MORNING WOOD

James Wood looks at Falling Man and, although there's much he admires, his usual objections to DeLillo remain.  (We responded similarily, though far less elegantly, reading the excerpt wondering "What the fuck is 'preliterate folkways' supposed to mean?")

But DeLillo is a very strange writer. For every elegant, compact sentence closing around its meaning as if delicately preying on it, there are passages that bear the other DeLillo mark, which could best be called a kind of fastidious vagueness. These are passages in which fancy words are deployed with a cool, technical confidence, in a spirit of precision, as if they have actual referents, but in which meaning is smeared and obscured. Consider this description of poker, a game that Keith had played every week with three other men, before "the day":

They played each hand in a glazed frenzy. All the action was somewhere behind the eyes, in naïve expectation and calculated deceit. Each man tried to entrap the other and fix limits to his own false dreams, the bond trader, the lawyer, the other lawyer, and these games were the funneled essence, the clear and intimate extract of their daytime initiatives. The cards skimmed across the green baize surface of the round table. They used intuition and cold-war risk analysis. They used cunning and blind luck. They waited for the prescient moment, the time to make the bet based on the card they knew was coming. Felt the queen and there it was. They tossed in the chips and watched the eyes across the table. They regressed to preliterate folkways, petitioning the dead. There were elements of healthy challenge and outright mockery. There were elements of one's intent to shred the other's gauzy manhood.

If I were given this passage in a blind test and asked for provenance, I would first murmur: "American, not English," for this could only be contemporary American prose, and then, more than likely, I would say: "Don DeLillo." What is most striking is the way the prose lifts itself up into a lyricism that is not quite lyrical: "glazed frenzy ... funneled essence ... preliterate folkways ... gauzy manhood" (whatever that is). The effect, very common in post-White Noise DeLillo, is an uneasy sense that the author is perhaps trying to be a bit funny, but not half as funny as he is unwittingly being. The passage is unwittingly funny because it is so awfully earnest, in an adolescent writer's kind of way. The earnestness makes itself felt in the peculiar shifts into solemn pseudo-scientific registers: "They regressed to preliterate folkways, petitioning the dead." In other words, DeLillo means, the players muttered every so often: "Mother, help me!" It is no good to claim that this is free indirect style -- DeLillo deliberately mimicking the earnestness of his poker players -- because this is how DeLillo always sounds, and because there is no reason to assume that his poker players think like DeLillo. But what, except a kind of pomposity, is gained by the quasi-profound diction, with its bogus air of massive anthropological expertise? After all, this is just a poker game. And why "preliterate"? Pre-literacy was a very, very long time ago: has no one called on the dead for the last literate four millennia?

Comments

[Jason]

Oh I wholeheartedly agree with you there!

I got the exact same sensation when listening to Ashbery at a poetry reading some years back, that we are supposed to sit in awe of phrases that heard sound wonderful or poetically deep but upon closer examination make no freaking sense at all. It's so sad. And why do so many writers insist on using "gauzy" beyond its dictionary sense?

[Jason]

p s, DeLillo always sounds a little off when he shoots for the Pynchonesque.

[PT Caffe]

What's sad isn't that so many writers insist on using "gauzy" beyond its dictionary sense, but that so few do. And, as Woods indicates, the passage cited doesn't sound like anybody but Delillo. Love him or hate him, it's Delillo. He's giving you Delillo (certainly not Pynchon). And I don't think he's "unwittingly funny" at all. He's simply funny. How do I know? Cold-war risk analysis tells me so.

[Jason]

I don't know. Gauzy has always struck me as being a bit too gauzy for my tastes. And "Gauzy manhood" is just such a weird phrase--the Gauzymandias of all weird usages of gauzy--that I suppose only DeLillo could have come up with it.

[pj nolan]

It seems a bit rich to castigate a storyteller for stretching your preceptions of language? Surely that goes with the job description? Would we criticise an improvising musician for bending notes? Where you see fastidious vagueness, I see the Other.

[Shya]

I agree with pj, and think, moreover, that Wood is misreading the sentence. "Petitioning the dead" refers back to those walking the "preliterate folkways," by which I'd assume Delillo's speaking of fundemental, biology-based urges. Instinct, in other words.

