James Wood

It is a very peculiar definition of "comedy" in literature that values such comedy for the way in which it manages to restrain itself from actually producing laughter, and that identifies as among the greatest comic writers in modern fiction the likes of J.F. Powers, Henry Green, and V.S. Pritchett. But this is indeed the view of comedy that emerges from James Wood's The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel.

I have nothing against the work of Powers, Green, and Pritchett (or, for that matter, many of the other writers Wood discusses in his book), but they are not the writers anyone surveying the landscape of 20th century Western fiction with any real concern for historical development or descriptive accuracy could plausibly select as exemplars of "comic fiction" as it has been practiced over the course of that century. They are instead exemplars only of Wood's particular, and particularly parched and narrow, preference for a kind of fiction "in which a mild tragicomedy arises naturally out of context and situation, novels which are softly witty. . . ." (Note the words "mild" and "softly"; they are the kinds of words Wood resorts to repeatedly--along with "gentle," which must be used a dozen times or more--in his descriptions of the "comic fiction" he most admires.

Again, Wood has every right to prefer this sort of fiction, indeed, to write essays extolling the virtues of those writers who provide it and belittling those who don't, but to elevate this preference to a critical principle of universal salience is something else. Although, one has to simply accept that Wood's critical principle is both incontestable and universally applicable, since Wood doesn't really carry through his notion of "the irresponsible self" and the gentle comedy accompanying it in any kind of sustained argument. Once he has set out his case for what he calls the "comedy of forgiveness" in the Introduction, in many of the ensuing essays he at best merely assumes the reader will remember the previous discussion and apply it for him/herself to the subject at hand. Certainly Wood does not engage in much of the kind of close analysis an argument as sweeping as that which he wants to make about both comedy and modern fiction would require. Frequently there is no further discussion of comedy of any kind in the essays collected in this book, and there are some essays included on writers--Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Joseph Roth--whose work hardly has any relation to comedy--certainly not as "humor"--at all. One essay is not about fiction at all, but is merely a review of V.S. Naipaul's Letters Between a Father and a Son.

Of course, it might be objected that these essays were written for publication separately, in various magazines and book reviews, and expecting them to cohere more systematically when collected in a book would be unfair. But what justification is there for them to be reprinted as a book if no real effort is made to make them readable as a book?

Although Wood ostensibly disparages the category of "religious comedy" (which he associates with satire), his own explanation of the secular "comedy of forgiveness" seems to me essentially religious in its expectations of fiction:

The comedy of what I want to call "irresponsibility" or unreliability is a kind of subset of the comedy of forgiveness; and although it has its roots in Shakespearean comedy (especially soliloquy), it seems to me the wonderful creation of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel. This comedy, or tragicomedy, of the modern novel replaces the knowable with the unknowable, transparency with unreliability, and this is surely in direct proportion to the growth of characters' fictive inner lives. The novelistic idea that we have bottomless interiors which may only be partially disclosed to us must create a new form of comedy, based on the management of our incomprehension rather than on the victory of our complete knowledge. . . .

This is a notion of "comedy" that ignores what is comedic in comedy in favor of the revelations of character, a spiritual communion with "fictive inner lives." Wood further muddies, rather than clarifies, the conceptual waters by opposing this comedy of forgiveness against the "comedy of correction"--satire--as if all other manifestations of the comic in literature were perforce satirical, only versions of what is to be found in Moliere or Swift. Such a reduction of the possibilities of comedy is not just an oversimplification; it completely ignores a vast body of comic fiction that is neither primarily satirical nor "tragicomic" in the "mild" and "gentle" mode Wood celebrates.

Mikhail Bahktin described this kind of comedy as embodying an attitude of "radical skepticism" that excludes as just another form of "seriousness" both conventional satire, which does indeed, as Wood maintains, seek to eradicate vices and flaws, and the "comedy of forgiveness," which is a thin veneer indeed on a form of fiction that otherwise could not be more "straightforwardly serious" in its intent. (Sentimentally serious might be a better way to describe it.) It is the kind of comedy to be found in Joyce rather than Henry Green, Beckett rather than V.S. Pritchett, Nathanael West rather than J.F. Powers. It is the comedy of Catch-22, of Gravity's Rainbow, of Mulligan Stew, and of the fiction of Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and Stanley Elkin. If a book were to be written that was truly about "laughter and the novel"--not about "mild tragicomedy"--these would be the books and the writers that would have to be examined.

