The Nearest Thing to Life

By James Wood

In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, the noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works—among others, Chekhov’s story “The Kiss,” The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald, and The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a boy from the provinces growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he draws between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. More than a tightly argued little book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic, The Nearest Thing to Life is an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781611687439

James Wood

James Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. He is the author of How Fiction Works, as well as two essay collections, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, and a novel, The Book Against God.

Book preview

THE MANDEL LECTURES IN THE HUMANITIES AT BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY

Sponsored by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation

Faculty Steering Committee for the Mandel Center for the Humanities

Ramie Targoff, chair

Brian M. Donahue, Talinn Grigor, Fernando Rosenberg, David Sherman, Harleen Singh, Marion Smiley

Former Members

Joyce Antler, Steven Dowden, Sarah Lamb, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, Eugene Sheppard, Jonathan Unglaub, Michael Willrich, Bernard Yack

The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities were launched in the fall of 2011 to promote the study of the humanities at Brandeis University, following the 2010 opening of the new Mandel Center for the Humanities. The lectures bring to the Mandel Center each year a prominent scholar who gives a series of three lectures and conducts an informal seminar during his or her stay on campus. The Mandel Lectures are unique in their rotation of disciplines or fields within the humanities and humanistic social sciences: the speakers have ranged from historians to literary critics, from classicists to anthropologists. The published series of books therefore reflects the interdisciplinary mission of the center and the wide range of extraordinary work being done in the humanities today.

For a complete list of books that are available in the series,

visit www.upne.com

JAMES WOOD, The Nearest Thing to Life

DAVID NIRENBERG, Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics

Brandeis University Press

An imprint of University Press of New England

www.upne.com

© 2015 James Wood

All rights reserved

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wood, James, 1965–

The nearest thing to life / James Wood.

   pages cm.—(Mandel Center for the Humanities lectures)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-61168-741-5 (cloth: alk. paper) —ISBN 978-1-61168-742-2 (pbk.: alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-1-61168-743-9 (ebook)

1. Wood, James, 1965– 2. Critics—Great Britain—Biography.

I. Title.

PR 55.W55A3   2015

801'.95092—dc23     2014035115

For C. D. M.

and in memory of

Sheila Graham Wood

(1927–2014)

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

GEORGE ELIOT

CONTENTS

1 Why?

2 Serious Noticing

3 Using Everything

4 Secular Homelessness

Acknowledgments

Notes

CHAPTER ONE

Why?

I

Recently, I went to the memorial service of a man I had never met. He was the younger brother of a friend of mine, and had died suddenly, in the middle of things, leaving behind a wife and two young daughters. The program bore a photograph, above his compressed dates (1968–2012). He looked ridiculously young, blazing with life—squinting in bright sunlight, and smiling slightly as if he were just beginning to get the point of someone’s joke. In some terrible way, his death was the notable, the heroic fact of his short life; all the rest was the usual joyous ordinariness, given testament by various speakers. Here he was, jumping off a boat into the Maine waters; here he was, as a child, larkily peeing from a cabin window with two young cousins; here he was, living in Italy and learning Italian by flirting; here he was, telling a great joke; here he was, an ebullient friend, laughing and filling the room with his presence. As is generally the case at such final celebrations, speakers struggled to expand and hold the beautifully banal instances of a life, to fill the dates between 1968 and 2012, so that we might leave the church thinking not of the first and last dates but of the dateless minutes in between.

It is an unusual and in some ways unnatural advantage to be able to survey the span of someone else’s life, from start to finish. Such surveillance seems peremptory, high-handed, forward. Grief does not seem entitlement enough for the arrogation of the divine powers of beginning and ending. We are uneasy with such omniscience. We do not possess it with regard to our own lives, and we do not usually seek it with regard to the lives of others.

