The Nearest Thing to Life (The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities) by James Wood

Author:James Wood [Wood, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brandeis
Published: 2015-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

It is all here, in this beautiful passage: criticism as passionate creation (“as if for the first time”); criticism as modesty, as the mind putting the “understanding” into abeyance (“he was baffled”); criticism as simplicity and near-silence (“It went, he said, far beyond any analysis of which he was capable”); criticism as sameness of vision (“was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there”). Fry “found the word he wanted,” but Woolf, using narrative much as she does in To the Lighthouse, withholds from us what that word was; slowly, gradually, “found the word he wanted” cedes to wordless humility and the fierce conviction that “what he saw was there”: a movement whereby, through a process akin to mimetic desire, the audience began to experience what Fry saw, experienced with him a sameness of vision.

A few years ago, I was in Edinburgh, and went with my father to hear the pianist Alfred Brendel give an illustrated talk about Beethoven’s piano sonatas. We were late, and arrived at the hall breathless and sweaty. But all was serene inside. Brendel sat at a table, with a concert grand piano behind him. He talked—or mumbled, rather—from his lecture notes, peering down at his text through thick spectacles. He has a strong Austrian accent, unaffected by decades of living in England. Every so often he would turn to the piano to play a few bars, as illustration. But something remarkable occurred when he quoted: even to play a short phrase, he became not a quoter but a performer, not merely a critic but an artist-critic: physically, he had to enter the trancelike state in which he performs whole concerts (his customary shudderings, phantom mastication, closed eyes, swooning and tilting); he could not blandly quote the music, in the way that one might read a line from French without bothering to put on the “proper” French accent. He had to become, as it were, French. In this sense, he could not quote. He could only re-create; which is to say, he could only create. It was intensely frustrating to hear, again and again, three bars of the most beautiful Beethoven, perfectly performed, only to have them break off and be replaced by the pianist’s inaudible Viennese mumbling. Play on, play on, don’t talk! I soundlessly urged. The mumbling quickly became of no interest or importance; one lived for the next pianistic performance, one was swinging from beauty to beauty, high above the dun currents of the prosaic. His “quotes” overwhelmed his commentary; he was approaching Walter Benjamin’s idea of a book entirely made of quotations.

Perhaps the analogy with literary criticism is imperfect, because the literary critic lacks this precise ability to inflect his chosen quotes as the musician performs his. But let Brendel’s wordy mumbling stand for a kind of literary criticism condemned to exteriority, a writing-about rather than a writing-through the text, a flat commentary, banished from the heart of the creative. And let Brendel’s performance on the piano, his inability to

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