Flipside of people who take their own lives. Theyre doing it in the pursuit of a cause, and the people who are doing it now i know the president doesnt want to call it radical islam, but there has been on the sunni side of islam a distortion of what islam was essentially about, and it has fed a lot of radical movements like alqaeda and isis. And it is and until islam deals with the distortion within, and there are real signs that its beginning to happen now, i think that the rest of us are going to have to be patient but also, more important, be very vigilant. Thank you. Very quick comment. Im sorry. This is more of a comment than a question. I came here because im interested in more literature, whether it be fiction or nonfiction. I actually feel like i will come out understanding my father better, also a veteran of the iraq war. I have struggled to understand where hes coming from, and and i want to thank you guys for helping. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. [applause] thank you both. Very much appreciate it. Thank you all for coming as well. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] literary critic james wood is next on booktv. From the seventh annual boston book festival. Hi, everyone. Im debbie porter, im the founder and executive director of the boston book festival, and it is thanks. [applause] its really wonderful to see you all here today to hear the humanities keynote with james wood. Before we get started, though, i have a favor to ask is of you. You know, weve the book festival is getting bigger and bigger every year and more and more expensive to run. And, you know, if everyone whos this this room right now in this room right now doe mated 10 to the boston book festival, we would pay for the rental of this beautiful venue for the day. If everyone who came through today gave 10, we would pay for the people to run the av that we run ourselves bring in ourselves to make sure you have a good listening experience. I would be very grateful if you took out the envelopes from your Program Guides and davis a donation, as you are the people who we are so happy to do this pest value for. And now be festival for. And now i have the great pleasure of introducing james wood. James wood is professor of the practice of literature at harvard and a staff writer at the new yorker magazine. Hes considered by almost everyone to be the most be influential literary critic in the englishspeaking world. But he is also an essayist and a novelist, and he is onehalf of bostons reigning literary power couple. We are lucky to have him in boston and even luckier to have him here today to give the humanities keynote. After his talk james will sign books in the back, so enjoy the talk. Thank you. [applause] thank you very much, debbie. I certainly dont deserve that sort of [inaudible] but ill take what i can get. So im not going to drone on for too long, i hope. I have something of an allergy to lectures as such, and i dont want to lecture today. I want to talk for a little while and then take some questions x as i talk and as i talk, i want to try to, try to work something out to my own satisfaction, and thats because i havent worked out this particular problem. And the particular problem has to do with something that has always obsessed me in literature, and that is the question of detail. Why is it that we can forget almost everything about a novel, and alarmingly early after the reading of it, you know, a year or two, you know . Weve forgotten most of it, important plot points have gone by the way. But we remember a particular detail, two or three details. Remember some, perhaps its a scene or the compacting of a scene into a particular moment. Thats also true, isnt it, about scenes from our own lives. When we think back to childhood, we tend to, we tend to fix onto textures, remembered smells, something someone said although, of course, we misremember those details too. I think theres a strange magic around detail x the magic i would put it Something Like this. Last week i was teaching the novel madame bovary to students at harvard, and i wanted them to explain to me a couple of very beautiful details in that novel. One of them is early in the book when the author is describing emma bovarys piano playing and says that, you know, she got better at the piano so you could the sound could be heard in the village. And then the author says, and sometimes the bailiffs clerk walking down the street, hapless with a sheet of paper in his hand, would stop and listen to the music coming from the open window. Thats one detail. Theres a beautiful one towards the end of the novel after emmas death, after the day of her funeral, i think, after her funeral. Flobert moves in on the young servant boy, justin, who in some way was clearly in love with emma and is described as kneeling on the soil in a field and crying. And then flobert moves away to the gravedigger and says, was at as the gravedigger came into the enclosure, so justin whod been crying leapt away and ran over the wall. And flobert continues, and then the gravedigger knew who had been stealing his potatoes. Thats very characteristic, isnt it . Makes us laugh too, that sort of ironic move away, but its also oddly moving. Anyway, i asked about a hundred students to not think like english students about to write papers, not to look for the meaning of those details, but just to try to think like writers or readers and explain to me why, first of all, that bailiffs clerk stopping to listen to the music, hapless with a sheet of paper in his hands, and secondly, justin crying or, rather or, justin crying followed by the gravedigger realizing that justin is the thief of his potatoes. Why those touch us in some way. Why what is it about them that pierces us . Arrests us . They couldnt do it. Nor could i, it should be said. I could see them looking with expectant faces as if to say, well, youre the professor, you work it out. You tell us. I spent some time trying to tell them, and i still find it extremely hard to do. You can think like an english student, so lets take the bailiffs clerk. You can say, well, theres something very moving about going just aesthetically about a camera panning from, as it were, an open window where piano music is coming out to another detail. Theres something very moving, i think, about moving from one world, emmas world, very fleetingly to another world and suggesting to us this is the bailiffs clerk that his world is completely his own, autonomousmay exist and may exist almost in complete separation