents and purposes, infinite in capacity, there is no particular reason for online book reviews to be confined to a few paragraphs in length. In their (frequent) discussions about the relationship between print and online criticism, literary bloggers are noticeably reluctant to admit that criticism might be a profession with specialised requirements. But criticism is work: if you want to state an opinion, you must be prepared to defend it; and if you are going to argue with someone, you must do them the honour of reading them properly first. Wood himself made this very point when he responded to some poorly researched criticism at The Reading Experience:

I know that bloggers do everything at breakneck speed—the hermeneutics of multi-tasking—but you should read people a bit less rapidly, and—hey, what a notion!—think before you write.

Hallberg’s essay is, as far as I am aware, the first attempt by the online literary community to rise to Wood’s level of rational debate. It represents, therefore, the first step towards a more mature level of critical debate on the Internet, and opens the door to the possibility of consensus between two very different ideas about the nature and function of fiction. One can only hope that Hallberg’s peers will follow him.

UPDATE 10/3/09: It has recently come to my attention that the best of the blogosphere’s James Wood-defaming power has been refined into a new blog entitled Contra James Wood, whose author accuses the critic, among many other things, of insidious right-wing propagandising and racism (one post is entitled ‘The Critic as Cracker’). How strange that it’s always the bloggers, and never the published writers, that resort to childish name-calling...

Literary Blogs and the James Wood Neurosis 2

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 08:45:00 +0000

[Click for Part One]
A few months ago, the literary site The Quarterly Conversation (edited by Esposito) published an article entitled ‘The One That Got Away: Why James Wood is Wrong About Underworld,’ by Garth Risk Hallberg of The Millions. On the one hand, it must be said that this essay is another fine example of the James Wood Neurosis at work (it would be hard to imagine a more pointed title); but Hallberg has composed something quite different from the hectoring clamour of his peers. The most immediately apparent change is one of style: Hallberg writes well, entertainingly, and above all, calmly. What a relief after the antagonistic rhetoric of like-minded bloggers, to read something so polished and so reasonable. But more important is Hallberg’s choice of subject: not the flaws of Wood’s personality, but the virtues of DeLillo’s novel. Hallberg evidently has a deep familiarity with Underworld, and he communicates his enthusiasm for the work with charm and conviction.

Not to say that Hallberg’s argument is flawless. For example, he is not above the implication that Wood is both too English and too old-fashioned to judge DeLillo fairly; such arguments do not, I think, stand up to close scrutiny. But such cheap shots are in the minority. Hallberg’s greatest successes are, I think, in his defence of DeLillo’s style and in his description of the novel’s form. This can be best illustrated with an extended passage:

Wood is correct that Nick “exists, grayly,” but not that, “fictionally speaking, he is a stranger promoted above his station”; Nick’s claim to our interest is precisely that he is a stranger to himself. “I was barely there,” he tells us, early on. Like his willed grayness, his worldview offsets the novel’s vivid, Dostoevskian obsessives: he believes in order and reason—in living “responsibly in the real.” “I didn’t accept this business of life as a fiction,” he declares. “History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it.” And yet we sense in his dip into the past tense here that Nick’s “responsibility” has yielded no firmer grasp of the meaning of being than have the conspiracy theories of Bronzini or the phobias of Sister Edgar. His life keeps erupting into disorder. When we first meet Nick, impulses he doesn’t understand have driven him to revisit an old lover, and as we move backward in time we will see him cheating on his wife, spending $35,000 on the Bobby Thomson baseball, cuckolding Bronzini, and eventually (in his adolescence) committing homicide. His characteristic locution as an adult is, “I told myself,” and it emerges that his life has become a sort of fiction, a story about self-control.

The value of this passage is that it is searching for value in the work itself. Any critic must be able to do this: what is the point of a critic who cannot tell you why they like something? In evoking the life of the protagonist, Hallberg offers a response to Wood’s claim that the characters are lifeless; in evoking his emotions, he demonstrates that there is emotion to be found in it.

Unlike Esposito, Hallberg even manages to engage the charge of didacticism:

[Wood] has, most significantly, failed to see that the form of Underworld is, among other things, a marvel of dialogics. In allowing its characters to talk at cross-purposes, the novel resists the pedagogy of the paranoiac, and allows DeLillo’s themes to ripen into questions: What is history? Who makes it? What are we so afraid of? DeLillo allows a dozen different characters to answer, and refuses to adjudicate among them.

