Though it deftly reveals how fiction works, its secret ambitions are grander. This is, as its humdrum title proclaims, a manual, an exploration of writerly craft. By examining the minutiae of character, narrative and style in a range of fictional works that starts with the Bible and ends with Coetzee and Pynchon, he fondly and delicately pieces back together what the deconstructors put asunder.
'Alienated from creative instinct', such critics vilify a bright, illuminating energy they cannot share. Even Barthes, whom he admires, is accused of possessing a 'sensitive, murderous' contempt for fictional realism and the reality it upholds. Wood, proud to be a practitioner, rebukes such arrogant scepticism. The aim of their endeavours was to dispense with what they criticised, since literature was at best the residue of a false consciousness, a tissue of oppressive untruths overdue for demolition. The theorists who used to be so academically modish had little knowledge of literature and even less love for it. Despite its clunkily repeated preposition, the latter job description spells out a defiant faith in practice as opposed to theory.
James Wood, once a Guardian book reviewer, is now professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard.
0 kommentar(er)
