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James Wood and the Age of Visions
by Samuel Liu

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Perhaps there is no essay by James Wood more thrilling than his piece on metaphor in Melville, published in The New Republic more than two decades years ago, in 1997. Of all his criticism, this is the most alive and dancing in its language, and has the poetic, prophetic fervor that exemplifies Wood’s ideal of criticism; he is channeling Melville’s prose. He comes as close to Melville as a diver traveling perfectly alongside his legendary whale; at times the prose merge, as if different shades of waters. Then Wood comes out in a cleaner blue, the ghost of Melville still clinging to his prose as the tatters of a transparent cloak as a hand strives forth to reach at what force it desires. It shows what literary criticism is meant to be: to be completely influenced by the prose of the superior ghost and to narrate within its power. And then, as how a parent, teaching her child how to use the bicycle for the first time, will run alongside the child holding onto the seat of the bicycle, only to – when the child is lost in his own head and spouts his favorite words – release the back of the seat so that the child goes on his own; thus is the critic freed momentarily. This criticism plays the score of the critiqued. A writer survives by how many younger poets he inspires; just so, a critic champions a writer by writing like him.

For Wood is playful to read for the same reason that he admires Melville: they both write and think compulsively in metaphor, enhancing their prose immeasurably, punning when they don’t have to, referring to unknown myths.

Soaked in theology, Melville was alert to the Puritan habit of seeing the world allegorically, that is, metaphorically. The world was a place of signs and wonders which could always yield up its meaning like secret ink.

He writes of the way metaphor pushes a thought forward.

Melville chooses the metaphors that then squeeze their return from him. […] But, of all writers, he understood the independent, generative life that comes from likening something to something else. Keats spoke of how language ‘yeasts and works itself up’—works itself. This was everything to Melville.

Everything to Wood, as well—for the musicality of his criticism. Who, disagreeing with Wood, does not like reading him? In this sense (to parody Wood), ‘his criticism advocates for itself, displays its riches and shows forth its own value by its very style, bribing its critics, spendthrift but also on point.’
	This is a mild parody of Wood, and already one can hear him saying, ‘But the metaphor isn’t quite on point—it slightly hedges, shifts meanings without quite making sense, reaching towards abstraction but fails to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability.’
	To which Proust would respond (this is again a parody), ‘Wood saw that, however high it flew, whatever miracles it drew about itself, it was necessary that every sentence be ‘of the earth,’ ‘felt,’ and concrete, as devoid of artifice as possible. For Wood the essential tension of literature was between that of consciousness and the eye, between the ability for fiction to ‘hold the ghost’ and represent consciousness; and yet simultaneously to balance this character-centric fiction, this dialogue of the accurate ear, with the writer’s eye, his shining desire to see, his musical prose of the inaccurate-ecstatic ear.
	‘One can get caught up trying to paint everything, and in the process lose the soul of his characters, to have written over the characters, to have made them say things that they would never say, to talk like the author and not the character. And, needless to say, in this one would have failed, found himself pinned and writhing under Wood’s pen—accused of running the scale all the way from Austen (who has no need for the visual world), to Updike (who has only the visual world). Updike’s prose, so Wood would tell us, had destroyed the characters’ consciousnesses.
	‘Yet to Wood it was natural that the writer must paint; he was intrigued, he had difficulty understanding why Austen saw it fit to dispense with detail, why she was so deliberately a pauper. For Austen understood that visual details – descriptions of feminine Flaubertian dresses, of Nabakovian lips – distracted from the pure, schematic psychological dance that was visualized in the most basic and efficient way possible, so as to get onto the next point, so that the next dance might begin.
	‘But he was not satisfied with Austen; he wanted, also, a visual world. For by describing the world and giving it ‘this-ness,’ by representing to us and placing upon a museum’s pedestal the formerly boring and unsignifying details of life, like this chair, that porcelain toilet, one does the job of art; one seeds the sterile earth and in that same movement—as of a fig tree blessed—sees it give forth good fruit. In sum. By describing the world, the writer gives us life back to ourselves.’
	—Silence, Proust!
	Wood’s essential point, so it seems to me, is the differentiation between the observer-author and the character who is, in almost all cases, never as good an observer as the author.
	Here is Wood observing this tension in the writer he most frequently holds up as a model, Saul Bellow:

‘A long perfect ash formed on the end of the cigar, the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency. It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man. For it was beautiful. Wilhelm he ignored as well.’

It is a gorgeous, musical phrase, and characteristic of both Bellow and modern fictional narrative. The fiction slows down to draw our attention to a potentially neglected surface or texture—an example of a ‘descriptive pause.’

