Bookplanet: on reading James Wood on Flaubert

Dispatches: Flaubert and the Anxiety of Inheritance
by Asad Raza

In a recent New York Times Book Review, James Wood reviews the new Flaubert biography. It's a natural call, because Wood sees Flaubert as a hinge figure for the development of 'self-consciousness' in literature (more on this below), and because of Wood's official (i.e. disputed) status as the last true literary critic. Flaubert's reputation matches up here quite well: the supreme stylist; the dogged aesthete; the urbane man of letters; the tireless reader and writer; the champion of aesthetic autonomy; the first diagnostician of our modern dilemma - Flaubert was born to die, to make way for his own legend. That said, to make an invidious historical comparison, Wood's style is far more self-consciously literary and concerned to brandish tropes than Flaubert's ever was: 'dipped in futility,' 'the great pool of death,' 'a long siege on his talent.' Where the air of death surrounds Flaubert at this juncture in the history of reading, Wood's analyses of literary style in the pages of The New Republic, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, etc., give off the less powerful aroma of anachronism. As n+1 so cattily remarked , Wood seems to want to be his own grandfather.

In a larger way, a funereal atmosphere seems to hover over the entire present 'literary world,' consisting of ten or so literary magazines, the review pages of a few newspapers, the populations of graduate creative writing programs, and that class of rich-in-cultural capital people who find it important to read, say, The Corrections, to remain 'part of the conversation.' I think members of that version of literary culture represent themselves wrongly as the sole defenders of the realm, and that the dour pronouncements they make about the state of literature are narrow and misguided. The death certificate can't quite decide which is the primary cause: the hateful mass market, the decline of reading, the rise of movies, the rise of video games, the loss of some essential seriousness, the inadequate stewardship of 'our' culture. (And just whose culture is it over which one feels a sense of ownership?) The stance is one of bemused detachment at this fallen world we live in, combined with an an unspoken assumption that literature and not movies or music is the true culture, and an exaggerated respect for the cultural achievements of the novelists of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Nostalgia for the literary accomplishments of prior eras I understand - what interests and confuses me is the rhetoric of 'dying literature,' 'the last critic,' etc.

And why Wood? The general trajectory one can extract from his writing is a fairly hoary narrative about how novels achieved self-consiousness in fits and spurts beginning roughly with Austen, truly emerging with Flaubert, and peaking with Henry James and Virginia Woolf. I don't entirely disagree with his thumbnail, but the exclusivity of this narrative is unwarranted. First of all, self-consicousness, however you define that, is far from unidentifiable in the novels of Sterne, or Fielding, or, for that matter, Cervantes. Second, the progression of literary styles from realism to modernism in the novel is a compelling story, but only one among tens of such narratives in comparatist literary history. Why not erect the development of prose nonfiction in eighteenth-century periodicals as the crucible of modernity, or the egotistical sublime of the Romantic poets, or really go out on a limb and advocate for Shakespeare? The question, then, is not so much with Wood's particular but unremarkable story of past greatness, as with the enshrinement of that story, and of Wood as a figure, as melancholic touchstones for our dissatisfaction with the state of the world today.

My hypothesis is that the exaggerated mourning for lost cultural greatness is a strangely self-deluded form of wielding authority. That is, the bemoaning of literature's lack of importance today, of the dearth of 'serious' (another keyword) readers, is mostly emitted by people who are, paradoxically, both the most widely read and the most self-abnegating of belle lettrists. What Wood and Franzen and The Believer and even n+1 share is that sense of coming at the fag-end of a period. They are our cultural coroners, except I don't think culture is dying. As with Harper's magazine's shrill doomsaying, their real complaint is of their own insufficient authority. As designated hitters for what counts as literature in U.S. culture, they wield considerable influence and even function as a coterie at times. But the nostalgia for an imagined golden age tells me something else: that they believe that the culture-at-large stubbornly refuses to give them the chance deservedly to impose their quite narrow cultural tastes. Unspoken lies an uneasy feeling that thirty years ago, style that wears itself like a merit badge and world-weary, paternalistic maleness should have been enough to guarantee lionization. We were groomed to rule, but somewhere along the way the kingdom shrunk from Western culture to a sub-principality of Oprah-land. As a counterexample, consider a figure very like Wood but who writes about movies: Anthony Lane, young, prose-stylish, British, retrograde, doesn't suffer under the weight of literature's supposed prior dominance. What is delusive about this bunker mentality is that this country's most widely circulated magazines are far more likely to publish a piece by Rick Moody or Dale Peck than by Fredric Jameson or Franco Moretti.