Ultimately, however, he fails, as Esposito did, to comprehend the full extent of Wood’s argument, as this statement shows (emphasis added):

But one can imagine a future in which the formal innovations of even the most gifted novelist will be used to sell dryer sheets before the first .pdfs of the novel have even hit the web. Thus, … James Wood’s insistence that out-culturing the culture is a goal both impossible and nonsensical for the novel.

By ‘out-culturing the culture,’ Hallberg is referring to the ‘social novel,’ a genre whose aim is to encapsulate an entire society. But the causality he sets up between the velocity of postmodernity and Wood’s statement obscures the depth of his critique, which questions the very foundational logic of ‘out-culturing the culture’ in the first place.

Like many on the Internet who have addressed this topic, Hallberg assumes that Wood, who invokes Dickens often in relation to novels of the Underworld type, that he wants them all to write like Dickens—that Dickens represents his realist ideal. This is not, I think, the case. Wood compares Dickens with DeLillo to locate DeLillo’s style in a history of the novel; to, as he has put it, ‘deny the postmodernists their meat’ by attempting to prove that what they think of as a blindingly new invention actually has its roots in the old social novel. The rather simple-minded logic behind this common error is, of course, that Wood favours Dickens because Dickens is old. Unfortunately, this error forms a keystone of Hallberg’s thesis: that Wood should appreciate Underworld because it combines the form of the Victorian social novel with that of the contemporary social novel. Such an argument is unlikely to move Wood, however, because it is the social novel itself that he contests.

There is an implicit logic to the social novel, for the new form perhaps more than the old, in which fiction is seen as a tool for a kind of cultural reprogramming: in DeLillo’s desire to ‘alter the inner life of the culture’ (as he put it in Mao II) one finds the desire to save not the novel, but the world. ‘The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinement,’ he says in ‘The Power of History.’ This is the same utopian mysticism that has infected liberal academia; as Leonard Jackson put it, ‘making revolutions of the mind and hoping society will follow.’

But for Wood this dream of social engineering is utterly quixotic, while its perception as a reasonable goal has a cumulatively debilitating effect on the power of the novel achieve anything at all. The discourse of other fields—history, sociology, politics—is dominated by rhetoric rather than fiction not by accident, but because rhetoric is such an efficient way to share information. The subject one chooses to render in the medium of fiction should flatter its natural strengths, which are, for Wood, the ‘human,’ the emotional, the ‘real.’ For Wood, fiction is a ‘secular’ medium—meaning that it acts as a corrective to the simplified proscriptions of dogma, revealing the complexity of individual lived experience. His ideal is a kind of ‘emotional realism,’ in which characters are ‘alive to themselves’ and free to represent not sociological theories, but real, living people.

Wood sees in DeLillo’s intent—revealed in an essay for the New York Times entitled ‘The Power of History’—a certain affinity with his own views. DeLillo states his wish to challenge the broad dogma of historical narratives, in which the complex realities of lived experience are erased:

Fiction slips into the skin of historical figures. It gives them sweaty palms and head colds and urine-stained underwear and lines to speak in private and the terror of restless nights. This is how consciousness is extended and human truth is seen new.

But in practice, the pull of the didactic, turning characters into allegories or dialogic representatives (even if the author’s position is finally unclear), strips his fiction of emotional realism. As Wood puts it in his review of Underworld (not available online):

After a while, DeLillo’s attitude toward these people… comes to seem irrelevant; their bulk amounts to a pedagogical statement. Though they are all different, their differences are burned away by the scandal of their sameness. DeLillo’s anxiety about having anyone of substance in the novel unconnected to his central theme is not only irritatingly airless, it is itself a little paranoid, as if the writer can only employ characters who are loyal to him and his agenda.

As a result, DeLillo is fighting dogma with merely a different dogma, turning literature into another form of religion. It is the same fault that he finds in White Teeth, that the author’s dogmatism has effaced the fiction’s aesthetic power, which is, for Wood, the only power a novel can possess. Is he correct? A true dialogue between these two opposing views of the nature of the novel would hopefully answer that question, but such a dialogue will never occur until the followers of DeLillo can comprehend the magnitude of the debate.

