James Wood Quotes
James Wood delivers a sharp, grand take on how storytelling can hide emptiness, perfect for anyone craving thoughtful critique.
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The big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion.
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An excess of storytelling has become the contemporary way of shrouding, in majesty, a lack; it is the Sun King principle. The lack is the human.
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“Everything has always been permitted, even when God was around. God has nothing to do with it.”
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“Melville, in his relation to belief, was like the last guest who cannot leave the party; he was always returning to see if he had left his had and gloves.”
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“When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I talk about detail I'm really talking about character, and when I talk about character I am really talking about the real , which is at the bottom of my inquiries.”
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“Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.”
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“Kazuo Ishiguro, the New Nobel Laureate, Has Supremely Done His Own Kind of Thing”
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“fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.”
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“This is merely another definition of dramatic irony: to see through a character’s eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can see (an unreliability identical to the unreliable first-person narrator’s). 11”
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“The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.”
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“They believed that this world was fallen but that restitution would be provided elsewhere, in an afterlife. I believed that this world was fallen and that there was no afterlife.”
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“Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliably unreliable. Think of Kazuo Ishiguro’s butler in The Remains of the Day, or of Bertie Wooster, or even of Humbert Humbert. We know that the narrator is being unreliable because the author is alerting us, through reliable manipulation, to that narrator’s unreliability. A process of authorial flagging is going on; the novel teaches us how to read its narrator. Unreliably”
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“Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.”
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“Fiction is most effective when its themes are unspoken. An ideal fiction has a kind of thematic ghostliness, whereby the novel marks its meanings most strongly as it passes, as it disappears, rather as on a street snow gets dirtier, more marked, as it disappears.”