James Wood's "Serious Noticing"

I relish criticism that takes me inside the heart of a piece of writing. James Wood’s essays and reviews accomplish this magnificently. In his How Fiction Works (2008), he says of Viktor Shklovsky and Roland Barthes, “Both were great critics because, being formalists, they thought like writers: they attended to style, to words, to form, to metaphor and imagery.” This is what Wood does, too. Exhibit A for his exquisite art is his new Serious Noticing, a collection of twenty-eight of his best pieces, twenty two of which are picked from his previous four collections, and the remaining six skimmed from his recent New Yorker work.

Dip into Serious Noticing almost anywhere and you’ll find Wood exploring the interior of a piece of writing, describing how it works. For example, in “What Chekhov Meant by Life,” he points out, “Detail is hardly ever a stable entity in Chekhov’s work; it is a reticent event.” In “Anna Karenina and Characterization” he refers to “the way Tolstoy slows down the tempo of realism.” In “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style,” he shows that the way Bellow describes his characters is a form of sculpture “pressed into by the artist’s quizzical and ludic force.” 

For me, the key to Wood’s art is quotation. He is an astute and generous quoter. Mark O’Connell, in his review of Wood’s The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed” ("The Different Drummer," Slate, November 2, 2012). This is an excellent description of Wood’s approach. Serious Noticing brims with examples of it. For instance, in “ ‘Reality Examined to the Point of Madness’: László Krasznahorkai,” Wood writes,

Here is a necessarily long quote from early in the book, as Krasznahorkai introduces Korin’s relentless mental distortions:

because he didn’t feel like going home to an empty apartment on his birthday, and it really was extremely sudden, the way it struck him that, good heavens, he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ’s sake, nothing at all about the world, which was a most terrifying realization, he said, especially in the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickeningly ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at the age of forty-four, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last forty-four years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for forty-four years he thought he had understood it, while in reality he had failed to do so; and this in fact was the worst thing of all that night of his birthday when he sat alone by the river, the worst because the fact that he now realized that he had not understood it did not mean that he did understand it now, because being aware of his lack of knowledge was not in itself some new form of knowledge for which an older one could be traded in, but one that presented itself as a terrifying puzzle the moment he thought about the world, as he most furiously did that evening, all but torturing himself in the effort to understand it and failing, because the puzzle seemed ever more complex and he had begun to feel that this world-puzzle that he was so desperate to understand, that he was torturing himself trying to understand, was really the puzzle of himself and the world at once, that they were in effect one and the same thing, which was the conclusion he had so far reached, and he had not yet given up on it, when, after a couple of days, he noticed that there was something the matter with his head.

The passage displays many of Krasznahorkai’s qualities: the relentless ongoingness of the syntax; the way Korin’s mind stretches and then turns back, like a lunatic scorpion trying to sting itself; the perfect comic placement of the final phrase. The prose has a kind of self-correcting shuffle, as if something were genuinely being worked out, and yet, painfully and humorously, these corrections never result in the correct answer. As in Thomas Bernhard, whose influence can be felt in Krasznahorkai’s work, a single word or compound (“puzzle,” “world-puzzle”) is seized and worried at, murdered into unmeaning, so that its repetition begins to seem at once funny and alarming. Whereas the characters in Bernhard’s work engage in elegant, even oddly formal rants—which can be removed from the fictions and performed as bitterly comic set pieces—Krasznahorkai pushes the long sentence to its furthest extreme, miring it in a thick, recalcitrant atmosphere, a dynamic paralysis in which the mind turns over and over to no obvious effect.

Wood’s commentary on Krasznahorkai’s passage displays many of Wood’s qualities: the focus on formal elements (syntax, word choice, phrase placement), the brilliant use of metaphor (“like a lunatic scorpion trying to sting itself), the descriptive analysis of the prose (“a kind of self-correcting shuffle, as if something were genuinely being worked out, and yet, painfully and humorously, these corrections never result in the correct answer”; “Krasznahorkai pushes the long sentence to its furthest extreme, miring it in a thick, recalcitrant atmosphere, a dynamic paralysis in which the mind turns over and over to no obvious effect”).

In addition to block-quotation, Wood creates wonderful collage-like assemblages of short quotations. “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style” contains this beauty: 

This life-sown prose moves fast, logging impressions with broken speed. Rereading Herzog, one encounters too many marvels to record. There is Herzog’s mistress Ramona, sparkily described as “certainly not one of those little noli me tangerines.” And there is a brief memory of Strawforth, a fat schoolboy, with his “fat curling thumbs,” and a rabbi, “short-bearded, his nose violently pitted with black.” And Nachman, who played the harmonica in the lavatory stalls: “You heard the saliva in the cells of the tin instrument as he sucked and blew.” And the light bulb that Herzog remembers at home, ” which had a spike at the end like a German helmet. The large loose twist of tungsten filament blazed.” Herzog recalls his asthmatic brother Willie in the grip of a breathing fit: “Trying to breathe he gripped the table and rose on his toes like a cock about to crow.”

My favourite piece in Serious Noticing is “On Not Going Home,” in which Wood connects his personal experience of expatriation with his deep appreciation of, among other works, W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. It’s an example of what Wood calls, in Serious Noticing’s Introduction, “writing through” (“And let Brendel’s performance on the piano, his inability to quote without also recreating stand for the kind of criticism that is writing through a text, the kind of criticism that is at once critique and re-description: sameness”). In “On Not Going Home,” the texts that Wood writes through, in addition to The Emigrants, are Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile,” Aleksandar Hemon’s Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls, and Ismail Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone. Two passages in “On Not Going Home” are, for me, unforgettable. The first is an inspired description:

Take the beautiful American train horn, the crushed klaxon peal you can hear almost anywhere in the States – at the end of my street at night-time, across a New Hampshire valley, in some small Midwestern town: a crumple of notes, blown out on an easy, loitering wail. It sounds less like a horn than a sudden prairie wind or an animal’s cry. That big easy loiter is, for, me the sound of America, whatever America is. 

The second is an inspired notion:

What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow revelation that I made a large choice many years ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, “afterwardness,” which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.

That “and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived” speaks to me. I read it six years ago when “On Not Going Home” originally appeared in the London Review of Books. I immediately incorporated it into my own viewpoint. It’s great to see it preserved in such a beautiful book.