The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities at Brandeis University

James Wood

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611687439
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, the noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works—among others, Chekhov's story "The Kiss, " The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald, and The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a boy from the provinces growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he draws between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. More than a tightly argued little book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic, The Nearest Thing to Life is an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.

CHAPTER ONE

Why?

I

Recently, I went to the memorial service of a man I had never met. He was the younger brother of a friend of mine, and had died suddenly, in the middle of things, leaving behind a wife and two young daughters. The program bore a photograph, above his compressed dates (1968–2012). He looked ridiculously young, blazing with life—squinting in bright sunlight, and smiling slightly as if he were just beginning to get the point of someone’s joke. In some terrible way, his death was the notable, the heroic fact of his short life; all the rest was the usual joyous ordinariness, given testament by various speakers. Here he was, jumping off a boat into the Maine waters; here he was, as a child, larkily peeing from a cabin window with two young cousins; here he was, living in Italy and learning Italian by flirting; here he was, telling a great joke; here he was, an ebullient friend, laughing and filling the room with his presence. As is generally the case at such final celebrations, speakers struggled to expand and hold the beautifully banal instances of a life, to fill the dates between 1968 and 2012, so that we might leave the church thinking not of the first and last dates but of the dateless minutes in between.

It is an unusual and in some ways unnatural advantage to be able to survey the span of someone else’s life, from start to finish. Such surveillance seems peremptory, high-handed, forward. Grief does not seem entitlement enough for the arrogation of the divine powers of beginning and ending. We are uneasy with such omniscience. We do not possess it with regard to our own lives, and we do not usually seek it with regard to the lives of others.

But if this ability to see the whole of a life is godlike, it also contains within itself the beginning of a revolt against God: once a life is contained, finalized, as if flattened within the pages of a diary, it becomes a smaller, contracted thing. It is just a life, one of millions, as arbitrary as everyone else’s, a named tenancy that will soon become a nameless one; a life that we know will be thoroughly forgotten within a few generations, like our own. At the very moment we play at being God, we also work against God, hurl down the script, refuse the terms of the drama, appalled by the meaninglessness and ephemerality of existence. Death gives birth to the first question—Why?—and kills all the answers. And how remarkable, that this first question, the word we utter as small children when we first realize that life will be taken away from us, does not change, really, in depth or tone or mode, throughout our lives. It is our first and last question, uttered with the same incomprehension, grief, rage, and fear at sixty as at six. Why do people die? Since people die, why do they live? What is the point of a life? Why are we here? Blanchot puts it well in one of his essays; by exaggeration he conveys the stunned truancy of the apprehension: “Each person dies, but everyone is alive, and that really also means everyone is dead.”

The Why? question is a refusal to accept death, and is thus a theodicean question: it is the question that, in the long history of theology and metaphysics, has been answered—or shall we say, replied to—by theodicy, the formal term for the attempt to reconcile the suffering and the meaninglessness of life with the notion of a providential, benign, and powerful deity. Theodicy is a project at times ingenious, bleak, necessary, magnificent, and platitudinous. There are many ways to turn around and around the stripped screw of theological justification, from Augustine’s free-will defense to the heresy of Gnosticism; from God’s majestic bullying of Job (be quiet and know my unspeakable power) to Dostoyevsky’s realization that there is no answer to the Why? question except through the love of Christ—embodied in Alyosha’s kiss of his brother, and Father Zosima’s saintliness. But these belong to the literary and theological tradition. The theodicean question is also being uttered every day, far from such grand or classic statements, and the theodicean answer is offered every day, too—with clumsy love, with optimistic despair, with cursory phlegm, by any parent who has had to tell a child that perhaps life does indeed continue in heaven, or that God’s ways are not our own, or that Daddy and Mummy simply don’t know why such things happen. If the theodicean question does not change throughout a lifetime, so the theodicean answers have not changed, essentially, in three millennia: God’s reply to Job is as radically unhelpful as the parent who replies to little Annie’s anguished questions by telling her to be quiet and go read a book. All of us still live within this question and live within these fumbled answers.

When I was a child, the Why? question was acute, and had a religious inflection. I grew up in an intellectual household that was also a religious one, and with the burgeoning apprehension that intellectual and religious curiosity might not be natural allies. My father was a zoologist who taught at Durham University, my mother a schoolteacher at a local girls’ school. Both parents were engaged Christians; my mother came from a Scottish family with Presbyterian and evangelical roots. The scriptures saturated everything. My father called my relationship with my first girlfriend “unedifying” (though in order to deliver this baleful, Kierkegaardian news, he had to ambush me in the car, so that he could avoid catching my eye). I was discouraged from using the suspiciously secular term “good luck,” and encouraged to substitute it with the more providential “blessing.” One was blessed to do well in school exams, blessed to have musical talent, blessed to have nice friends, and, alas, blessed to go to church. My untidy bedroom, said my mother, was an example of “poor stewardship.” Dirty laundry was somehow un-Christian.