But if this ability to see the whole of a life is godlike, it also contains within itself the beginning of a revolt against God: once a life is contained, finalized, as if flattened within the pages of a diary, it becomes a smaller, contracted thing. It is just a life, one of millions, as arbitrary as everyone else’s, a named tenancy that will soon become a nameless one; a life that we know will be thoroughly forgotten within a few generations, like our own. At the very moment we play at being God, we also work against God, hurl down the script, refuse the terms of the drama, appalled by the meaninglessness and ephemerality of existence. Death gives birth to the first question—Why?—and kills all the answers. And how remarkable, that this first question, the word we utter as small children when we first realize that life will be taken away from us, does not change, really, in depth or tone or mode, throughout our lives. It is our first and last question, uttered with the same incomprehension, grief, rage, and fear at sixty as at six. Why do people die? Since people die, why do they live? What is the point of a life? Why are we here? Blanchot puts it well in one of his essays; by exaggeration he conveys the stunned truancy of the apprehension: "Each person dies, but everyone is alive, and that really also means everyone is dead."

The Why? question is a refusal to accept death, and is thus a theodicean question: it is the question that, in the long history of theology and metaphysics, has been answered—or shall we say, replied to—by theodicy, the formal term for the attempt to reconcile the suffering and the meaninglessness of life with the notion of a providential, benign, and powerful deity. Theodicy is a project at times ingenious, bleak, necessary, magnificent, and platitudinous. There are many ways to turn around and around the stripped screw of theological justification, from Augustine’s free-will defense to the heresy of Gnosticism; from God’s majestic bullying of Job (be quiet and know my unspeakable power) to Dostoyevsky’s realization that there is no answer to the Why? question except through the love of Christ—embodied in Alyosha’s kiss of his brother, and Father Zosima’s saintliness. But these belong to the literary and theological tradition. The theodicean question is also being uttered every day, far from such grand or classic statements, and the theodicean answer is offered every day, too—with clumsy love, with optimistic despair, with cursory phlegm, by any parent who has had to tell a child that perhaps life does indeed continue in heaven, or that God’s ways are not our own, or that Daddy and Mummy simply don’t know why such things happen. If the theodicean question does not change throughout a lifetime, so the theodicean answers have not changed, essentially, in three millennia: God’s reply to Job is as radically unhelpful as the parent who replies to little Annie’s anguished questions by telling her to be quiet and go read a book. All of us still live within this question and live within these fumbled answers.

When I was a child, the Why? question was acute, and had a religious inflection. I grew up in an intellectual household that was also a religious one, and with the burgeoning apprehension that intellectual and religious curiosity might not be natural allies. My father was a zoologist who taught at Durham University, my mother a schoolteacher at a local girls’ school. Both parents were engaged Christians; my mother came from a Scottish family with Presbyterian and evangelical roots. The scriptures saturated everything. My father called my relationship with my first girlfriend unedifying (though in order to deliver this baleful, Kierkegaardian news, he had to ambush me in the car, so that he could avoid catching my eye). I was discouraged from using the suspiciously secular term good luck, and encouraged to substitute it with the more providential blessing. One was blessed to do well in school exams, blessed to have musical talent, blessed to have nice friends, and, alas, blessed to go to church. My untidy bedroom, said my mother, was an example of poor stewardship.

Reviews for The Nearest Thing to Life

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

James Wood has an affinity for serious noticing, in literature and in life. In these essays he applies that talent to both as he reflects upon his life as a journeyman critic. For Wood, everything is available to the critic; his whole life can be brought to bear in his criticism. But the critic, or the best kind of critic, must become an active participant in the drama, reading through the work as a sort of performance, like a great actor or a pianist performing a score. It is an appealing notion even if it may not sustain intense scrutiny.These essays began life as orations, lectures at Brandeis University and the British Museum. They both benefit and suffer from this. They are lyrical and often playful, an entertainment of sorts despite their sometimes academic subjects. But they lack substantive detail that might not have been easily graspable in the immediacy of the lecture hall. They are at their best when Wood works directly with the literatures that he thinks warrant serious noticing. They are weakest when he moves into theoretical realms, either critical, religious, or philosophical.And they are charming when he draws details from his own life — the choir boy in Durham Cathedral, the sound of coal shuttling into the basement, the distinctive language of northern England, and the ‘homelooseness’ he experiences as an ex-pat now living in America. Wood is, as usual, a pleasure to read. His enthusiasm for certain writers like Penelope Fitzgerald or W.B. Sebald is infectious. It makes recommending this thin volume an easy thing to do.