So literature, then, or at least a particular idea of it, seems to have become a narrative of decline whose retelling celebrates one's refinement and sensitivity, one's belief in what is of true value, and one's allegiance to the superiority of an imaginary time before theory, before globalization, before now. It's as comfortable as a wool sweater. One can see why Flaubert excites reviewers such as Wood: here is the one writer whose famously toilsome life of writing was rewarded with immortality. Premature obsolescence becomes posthumous greatness. He is the human allegory of the value of art beyond and in opposition to economic value. (Not for nothing does Bourdieu identify Flaubert as the key figure of the nineteenth-century French aesthetic field.) Praising Flaubert's style, his adaptation of descriptive prose into a vehicle for a deliciously ambiguous form of seeing the world, allays not Bloom's anxiety of influence, the need to kill the poetic father, but the anxiety of inheritance, the need to see oneself as the true heir of the revered father. It's a telling reversal, in that a vital artistic tradition should be much more eager to dethrone than rethrone canonical forbears. It is a form of reading Flaubert's will, and finding one's own name as the beneficiary of all that (cultural) capital.

All of which is a shame, because on the matter of literary style, Wood is very good. Like Hugh Kenner before him, he has a talent for the producing something literary out of talking about literature. And he is also illuminating on his authors, in the case of Flaubert identifying the strange contradiction between his constant satirizing of the bourgeois life and his deep immersion in it. (It's precarious realism, satire perched on the edge of mimesis, and you want to cheer as Flaubert keeps keeping his balance.) But Wood stops there, as though he were the only person still having this conversation, like a jellyroll archivist. The last critic, indeed. But lots of people are talking about Flaubert, only in ways that are also informed by whole schools of thought that swam right past Wood. I saw a lecture on Flaubert only two months ago by Sara Danius, the Swedish translator of Jameson, which treated many of the same issues as Wood, only it attempted to connect Flaubert's aesthetic practice not only to a geneaology of novelists, but to his historical period itself. D.A. Miller, the author of Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style, likewise makes the study of style into more than an anachronistic internal affair.

It's on the relation of style to history that I think Flaubert continues to fascinate. Sentimental Education (which is the true masterpiece, not Bovary) is the story of how a life is shaped by historical events of the grandest variety, but which can only be dimly sensed by the protagonists, absorbed as they are by the petty and familiar dramas of their own lives. Even those characters who are politically and intellectually engaged are shown to have at best a limited purview on the conditions of their existence, while much action is taken for completely quixotic reasons that have nothing to do with their outcomes. The novel is a tour-de-force of contingency, starting with the famous first scene, in which our hero Frederic first glimpses his great obsession, Madame Arnoux. That Flaubert's own life was marked by such a obsession fascinates, but Frederic's cowardly and utterly sympathetic disappearance during the most epic moments of 1848 shapes the novel as much negatively as the pursuit of Madame Arnoux does positively. In a novel saturated by looking at things, Flaubert is at pains to show the difficulty of seeing anything for what it is, and at many moments suggests the pointlessness of trying. But conscripting Flaubert into playing the absent father in our own anxiety dreams about the death of literature and the marginality of writers ignores another drift of his work, not the one toward the autonomy of style, but toward seeing past the sentimental towards a world that is only ever represented but no less real for that fact. A longed-for wholeness and a fallen world are by no means the special burden of recently disenfranchised social elites; they are, to paraphrase another nineteenth-century French novelist, illusions to be lost.