…

But at the same time it is a detail apparently seen not by the author—or not only by the author—but by a character. And this is what Bellow wobbles on; he admits an anxiety endemic to modern narrative, and which modern narrative tends to elide. The ash is noticed, and then Bellow comments: ‘It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man.’

The Bellow anxiety occurs at the balance between what the character sees and what the author sees. The character seems always to get in the way. The beautiful sentence is in the danger of being continually appended with, ‘so X— saw.’ Then the character thinks something completely banal about the object, ‘That watch his grandfather had given him, for some reason, not on a holiday or anything,’ — which banality, Wood says, is indeed lifelike, since we do not often poeticize about objects, and our common thoughts intrude. But something is lost.

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It is the contention of this piece that the metaphorical style advocated by Wood in his Melville piece, is actually resisted by the character-driven realism that he outlines.
	The ecstasy of obsessive poetic metaphor suffers under character-driven fiction.
	Those interested in describing the world in an ecstatic fashion so often have to either dispense with a character-observer altogether, or make the observer the author (like Proust). Shakespeare bypasses this—and of this realism does not allow—by making all his characters speak in metaphor, forcing them to be eloquent. When Queen Gertrude reports of Ophelia’s death, she reports it in Shakespeare’s language—in essence, Queen Gertrude is a better author than Bellow (assuming that we prefer Shakespeare to Bellow). That is how Shakespeare bypasses the description problem; we don’t have an issue with everyone speaking with poetry, because that’s what we already expect—since it’s Shakespeare.
	The grammar of realism has led us to assume normality as the grounds of speech. This normality pushes out the ecstasy of metaphor, or limits it to the domain of the ecstatic speech. Only geniuses, usually insane, like Ahab or Ivan Karamazov, are allowed to talk this way. Wood would doubtless point out that there are brilliant instances of peasant-speech in Shakespeare that beautifully use metaphor, and he is right. The prose that Wood prefers involves a dosage of banality, as if a bit of mud were weighing down the airy sentence to give it weight. A drift of thought and feeling: ’the sublime dapple of emotions.’
	But I am speaking of the capacity of the author to describe sensual intensity, rather than for a character to linger comically and beautifully in his own speech. In this, I am not arguing against Wood, but hope to make clear the boundary that he has implicitly determined.
	The best kinds of description often involve the disappearance of the observer, in which the author seems to take over. It is correct to say that what I am describing is more like prose poetry than the novel.
	For in this kind of thing—let us just call it ecstatic ekphrasis—the character cannot intrude.

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It is my argument that there are two modes of noticing; there is the type advocated by Wood and seen in Bellow, and another type, one of obsession, ecstasy. In this, the author stands so still he may count the seconds that pass and yet count himself lucid in those seconds. This is to perceive the world and all its details within one system of thought.
	It is this that I position in contradistinction to Woodian noticing, which is the realm of Flaubert and Bellow.
	It is the problem of the Woodian flâneur over the terrified, ecstatic child standing in front of the wasted garden-yard. Here, there is no mere descriptive pause, here there is no time to take out your notebook to observe; one’s entire being pauses, and the plot of the story ceases to makes sense and becomes irrelevant; the prose becomes not just painting but, far superior to painting, an image that lingers like a slow burn in the air.
	Here is the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, whose descriptive power only Proust approaches.

And over near the fence a sheepskin coat of grasses rises like a protuberant hillock-hump, as if the garden has turned onto its other side in its sleep and its thick peasant shoulders are breathing the silence of the earth.
…

And while the tattered clothes slip onto the ground and scatter across the garbage dump like frightened rats, the heart of the dump digs its way out from them, the core slowly unwraps itself and emerges from its shell: a half-naked, dark imbecile slowly rises and stands there, looking like a little pagan idol on short, childlike legs, while from her neck, which is swollen with an influx of fury, from her flushed face growing dark with rage, on which the arabesques of swollen veins resembling primitive paintings are efflorescing, a bestial shriek escapes, a throaty shriek, produced from all the bronchi and pipes of this half-bestial, half-godlike breast. The milk thistles, burned by the sun, are screaming, the burdocks puffing up and flaunting their shameless flesh, the weeds drooling glistening poison, and the imbecile girl in a wild convulsion, hoarse from her shrieking, with frenzied passion thrusts her fleshy groin against an elderberry trunk that, bewitched by this whole beggars’ chorus to perverted pagan fecundity, creaks softly beneath the urgency of dissolute lust.

