How Fiction Works
Monday, April 7th, 2008
Near the beginning of How Fiction Works, James
Wood announces that his favourite 20th-century critics of the novel
are “the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and the French
formalist-cum-structuralist Roland Barthes”. His admiration does
not, however, prevent him from describing their ideas in his next
breath as “interesting but wrong-headed”. For at the heart of
Wood’s criticism is a quarrel with formalism.
This is not to say that Wood is reluctant to consider how
fiction “works” in the functional sense of the word. As its title
suggests, his third book of literary criticism is a kind of primer
that discusses the basic elements of fiction - language, character,
dialogue, and so on - drawing its examples from some of the
greatest novels of the past two centuries.
But Wood is deeply antipathetic to any suggestion that
literature might be understood solely as a collection of devices
and conventions. His response to an essay by the American novelist
William Gass, in which Gass slices one of Henry James’ characters
into a list of tropes, is unequivocal. Such an approach, he argues,
is “deeply, incorrigibly wrong”.
The observation that literature is a structure of words is
little more than a truism. It takes no account of why we read in
the first place. The most important thing is always how a fictional
representation relates to life.
At the bottom of all Wood’s inquiries is an abiding concern with
“the real”. There is no necessary contradiction, he argues, between
fiction’s artifice and its capacity to depict reality; indeed, it
derives much of its potency from the necessary tension between
these two aspects.
How Fiction Works is, in this sense, something of a
manifesto. Like Wood’s previous collections of critical essays,
The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, it
stresses the importance of realist practice in fiction, and in
doing so advocates a certain stance toward literature itself.
Wood is interested, not simply in how fiction “works” in a
technical sense, but in the rather more elusive sense of how it
affects us, how it brings realities to mind, how it teaches us to
become better observers of ourselves and others. He is particularly
interested in its ability to convey psychological insight. He is
always reading with an eye for this “sudden capturing of a central
human truth, this moment when a single detail has enabled us to see
a character’s thinking (or lack of it)”.
For Wood, who greatly admires the Russian realist Anton Chekhov,
detail is the lifeblood of great literature. As Chekhov well
understood, we tend to give ourselves away in our smallest
gestures. It is through precision of detail and vividness of
metaphor that fiction addresses our sense of the real.
This fascination with detail is both a strength and a weakness
of Wood’s criticism. He is, philosophically and temperamentally, a
close reader who rarely feels the need to step back and take in a
novel’s architecture. The glaring omission from the book’s chapters
on the various aspects of fiction is plot. When Wood discusses
narrative he prefers to speak of the flaneur’s gaze and the
development of free indirect style, rather than the workaday issues
of dramatic complication, rising action and denouement.
That Wood is not particularly interested in the way narrative
pushes toward resolution - the way it seems, on some deep level, to
demand it - is significant. However incorrigibly wrong Gass may be
about character, he was right when he said that all stories are
“sneaky justifications”.
Wood has good reason to be wary of plot. As he was apt to point
out in his timely attack upon the overheated style of fiction he
dubbed “hysterical realism”, there is nothing that destroys a
fictional work’s credibility quite so effectively as one outrageous
coincidence too many. It is plot, more than detail, that pushes the
limitless variety of experience into a particular shape. Life
simply isn’t like that, as Chekhov observed; but stories and novels
certainly are like that, including those couched in Chekhovian
ambiguity.
Of course, part of the difficulty in talking about how fiction
works is that it refuses to be corralled. The Russian critic
Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that the novel cannot be considered a
genre because it has no fixed formal properties; it is, rather, a
constantly evolving anti-genre that omnivorously gobbles up
techniques and dialects. As Wood puts it, the novel is “the great
virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules
thrown around it” - including his own.
In the midst of a spirited defence of realism against those,
such as Gass and Rick Moody, who have expressed impatience with its
conventions, Wood digresses to observe that certain works by Franz
Kafka and Samuel Beckett might not depict “likely or typical human
activity but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts”.
One takes the point, but this is lame. It blithely goes against
so many of Wood’s arguments. Suddenly he wants to have his realist
cake and eat it. The “real” obviously won’t do as an explanation of
a story in which a man turns into a giant beetle, so “truth” steps
in to rescue an obviously important work from critical oblivion.
The “real” is fundamental to literature, it seems, except when it
isn’t.
By making reality interchangeable with truth, effectively at his
own pleasure, Wood makes both concepts promiscuous.
On this question, How Fiction Works might have
benefited from a more concerted engagement with some strong
exceptions to the general thrust of its argument: Laurence Sterne’s
classic anti-novel, Tristram Shandy, for example, which is
about the impossibility of realism; or more recent novels, such as
Catch-22 or A Confederacy of Dunces, which would
appear to be excluded from Wood’s definition of comedy on the
grounds that they are much too funny.
In The Irresponsible Self, Wood made it clear that he
regards farcical or satirical humour as an inferior mode, and this
preference was a feature of his critique of the hysterical
realists. But (as long as we are throwing the term about) there is
certainly no shortage of “truth” in Joseph Heller’s brilliantly
absurd anti-war novel.
Wood is aware of this promiscuousness and the equivocations it
requires. Realism, he acknowledges, is an indistinct and
problematic term; less an identifiable genre than an impulse in
fiction. He attempts to work around this difficulty by coining a
rather feeble neologism - “lifeness” - to denote “life on the page”
evoked via the “highest artistry”. This concept, he suggests, might
be applied to any style of fiction. But this makes “lifeness”
itself close to a truism: it says that what works, works.
Wood is nevertheless right to suggest that formalism on its own
can never be enough; it will never feel like a satisfactory
explanation of a great book. While there are cases where it could
be argued that authors have succeeded in wresting language away
from its denotative quality to revel in the free play of sound and
rhythm - certain passages in James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, for
example - no piece of writing, not even Finnegans Wake -
can set up permanent camp in pure abstraction without ceasing to be
language at all. In this sense, fiction does always enter into a
relationship with a reality beyond itself and can evoke the truths
of lived experience.
Wood’s deserved reputation as an important critic rests upon his
willingness to insist upon this central humanist impulse of
literature. How Fiction Works is a pithy, lucid,
inconsistent, argumentative and opinionated piece of popular
criticism. It deserves to be widely read.
