Rigid and Impacted

James Wood indulges in his usual hectoring sermon masquerading as a book review. This time it's Cormac McCarthy who just doesn't understand that James Wood's approach to fiction is the only one possible:

. . .McCarthy has never been much interested in consciousness and once declared that as far as he was concerned Henry James wasn’t literature. Alas, his new book, with its gleaming equipment of death, its mindless men and absent (but appropriately sentimentalized) women, its rigid, impacted prose, and its meaningless story, is perhaps the logical result of a literary hostility to Mind.

Actually, it's James Wood's criticism that represents a "literary hostility to Mind," since it almost never engages in honest analysis of a given text in terms of what it seeks to accomplish, but instead just endlessly repeats the same old formula: psychological realism is all, psychological realism is all.

Comments

[bono]

At first I was amazed that James Wood bothered to respond to your silly, vapid and unintelligent blogs about his work. Your own prejudices are so obvious and so dull. Then i realized -- he's just campaigning for himself, getting himself some new readers.
You only lost some.

[Richard L. Pangburn]

Just to chime in with a minority opinion.

I think James Woods was a mite hasty in branding Cormac McCarthy's NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN as being empty. The first part of the novel takes place at a lower, everyday state of consciousness, what Robert Penn Warren characterized as THE GREAT TWITCH, what Walker Percy wrote about in THE MOVIEGOER.

Here's a bit of what's there:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/291LWG318YOWM/ref=cm_aya_av.lm_more/002-3192346-3320832

You might say NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is too obtuse, but McCarthy certainly did not write this carelessly nor to be "just a thriller." He did indeed write this novel very deliberately about consciousness and its existence at different levels.

Obtuse? Yes, it is a difficult book. I realize that many will violently disagree, as they already have in their views above. But I'm confident that in time the academic estimation of the book will soar.

All best,

Richard L. Pangburn

[gerardo ramos]

Enough dogmatic hairsplitting - a book either rings true or it doesn't; for me a truthfull ring comes when something solid is struck about the human condition. One can find it in the "higher" literary forms as well as in a so-called genre form when the writer has the stuff to go deeper and better than its cookie cutter practitioners.

Now, for me the problem with No Country for Old Men is not that Mr. McCarthy wrote a crime thriller, but that it is badly written. I am sorry to say this. The sheriff's first-person monologues are mired in a trite and repetitive sentiment that gags. So repetitive as to betray the character of Ed Tom Bell, who would not have tolerated such self-indulgence. McCarthy's hallmark high-noon type lawman, tough but compassionate and essentially a moral torchbearer, is reduced to a caricature. There is page after page of padded dialogue throughout the book - parodies, really, of the brilliant, stark but loaded dialogues from his previous books. There is a carelessness that troubles - for example, referring to the hotel maids as "Spanish" rather than Mexican - Mr. McCarthy knows the difference. As trivial as this may seem to some, the distinction is important to those of us who are quite conscious of our Mexican race and ethnicity, which is why I whince when i hear someone use the term Spanish and the person or thing described is Mexican... The point being, Mr. McCarthy, a resident of the border region, knows the difference, and i wonder why the text negates that.

Theories: 1) Mr McCarthy is losing it as a writer. 2) Was in urgent need of paying some bills and didn't care how the book came out. 3) He started the book, lost faith in it, and someone else finished it and that is where the trite, padded dialogues came from.

I think there may be significance in the fact that the author does not face the camera dead on for the photo on the jacket liner, a departure from the stock photo that graced previous books' jackets. I suspect he doesn't really care to own this one.

Whichever the case, his reputation stands on his previous work, on the strength of which he remains one of the best ever.

g. ramos

[genevieve]

Agree with Scott that this ignoring of elements of text was a central failure in New Criticism - we had a tutor at uni who survived the culture wars in our English department with considerable style due to his ability to see this and incorporate it seamlessly into his teaching. No jargon either. What a guy. Needless to say, as he was a dedicated teacher, he is not a famous critic, though he has been mentioned in despatches by Harold B.(perhaps that makes him infamous?)

[anon]

'The aesthetic is a human product, and so it will always have a moral dimension.'

What? cf 'weelington boots are a human product and will always have a moral dimension'. This is a banality.

[Hayden Childs]

As a disclaimer, I haven't read any of the Border trilogy nor the new McCarthy book, and I'm therefore not commenting on the argument at hand.

I am, however, curious about why Mr. Wood didn't mention Suttree, which certainly seems to be a work as significant as Blood Meridian, as well as the primary shift from the more Gothic tone of his earlier works to the mythic scope of Blood Meridian (which, I understand, continues with varied success in his more recent novels, and good lord, could I please add another clause in this side-thought), in his discussion of McCarthy's oeuvre. This seems as much of an oversight as a review of Pynchon's novels that doesn't mention V.

[John Kenyon]

This is why other people get paid to do this for a living. Here, from Walter Kirn's review of the McCarthy book that appeared in the Sunday NYTBR, is a fair summation of what I've written here less succinctly. Why leave the trappings of being declared a savior of Western fiction, etc., to write a thriller? Why not: "Instead, he decided to have some nasty fun and write like a fellow who was still alive, shedding the murky, grand German philosophizing that bogged down the last two installments of his trilogy for a sleeker, slimmer linguistic manner and a darting movie-ready narrative that rips along like hell on wheels because it has no desire to break new ground, only to burn rubber on hard-packed old ground, thereby packing it down harder." Amen. Why can't that be enough?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

This statement by Mr. Wood strikes me as odd: I think that Dan Green has here artlessly revealed the soft underbelly of the postmodern idea of fiction, in which books are enjoyed or not enjoyed according to strangely abtract aesthetic criteria -- form, language, narrative games -- which are oddly detached from what would also make them moving and affectively powerful in the world. As I say, I suspect this of actually incarnating a kind of repressed or disguised puritanism, a desire to make aesthetics formally 'clean' rather than humanly messy, a desire to make fiction a kind of crystalline science.

