Wednesday, 14 May 2008
I was recently looking for information on James Wood and stumbled into a bevy of online discontent with which I must, to some extent, concur. I think it started with a long challenge from The Rake in which he takes umbrage at the recurrent suggestion by Wood that there is something morally wrong with the novels he doesn’t like. Rake believes that this moral opprobrium extends not only to the work but also to those who write it and to those who read and enjoy it. In other words, he feels Wood indicts everyone who likes Pynchon or Zadie or Franzen or Delillo.
And to some extent, the Rake is right. It’s quite clear from the works he cites — such as the now famous pair of essays that preceded and reacted to 11 September 2001: the review of White Teeth, and his admonition for American writers to abandon social and theoretical glitter (as The Guardian glossed it) — that Wood does repeatedly call those novel he dislikes morally deficient, because he believes they are not sufficiently human, are not “novels about human beings”. Indeed, he does it again in his response to this Daniel Green complaint (see the comments) about the way Wood dismisses Cormac McCarthy.
Wood privileges feeling in the novel, so much so that he despairs when he reads a novel that he finds insufficiently compassionate. Certainly, emotion is essential for fiction; I tell my students that fiction aims to reveal emotional truth. But I think it important to recognize, as Zadie suggests in her response to Wood in the Guardian, that people are emotionally attached to thoughts and ideas as well as feelings. In other words, I think Wood makes too much of feeling and too narrowly construes, thereby, what the novel might do.
But that’s the sort of thing that can be easily forgiven. What makes Wood seem like a nemesis to so many people is how insistent he is that he is right and they are wrong, that the novels (and writers and readers) are wrong, morally wrong. He makes this claim for moral deficiency but never clearly explains what ethical theory would account for this moral evaluation. I can’t quite fathom how it’s ethically wrong to write a book with a mechanical duck as a character (as Pynchon has done, to Wood’s dismay), especially since the duck has human emotions that are instantly recognizable and so would seem to fall into Wood’s desire to see human feelings depicted in prose. Since Wood fails to make the justification for these pronouncements clear, its easy to assume he simply says mean things about the books that he doesn’t like.
But, if it’s all personal preference, then why all the fuss? And how can he justify such categorical pronouncements? As Laura Miller argued in her review of his first book, the world of literature need not be a narrow one but can easily expand to include lots of different styles and attitudes, genres and modalities. Wood wants to insist on one but refuses to precisely define that one enough to allow for a coherent rebuttal. That hardly seems fair.
Update: On further reading, I found this more recent tidbit interesting. James Wood invited Jonathan Franzen (one of those he has pilloried) to speak to his class at Harvard. Evidently, he was quite gracious. Franzen, for his part, didn’t attack Wood directly but took aim at criticism and Michiko Kakutani instead.
—
andru
@ 5:02pm |
Friday, 28 March 2008
I’ve found my candidate.
“I did not watch any TV” during his quick getaway this past week to the Virgin Islands, he said. Nor did he get much writing done, as he had said he had hoped; instead he said he enjoyed reading a book, Philip Roth’s latest novel, “Exit Ghost.”
— Barack Obama on his recent weekend away
—
andru
@ 10:36am | [4]
Friday, 19 October 2007
James Watson’s recent comments were delivered in that nebulous zone between public and private speech. He was, after all, in his own office, speaking casually with a reporter. The conversation did not focus on his scientific research. Rather, he spoke on a variety of informal topics. But he also knew that his comments would be published. He was speaking to one journalist, but through that journalist he was addressing the world.
It has been important for Watson’s defenders on this matter to cast him as a lone hero, someone who has the courage to say what others haven’t been able to. Defending him in these terms, as hundreds have done on various websites this week, is revealing. What did Watson say? He said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” and “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” Consider, in addition, Watson’s second statement: that he hoped everyone was equal but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.” What do these statements of his mean? I think it might be helpful to examine them structurally.