[briantomlin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book reminded me of why I decided to go to graduate school in literature, and reminded me that a passion for fiction is something to treasure. People who truly love reading fiction live their lives through their books, analyze the structure of their lives the way they do books, and this book is a great pleasure to read for such a person.

[alpin_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot." – George EliotGeorge Eliot has provided the perfect epigraph for James Wood's commentary on fiction and its importance in our lives, more specifically its importance in his life. These four essays, which originated as lectures at Brandeis University and the British Museum, combine critical insights with memoir and it is his personal reflections that give them color and flavor. Interspersed with discussions of why we read, the writer's practice of “serious noticing,” and the experience of the writer as exile or expatriate are glimpses of young James Wood in the provinces of England, discovering reading and, at the age of 15, picking up a remaindered book on novels and novelists in Waterloo station that will profoundly influence his life as a reader. Delightful.

[thebookjunky · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the essay "Serious Noticing", James Wood says that the great writers "notice" the details. It is a "Chekhovian eye for detail, the ability to notice well and seriously, the genius for selection" that infuses a story and brings it to life. He thinks of details as "nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them." Karl Ove Knausgaard, Chekhov, Elena Ferrante, Henry James, Saul Bellow are among the many writers he touches upon.

The essay called "Why?" is introduced with a poignant yet clear-eyed description of the memorial service of a friend's brother, using that as the springboard for the question of why do we die? Why do we live? What is the point? Reading fiction has as profound a role as religion.

He sprinkles these seeds of ideas before him, striding confidently through his essay like a farmer planting out his crops for the umpteenth time. He knows exactly how he wants to grow these.

This is a slim book. "Why" was first published in the New Yorker, "Secular Homelessness" was published in London Review of Books, and parts of the other two ("Serious Noticing" and "Using Everything") appeared in a couple of literary journals. Even though I'd read a couple of these essays before, it was a delight to be reacquainted.

It's wonderful having a guide that so eloquently notices the details of the noticers.

[isolablue · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

James Wood has a seductive title with his small book of memoir and essays. "The Nearest Thing to Life" refers to Wood's take on the art of fiction. For those who love philosophy, literary criticism, or for those who write in the fiction genre, Wood's book is worthwhile. Composed of four chapters or four essays, depending on how the reader views them, "The Nearest Thing to Life" explores the question of what fiction actually is. It brings forth Wood's spiritual background, his work as a literary critic, and interestingly, the role of exile and expatriates in fiction."It might seem a relatively tame license, this notion that anything can be thought, anything written, that thought is utterly free. . . .And fiction adds the doubleness of all fictional life: to witness that freedom in someone else is to have a companion, is to be taken into the confidence of otherness." Sentences like this draw the readers in. It is almost as though we are recognizing a voice in our own head, put on paper by another.Woods explores the contrast between religion and fiction (and he has a background in both, so his thoughts seem most authentic to us.) "Fiction, being the game of not quite, is the place of not-quite-belief. Precisely what is a danger in religion is the very fabric of fiction." We could read this sort of philosophy for pages and pages, but unfortunately it is confined to just one chapter.Death plays out largely and prominently in Wood's essays, the connection between death and fiction being explored - "And partly by turning the present into the past: although we move forward through a story, the entire story is already complete. We hold it in our hands. In this sense, fiction, the great life-giver, also kills - not just because people die in novels and stories, but more importantly because, even if they do not die, they have already happened. Fictional form is always a kind of death . . ."Woods give readers a great deal to ponder. Chapter One - "Why?" is the most accessible, philosophical, and dreamlike. It is easy to re-read, a new revelation coming about with each reading. Chapters Two and Three go in other directions and do not seem to speak quite the same language despite coming from the same man, a man with whom we feel quite familiar by the end of the book.Chapter Four: "Secular Homelessness" is less about fiction and more about the immigrant state. Wood, himself, is an immigrant to the States. He writes of his childhood in England, his current status in the USA, and of writers producing work in exile or as expatriates. This chapter weaves philosophy with memoir and works quite well."The Nearest Thing to Life" is a short book, a nice volume to carry around to read on a train, or a chapter each night before sleep. Despite being about fiction, it will not be appreciated by the average fiction fan. Readers of romance, mysteries, or science fiction will probably find Woods too dense, too high brow, too deep. But readers and writers of literature should love him. He speaks that unique, secret language. He DOES have an audience.