I don't think attention to "form, language, narrative games" constitutes "the soft underbelly of the postmodern idea of fiction" so much as the New Critical celebration of modernism. Read Cleanth Brooks' two books on Faulkner if you don't believe me. In them, Brooks consistently shoves the substance of History (or what Penn Warren called "the Legacy of the Civil War" in the book of the same name) to the side so that he may admire the formal properties of the text and the aesthetic experience they produce. His work on Absalom, Absalom! is particularly stunning in this respect: the content of the novel flees from his account; were it the only account you read of Absalom, Absalom! you would have no idea that the formal elements of the text Brooks champions work to impress the novel's themes upon the reader. The ambiguity's there, no doubt, but it's there in the service of that most characteristic of Faulknerian themes; namely, how the way people understand, misunderstand, or remain ignorant of History (so imagined, complete with a capital "H") limits the way they can think about the present.

[Chris B]

I have to admit that Keats' great line is no less beautiful for not being true.

[genevieve]

Call it aluminium in my cooking pots if you will, but somebody somewhere has asserted recently,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" - the sense being that the truth is often so awful it has a beauty of its own. It is probably the woolly-minded Elliot Perlman, whose large overblown book I have just finished, and need to read again because it annoyed me. But if we must mingle aesthetics and morals (ewwh, so old-fashioned, people), maybe this has something to do with the mix.

[Alan Jacobs]

There is a way forward in this conversation -- or in what this conversation has become. (I don't think we can get to an evaluation of Cormac McCarthy's new novel in this thread!) James Wood has explained in some detail why he thinks that the aesthetic and the moral are always implicated in each other. ("The aesthetic is a human product, and so it will always have a moral dimension.") This view of things has a strong prima facie credibility, since we all know that experience is complex and multivalent and not susceptible to being demarcated into neat categories; plus, Wood defends this view at length. In response, Dan merely asserts, "I can very easily stick to the aesthetic and leave the moral alone." But can he? Is it really that easy? I know that, in my own reading anyway, I am rarely sure whether my strong response (positive or negative) to a work of art is truly aesthetic or, rather, wrapped up in moral or religious or philosophical beliefs and commitments that I'm not fully conscious of at the time. If Dan can indeed keep his aesthetic response so neatly and completely separated from other elements of his humanity, I'd sure like to know how he does it.

[Robert Nagle]

To pick a nit: what's wrong with having opinions about book reviews and books they purport to review if you've never actually read the book? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of reading book reviews? Or should one read only book reviews of books you've already read?

[Lauren Baratz-Logsted]

Not that anyone else would care about this sort of thing, but Mr. Wood cites A Simple Plan as being a film with a similar plot to McCarthy's latest. A Simple Plan was a film, of course, but first it was quite a good first novel - except for the part near the end where the train flew right off the tracks - written by Scott Smith, famously blurbed by Stephen King, loosely based on Macbeth, and review well in the NYTBR.

[Adam Ash]

Seems a lot of the binaries here -- like "aesthetic"/"moral" -- come down to form and content, and that Dan Green thinks how you write something can be interesting in and of itself, devoid from the content or the moral, and that James Woods thinks the moral is in the aesthetic. I happen to think they're both right, but if one doesn't, one will disagree till the cows come home.

[J. D. Daniels]

Here is a revised version with the offending aperture removed.
Criticism is not personal abuse.
Opposition is true friendship. All things take place through strife. JDD

Green's story "The Primal Scene" is about whacking off, both literal and metaphorical, and it attempts to forestall criticism by criticizing itself, by acknowledging that it is about whacking off, etc. Such an insistently centripetal retreat is self-involution born of fear. Masturbation is about dreams or fantasies bounded by the self, while actual fucking is, in part, about the forced terror of acknowledging one's own imperfections and the frank reality of another imperfect person. And good fucking, like good writing, necessitates communication: an attempt to negotiate a temporary bridge. Morality begins with the acknowledgment that one is not alone in the world.

[Chris B]

Conrad once said that any work that aspires to the status of art ought to carry its justification in every line. Serious criticism--as opposed to more utilitarian review work, which certainly has its value--bears the same responsibility. It strikes me as wrongheaded to ask in the abstract what gives Wood or any other critic the "right" to make judgments about genres or intentions or "ambitions." Wood is correct to say that one "creates that right on the page." I would add that one earns that right by listening attentively to the author, i.e., carefully reading the text and thoughtfully responding to it.

Part of this careful reading doubtless involves trying to understand the terms upon which the work presents itself. I don't, however, understand why this careful reading requires blindly ACCEPTING those terms. I suppose this forms the fundamental sticking point between the Wood camp and the Green camp. This difference is likely unsurmountable. As I said earlier, the argument the Wood camp has in its favor is consistency. There is a basic logical inconsistency or circularity built into the foundation of Dan's argument. Viz., it seeks to criticize Wood's intention to scrutinize literary intentions.

(BTW, there are now at least two Chrises posting comments on this thread; I'm the one who posted the first two or three posts under this name.)

[Dan Green]

I deleted your comment because it substituted name-calling and personal abuse for "debate." You can criticize anything I've said or written all you want, but a comment that began by remarking on my "urethra" of a mouth marked itself as not worth considering further.

[J. D. Daniels]

Wood writes of this whole affair that it "is not serious, and it raises the question of what [Green's] blog is FOR." Chris wonders "if you mean for your blog to be a legitimate forum for healthy debate." If not, why is there a comments section? Bloodshed or not, erasing my comment of July 23, 2005 07:46 AM is disgraceful. As I wrote to you then, "[m]orality begins with the admission that one isn't the only person in the world." But I see you've found a way around this problem: namely, deleting the other people.

[birnbaum]

Ah, blood shed, at last!

[Dan Green]

"it shows me that Green simply doesn't think of fiction as in any way a moral activity, nor of criticism, by extension, as a moral activity."

I don't think I said that. I said that it is not "inescapable" that the aesthetic leads to the moral. I don't believe that it does. I can very easily stick to the aesthetic and leave the moral alone--as least as far as literature is concerned.

