The problem with a practicing novelist writing about how fiction works is that it tends - naturally enough - to be about how the fiction that writer likes to write and read works. I haven't read Wood's book - though I have no doubt it is worth reading - but I am preemptively skeptical of any prescriptive aesthetic. As Blake put it, "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's; I will not reason and compare; my business is to create."
Wood is critic first and practising novelist second, or maybe third. He's definitely worth reading - not prescriptively (though I think any critic worthy of the name is bound to speak prescriptively in a broad sense) but for the all-too prevalent assumptions he forces us to confront and challenge. Do I always agree with him? Of course not. There are other fine critics out there, and the only way a writer who reads criticism at all can survive with a shred of integrity - i.e. individual voice - is by reading a broad selection. We each choose our own prescriptions; at least we should be aware what they are.
ReplyDeleteI read critics for the same reason I read anything else - for the pleasure of it. What I like best is criticism that draws my attention details I might otherwise have overlooked. I also like offbeat, hyper-personal reactions to things, which is why I like D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature.
ReplyDeleteAh, pleasure - if it were only not so fraught!
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