Literary Criticism: James Wood starts out not with a joke but a quip. The poet and editor of the now defunct New Review, Ian Hamilton, himself now also defunct, was sitting one morning in his "office", a table in the Pillars of Hercules pub in Soho, at work on an upcoming issue of the magazine and, of course, slugging away at an eye-opener.
A fellow-poet entered, looking pallid and worn. Hamilton offered him a seat and a drink. No, pale poet cried, I must stop drinking, it is doing terrible things to me, and not even giving me pleasure any more. "Hamilton, narrowing his eyes, responded to this feebleness in a tone of weary stoicism, and said in a quiet, hard voice, 'Well, none of us likes it'."
Not exactly a rib-tickling response, you may feel, but Wood thinks it very funny, and certainly prefers it to those "forced moments" when someone buttonholes you and asks the dread question, "Have you heard the one about . . .?" Hamilton's lugubrious bit of repartee simultaneously plays on the inversion of drinking as good fun while playing off the grim truth of alcoholism, which of course is indeed a state in which drinkers may not much like alcohol but cannot release themselves from it. Against those two worlds - the world of ordinary, pleasant, voluntary drinking, and involuntary alcoholic enslavement - Hamilton's reply proposes a stoical tragi-comic world, populated by cheerful but stubborn drinkers doing their not very pleasant duty.
Wood in this book makes what is for him an essential distinction between two kinds of comedy, the "comedy of correction", in which characters are found out in their foolishness, egotism and peccancy and duly punished by our ridiculing merriment, and the "comedy of forgiveness", which expresses in stoical, tragi-comic terms the commonality of all human beings. The former laughs at, the latter laughs with. Momus, the perennial kill-joy, who appears in Hesiod and Lucian and eponymously in the 15th-century allegory by the Genoese architect and poet Alberti, wants to insert a glass window in the breast of man through which his errant heart may be viewed. Momus is one with Homer's mocking but unamused gods whose "unquenchable laughter arose . . . As they saw Hephaestus limping through the hall", and, indeed, with Jesus, who in the Gospels, as Wood notes, weeps but never laughs.
Wood's argument is that most comedy before the modern novel - that is, the novel of the 19th and 20th centuries - is of the sort defined by Aristotle in the Poetics as arising, in Wood's gloss, "from a perceived defect or ugliness that should not be so painful that we feel compassion, since compassion is the enemy of laughter". Joubert, in his Traité du ris at the end of the 16th century, refining Aristotle, held that ugliness and the absence of strong emotion are essentials of comedy. In order for us to laugh at something ugly, Joubert contends, we must not only be allowed to lack compassion but must take an active pleasure in that lack. This, one might say, is not so much the comedy of correction as the comedy of cruelty, the only kind available in the long childhood of mankind.
The comedy of forgiveness inverts the Aristotelian and Joubertian prescription, and is, Wood insists, almost entirely the creation of the modern novel. Jane Austen is seen as the essential transitional figure:
In her work, broadly put, there are the minor characters, who seem to belong to the theatre, and who are theatrically mocked and "corrected" by the author in her old 18th-century satiric mode; and there are the great heroines of the books, the sole possessors of interior consciousness, heroic because they exercise their consciousness, who seem to belong to the newer world of the novel and not of the theatre, and who are not mocked but gradually comprehended and finally forgiven . . .
Wood restates his initial distinction by speaking of the comedy of correction as religious comedy, and the comedy of forgiveness as secular tragi-comedy, which allows him to turn a neat phrase: "If religious comedy is punishment for those who deserve it, secular comedy is forgiveness for those who don't." Here enters the "irresponsible self" of Wood's title. He recalls Henry James famously reviewing Middlemarch and criticising George Eliot, unfairly, Wood feels, for hedging her characters round with authorial lectures and moralisings. James recommended instead a return to the forging of fictional characters "in the old plastic, irresponsible sense", which Wood takes to be a reference to Shakespeare, "the essential progenitor of the English novel".
Shakespeare, as we would expect, looms large in these pages. The two magnificent opening essays, 'Shakespeare and the pathos of rambling' and 'How Shakespeare's "irresponsibility" saved Coleridge' cleave to Harold Bloom's large contention that the Bard was the inventor of human personality. In the first essay, Wood notes that "if the philosophical question is How do we know ourselves?, the literary question is always both the philosophical question of how we know ourselves and the literary-technical question of how we then represent knowing ourselves".