[James Wood]

It interests me that Dan Green never actually argues with any of the arguments put his way. I send a long message that argues for the imbrication of the aesthetic with the moral, and all he does is to reply, in effect: well, but they aren't linked anyway! This is not serious, and it raises the question of what his blog is FOR, if not for proper argument. His curious notion of "leaping" from the aesthetic to the mora -- and his curious notion that to be interested in the aesthetic and the moral is always to be MORE interested in the moral than the aesthetic -- is one of the most primitive things I've ever encountered in criticism; Green seems to be a slave to his own binarisms. But this exahnge has been usefully clarifying for me, because it shows me that Green simply doesn't think of fiction as in any way a moral activity, nor of criticism, by extension, as a moral activity. My characterisation -- pace Chris -- of the postmodern as 'abstract' was not a characterisation of the postmodern tout court, but precisely only of Dan Green's position, which so inflates the aesthetic that nothing is left in its path. This does indeed seem fundamentally abstract to me, because so divorced from life.
And yes, of course one has the 'right' to make the criticisms one does as a critic; one creates that right on the page. It's the critic's job to make an evidentiary and rhetorical argument; and the reader's freedom to reject it. One's power lasts only within the space of the review: that is its frail beauty. That's as much right as one has. To argue, as Green seems to in his new post, that one doesn't have 'the right' is merely the hoariest relativism -- an unedifying mixture of obscurantism and ressentiment. But this, too, has been clarifying.

[Chris]

"...the soft underbelly of the postmodern idea of fiction, in which books are enjoyed or not enjoyed according to strangely abstract aesthetic criteria -- form, language, narrative games -- which are oddly detached from what would also make them moving and affectively powerful in the world."

This is an awfully reductive statement, given the number of "moving and affectively powerful" works of postmodern fiction that there are. "Lost in the Funhouse," to name only one, which meets each of those "strangely abstract aesthetic criteria." And if they aren't moving, &c.? These are the criteria that would elevate them?

[Dan Green]

"Isn't the discussion about the new McCarthy novel precisely a discussion that begins in aesthetics. . .which inescapably becomes a moral discussion"

It did beome a "moral discussion," but it's certainly not "inescapable" that it had to. One could stick to the aesthetic or leap to the moral. This is not a necessary leap. Only if you're more interested in the moral than in the aesthetic.

[james wood]

I'm grateful to the sensible and temperate comments of people like J.D Daniels, David Milofsky, Ken Chen and Grant Barber. Dan Green and I will have, I hope, many more opportunities to argue about what fiction does. It's vain and boring to defend myself -- so of course, I will now do it! -- but I did want to resist, or at least complicate, Dan Green's idea, often expressed, that I am a 'moral' critic and therefore -- such is the implication -- not a formalist one. I'm drawn again and again to aesthetics, to questions of style. I think I paddle in an author's language -- in simile, metaphor, word-choice, adjective and adverb and so on -- more than most people who write regularly about fiction. Style is an absolutely central category for me, and I would no more want to separate it from form or content that Dan Green would. In fact, I'm sure, as are others, that I'm what would be called a formalist critic. My long, repeated critiques of John Updike, for instance, have always come out of a desire to request that he be as good a stylist as he was twenty or thirty years ago, and not succumb to easiness and professional lyricism. How can Dan Green seriously call me a 'moral' critic (with the implication that I exclude aesthetics)and have actually read -- I mean, read -- my essay on Flaubert, or Melville, or Bellow (my love of Bellow is almost entirely stylistic), or Henry Green or J.F. Powers or Sebald? If I'm not talking about style in those essays what on earth am I talking about?

But why should we accept Dan Green's strange binarism anyway, itself the reflection of a puritanism far deepper than any he can ascribe to me? Why should we have aesthetics OR the moral? (The moral, of course, meant in its largest sense, to meam something like 'meaningful human conduct and the discourse about that'.) Why not both? The aesthetic is a human product, and so it will always have a moral dimension. Isn't the discussion about the new McCarthy novel precisely a discussion that begins in aesthetics -- the choice to write a certain kind of genre book, and the limited formal codes of this genre -- which inescapably becomes a moral discussion (the way these aesthetic decisions limit the kind of meaning McCarthy has at his disposal)? Chekhov is a great writer because he is a great stylist, and because of certain qualities of his style he is also a great humanist. Flaubert gives rise to moral doubts, as times, on the part of readers, because his style seems to incarnate a kind of hatred of his subjects; he longed, famously, to write a book about 'nothing, with no external attachment', and there are times when his aestheticism seems to want to do away with matter altogether, to pulverize the human subject. To call something, in a derogatory way, 'mere aestheticism' is to make a moral judgment about certain kinds of aesthetic decisions. (This isn't being only a moral critic; it is being a moral and an aesthetic critic: what other kind could there be?) Chekhov, for me, is so miraculous because an absolute perfection of form -- he instructed the journal editor of 'The Bishop' not to change a single word -- co-exists with the opposite of Flaubert's misanthropy. Style, for Chekhov, seems not to have been in any necessary conflict with the humane. He is the great stylist and the great humanist. Henry James, whom Dan Green praises, exactly showed, in his critical comments on Flaubert and others, that a great interest in the moral and a great interest in the formal can and should co-exist. Truth and beauty together, not separated. I thought all this was pretty obvious.

Dan Green writes that "a novel might be aesthetically unsuccessful because it fails aesthetically, but this has nothing to do with its 'argument', I would maintain, or vice versa." NOTHING to do with its argument? What a curious dichotomy. Surely when ideas take fictive form, as they do as soon as a narrative of any seriousness if essayed, they become indistinguishable from aesthetics? This is what an idea or an argument IS in fiction: it has taken a form which it could not exactly have taken outside this particular fiction; it has an aesthetic shape; it has been irrevocably modified by aesthetics. It was Eliot, apparently only a 'formalist' and not a 'moral' critic according to Dan Green -- has he read TSE's essays on Pater and Arnold and Baudelaire? -- who best said this in his famous words about how Henry James's mind was so fine that no idea could violate it. He didn't mean that James wasn't thinking; he meant that James thought fictively. I think that Dan Green has here artlessly revealed the soft underbelly of the postmodern idea of fiction, in which books are enjoyed or not enjoyed according to strangely abtract aesthetic criteria -- form, language, narrative games -- which are oddly detached from what would also make them moving and affectively powerful in the world. As I say, I suspect this of actually incarnating a kind of repressed or disguised puritanism, a desire to make aesthetics formally 'clean' rather than humanly messy, a desire to make fiction a kind of crystalline science. (I'm using, of course, Iris Murdoch's famous distinction between the journalistic and the crystalline novel.) Robert Birnbaum imagines me, and others like me, reading books in washed-out halls with no dirt in them, but I think Dan Green's idea of aesthetics -- aesthetics divorced from ideas, from argument, from the human, and apperently from content and even form -- is far more sterile than mine. The problem with the new McCarthy novel, just to bring our argument full circle, is precisely that it is so 'clean': all the spilt blood is cleaned away, made substanceless, by the hygiene of the thriller form. On the contrary, I say, bring on the dirt...