[Part Three]

Literary Blogs and the James Wood Neurosis 1

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 09:40:00 +0000

If one takes a broad perspective, the idea that a critic of James Wood’s stature would require defending by a nobody like me is rather absurd. He has been described as ‘the best literary critic of his generation,’ ‘our best living reviewer,’ and ‘a treasure.’ He has received he highest praise from the likes of Cynthia Ozick, Harold Bloom and Susan Sontag. He has recently taken a new post at The New Yorker, and has for some years worked as a professor of ‘the practice of literary criticism’ at Harvard, this despite not having a doctorate. Yes, in the world of print journalism, James Wood has a phenomenal reputation. This makes it all the more baffling that here in the alternate universe of the internet, he is subject to such frequent and venomous attack.

Anyone who read only what the ‘litblogs’ have to say about Wood would have to conclude that he is the most puritanical and reprehensible dullard in the history of criticism. eNotes Bookblog remarks: ‘Another talented soul is James Wood, but his gift is more in hating books than writing them.’ Eric Rosenfeld in Wet Asphalt: ‘Critics like the reactionary James Wood think what we need to do is go back to modernism and start writing like Chekov [sic] and Flaubert again. (“Novelists should thank Flaubert like poets thank spring,” wrote Wood in an article in the New York Times Book Review.)’ Black Garterbelt: ‘His continued struggle against the hysterical seems like the despairing stage whispers of a quaking moralist.’ Ed Champion on Return of the Reluctant: ‘James Wood is the most feared man in American letters? Get real. He’s a mere nitpicking titmouse. To be afraid of Wood is like having minor chest pains while passing the Grey Poupon from one Rolls Royce to another.’

Are we talking about the same man? I haven’t even included the congratulatory comments that hang off these posts like dribble, accusing Wood of everything from idiocy to misogyny. Wood is of course not without his detractors in print (Reese Kwon detailed some of these in her essay on Wood for Small Spiral Notebook); nor is he without his followers online, including Kwon as well as Mark Sarvas at The Elegant Variation. But the condemnation of Wood’s work to be found online is not merely negative, but derisive, veering towards libellous.

Evidently, the fundamental cause of the vitriol against Wood is that he holds strong opinions that are decidedly at odds with those of his detractors. But other critics have given unfavourable reviews to ‘postmodern’ authors like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Zadie Smith. One thinks automatically of Wood’s former colleague at The New Republic, Dale Peck, whose collection of essays was entitled Hatchet Jobs. Peck made a sport of attacking writers that he considered too pretentious, too idolised and too postmodern. Wood has never done this. He has never dedicated a review of any book to a continuous harangue against the author, never neglected his responsibility to apply himself to the text. Quite the contrary, he is rightly lauded (even, grudgingly, by his detractors) for the superhuman depth of his attention to detail. He coaxes nuance from the slightest stylistic choices with such sensitivity that one imagines that, given enough time, he could decipher a page of Japanese or Urdu simply by staring at it. Even when in a broadly negative review, Wood demonstrates a profound sensitivity to a writer’s talents: for example, he has called DeLillo’s prose ‘frequently distinguished’ and Smith’s ‘breathtaking;’ and Franzen’s The Corrections ‘succeeds marvellously.’ And yet, bizarrely, Peck’s name is almost absent from discussion, while Wood risks being burned in effigy at the next litbloggers’ convention. At the very least, it seems a little unfair.

A particularly illuminating example of the kind of attention Wood receives can be found on Conversational Reading, whose author, Scott Esposito, returns again and again to jab at Wood’s articles, with the relentless commitment of a full-blown obsessive. It is clear from this passage that Esposito feels a pressure to debate with Wood:

Wood is a great critic. He's very insightful when he's praising authors. But for the life of me I can't figure out why he’s so anti non-realist authors. I know it has something to do with being “cold” but I still don't get why good literature can only produce warm fuzzy feelings. Why can't it be cold, mathematical? What if that's how the author sees the world? What if the author wants to depict feelings in a different way from warm and vibrant? Can't we paint with different palates [sic]?

