>> that is fueled by a sense of isolation and betrayal and also, and i said this earlier, a vocabulary of violence, a lack of syntax, a lack of ability for this young, this perp in -- this person in the play and in society, more our young people to express themselves any other way. >> could i say very quickly that the suicide bombers are the

flipside of people who take their own lives. they're doing it in the pursuit of a cause, and the people who are doing it now -- i know the president doesn't 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 al-qaeda and isis. and it is -- and until islam deals with the distortion within, and there are real signs that it's 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. >> i'm sorry. this is more of a comment than a question. i came here because i'm 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 he's 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. i'm debbie porter, i'm the founder and executive director of the boston book festival, and it is -- thanks. [applause] it's 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, we've -- the book festival is getting bigger and bigger every year and more and more expensive to run. and, you know, if everyone who's

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. he's considered by almost everyone to be the most be influential literary critic in the english-speaking world. but he is also an essayist and a novelist, and he is one-half of boston's 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 don't deserve that sort of -- [inaudible] but i'll take what i can get. so i'm not going to drone on for too long, i hope. i have something of an allergy to lectures as such, and i don't 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 that's because

i haven't 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? we've 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 it's a scene or the compacting of a scene into a particular moment. that's also true, isn't 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 there's 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 bovary's 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 bailiff's 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." that's one detail. there's a beautiful one towards the end of the novel after emma's 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 -- who'd been crying -- leapt away and ran over the wall. and flobert continues, and then the gravedigger knew who had been stealing his potatoes. that's very characteristic, isn't it? makes us laugh too, that sort of ironic move away, but it's 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

bailiff's 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 couldn't do it. nor could i, it should be said. i could see them looking with expectant faces as if to say, well, you're 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 let's take the bailiff's clerk. you can say, well, there's 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. there's something very moving, i think, about moving from one world, emma's world, very fleetingly to another world and suggesting to us -- this is the bailiff's clerk -- that his world is completely his own, autonomousmay exist -- and may exist almost in complete separation from emma's world but is worth noticing. i think that's what flobert does a second time with justin and the gravedigger. there's justin who's 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 that's fairly easy, is it not? that's the easy part. we can all get there ourselves and do the exapplication that -- exapplication that's needed. there's 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 i'll just read to you if it doesn't seem too cumbersome. i'm not sure if it's, it's true really, but here it is. it's 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 writer's 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 life-like, 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 they're also touching us and sticking out in some way. and i think it's 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, they're clearly created by the artist. and yet they're created be by the artist in such a way that they begin to seem not just life-like, 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 isn't. but what i just said about a detail becoming life -- not just being life-like, 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 flobert's "a simple heart" where he is describing a woman's, a woman's 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 she's 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 it's 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 don't 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, there's some truth in this, is there not? what bart is describing there is a kind of formulaic, conventional filling-in 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 bailiff's clerk -- whether all

detail belongs in that derided category. i would say for obvious reasons that it doesn't. 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 they're full of accidental details. he loves the fact that, you know, there'll 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 it's accidental and found, by and large. of course, it can be arranged by a photographer too, but often it's just found in the sort of cartier mode. it's found. and he likes it because it's accidental. but then when he looks at writers like flobert, he doesn't like it because the writer intends it, makes it up. and so for bart's 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 there's so much predetermined artifice and control and ambition about it whereas when the photographer or just finds it on the street, it's 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 let's not look at that. let's look at what still -- let's look at the punctum as it is in fiction. let's instead of saying that the detail is a problem in fiction, let's say it's the best kind of problem because it's 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. they're not found, they're 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 bailiff's clerk, like the gravedigger with his potatoes has the ability to rescue life from, from disappearance, that it's 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 one's 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 writer's 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 child's reality and an adult's, 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 wasn't. for its meaning had been displaced and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness. literature, like art, pushes against time's 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 life-giving aesthetics. isn't 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. it's 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 it's still alive. and he is still alive.

