NP - On James Wood

[Matthew Cissell]

Over the past few weeks there have been several mentions on the P-list of James Wood's book "How Fiction Works", some take exception to his treatment of TP but Alice and some others have not been unkind in their reference to his text. I would like to ask a question of the P-listers.

Does it not strike you that their is something amiss in his book? The ostensible goal is to explain the proper functioning of fiction to the common man and woman (let us be clear that this book was not aimed at an academic market - see p.xix). Wood lays out his argument early replete with refences to Ruskin, Forster, Kundera, Barthes, James, Flaubert and (importantly) Fielding. Quite a bellelettristic list, no? But is this the sum of fiction? Methinks the title has left something in invisible parenthesis.The real title is "How Literature Works" or "How (Proper) Fiction Works". I say this because it is clear that Wood's treatment of fiction leaves out so called genre fiction. No mention is made of how Harlequin romances work for the millions of readers that buy those books.

Wood's work is a good example of what Bourdieu called the scholastic fallacy, involving a failure to objectify ones own objectifying practice. It is then no surprise when this scholar informs the reader in a footnote on page 150 that Pynchon's characters "are not truly frightening" but that Conrad's anarchist is. Wrapped in the regal robes of authority that communicate the accumulated cultural capital of this accomplished literary high-cleric, Wood exercises a symbolic violence that coerces the reader into a particlular stance. The aesthetic judgement becomes literary law, to which (as Kafkas Doorgaurd would tell us) the common reader cannot gain access. You have been informed, now believe.

But that's just my take. Waddyathink?

ciao
mc otis