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The Newness of the Old
by
Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.
In Wood’s inaugural book of literary criticism, The Broken Estate (1999), he zeroed in on the sometimes tortured, sometimes redemptive relationship between literature and belief. In a set of now-famous essays, Wood hurled his barbed critical spears into the flesh of George Steiner and John Updike—not to mention Philip Roth, Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo. Bemoaning Updike’s “complacent God,” for example, Wood remarked that “it is a lost opportunity in American fiction that one of the few theologically literate novelists remains so unexercised by the tremor of faith.”
In spite of these celebrated—some would even say vicious—attacks on these authors, these essays, and his reviews as the literary critic of The New Republic, have established him as one our most incisive, deeply-read and thoughtful literary critics. To read an essay by Wood is to be conducted on a journey through a mini-history of Western literature while at the same time being seduced by his elegant prose.
Wood turns from the religious to the secular in his newest collection of essays and reviews. The pieces gathered in The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $24) are connected by the idea of comedy.
Avoiding a theoretical approach to various kinds of comedy, Wood instead offers masterful readings of the comic landscape of modern literature. Ranging through Shakespeare, Coleridge, Dostoevsky, J.F. Powers, Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie, Saul Bellow and Henry Green, among others, Wood proposes that modern comedy “is a kind of tragicomic stoicism which might best be called the comedy of forgiveness.” Such comedy, he points out, differs significantly from the comedy of correction, a form of comedy characterized by “faultfinding, reprehension, and correction.”
According to Wood, comedies of correction—including works by Aristophanes, Rabelais, Swift, and Flaubert—laugh at the shortcomings and wickedness of their protagonists. Comedies of forgiveness, on the other hand, laugh with the protagonists for their sometimes-bumbling inability to see clearly their own shortcomings. As Wood points out, “if religious comedy is punishment for those who deserve it, secular comedy is forgiveness for those who don’t.”
In fact, Wood observes, “. . . the modern novel’s unreliability or irresponsibility is a state in which the reader may not always know why a character does something or may not know how to ‘read’ a passage, and feels that in order to find these things out he must try to merge with the characters in their uncertainty.”
One of the finest essays in the collection is on J.F. Powers, an unfortunately now almost forgotten comic presence in American literature. Woods resurrects Powers and his comedy of forgiveness: “Powers shows us again what comic realism can do: how it attends to the human exception, how it scathes our pretensions and blesses our weaknesses.” “His characters are not punished but already forgiven for sins they do not repent of, and the dry ground of their souls is moistened by the author’s gentle laughter.”
Yet, in his well-known essay “Hysterical Realism,” Wood attacks much of contemporary fiction for its inability to create human characters rather than caricatures. Focusing on Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, he points out that “certainly the people who inhabit the big, ambitious contemporary novels have a showy liveliness, a theatricality, that almost succeeds in hiding the fact that they are without life.” On this point, Smith, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo and Salman Rushdie all come up short in Wood’s view.
Contentious and provocative, Wood’s elegant essays provide new ways of thinking about old categories—in this case, comedy—as well as engaging and magisterial readings of modern literature.
Henry dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as publisher of T&T Clark and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Henry can be reached at
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