[birnbaum]

There is a parallel thread going on at Tingle Alley and I thought I'd post my last (for the moment) thoughts on the GREAT McCARTHY DEBATE here also:

Funny, I've now read Wood, Adam Begley and Martin Smartt Bell on Mc and what has struck me in the aftermath is that the latter two seem, beyond whatever complaints that they might have with No Country for Old Men (also, its a bit odd that Wood doesnt deign to reference the provenance of the title from Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium)to have enjoyed at least the reading of the book in question. Wood's tone suggests The Talking Heads song, Heaven:

Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.

There is a party, everyone is there.
Everyone will leave at exactly the same time.
Its hard to imagine that nothing at all
could be so exciting, and so much fun.

I see white robed people reading books in washed out, white halled rooms. Theres no dirt (to quote Laurie Anderson). Which explains why I felt the debate here was bloodless, I guess.

Anyway, I'd be very interested to hear what the participants in this brou ha ha think about their own remarks if and when they actually read the Cormac McCarthy book.

[David Milofsky]

J.D.,

I may have misunderstood, but I thought you said you had originally written under another name. If this is my mistake, I apologize.

Dan,

You're a New Critic, through and through, in an age that values historicity, subjectivity and the rest. I'm similarly old-fashioned and can't imagine like someone's work simply because it diverged from my taste, but good critics are eclectic, unpredictably and can't be filed or categorized. Perhaps that was your real objection to Wood--that he was predictable and annoyingly so. Certainly we can learn from those whose views (critical or otherwise) are different from ours. In my case, for instance, my greatest influences (Gass, Elkin, Coover) have absolutely nothing to do with the way I've chosen to write--and that has helped enormously.

[Grant Barber]

Johnny Carson, of all people, once said that you should be careful of who you make your enemy because you become just like them. Variation on 'judge not lest you be judged.' Pan and kettle, both black. Must make it hard to be a critic then. The thread seems to lose track of McCarthy's latest book.

First, you've got to read it to be able to speak about the book. Woods is speaking about the book, using a certain criteria; Dan is speaking about Woods criteria without addressing the actual book. If Dan would read the book I wonder if he might come to a similarly reserved review of the book, based on his own criteria.

I am a McCarthy fan. I also read a lot of other stuff, 'high' and 'low' brow--including detective fiction such as written by James Lee
Burke. Great escapist, airplane reading; narrative driven primarily. I scored an advance copy of McCarthy's newest. My expectations began sinking almost immediately. I was curious if McCarthy were going to write more in his earlier style, or the one which made him more popular in the Trilogy--I like both. Instead the novel reads like a dark James Lee Burke novel, or that genre at least. I agree with the comments in this thread which said it is almost written as a film proposal. My more cynical side started wondering: so the guy is aging, and he has a son who is under ten, and he's got to be thinking about what estate he'll leave--here's a money maker pitched to popular cultural. I know--unfair, and almost impossible to figure out other people's motives in this way. Probably wrong.

Add to this though McCarthy's comments in the latest Vanity Fair interview that this was a novel manuscript he took off of a stack of others to send to his publisher, as if he is now going to start publishing, serially, manuscripts which he hadn't sought to publish previously. Just kind of odd.

So I'm reading all the reviews to debunk my first impressions. I dearly want insight to use in going back to a reread to catch something more profound or important than I discovered during the first read. I'm not finding it though.

BTW, I think Wood is a great critic, albeit misbegotten about religion/God. And I appreciate this blog and the insights of it's author. Thanks to both.

Grant Barber

[J. D. Daniels]

Dear David,

What pseudonym? My name is John David Daniels.

#

Dear Dan,

The context is hardly “clear”: McCarthy is, after all, the immediate antecedent. Still, scrutiny forces me to admit the plausibility of your interpretation.

And now, for some six or seven seconds of more attentive reading:

Wood’s criticism “almost never engages in honest analysis.”

“I need not have read the book to understand the criterion you're applying in reviewing it. It's the same criterion you always apply.”

“Cormac McCarthy could have written any sort of book whatsoever and, if it hadn't demonstrated a ‘hospitality to thought’—as you define it—you undoubtedly would have written the same kind of review.”

“You should just come out and say you want all novels to do this.”

“Your discussions of psychological realism are always couched in such a way that we readers are meant to agree that, of course ‘the human’ and ‘plausible human activity’ are what novels should be about.”

Never, always, undoubtedly, all—these modifiers indicate a certain dangerous habit of mind.
Such careless intensification occasionally veers into the absurd:
“Thank you for your most recent, and very temperate, comment.”
How can anything be “very temperate”?

The foremost quality of elegance is restraint.
Stanislavsky believed that hysteria was a refusal to feel deeply.

Yours
J. D. Daniels

[Dan Green]

"Would you ever dislike a novelist simply because his opinion differed from yours?"

If I knew what the novelist's opinion was, and if the subject was sufficiently important, I might disapprove of his opinion. I might even disapprove of him personally. But this would have nothing to do with my judgment of his work, where "opinion" plays no role. Or if it did, if the work in question was transparently an attempt to argue a postion on some subject, I would disapprove of that work because it would be aesthetically flawed. Even if I agreed with the position, I would judge the work a failuure.

[David Milofsky]

I've now followed J.D.'s lead and read the interview in question, published in 1992. Who can say to what extent this represents McCarthy's present sense of things, but what he actually says in the brief passage about James is: "I don't understand them. To me, that's not literature." Not what I'd call great criticism, but probably honest.