The closest Wood comes to assessing this brand of fiction is his back-of-the-hand dismissal of what he calls "hysterical realism." Wood identifies Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, and Thomas Pynchon as the chief hysterics in question, but one suspects he would accuse many of these other writes I have mentioned of being unduly hysterical as well. He never really defines "hysterical realism" at any great length or with any great analytical precision, but the following passage comes pretty close to capturing the essence of the idea: ". . .there are also 'comic novels,' novels which correspond to the man who comes up to you and says, 'Have you heard the one about. . .?' novels obviously very busy at the business of being comic. Tristram Shandy, for instance, is in multifarious ways a marvelous book, but it is written in a tone of such constant high-pitched zaniness, of such deliberate 'liveliness," that one finds oneself screaming at it to calm down a bit."

There are indeed comic novels that embody the sort of laughter associated with jokes and comic routines. (Catch-22 is one of these, as is Portnoy's Complaint and most of Elkin's novels), and many more that are broadly funny in a fashion James Wood no doubt finds excessively "lively." Frankly, I am surprised to find that Wood admires Cervantes, since Don Quixote is quite a "zany" book (or so it seems to me), as are most of the many novels influenced by Don Quixote throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Furthermore, few of these kinds of comic novels could convincingly be labeled "hysterical realism" because almost none of them are realistic in any credible sense of the term. In fact, comedy is almost by definition not realistic, depending as it does on a deliberate distortion of reality, even to the point of completely reversing its normal assumptions. To the extent works of fiction seek first of all to be "realistic," whatever comedy they might also contain is almost certainly going to be incidental, the sort of "mild" and "gentle" amusement Wood clearly enough enjoys.

(The one writer Wood discusses to whose work the term "hysterical realism" seems appropriate is Tom Wolfe, whose novels Wood accurately judges to be shallow and really not very funny. It is one of the few essays in The Irresponsible Self with which I unreservedly agree--one of the others is the essay entitled "Shakespeare and the Pathos of Rambling.")

Finally, both "hysterical realism" and the book's occasional analyses of comedy more generally seem really to be devices Wood has adopted in his essays to make a more compelling case for the kind of fiction he manifestly most esteems: loosely, the sort of late 19th/early 20th century fiction that added to the realism that had come to be valued by writers like Flaubert and Tolstoy and George Eliot a further "psychological realism" that located the real truth about human reality in the disclosures of consciousness. Much of this fiction remains vital and important, and many of the strategies developed by writers like James and Woolf and Henry Green continued to be adapted by later writers in different and interesting ways. But the pure form of pyschological realism Wood continually returns to--"a state in which the reader may or may not know why a character does something, or may not know how to read a passage, and feels that in order to find these things out he must try to merge with characters in their uncertainty"--is not a method that most subsequent 20th century writers continued to practice as if it had been determined to be the "correct" way to write novels and stories. (Neither it nor "mild tragicomedy" have been been greatly favored in, especially, American fiction, which by and large Wood doesn't emphasize much at all in The Irresponsible Self; in most of his critical writing Wood appears to be particularly dismissive of post-60s American fiction, which has most consistently sought alternatives to the approach Wood seeks to privilege.)

It doesn't bother me in the least that James Wood approves of psychological realism and the creation of the "irresponsible self" more than any other technique a writer of fiction might choose to employ. To each his own where taste in fiction is concerned. However, Wood's overriding critical precept, that things were done much better back when, that the way things were done then is the only right way, performs no service (no useful service, at least) for the cause of contemporary fiction whatsoever.

Comments

[Sam]

In fact, Dan, I got the impression reading the book that some editing had been done to make the collection "more readable as a book." Perhaps I shouldn't say this since I don't have the book to hand and haven't traced the essays back to the source to confirm it, but in some cases (the Henry Green essay, for example) you know it was written as a review, but it's hard to identify which of the books he discusses is under review. Certainly they all lack the heading the identifies the books being reviewed (as, for example, you see in Amis' "War Against Cliche," James's "As of This Writing," Penelope Fitzgerald's "Afterlife," and most other collections of literary essays). Nothing wrong with it; it just made me wonder what other changes may have been made.

[Dan Green]

I assume that some relatively minor changes were made. But the essays still bear the mark of their original publication, and I don't think they've been integrated well enough for them to bear the persuasive burden Wood wants them to bear.

[Sam]

Of course. Your comment just reminded me of the changes noticed, and wondered about.

On second reading here, your comment about "a state in which the reader may or may not know why a character does something, or may not know how to read a passage, and feels that in order to find these things out he must try to merge with characters in their uncertainty" makes me wonder whether you think unreliable narration became less common, more common, or about as common in the last half of the 20thC as in the first.

