James Wood on Fiction How Fiction Works James Wood may be the most tenacious watchdog literature has ever had. A passionate disciple of the one true religion, he brings the judgment of the heavens down upon heretics, lapsed believers, and infidels. His moral seriousness is notorious; many a wayward writer has felt himself a sinner at the mercy of a wrathful apostle. When he dislikes a book one feels not only his disapproval but his indignation. But his criticism is rescued from mere crankiness by the fact that in it the claims of the reader are always prior to the claims of the critic. Even at his grumpiest he sounds notes of pleasure ‘nicer’ critics forget. Through Wood’s eyes literature is the garden of sesames and lilies of which Ruskin wrote, an enchanted world of intelligible, blissful mysteries. Books he dislikes are still books he has tried desperately to like; he always scolds as a frustrated lover. As Wood told n+1 magazine a few years ago, his negative reviews were his way of telling authors, “Write better!” In The Guardian, in October 2001, he published a stern lecture to the current slate of young novelists about measuring up to the moral and artistic imperatives of life in a post-9/11 world. Zadie Smith offered an obsequious response about how ashamed she felt at the lack of words she had to describe this frightening new world. Sounding helpless and chastened, Smith’s essay ended with an appeal for the mad mystic to come down from the mountain and answer the questions, “How is this book made? How can I do this?” Fortunately for us, Wood took pity on Smith and gave us How Fiction Works. This lively, sure, elegantly written essay seeks to explain just how it is that writers conjure their magic. His “little book”, as he calls it, is a conversational, more confidently assertive, less donnish cousin of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. Wondrously footloose in Wood’s megasphere of literary reference, the book is sharper and more collected than Forster’s series of Cambridge lectures which were so ragged and unsystematic that Forster’s tone was at times almost apologetic. Wood gets around this by reporting that he has written the book in his study, using for inspiration only the books nearest at hand. Yes, an afternoon lark, a morning’s pleasant diversion. It is difficult to believe any reader will be taken in by this show of modesty; the book is ambitiously called How Fiction Works, after all, and in any case it would be like describing the conversation of Dr. Johnson as polite after-dinner chatter. READ MORE Posted: 2/28/2010 Publick Service Announcement Daniel Defoe Defoe’s The Storm, published in July, 1704, recorded first-hand accounts of the worst storm in British history. An extremely rare hurricane battered Wales and southern England, the worst of the apocalyptic rain and wind arriving overnight from November 26 and 27, 1703. More than 8,000 people died, including a fifth of the sailors in the sovereign fleet. Homes were destroyed, ships sunk, livestock drowned and everywhere massive trees were uprooted and flung about like matchsticks. The majority of The Storm consists of written firsthand accounts sent to Defoe in response to the advertisements he published in the Daily Courant and the London Gazette. His stated purpose was to “preserve the Remembrance of the late Dreadful Tempest” as an exact and reliable record of events. In the Preface he writes, “If a Man tells a Lye in Print, he abuses Mankind, and imposes upon the whole World, he causes our Children to tell Les after us, and their Children after them, to the End of the World”. Fact-checkers of the world, take heed. The thing about life in England in 1703 one learns from Defoe’s book is that chimneys were killers. Aside from the raging seas that drowned so many sailors, the most common cause of death in the storm was chimney-collapses caused by wind. Most of the accounts go something like that of poor Mr. Simpson's, a scrivener living on Threadneedle Street in London. “Fatally sleepy”, he ignored his family’s admonitions to leave his bed and subsequently was crushed where he lay by falling chimney bricks. This sort of story makes up the modicum of suspense contained in the gathered letters. Defoe’s intention of scrupulously adhering to the truth results in a generally trustworthy account, but the various letters are shaped with anything but an eye for entertainment. Mostly they are lists of damaged property and unvarnished descriptions of terrified people. Stylistically the letters are almost indistinguishable from each other. They are larded with prefatory remarks and tiresome qualifications. “SIR, Having seen an Advertisement of a Design to perpetuate the Remembrance”, “I perceive by an Advertisement in the Gazette of last Monday”, “you, or your ingenious Undertakers are left at liberty to publish so much, or so little, of this Narrative as shall be thought fit for the Service of the Publick”, etc. Granted, the book