[David Milofsky]

Gee, J.D. you got me. I missspelled Blood Miridian. Good eye. As for the James comment, I didn't say McC didn't say it, I asked where and when, which you still don't supply. My comment about McC having given only two interviews came from published reports and, as I said, he didn't say anything about James there. Regardless,however, it's a pretty thoughtless comment, if true. I'd stand by that. Yammering? Much of the criticism I read could fit that description. And why take on a pseudonym to post on a blog?

[Dan Green]

J.D. Daniels: The "man" referred to in my comment was James Wood. This was clear from the context--I was replying to the previous comment. You should take more than four seconds to read them.

[Ken Chen]

Hi,

I just wanted to chime in and say that I was a regular reader of this blog from its inception but had to stop because I couldn't take all the dogmatism. (And I'm a guy who reads Djuna Barnes, Flann O'Brien, and David Markson!) I actually posted about this in one of your previous posts about Wood, where I noted that you seemed to selectively quote his material and beg the question w/r/t Wood's moral impulses. I've pasted the post below, along with your reply, which you'll note doesn't exactly reason with me, but states your opinions as declarations sent down as Mount Sinai-style declarations. I think what you ignore is that Wood's critiques are largely technical, even if their foundation is moral. Usually when we criticize a critic as dogmatic or moral, we tend to mean that they are censors rather than critics--that they disqualify works based on how the work reduces to easily-ascertainable moral theses, rather than on, say, qualities of style or characterization. Although Wood writes what may be called moral criticism, his criticism never does the former and always calls attention to what most novelists would consider formal devices, such as characterization or style. The morality is a selection-device when it comes to characterization, but I don't see how one wouldn't always already adopt similar criterion as Wood when reviewing certain genres. Although I don't necessarily share Wood's reviewing biases, I would end up using the same approach when, say, reviewing a film like American Beauty or Sideways. Since these films hold themselves out as projects in the discourse of moral enlightenment or realistic characterization, it would be difficult not to point out that they don't perform these tasks very well. And this would be the kind of pragmatic critique that you suggest.

Incidentally, I don't see why we should dislike a critic for displaying harshness or their own subjectivity. The latter implies that such a thing as an "objective" opinion is possible. I don't mean to recite the banality that everything is subjective, but merely suggest that one aim of critical discourse is the same as that of fiction: to display these subjectivities. I'm curious if any of your criticisms would apply to a poet or novelist? Would you ever dislike a novelist simply because his opinion differed from yours?

http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2004/04/it_would_seem_t.html#comments

Well, I'm an admirer of Wood's, so naturally, I disagree with many of your statements. I think that Wood is less similar to Leavis and more like Eliot--and like Eliot, he is a very polarizing critic. It's possible to either applaud his accuracy and analytical precision or to allow that specifically analytical (and, thus, apparently unsympathetic) character of his criticism to fend you off. Thus, Borges said that Eliot was a masterful prose stylist (as, I think, Wood is) but Eliot and Wood are both probably read in much smaller proportion than their accuracy would demand--they have an alienating accuracy.

Also, I think that many of your characterizations are inaccurate--and like the assertions of Wood's that disturb his detractors, they seem to rely a lot on just ad hoc pronouncements. First, I agree that Wood obviously values psychological realism and thinks that the novel is a tool for making selves, but I don't think that this is quite the fault or mania that way you make it out to be. First of all, some of his best reviews are not about psychological novels at all: he praises Hamsun (revealing his appreciation for Kafkaesque non-realism), Momus/Erasmus (a pre-novelistic farce), and W.G. Sebald (what author has less self than Sebald?). Secondly, I think that, although he's very harsh on writers who aren't Chekhov, Wood seems to me to be often harsh but never partisan. What is especially scathing about his critiques is how they are immanent: he often presents an artist's aesthetic as an "argument" and suggests how the author is being aesthetically incoherent. His point isn't that his subject isn't being a good enough Henry James--he isn't being a good enough version of himself. Thirdly, this isn't really a snark-related argument, but it seems odd to dislike an author because one doesn't share their interpretive discourse. I mean it seems like a more appropriate response would be to want to read Wood when we act as participants in the "novel-as-exploration-of-consciousness" discourse and then read with his bracketted -away assumptions in mind when we become participants in other discourses. I don't see any reason why Wood has to like my favorite author; what's more useful is that reading him read his authors is, overall, more beneficial than not reading him. In any case, I'm not sure how you can disagree with Wood without falling into a solipsistic loop--like being intolerant of someone for being intolerant?

Finally, some of your characterizations of Wood seem rather absolute, in the way that you criticize Wood of being absolute. First of all, I think his aims *are* moral but they are not moralistic: his aesthetic is not exclusively judgmental--and its moralism is based on empathy rather than on a pedantic impulse to flog everyone with his own ethical guidelines. Also, his response to writing is almost always explicitly "aesthetic"--take a look at his great Moby Dick review; it's almost entirely about adjectives. Secondly, I think Wood isn't really gushy but he does seem to make efforts to point out when he likes something and what he likes about books he dislikes. I think he's a much better writer when he praises than when he negates: half of THE BROKEN ESTATE are very loving and (intellectually) intimate reviews of Chekhov, Woolf, Mann, Sebald, Hamsun, Melville, and so on.

Anyways, I'm sorry if any of this seems belligerent. Though I have to say, you seem a lot harder on Wood than Wood usually is on authors he dislikes: Wood's pans are at least rational discourse (in the sense that he brings you through his thought process) and he tends to avoid (I could be wrong about this) rhetoric about the fate of the British criticism and snippy asides. Also, it seems sort of funny to end a polemic against a reviewer who likes psychological realism, by psychoanalyzing him!

Posted by: Ken Chen | April 5, 2004 05:40 PM

Ken,

I would make four points about your comment:
1) You speak of Wood's "analytic" skills. I don't think there is much analysis in Wood's criticism. There's a bias--either the book at hand provides a window into consciousness or it doesn't. Then he finds reasons to praise or disparage the book based on this conclusion. If by analysis you mean something like "close reading," I don't see it.

2) Wood is nothing like Eliot. Eliot was the forerunner of New Critical formalism, and as a "moral critic," Wood is very far away from this.

