Pessimism keeps breaking in

State-of-criticism overviews and assessments almost always strike a bleak note —the critical mind naturally angles towards pessimism — so it can be worthwhile occasionally to announce that, against expectations, despite everything, literary criticism is still alive and in print. Recent technological and economic threats have not been as damaging as the so-called theory wars of the 1970s and 1980s, and while theory does colour some recent fiction (treated with ironic humour by Jeffrey Eugenides, say, or with cramped loyalty by Tom McCarthy), critics outside the academy now act as though it has been vanquished through institutional assimilation; the models are Edmund Wilson and Clive James, not Derrida and de Man.

In his brief, personal new book, adapted from a series of lectures, James Wood is diplomatic about what has been left behind. For him, the theory wars ‘have ended in a productive stalemate, in which, roughly speaking, both sides won’. He goes on to explain his critical ideal, which he calls ‘writer’s criticism’ or ‘writerly criticism’. ‘Such criticism… is situated in the world, not behind scholarly walls, and is unafraid of making use of anything that comes to mind or hand.’ It exists ‘as literature… and it is the kind of criticism that should give evaluation a good reputation’.

Part of Wood’s authority comes from a seriousness that is pre-theory, perhaps even pre-modernism. Literature is life and death, holier than God (his sole novel is titled The Book Against God). Reading fiction gives us ‘the uncanny powers of the monitoring Jesus, but the humane insight of the forgiving Jesus’, and a novelistic understanding of human nature ‘seems to put one at an almost priestly advantage over people’s souls’.

Wood elevates particular details above structure and form, sometimes to an ecstatic degree: ‘At least four times a week I think of Nabokov’s great defamiliarising joke in Pnin, about how the workmen come back day after day to the same spot in the road, to try to find the lost tool they accidentally entombed.’