James Wood
The excellent James Wood has today published a review of a new biography of Flaubert. Wood finds much to admire both in Flaubert and in the biography by Fredrick Brown; and when you read the last line of the passage that I have quoted below, you know that Wood could be talking also about himself:
We have George Sand, it seems, to thank for the existence of “A Simple Heart.” In her last years this devoted correspondent goaded him to produce lofty and moral work. People had reviewed “Sentimental Education” poorly, she said, because he had not made clear which character was worth admiring. Flaubert replied that he did not feel he had the right to judge his characters in this way. Sounding like Chekhov, whose “Lady With the Little Dog” would owe something to “Madame Bovary,” he wrote that: “Obscene books are immoral because untruthful. When reading them, one says: ‘That’s not the way things are.’ ” And in a characteristic coda: “Mind you, I detest what is conventionally called ‘realism,’ although I have come to be regarded as one of its pontiffs.”
Once again, let me direct you to the essay in Prospect that Wood published recently. Consider this paragraph:
Literary theory has been recurringly obsessed with traditional realism, determined to unmask its naivety, proclaim its enthralment to bourgeois convention and gloat over its final impossibility. Thus the paradox that the most sensitive modern analyst of realism, Roland Barthes, the critic who most acutely laid bare realism’s grammar with something like a lover’s devotion, was almost derangedly hostile to its ambitions, an implacable denier of its effects.
In today’s paper, Wood is described as “a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University.” I’m curious whether in his courses Wood uses Barthes’ S/Z, a text that he mentions in his Prospect essay; I also wonder what other examples of criticism he holds up as models for his students. Does his robust commitment to a more open and unstable realist aesthetic also find its echo in his classroom-advocacy of diverse critical approaches, especially those that disturb settled notions of what it means to practice literary criticism? I can imagine myself reaching, perhaps too conveniently or indiscriminately, for anyone from Walter Benjamin to Alain de Botton–with writers like James Agee, Virginia Woolf, John Berger, Susan Sontag, Edward Said, W.G. Sebald, Jonathan Franzen, Geoff Dwyer, Andrew O’Hagan, and several others, thrown into the mix. This semester, in my freshman writing class, I’m using Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story; it is a wonderful little book that I hope will teach students to write better by teaching them to read better. I’ve liked very much Gornick’s sharp readings of different kinds of non-fiction; more than that I’m persuaded that you can teach your students “how to search out the link between a narrative line and the wisdom that compels it; how to ask, Who is speaking, what is being said, and what is the relation between the two?”