is a product of the eighteenth century, but the question must be asked: was Defoe paid by the word? Hints of adventure finally appear near the end of the book in the form of a few first-hand accounts written by sailors on ships caught in the storm. A certain J. Adams reported that his ship, blasted by the tempest and without anchor, was nearly sunk before having its gutted hulk blown to Norway. His letter is more in the mode of exciting naval romances. At one o’clock, in terrifying darkness, he witnesses a foundering ship, and “tho’ the Noise was very great with the Sea and Wind, yet we could distinguish plainly, in some short Intervals, the Cries of poor Souls in Extremities”. After this he describes his ship's narrow escape from a large Man of War “driving down upon us, all her Masts gone, and in a dreadful condition”. The book resembles a letters page in a magazine, each dispatch set off in the text as a block of prose signed by the various authors. In his editorial comments Defoe likes to point out that he is collecting unembellished testimonies, as if openly acknowledging the sacrifice of excitement for veracity. He only emerges to speak in his own voice in the addendum called “The Lay-Man’s Sermon On The Late Storm” (“Not so much a jest as ‘tis thought to be”, the title page helpfully clarifies). Here Defoe takes the common belief about the storm, that it was God’s punishment on a wicked nation, and turns it into a rollicking jeremiad against his enemies in the church while championing moderation as a saving English virtue. The difference in style and tone only gives the previous account of the storm that much more credence. Indeed, so stark is the contrast in tone between the main body of The Storm and its epilogues (the ‘Sermon’ and an ‘Essay’, a humorous, satirical poem written in the same spirit) that it’s tempting to look back with slightly more interest on the letters Defoe collected and published. In the largest, foremost part of the book he is almost totally absent in the interest of avoiding charges of embellishment. Clearly Defoe understood that to reach and convince the public one first has to disappear into the public. He must have learned a great deal from the writing of the book. The Storm doesn’t introduce the idea of the importance of a trustworthy witness to narrative writing, but it does bring together narrative prose and truthful accounts in a manner that blurs the two with great subtlety. The ostensible fidelity to truth would serve him later in one of the first English novels, Robinson Crusoe. Fifteen years after The Storm, ‘Crusoe’ was published with a preface allegedly written by an “Editor [who] believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it”. The original title page even describes the contents of the book as “Witnessed by Himself”, meaning Crusoe. ‘Witnessed by himself’: centuries of lying made possible by Defoe’s careful stewardship of the truth. (James Frey in this light is part of a grand tradition.) In 1722 Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year, stated to be account of a “Citizen who continued all the while in London”, completing the muddle between fact and fiction. In twenty years, Defoe all but invented the novel, and in their early development we see that journalism and fiction were mixed at the inception of both. Not really a shock, but it’s important to remember that The Storm is supposedly a transparently truthful compilation of eyewitness accounts assembled by one of the first great liars in English literary history. The arrangement of the letters suggests that Defoe understood how vital a role is played in community news reporting by amateurism, repetition, and sameness. In our present age of ubiquitous recording devices, now such an inextricable part our lives, there isn’t an “assembler” lurking behind a big curtain. The sophistication of our technology, and its ability to document our lives, guarantees the veracity of the eyewitness accounts even as it demands that they keep to a particular look and tone. Spotting fakes is a cinch. Everyone instantly knows the difference between a network television show or a studio film and a video blog on YouTube: costumes, lighting, recognizable actors, shaky camerawork, and most obviously of all the context of the content itself. The assumption is that homemade footage looks the same because amateurism looks the same. But amateurism is rapidly becoming a standard of its own, lacking an author but no less subject to the same laws of verisimilitude. In the dawning age of public journalism truth must look the same, feel the same, and sound the same, or else it will not be truth. It is yet another way in which the sophistication of the public will be used against it. Though we can worry less about the threat of a single liar, or a small, concentrated conspiracy of liars, in their place will arise a condition where news is only accepted as such if collected by many eyewitness accounts, the identical