3 It's incoherent to identify an "argument" and then discuss its "aesthetic" qualities. A novel might be aesthetically unsuccessful because it fails aesthetically, but this has nothing to do with its "argument," or vice versa. I would maintain the two things are mutually exclusive.

4)More often than not, Wood doesn't read "his" authors. His more typical mode is to dismiss those who aren't his.

Please feel free to criticize me all you want. I appreciate your response. (Also, in calling Wood an intolerant critic, I deliberately did not say he was personally intolerant. I"m sticking to what I see in his texts.)

Posted by: Daniel Green | April 5, 2004 06:25 PM

[David Milofsky]

I wasn't specifically referring to anyone, but several posts have noted that the writer hadn't read McCarthy's book. You can't really expect to be taken seriously if you haven't even read the book under discussion. As for the sheriff, as far as I'm concerned his centrality in the novel constitutes the real failing of the book. That is, McCarthy kills off the protagonist two-thirds of the way through and the rest is anti-climactic, full of cracker-barrel philosophizing and worse. I don't know if this is why Woods neglected to spend much time on the sheriff or not, but it's puzzling to me why a novelist as skilled as McCarthy would make such a puzzling artistic choice. For what it's worth, however, I agree about Mahler.

[birnbaum]

First, let me say that I have read No Country for Old Men.

Second, I reread James's piece on it last night or this morning, after I was confounded by some of his remarks here. Other than an appreciation of his creating new adjectivic forms as in "granitic" that re-read was not helpful (okay, not entirely true, I was impressed by James's recall of a small descriptive phrase that McCarthy reprises 7 years later).

Unfortunately, I have lent my copy out, so I will have to rely on memory (hah!) as I read Old Men a month or so ago— but what is clearer to me is that the old Sheriff is given short shrift in Wood's view —"and, bringing up the rear, like a flailing old grampus, must be the police. " A good portion of the narration is seen from Sheriff Bell's vantage point. Among other things Bell brings touches of humor to this grim story (no small thing) and, I would argue, much more,

I see a corollary situation that probably all of us face. I think Mahler is no doubt a great composer — I have over the years tried to listen to him. But other than Das Lied von Der Erde, none of his music grabs me. Isn't it that way for everyone with some artist or other?

[David Milofsky]

Whew, what an exchange, much of which seems to be cross-dueling without responding to what the other person says, scoring points, etc. It seems meaningless to me to talk about McCarthy's work, pro or con, without having read the latest book, which after all Woods is criticizing. For what it's worth, I've read (and reviewed) it and agree with him, but that's not the point either. The idea that a critic should limit him or herself only to those authors with whom he's in philosophical agreement (whatever that might mean) strikes me as questionable. Most of us who review professionally are assigned books, although we may pass on this book or author if we choose. The only real limitation should be that whatever the critic's aesthetic, he/she take the author on his/her own terms. That is, one should review the book the author has written not the one you'd like him to have written. Alas, critics often make that mistake, but having read Woods' review in the NYer, I don't think he did. I think his criticisms of McCarthy were fair, and I say this as an admirer of both McCarthy and many post-modern authors as well. One needn't be in once camp or another when it comes to literature, however it may seem at times.

[J. D. Daniels]

McCarthy’s “list of those whom he calls the ‘good writers’—Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner—precludes anyone who doesn't ‘deal with issues of life and death.’ Proust and Henry James don't make the cut. ‘I don't understand them,’ he says. ‘To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.’”—Richard B. Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” New York Times, 19 April 1992.

I remembered where to find this, but pretended I didn’t: I pretended I was Jonathan, above, who asked, “Is Woods [sic] misrepresenting this remark, or McCarthy [sic] really say it?”, or David Milofsky, who wrote, “I mean, the fact that he says McC once said this (without saying when and where), makes me suspicious. As far as I know, McCarthy's only submitted to two interviews since Blood Meridien [sic] and he didn't make this comment in either one. Of course, Woods [sic] may have some other source in mind that he doesn't mention.”

It took me four seconds to Google “cormac mccarthy interview henry james literature,” all clues provided or implied by the sentence, “McCarthy has never been much interested in consciousness and once declared that as far as he was concerned Henry James wasn’t literature.”

“I've read almost everything the man has written,” Green writes: almost everything, but not the novel in question.

Four whole seconds. What a grueling effort: one requiring a desire to know, instead of merely to yammer.

[Chris]

Dan-

Again, don't misunderstand me: you never need ask excuse for your opinion. But neither need Wood, big name critic or not. You can't get into the game of criticizing people's opinions without it coming back to you. What I am asking, for better or worse, is that you hold yourself to the same critical standard to which you hold Wood and the rest of the world. Every time you reply to a substantive criticism by saying, "Excuse my having an opinion," or "I'm just an obscure lit-blogger," you are doing yourself and all of your fellow lit-bloggers a disservice. Words mean things. If you aren't willing to defend your own with a stronger message than "No one listens to me anyway," you ought not send them out into the world in the first place.

Chris

[Dan Green]

Dear James Wood,

Thank you for your most recent, and very temperate, comment. I would like to keep myself on a temperate track as well.

I need to make this clear: I have found your essays on the novelists you admire to be insightful and in some ways inspiring. In such essays you make the best case for "psychological realism" I have seen. (Since you don't like the term, I will no longer attribute it to you.) In some cases, you have prompted me to seek out writers I had not read before--your essay on Bohumil Hrabal, for example.

Also: I think many of the writers you like are great writers. Henry James is among the two or three greatest novelists who ever lived. I just don't think everyone has to write like James.

As to the role of moral judgments in the criticism of fiction: That's a whole other kettle of fish, which I certainly don't want to stir up in this thread.

I would love to have the discussion you mention. I will try to read the new TNR review and see if I have something intelligent (and temperate) to say about it.

[birnbaum]

I was tempted to follow Wittgenstein's prescription "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen" — whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent —especially when I read:

"what most troubles me about McCarthy as a writer, and that is his tendency to roll everything into a vast bloody myth. He tends to de-theologize theodicy and then re-mystify it, and I think this is obscurantist. You can be a vatic writer, as he is, and still be lucid. He isn't always."

