The Art of Quotation (Part I)

Jonathan Kramnick, in his absorbing Criticism & Truth (2023), argues that quotation is a key element of critical writing. He says, “Much of literary criticism turns on the art of quoting well.” He sees quotation as a form of craft – “weaving one’s own words with words that precede and shape them.” I agree. Kramnick identifies two types of quotation – in-sentence quotation and block quotation. In-sentence quotation is “embedding language from a text within your sentences.” Block quotation is “setting off larger gobbets in block form.” In-sentence quotation is a form of weaving; block quotation is a form of mortaring. Both forms are creative: “The skilled practice of writing about writing makes something new in the act of interpreting it. It is fundamentally and irreducibly a creative act.”

It’s tonic to see these points being made. Not all critics are quoters. Edmund Wilson rarely quoted. He preferred paraphrase to quotation. But, for me, the best critics are the ones who quote extensively, e.g., John Updike, Helen Vendler, James Wood, Janet Malcolm, Dan Chiasson, Leo Robson. 

Updike included quotation as Rule #2 in his “Poetics of Book Reviewing”: “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste” (Higher Gossip, 2011).

That’s one compelling reason for critics to quote. Another is to point something out. Mark O’Connell, in his review of James 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 method. It’s a form of literary noticing. Kramnick calls it “fundamentally demonstrative and deictic: look at these lines, this moment; observe how they do this thing.” 

Seldom have I seen such a deep appreciation of quotation as Kramnick’s. He calls it an art, and he shows why. I applaud him. 

June 14, 2021 Issue

A James Wood review has a distinctive look. Instead of the narrative approach that most literary critics opt for – paragraph on paragraph of plot summary and interpretation trailing down the page – Wood quotes and analyzes the writing. 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 method. You see it in his “Where I’m Coming From,” a review of Francisco Goldman’s novel Monkey Boy, in this week’s issue. Midway in the piece, up goes the block quote:

An extended recollection from this period of Frankie’s life demonstrates the hospitable rhythms of the prose:

The memory of sitting in my bedroom’s window seat and passing my toy truck out through the bars to an Indian woman who took her baby boy out of her rebozo and set him down on the patterned old paving stones of the sidewalk so that he could play with the truck and my astonishment that he was naked. A memory like the broken-off half of a mysterious amulet that can only be made whole if that now-grown little boy remembers it, too, and we can somehow meet and put our pieces together. I don’t even remember if I let him keep the truck or not, though I like to think I did. Not all that likely that he’s even still alive, considering what the war years were like for young Maya men of our generation. Who knows, maybe he’s up here somewhere and even has children who were born here.

The density of the memory, the playing over present and past, the essayistic space made for an ongoing political dimension, along with an insistent optimism—all these are characteristic of the novel as a whole, and of Goldman’s feel for a kind of narrative phrasing that allows an ideally sauntering and shifting perspective.

This is quintessential Wood, and I love it. His artful use of quotation gives the reader a taste of the book under review. And, at the same time, it gives Wood an opportunity to do what he does best – analyze style. 

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. 

In Praise of Alex Abramovich's "Built to Last"

S. F. Denton, "Pickerel" (from John McPhee's "The Patch")

One aspect of Alex Abramovich’s “Built to Last” (Bookforum, Dec/Jan 2019) that I especially relish is his analysis of John McPhee’s style. He selects a “bravura passage” from McPhee’s “The Patch” (The New Yorker, February 8, 2010) and comments on it. Here’s the passage:

Pickerel have palatal teeth. They also have teeth on their tongues, not to mention those razor jaws. On their bodies, they sometimes bear scars from the teeth of other pickerel. Pickerel that have been found in the stomachs of pickerel have in turn contained pickerel in their stomachs. A minnow found in the stomach of a pickerel had a pickerel in its stomach that had in its stomach a minnow. Young pickerel start eating one another when they are scarcely two inches long. 

And here’s Abramovich’s comment:

That final turn is typical McPhee—you see the same fillip in the last line of the Cary Grant passage I’ve quoted above. A simple declarative sentence performs the rhetorical function a couplet provides in Shakespearean sonnets: It sticks the ending; it sums up the argument; and, in this instance, it sends us back to the Escher-like, ouroboric sentences that have preceded it.

That “Escher-like, ouroboric sentences” is wonderful. It’s an original attempt to describe McPhee’s pickerel-within-pickerel-within-pickerel construction. But what I really like about Abramovich’s approach is his use of quotation. Mark O’Connell says of James Wood, “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). The same can be said about Abramovich's quotes in his McPhee piece. It's like he puts them up on a screen to highlight their brilliancies. 

McPhee is a master stylist. It’s time we had a full study of his form. Abramovich’s superb “Built to Last” points the way.