When I asked where God came from, my mother showed me her wedding ring, and suggested that, like it, God had no beginning or end. (But I knew that someone had made the ring, even if I didn’t say so.) When I asked about famines and earthquakes, my father told me, correctly enough, that humans were often politically responsible for the former, and, in the case of the latter, were often to blame for continuing to live in notoriously unstable areas. Well, so much for remediable poverty and pestilence, but what about cancer, mental and physical handicap, awful accident, the freakish viral attack that felled my friend’s brother at the age of forty-four? Why is there so much suffering, so much death? I was told that God’s ways are incomprehensible, and that in many cases, a Job-like humility before the incomprehensible must be cultivated. But Job was a complainer before he was a saint or stoic, and I fear that my childish questioning got permanently jammed in the position of metaphysical complaint.

My anguish about death was keen because two members of my parents’ congregation died at early ages, from cancer; one of them was a single mother. I played with her children. Prayers were uttered; prayers were unanswered—except that, when my parents told me that “God has called Mrs. Currah to be with him in heaven,” it seemed that, in some mind-bending way, God might have been answering our prayers by failing to answer our prayers.

So inquiry was welcomed up to a certain point, and discouraged as soon as it became rebellious. Job could not become Captain Ahab. This illiberality, coupled with my sense that official knowledge was somehow secretive, enigmatic, veiled—that we don’t know why things are, but that somewhere someone does, and is withholding the golden clue—encouraged, in me, countervailing habits of secrecy and enigma. I would reply to their esoterica with my esoterica, their official lies with my amateur lies. They believed that this world was fallen, but that restitution was promised elsewhere, in an afterlife. I believed that this world was fallen, and that there was no afterlife. As they kept the actuality of their afterlife a kind of prized secret, I would keep my revelation that there was no afterlife a prized secret, too. I became a formidable liar, the best I knew, accomplished and chronic. Lying went all the way down: you started by withholding the big truth, your atheism, and ended by withholding small truths—that you swore among friends, or listened to Led Zep, or had more than one drink, or still had the unedifying girlfriend.

Literature, specifically fiction, allowed an escape from these habits of concealment—partly because it offered a symmetrical analogical version of them, a world of the book within which lies (or fictions) were being used to protect meaningful truths. I still remember that adolescent thrill, that sublime discovery of the novel and short story as an utterly free space, where anything might be thought, anything uttered. In the novel, you might encounter atheists, snobs, libertines, adulterers, murderers, thieves, madmen riding across the Castilian plains or wandering around Oslo or St. Petersburg, young men on the make in Paris, young women on the make in London, nameless cities, placeless countries, lands of allegory and surrealism, a human turned into a beetle, a Japanese novel narrated by a cat, citizens of many countries, homosexuals, mystics, landowners and butlers, conservatives and radicals, radicals who were also conservatives, intellectuals and simpletons, intellectuals who were also simpletons, drunks and priests, priests who were also drunks, the quick and the dead. There was the nice stealthiness of canonicity, whereby authors who had been approved by posterity or enshrined in university study, or simply given authority as a Penguin Modern Classic (the austere glamour of those light gray covers—I remember my brother saying solemnly to me, as we loitered by shelves, “If I publish a book I would want it to be done by Penguin”), turned out to be anything but respectable—turned out to be blasphemous, radical, raucous, erotic.

I would come back from the bookshop, these paperbacks glowing, irradiated by the energy of their compressed contents, seething like porn, as I slipped them past my unwitting parents and into my bedroom. Did they not know how blasphemous and riotously anticlerical Cervantes was; or that Dostoyevsky, despite his avowedly Christian intentions, was feeding my very atheism? Lady Chatterley’s Lover was still officially a “naughty” book, but Lawrence’s earlier, beautiful novel, The Rainbow, had somehow escaped such censure. And yet, open the pages of that book and here were Will and Anna, in the first, gloriously erotic, swooning months of their marriage, and here was Will noticing that as his pregnant wife was nearing her due date, she was becoming rounder, “the breasts becoming important.” And here was Anna, dancing naked in her bedroom, as David once danced before the Lord; and Ursula and Skrebensky, kissing under the moon. And the marvelous scenes in which Skrebensky and Ursula run away to London and Paris—how simple and beautiful, the way Ursula, while always finding something spiritually lacking in Skrebensky, emphatically falls in love with sex and her lover’s shape. In a London hotel room she watches him bathing: “He was slender, and, to her, perfect, a clean, straight-cut youth, without a grain of superfluous body.”