What Watson is doing in these statements is taking advantage of the gap between public and private speech. Hence the conspiratorial tone, and the offhand manner in which he implicates his interlocutor in his statements. He is using a stage whisper and a megaphone. It is coded language, less carefully coded, perhaps, than what a Republican candidate campaigning in the southern US might say, but coded all the same. Whatever else might be going on here, it’s clear that Watson has an idea of “our” which is distinct from “Africa” or “black.” He gives this binary opposition a further twist when he implies that on one side you have “people” and on the other “black employees.”
Quite apart from the inaccurate assertions he makes about differences in intelligence, Watson commits a more fundamental error here. He seems to genuinely believe that there’s an in-group that is not and cannot be the same as African people. It certainly would not seem so to someone who has a lifetime habit of thinking of his in-group in terms of whiteness and maleness. It would not seem unethical at all. It would seem normal. That is the problem.
Watson is a geneticist. As such, he knows that the genetic diversity on the African continent far surpasses anything outside it. As difficult as it is to generalize about Europeans in genetic terms, it is even more difficult to generalize about Africa. Whereas Europeans represent a movement of selected populations from East Africa, via the Levant, into the European peninsula, the African population is largely what it has long been: a staggeringly complex web of human diversity. To compare the two in general terms would be like comparing a pair of Tiepolos with the entire artistic output of the Netherlands in the 17th century. It would make no sense.
Watson no doubt knows these things in theoretical terms. However, his urgent need to defend his privilege trumps this knowledge. He talks about Africa, but it means nothing, really. It is merely a word denoting the despised Other. It means only that his own whiteness is a valuable source of self-esteem to him. That Watson does not anywhere in the conversation say “ white” or Europe is, I think, also signal. For him, these categories constitute normality. To be white, to be of purely European descent, is to be “we.” He talks about “our social policy,” and so on. The “our” in question is a racialized in-group that includes the white journalist in conversation with him, the all-white readership he imagines for the Sunday Times, and also includes the world of work where the “people” who do the hiring are white.
What Watson’s “our” does not include is scientists of any other race, or readers of the paper who might be black or Asian, or indeed most of the population of the world. These nodes of exclusion will be familiar to any non-white person who has had to function in a majority-white environment.
Watson’s insinuations are intended, foremost, to provide comfort to just the sort of people who have appeared in large numbers all over the internet to support him. Insecure people, the sort who believe that, as the most widely used study suggests, Nigerians have an average IQ of 67. People who are happy with the insinuation that the average African is mentally retarded, and that to be normal and fully human is to be white.
Watson is wrong here, not only because he gets the facts wrong, and not only because he treats a ridiculously antiquated concept like IQ-testing with incurious respect. For a scientist, these are damaging gaffes, but they are forgivable. He is more egregiously wrong because he does linguistic violence to entire populations of people. In other words, he’s not wrong like Copernicus, he’s wrong like Goebbels.
His “our” denotes a world split into black and white. Blacks don’t belong. Whites are intelligent and they are the employers. They, the whites, are really the “people,” the “gens” from which both gentry and genetics are etymologically derived. But what about the thousands of Chinese-born researchers and professors in molecular biology today? Aren’t they people too? What about the thousands of Indian physicians in the US? What is served by pretending that the world, or the scientific world, is only black and white? Watson’s binary view is unconnected with reality.
My younger sister holds a doctorate in Microbiology and has presented several papers at Watson’s institution, Cold Spring Harbor. That he might cast aspersions on her intelligence is simply laughable. More troubling, however, is that he, from his position of power, continues to aggressively exclude people like my sister from the conversation. He is not alone. His is only the latest nasty and unwarranted attack on a group of people that is, and has been for so long, under constant attack.
Long after the Watson brouhaha has died away, the old question of who belongs will remain. The question of who owns what, the question of who the “our” in “our social policy” is, will have to be tussled with. It would be a mistake to see the Watson case—or any of the other rash of racially aggressive incidents in the media this year—as a question of free speech or political correctness. The issue here is ethical. When Goebbels said, of the Jews, “it is true that the Jew is a human being, but so is a flea a living being—one that is none too pleasant. Our duty towards both ourselves and our conscience is to render it harmless. It is the same with the Jews,” the ethical response is not, “We need to do further tests to figure out whether there’s any scientific truth to that.” It was a social statement, and it was intended to degrade and to humiliate. When James Watson declares, likewise, that blacks are less intelligent than “us,” he is speaking pseudoscientifically, and with a view to humiliation. What is a “black”? What is “intelligence” and how does one test it? The statement is a social one. It is a social intervention, a masked way of saying “I like our kind. And I don’t like blacks.” Watson’s people, those who share such views, understood the code right away.