Comments
Nicely done Asad. I think you're right about the essential silliness, and self-promotion, of Wood's pose as the last of the critics. I'm not sure if the "New York Critics" ever really were what their biographers say they were but they were certainly more than this:

"Much of the time Flaubert's influence is too familiar to be visible. We so expect it that we hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert. And after Flaubert, it sometimes seems, this is all you can find."

Wood's style seems to break under the weight of its own aspirations. All those semi-colons don't quite hold the sentence together. (Strictly speaking, they're not grammatical either.) One wonders who, exactly, he imagines as his audience. But then again the Times is publishing a lot of this sort of faux belle-lettrist stuff lately. Take a look at their recent piece on Elizabeth Bishop (linked a week ago or so, with a suitably snarky comment from me).

Perhaps then the question really ought to be why the resurgence of this sort of gaseous, ersatz criticism precisely at the moment of its obvious irrelevance?

Posted by: Jonathan | Apr 17, 2006 3:29:53 PM

I'm not sure I agree with some of these characterizations.

First of all, this issue of lateness isn't really intrinsic to Wood, but a characteristic of a wide range of postmodernists, including, say, John Asherby. The texture of the lateness is also different: I think Wood's view is more evaluative (contemporary novels took a wrong turn away from Mind and have not produced as good work), while an avant-garde poet is really pissed off at having missed the boat.

Also, the Anthony Lane comparison isn't very edifying: Lane really doesn't care if he likes a movie or not. Wood himself has said that he likes reading Lane but could never write like that--it's mere entertainment. And Lane has been criticized for the inverse of what you're praising him for: for not being an idealogue.

Have you read Wood's book? They're actually very good, thoughtful--much smarter than, say, Jameson. (The NY Times pieces are typically shorted, less dense versions.) I think the real issue with Wood is his neoclassical flavor--he's very new critical in his concern for aesthetics. The question is whether he should be more of a historicist or if he fits in a movement towards evaluation and intention that one might associate with, say, Walter Benn Michaels.


PS - Those semicolons are accurate--those aren't sentence fragments but items in a list.

Posted by: kenchen | Apr 17, 2006 3:53:00 PM

I don't see this kind of criticism as a resurgence, Jonathan, as much as I see Wood as representing a particularly concentrated variety of it at the moment. Book reviewers are usually belle lettrists of some stripe. But I do think that the doomsaying culture of these sorts of commentators has inflated along with the increasing irrelevance of the literary guardians employed by the mainstream literary press. Wood, in this regard, is not the worst offender at all - generally I find his tone pretty amiable. But he gets these assignments because without explicitly saying it, he simply writes as though large swaths of critical thinking had never been produced. He's like the critical equivalent of a classic rock station. And while I love 'Black Dog' as much as the next Buffaloian, I'm more partial to Broken Social Scene nowadays. Though maybe this is part of a larger cultural retrenchment, a kind of forgetting of the troublesome English professors of the last twenty years. What do you think?

Kenchen, I don't think my point has to do with lateness generally (a preoccuption of Adorno's and Said's as well) as much as it does with the promulgation of the sense of cultural death associated with the lack of literary critical discourse in the public sphere. This is seen in contrast to the era of Trilling, Wilson, McCarthy, and the high priests of 'seriousness.' Recall that Wood's most remembered formulation, 'hysterical realism,' is a kind of attack on exuberance and a call for better literary manners. Which is odd, because Wood champions the narcissistic exuberance of Updike and Bellow.