But Esposito is either unable or stubbornly unwilling to engage with Wood’s arguments, and so his comments degenerate into spiteful and often inarticulate sniping:

To read Wood's most recent collection of criticism, The Irresponsible Self, is to wonder if all this talk about Wood's greatness hasn’t gotten a bit overheated. Granted, Wood's writing is a cut above what you're likely to encounter in popular book reviews today, but one begins to wonder whether it's Wood's greatness or the majority's mediocrity. Certainly Wood is an erudite and well-read literary critic, but, well, why shouldn't all respected critics be erudite and well read? Is this really such rarefied territory?

Is it necessary to explain why these remarks are both mean-spirited and incoherent?

What is most incomprehensible is that Esposito should plead that he ‘can’t figure out’ Wood’s argument, when he has made it so frequently and with such clarity. As an example, let us examine the way Wood condemns the use of character in ‘hysterical realist’ novels, taken from his review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (emphases added):

By and large, these are not stories that could never happen (as, say, a thriller is often something that could never happen); rather, they clothe real people who could never actually endure the stories that happen to them. They are not stories in which people defy the laws of physics (obviously, one could be born in an earthquake); they are stories which defy the laws of persuasion. This is what Aristotle means when he says that in storytelling “a convincing impossibility” (say, a man levitating) is always preferable to “an unconvincing possibility” (say, the possibility that a fundamentalist group in London would continue to call itself KEVIN).

Near the end of White Teeth, one of the characters, Irie Jones, has sex with one of the twins, called Millat; but then rushes round to see the other twin, called Magid, to have sex with him only moments after. She becomes pregnant; and she will never know which twin impregnated her. But it is really Smith's hot plot which has had its way with her.

These novels find themselves in the paradoxical position of enforcing connections that are finally conceptual rather than human. The forms of these novels tell us that we are all connected—by the Bomb (DeLillo), or by myth (Rushdie), or by our natural multiracial multiplicity (Smith); but it is a formal lesson rather an actual enactment.

It is Smith who made Irie, most improbably, have sex with both brothers, and it is Smith who decided that Irie, most improbably, has stopped caring who is the father. It is quite clear that a general message about the need to escape roots is more important than Irie's reality, what she might actually think, her consciousness.

As we can see here, Wood’s concern is that author’s premise talks over her characters: they become mere abstract representations or mouthpieces for certain ideas. Thus, he is not arguing against novels whose aim is to depict ‘cold’ emotions, but against novels whose purpose is not to depict emotions at all, but to depict arguments. This seems to be a distinction to which bloggers like Esposito are utterly blind.

Why are Esposito and his colleagues so tormented by Wood’s readings that they must resort to such petty tactics? Wood’s criticisms seem to possess a viral tenacity that, I believe, is rooted in the clarity and depth of his argumentation. Reese Kwon’s essay on Wood includes a quote from Adam Kirsch of the New York Sun that phrases the matter perfectly: ‘Most reviews simply present an opinion, and it's easy to dismiss contrary opinions—everyone has the right to an opinion, after all. But Wood raises the discussion to a higher level, which forces people to question and rethink their own understanding of literature.’

It makes sense, therefore, that so many lovers of ‘postmodern’ novels would seem to be haunted by Wood’s words. Dale Peck’s tirades can be swatted like flies, because rather than trying to prove his argument, he restates it with rising emphasis. But the cogency of Wood’s arguments, together with the depth of his reading and the poetry of his phrasing, give his reviews the appearance of some indomitable truth. As a result, Wood’s words lodge in the minds of these poor postmodernists, demanding a response they have not the vocabulary to give. These cheap jibes—‘idiot,’ ‘nitpicking titmouse’ (a curious image), and so on—are directed not at the real James Wood, but at the ghoulish manifestation that has taken up residence in their own minds, demanding that they justify their tastes.