I guess I should read James's piece again as I have very little idea what the above means. I expect it will be unpacked in some meaningful way in the New Yorker essay on McCarthy.

But in the meantime two things— I don't accept that McCarthy has chosen the thriller mode—whatever that means and I think that is a diversionary issue especially since Wood has already expressed himself on that degraded genre. Also, I think one is on very shakey ground suggesting something has no "affective power." That judgment — the affective power of something, strikes me as, at the heart, deeply subjective.

I want to reiterate what I suggested above albeit in the light of the various remarks in this thread. I think James is tone deaf to the kind of writing that McCarthy presents and, in fact, seems to evidence no faculty or appendage or ability that would acknowledge Cormac McCarthy's prose and narrative viscerally.

Yup, that's what I think.

Anyway, my dog Rosie still remembers James fondly—as do I.

[james wood]

Dear Dan Green
Your blog is not as obscure as you imagine; and I read you because I take seriously your articulate defence of the postmodern position. As I say, I think there is quite a lot we might agree about; doubtless on the question of 'psychological realism' (not a phrase I care for or have ever used, to my knowledge) we disagree. I've just written about this question for next week's New Republic, and perhaps when this piece comes out we can have a proper discussion. Briefly, I think that 'realism', seen in the broadest sense as Aristotle defined it (and not as merely a nineteenth century invention) is the central language of narrative. It is the lenient tutor that schools its own truants: everything else comes from it. I made this clear in the introduction of my first book of essays, while also arguing that fiction is of course a sublime artifice -- what I called 'the game of not-quite'. This large sense of realism would bring together, say, Shakespeare and Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew or Beckett's late fiction. Of course, these artists are not doing the same kind of thing, but one of the elements that affects us when we read their works, along with the beauties of language and form and so on, is this basic connection with the human: what Auden called 'a mouth.' It's not about psychological realism, for this phrase makes it seem as if I want all fiction to be a Jamesian examination of the self, and clearly I don't. There are all kind of selves and all kinds of humans in fiction -- including the human voice and intelligence of the novelist him/herself. (As in, say, Sebald or Bernhard, writers I like.) I think Judge Holden, for instance, is a considerable creation, in the Kurtzian mode, and it would be silly to wish him other than what he is. But take McCarthy's new novel. It rips along at great speed but it has no affective power, and hence no aesthetic power apart from an abstract one, and this is because the mode it has chosen -- the thriller mode -- allows no character any important freedom. People die by the dozen but nothing is importantly at stake. And this is what I read for: I need to know what is at stake (morally, aesthetically, philosophically, humanly). The film A Simple Plan, (I think I have the title right) which has the same basic plot as the McCarthy novel, was far more powerful and involving than this new novel just because it introduced the idea of ordinary human frailty.

I think you misunderstood my point about the inflamed rhetoric of Blood Meridian. I wasn't saying that the lack of internal borders blocks the delineation of consciousness (though I suppose it does), but that it makes for a kind of moral muddiness, a lack of lucidity, at the heart of the book. I made this point in connection with what most troubles me about McCarthy as a writer, and that is his tendency to roll everything into a vast bloody myth. He tends to de-theologize theodicy and then re-mystify it, and I think this is obscurantist. You can be a vatic writer, as he is, and still be lucid. He isn't always.

I agree with Chris that one can't -- and in practice, doesn't -- simply review every novel one encounters on the basis of whether they have fulfilled their ambitions. (This is pragmatism, in which each novel is simply 'the story we are telling ourselves at the present moment.') Sometimes their ambitions may seem the wrong ones, or limited ones. I happen to think that the thriller genre is a limited, maimed, reduced thing, and unworthy of a writer of McCarthy's powers. So I think that however well he fulfilled his ambitions -- and it's a very sleek piece of work -- his ambitions deserve censure. Hardy, for instance, was a mythmaker and a bit of an obscurantist in the same way, but he didn't write a pulp thriller. I'm sorry this seems so predictable. I'd point out that my dogmatism seems positively airy and relaxed alongside what I have seen of your dogmatism, which defends again and again a narrow postmodern aesthetic and canon as if we all wanted to bring it down. I don't. I'd rather expand my idea of realism -- to appropriate Bernhard, say -- so as to co-opt and absorb your idea of the postmodern!

[Dan Green]

You misunderstand my use of the word "ambition." I meant ambition as "goal." To criticize Cormac McCarthy for not being a psychological realist is to misunderstand his goal in this context. He never set out to be one.

Otherwise: Excuse me for having an opinion. I've read almost everything the man has written, and I stand by what I said.

[Chris]

And doubtless Franzen, Wallace, Z. Smith, et al., will survive Wood's single-minded comments. But it seems it's the single-mindedness itself you object to.

The point is your argument is logically inconsistent. The problem with perspectivism, as they say, is that it's just another perspective. The problem with roping "ambition" off from the legitimate domain of the critic, is that it happens in this case to be Wood's "ambition" to criticise the "ambition" of the hysterical realists. In which case your own critical m.o. would appear to leave you without a seat at the table.

However obscure and lightly read you are, you've attracted the man's attention (more power to you), and he has made a good faith (and rather sound) effort to answer your criticism.

The better part of valour would be to admit when you're licked. Don't misunderstand: I don't mean that you ought to bow down to the big name critic who deigns to post on your blog. Only that if you mean for your blog to be a legitimate forum for healthy debate on these matters (perhaps you don't), you ought at least to make a show of considering what the man writes before repeating charges he's already addressed.

[Dan Green]

Chris: You're right. It is my site. James Wood is a well-known and well-regarded literary critic. I have an obscure and lightly-read weblog. He'll survive my single-minded comments.

[chris]

Dan-

Wood writes, "I do indeed have a prejudice in favor of the human, when it comes to mimesis (what might be called the representation of plausible human activity) and I make this perfectly clear; your rather strange implication is that I am somehow hiding this and ought to 'come out with it.'"

You respond by repeating that he should "come out" with his aesthetic prejudices. This is your site, so it's obviously your prerogative to have the last word, but I don't see the value in repeating gripes that have explicitly been answered. Everyone who reads Wood's work well understands the rather precise view of fiction that informs his criticism. One is entitled to disagree, but short of talking him out of his preferences (not likely), disagreeing repeatedly in the same terms is not pushing the ball forward, so to speak.