[ed]

Reactionary critics like Mendelsohn and Wood frequently tsk-tsk the author for bending the notes, so to speak. I'm tired of seeing them admonish authors when they should instead be attempting to understand these new vernaculars and how they fit in with the evolving direction (or lack thereof) of literature. I can only imagine Wood reviewing some of the classics:

"What does Ginsberg mean by 'dragging themelves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix?' If I were forced to play Pin the Tail on the Donkey after several shots of Stoli, I could easily identify this as the kind of prose fashionable among the beret-wearing riff-raff. Streets are not racial! How is a fix angry?"

[Steven Augustine]

Wood is an auto mechanic looking under the hood of a UFO. DeLillo is very good at a kind of jazzy, flickeringly wry compression. He does in two paragraphs what other writers need a chapter to accomplish. Wood's hysterical attempts to debunk DeLillo are obvious clues to his personal feelings about DeLillo's enormous talent and Wood's own subordinate position as a professional interpreter of DeLillo's Art. Wood falsely interprets a DeLillo trope then knocks the false interpretation...this is a critical method I'm supposed to take seriously? Bitchy, wounded, camouflage erudition.

[Steven Augustine]

Re: the "dictionary sense" of "gauzy": don't really see how it precludes a pairing of the word with "manhood" or in what way that compound defies interpretation.

[crocodile]

Isn't 'negro streets' an example of the transferred epithet? Works pretty well for Ginsberg, and we all use them e.g. 'I sit in my lonely room'. Wood's point, as I take it, is that the effective transferred epithet depends on the the reader's being able to identify from where and to where the epithet has been transferred. In my example it's obvious that it is I that is lonely; in Ginsberg's it is clear that the streets are lived in by negroes. Wood thinks that the adjective-noun combination in De Lillo is often strained - and I think he's picked quite a good example.

[Garth Risk Hallberg]

"Jumping Jehosephat! Mary and Joseph! Though I think this is on the whole a finely calibrated review, Wood is (despite his reputation as a close reader) at his worst when he cherry-picks and then misrepresents passages in the service of his prosecutorial inclinations. (See also his review of "Underworld.") In the spirit of turnabout as fair play: "pre-literacy," in the Saudi milieu from which some of Falling Man's characters hail, was as recent as 1950 (cf. Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower"; Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy"). Also: for the anthropologically curious, a card game is never just a card game (to state otherwise is to flourish a "bogus...expertise.")
The quoted passage makes no pretension to being free indirect style. Rather, it's DeLillo the narrator using his own rangy diction (characteristically) to take the piss out of some of the sententiousness he and Keith Neudecker are tempted, retrospectively, to foist onto this tableau. The pseudo-scientific phrasing is exactly where the sentences are least in earnest. (Do we believe that DeLillo really wants us to belive that "they used cold war risk analysis?" Of course not. The term of art is hyperbole (not one of James Wood's favorite rhetorical devices, "Book Against God" notwithstanding. Though, in fairness, understatement is the cornerstone of the Oxbridge house style.))

At his most humorless (cf. the endlessly unfunny but otherwise wonderful introduction to "The Irresponsible Self") Wood insists that narrators must either be objectively reporting, exercising free indirection, or directly recording the thoughts of characters. This ignores the possibility of recording the thoughts of characters in subjective language chosen by the narrator--an elaborate paper-folding method which, in the right hands, blossoms into irony. DeLillo's mode of irony may not be Wood's--that it isn't, in fact, seems to be the unacknowledged source of much of Wood's animus against DeLillo--but it is irony. American irony. And if the great Wood (and he is great) is going to be "the best critic" of his adopted home, he's going to have to broaden his palette. Whatever Wood may wish to believe, liking Melville and Bellow (and sometimes Roth) and lumping everyone else doesn't exactly distinguish one as a commentator on American literature. I suggest he start with "Light in August" and work forward and backward.

[Niall]

Wood wrote about Faulkner several times during his stint at The Guardian. He largely sings from the Faulkner hymn sheet (everything between 1929 and 1942 was great; thereafter, oh dear), and has also written that he considers Light in August Faulkner's greatest novel.