James Wood: How Fiction Works (2008)

James Wood’s How Fiction Works asks “questions about the art of fiction” with the aim of revealing to general readers the techniques that make fiction work. He justifies the existence of his book by arguing that academic literary criticism has not adequately served this task (though he does admit a fondness for formalist critics such as Barthes and Shklovsky). This is a rather dubious claim, especially since Wayne Booth’s classic The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) deals with most of the same aesthetic and narratological issues and discusses many of the same literary examples. Besides a brief mention of Milan Kundera’s books on writing fiction, Wood also omits any reference to the numerous manuals that offer would-be writers clichéd advice on how to construct a good novel. Wood refuses to ground his analysis of the art of fiction in either a political program or a systematic aesthetic theory, so he winds up offering a rather idiosyncratic and incomplete appreciation of good fiction’s dedication to “truth” and “lifeness.” How Fiction Works starts out well with a chapter on narrating that demonstrates Wood’s sensitivity and sophistication as a reader. He claims that, with some exceptions, almost all stories are told in the third person or in the first person. But he questions the “common idea . . . that there is a contrast between reliable narration (third-person omniscience) and unreliable narration (the unreliable first-person narrator, who knows less about himself than the reader eventually does).” He finds this contrast to be a “caricature,” and claims, “first-person narration is generally more reliable than unreliable; and third-person ‘omniscient’ narration is generally more partial than omniscient.” Because authors flag the unreliability of their first-person narrators, readers learn how to read that unreliability. “Unreliable unreliable narration is very rare, actually – about as rare as a genuinely mysterious, truly bottomless character.” Turning to third-person omniscience, Wood argues, “authorial style generally has a way of making third-person omniscience seem partial and inflected.” He explains, “So-called omniscience is almost impossible. As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking. A novelist’s omniscience soon enough becomes a kind of secret sharing; this is called ‘free indirect style.’” Wood proceeds to offer one of the best explanations of free indirect discourse you’re likely to find anywhere. He rewrites the same third-person sentence multiple times, slowly transforming it into an example of free indirect discourse. In free indirect discourse, language seems to hover between being the property of the novelist and of a character. “Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. A gap opens between author and character, and the bridge – which is free indirect style itself - between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance.” Wood is at his best in the book in the following discussion of literary examples that exploit this tension in free indirect discourse. When he identifies a single word in a Henry James sentence that pushes the text into free indirect discourse, Wood comes close to justifying his dismissal of the theoretical sledgehammers academic critics usually apply to literary works. Unfortunately, the rest of Wood’s book does not maintain this level of insight, and Wood is unable to keep many of his later claims from resembling aesthetic commonplaces. In the next chapter, he turns to Flaubert, who of course is the foundation of modern narrative and literary realism. Flaubert’s mastery of details that seem at once trivial and important leads into a discussion of the function of detail in fiction. Wood admits he is ambivalent about the “post-Flaubertian” fetishizing of the detail, which often leads to “surplus detail” in the text. Roland Barthes’ essay “The Reality Effect” argues that irrelevant, excess detail is a code for the real: it makes the text say, “I am real.” Wood adds that no detail in a novel is really insignificant, though some may be “significantly insignificant,” that is, they function precisely through their lack of clear significance. But lacking Barthes’ interest in semiotic systems, Wood explains this claim by making a problematic comparison of literature and life, arguing that irrelevant detail in literature demonstrates “the irrelevance of reality itself,” the presence of surplus detail and a “margin of the gratuitous” in everyday experience. Turning from detail to character, Wood objects to E. M. Forster’s famous distinction between flat and round characters. Wood notes that many of the great characters of literature are surprisingly flat, mere outlines that are never fully fleshed in. At this point, Wood enters into a rather unnecessary polemic against postmodern, metafictional writers who deny the existence of characters (William Gass is the direct target). Here as elsewhere, Wood comes across as being rather traditional and conservative in his literary values, values that he ultimately can only prescribe without justification. He writes, “My own taste tends toward the sketchier fictional personage, whose lacunae and omissions tease us, provoke us to wade in their deep shallows.” But more generally, “novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level.” “It is subtlety that matters – subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure – and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do.” Some rather brief and fragmentary chapters on sympathy, language, and dialogue follow, so that the book increasingly seems like a collection of random thoughts rather than a systematic account of how fiction works. When he finally reaches the question of the value of literature itself, Wood offers an answer that could have come straight from Lionel Trilling: “the novel does not provide philosophical answers . . . it gives the best account of the complexity of our moral fabric.” This response leads him to more directly confront the issue of literature’s relation to reality. He acknowledges that literary realism has largely become what he terms “commercial realism,” a degraded genre that relies on a set of conventions to depict reality. But rather than agree with the postmodernists who, denying language’s referentiality, claim that commercial realism illustrates the artificiality and arbitrariness of all realism’s codes, Wood wants to preserve a stronger link between literature and the real. He proposes to “replace the always problematic word ‘realism’ with the much more problematic word ‘truth.’” “Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life-sameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.”