[Part Two]

American Myth: The Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men [pt. 2]

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 07:05:00 +0000

[Click for Part One]
On the release of Miller’s Crossing in 1990, the year that also saw the release of The Godfather Part Three and Goodfellas, the brothers commented that of all the gangster films released that year, theirs was the most ‘mythic.’ This word is fundamental to understanding the Coens’ approach to filmmaking. The conventional stories of genre fiction, conventions that emerged more or less organically from generations of pulp fiction writers and Hollywood filmmakers, are seen by the Coens as myths to be endlessly reformulated. In the same way that ancient Greek playwrights redigested their traditional stories over and over, to excite different emotions or to tackle different themes; the thriller or the screwball comedy is one basic story with fixed conventions that can be endlessly reinvented. Goodfellas is a film about gangsters; Miller’s Crossing is a film in the key of Gangsters, but its subject has no more to do with gangsters than with any other human beings. It seems to me that it is a film about ethics: it is a dramatisation of the axiom that the only true moral dilemma is a choice between two evils. But the archetypes of the gangster film give the story direct access to the psyche, taking part in the cultural dream that is the gangster narrative. Similarly, although O Brother, Where Art Thou? credits Homer’s Odyssey as its inspiration, the references to sirens and Cyclopes are really incidental. It is the manipulation of classic American stories, both apocryphal and true, that turns 1920s’ Mississippi into a mythic landscape to rival the semi-real Mediterranean of Odysseus’ wanderings.

But the conventions of genre may not be manipulated arbitrarily; the great genre writer distinguishes herself not merely by subverting conventions, but by internalising an understanding of what conventions may be subverted and how. When asked to describe the character of the killer Anton Chigurh in their latest film, the Coens (I forget which one; Ethan, maybe) replied simply, ‘he’s a character in a thriller.’ Though it sounds like a brush-off, this response speaks volumes. The shape of Chigurh’s personality, it implies, is dictated by the contours of the story. And what forms those contours? They are a reproduction of the landscape of the human mind. This is the crucial point where genre and myth meet, and where both distinguish themselves from mere allegory.

In his review of the Cormac McCarthy novel on which No Country was based, James Wood bemoaned the lack of psychological depth in the characters. Although I am a lifetime member of the James Wood fan club, I fear in this instance he betrays a failure to understand the logic of genre fiction: the characters in a conventional genre do not have psychology, they are psychology. For the protagonist of a thriller to lapse into stream of consciousness would be redundant, because her inner world has already dictated the nature of the physical world around her. The Coens demonstrate their understanding of this psychological power of genre with the introduction to Raising Arizona of Leonard Smalls: the night following H.I.’s abduction of a child, he dreams of a demonic biker whom he feels that he himself ‘unleashed.’ Emerging from a wall of fire, the biker jumps over our line of vision into… reality. The biker that becomes H.I.’s actual nemesis thus emerges literally from his own psyche, a manifestation of his rampaging id. Although there is no explicit parallel to this sequence in No Country, there is no doubt that Chigurh plays an equivalent role both for the hunted Moss and the pursuing sheriff.

Of course, if the Coens are right this would have to be true anyway: every thriller has a character like Chigurh with the same archetypal significance as all the other Chigurhs. So what makes a thriller by the Coen brothers stand out from any other thriller? This brings us back to No Country and its unique ending—because although the archetypes may be always the same, the way they are positioned, like the notes in a piece of music, is what separates pabulum from the transcendent beauty of true art.

The typical commercial Hollywood thriller amounts to a superhero fantasy. Take the Jason Bourne series as a perfect example: Bourne is a troubled Everyman who finds himself unaccountably gifted with the power to escape from any life-threatening situation virtually unharmed. By the end of the third film it is fairly clear that Bourne is immortal: his triumphant swimming away into darkness—after surviving, Rasputin-like, from being shot and then falling into a river—amounts to an apotheosis. There is absolutely nothing the CIA could do to kill him. This climax offers relief at first, because we have invested something in Bourne’s struggle, but it is ultimately dissatisfying, because we know deep down that we are being fed a lie. There are no superheroes, we are not superheroes, and the fantasy of invulnerability is beguiling only for as long as it lasts. The commercial film is to art what midnight bingeing is to a nice meal. It is an addiction fed to repress one’s knowledge of a painful truth, and the addiction is returned to again and again precisely because it does not work. As in the Bourne films, each time we return to satisfy our craving, we need thrills of ever-greater magnitude to disguise the fantasy’s diminishing return.

