James Wood and the Nature of Exceptionalism

Posted 28 January, 2008 in Literary Criticism |

There is a remarkable moment in James Wood’s critique of character from yesterday’s Guardian, in which he does something that most lesser critics go to extreme lengths to avoid: he admits to uncertainty. In the midst of a lengthy meditation about the nature of character in fiction Wood actually asserts that he is “not sure what a character is.” The phrase is so innocuous as to utterly belie its radical nature.

The tendency among literary critics — most evident in those who can least afford it — is to adopt a baldly authoritarian tone, to write as though individual perceptions and biases carried the weight of divine fiat. Wood, by contrast, is an essayist in the true sense of the word: he is making an attempt, a try at understanding, and feels no need to adopt the mantle of the infallible expert. Indeed, when he asserts that “a great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction — from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little,” one finds it difficult to take issue.

Wood finds equal fault with the naive and unsophisticated reviewers who post on Amazon.com, demanding likable characters that they can identify with — Wood diagnoses a “contagion of moralising niceness” in such readers — and with those on the postmodern left, whose involuted and overly intellectualized deconstructionist readings render the entire point of fiction moot: “of course characters are assemblages of words, because literature is such an assemblage of words: this tells us absolutely nothing, and is like elaborately informing us that a novel cannot really create an imagined ‘world’, because it is just a bound codex of paper pages.”

By starting from a point of uncertainty and humility, Wood is able to chart a critical course that avoids any kind of dogmatism, but rather takes the characters in different novels on their own terms, without demanding that they perform some predetermined function or slot easily into some preexisting ideology.

Here is the crux of Wood’s argument, which could — and probably should — be pasted above every literary critic’s desk:

The truth is that the novel is the great viruoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown at it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as a “novelistic character”. There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.

Amen, Mr. Wood, and thank you.

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