Michael Wood
Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction
New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Pp. 241. US $22.95
Reviewed by Roger Seamon

The publicity quotes on this book are true: these essays are alive with intelligence, and Michael Wood is one of our finest critics. His greatest gift is for just what criticism of contemporary fiction should be, an effort to convey “what it feels like to read the work in question” (9). His accounts of the books one knows are usually dead-on, although one could not have said it so well oneself. Here is how he captures Beckett, the brooding comic hero of the whole collection: “We can’t take ourselves seriously without getting ourselves wrong, but how else are we to take ourselves, given the seriousness of our plight” (44). That is also-with some variation in emphasis-the attitude of most of the writers Wood discusses. Thus Wood says that Cortázar’s A Manual for Manuel “is a running plea for frivolity in the midst of serious concerns” (51), and he finds the mixture even in Stephen King, whose horror stories “suggest that we have returned, on some not entirely serious, not entirely playful level, to the notion that superstitions are right after all, that they offer us a more plausible picture of the world than any organized religion or any of our secular promises” (148).

The writers discussed are, in order of appearance: R. Barthes, S. Beckett, J. Cortázar, G. Cabrera Infante, R. Arenas, M. Kundera, I. Calvino, G. Garcia Marquéz, T. Morrison, A. Carter, S. King, E. Said, K. Ishiguro, and J. Winterson. They are-save for King-James’s, Joyce’s, and Beckett’s heirs, and so it is not surprising that a major leitmotif is language. The introduction takes up Wood’s recurring themes of story (vs. novel), “the dream of Eden,” silence, and the novel’s relationship to history. In the essay on Barthes-the first writer discussed-he draws a moral from a passage in Wittgenstein in which language is compared to an ancient city, with a dense and complex inner core that is surrounded by suburbs with “straight regular streets and uniform houses”: “it is the specialized vocabulary that is direct and simple, common usage that is winding and cluttered” (18). For Wood, fine fictions live in that ancient center, and he relishes being our guide, especially to the way that the poets can express what we can only attempt to say. A brief sentence from Morrison’s Beloved-“If I hadn’t killed her she would have died”-elicits this from Wood: “the tangle of the thought is the exact image of the tangle of her heart and mind. In sharply evoked crookedness of this sort, tender, horrifying, passionate, and violent, Morrison finds a solution to the problem of severely registering the effects of oppression without making its victims seem only victims, less than human, precisely the passive, inferior beings their oppressors like to think they are” (121).

There we see the legacy of Wood’s teacher, R. P. Blackmur. Like many, I have my doubts about the value of such paraphrase (yes, that is just what New Critics often did despite all the noise about it being heretical), but it works pretty well when done sparingly (it is a way of summing up) and Wood is excellent at it.

Wood, however, is too charitable toward the current fashion for political moralism among American academics, here represented by Edward Said. The track record of both left and right criticism is bad, and the intellectuals’ general abandonment of liberalism earlier in this century is, at best and charitably, a deep embarrassment. I was, therefore, very disheartened when Wood explained away Kundera’s straightforward liberalism (“a re-invention of Lionel Trilling’s Liberal Imagination”) as “entirely understandable, given Kundera’s experience of a totalitarian world” (71). That is miserably patronizing. It gets worse later when he tells us that Nabokov’s “genuine indifference and frequent political silliness would be readable as marks of damage” (198), that is, need excusing through a quasi-Freudian interpretation. Nabokov’s “indifference” is simply one right response to those who badger writers to be political, since there is no political justification for what poets, acrobats, athletes, and jugglers do; what they do is justified by being possibly wonderful. Nabokov is a classical political liberal, and therefore anything but silly, while Said’s “political” criticism of Austen, which Wood praises, is worse than silly, as well as being inaccurate (see Francis Sparshott, “The View from Gadshill,” Philosophy and Literature 20 [October 1996]: 401-404 for a detailed critique of Said’s blatantly tendentious misreading of Mansfield Park). But in the end Wood happily gets it right when he says, apropos of a Cortázar story, “what is murdered here, or about to be murdered, is not a character but our immunity; the old quiet privilege of reading” (205). One can never really be immune, so that privilege should be defended. But usually only writers like Nabokov and Kundera-who have lived where such reading was not possible-can affirm privilege unequivocally, that is, without liberal guilt and its attendant defensiveness. The presence of both is the only serious and annoying defect in an otherwise fine book.