My Disappointment CritMyM
NOVEMBER 7, 2011
MY DISAPPOINTMENT CRITIC JONATHAN LETHEM
“The job of the regular
daily, weekly, or even monthly critic resembles the work of the serious
intermittent critic, who writes only when he is asked to or genuinely moved to,
in limited ways and for only a limited period of time … What usually happens is
that (the staff critic) writes for some time at his highest level: reporting
and characterizing accurately … and producing insights, and allusions, which,
if they are not downright brilliant, are apposite … What happens after a longer
time is that he settles down. The simple truth — this is okay, this is not
okay, this is vile, this resembles that, this is good indeed, this is
unspeakable — is not a day’s work for a thinking adult. Some critics go shrill.
Others go stale. A lot go simultaneously shrill and stale. A few critics,
writing quietly and well, bring something extra into their work … Some staff
critics quit and choose to work flat out again, on other interests and in
intermittent pieces. By far the most common tendency, however, is to stay put
and simply to inflate, to pretend that each day’s text is after all a crisis…”
— Renata Adler, “The
Perils of Pauline”
“As [Harold] Bloom has
settled into this second career, so his old virtues have gradually fallen from
him. An extraordinary amount of the work of the last decade is luxurious with
padding and superfluity; there is hardly a book of his that would not have been
better off as an essay. He is not a critic anymore, but a populist appreciator
… Above all, for Bloom, writers must be ranked, and the greatness of the very
greatest asserted again and again. Moreover, all great writers are essentially
alike.”
— James Wood, “The
Misreader”
“The house of fiction, as
Henry James once said, has ‘not one window, but a million,’ and hence no single
aperture gives access to what James called ‘the need of the individual vision
and the pressure of the individual will.’ Different novelists look to different
models. Fielding, Sterne, and Stendhal set the pattern for the ironic or
self-conscious novel, flaunting its own narrative devices. Balzac became the
great exemplar of the social novel, as Scott and Manzoni did for the historical
novel. Tolstoy’s deceptive simplicity transformed style into a transparent
window on the real. Kafka’s metaphorical novels and stories turned fiction into
fable or parable. Each of these writers depends on exact circumstantial detail,
but the strength of their fiction comes not from the phrase, the sentence, the
metaphor, as critics like Wood would have it, but from how they actualize
larger units of scene and theme, plot and character. It can be misleading to
approach fiction primarily through its language, a technique better suited to
the study of poetry…”
— Morris Dickstein,
letter to New York Times Book Review, May
7, 2006
“Everyone speaks of the
‘negative capability’ of the artist, of his ability to lose what self he has in
the many selves, the great self of the world. Such a quality is, surely, the
first that a critic should have; yet who speaks of the negative capability of
the critic? How often are we able to observe it?”
— Randall Jarrell,
“Poets, Critics, and Readers”
WHAT HAPPENED IS THIS: I
wrote a book (The Fortress of Solitude) and
James Wood reviewed it. What happened next: I wrote James Wood a long,
intemperate letter. (Not an open letter.) And he wrote a curt postcard in
reply. Eight years later, I haven’t quit thinking about it. Why? The review,
though bearing a few darts (“Depthless Brooklyn,” “squandered,” “before our
disappointed eyes”), wasn’t the worst I’d had. Wasn’t horrible. (As my uncle
Fred would have said, “I know from horrible.”) Why, I hear you moan in your
sheets, why in the thick of this Ecstasy Party you’ve thrown for yourself,
violate every contract of dignity and decency, why embarrass us and yourself,
sulking over an eight-year-old mixed review? Conversely, why not, if I’d wished
to flog Wood’s shortcomings, pick a review of someone else, make respectable
defense of a fallen comrade? The answer is simple: In no other instance could I
grasp so completely what Wood was doing.
Also, I had expectations.
(That fatal state.) I felt, despite any warnings I should have heeded, that to
be reviewed at last by the most consequential and galvanizing critical voice,
the most apparently gifted close reader of our time, would be a sort of
graduation day, even if I’d be destined to take some licks. Taking some, I’d
join a hallowed list. I mean this: I’d have taken a much worse evaluation from
Wood than I got, if it had seemed precise and upstanding. I wanted to learn
something about my work. Instead I learned about Wood. The letdown startled me.
I hadn’t realized until Wood was off my pedestal that I’d built one. That I’d
sunk stock in the myth of a great critic. Was this how Rushdie or DeLillo felt
— not savaged, in fact, but harassed, by a knight only they could tell was
armorless?
As it happened, I wandered
into this encounter a self-appointed expert in the matter of expecting — a lot?
too much? — and being disappointed. I’d written a cycle of personal essays
called The Disappointment Artist, its subject, precisely, the
crisis of being so fraught with preemptory feelings in approaching a thing-a
book, a movie, another person-that the thing itself is hardly encountered. So
was I too ready to see Wood in my own framework, a version of “the narcissism
of minor difference”? Or did it make me specially qualified to demand of Wood
what I’d demanded of myself: that in the critical mode I sort out self and
subject, even if they always again intermixed, at least long enough to spare
the pouring-on of inapt disappointment?
James Wood, in 4,200
painstaking words, couldn’t bring himself to mention that my characters found a
magic ring that allowed them flight and invisibility. This, the sole
distinguishing feature that put the book aside from those you’d otherwise
compare it to (Henry Roth, say). The brute component of audacity, whether you
felt it sank the book or exalted it or only made it odd. These fantastic events
hinge the plot at several points, including the finale — you simply couldn’t
not mention this and have read the book at all. Or rather, you couldn’t unless
you were Wood. He seemed content to round up the usual suspects: italics,
redundant clauses, and an American kind of “realism” he routinely deplores.
