Onsdagslenker

• James Wood har skrevet en interessant kritikk av David Mitchells nye bok The Bone Clocks i The New Yorker. «Much contemporary writing fetishizes style», skriver han blant annet, og har selvfølgelig helt rett i det.
• Geir Rakvaag i Dagsavisen har intervjuet Stian Johansen om diktboka Jeff Tweedy, liksom.
• En 11-åring har gjenskapt 100 scener fra Infinite Jest i lego.
• Arne Berggren har skrevet 10 tips for folk som vil skrive for film, mye av det er direkte relevant for andre typer skriving også. Det ligner på råd man har hørt før, om man er av typen som har brukt en del tid på å høre på råd om skriving, men det betyr ikke at de er dårlige av den grunn; tvert i mot.

A D Jameson om James Woods reduktive syn på hva som er akseptabel fiksjon

Literary critics are storytellers themselves, and we appraise them by how compelling, and how useful, we find their stories about fiction. Wood’s own account is smug and small. Again and again he dogmatically insists upon fiction that’s written in the third-person limited, that enlists only the most appropriate metaphors and details, that employs a language that’s musical but not over-aestheticized, and whose plot takes a definite backseat to the characters—the all-important characters!—who should “[serve] to illuminate an essential truth or characteristic” (128). By the time that Wood is finished carving away at fiction, little remains of the art form that I know and love. But James Wood, ever the arbiter, ever the tastemaker, desires only a certain fiction: one that’s primarily truthful, stylized but never over-stylized, and never intrusive—like Goldilocks’s chosen bowl of porridge, chair, and bed, it must be exceedingly, prissily just-so. Unsurprisingly, Wood’s preferred fiction is realist, and bourgeois, and 99.9% dead, white, and male.

Throughout How Fiction Works, Wood systematically diminishes fiction’s enormous capacity. The actual art form is vast, and audiences delight in its diversity. It can accomplish a great many things: entertainment, instruction, journalism, shock, experimentation, verisimilitude, confusion. Its forms range from anecdotes to jokes to fables to parables; from morality tales to allegories to tall tales to dirty stories; from pulp genres like horror, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, war, thrillers, and westerns, to surrealism, Dadaism, and absurdism, to genres more enamored with realism: naturalism, regionalism, and minimalism; from comic books to zines to airport paperbacks to the “great books” on Harold Bloom’s canonical lists; from children’s stories to young adult novels to adult literature to adults-only novels; from the picaresque to the baroque to the romantic to the modern to the postmodern and well beyond; from the high to the low and back again; from the experimental to the utterly conventional. It contains room enough for even the quaint, timid stories delivered weekly by the New Yorker!

Fra denne lange, lange artikkelen.

James Wood - Half Against Flaubert

The failings of contemporary writers reveal certain weaknesses in Flaubert's greatness. Flaubert, for better or worse, established for us our idea of realism: a pressure of detail, a poised, deliberate chosenness. In Flaubert, the monstrous chosenness of detail is revealed through reticence. The pressure of the prose is the pressure of the thought that preceded it but wich does not lie on the page. The great descriptions in Flaubert - the great ball at La Vaubyessard in Madame Bovary, or the agricultural show in the same novel, or the Parisian barricades of 1848 in Sentimental Education - are surrounded by the ghost of avoidance, by everything that was rejected to produce this style, by the careful hiatus, by the intelligent starvation. It is the idea of paint, of depiction rather than thought or commentary: the very speck of the real. Contemporary writing - Robert Stone is an obvious example - takes Flaubert's controlled visual sweep, shaves of some of its richness, and merely cinematizes it. How would a town square in Italy or Brazil be described nowadays? I will parody the style: "In the northeast corner, a woman threw out her bucket of water, the contents of wich briefly yellowed the large, red slabs of the town square. On the other side, a priest, who had been reading the excitable morning paper, looked up and smiled, apparently to himself. His paper rustled in the small, hot breeze like fire. A piano could be heard: it was Miss Dupont's first pupil of the day." This kind of thing, or something like it, is the staple not only of realism, but of magic realism and of thriller writing. And there is good reason, because precise, observed detail is the food of any decent fiction. But Flaubert surely institutionalized this way of writing, canonized it into orthodoxy. Flaubert made it into a style: "A breeze from the window ruffled the cloth on the table, and down in the square the peasant women's big bonnets lifted up, fluttering like white butterflies' wings" (Madama Bovary)

Fra Woods essay om Flaubert i The Broken Estate, (Picador 2010) s. 61