amateurishness of which being a necessary condition of their credibility. In the wake of such an exchange the status of truth will no less imperiled. Posted: 1/31/2009 J. G. Ballard J. G. Ballard (i) The Paradises of the Sun You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe Say Goodbye To The Wind Duel With A Crocodile Danger In The Streets of the Sky The Drained Lake Motel Architecture The Terrible City The Psychopath As Saint Notes Toward A Mental Breakdown The Impresario of Rubbish A Banquet of The Fathoms The Subliminal Man The Street of Darkest Night Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan The Depot of Dreams (ii) "A small revolution was taking place, so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed". "Noon talk on millionth street:" "Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool." "Faulkner Was Slowly Going Insane." "Dreams of rivers, like scenes from a forgotten film, drift through the night, in passage between memory and desire." "Ryan's dream of a cease-fire first came to him during the battle for the Beirut Hilton." "Crossing frontiers is my profession." "Later, as he sat on the balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusal events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months." *In honor of J. G. Ballard, the greatest living novelist, who, sadly, it was revealed today, has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Of Ballard's many strange and wonderful charms, foremost was his uncanny knack for titles and first lines. This representative selection is a small but by no means trivial testament to his inimitable genius. Posted: 1/22/2008 The Strange Smugness of The Press Tom Toles, Washington Post Now and then it's pleasant to be reminded that nothing slashes through nonsense like a good op-ed cartoon. Tom Toles' cartoon of August 28, 2007, marking the ignominious departure of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, features one Washington beat writer telling another they should get independent confirmation of the most transparently truthful statement Gonzalez ever made. This would seem to be an easy but satisfying strike at the former Attorney General, a satirical target of barnlike proportions in whose facial features, slowly warming up to even the mildest job-related question, one could see a slow, almost zen-like dance of yin stupidity and yang mendacity. Ironically, though, Toles also inadvertently foregrounds a bracing example of the media's negligence in reporting on the White House since 2001. Independent confirmation? Objectively pursuing facts? Skepticism in the face of proven liars? Where has all this been? The simple professionalism displayed in the cartoon reporter's remark only makes more bewildering and unforgivable the sad failure of the real press corps, these last six years, to honor one of its most sacred commandments. But the smugness! One can only marvel at the carnival dexterity of these men and women who salute their noble profession with one hand and destroy it with the other. Posted: 8/28/2007 Fallen Angels O Captain, my Captain The enthusiasm with which one analyzes Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli is bound to be dampened by the knowledge that much of what one takes from this crowded and difficult book is probably wrong. Strauss never openly announces that he himself is following in the line of esoteric authors whose works he is unpacking for his reader, but there are plenty of hints that, as Allan Bloom wrote, “The distance between the appearance of this book and the reality is amazing”. Measuring that distance, through careful reading, is nevertheless an important victory in itself. At the end of his dizzyingly tortuous book, Strauss writes “a stupendous contraction of the horizon appears to Machiavelli and his successors as a wondrous enlargement of the horizon”. Machiavelli seems as deceived as his successors by this "contraction". In the Introduction, however, Strauss had given qualified praise of the “grandeur” of Machiavelli’s vision. It is possible, I suppose, to remark on the “grandeur” of a vision which is actually a contraction of the “larger” metaphysics of the ancients, but Strauss followed that line in the introduction with a key statement on his method: “The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things”. “The surface of things” in Strauss’s book is an exegesis of Machiavelli’s two major works, The Prince and The Discourses, which Strauss persuasively argues are complementary texts. Without going into the specifics of his analyses of these books, it becomes apparent by Chapter IV, “Machiavelli’s Teachings”, which is a mixture of summary and argument, that the moral space Strauss has opened up between himself and Machiavelli, to say the least, wavered. The early judgment that Machiavelli was a “teacher of evil” places Strauss at a distance from Machiavelli, yet that judgment fades from view by the book’s ending. In the simplest