It goes without saying that Watson would be unable to speak intelligently about the points of comparison and contrast between Scottish folksong, Yoruba oriki and Carnatic music. He would have no access to the depths of intelligence and subtlety contained within each. Such specific knowledge is outside his ken. He doesn’t know it, but he doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know it. Why would he wish to get bogged down in such specificities? He simply wished to air a prejudice.
—
abdul-walid of acerbia
@ 4:57pm | [6]
Jack (1989) by A. M. Homes
Our freshman have to read this novel at the University I now teach at, probably so we can claim to teach them something about literature during whatever internal political debates that take place. We never discuss the novel in class and the only subsequent engagement with the work will be a series of questions on the mid-term exam designed to gauge whether they actually read it. I wish we could ask more of them, but the courses for freshman are more like advanced foreign language courses than English courses focused on literature. Only the upper division courses take on the character of a literature department, and farangs seldom get to teach such courses.
If we were going to teach them literature, I would not teach this book. I didn’t particularly like it and was often bored. There are some nice set pieces and no one can fault Homes’ writing — she’s a fine craftsman of American prose — but I just thought it too pat and predictable. I thought it rather ordinary, common, and unremarkable. This is the third book of Homes’ that I’ve read and I would say the same about all of them (although, to be fair, I’ve not read the one’s that are most highly praised). She strikes me as an ordinary but gifted writer working in a very conventional mode exploring rather obvious and common subjects. I don’t mean that to be as damning as it may sound, but to be descriptive. Many people like reading conventional stories — that’s why genre fiction always does so well, for how well it adheres to and plays with the conventions — about everyday life. If you are one of these people, then A. M. Homes writes books you might enjoy. If you are not, then avoid her whenever possible because that is her métier.
Friday, 6 July 2007 | [3] 
James Wood, who never particularly likes Don Delillo because of the latter’s disdain for faith and God, reviews Delillo’s Falling Man. His assessment is that while it sometimes achieves an aching beauty, it ultimately fails to reveal much about the sources of that which haunts our lives now, nor does it manage to paint a full picture of those lives. The weird thing is that the passages that he quotes admiringly I thought less impressive than those he quotes disparagingly. I suppose, as always, it comes down to a matter of taste, and mine does not coincide with our most esteemed literary critic.
This post on the Dubliner website offers this advice from Graydon Carter on what makes a good magazine essay. Magazine articles are built on three pillars: access, disclosure, or narrative. The best have all of them. Access is opening a new experience or world to the reader. Disclosure is a scoop, some new information or insight. Narrative, of course, is a story with characters and an arc.
Sunday, 01 July 2007
Without anyone mentioning his recent death, a passing we may or may not even have yet been aware of, Richard Rorty came up in conversation with my colleagues a week or so ago. The philologist asked me if I thought, in light of what I had just said in trying to distinguish Rorty’s thinking from the context in which it had been raised, if Rorty were a follower of Derrida.
Rorty and Derrida agree on a number of things, I said, without Rorty being a follower of the Frenchman. They both believe that philosophy or philosophers, rather, mistakenly see what they do as finding or describing truth, when philosophy is more a kind of literature. Each tries to do philosophy in a distinctively literary manner, and the most obvious difference between them lies in their personal literary styles, which I’ve always taken to be cultural in origin: Derrida almost a symbolist poet (his words divorced from their literal meanings) while Rorty is an American yarn-spinner of a philosopher (homespun wisdom in straightforward prose). Both men wanted to show how philosophy might be done without recourse to metaphysical theorizing and turned to a literary style to do so.