just. the life signs in the throat. although nab cover was too competitive to say anything don't about his peer, saul belle low, it's 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 don't 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 sleeper's 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 self-serving 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 might well mean vladimir nabokov. but they have hold, i think, of a central truth. surely it's no surprise that we so often remember details that concern the deaths of real

people, famous last words and so on, final scenes. isn't this because at such moments we are snatching the details of life and the life of details from the extinction that surrounds and threatens them? mountain in his -- month town in his's cay of cruelty -- essay of cruelty writes about socrates' life. by that quiver of pleasure, he writes, that he feels in scratching his leg after the irons were off, does he not portray a sweetness and joy in his soul at being unfettered by fast discomforts. and is he not prepared to enter into the knowledge of things to come. but whereas montaigne strikes me as essentially pre-novelistic because he has a tendency to moralize about such details and sees this moment of scratching the leg as an example be not of

accident, but of moral vigor, of preparing for the life to come. a later writer, like tolstoy say, would see such a gesture as accidental or automatic as life just instinctively desiring to extend itself beyond death. i'm thinking of moment witnessed by pierre in "war and peace" where when he sees a young russian blindfolded and about to be executed by a firing squad fiddle with his blindfold, perhaps in order to make it a little more comfortable. and that detail will remind some of you of a famous detail from george orwell's essay, "a hanging," where orwell watches in burma a man being led to the gallows inexplicably swerve around a puddle at the last second on the way to, on the way to being hanged.

and although it actually happened, he -- as it was -- sees with a novelist's eye this occurrence which isn't explicable, it seems to me, except as some kind of life force extending itself beyond death, right? we can all see that it makes no sense. the man's life will be over in a half a minute. and yet some other life surplus goes on instinctively as if he were going to live another day. and so he doesn't want to get his shoes dirty. he walks round the puddle. i think it's important -- i deliberately pushed together there montaigne, orwell, an essay nonfiction and tolstoy,

fiction -- made up -- to make the point that in all these cases what the punctum, the thing that comes out and grabs us, is this moment of accidental lifeness. and to most of us, i think, it is irrelevant that tolstoy is the sole fiction writer this that trio, that tolstoy is the one who makes it up. so what? he makes it up. it has exactly the power of the other two nonfictional writers, and that is the mag which we wave -- flag which we wave in postmodern enemy territory. this is the life surplus pushing itself beyond death, outliving death. think of tolstoy's ivan -- [inaudible] the death at the moment of greatest loneliness. he remembers the plums of his childhood and the way that when you got down to the pit of the

fruit, the saliva would flow. when bello's character sees lobsters behind the glass of a manhattan fishmonger, he sees their feelers bent, pressed up against the glass. the complaint of life against its deathly imprisonment. when the contemporary american novelist rachel kushner or sees a squashed cockroach on a new york sidewalk, she sees its antenna swiping around for signs of its own life. in lydia davis' story "grammar questions," the narrator comes to the conclusion that her dying father is pure negation, has become nothing more than the adverb not; hence, the story's title, "grammar questions." and yet what she remembers, what extends out of her story is the way her father is frowning as he lies in his sick bed, for she has seen this frown many times in her life. it's what bello would call a life sign.

to notice is to rescue, to redeem, to save life from itself. one of the characters in marilyn robinson's novel "housekeeping" is a girl described who felt the life of perished things. she writes about how jesus raised lazarus from the dead and restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to rescue them. a fact, she writes, that allows us to hope that resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail. be i like the idea that heaven might reward us for what we have lost by paying attention to detail. that heaven must be a place of serious noticing. but perhaps we can bring back life here on earth by applying what's called the natural prayer of the soul, attentiveness. we can bring the dead back by applying the same attentiveness to their --