terms, Machiavelli’s writings are called “evil”, but three hundred pages later they haven’t been called “mistaken”. A clue to how we might make sense of this fact is given, again, in the Introduction. Though Machiavelli is called a “devil”, Strauss reminds us that if this parallel holds, Machiavelli is not a devil simply. He is a fallen angel. Upon reading this one of course thinks of Milton’s Satan, and Strauss’s book, like Paradise Lost, emphasizes the seductiveness of Machiavelli’s teachings in an attempt to render the text a kind of temptation in itself, so that in the process of reading the book one is given a choice of whether or not to reject the evil. In this sense, a true understanding of Thoughts On Machiavelli requires a serious and dedicated effort on the reader’s part, which would suit Strauss’s design as an esoteric writer. The “devil” comes up again much later, though, in a striking manner which presents another clue about the book’s true meaning. Machiavelli-as-captain seeks to recruit men for a war, Strauss writes, “a war of the Anti-Christ or the Devil”. His hope rests on the future, on the young, who might discern his real teachings from his fake conventionalities, and thereby overthrow the Church in particular and political philosophy, or philosophy itself, in general. Strauss believed that Machiavelli succeeded wildly, granting him as the source of all modern philosophy. Not exactly high praise when one considers that the ideal man of modern thought, as Strauss would have it, is a Man-Beast rather than a Man-God, but it pays the bills. If Machiavelli succeeded in his war against God, it follows that he had his successor captains, men of “rare brain” who carried on the fight. Who might that successor, or successors, be? “They will live in an even temper without hope and without fear or trembling. They may have regrets but they will feel no need for repentance or redemption. ... Imitating nature, they will be filled with both gravity and levity but they will be free from fanaticism. They will not expect to find perfection or immortality anywhere except in works of art. They will regard as the virtue opposite to pride or arrogance, not humility, but humanity or generosity.” Strauss, glossing Machiavelli, carefully elucidates the qualities of the “excellent man” who combines all the highest qualities, and this man—a man, and only a man or a few men, not a multitude—resembles in certain important respects the ideal man another writer called “the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul”. The writer was Nietzsche, of course, and the ideal man was the ubermensch. Indeed, if Thoughts On Machiavelli is meant to be read as a map of philosophy from Machiavelli to the present day (1958, the year of the book’s publication), all roads must lead to Nietzsche (and then to Weber and Heidegger). The “Archimedean point” of Strauss’s text, the unnamed target beyond his pages, is really Nietzsche, the true heir of Machiavelli’s who surpassed his master in stripping away the divine in favor of the Beast-Man. And when one considers the difficulties of Strauss’s relationship to the subjects he is discussing—the “mixed body’ of his text, which commingles his voice with two of his purported enemies, Machiavelli and Nietzsche-— one begins to understand what Strauss meant by his stated ambition, both in this book and in other essays: his desire to recover “the permanent problems”. The more I read Strauss, the more I become convinced that his project, the recovery of “the permanent problems”, does not entail a direct and total refutation of either Machiavelli or Nietzsche, or for that matter nihilism taken as an idea outside political philosophy. Two important points seem clear to me: one, Strauss is probably as much a dissembler as his critics claim he is; and two, his critics have not engaged him as fully as they should have and hence do not understand the purpose and necessity of his dissembling. The “permanent problems” may be many things, but to risk a tautology, what they are chiefly is problems, a fact not sufficiently understood by contemporary thinkers and artists who have made the mistake of transmitting it to populations who recognize them only in the crudest terms. As such, Strauss’s project begins to seem more and more like an attempt to protect philosophy from the masses. His judgments against historicism and relativism carry the impact of total condemnation, but upon further reflection this condemnation appears intentionally superficial, perfunctory in the same way that Machiavelli showed due respect to the accepted opinions of his day. Thoughts On Machiavelli is really a primer on how to read a philosophical text—how to read itself, in fact. Writing of this book, Bloom says “one learns what it means to live with books; one is forced to make them a apart of one’s experience and life”. In other words, one is forced to become a philosopher. The “edifying” value of Strauss’s book has less to do with