Punching windows in the ivory tower of criticism

Uncommon Readers

Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, George Steiner,

and the Tradition of the Common Reader

Christopher J. Knight

University of Toronto Press: 508 pp., $53

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The Irresponsible Self

On Laughter and the Novel

James Wood

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 312 pp., $24

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Recently the critic James Wood lamented, “Literary criticism as a discourse available to, and even attractive to, the common reader has all but disappeared.” Wood’s gloominess is odd, not to say unwarranted. Sure, most academic literary criticism is pretty dreadful, but just stop by a newsstand for the remedy. There you’ll find a bounty of publications for the general reader, from old stalwarts like the New York Review of Books and the New Republic to such newer venues as the Believer and Bookforum.

Despite repeated obituaries, journalistic literary criticism still has a strong pulse. Take Wood himself: Few critics in our time have done as much as this young Englishman to make criticism available to the common reader. (Wood inspires raptures from his fans, and I’m no exception.) His critical mode may be the poor cousin to the exotic jargons of literary theory in many an English department, but beyond academe, the contract between the generalist critic and the common reader endures, even in the face of mass culture’s buzzing distractions.

George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Denis Donoghue, the three subjects of Christopher J. Knight’s valuable study “Uncommon Readers,” have long honored this contract. This trio of university-based scholar-journalists (Donoghue teaches at NYU, while Steiner and Kermode have been affiliated with Cambridge University) keeps the lines open between the world of the academic humanities and the needs of a general literary culture. All excel at playing the role of critic as middleman, Knight argues, and “stand opposed to the cloistering of knowledge in dogmatism and sectarian language.”

In an era when academic critics seem to pride themselves on obscurity, this is an admirable sensibility. Kermode and Donoghue -- Steiner is a more problematic figure, but more on that in a moment -- see criticism as a kind of back-and-forth between critic and reader. They favor provisional judgments over closed argument, pragmatic flexibility over rigid ideological formulations. Knight lauds their “willingness to reside in contradictions, to review and to take responsibility for conveying a host of viewpoints, not all of which the critic finds congenial, but which nevertheless enhance the critic’s own best sense that final determinations should be kept in abeyance as long as possible.” (Unfortunately, Knight’s style is a far cry from the limpid grace of a Kermode.)

Doggedly independent, associated with no critical movement or school, they have sometimes been caricatured as doughty belletrists for their eclecticism and lucid style. This is unfair, Knight contends. Though “attentive to the sort of questions that remain unhoused in recent theory,” they are opposed not to theory per se but to how it is applied. This is a crucial distinction. Of any literary technique, Kermode and Donoghue ask if it can make one a better reader. They have taken what they can from the theoretical innovations of the last 30 years -- indeed, Kermode championed the work of Roland Barthes in the ‘70s -- while Steiner’s obsessive doubts about the stability of language often have him flirting with deconstruction and its insistence on the elusivity of meaning. What raises their hackles is theory’s antihumanist bent and misguided political goals.

Knight’s bibliographic gusto is mind-boggling. He has read their books closely and dug up thousands of essays and reviews. Their work as literary journalists best displays their merits, he argues, for they are always “prepared to be provoked by the last book they have read and to place it at the center of a discussion which ripples outward.”

This brings us to the thorny question of Steiner, a troubling candidate for inclusion in Knight’s pantheon. A former contributor to the New Yorker and now a staple on the Observer’s books pages, Steiner deplores the culture of journalism. In fact, he deplores most of modern life. He is deeply suspicious of egalitarianism and democracy. While Donoghue and Kermode have been eager readers of American literature, Steiner scorns America’s “museum culture.” His favored genre is the overwrought elegy lamenting the passing of high culture. Where Kermode peppers his essays with dry, donnish flashes of wit, Steiner is humorless and grating; his Olympian hauteur goes against everything Knight values. The author bends himself into a pretzel trying to explain why Steiner deserves the accolade of public critic, but his contortions are unconvincing.

If Steiner, Kermode and Donoghue are the elder statesmen of journalistic literary criticism, Wood is a worthy heir. His moral strenuousness recalls the work of another English critic, F.R. Leavis, but Wood is thankfully free of Leavis’ dourness or Steiner’s apocalyptic despair. As a true believer in the necessity of fiction, his passion burns on nearly every page. Wood likes to startle with a bracing assertion -- “Tom Wolfe’s novels are placards of simplicity” -- or provocative query: In an essay on the writer J.F. Powers, Wood jokingly asks, “Does anyone, really, like priests?” A master of close reading, Wood has an unmatched ability to tease out the minutest nuances of character and plot, but sometimes his soaring metaphoric prose, his sheer literary flair and extravagant reach can leave one a little dizzy.

Wood’s reputation as a stern judge is well earned. His criticism bristles with antipathies. In his first book, “The Broken Estate,” he savaged such contemporary giants as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. “The Irresponsible Self,” which collects Wood’s essays on the comic aspects of fiction from such venues as the New Republic and the New Yorker, reveals a gentler, more playful side, though it doesn’t downplay the polemical fireworks. Just take a look at his 2002 anti-manifesto “Hysterical Realism,” a punishing attack on the “pursuit of vitality at all costs” in the work of Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace.

Still, this is mostly a book of enthusiasms. The first chapters find Wood in a slightly theoretical mood; being Wood, he takes comedy very seriously. He contrasts “the comedy of forgiveness” and “the comedy of correction”: “The latter is a way of laughing at,” he writes, and “the former a way of laughing with.” Wood wants to laugh with, and tenderly indulges the foibles of, great tragicomic characters of 20th century literature, such as Zeno Cosini, Italo Svevo’s wonderfully neurotic antihero, and V.S. Naipaul’s poignant Mr. Biswas. One of Wood’s most impressive strengths is how he reminds us of these great characters’ fictionality but at the same time persuades us that they satisfy some essential criteria of realism.

For all his deep love of fiction, Wood is a somewhat backward-looking critic; he prefers the sturdy pleasures of the 19th century to the postmodern high jinks of Pynchon or Salman Rushdie. Wood defines the novel’s traditional task as “the patient exploration of motive in domestic settings.” This is an important clue to his aesthetic, and it explains why he admires Franzen’s evocation of the Lamberts, the dysfunctional family of “The Corrections,” but loathes the novel’s essayistic flourishes and compulsive news flashes. Wood doesn’t want novelists to be newscasters; their proper brief is the exploration of filial bonds and matrimonial dynamics.

It’s no wonder that one of the precious few contemporary writers Wood has praised is Monica Ali, whose novel “Brick Lane” tells the story of a young Bangladeshi immigrant woman’s arranged marriage in London’s East End. In Ali’s work, and in that of Vikram Seth, Wood sees an extension and renewal of the tradition he reveres, for they “return fiction to its nineteenth century gravity ... by reimporting into the Western novel traditional societies, with their ties of marriage, burdens of religion, obligations of civic duty, and pressures of propriety -- and thereby restoring to the novel form some of the old oppressions that it was created to comprehend and to resist and in some measure to escape.” Some may accuse Wood of limiting the scope of the novel -- after all, one of the form’s greatest virtues is the freedom it grants the novelist -- yet no one should doubt that he is one of its greatest living advocates. *