I'm not praising Lane, merely pointing out that he isn't burdened in the same way as Wood. In fact I think he has his job for some similar reasons, one of which being the ability to produce a 'literary' style in a sort of critical vacuum. And I wouldn't compare Wood to a historicist or to Walter Michaels, because he isn't a scholar and he doesn't partake of the debates of literary theory. He's a reviewer whose popular enshrinement I think represents a literary culture that confines itself to rehearsing the past.

Posted by: Asad | Apr 17, 2006 4:37:47 PM

I don't think Wood attacks "hystical realist" works for their exuberance, but for their specifically inhuman brand of exuberance. He likes a number of exuberant writers--he just doesn't like the diminishing of the social.

Also, when I asked if Wood should be more of a historicist, I meant it as code for your main point--that Wood writes as though certain academic trends hadn't been written. Because Wood doesn't do this, I agree that he might be re-grouped in a retrenchment effort, which WBM might also be a part of. Compare Against Theory to Wood's LRB essay that emphasizes intention.

I guess I'm saying that, while I may agree with your characterization of Wood, I'm not sure if I agree with your conclusions. Can you give more examples of this funeral mood?

Posted by: kenchen | Apr 17, 2006 5:45:56 PM

Kenchen,

They're not items on a list; they're a series of dependent clauses. They ought to be separated by commas. That Wood falls back on the incorrect use of the semi-colon only shows that the sentence ought to be constructed differently.

If they were items on a list they would be preceded by a colon and wouldn't need all the deictics.

Asad, more soon...

Posted by: Jonathan | Apr 17, 2006 6:59:06 PM

As long as we're pointing out grammatical gaffes:

"One wonders who, exactly, he imagines as his audience."

Shouldn't it be "One wonders whom, exactly, he imagines..."?

Posted by: anon | Apr 17, 2006 7:50:29 PM

Ken,

Though examples are rife in any copy of Harper's, The Believer, The New Yorker, The New Republic, etc, the best example when it comes to Wood is simply his stature in the world of reviewing. His outlook implies by its omissions that the criticism of James, Lubbock, Brooks, Trilling, and others who pioneered formalism can be resurrected uninflected by critical work that has come since. That in itself is an implicit claim for the superiority of an antique past in which the notion of aesthetic value was thought independently of sociology. At moments when Wood poses himself as simply a corrective to what prevails today, he also misrecognizes the degree to which the New Formalism or New Aestheticism already dominates the scene of U.S. literary culture - even as it constantly grieves the loss of its larger cultural authority.

Posted by: Asad | Apr 17, 2006 7:52:48 PM

Asad, I don't think it's really about forgetting all those troublesome English professors, since they were never really noticed anyway.

Posted by: Jonathan | Apr 17, 2006 8:05:21 PM

Mr. Anon,

"Shouldn't it be "One wonders whom, exactly, he imagines...?"

Yes, it should, and you're right. That's a particularly tricky example of the objective case looking like the subjective. But thank you. I happily stand corrected.

Posted by: Jonathan | Apr 17, 2006 8:22:21 PM

Okay, you're right about the semi-colons!

I'm still skeptical about the death of culture claim. First of all, your argument about Wood's formalism is interesting but tenuous: (1) Wood's style is formalistic; (2) and therefore resembles the New Critics; and (3) because it resembles an earlier style, it automatically indicates nostalgia for this style and hence the view that we're living in a decadent dark age, etc. I agree that Wood doesn't really deal with academic criticism after formalism, but couldn't it be argued that the mainstream literary essay is its own genre whose conventions are set by the examples of Empson, etc.?

Also, I don't think the examples about our dead culture are that one-sided. In poetry, the general theme seems to be the overwhelming newness of experimental verse movements. As for The Believer, etc., doesn't the Mcswnys brand surround itself with an emphasis on supposed novelty?

Posted by: kenchen | Apr 17, 2006 10:06:51 PM

This is what I love about you English guys: you are SO connected to reality.