The artist, conversely, balances the protagonist’s (and therefore the viewer’s) hope of success with the weight of inevitability. If the forces of antagonism are stronger than the powers of the protagonist, our hero must sadly fall. And we might feel upset, even cheated, for a moment; but a moment’s courage on the part of both the author and the viewer, the courage to accept the inevitable, is repaid with a glow of peace that burns in the heart with slow-dying embers. It is this peace, this wholesome sadness, that one feels at the dwindling climax of No Country For Old Men. No less important, the brothers eschew the Brechtian analysis that made The Ladykillers so soulless. Although No Country shares with Raising Arizona and Fargo aspects of the former’s psychologising and the latter’s social commentary, one’s awareness of those themes is perceived only in retrospect. In No Country For Old Men, the Coens successfully reconcile their two competing impulses for entertainment and philosophy, fusing them to create a near-perfect example of genre as art.

American Myth: The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men [pt. 1]

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 18:02:00 +0000

Following the trail of blood left by his wounded quarry, Llewellyn Moss, an amateur antelope hunter, comes upon the aftermath of a failed drug deal: bullet-riddled trucks, dead and dying bodies and—that faithful MacGuffin—a case full of money. It will not be long before the trail being followed is left by Moss himself. This image of a trail of blood recurs again and again throughout No Country For Old Men, the latest film by Joel and Ethan Coen, adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy. Overuse by so many clichéd Hollywood movies has devalued the idea of ‘the hunter becoming the hunted,’ but it reclaims its poignant irony in this film, if only because the hunter in question so stubbornly refuses to accept his new role. Moss (Josh Brolin) is constantly devising new ploys to gain the upper hand over his adversary, the chilling killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). In the average American movie, his self-confident tenacity would stand as testament to his heroism, even if it proved his undoing (think Cool Hand Luke); but the Coens deny him his moment of glory, robbing him of his iconic last stand. It is an unusual decision in a thriller, particularly such a tangibly American one; but for the Coens, any other course would be unthinkable.

No Country For Old Men is the Coen brothers’ first film in three years, but it is their first in six years to display the quality that distinguishes their best work. Following the excellent Man Who Wasn’t There, the pair seemed to lose their way with a pair of comedies, Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, each one disappointing in different ways. The first appears to be an attempt at a pure, uninflected comedy, but it lacks the wit and originality of their earlier work; while the second is a highly analytical disquisition on death and spirituality, enacted by a bunch of unappealing stereotypes. No Country falls into neither of these traps; it is a taut, suspenseful thriller that atypically slackens, slows and fades into a melancholy diminuendo at the finish. It is incredible, considering the film is an adaptation, that it harmonises so closely with the brothers’ other films; so much so, in fact, that it seems like a blend of Raising Arizona and Fargo, the chilling killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) taking the place of demon biker Leonard Smalls from the former and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the emotional heart of the film, taking the place of Police Chief Marge Gunderson from the latter. As in Fargo, the detective figure does not appear until quite some time into the film; in this case, even after his first appearance it is some considerable time before he is required to take much narrative weight. In the meantime we follow Moss (Josh Brolin), whose relative anonymity and lack of obvious charm seem to render him all the more vulnerable to the forces of darkness that quickly surround him.

The Coens have always shown a great sensitivity for the natural poetry of non-standard English, and No Country’s dialogue is characteristically colourful, as in this monologue by Sheriff Bell:

Well you know how they used to slaughter beeves; hit 'em with a maul right here to stun 'em, and then truss 'em up and slit their throats? Well here Charlie has one trussed up and all set to drain him and the beef comes to. It starts thrashing around, six hundred pounds of very pissed-off livestock if you'll pardon me...Charlie grabs his gun there to shoot the damn thing in the head but what with the swingin and twistin it's a glance-shot and ricochets around and comes back hits Charlie in the shoulder. You go see Charlie, he still can't reach up with his right hand for his hat... Point bein, even in the contest between man and steer the issue is not certain.

What stands out immediately is the vocabulary, particularly the pungent ‘beeves’ (does anyone in Texas really say ‘beeves?’). But the metre of the passage is no less impressive; in fact, it could almost be blank verse. The sinuous, paratactic rhythms of the story, set to a quick time by the sheriff’s compound phrases, reach the perfect conclusion in the regular iambs of his final ‘point.’

