Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction (review)

Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction. By Michael Wood. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 241 pp. $24.50.

"Discourses," declares Plato's Timaeus, "are akin in their character to that which they expound." Timaeus, one might add, was an early reader of European Modernist and Postmodernist literature. Beginning as early as Edmund Wilson's discussion of Proust in Axel's Castle, our criticism has assumed some connection between message and the structure of message, and Robert Alter has applied this "mimesis of form" retrospectively to the Realist novel. For the most part, students of European fiction have linked textual architecture to an imagined social construct: divided narrative points of view mirror the schizophrenic site of modern consciousness (Woolf, Nabokov); a rhetoric of anxiety is engendered by a world shorn of hope (Beckett); and dialogic speech realizes the principle of personality articulated by a particular religion (Bakhtin on Dostoevsky's orthodoxy). Michael Wood, in contrast, is more interested in writing a modern history of reading than he is in marking the play of text and social thought.

Wood's is a book about books with small, insoluble puzzles; clichés that are conjured and juggled; and magical devices which do not presuppose a supernatural metaphysics but merely lift the reader over the ordinary stumbling blocks of plot. In his closest approach to a manifesto, Wood asserts, "reading understood as finding pieces of a world, as distinct from imagining whole worlds, assembled, disassembled, reassembled, has a peculiar richness of its own" (87). He is intrigued by the fact that Postmodernism seems simultaneously to have stopped posing questions and to revel in the posing of questions which it then loses interest in answering.

Underneath this aesthetic lie a man and a culture: Roland Barthes, and the world of entertainment. Like his critical idol, Wood delights in dwelling on the radiant energy of small stretches of text. For him "finding pieces of a world" is clearly a form of jouissance, and Postmodern fiction, he implies, notably collapses the act of reading and the act of writing into the shared pleasure of a treasure hunt. That the treasure means nothing or may mean different things is irrelevant. Indeed the shrugging off of meaning, with all the baggage it entails, is--to borrow a Formalist term--the dominant of contemporary letters. Among the authors Wood investigates are Angela Carter, whose characters lose "track of their moral or psychological selves" but are "wonderfully adept at inventing new stylistic selves" (140); Milan Kundera, who finds philosophy "inappropriate" (72); and Jeanette Winterson, the writer of narrative-less stories which "allow us to rearrange and reinterpret what we have done" (190). To rearrange rather than (re)assemble, one might paraphrase Wood, is the project of modern European art. Though its source may be angst, its goal is not enlightenment but clarity, entertainment rather than instruction. "Literature . . . entertains history, the way we entertain an idea; it also entertains itself, never at a loss for conversation or amusement." (13)

Wood's study gains immensely by bringing under the critical light relatively unknown figures. Beckett, Márquez, Calvino, and Cortázar have their chapters, but so too do Kazuo Ishiguro and Reinaldo Arenas. This rummaging through the library of literature is itself a telltale of the Postmodernist mentality, but whatever negative value one attaches to the indiscriminacy of taste in the Postmodern work itself, one can only applaud the discrimination which brings Wood to find intelligence and craft in minor figures, thereby shuffling their work to the surface of our culture.

We could restate Wood's conclusions by saying that his chosen authors prefer investigation to the creation of structure. This is not to contend that there are no self-imposed moral imperatives in twentieth-century literature, but that ethics has no precise configuration. It is shifted onto the experience of emotion ("the fantasy of immense violence" in Stephen King [148]) or of absolute otherness (the "ferocity and innocence" of beasts in Angela Carter...