I can’t decide if it’s strange that each died, in the past few years, of the same disease — pancreatic cancer. In an email he sent to friends, Habermas writes, Rorty claimed his daughter joked that it must be caused by “reading too much Heidegger.” I’ve come to understand in recent years that each man articulated positions that resonated with things I believe, even though I fought hard with those who took their positions and advocated complete relativism. I still believe some things are right, some wrong, that humanity shares a great deal across cultures and time, and that we can sometimes justifiably claim to know something, but at the same time, I share many basic principles with Pragmatists and Deconstructionists. Although each of them would consider many of my positions untenable, perhaps even false, I live in the world they described.
Todd Gitlin suggests that Rorty knew only one vice, one value that ought to be opposed absolutely: “the fetish for purity.” I couldn’t agree more, although I would add righteousness to that list of vices. But read what his friends and peers have to say about him — I only ever knew people who knew him rather than the man himself — and I think you might find his pragmatism not unlike your own.
—
andru
@ 3:48am | [2]
Andrew O’Hagan, in this piece in The New York Review of Books, argues that Don Delillo’s new novel, Falling Man fails because it doesn’t hew closely enough to the actual events, the true story, the reality. I find this a rather limited view of what the novel can and should attempt to do. He concludes on this pointless criticism:
DeLillo’s novel was inspired by a photograph of a real person—most agree that he is Jonathan Briley, who seemed at a certain point in his descent from the North Tower to plummet straight, upside down, one leg bent, his shirt flying off in the ferocious breeze, his head scorched, “The Falling Man” whose image became a token of horror and a mass-media legend. And the things pertaining to his image are what interest Don DeLillo. Yet the person inside the legend was a man from Mount Vernon who worked in the North Tower restaurant, Windows on the World. He was flesh and blood, not just an idea. He was born on March 5, 1958. He was six feet five. His father was a preacher. He suffered from asthma and had a wife called Hilary. He died sixty-five minutes twenty seconds after Mohamed Atta, and is currently awaiting a writer sufficiently uncoerced by the politics of art to tell his story.
Michael Wood, on the other hand, finds Falling Man to be a cogent depiction of the events and aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York. The novel has been hit hard by many reviewers, in addition to O’Hagen, for its lack of adherence to reality, to documentary veracity, but for Wood and others, it feels true if not necessarily accurate. How else should fiction be?
This essay discusses four recent collections of essays by novelists — Milan Kundera, J.M. Coetzee, Susan Sontag, and Mario Vargas Llosa — and the relationship between novels and essays, both capacious forms that come close to encompassing the full human experience, which is a political as well as personal one.
A fascinating comparison between what The Unbearable Lightness of Being meant for Czech people when it first appeared and what it means today. Also a study in how literature changes with time even as the words stay the same. A book of politics, philosophy, love, and story all at the same time.
Amis follows Tony Blair, whom he obviously admires, on his farewell tour. He writes well, although his description of Blair’s failure of words in Iraq could be a clearer: what does he say and how does it fail. An interesting portrait.
Adam Kirsch attempts to be judicious in seeing both sides of the debate between book critics and (so-called) book bloggers, but even so the comments in response become rather pointed and snide. He seems to define blogs by content and length rather than by format, which is the most standard definition: occasional writing organized by date (often with comments and keyword tagging). He is right that literary discussions will continue to grow online, given the ease of publication and infinite space, but he still manages to be slightly sneering of blogging and what it can be and do. The problem in these debates that no one acknowledges is that there is a literature culture and a publishing culture that are only tangentially related. Blogs and book reviewers both cater to the publishing culture (what is new) much more than to the literature culture (what is lasting).
The difficulties that young writers face are only more difficult in the glare of New York’s many distractions and demands, Peter Carey has learned from watching his students at Hunter College. He also remembers his own days in Australia when there were no good reasons to write but also nothing else to do.
Or the lack thereof. Akhil Sharma, Suketu Mehta, Gary Shteyngart, John Wray, and Ray Isle (a food writer I’m unfamiliar with) get together once a month to commiserate about writing and the writing life. Maybe light on substance but an article that can leave one longing for companionship.
Thousands of inexplicable mutations thought by scientists to be silent, having no effect on the individuals phenotype, turn out to open the body up to specific diseases, new findings show. These findings will also requires scientists to rethink how DNA functions and works in controlling who we become.