Do you see any irony in the fact that your single underlying criticism of Wood, repeated ad infinitum, is that he has a single underlying criticism of contemporary literature and repeats it ad infinitum?

"Proper criticism considers what a given work sets out to do. It judges that work by how effectively it carries out its ambition." Is that so? Are all ambitions equal? Why is 'ambition' a less appropriate subject for critical evaluation than execution?

Do you see the further irony in your unwillingness to judge Wood on the basis of what he sets out to do, on his ambition to thoughtfully and consistently apply the (perhaps narrow) literary criteria he has chosen to advocate?

-Chris

[Dan Green]

Dear James Wood,

In my opinion, the "warm things" you said about McCarthy are the equivalent of damning with faint praise.

Your discussions of psychological realism are always couched in such a way that we readers are meant to agree that, of course "the human" and "plausible human activity" are what novels should be about. It's a way of muting your underlying bias. You should just come out and say that you think the acme of the novel's achievement was the high modernists from James to Henry Green and that, for example, the postmodernists (or the "hysterical realists") are never going to measure up. That way, everyone will know that you are not really someone to read for a fair assessment of such writers, unless we already agree that the postmodernists have gone off in the wrong direction.

Why would my "strange, easy pragmatism" "disable" criticism? Proper criticism considers what a given work sets out to do. It judges that work by how effectively it carries out its ambition, as well as by more general literary criteria. I don't see why psychological realism must per se be among those criteria.

Your point about *Blood Meridian*'s style, as I take it, is that it doesn't allow for the appropriate delineation of character and consciousness. My own point thus follows directly from the first paragraph.

[james wood]

Dear Dan Green
It's not true that McCarthy could have written any kind of book and received the same kind of review from me -- and the evidence is there in my piece: the warm things I said about his other books. I do indeed have a prejudice in favor of the human, when it comes to mimesis (what might be called the representation of plausible human activity) and I make this perfectly clear; your rather strange implication is that I am somehow hiding this and ought to 'come out with it.'
I don't this a narrow aesthetic but the central language of the novel. And I am quite as interested as you in questions of style and aesthetics. Nor do I think that McCarthy is a 'realist' writer or should be one; I just think that his new book is morally empty and deftly formulaic.

Your second paragraph, about the inflamed diction of Blood Meridian, doesn't follow from the first. There is magnificent writing in that novel, as I, a great lover of Melville, wrote in the review. There is also a strain in McCarthy that can only be called hamminess (inflamed is a polite word); as I made clear in several quotations in the piece, this at times produces something close to antiquarianism at best and nonsense at worst in his writing. It is the business of the critic to sort these things out.

Your strange, easy pragmatism, by contrast, whereby every novelist is just writing the kind of novel he has set out to write -- every novel nicely occupying its own genre, its own grammar of codes -- disables proper criticism. I'll also add that it is strange that you, of all people, would so defend a thriller like this, since it represents merely the dead grammar, palely replicated, of the realist novel you so disdain anyway. It is a mere tissue of worn narrative codes. You'd see that if you read the book.

[Dan Green]

Dear James Wood,

I need not have read the book to understand the criterion you're applying in reviewing it. It's the same criterion you always apply: Does the book explore consciousness, reveal to us something about "Mind"? Cormac McCarthy could have written any sort of book whatsoever and, if it hadn't demonstrated a "hospitality to thought"--as you define it-- you undoubtedly would have written the same kind of review.

(You say of *Blood Meridian*, for example that "The inflamed rhetoric of [the novel] is problematic because it reduces the gap between the diction of the murderous judge and the diction of the narration itself: both speak with mythic afflatus. 'Blood Meridian' comes to seem like a novel without internal borders." I don't find McCarthy's style either "inflamed" or "problematic." It's the sort of style this writer uses to write the kind of novels he writes. No internal borders. You don't like the kind of novels he writes because they don't delineate consciousness. You should just come out and say you want all novels to do this; it will allow your readers to reflect on whether they believe the same thing and assess your judgments accordingly.)

The "wild stuff" written about McCarthy is written by people who like what he does. So what?

And I have read your last book of essays. I put up a very long post about it--not the one to which you refer.

[James Wood]

Dear Dan Green
You make a specialty of commenting on things you haven't read, and readers of your blog should know this. The last time I wrote to you it was to point out that you had completely inverted, on the basis of a partial reading from an extract in a newspaper, the thrust of the introduction to my last book of essays. (You had me disapproving, rather than approving, of the irresponsible self in comic fiction!) Just a few weeks ago you were merrily opining, over at The Elegant Variation, about my review in the LRB of Nicole Krauss's novel, even though you had neither read the novel nor read the whole review (you were commenting on exactly two paragraphs of the review.) Now you weigh in on my review of the new MCcarthy novel, but I'd bet a hundred dollars that you haven't read the novel itself.
Neil Paraday is right; it's very violent, very tightly written (almost completely free of McCarthy's usual prose), and utterly empty: a pulp noir thriller, bound for the movies. It incarnates a kind of hostility to thought, dressed up as a hospitality to thought ("He sat and thought about his life" etc etc). I didn't think anything of the book but I take McCarthy seriously as a writer and above all as a prose stylist. How could one not? The review, far from being a rant, tried to cut through the wild stuff that is written about McCarthy, both negative and positive, and give a balanced assessment. This seems something you are constitutionally incapable of doing. It's a shame, and a shame that you are so furiously worked up about my aesthetics, because I suspect we'd have much to agree on (the importance of intelligence, for instance, in both fiction and criticism, the importance of the foregrounding of the aesthetic, of style, and many other things).
Yours
James Wood

[neil paraday]

Dan, I suspect you've read Wood's review but not McCarthy's new book. The description you quote from Wood's review is exactly right -- it's a thriller, with lots of guns and blood and not a thought in it. Completely anti-intellectual. If Elmore Leonard had written it you wouldn't be suprised at all. And I don't think Wood's review was a rant at all. It sensitively discussed Mccarthy's prose in a more complete and considered manner than I have ever seen in print.
neil Paraday