Real Character
James Wood had a very interesting piece in yesterday’s Guardian Review about the nature of the “character” in the novel and beyond. It made special reference to Spark’s Miss Brodie, which is a good thing. On an utterly unrelated lighter note, Suharto is dead. Break out the party poppers!
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- La grande boucle
- Zadie Smith lecture
- Hobsbawm, Hamilton, Orwell
- Death Becomes Him Tupac Shakur’s posthumous reput…
- Hatchet Job An old review I’ve just rediscovere…
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One Response to “Real Character”
Mark Thwaite
January 28th, 2008
As so often with Wood, it is an excellent piece — well argued, wide-ranging … and good to see him move a little away from what I think of his rather dull affection for realism with this revelation “my own taste tends towards the sketchier fictional personage, whose lacunae and omissions tease us …”
Still, I think there is some dodgy ground within the piece — for one, he dismisses Gass way too quickly. When Gass says that “nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be correctly said of” fictional characters Gass is attacking the same kind of “moralising” that Wood himself berates earlier in his article when he quite snottily (and stupidly) attacks book club attendees as “feeble readers ” … but I’ll deconstruct the article in full elsewhere …
I liked this: “The truth is that the novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it.”