Schulz is childishly obsessed with an object; he can’t take his eye away from it; he walks down a street one day, hears music in his mind, and stops and stares; the object undergoes several transformations of impression in his mind. These transformations are the actions of metaphor on itself, the vision deepening, as like infinity condensing in the curdling of a hitherto sterile and clear soup. Then, some proposition is gained, some spiritual content occurs—a new vision is shown; by this I mean, a climate is created.
	Schulz’s language is actually very systematic with its concepts; ‘shameless,’ ‘rage,’ ‘fury,’ the motifs recur and pass throughout his prose, in the way that a poet has a set of vocabulary special to him that he uses continually and infuses with new meaning such that no other poets can use these words without accidentally calling to mind the poet. This is actually what Wood means when he writes:

Everyone is called a “beautiful writer” at some point or other, just as all flowers are eventually called pretty. “Stylists” are crowned every day, of steadily littler kingdoms. But of course, there are very few really fine writers of prose. This is not surprising, since a prose is a vision, a totality.

Indeed, prose is a vision, a totality—a new vocabulary. Schulz owns the word ‘degenerate,’ for he uses it in a completely positive manner; in order to make the world complete to his own inner system, he has to change the way he speaks—that is why he is a stylist. One does not become a stylist merely by observing things very well, or writing accurate images, or even deploying disparate ingenious metaphors, or even sounding very good—this is Bellow. Bellow is musical but his prose is not, as with Kafka’s The Trial, or Proust’s daydream-sentence, a philosophical system unto itself, in the way that Hegel’s prose embodies his dialectic thought. A stylist, I am arguing, also happens to be a systematic philosopher.
	A stylist—in the way I propose—has their own vocabulary, and every sentence they write seems ‘formulaic’; as to say, it belongs to the other sentences, it has the same genes; any sentence taken out of context is ‘Schulzian.’

During that long, empty winter the darkness reaped an immense, hundredfold harvest in our city.

This is a good example of Schulz’s strange logic, the type of sentence that is repeated throughout his works; his metaphysics are embedded into his language, and never need to be stated: when nothing happens for too long, advantage is taken of that nothingness, and something wonderful occurs. When the winter has been too long empty, darkness reaps a harvest in the city. It is as if a charge has been built up on the left side of the sentence, and releases itself on the other side in—Schulz’s words—a short-circuiting flash of sense.

The primeval word was a shimmering aura circling around the sense of the world, was a great universal whole. The word in its common usage today is only a fragment, remnant of some former all-embracing, integral mythology. That is why it possesses a tendency to grow back, to regenerate and complete itself in full meaning. The life of the word consists in tensing and stretching itself toward a thousand connections, like the cut-up snake in the legend whose pieces search for each other in the dark.

	No Thing is on its own; nothing can be walled in forever; no sterility shall have victory over God, and demise is not without a revenge against it. An immortality is assumed—his objects continually disintegrate and come together, like that vision of the universe as a cycle of violent expansion and condensing.
	That is why he is unforgettable in a different degree; his images reside in a system of language, under their unique mood. His metaphors belong to a perfect structure, and may be examined and spread out across a page like a flower, their progressing through the story charted.
	Because Schulz does not come with a notebook to adorn his realist novels: he comes with something to say, and this something is on his tongue all day as he walks through the crackling heat of Drohobycz. And look, this object—it says exactly what you are trying to say. You did not go out to gather interesting details, to sit at a gathering and write down clever observations; something about it captured you, you were enamored with the object, it obsessed you, appeared in your childhood fantasies.
	In Schulz, it is as if every object feels the way the author does; he enters into them and has them shout out, harmonize with what he experiences while looking at them; and the air is hot, and crackling, and filled with tension, the zigzags of thought.
	In realist fiction, because the character’s consciousness is always on the move, as it were on a march, we seldom have time to stop and stare, much less to engage the object before us in an imaginative way, to ask the object to speak or to tell us something—to place ourselves at the disposal of the object. We move on, like a flaneur. Wallace Stevens:

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

Asking the object for its name enhances our understanding of the object, is indeed our moral obligation, as Kant understands beauty to place a claim upon us, is our real duty to ‘the Celtic spirit,’ (this is an actual Proust quote), ‘that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.’