his “hidden meanings” than in its subtle impenetrability. He stresses the process by which Machiavelli instructs his readers in order to make us aware that he, Strauss, is also leading us through a process of thinking and reading which is just as primary as the teachings revealed to us if we have the stamina, will, and “rare brain” to follow complete this process. The “permanent problems” are this process—they are philosophy itself. Many conclusions can be drawn from Strauss’s dissembling. First and foremost, it seems overwhelmingly obvious that Strauss could well have believed, as his fiercest attackers claim, that the wise man must secretly counsel the powerful on the right courses of action, and that lying to the people is merely one of several acceptable tools for maintaining a republic. Strauss is Machiavellian functionally but against Machiavelli publicly, which is exactly what the ancient thinkers were, for Strauss remarks that Machiavelli’s didn’t create power politics, he merely signed his name to what ancient men were too prudent to avow in their own names. The Florentine's true “innovation”, if it must be broken down into a simple phrase, was to replace philosophy’s “Ought” with the historian’s “Is”. Crucially, Strauss illuminates this sleight-of-hand without explicitly resolving, in philosophical terms, why the question of the “Ought” should be restored. Instead he indicates why it must be restored in a classic Machiavellian formula: religion must be used to return the Man-God to liberal democracy or else the modern Man-Beast will destroy, or allow the destruction, of the state. In a limited sense this explains the intellectual side of conservatism's rise in America in the last thirty or forty years, and helps indicate the true intentions of Strauss and his students. Their objection to Nietzsche and his heirs is not that they were wrong, but that their teachings are not salutary to liberal democracy. Truth is the highest aim of the philosopher, but not the highest aim of the state. Self-preservation is the aim of the state. The objection has incredible force in light of the Germany’s tragic collapse into Nazism in the 1920’s and 30’s, and even more so in the many eerie parallels between the Weimer Republic and modern-day America. The popularization of higher philosophical “truths” is a Promethean fire men cannot control. Strauss wanted to keep the fire in the hands of the true keepers of the flame, the philosophers. Everyone else is fit for manipulation. However, Strauss’s alleged crime—advocating the necessary manipulation of the masses by the powerful as a way of ministering an antidote to Nietzsche’s poison—is a gross simplification and therefore exactly the error that Strauss so strongly and painstakingly cautioned his followers not to make. Over and over again, Strauss lays enormous emphasis on the difficulty of philosophy and the necessarily problematic nature of its use in governance. Machiavelli’s excellent man, or Nietzsche’s ubermensch, amount to the same thing: the highest human, the man with the most wisdom, prudence, and virtue; that is, the true philosopher. The teachings of Strauss, like the teachings of all great men, are instantly and perhaps fatally compromised when they are used by those who lack the philosopher’s virtue. In effect, Strauss wants the withdrawal of philosophy, not its permeation of government. Philosophers are rare, and in whatever numbers they do exist, they can and perhaps should influence the powerful—but always with judiciousness and prudence, with high virtue. Strauss implies that Machiavelli’s worst vice was his immodesty. His wickedness was not fancying himself a “captain” of a future army, but his desire to recruit an army at all. To the extent that Strauss’s teachings have influenced the current administration, we are horrified witnesses to the tragic misapplication of his philosophy by his lieutenants, as it were. They must be questioned before the master is indicted, for they have clearly failed as students. They have failed, these soldiers trained by Machiavelli-Strauss, by conjuring up the “American Imperium” without taking into consideration niggling little details like “the facts on the ground”. Directing the rogue’s gallery currently in Washington to conduct a war that was enmeshed in an almost infinite web of conflicting interests before the first bomb was dropped does not look like prudence. It looks like foolishness. Machiavelli’s worldview holds that men are malleable, but also—this is the vital point—that only men of great virtue can mold them. The coarseness and stupidity of the America polity we owe to the ham-fisted idiots who tried and failed to shape it, and not Strauss himself. To emerge from this bloody morass, we might start by following his one exoteric teaching, the one the deliberate difficulties in Thoughts On Machiavelli hammer home. Enough with the solutions. Let’s get back to the problems. Posted: 6/11/2006   Next Page Last Page