The use of narrative detail is similarly subtle. Considering that the Coen brothers came to prominence in the same generation that saw the rise of Quentin Tarantino and legions of other ‘indie’ filmmakers raised on Martin Scorsese, the subtlety of their storytelling, impressive at any time, among their contemporaries is almost unique. This is particularly noticeable in relation to the use of violence; many of their films are graphically violent, but never gratuitously so, and they seem always sensitive to the effect of screen violence on the audience. For example, once the fact of Chigurh’s violence has been established by several graphic killings, its representation on screen is constantly diminished, abstracted, iconicised; until by the end of the film it is enough to see him check the soles of his boots. As one would expect from the Coen brothers (and from their regular cinematographer, Roger Deakins), No Country is a film of quietly consistent visual beauty. Their images combine compositional elegance with precise narrative focus, always managing to avoid mere picture-postcard prettiness. For example, the image of Moss’ truck on the brow of a hill, silhouetted by the night sky, has a real iconic beauty; but it is also a beautifully economical narrative device. Moss looks up at the hill—one truck: good. Soon after, Moss looks again—two trucks: bad. The simplicity of the image makes the appearance of the second truck hit the viewer with the same force that strikes the prone and fearful protagonist.

Unfortunately, this technical skill for which the Coens are rightfully renowned has come to be seen by many as their only virtue. The position of the Coen brothers in the culture of American cinema has always been somewhat uncertain: too modest for the avant-garde but too ‘weird’ for the mainstream, they can never entirely count on either side to defend them. Their films are always related to one strain or another of traditional Hollywood genres, but their films invariably contain an undertone of parody, an allusive, knowing distance that has lead many critics to dismiss them as superficial stylists. For example, Vincent Canby in the New York Times denounced Miller’s Crossing as ‘a movie of random effects and little accumulative impact,’ while Kevin Jackson in Sight and Sound described O Brother, Where Art Thou? as ‘an encyclopaedic ragbag’ of references, implying that their combination is based on little more than the filmmakers’ caprice. But as I hope to demonstrate, there is a depth, both thematic and aesthetic, to even their most apparently frivolous work that displays a profound understanding of the great and overlooked aesthetic power of pulp fiction.

[Part Two.]

On the Responsibilities of the Critic

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 03:31:00 +0000

Kudos to Tom Paulin, whose dazzlingly subtle inquisition of Keats’ “Ode to Autumn,” published in today's Guardian, finally proves beyond doubt that the work in question is not (as has been believed and taught by bovine generations of “Literalist” scholars, their brains addled by the stench of their own tweed) a poem about the humble pleasures of that season, but an elaborate proto-Marxist illustration of the master-slave dialectic in the context of agricultural labour, ending in a passionate call for the immediate assassination of George III. Paulin reveals his familiarity with and admiration of the luminaries of the Zemblan Discontortionist school of literary criticism, forcefully revealing John “Che” Keats’ hitherto undisclosed status as the originator of the radical trade union movement.

What makes Paulin’s accomplishment all the more astounding is his ability to derive the most profound analyses from evidence that a more mediocre critic would no doubt refer to as ‘scant.’ To fully understand his achievement, let’s compare the poem with his analysis. Here’s Keats:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease;
For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells.

And here's Paulin:

If we look closely at To Autumn, we can see that it is a pastoral poem, which aims to communicate a subtle anxiety and discomfort behind or within its apparently attractive images. The susurruses in the first line begin this, and the word "mists" takes us back to Milton, whom Keats read very closely: Milton speaks of the "mists and intricacies of state", and characterises Satan as a mist.

Because Keats uses the word “mist” he must be talking about Satan. Autumn is therefore the season of Satan and mellow fruitfulness. Now things begin to become clear, no?

The word "conspiring" alludes to what the Tory press called the "Manchester conspiracy" - the meeting on St Peter's Fields, where the massacre took place.

The word “conspiring” obviously means that Autumn is conspiring to repeal the corn laws. Does this mean that Satan was in favour of land reform? I'm not sure.

The sun-blood-run combination brings gun almost to mind, and those loaded apple trees make me uneasy: once apples touch the ground they're prey to slugs and go rotten. The word "bend" belongs to the language of power, and that phrase "ripeness to the core" is strange and unsettling - we talk about fruit being rotten to the core, never ripe. There is a similar effect in "clammy cells", almost a prison image, or a far-off echo of a Manchester sweatshop.

Okay, I give up. I think at this point Paulin has become immune to parody. But I advise you to read the rest, because it really is quite wonderfully insane.