James Wood's "The Fun Stuff"

James Wood, in the Preface of his great How Fiction Works (2008), writes, “I admire Milan Kundera’s three books on the art of fiction, but Kundera is a novelist and essayist rather than a practical critic; occasionally we want his hands to be a bit inkier with text.” Occasionally we want his hands to be bit inkier with text – how fine that is! It perfectly catches the quality I most desire in a critic’s writing – deep immersion at the level of sentence and structure. Wood’s hands are always inky with text – right up to his elbows. That’s what I love about his work. He gets inside writing, analyzing the words-as-arranged-on-the-page. Helen Vendler, in her review of Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue, writes, “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act, the texture of the lines on the page” (Soul Says, 1995). That’s Wood’s art, too. His new collection, The Fun Stuff, contains twenty-five essays - seventeen of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. They are all bravura pieces of writing, knit together by three of Wood’s abiding themes: the noticing eye, a distain for convention, and a love of the long sentence.

A key element of Wood’s aesthetic is close observation of detail. “Literature teaches us to notice,” he says in How Fiction Works. Of one of his favorite writers, Saul Bellow, he says, “Bellow notices superbly” (How Fiction Works). In "Red Planet," one of his earliest New Yorker pieces (not included in The Fun Stuff), he says that Cormac McCarthy is a “wonderfully delicate noticer of nature.” In "Reality Effects" (another New Yorker piece not included in The Fun Stuff), he says that John Jeremiah Sullivan is a “fierce noticer.” In "Cabin Fever" (yet another New Yorker review missing from The Fun Stuff), he says that the protagonist of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is a “steady noticer of the natural world, and that the novella’s prose follows his eye, with frequent exhalations of beauty.” In "Wounder and Wounded" (in The Fun Stuff), he calls V. S. Naipaul a “brilliant noticer.” Wood himself deserves this compliment; he’s a brilliant literary noticer. Mark O’Connell, in his terrific review of 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). I know exactly what O’Connell means; I totally agree with him. Wood has a jeweler’s eye for choice quotation and a luminous way of presenting it. For example, here’s a passage from his excellent "Beyond a Boundary: 'Netherland' as Postcolonial Novel" (in The Fun Stuff):

The eye that sees the “orange fuzz” of the streetlights is the eye that elsewhere in the novel, alights on the “molten progress of the news tickers” in Times Square, the “train-infested underpants” of Hans’s little boy, “a necklace’s gold drool,” the “roving black blooms of four-dollar umbrellas,” and that sees, in one lovely swipe of a sentence, a sunset like this: “The day, a pink smear above America, had all but disappeared.”

That “in one lovely swipe of a sentence” is delightful, perfectly describing O’Neill’s inspired “pink smear” line.

Wood is impatient with conventionality. In "Keeping It Real" (The New Yorker, March 15, 2010; not included in The Fun Stuff), he describes Chang-Rae Lee's The Surrendered as "a book that is commendably ambitious, extremely well written, powerfully moving in places, and alas, utterly conventional." He scorns what he calls the “cumbersome caravans of plot” (“Life’s White Machine: Ben Lerner,” in The Fun Stuff). In “Keeping It Real,” he exclaims, “All this silly machinery of plotting and pacing, this corsetry of chapters and paragraphs, this doxology of dialogue and characterization!” As an alternative to all this “silly machinery,” Wood points to novels such as Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Teju Coles’s Open City. Regarding Lerner’s novel, he says:

Lerner is attempting to capture something that most conventional novels with their cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and “conflict,” fail to do: the drift of thought, the unmomentous passage of undramatic life: what he calls several times in the book “life’s white machine”: “that other thing, the sound-absorbent screen, life’s white machine, shadows massing in the middle distance … the texture of et cetera itself.”

The Fun Stuff evinces Wood’s fondness for the long sentence. In “Beyond a Boundary,” he writes, “O’Neill writes elegant, long sentences, formal but not fussy, punctually pricked with lyrically exact metaphor.” Regarding postwar avant-garde fiction, in “‘Reality Examined to the Point of Madness’: László Krasznahorkai” (in The Fun Stuff), he says,

A lot has already disappeared from this fictional world, and the writer concentrates on filling the sentence, using it to notate, produce, and reproduce the tiniest qualifications, hesitations, intermittences, affirmations, and negations of existence. This is one reason why very long, breathing, unstopped sentences, at once literary and vocal, are almost inseparable from the progress of experimental fiction since the 1950s.

In his beautiful personal essay, "The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon," Wood describes his notion of the “ideal sentence”: “a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but disheveled, careful and lawless, right and wrong."

Wood himself occasionally writes a medium-length, Krasznahorkaiesque sentence. Consider, for example, this syntactically rich, eighty-eight word assemblage from “Life’s White Machine: Ben Lerner”:

At once ideological and post-ideological, vaguely engaged and profoundly spectatorial, charming and loathsome, Adam is a convincing representative of twenty-first century American Homo literatus – a creature of privilege and lassitude, living through a time of inflamed political uncertainty, yet certain only of his own uncertainty and thus always more easily defined by negation than by affirmation, clearly dedicated to poetry but unable to define or defend it (except to intone emptily that poetry isn’t about anything) and implicitly nostalgic for earlier, mythical eras of greater strength and surety.

The New Yorker took one look at that line and put a period after “Homo literatus,” breaking the sentence in two (see "Reality Testing," October 31, 2012). Obviously, Wood prefers the single, long line. When he collected the piece in The Fun Stuff, he opted for his original conception.

The Fun Stuff is a brilliant collection of critical and personal pieces, one of the best in recent memory. I'm enjoying it immensely.