I particularly want to thank Anon and Ken for writing about Jonathan's writing about Asad's writing about James Wood's writing about some biographer's writing about Flaubert's writing about imagined things which resemble... hey, HERE IT IS: reality! This makes Morgan's idea of launching the Review of the Review Review look like the embarrasingly modest ambition of a lit-crit bumpkin.

Fascinating discussion of grammar which taught me the indispensible word "deictic." Thanks much.

(Oh, please don't bother to point out that I have just written about Anon and Ken writing about...)

Posted by: Abbas Raza | Apr 18, 2006 12:54:40 AM

Also, just to kick you while you are down, Jonathan: "Mr. Anon" sexist much?

Looking forward to kicking you in person later today...

Posted by: Abbas Raza | Apr 18, 2006 2:48:07 AM

Back in the 70's (the 1970's!), I had the pleasure of taking several classes from one Dr. Joe Butler at San Diego State University (still reading?)...

I liked Joe a lot: as a teacher, a human, and a writer.

I first met him at a "writers' party"; that night degenerated (as they always did, at least for me) to a point (I am sure things got worse) with Joe taking a wild swing at me (he missed--he was more drunk than I); I believe the fight started over the (proper) usage (use?) of revered semi-colon...

Thanks for bringing back those memories.

Aside from the review of the review (of the review), the other memory some of the postings evoked, was the time another professor read one of his "works in progress" to the class.

It was one of those writer's workshop types of things where we all searched so frantically for "meaning".

After he finished (he was one of those readers whose voice changed dramatically when he recited his work, like those poets who read their stuff with their strange "I'm reading one of my poems" voices) he asked me what I thought of his work.

I told him that I found it interesting that an incident of having a big Navajo Indian washing his window at a gas-station in Arizona was the thing that he chose to read to us, but that I certainly could place myself at the scene, so he had succeeded (if that had been his goal)...

He then read one of my short-stories (which were all quite bad, but I did work hard on them) and proceeded to tell the class that while my words and descriptions were "beautiful", the words were empty and I really was saying nothing...

Flaubert has always made me feel better about that "style" of writing, as it seems to me to present us a view of something we can then interpret on our own, while also made cognizant of his perspective of all that whirled around him--that which whirls around us all...

The real fun I had when I read all the interesting commentary you folks so quickly and skillfully assembled, was to read each of your remarks aloud, and I felt an extra connection with Flaubert and you very smart people...

Back to Joe Butler--I took a class from him titled the Panzaic Principle, and understood maybe one in every 30 words he spoke. When I asked Dr. Butler how it was I was given an A+ for the class when I understood so few of his words, he told me that at least I understood more than any one else in the class, and that made him feel like he was achieving something...

Posted by: Rex | Apr 18, 2006 1:30:50 PM

Rex, the 'I'm reading one of my own poems' voice is dead on; I bet you Flaubert had one of those himself.

Ken, I'm reading Wood as a symptomatic figure for a literary culture that treats the present as a debased version of the past. Wood's writing doesn't make this claim explicitly, but by its omissions. Others are much more world-weary in their tone. Wood also performs a normative retelling of the realism-modernism-postmodernism developmental narrative, which implies that literary form is exhausted, but superior to anything that comes afterwards.

Abbas, dem's fighting words. I think a rumble on the clay will have to settle this one.

Posted by: Asad | Apr 18, 2006 6:12:13 PM

Sorry, I was trying to be funny, but these things never come off right in writing; at least for me. (Oops, did I misuse the semicolon there?) I did enjoy your article very much.

But bring on the Tennis! (Thursday, right?)

Posted by: Abbas Raza | Apr 18, 2006 6:35:28 PM

It was funny, and I did get it. I was just responding in kind. Of all people to reenact a two cultures ultimate battle, Sokal-Ross II, us!?!?

(me laughing.)

Posted by: Asad | Apr 18, 2006 6:39:39 PM

The essay and much of the commentary went way over my head. But I am up for the tennis game.

Posted by: TAsnim | Apr 19, 2006 9:26:13 PM