An interview with the most excellent James Wood appears in the pages of the Kenyon Review. The interviewer Jesse Matz picks out all the questions that ought to be asked of Wood, and what makes the interview particularly interesting is that it is conducted in front of a college audience. It is this latter aspect that is responsible, I think, for the things that get said about “the critical scene at its very best” and “how to write, edit, teach, and read–all in the service of the books themselves.” Wood observations always shimmer with a bright energy, and he never fails to be engaging, even when he is a bit off the mark, as when he presents academic critics as relentless defenders of the canon. The interviewer asks Wood a great question toward the end about what the role of the contemporary novel–”is there anything that today you think the novel is for, specifically?–and the reply makes me wonder whether it doesn’t also hold the kernel of a more elaborate argument that can be made about why the literary, when thought about in slightly more serious terms than most creative writing programs allow, trumps the greater, more abstract, ambitions of theory:

One of the phrases I’m very fond of is the famous one that comes in Henry James’ letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, where he defends essentially his idea of what the modern novel can do against his idea of the limitations of the historical novel. The phrase he comes up with is this compound phrase “the present palpable intimate.” I think it’s still something which I hold fast to. Present, because obviously, the novel needs to be set in the contemporary world, has its traffic with the contemporary. Palpable, because it’s full of concreteness and density and all the rest. And the intimate, above all for me, the intimate, which I don’t think needs to be limited to the domestic. That’s the mistake that perhaps an experimentalist might assume, that “The intimate must mean only domestic settings.” But, the expiration of the “present palpable intimate” along with what I would call, what you might call a sort of “circularity” of the novel form. I mean by that that we’re surrounded by discourses that are very efficient at analyzing a contemporary sign world, the world of the spectacle.

That’s been one of the enormous benefits, it seems to me, of the last thirty-forty years. What the novel can do, you might define it in circular terms: it justifies itself by making an inquiry which only it can do. It doesn’t need to, I think, be infused with, and this is one of the things I don’t like about Franzen, for instance. I don’t think it needs to borrow the language, the languages of theory or cultural studies. It will make its own formal justification. So I would, yeah, I think there’s a limitless amount that the novel can do, especially in this world almost entirely dominated by film, especially by the rapid editing of film, the one-and-a-half minute scene and so on.

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