[esta1923 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"The Nearest Thing to Life" by James Wood is a rich, thoughtful/thought-provoking book that merits rereading.Its title is a quotation from George Eliot and throughout his book Wood matches his ideas with those of other critics.I especially appreciated Chapter 2,"Serious Noticing."

[berthirsch · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Nearest Thing To Life by James WoodA book that consists of lectures the literary critic gave at Brandeis University. Any person who lives to read and has spent much of their own lives buried deep in literature will relate and cherish Wood’s description of his own passion for books and literature.Wood examines the world of fiction, how the writer looks for the details, little moments, observations that in everyday life we overlook. The writer of fiction (Knausgaard for instance) helps us to remember those details which make our life richer, complex and unique. . “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself or forgetfulness. Fiction brings to life what we forget or fail to realize”. He cites many authors- Saul Bellow, Aleksander Hemon, Nabokov, Rachel Kushner, Lydia Davis among others. At the age of 15, Wood finds an odd volume in a 2nd hand bookstore: “it looked as if it had been born in a permanently remaindered state, like a movie going straight to video”. Yet it appears this book, “Novels and Novelists: A Guide to the World of Fiction” edited by “the brilliantly wayward poet and man of letters” Martin Seymour-Smith, changes the course of Wood’s life setting him afloat on an ocean of books, reading, critiquing, consuming to his life’s content. Like a young boy collecting baseball cards or marbles he becomes enamored by the writers described in this book, setting up his own rating system and planning out which books he will read.In the 3rd lecture, “Using Everything” he describes the magic of criticism, of not understanding, of being awestruck and through metaphors, the writer attempts to convey what he feels.This is a book any avid reader will enjoy and appreciate.