It might seem a relatively tame license, this notion that anything can be thought, anything written, that thought is utterly free. Aren’t most of us exercising that license every day, in our own minds? Why cherish fiction for merely replicating this exhausted liberty? But many of us don’t exercise that liberty; we nervously step up to the edge of allowable thought, and then trigger the scrutiny of the censuring superego. And fiction adds the doubleness of all fictional life: to witness that freedom in someone else is to have a companion, is to be taken into the confidence of otherness. We share and scrutinize at the same time; we are and are not Raskolnikov and Mrs. Ramsay and Miss Brodie and the narrator of Hamsun’s Hunger, and Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. This should feel exciting and also a little unseemly. Reading fiction feels radically private because so often we seem to be stealing the failed privacies of fictional characters. For sure, Shakespeare anticipates and contains all of the unruly life to be found in the modern novel. But Shakespearean soliloquy is uttered privacy (which has its roots in prayer, and ultimately in the psalms), while fictional stream of consciousness is, or tries to resemble, unvoiced soliloquy. And unvoiced soliloquy seems to meet our own unfinished thoughts, with the request that together we—the reader and the fictional character—complete, voice, a new ensemble. Their failed privacies become our more successful privacies.

The idea that anything could be thought and said inside the novel—a garden where the great Why? hangs unpicked, gloating in the free air—had, for me, an ironically symmetrical connection with the actual fears of official Christianity outside the novel: that without God, as Dostoyevsky put it, “everything is permitted.” Take away God, and chaos and confusion reign; people will commit all kinds of crimes, think all kinds of thoughts. You need God to keep a lid on things. This is the usual conservative Christian line. By contrast, the novel seems, commonsensically, to say: “Everything has always been permitted, even when God was around. God has nothing to do with it.”

Of course, the novel’s license seems easier to inhabit than the world’s, because novels are fictional worlds. Fiction is a ceaseless experiment with uncollectible data. What I loved, what I love, about fiction is its proximity to, and final difference from, religious texts. The real, in fiction, is always a matter of belief—it is up to us as readers to validate and confirm. It is a belief that is requested, and that we can refuse at any time. Fiction moves in the shadow of doubt, knows it is a true lie, knows that at any moment it might fail to make its case. Belief in fiction is always belief “as if.” Our belief is metaphorical and only resembles actual belief. In his essay “Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner,” Thomas Mann writes that fiction is always a matter of “not quite.” “To the artist, new experiences of ‘truth’ are new incentives to the game, new possibilities of expression, no more. He believes in them, he takes them seriously, just so far as he needs to in order to give them the fullest and profoundest expression. In all that he is very serious, serious even to tears—but yet not quite—and by consequence, not at all.” Fiction, being the game of not quite, is the place of not-quite-belief. Precisely what is a danger in religion is the very fabric of fiction.

II

How could these issues of freedom and surveillance not vibrate deeply, in a literary culture so marked by religious tradition? Jesus himself seemed unable to decide whether he was the ideal reader of fiction, or its implacable enemy. The Jesus who challenges the sinless to throw the first stone at the woman caught in adultery was apparently also the chief scourge of the thought police, announcing that any man who looks upon a woman with lust in his heart has committed adultery. Now, to ask us to look into our hearts and defer judgment of a person, out of compassionate fellow-feeling, is a thoroughly novelistic gesture: we do it every day as readers of fiction. But to claim that thinking something is identical with doing it, is thoroughly anti-novelistic: how could we read fiction if we actually believed this? Instinctively, though I couldn’t yet formulate the objection, I resisted Jesus’s parental surveillance of my own thought, while greedily availing myself of Jesus’s powers of scrutiny. The assertion that for a man to look at a woman with adulterous thought is the same as committing adultery shocks us perhaps for two reasons: because Jesus claims that thought is action; and also because he seems to claim the power to know what you are thinking, the power to interpret your stray look, your free gesture, your aimless glance. He claims the power to make your private thought public. We flinch from this, as Coleridge does, in the Biographia Literaria, at the idea that Momus, the ancient personification of correction and fault-finding, might put a glass window in the breast of man so that his heart could be seen. (Poor Coleridge, the weak-willed opium addict, had much to fear from such magnified religious observation.)

In one obviously important way, to read fiction is to have non-actionable thoughts; we assert the humane, nonreligious right to separate thinking from doing. To think freely is to insist on...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedecation
• 1. Why?
• 2. Serious Noticing
• 3. Using Everything
• 4. Secular Homelessness
• Acknowledgments
• Notes