from emmas world but is worth noticing. I think thats what flobert does a second time with justin and the gravedigger. Theres justin whos crying. He has his own particular set of emotions that are very intense and have to do with mourning emma. And then cutting into that is the gravedigger who might mourn emma, and anyway is thinking about his potatoes. But thats fairly easy, is it not . Thats the easy part. We can all get there ourselves and do the exapplication that exapplication thats needed. Theres still some question that needs to be asked about how this detail moves us and why. And that is the thing i find incredibly difficult to describe generally in fiction and in poetry. I wrote a book in 2008 called how fiction works which sort of sorts through a number of technical issues in fiction. But in a sense, every chapter was moving in on same issue on the same issue which was the peculiar magic of fictional reality as it adheres in the particular details that we remember. I recently wrote a book called the nearest thing to life and tried to come up with a formulation which ill just read to you if it doesnt seem too cumbersome. Im not sure if its, its true really, but here it is. Its as true as i can get. Details represent those moments in a story where form is outlived, canceled, evaded. I think of details as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the freeze of form, imploring us to touch them. Details are not, of course, just bits of life. They represent that magical fusion whereby the maximum amount of literary artifice the writers genius for selection and imaginative creation produces a maximum amount of nonliterary or actual life. A process whereby artifice is then, indeed, converted into new life, fictional life. Details are not necessarily lifelike, but irreducible, things in themself, what i would call likeness itself. That, i think, gets somewhere close to the strange mystery. The mystery that we have the sense that we have when we read fiction that certain details are, as i put it there, are sticking out in some way of the form of the novel. I say rather, in a rather overwrought way there imploring us to touch them, but theyre also touching us and sticking out in some way. And i think its no accident that they, as it were, they are the things that we remember when so much else is forgotten, the things that survive. And as i say, i think some of the mystery is that this is clearly, theyre clearly created by the artist. And yet theyre created be by the artist in such a way that they begin to seem not just lifelike, but actually pieces of life themselves. This is a what i just said is a formulation that would be highly contested, disagreed with by probably the last 40 or 50 years of literary theory. Insofar as literary theory is particularly interested in such matters, and it generally isnt. But what i just said about a detail becoming life not just being lifelike, but becoming a piece of life through some weird authorial magic is, as i say, is, seems almost a lie to a great deal of postmodern theory which places the emphasis, and not wrongly, on artifice rather than on life. So the famous french theorist bart writes in the 60s, i think, an essay called the reality effect in which he looks at detail. His example, one of his examples is from floberts a simple heart where he is describing a womans, a womans house, a bourgeois house which has in it a piano, a barometer and a pile of boxes, i think, under the piano. And bart says, well, you know, the piano, yes. The piano would be there in a bourgeois household. The pile of boxes suggests a certain amount of disarray because shes recently widowed, but the barometer on the wall, says bart, is the kind of thing that, is the kind of thing that annoys him, because its the kind of thing that is just put in by realist writers. And he goes on to say, to mount a strong postmodern critique of, essentially, what i just said a minute ago. He says dont look at the barometer and think the barometer tells us anything about life. The barometer merely announces to the realizer, this is realism. To the reader, this is realism. This is the kind of thing when you read a realist writer. Now, theres some truth in this, is there not . What bart is describing there is a kind of formulaic, conventional fillingin of detail that does, indeed, afflict a great deal of fiction, and it afflicts a great deal of realist fiction from flobert onwards. We can go into a book shop, and 90 of the books we pick up will be written in that kind of easy, fundamental formula and is full of those kinds of details. The question is whether bart is right to suggest that all detail even the gravedigger and his potatoes or the bailiffs clerk whether all detail belongs in that derided category. I would say for obvious reasons that it doesnt. And i would actually point to another book by bart, a great book that he wrote on photography. There he very sensitively works through a number of photographs that he loves trying to explain to himself and to the reader why he loves them so much. Well, it turns out that what he loves about photographs, among other things, are that theyre full of accidental details. He loves the fact that, you know, therell be a photograph from 1890 of a couple, and the guy has not be, you know, done his trouser belt up properly, or a shoe lace is undone. He calls this kind of detail the thing that comessous out and comes out and actually punches us, actually reaching out from the photograph and sears us in some way appeals to us. And he likes that in photography, it seems to me. He likes it in photography because its accidental and found, by and large. Of course, it can be arranged by a photographer too, but often its just found in the sort of cartier mode. Its found. And he likes it because its accidental. But then when he looks at writers like flobert, he doesnt like it because the writer intends it, makes it up. And so for barts kind of puritanism, the detail is not accidental so much as intended. Clearly, what drives him mad is the idea of a writer sitting at his or her desk saying, now, i will make the man in the photograph poignant because i will insure that he has not done his belt up properly. Or i will make the woman interesting in the photograph because i will have one shoe undone. That seems to drive him mad because, because theres so much predetermined artifice and control and ambition about it whereas when the photographer or just finds it on the street, its fine. This is illogical, is it not . Be and the more interesting