The Trouble with Literature
By contrast, Wood argues, contemporary novelists too often treat their pages more like flypaper, ready to cling on to any randomly floating bits of cultural debris: ‘How to make the best Indonesian fish curry! The sonics of the trombone! The drug market in Detroit! The history of strip cartoons!’
As a result, novels expand in size but shrink in significance. With the writer struggling to make himself heard above all this background noise, it becomes even harder to hear the voices of believable characters, who are duly downgraded to the status of puppets jerked on by the strings of plot.
Once Stendhal’s mirror is replaced by stories that seem happier reflecting on the problems of story-telling, as if hugging themselves at their own cleverness, old-fashioned realism is replaced by a new form of ‘hysterical realism’, in which novelists such as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo need to shout in order to disguise the fact that they have nothing to say, or nothing worth listening to.
review of James Wood’s The Irresponsible Self:
On Laughter and the Novel
[x]#545 fan dinsdag 18 mei 2004 @ 23:37:58