[TEV]

Dan, as always, this is a thoughtful post. I'd like to mull over a fuller response which, with an imminent departure, might have to wait, but I have a question: What do you make of his review of Brick Lane (admittedly, a rather old-fashioned novel), and how would you place it in relation to your comment about Wood's relevance to the cause of contemporary fiction?

(Nice to see you back, Sam.)

[Dan Green]

Honestly, I don't think there's that much truly "unreliable narration" in modern fiction. Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is often given as an example, but even there it only goes so far--not so far as to make us really doubt the essential truth of the narrative. Usually, an "unreliable narrator" is someone about whom information is gradually divulged that makes us reconsider our responses. This is a perfectly acceptable literary trick. I really think Wood has something more like "stream of consciousness" in mind.

I haven't read Brick Lane, so didn't feel informed enough to discuss that essay. My impression was that he praised it as a "immigrant" narrative that precisely restored some of the "old-fashioned" assumptions about novels. Many people no doubt find this to be their cup of tea. It really isn't mine.

[TEV]

Yes, that more or less confirms my impressions. (I also think he's influenced by its resemblance to Naipaul's House for Mr. Biswas, which he's on the record as loving.)

I wonder about the question of narrators, though. I did find his notion of the division between reliably unreliable and unreliably unreliable narrators to be illuminating, and certainly can think of several 20th century narrators firmly placed in the latter camp. Wouldn't you put Humbert Humbert in that club?

You know of my admiration for Wood but I will certainly agree that it's a shortcoming of his - perhaps his greatest one - to be prone to these sort of sweeping generalizations; I'm always left wondering to what extent this almost Manichean approach to literary criticism is a vestige of his religious background.

Still, I must say that I agreed with a good deal of what's said in the hysterical realism essay, and I do think he defines it quite neatly, in the essay's second paragraph:

"The big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence ... these novels continuall flourish their glamorous congestion ... the pursuit of vitality at all costs ... Indeed, vitality is storytelling as far as these books are concerned."

And later:

"Storytelling has become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure and drive themselves on."

Clearly, Wood is fan of the quieter moments (as, I suppose am I), and as you point out, it is a personal preference, nothing wrong with it. Wood's vulnerability as a critic, I suppose, comes from the absolutism of his stances.

[Dan Green]

I think Humbert Humbert is reliably unreliable. He interprets everything through the filter of his own needs and self-preoccupations. We know that and take it into account--or should. A novel really narrated by an unreliably unreliable narrator would simply be incoherent.

I'd be more comfortable with Wood's critique of "big contemporary novels" if he were more exact in identifying them. Does he mean only Rushdie, DeLillo, and Pynchon? (No doubt he would include David Mitchell.) DeLillo writes lots of small contemporary novels. Is The Plot Against America a big contemporary novel? The Time of Our Singing? The Corrections is probably one of these, but Wood likes it because it is more "quiet."

Think of all the great novels that could be accused of being "perpetual motion machines" and pursuing "vitality": the works of Fielding, Sterne, Dickens; Ulysses (how else to draw dramatic interest out of a 24-hour period?), The Master and Margarita; much of Faulkner, Malamud, the later Roth; Lolita itself.

What's wrong with storytelling as a kind of grammar--for some writers? Some kinds of fiction simply depend more on plot than others.

[Scott]

Dan,

What exactly would you classify as "hysterical realism"? I can see how someone like Pynchon would fit, both because of of the energy and comic tone of his novels. But someone like DeLillo strikes me as an ill-fit. Perhaps Underworld is atypical for DeLillo, but that book struck me as very sober in tone. Certainly there were many fantastic elements that took the book beyond what was strictly realistic, but energy and comedy did not permeate that book in nearly the same way as it did in something like Gravity's Rainbow.

I can see many similarities in Pynchon and DeLillo's writing, but I'm not sure that those similarities necessarily make both "hysterical realists".

[Dan Green]

Scott: I agree with you completely. Clearly Wood means "hysterical realism" to be a disparaging term, but as I said in my post, the only writer it seems to me to fit is Tom Wolfe.