thing to do would be to take what bart says about detail and photography and take back to fiction and say, of course we know the writer makes it up, of course we know the writer intends it, and of course we know that a great deal of convention, of description in fiction becomes formulaic, conventional and empty. But lets not look at that. Lets look at what still lets look at the punctum as it is in fiction. Lets instead of saying that the detail is a problem in fiction, lets say its the best kind of problem because its the sort of problem that assails us and keeps on challenging us to work out why it moves us so much. We know when we read fiction, or at least half of our mind knows when we read fiction, that the details are not accidental in the strict sense. Theyre not found, theyre made up. And yet at the same time, we willingly join forces with the fiction writer and accept in some kind of contract that they are accidental, that they have the power of accidental detail. Thinking again and again about this over the last few years, i came to the decision that detail the great detail in fiction like the bailiffs clerk, like the gravedigger with his potatoes has the ability to rescue life from, from disappearance, that its right to say that detail is like a piece of life, because it actually rescues life from its own death. Let me read out a passage from an essay i wrote called serious noticing. I just want to what do writers do when they seriously notice the world . Perhaps they do nothing less than rescue the life of things from their death. From two deaths. One small and one large. From the death that literary form always threatens to impose on that and from actual death. I mean by the latter the fading reality that besets details as they reseed from us recede from us; the memories from our childhood, the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention, by congested habits or through laziness, lack of curiosity, thin haste. We stop looking at things. Growing older, says carlo [inaudible] is like standing in front of a mirror while holding another mirror behind ones head and seeing the receding dance of images. Quote becoming smaller and smaller as far as the eye could see. His world is one many which the adventure of the ordinary, the inexhaust about of the ordinary as a child once experienced it, quote, the taste of salt that could fill your summer day toss saturation is days to saturation is steadily retreating in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. The writers task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat, to bring meaning, color and life back to the most ordinary things; to soccer boots and grass, to cranes and tree is the and airports and even to gibson guitars and roland amplifiers and old spice and ajax. You can still buy, he writes, tennis racquets and skis, bindings and boots. The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, he continues, which is the difference between a childs reality and an adults, was they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of soccer boots was just a pair of football boots. If i felt anything when i held a pair in my hands now, it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else. Nothing in itself. The same with the sea, he continues, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation. Now it was just salt. World was the same, yet it wasnt. For its meaning had been displaced and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness. Literature, like art, pushes against times fancy, makes us insomniacs in the holes of habit, offers to rescue the life of things from the dead. A story is told about the artist oscar [inaudible] who was leading a life drawing class. The students were bored and doing boring work, so ca cash ca whispered to the model and told him to collapse to the ground. He went over to the prone body, listened to his heart and pronounced him dead. The class was deeply shocked. Then the model the stood up, and key korb ca said now draw him as though you were aware he was alive and not dead. What might that painting many in fiction of a live body look like is . It would paint a body that was truly alive but in such a way that we might be able to see that a body is always really dying. It would understand that life is shadowed by mortality and, thus, make a death scene metaphysics of the lifegiving aesthetics. Isnt this what makes serious noticing truly serious . It might read like this passage from a late story by saul bellow, something to remember me by. Its a paragraph about a drunken irishman who is passed out on a couch. Quote i looked in at mckern who had thrown down the coat and taken off his drawers. The par boiled face, the short nose, the life signs in the throat, the broken looking after his look of his neck, the black hair of his belly, the white shine of the shins, the tragic expression of his feet. This is perhaps what he had in mind. Bello is painting in words a model who might or might not be alive, a painting that threatens at any moment to become a still life. So his character looks very hard at mckern the way an anxious young parent does at a sleeping baby to check that its still alive. And he is still alive. Just. The life signs in the throat. Although nab cover was too competitive to say anything dont about his peer, saul belle low, its hard to read this description without thinking of words in one of his lectures on how the writer models a man asleep. To minor authors, writes nab nabokov, these do not bother any reinventing of the world, they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of the given order of things, out of traditional paths, the fiction. There is the critique and here, essentially, is the critic replying to him and saying dont concentrate on the ways in which fiction gets pressed down and decomposed and becomes merely commercial and conventional. Concentrate on what remains original, on what continues to be inexplicable or at least hard to explain. But the real writer, he continues, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asheep and eagerly tampers with the sleepers rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal. He must create them himself. The art of writing is a very futile business, he continues. If it does not imply, first of all, the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. Nabokov, of course s a highly selfserving and romantic view of the author who seems to have no indebtedness to any other author. Indeed, this writer who fashions humans from ribs is god himself which