[almigwin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is a treasure. I admit I am a fan of his books of criticism and his reviews in the New Yorker, so I expected to like this book. but I didn't like it, I loved it. It is a beautiful, and a to be cherished paean to literature, specifically novels. Whenever I read his work I discover insights and ideas that illuminate not only the book or story in question, but much if not all of literature.The book is composed of three lectures given as the Mandel lectures in the Humanities at Brandeis University, and one given at the British Museum and subsequently published in the New York Review of Books. The first is called "Why". (Presumably 'Why read novels'?. It involves the thought that like death, the characters in novels are complete, finished, whole, without a future. Their lives can be scrutinized and seen completely, as no living person's can. Wood discusses his liberation from harsh religious strictures in the found freedom of novels, and his joy in them.The second lecture called 'Serious Noticing', discusses a story by Checkov, containing the surprising sentence that the story told by a young soldier only took a minute, but the soldier thought it would take all evening. Wood believes that every story produces 'offspring'- "hapless embodiments of their original ability to tell the whole tale". He believes a real story is endless but always disappointing, because the author coerces a form and there is a surplus of life left out. He calls details little "bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form" where artifice is converted into new life. He gives examples from Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Alexander Hemon, where in the first lecture he talked about Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Melville and others. His examples are consistently illuminating. He quotes John Berger who says that civilians merely see, but artists look!. In drawing a tree, the artist is "examining the structure of experience". The drawing has a relation to every other drawing of the same thing, in this case, a tree. He quotes Berger as seeming to say "artists learn from looking at the world, and looking at what other artists have done with the world. The third lecture is called "Using Everything". He talks about a book evaluating novels in all genres that influenced him at 15. He now finds the author, M. Seymour-Smith, exercising "ramshackle hospitality" to the 1348 authors he evaluated. (He included cinema and science fiction!) but he got quite a lot of it right.. Wood attempted to read the great ones.The book for him had an "intoxicating air of urgent aesthetic advocacy.....a deep certainty that writing mattered". He recognized that "aesthetic hierarchies are fluid, personal, eccentric and always subject to revision". For example, Smith got right the importance of Theodore Fontane and the beauty of Lawrence when he celebrated human instinct. He discusses the theory wars and the difference between writerly criticism and academic criticism. He believes that the wars have ended but caused all the various schools of criticism to learn from each other. He finds the writer-critics (of which he is one, having written novels ) as the most interested in evaluation. He says that literary criticism existed as Literature before the advent of academic literary criticism and his examples include Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson. He now admires what he calls "passionate redescription".... "a way of writing through books, not just about them", noting that art and music critics can't do it. Wood believes criticism enacts "a sameness of vision" where the critic enables the reader to see the text as he does, and it is metaphorical. He thinks the "reader (or critic's) metaphorical identification is very close to the writer's". The fourth lecture is called "Secular Homelessness". There is discussion of Sebald's "the Emigrants" and his 'lesser homelessness' than that of Selwyn, a character in the novel. Wood was born and raised in Durham, where his father and mother taught. He says there is the reality of outsiderdom, and he is, although comfortable in Boston, an outsider now in Durham, still in between two places. He calls it" afterwardness". Too late to do anything about it,and that may be all right.

[kcshankd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

LibraryThing Early Reviewer CopyFour short essays from James Wood, author of _How Fiction Works_, a treasure. In each essay Wood touches on an event and goes on to explore it through fiction. A funeral of a man dying not yet old, a Chekhov story that at heart is about telling an inadequate story, the uses of a lifetime of literary criticism, and the 21st Century ennui of being from everywhere, and nowhere, simultaneously. Wood seamlessly weaves his thinking on the page, and successfully assays the essays.

[crowvoice-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book offers true and novel insight into the craft of writing, but it is too filled with East Coast desiccation for the message to resonate. 4 stars for content and 2 for style, gives it a 3-star review.

[seidchen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I only wish I could have heard these talks in person! James Wood does not disappoint with this slim but revealing collection of essays, and it was a treat to read some deeply personal recollections about reading along with the insightful, nuanced literary criticism readers of Wood's have come to expect. Lovely.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The British literary critic James Wood (°1965) hardly needs further explanation. More than anyone else, he has grasped the essence of what fiction is, and he proves it again in these four lectures, short essays that each time peel off a layer of that fantastic realm of literature. He rightly links fiction to religion, both are forms of believing in a true lie: “The real, in fiction, is always a matter of belief — it is up to us as readers to validate and confirm. It is a belief that is requested, and that we can refuse at any time. Fiction moves in the shadow of doubt, knows it is a true lie, knows that at any moment it might fail to make its case. Belief in fiction is always belief ‘as if’.”The second lecture, 'Serious Noticing', particularly appealed to me. According to Wood more than any other art, literature is able to offer a glimpse into people, into the 'self', but that does require attention and a trained eye. “For fiction's chief difference from poetry and painting and sculpture — from the other arts of noticing — is this internal psychological element. In fiction, we get to examine the self in all its performance and pretense, its fear and secret ambition, its pride and sadness. It is by noticing people seriously that you begin to understand them; by looking harder, more sensitively, at people's motives, you can look around and behind them, so to speak. Fiction is extraordinarily good at dramatizing how contradictory people are.”Well, I know, it are all open doors, but literature really pushes your boundaries and opens your eyes to other worlds, other stories, other 'selves'. What a joy it is to dwell in the realm of fiction.