Perhaps Wood’s agenda edged him into bad faith on the particulars of the pages
before him. A critic ostensibly concerned with formal matters, Wood failed to
register the formal discontinuity I’d presented him, that of a book which
wrenches its own “realism” — mimeticism is
the word I prefer — into crisis by insisting on uncanny events. The result, it
seemed to me, was a review that was erudite, descriptively meticulous, jive. I
doubt Wood’s ever glanced back at the piece. But I’d like to think that if he
did, he’d be embarrassed.
Strangely enough, another
misrepresentation, made passingly, stuck worse in my craw. Wood complained of
the book’s protagonist: “We never see him thinking an abstract thought, or
reading a book … or thinking about God and the meaning of life, or growing up
in any of the conventional mental ways of the teenage Bildungsroman.” Now this,
friends, is how you send an author scurrying back to his own pages, to be
certain he isn’t going mad. I wasn’t. My huffy, bruised, two-page letter to
Wood detailed the fifteen or twenty most obvious, most unmissable instances of
my primary character’s reading: Dr.
Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Lewis Carroll, Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Mad magazine, as well as endless scenes of looking
at comic books. Never mind the obsessive parsing of LP liner notes, or
first-person narration which included moments like: “I read Peter Guralnick and
Charlie Gillett and Greg Shaw…” That my novel took as one of its key subjects
the seduction, and risk, of reading the lives around you as if they were an
epic cartoon or frieze, not something in which you were yourself implicated, I
couldn’t demand Wood observe. But not reading? This enraged me.
(As for “thinking about
God,” was there ever a more naked instance of a critic yearning for a book
other than that on his desk? Can Wood’s own negative capability not reach the
possibility that in some life dramas “God” never made it to the audition, let
alone failed to get onstage? Pity me if you like, but I can’t remember
even considering believing in either God or Santa
Claus. The debunking was accomplished preemptively, preconsciously. Hence, not
a subject in my Bildungsroman. Sorry!)
“The conventional mental
ways of the teenage Bildungsroman.” Here, fobbed off in one casual phrase, may
be the crux: the conventional mental. Wood is
too committed a reader not to have registered what he (apparently) can’t bear
to credit: the growth of a sensibility through literacy in visual culture, in
vernacular and commercial culture, in the culture of music writing and
children’s lit, in graffiti and street lore. What’s at stake isn’t a matter of
“alternate” or “parallel” literacies, since these others aren’t really
separate. They interpenetrate and, ultimately, demand familiarity with the
Bloomian sort of core-canonical literacy. (I couldn’t have written my
character’s growth into snobbery without Portrait of a Lady and Great Expectations at my back, but James and
Dickens were simply not where I boarded the bus.)
What’s at stake is the
matter of unsanctioned journeys into
the life of culture. And I don’t believe anyone sanctions any other person’s
journey into the life of culture. This is the point where I need to confess
that my attention to James Wood, in the years since sending my letter, has been
as cursory as it was before that uncomfortable passage (uncomfortable for me; I
doubt I ruffled his feathers). Earlier I’d been content to sustain a cloudy
image of a persuasive new critic who made people excited and nervous by
passionately attacking novels that people (including myself) passionately
believed in; now I found myself content to revise that in favor of an impression
of a unpersuasive critic whose air of erudite amplitude veiled — barely — a
punitive parochialism. It didn’t make me want to read him, so I’m not qualified
to make any great pronouncements. I’ve only glanced, over these years, and it
may be that my confirmation bias is in play when I do. Here’s what I see in my
glances. When Wood praises, he mentions a writer’s higher education, and their
overt high-literary influences, a lot. He likes things with certain
provenances; I suppose that liking, which makes some people uneasy, is exactly
what made me enraged. When he pans, his tone is often passive-aggressive,
couched in weariness, even woundedness. Just beneath lies a ferocity which
seems to wish to restore order to a disordered world.
Not that any God had me in
mind, but if you’d designed a critic to aggravate me you couldn’t have done
better. About books I’m Quakerish, believing every creature eligible to commune
face-to-face with the Light; he’s a high priest, handing down sacred mysteries.
To one who pines for a borderless literary universe, he looks like a border
cop, checking IDs. The irony of Wood’s criticisms of Bloom is that Wood’s own
“narcissism of minor difference” looks unmistakable: Wood is a critic whose
better angels are at the mercy of his essentialist impulses.
His postcard to me? I’ve
lost it, but can give a reliable paraphrase, since after my outpouring, rather
than address what I’d said, Wood spared me just one or two arched-eyebrow
lines. It was as though my effort bore an odor of ingratitude. “I’m sorry you
felt that way,” he wrote, more or less. “I liked the book so much more than any
of your other work.” His tone, it seemed to me, that of an aristocrat who
never really expected those below him to understand the
function of the social order. He’s not angry, he’s disappointed. Well, that
makes two of us.
Addendum: On Bad Faith
My original letter to Wood
included the suggestion that he was “in bad faith.” This, the confidant who
vetted the letter wanted to challenge. He knew Wood and didn’t believe that was
“the explanation” (though he couldn’t propose an alternative). But maybe it was
a bridge too far. Reading the above, written eight years after, I see I’ve
reached for the same term. What does it mean to me?
I’m not actually trying to
read James Wood’s mind, or to change it now. Whether Wood consciously or
unconsciously betrayed a standard he consciously recognizes, or could be made
to recognize, doesn’t interest me. His piece is in
bad faith. The instant it was published, with its blanketing tone of ruminative
mastery, and yet with all it elides or mischaracterizes, it was so — period. It
was in bad faith with my novel, and, I’d say, with novels, an enterprise to
which Wood believes himself devoted, a belief I’d have no basis for
challenging. So let’s call this “resultant bad faith,” a term which spares us
the tedium and rage of guessing at the interior lives of those with whom we
more than disagree.
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