[inaudible] by transfiguring the object. phrase comes in a letter about kafka. perhaps he was recalling this idea of attentiveness when he wrote many years later that if the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye. thank you. [applause] i'll be very, very happy to take questions those of you who want to ask questions are encouraged to come is and talk into the mic so that everyone else can hear. and if people can't hear, of course, i'll repeat the questions. but i think we have about 15 minutes or so, and if there are no questions forthcoming, then

i'll just drivel on a bit. [laughter] >> great talk, professor. i have one question. so i completely agree, you know, the details do kind of outlive life. but what do you think of the do e tail in foster's book, the one about the house? >> [inaudible] >> i do remember how it ends in the sense that who gets the house is so important. is that a detail or is that, like, a plot point that kind of rises beyond itself and becomes a detail? >> right. that's a very good point. did everyone get -- hear that? it was a question about the end of -- which is true. everyone remembers the end of howard's end because it's an important point. someone who inherits the house. that's really shrewd because, of

course, it's important to define, it's important to define what a detail is, and it's not true, of course, that we only remember the striking things or the things that move us or touch us. we remember all sorts of things, and our minds are full of junk that, you know, that we'd like to get rid of. so, you know, but i suppose i could turn it back to you which is you remember, you remember the inheritance of the house. do you remember, do you remember a final scene from that novel? >> no, not even after seeing the movie, actually. [laughter] >> well, it may be in the movie too. the children are playing in the field where the hay is still, has yet to be cut, and there's a sort of -- that's, i mean, it's 20 years ago i read it, but i

do, i actually remember that thing of the sort of move out from the house to the next generation who were in the field. and maybe i'm just making this up, could be. [laughter] someone will correct me. but, yes, i think simply, simply what we remember wouldn't be good enough definition of what's striking about detail, because we're also going to remember scenes and plot points and the like. and perhaps i think the better way of, the better way of thinking about a definition of detail is that it's the thing that arrests us and then challenges us to explain it and possibly defeats our explanation. that's what i'm drawn back, drawn to again and again. thank you. >> this isn't really a

formulated question, but you did quote from -- [inaudible] and could you speak to the use of detail in his voluminous -- >> yeah. >> -- books? and a cheap shot, what do you think of his work, and is it literature? and -- >> right. no, i think he's a very good writer to bring up because in some sort of flobertian test, he fails, right? if the test is how well you select and how brilliantly you notice and what your general, you know, how high your general level of noticing is, then there's obviously something deliberately prosaic and almost

lazy about canals guard, and he'll sort of admit that in a way. what he wants to do often is to saturate and to pile things up. there is wonderful detail. i think of a moment in the volume three about boyhood, which i think is a lovely book, because it takes time just to sink down where the young author is brushing his teeth, very typical, sort of prosaic. most writers wouldn't bother with brushing the teeth. and he says the sound of the brushing was so intense that it sort of takes over his mind, and it's all he can hear, and he doesn't hear his father come into the bathroom behind him and say something, i think rather alternative, the him. because at the moment of the

tooth brushing, his entire auditory life is full of the sound of the toothbrush. and i thought that's really good. i thought it was really good just as a single pungency, but i thought it was, in a way i thought it was good as a sort of analogy for -- or as a figure for all of his world that he's very good at describing and, indeed, unafraid to describe that way in which, in which detail becomes us and we become detail. for instance, very good on how in that same volume when we were children we had a particularly charged relation to objects that we don't have when we're older, i think, in the same way. some orange t-shirt that you love as a kid and that you're

proud to take to school for the first day and jealously watch when you, you know, take it off and put it in your cubbyhole. is your world for a while that orange t-shirt? we all remember what that was like as kids. does that happen in quite the same way when we're older? i don't think so. and i think he's right about some loss, although perhaps he romantically talks too much about the loss and not be enough about what is gained in growing up. but for me, that's what i find most powerful in his work. i've only read -- i can't remember, yeah, i've only read the first three volumes. that's what's most powerful, is this patience he takes with describing childhood. and this -- i mean, it can seem, it can seem nowing and tiresome

to people -- can annoying and tiresome to people who don't enjoy reading him or narcissistic and arrogant that he thinks his life is interesting enough to spend 50 pages talking about a new year's eve party and how they have to get the beer from one house to another, and that truly does happen in volume one. but i think, i see it another way which is that actually it's an act of modesty. i don't think it's an act of narcissism. i think he says, look, here's a norwegian life, above all a more wee january -- norwegian childhood and youth. i'm going to give all of it to you, and i think it will speak to you in such a way that you will be able to find connections with it from your own life and, indeed, what i'm giving to you is not remarkable or particularly interesting. it's very ordinary and universal. and there is some interesting way in which he, in so doing

despite it being a very modest gesture, he's rediscovering some kind of universal ambition that, say, 19th century novelists -- tolstoy was mentioned -- took for granted as part of the business of setting about writing ambitiously. so he remains exciting to me. thank you. >> [inaudible] thank you very much. >> thank you. >> hi. i just read how fiction works and loved it. >> thank you. >> i thought your defense of realism was striking and convincing. toward the end of the book you talk about -- and i don't remember exactly how you phrase it -- but also substitute the word truthful for realistic. and while it sounds counterintuitive, because we all know it's all made up --