And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

The reason Proust's prose is ‘beautiful,’ is not actually on account of its sensuous accuracy alone, but the way that Proust abstracts, generalizes, and spiritualizes the content with his thought and sentiment before returning to the image again, which is now infused with that previous thought. This is actually also the interaction between Hegel’s abstract language and his picture-thinking.
	In Proust, as with Melville, the metaphor is weaved throughout the paragraph, like rice planted into the clauses before anyone knew what was happening; then it gets lost in its own drift, runaway by delight in its own colors, sniffing out its colors as the intuition, that these colors shade well together. In no small way, it is like a ship caught in the current of a mid-ocean river; one leans over and observes the various fish in this different, deeper color. Proust’s metaphors are usually just mini-stories, thereby enhancing the story continually with plot despite there being ‘no plot’ in In Search of Lost Time—and before we know what has happened, in a totally different time and place, transported to the golden clime of Summer, we would recall something, as that day when, sitting in the fields not having realized the heat was here, a little Chinese girl came running by and shouted, ‘It’s time to go to the harvest, and pluck out the shoots!’ announcing summer in the paddling by of her bare feet.
	Each of Proust sentences enacts its own involuntary memory.

*

What is lifelikeness in fiction, and in art? Here is some more Proust-parody, just for fun.
	‘Sometimes my friend would use the word ‘thin’ to characterize the difference between Strauss and Mahler, in that after listening to Mahler, he felt as if he had read a ‘thicker’ book for the same effort and expenditure in time. By this he meant something as to the following. In Jackie Chan’s Kung Fu films, when a blow is landed on someone, the editor repeats it three or four times within the span of the frame, which is obviously counter to reality (since the punch only occurs once), yet it does not remove our belief in its reality not simply because it occurs so quickly as if in the blink of an eye, but also because it enhances the punch in our ‘stomach,’—it feels thicker and stronger. It has more seemingness. It seems right, since it feels right, even though the punch has occurred only one time. It gives more impact to the image.
	‘Likewise, and Wood is fond of this word ‘slay,’ a detail ‘strikes’ us more when it lands more hits; when it fits the groove of our sensibility perfectly and as quickly as possible, a matching of shapes.
	‘As also in psychological hedging. —As to say, ‘He did not see that she wanted nothing to do with him, though in an area blind to himself he faintly perceived it’—it performs a sort of over-lapping movement that seeks to cleave to the shaded, shading, partially blind waves of emotion; the author is, ‘as he is writing, searching, though without a real terminus or goal to that search, if only to arrive at what sounded like truth.
	‘Every time I match something you feel, I score a hit. The more subtle I am, the more hits I seem to score. Proust achieves great memorability, even without spectacle, because he impacts us subtly in this way, leaving the strong feeling that we have been impressed upon our consciousness many times; the feeling of ‘this is true’ is a correspondence between the shape of the sentence and the shape presented by our internal sensibility.
	‘This is true of composing something, too. One imagines a composer singing a phrase into the air, listening to it, as if to contemplate a butterfly that he had just briefly frosted there, then discarding it, or, in the next draft, measuring out a butterfly of the same genus and class so—as by an artful artificial selection—to bring into reality more phrases of the type that had pleased him. Such is the pleasure of composition, as continuous, of a rhythm and beat, as fertile and fructifying, as a cow chewing cuds; we speak quietly to ourselves as we write, delight in our better turns of phrase as we fall asleep that night. So the joy of the sentence might have seemed to Jonathan Franzen, who in his despair—in his Harper’s essay—proposed that after the death of the social novel, the end of literature’s relevance, one had only the sentence as refuge. Perhaps better said, to take a step further, that one had only the composing of a sentence as refuge.’

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But realism as Wood prescribes—and if the realist novel has seen its proper champion, it is Wood—it is for those defeated in spirit, who have ceased to have visions, who write in prose, who have lost the first love, and turn to complexity and its intellectual sentences—like these—as consolation. Those who understand me will understand me—that there is something infinitely higher than Jane Austen, who will never be overcome in the psychological category; that it is not just the romantic spirit—though we are not offended by Rilke—but that there is still some astounding thing to the imagination, not merely representative and accurate and merely interesting like realism—but far beyond the imagination and a violence to it. I can only speak mystically, and those who have no interest in hearing me will dismiss me here; for what I describe does not necessarily exist, and is a postulate, or mission. The zeitgeist fiction is The Cat Person, which is a one-shot, excellent piece of inspiration, and which is only itself—psychology which will never match the acuity of Austen; and psychology alone. One should understand how low are the aims of this fiction. We might say that Penelope Fitzgerald has defeated Novalis, in the sense that the comic novelist has taken the romantic poet captive and turned him into her fool-cum-hero. Who will stand before the mounds and truly believe that he sees the spirit of his philosophy standing there in the body of a recently deceased girl? Who will be so deluded? Only a madman will fall under the throe of his metaphor. For the eye is without vision, and the imagination is small. As the poet says it, May the one whose sandal we are not fit to tie strike up the banner; beat by blood the tympan of his mother’s ear; and grow restless in the womb.