James Wood
From Philosopedia
Wood, James (1965 - )
Wood, a Durham, United Kingdom-born critic, since 1990 has been the chief literary critic of The Guardian in London, and since 1996 the senior editor of The New Republic. In addition, he is editor-at-large of Kenyon Review.
In 1990 he was recipient of the British Press Young Journalist of the Year Award.
He is a member of the editorial board of London Review of Books and has taught at Kenyon and Boston University. Since September 2003, he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University.
Wood is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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On Belief
To Warren Allen Smith, he told of his interest in authors’ philosophic outlooks:
- In literature, it is often very difficult to determine what people believe: Tolstoy, for instance, could not be called a Christian in any proper use of the word, but is always banging on about God and Christ. Melville is tough. Using the word “theist” to mean a belief would say that Melville was a theist. But he was not a Christian theist. I think he was tormented by the impossibility of God, and equally tormented by a sense that he could not relinquish this idea of God. There is nothing in his early development like George Eliot’s clear awareness, at 22, that she did not believe in a supernatural God. Melville, I think, did believe—and hated God for existing. This is my own reading. I was brought up in the Church of England in a strongly evangelical English household. I am strongly non-theistic, with a slight Melvillean urge to attack the Biblical God, or the idea of the Biblical God. But I do not believe that we were created by a God, nor that a creating God exists. I think that we are a miraculous and tragic accident—though even to say such a thing is terrifying. This is always my test, when confronted by “new religionists”—do you believe that you were created by a force that you are willing to call “God”? On this test, very, very few people are non-theists; though most people act as if they were.
On Non-belief
In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999), Wood described his conversion from the “charismatic” evangelicalism of his childhood to his present embrace of atheism:
- Life-under-God seems a pointlessness posing as a purpose . . . life-without-God seems to me also a pointlessness posing as a purpose (jobs, family, sex and so on - all the usual distractions).”
For Wood, belief must include the freedom not to believe:
- The gentle request to believe is what makes literature so moving. Fiction moves in the shadow of doubt, knows itself to be a true lie. . . .
The title refers to Christianity’s losing its claim to divine truth, and literature’s attempt to fill in that which was lost. With literature, one can accept fictional truths; however, this does not imply belief, for “one can always close the book, go outside, and kick a stone.” Wood: not the typical non-theist!
On Theism
In a New Yorker article (9 and 16 June 2008), "Holiday in Hellmouth", Wood discusses theodicy, commenting that it "nowadays seems a very old-fashioned exercise in turning around and around the stripped screw of theological scholastics." Theodicy, he avers, may be abstract and antique but thinking about theodicy still has the power to change lives. For example, he tells of growing up in a "somewhat austere Christian environment" and finding that he found religion's negative aspects by recognizing "the inefficacy of prayer." Despite his prayers for two members of his parents' congregation, they still died of cancer, this years before "I discovered Samuel Butler's image for the inutility of prayer in his novel The Way of All Flesh - the bee that has strayed into a drawing room and is buzzing against the wallpaper, trying to extract nectar from one of the painted roses." Theodicy figured in his reasoning that the world is full of pain and wickedness so "
- God may be jealous but is also merciful and all-loving (how much more so, if one believes that Christ is incarnated him. If he has the power to alleviate this suffering but does not, he is cruel; if he cannot, he is weak. I wasn't consoled by the standard responses. Suffering is a mystery, I was told, as is God's absence in the face of suffering. But this was what I was also told when prayers failed to make their mark: the old "incomprehensibility" routine. It seemed to me that the Gospels, central to my family life, made some fairly specific promises and laid on us some fairly specific obligations; yet that specificity could simply go on holiday whenever God himself seemed to have gone on holiday. ("God moves in mysterious ways.")
- God "suffers with us," I was told; he feels our pain. If Christ was God incarnate, then God suffered on the Cross. He walks with us in our suffering. This has been the great twentieth-century addition to the familiar arguments, which is perhaps unsurprising, amid so much carnage.
Wood refers to Slavoj Zizek's On Belief, that when God abandoned Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane he abandoned himself: "It is Christ (God) himself who has to occupy the place of Job. . . . Man's existence is living proof of God's self-limitation. As he matured, Wood was finding that "if God existed, which I strongly doubted, then this entity was neither describable nor cherishable but was a vaporous, quite possibly malign force at the horizon of the sayable.
Wood, critiquing Bart D. Ehrman's God's Problem, How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most important Question - Why We Suffer", find the title highly adolescent in tone but generally approves his book that has "warmed up Ehrman's reputation on the New Atheists' circuit, for its includes the University of North Carolina professor's own revelation that he was "born again" in high school, attended the fundamentalist Moody Bible Institute, then Wheaton and Princeton, and now no longer goes to church, no longer believes, and no longer considers myself a Christian.
Family
Wood, who is married to Claire Messud, an American novelist, lives in Washington, DC, and Somerville, Massachusetts, with their two children.
Selected Works
James Wood is the author of two books of criticism . . .
- The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (Modern Library, 2000)
- The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)
. . . a novel
- The Book Against God (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2003)
. . . and introductions to
- Selected Stories of D.H. Lawrence (Modern Library, 1999)
- Collected Stories of Saul Bellow (Penguin, 2002)
- The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov (2001)
- The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (Penguin, 2004)
- Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (Modern Library, 2001)
- The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy (Modern Library, 2002)
- The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000)
- La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre (Penguin Modern Classics, 2004).
{The Economist, 13 March 1999; WAS, 5 August 1997}