>> right. >> -- it struck me as being very accurate. i wondered if you could talk about that in the context of detail. >> yeah. thank you very much. and i think that absolutely goes to the heart of what i was trying to talk about just now. is what is, what is truthful about detail once we've worked through our knowledge that it's head up, right? we mow it's made up -- we know it's made up, so that seems the least interesting thing to say about it. then perhaps there's a critique to make about it being formulaic or conventional or in some other way failing. but once you've worked through that and you still think that a particular moment in fiction has moved you -- and let's not talk about detail anymore, let's just talk about fiction. when a particular moment in fiction has moved you, then what's the language with which to talk about it? and it seems to me that this, the terms that you see in ordinary reviews, and i'm sure

that i use them in my reviews too which relate to words like "realistic," so things faulted for not being credible or implausible or not being lifelike, won't do. that's insufficient. but it's not simply, of course, about how fiction lines up with the plausible, the credible or lines up with life. if that were the case, then there would be all kinds of writers like kafka and beckett and so on or half of king lear, you know, that we would turn away from. because we would say, well, it's not like life. it's implausible. i don't think this would happen. we have to -- in that sense we clearly have to move beyond the term "realism" which, anyway, has a distinct, you know, history and is, you know, sort of gets started in the mid 19th century and means a number of specific things. so if we want to move beyond the word "realism," we probably want to move be beyond the word

"real" too, and that's exactly why i tried to find other words. the problem is the other words aren't there. and the most obvious one, truthful, seems the most scandalous because you're putting it against what is made up. and yet that's always been done in the tradition of talking about fiction. it's always been the game for fiction writers, serious game that fiction writers know they're engaged in. and when you get any collection of writers together, even though they might write in all sorts of different ways and styles, they -- i think they will all know what you mean when you start talking about something not seeming truthful on the page, not honest, not alive. vital, i think, vitality is another sort of stand-in word that helps get us beyond realism. but all of these words fail in some way, which is why i was

forced at the end of my book to come up with a horrible knee lo to gym, lifeness, hoping english readers would think i catched it from the german or something. anyway, thank you very much. [laughter] yep. >> hi. you mentioned roland bart is kind of the enemy of this kind of detail. >> uh-huh. >> but i was wondering if you thought his idea that he posits of the reference code -- >> yeah. >> -- sort of provides readers to give their own life signals -- [inaudible] make any work kind of intensely personal? >> just say one more thing about that, that's interesting. so -- >> the idea that -- [inaudible] an essential part of any work is the life experiences that a reader brings to it. >> yes. yeah. thank you very much.

i think what's interesting -- by the way, i should say that i feel when i read him whether it's reality effect or countless other, mythology is probably the most famous book, i feel -- but certainly when he's talking about fiction and a certain kind of fiction, i always feel that, i always feel that he's 99% right. in other words, i go a long way with his critique. and i think he has brilliantly described the ways in which a certain kind of realism goes completely dead very quickly. but i always think too that the 1% where i don't agree is a very large 1, as it were. large 1%, as it were. rather like the 1% that separates us genetically from

chimpanzees -- [laughter] is, obviously, statistically only 1%, but in every other way it's clearly 58%, you know? so, and i think in general what i like about him as a critic and the reason i go back to him and read him again and again is that exactly as you suggest, he's very -- even when he's writing about conventions of formularity that he doesn't like or is skeptical about, largely for him 19th century realism -- there's some part of him that is greedily searching for this, i think, the secret of its life too. he wouldn't put it like that, and he won't quite admit it. but what i find i like in him is this dividedness, that he seems to be drawn back again and again to effectively murder the thing that he secretly loves.