Individual personality is most immediately and strongly manifest in Shakespeare, Wood argues, when a character's consciousness rambles off on a frolic of its own. He cites instances of this phenomenon, such as, in Henry IV Part 2, Mistress Quickly's haranguing of Falstaff in her attempt to get him to pay a debt he owes her - "Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt table, sitting in my Dolphin chamber, at the round table, by a seacoal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week . . ." and so on, and on - and the King of France's maundering introductory address to Bertram in All's Well that Ends Well - "I would I had that corporal soundness now/ As when thy father and myself in friendship/ First tried our soldiership . . ." - and, from the same play, most wonderfully, the clown Launce's lecture about and to his dog Crab, first adduced by John Berryman, in anticipation of Bloom, as the earliest instance in English comedy when we attend "to a definite and irresistible personality . . ." So irresistible is it, indeed, that one cannot but quote the passage at length:
Nay, I'll be sworn, I have sat in the stocks for puddings he hath stol'n, otherwise he had been executed; I have stood on the pillory for geese he hath kill'd, otherwise he had suffer'd for't. Thou thinkst not of this now. Nay, I remember the trick you serv'd me when I took my leave of Madam Silvia. Did not I bid thee still mark me and do as I do? When didst thou see me heave up my leg and make water against a gentlewoman's farthingale? Didst thou ever see me do such a trick?
(One could love Shakespeare for this little speech alone, and thank Berryman for spotting it and Wood for bringing it again to our attention. Such are the not so incidental pleasures of literature.)
Wood in his Acknowledgments tells us that The Irresponsible Self was "planned as a collection with a number of repeating themes" and in the hope that it would serve as a "secular reply to the more religious proposals" in his previous essay collection, The Broken Estate. We may allow him this intentionality, yet some of the subjects gathered here may raise an eyebrow, given that this is a study of laughter and the novel. Knut Hamsun? Coetzee's Disgrace? The characterisation in Anna Karenina? Dostoyevsky's God - Dostoyevsky's God? Not many belly-laughs there. Even when a chuckle might be raised Wood frequently declines to allow it. Why, for instance, does he misquote Beckett's splendidly po-faced questions from the closing pages of Molloy? It is not, as Wood has it, and in quotation marks, too, "How long do we have to wait for the Antichrist?" but "How much longer are we to hang about waiting" for what my Calder & Boyars edition of 1966, inadvertently adding to the fun, calls "the antechrist".
But this is to cavil. Wood is one of the finest critics at work today, heir to Coleridge, Hazlitt and V.S. Pritchett at his best. He combines the breadth and seriousness of Edmund Wilson with the pellucid prose style of Cyril Connolly. Who else in the Eng Lit business today would be capable of, or would dare, a sentence such as this, in a lovely passage on Henry Green's Loving: "There is little in the way of dynamic plot, and yet the book's bashful, shaded drift brings to our sympathy several souls." These essays are criticism post-theory, and are entirely jargon-free. Wood pursues his craft with a high seriousness the like of which we had not thought to see again after the death of Lionel Trilling.
Included here is Wood's by now notorious polemical essay, 'Hysterical Realism', his term for the work of writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith and, of course, Salman Rushdie - Wood reprints a long review of Fury which, if Rushdie read it, must have made him consider giving up writing. Wood lays his objections to hysterical realism - he sees no "magic" in it - not, as he says, "at the level of verisimilitude but at the level of morality: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality - the usual charge - but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself". Novels such as Fury, White Teeth or Gravity's Rainbow are praised by some critics and many readers for being "brilliant cabinets of wonders" when in fact they are merely busy. As Wood elegantly has it: "Bright lights are taken as evidence of habitation."
Wood is at all points on the side of the humane, the accommodating, the forgiving. At the close of his Introduction he cites Bergson's definition of the comic as the experience of a man watching through a window people dancing to music which he cannot hear. But what if, Wood wonders, the watcher at the window did not know the dancers were dancing to music? "What if he felt no advantage over them, but felt, with mingled laughter and pity, that he was watching some awful dance of death, in which he too was obscurely implicated?"
This alternative picture comes closest to my notion of the modern novel's unreliability or irresponsibility, a state in which the reader may not always know why a character does something or may not know how to "read" a passage, and feels that in order to find these things out, he must try to merge with the characters in their uncertainty. Such a person is no longer the cruelly laughing Yahweh or Jupiter, and no longer the correctively laughing theatregoer, but simply the modern reader, gloriously thrown into the same mixed and free dimension as the novel's characters.
• John Banville's last book, Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City, is published by Bloomsbury