[Paul Feldman]

As a faithful and admiring reader of your blog (I check it constantly during the day hoping for new entries), which I value for its seriousness and its clarity, I'm prompted to make my first comment. I'm out of my league here, I usually just glean what I can, but I find myself wishing I understood your objections to Wood's work better. If I didn't feel certain that you are serious critic, I would wonder what drives your criticism of Wood's work, which is full of beautifully close readings of the kind that I've been led to assume you valued. I can see and agree with the point that Wood doesn't quite follow through on his initial premise about comedy, and that the book is clearly a collection that has been forced together, in terms of suppporting an overall theme. But is that it? Is that your main objection? I have a feeling that I'm not alone among fans of both your work and Wood's, who are trying to reconcile your differences. Of course it's not at all imperative that you agree. I just wish there had been some appreciation for Wood's acumen and passion on a piece-by-piece basis. Or else some sense of why you don't see or value those qualities.

You ask of the collected essays "what justification is there for them to be reprinted as a book if no real effort is made to make them readable as a book?". This is such a strange question, and one you can only ask if you feel that the pieces individually have no merit at all. Perhaps the book would have been better titled simply "Essays and Reviews by James Wood," but because it doesn't follow through on its interesting premise doesn't mean the pieces weren't worth collecting, does it?

Finally, while I'm here: please, post more often.

[Dan Green]

I surely thank you for your nice words about the blog.

I'd probably be more accepting of The Irresponsible Self if it were titled "Essays and Reviews by James Wood" and didn't pretend instead to be about "laughter and the novel."

I don't really think of Wood as a "close reader" in the formalist sense of the concept--and it is essentially a formalist concept. He's a moral critic concerned ultimately about literature's ethical implications. He can certainly have his political biases--see his relatively recent review of Le Carre's Absolute Friends.

I really am posting as fast as I can. Really.

[Leonard Bast]

Very nice post here. I've read some of Wood's essays, as well as his novel The Book Against God, but I didn't realize that the phrase "hysterical realism"--which I encountered via Isaac Butler--could be traced back to him. I'll have to look up that particular essay.

I think I'd say that the difference between Wood's favorite fiction and the more broadly comic kind that you describe here is, in part, the difference between most contemporary English fiction and most contemporary American fiction--for instance, Alice Thomas Ellis vs. Flannery O'Connor. Many of the writers of "hysterical realism" would be unthinkable if modernism (and later postmodernism) had never happened. But so much post-1945 fiction coming out of England seems to be in revolt against modernism. I like a great deal of this fiction myself, but I agree with you that to make this kind of fiction THE ideal, as Wood seems to do, is to distort literary history and to risk falling into mere nostalgia.

[Cuthbert]

I don't share Wood's tastes but his broad distinction between comedy and satire is reasonable and not unprecedented: Nathaniel West, Heller, Barthelme, Pynchon, DeLillo and Tom Wolfe are all satirists first and foremost and there are strong satirical elements in most of the other writers you mention. Many of Wood's problems with contemporary fiction can be traced to his lack of sympathy with satire as a mode -- see the review of Martin Amis' The Information in his first collection, which holds the book to the standards of a realistic novel, and complains that the characters are two-dimensional. I wonder what he thinks of Gulliver's Travels? There's not much unknowability to the Lilliputians...

[Dan Green]

I don't agree that West, Heller, Barthelme, Pynchon, and DeLillo "are all satirists first and foremost." Wolfe yes, and a poor one, but the others are not. There's very little in their work that's designed to evoke satirical "correction." It's a different kind of "carnivalesque" comedy altogether. If Wood thinks they are satirists, he's misreading them completely.

[Manish]

You didn't publish my last post, did you? Well and good, as it was a little embarassing to me, and fairly hysterical if I say so myself. Plus, I hadn't really read what you had to say, and just used the forum as an opportunity to bash James Wood, whom I sometimes disagree with.

As for your point, which I'm only now beginning to get, because I've only now read what you had to say, I'll say that I didn't really understand everything. Partly because I don't like "theories of comedy" or "Theories of Sorrow" or "Theories of Tragedies", and am therefore rather badly informed on the subject. To me, the question is essentially a simple one, and these "Theories" merely an attempt to analyze that which will not be analyzed. In that regard, I liked your point about comedy being essentially unrealistic. Thats the case with most things that human beings respond to, I think. Analysis, of the type Wood conducts, is an admirable thing at times, especially if it serves to separate the good from the bad, and his punching of Tom Wolfe and putting that pompous pretender in his place was very justified, but otherwise, I don't really see the need for people like him. And this while agreeing that he offers astute analysis. Its not the astuteness that I have a problem with, its the very analysis. When Wood, for instance attacks the author of "Gravity's Rainbow" for being too vivid, he's essentially telling him that there are too many things in his book and that those are causing him to lose his way, the way James believes was meant to be travelled. And yet the same criticism can be levelled on him, that his analysis is too vivid, as when, for instance he attacks Don Delillo in "Underworld" for saying that a baseball is the size of a nuclear reactor, and somehow linking this with Delillo's infamous penchant for paranoia,a link that Delillo himself never makes in the book. What's the point of such an absurd linkage, Mr. Wood?