and i don't think it's any surprise that towards the end of his life he came back to writing about, again, about 19th century fiction. and i think, yes, this idea that this is space in fiction for our own, for our own thoughts is -- or our own constructions, it's very important. and i suppose what he disliked about formulaic, conventional fiction is that it doesn't allow that, that it simply directs you. here is the barometer, here is the piano. or if we think in contemporary terms of sort of thrillers, right? that they direct you in a certain way that is absolutely known and conventional that has its own tradition and history. and allows us very little space to rebel or to do our own

construction. whereas the bailiff's clerk, for all that flobert can seem a manipulating and controlling author, you know, the supreme artist, the impersonal guard and so on, still what moves me about bailiff's clerk is that it's simply there. there he is walking along with a sheet of paper. why the sheet of paper? a sheet of paper in his hands, hapless, stopping to listen to the piano. and once we've read it and made a picture of it, then we can do what we want with it. it's ours. i think it's absolutely right, what you suggest. perhaps time for one more question if there are any, but if not, then thank you very much for coming. [applause]

>> every weekend booktv offers 48 hours of programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. keep watching for more here on c-span2. >> while i've traveled the world for many years, i am a man of the south. i actually never thought of myself that way before. but coming into nashville i realized it's so similar to new orleans, it's so similar to so many places that i grew up, it's a unique demonstration of the american aesthetic that we have in the south.

one of gregariousness ask one of passion and one of great vision, of great opinion. but it's just very unique to have that sort of epiphany and awakening today. it reminded me of what i went through in new orleans. i am an actor, but i first and foremost am from new orleans. that northernmost caribbean city -- [laughter] right? the last bo hemoya, the big easy. [speaking french] right? and it's a place that is so unique and is so defining of who i am, it is like a loved one. it is a family member. it is someone -- i even speak of it as a person, someone of who

is near and dear to my heart. so ten years ago when the disaster, the flood of new orleans that happened during katrina, i thought i had lost it. i thought that she had died. many of us can remember where we were when we heard those fateful notes, do you know what it means to miss new orleans? ♪ and miss her each night and day? ♪ when you miss the one you care for more than you miss new orleans -- we thought she was gone forever. it was a funeral procession. that storm destroyed 80% of the city, and i knew 20 years from now some kid was going to come up to me and say, mr. pierce, in new orleans' darkest hour, what did you do?

and i wanted to be able to have an answer to that. so i decided i'm an artist first and foremost. i'm going to respond as an artist. and so i, along with the creators, the founders of the classical theater of harlem in new orleans -- in new york did a production of waiting for -- [inaudible] this existential play from 50 years ago that is surreal, distant, about two men in a deserted void of nothingness, a road and a tree and a lack of memory and sense of who they are looking for an entity outside of themself to find purpose, to find a sense of their own humanity. who they are and what do they stand for. waiting for godeau, something outside of themselves. and there was an image of two men in new orleans on a raft in

the water abandoned, slightly looking at something in the air that was captured and moved us to do that play. it's a classic play. classic in the sense that it speaks out humanity no matter where we're from across time and space from nazi-occupied paris where mr. samuel beckett wrote the play to share jay slow in -- sarajevo in 1994 where so many people were suffering the violence and desolation where we always see the ugliest part of human nature when we see war and violation, to san quentin where it was prohibited from being performed because it moved the inmates to a place where they can actually see vision and purpose to their life outside of what they saw as their hopelessness as they were incarcerated. and then we went to new orleans

and is saw the lower ninth ward and realized in this vast emptiness with miles around where everyone was destroyed, where we on hallowed ground saw what the flood did and how many lives were destroyed and hundreds of people had died, on that hallowed ground we said let's do the play here. let's respond to what has happened to our city, to our community here. and that's where i decided to do the play. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org.ng >> and now on your screen is garry kasparov, former world chess champion and the author of this book, "winter is coming: c why vladimir putin and the enemies of the free world must be stopped." mr. kasparov, what's your history with vladimir putin? >> guest: i never met vladimir