I would like to have Wood explain the relationship between realism, that is, literary realism, and reality? Does he understand this autonomous human consciousness as a fictive representation of a corresponding state outside of fiction--in the presumably real world? Or does it represent a purely aesthetic reality, an ideological projection of a deeply felt belief which it is the artists responsibility to confirm? How is it possible to understand how consciousness can be autonomous? Even as an imaginative ideal, when it represents at its core a violation of the boundaries of inside and out, the distinctive achievement of life established when first a membrane governed exchange between what was within and what was external to the cell? Consciousness treated as interiority represents, not reality, but a kind of delusional thinking--one of great importance, one of those things, like belief in gods, that make us human--but what a restrictive and misleading thing it is to call this view a "realism" --by any definition!
When I look for what exemplifies human consciousness, I think of Northrop Frye writing of Homer: how in contrast to the battle scenes in the prophetic books of the Jewish Bible (very similar in many ways to the battles in the Iliad, with the heroes advancing before the assembled armies exchanging challenges and threats meant to intimidate the enemy before the battle began); what Homer contributed, Frye claims, is the possibility of an imaginative recognition of the suffering of the enemy, empathy that was not restricted to one's own tribe. The essence of human consciousness being: awareness of the other as one like oneself (think of the many versions of the Golden Rule). The sense of self grows out of both a confrontation with the limits imposed by the reality of others, and the ability to imagine and to experience the other side.
We are not monads. Language is created and experienced together. Between our first breath and our last, there is nothing we experience that is not in part a shared reality. I recently finished The Bruise, Magdalena Zurawski's wonderful extended meditation on the wound of consciousness (as close as I can come to a name for the--both physical and metaphorical bruise--carried by the novel's protagonist: a mark of Cain that both sets apart and protects, a wound like that in Kafka's Country Doctor). With great precision and insight, Zurawski leads us through the impossible journey, impossible to escape, impossible to resolve or conclude, of discovering what part of us lives out there in a real world, a world that is not us, and how it is, if we do, that we do not ourselves become nothing? In consciousness, even our bodies betray us. We cannot fulfill our animal lives, our natural sexuality without the danger of falling out of ourselves and into the other, and we cannot realize our own reality unless we do. I can't think of anyone I've read since I first came across Kafka who so deeply understood the contradictions of consciousness, and so bravely refused the temptation to falsely reconcile them, refuse to offer her readers the ideological comforts of characters in free flights of Woodsian autonomous consciousness.
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Coincidental post on Laval Subjects touches on similar ideas.
More on aesthetics and realism: Wound of Consciousness II
Consciousness refers both to the part of the mind's working one is aware of, and to being aware of and responding to one's surroundings... very difficult to separate the two...one needs something to process before one becomes aware of the fact it is being processed.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how Wood gets dragged into all of these philosophical issues. I left a longer comment on the first blog you linked to stating my stance on Wood. I think literary theory, like Western Philosophy, is particularly vulnerable to the quagmire of language games and brambles of thought we easily get stuck in. At it's base, we're using texts to advance ideological positions. Ahh, how far we've moved from enjoying the book itself--which was probably the reason why Wood wrote Broken Estate and How Fiction Works--he, like all of us, appreciates literature. When can we go back to appreciating literature, and stop throwing mud pies at each other for having different tastes in art?
ReplyDeleteI was speaking, of course, of human consciousness, consciousness conditioned by language, and probably, before the acquisition of language--by the impression on the human facility for language. An infant perceives the world (reality) not through its own senses and the brains arrangements alone, but through the mother, through the interactions with adults, such that the "something to process" does not begin with the infant, but as something already processed.
ReplyDeleteHuman consciousness is not simply "awareness:" with self awareness a variety of awareness-of-the-world. It in the internalization of awareness. That was my point, in response to the Woodsian character's free flight of consciousness thing, the heart of his error: the unquestioned assumption of an autonomous "self."
We are many from before the beginning. "I" am many even as I am one. The moments Wood privileges are a species of illusion--deserving neither to be called "reality" nor "realism."
Enjoying the book itself? Why does that require our foregoing the pleasure of thinking about the nature of that pleasure, thinking about relationship of that pleasure to language, to "reality."
ReplyDeleteIt's because Wood claims the sort of fiction he approves of somehow deserves to be called "realism" that Wood gets dragged into this. That makes his aesthetic stance more than, no--something other than an aesthetic stance: it is moral, political and philosophical stance.
He isn't returning to some less complicated "pleasure of the book," that a mask that demands we not question or think about the assumptions that are its foundation. Worse, it supports publishing world's deferring to the bottom line and exclusion of writing that exposes those assumptions and seeks to get beyond them. Edmond Caldwell has been spot on in his continuing critque.
Jacob, you write so movingly of Magdalena Zurawski's The Bruise that now I'm going to have to go out and buy it and read it -- like I really need another book!
ReplyDelete(OK, I always need another book...)
We all have different tastes... but I think I can promise you, you won't be disappointed.
ReplyDeleteAnd even if you are, I look forward to our response.
ah... make that Your response.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Lethe. Are you suggesting that by stating what he admires Wood is somehow contributing to the oppression of what he doesn't? That by praising canonical works he is contributing to a capitalist system that somehow discriminates against the experimental?
ReplyDeleteHis aesthetic stance, is his aesthetic stance, if you ask me. We live in a system which does make publishing the kind of 'assumption'-challenging books you speak of, difficult; but to lay the blame for this weakness on the lap of one who so evidently loves literature for its intrinsic value, regardless of how he might equate consciousness in literature to existence in real life, is, with all due respect, presumptuous, and...limiting.
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHad the wrong URL: This time the link takes you to the right post
ReplyDelete"I agree with Lethe. Are you suggesting that by stating what he admires Wood is somehow contributing to the oppression of what he doesn't? That by praising canonical works he is contributing to a capitalist system that somehow discriminates against the experimental?"
Dan Green has a critique of William Deresiewicz's review of James Wood's How Fiction Works in The Nation--a defense against the sort of claim you seem to think applies to me, a reading that is both simplistic and imprecise. I have no quarrel with Wood's literary aesthetics, other than the limited range of the texts he prefers; it is where his aesthetics bleeds into the metaliterary, into claims that he prefers not to examine or even acknowledge, claims that are not in essence, aesthetic, where I find reason to complain.
I've gone over this before. It's the unexamined claim that the books he prefers more powerfully or more accurately represent "the real," the validity of which is not a matter that can be decided within the limits of aesthetics. It's that extra-aesthetic claim that generates economic, political and social implications. The whole "reality" thing is one big beggared question and it's a real problem, one that vitiates his aesthetics, transforms it into the political, takes it hostage by stealth. Raising the volume of the defense on the grounds of aesthetic purity misses the point--misses the significance of that word, "realism," misses how deeply it corrupts his aesthetic judgement, runs away in a panic from the importance of unpacking its implications.
"...to lay the blame for this weakness on the lap of one who so evidently loves literature for its intrinsic value, regardless of how he might equate consciousness in literature to existence in real life, is, with all due respect, presumptuous, and...limiting. "
Meaning, you prefer not to examine or think about those implications. "Presumptuous," as I've said elsewhere, displaces the fault from the idea to the person. An idea fails through weakness of evidence and reason. One can as well be presumptuous and right as humble and wrong.