It really is strange what James Wood finds funny. There are many things to be said about V.S Naipaul, but he is not known to be especially funny. What is James Wood trying to prove when he supposedly sees the laughter in a situation that I can't? Or is it precisely that, that he is being of a higher order, which can understand what the rest of us can't. Is this what his "Theory of Comedy" ultimately leads to? And while the idea of restraint is a good one, can that seriously be applied to comedy? It can't. Because then the whole purpose is ruined. If you try seriously to keep your humor in check, then what comes out is not humor but seriousness.

That sort of comedy might appeal to His Dour Highness, but I daresay that the rest of us prefer, if we are given a choice, the other, even the hysterical kind, something that's not constrained by an almost unnatural urge to be prim and proper, but which lets our emotions come out fully, and if he doesn't approve, then that's to his, not our, disadvantage.

[Tom]

Validity of opinion aside, the following sentence is unintelligibly ungrammatical: "It is a very peculiar definition of "comedy" in literature that values such comedy for the way in which it manages to restrain itself from actually producing laughter, and that identifies as among the greatest comic writers in modern fiction the likes of J.F. Powers, Henry Green, and V.S. Pritchett." Syntactically, the first "that" corresponds to "literature," not "a very peculiar defenition of 'comedy' in literature." Do you mean "literary comedy"? And how could a definition of comedy "value" a kind of comedy? Certainly it could represent a kind of comedy, but for only a person or sensibility can "value" something as you have suggested. And this is just the first sentence of your critique. I write this comment now because I think much of what you seem to intend to say is interesting and even demonstrative of Wood's oversights and cloying tendencies, such as his fondness for the word "gentle." (Keep in mind, however, that Wood himself objects to John Updike's own overuse of that word, which Updike uses to describe physical traits; whereas Wood uses it to describe, more appropriately, prose style.) I am particularly interested in Wood, and routinely search the internet for discussions about his work. Yours is not glibly dismissive, as so many tend to be. But it is significantly uneven and deserving of more of your attention than it got.

[Tom]

That "but for only" is a typo. It should read "but only."

[Dan Green]

"Syntactically, the first "that" corresponds to "literature," not "a very peculiar defenition of 'comedy' in literature."

No it doesn't. You're wrong. The sentence is perfectly intelligible.

[Chris]

Coming VERY late to the party.... I must say, I rather like James Wood, priggishness and all. And I even agree with his thesis about "hysterical realism" so far as it goes.

My problem with Wood's thesis, however, is that the "hysteria" he finds in DeLillo and Pynchon is only intermittent. Much of their prose is not "hysterical" at all, and it isn't even comedic. I actually don't find Pynchon's jokes funny at all: Pynchon the comedian is lame indeed. But Pynchon the prose-poet of landscapes, cityscapes, and technology is non-pareil.

And this is what Wood fails to see. Wood seems bewildered as to why Pynchon and DeLillo are so popular despite the fact they don't create three-dimensional characters and don't tell traditional A to B stories. But the reason, to me, is obvious. The reason is that they tackle "the way we live now," they analyze and interpret the technological utopia/dystopia we truly inhabit. The late Saul Bellow (Wood's idol) didn't do that. He never addressed what crucially distinguishes our time from George Eliot's time: the omnipresence of science and technology in our lives - high tech gadgets, the world wide web, transnational corps, patented genes, advanced weaponry, etc., etc. which most of us don't truly understand, not in the way any reasonably well educated 19th century person could grasp all the essentials of the science of their day. We live in a world not of our making, and we don't sufficiently comprehend the advanced maths and sciences that have created this world for better or worse. But Pynchon grasps it. Pynchon is one of the few writers around who is enough of a math whiz to truly understand all this stuff, while also being enough of a prose stylist that his writing isn't perfunctory, like say, Arthur C. Clarke's. He has the science background of a Clarke combined with the powerful prose of a Joseph Conrad.

My ideal writer would also be able to create complex, vivid characters in addition to all this. But I can't think of anyone right now who can do all three (rich characterization, scientific/technical knowledge, stylish prose). Pynchon can do two out of three, and that's pretty damn good. Wood thinks otherwise, but that's only because he doesn't take the interest Pynchon does in the impact of advanced technology on all our lives. He doesn't see Saul Bellow's lack of interest in this topic as a blind spot or shortcoming, but I do.