Anxiety, seriousness, curiosity, connectivity—these were the thematic undercurrents of James Wood and Daniel Mendelsohn’s conversation with Pico Iyer at the South Court Auditorium of the New York Public Library on Wednesday evening (aptly entitled Reading in a World of Images).
Wood and Mendelsohn, two of the most prominent literary critics of this nation, have both recently published new books—How Fiction Works and How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, respectively. Iyer, a renowned essayist and author in his own right, joined Wood and Mendelsohn as they shared their perspectives on reading, literature, and criticism in the 21st century.
The three writers sat around a table on the stage, facing the audience and each other. Due to the familial setting, one might have thought that they were having a casual chat, were it not for the fact that all three were wearing suits. Afterwards, members of the audience were able to pose questions in a brief Q&A session.
Iyer opened the discussion by asking Wood why he writes about literature and how he chooses his writing topics. “I’m celebrating something I know about,” Wood said. “You have to mine as deeply as you can in one form or genre.” Wood’s recent release, How Fiction Works, was heavily influenced by his teaching experiences at Harvard and Columbia (where he is a professor of master classes in the School of the Arts). “A certain amount of stuff going on in my classes can be codified in books,” Wood said. He also wanted to create a “guide to the novel … a writerly text,” because not many of those exist.
Mendelsohn, a professional classicist, also shared his experience as a professor of humanities at Bard College. “What always impresses me about freshmen is that they are true believers,” he said. “They believe that great literature is great literature. It gives me great comfort.” This is why he feels responsible to readers, not to authors. As a critic, he is always talking to the public—his job is to tell people what he thinks is the “right way to look at something.”
A popular conception of critics is that they are, as their title implies, always critical, and, in a broader sense, apathetic to the feelings of authors. Mendelsohn referred to this as the “wound” factor, and claimed that a critic’s obligation is to literature. “It’s insulting if you’re worried about the feelings of the author,” he said. “You should only be worried about literature’s feelings.” Yet, tearing apart novels is certainly not the motivation of critics. According to Mendelsohn, critics “write because they love their subjects. They don’t care about the people.”
The period for criticism is ripe. Numerous literary magazines and periodicals abound, and “long essays are being written by serious critics who are a lot more incisive and scholarly than the general standard 30 to 40 years ago,” according to Wood. Yet the advent of technology has brought not only competition, but also a huge controversy about literary bloggers vs. critics. “The Internet is like a printing press,” Mendelsohn said. “It’s neither good nor bad—it just distributes texts. Anybody can say anything about anything.” He did have an issue with blogs, however, saying that the problem with that kind of criticism is that “there is no authority or responsibility—it’s just people saying what they think.”
It is difficult to obtain a quiet moment to read a book in this day and age. Novels are a “private experience,” according to Mendelsohn, but now “lines between public and private have been eroded … the ability to be private is something you see disappearing.”
And according to Mendelsohn, modern technology “is changing how people read.”
Yet there is still hope. The auditorium was overflowing with people (extra chairs actually had to be brought in)—a testament to the fact that, in the words of Iyer, “the book has a future.” That future may be uncertain, but one can be sure that it will only benefit from the plethora of insight that critics have brought us.