Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘James Wood’ category

From Wood to Saramago to Houellebecq

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I wrote last week how Wood champions literary realism at the end of How Fiction Works. But really, he does this subtly throughout the entire novel. Not by ever contending that experimental fiction doesn’t have as much to say about the relationship between fiction and life, but through a kind of censure, again related to craft, which is detectable in passages like this:

Is there a way in which all of us are fictional characters, parented by life and written by ourselves? This is something like Saramago’s question; but it is worth noting that he reaches his questions by traveling in the opposite direction of those postmodern novelists who like to remind us of the metafictionality of all things. A certain kind of postmodern novelist (like John Barth, say) is always lecturing us: ‘Remember, this character is just a character. I invented him.’ By starting with an invented character, however, Saramago is able to pass through the same skepticism, but in the opposite direction, toward reality, toward the deepest questions.

Wood is talking about José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, a novel I’m now really eager to read. I do really like postmodern fiction, but there are times it can get tiresome. A bit shouty. But based on Wood’s description, it sounds like I would love Saramago’s way of negotiating a postmodern existential crisis.

What I understand Wood to be saying here is that he approves of Saramago’s existential exploration because it doesn’t just stop at revealing the artifice to the reader. Instead, it uses that revelation to ask a further question. His quote is lovely:

Yet the novel suggests that perhaps there is something culpable about being content with the spectacle of the world when the world’s spectacle is horrifying.

Because I am deep into my Houellebecq project at the moment, this makes me consider the metafictional aspect of his work. I am slowly getting the sense that Houellebecq is unable to forget for a moment that he is writing, that he is creating a story for others to read, to be consumed. A certain narrative personality—either Houellebecq himself or an authorial personality he uses when writing—hovers over his work. It isn’t so much like Barth and the constant reminder of the invented character, but more like Houellebecq just can’t get out of the way.

I’m slowly starting to get a feel for Houellebecq’s overall aesthetic, and his project, and the more I read of his work, the more I think that he uses this form of metafiction because he would consider it dishonest to write the kind of fiction that pretends the writer doesn’t exist. I find that notion of dishonesty pretty interesting.

But I’m still working through all of his work and I think I’ll wait to expand on this idea until I’ve finished, or at least, nearly finished. I want to think about it a little more in case I’m misreading him…

*Thank you to careful reader, Guilherme, who kindly reminded me that it is Saramago and not Saramango! This post now corrected.

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About the end of James Wood's How Fiction Works

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I have been meandering my way through James Wood’s How Fiction Works for the last month or so and finally finished it up over the weekend. I think what I love the most about this little book is how easy Wood makes the study of literature appear. He condenses years of study and probably thousands upon thousands of hours of passionate, careful reading into a series of thematically-linked paragraphs. Paragraph 1 begins with narrative perspective and Paragraph 123 ends the book with a succinct appeal to craft:

…for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable ageing. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.

This last sentence is Wood’s answer to the assertion that literary realism is no longer a viable genre. To get to this statement, he visits several of realism’s loudest denouncers (Roland Barthes, Rick Moody, William Gass…) and disagrees with their conclusions that because fiction suffers from convention it therefore cannot ever express what is real:

…just because artifice and convention are involved in a literary style does not mean that realism (or any other narrative style) is so artificial and conventional that it is incapable of referring to reality.

Wood concedes that literary techniques are constantly becoming conventional. Of course narrative techniques, expressions, metaphors and all the other building blocks of fiction are always and forever ‘at-risk’ of rendering themselves ineffective. What is called into question is their ability to render ‘truth’ in an original and novel way, but never their ability to reflect reality.

I’ve never been particularly fussed about the debate on literary realism. I think both perspectives provide insight into how fiction works as an art form, how it is negotiated by readers. I am definitely more rooted in literary realism, however, so I would never be the kind of reader to chuck it out the window anyway, but I appreciated Wood’s championing of the genre as well as his celebration of the writer who simultaneously embraces realism while writing to escape all that has already been written.

So, I’ve only touched on approximately 20 pages of this excellent 180-page book. I’ll see if I have more to say another day…

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