NP Very Misc. Wooden idea

[matthew cissell]

Dear all,

Instead of knocking on James Wood I'd rather try to understand this
very curious situation in which "the" Uber anglo critical voice de
jour finds so much fault in the work of such a widely acclaimed
novelist. How would you explain this to someone unfamiliar to all this
talk of books and writing? Shouldn't scholars of Pynchon's work be
able to account for this with more than, "Wood has it all wrong" or
'different strokes for different folks'? Are polemics and relativism
the only options?

   "It has to be acknowledged, therefore, that it is historical
analysis which allows us to understand the conditions of the
'understanding', the symbolic appropriation, real or fictive, of a
symbolic object which may be accompanied by that particular form of
enjoyment which we call aesthetic."  A bit further on Bourdieu adds to
this: "... the foundation of belief... resides in the illusio, the
adherence to the game as a game, the acceptance of the fundamental
premise that the game, literary or scientific, is worth being played,
being taken seriously."

   Wood takes literature very seriously and has taken a series of
positions that has led to his present place in the field of literary
criticism.

  Wood has praised W.G. Sebald for his "great powers of reticence and
understatement"; Sebald is a serious writer. Compare this to how Wood
loads his review of AtD with terms like: manic, vaudeville, larking,
and accuses TP of being enamored of the "farcelike, overlit
simplicities of Fielding", and later warns that "as in farce, the cost
to all seriousness is considerable." You see, Pynchon is not serious,
thus the title of the review: "All Rainbow, No Gravity".

   This offends Wood. It comes through in his M&D review where he
writes:  "So this is America in the 1760s. But really, it is the
thickly sown lot of Pynchon's mind. For the wartime London of
Gravity's Rainbow is a similar place, less a city of one noble British
defense than the site of internecine paranoias, a city of shadowy
groupings and official acronyms..." How dare Pynchon treat something
so serious as the Blitz with a scene about bananas? Wood seems to have
forgotten or to be unaware of what Hayden White tried to argue about
how we emplot events through narrative modes. (Still, I bet James Wood
laughs at the 'Bring out your dead' scene by the Monty Python!) It all
makes me think of what Steve Jobs said about Gates: "He'd be a broader
guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an Ashram when he was
younger." Of course, Jobs was talking about a reorientation that
fundamentally repositions one. The closest to that  we may see with
Wood is his shifting postion on a writer like DFW (see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsbKT50ud04 about 6 mins in) about
whom Wood claims "my blindnesses have been educated".

  A question arises: Now that Wood has gone to Harvard, will his
vision be further educated? But there is also a different question.
The early critical literature around Pynchon's early work is still
valuable to students of Pynchon's work, will Wood's critical essays
(in reality reviews republished as essays) be valuable to future
Pynchon scholars when studying later Pynchon writings?

ciao
mc otis



On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 11:21 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> OK, I bite.
>
> That Wood is an a-historical phony becomes obvious not only where he disses
> authors like Pynchon but also where he is on a mission to re-introduce
> authors from classical modernity.
>
> Look at this - doubtlessly: inspired - review of Hamsun from 1998:
>
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n23/james-wood/addicted-to-unpredictability
>
> ("Hunger" is a hell of a book --- go and read it if you can!)
>
> The sentence which is so extremely stupid is the following:
>
>> His senseless hatred of England – he never supplied any reason for this
>> prejudice – drove him into a mindless veneration of Germany. <
>
> "(H)e never supplied any reason for this prejudice(?)" This is bullshit.
> Now, Hamsun was an anti-globalist writer, one of the first. It isn't for
> nothing that the words "earth" and "soil" pop up so often in his work. The
> clearest expression of Hamsun's anti-globalist message can be found in the
> novel "August" (dt. August Weltumsegler) from 1930, which explicitly
> articulates anti-capitalism as anti-globalism, but it goes all through his
> work and can also be found in his journalism. And which nation did represent
> the indivisible world-market in Hamsun's times? That's the UK. So, is James
> Wood an idiot? No, of course not. Probably he just wanted to push Hamsun and
> make him more read among anglophone readers. As likable as that is, as off
> turning is his phony acting stupid. I really despise this ...
>
>
>
> On 02.03.2015 12:40, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>
>> We should gather all our Wood thoughts and self-publish them.
>> Knock(s) on Wood.
>>
>> We might get, Oh, 3--5 buyers outside of ourselves (but I bet even
>> we won''t buy it. Why should we, they are all here).
>> -
>> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l