Reading Colbert: It's Time for Some Lit Crit

James Wood's essay MSM S&M is the smartest piece I've come across yet about Stephen Colbert's performance and the media's timid reporting on it.

"It is time--it is always time--for some literary criticism," Wood writes. Yes it is, sir. Yes it is.

And Wood's lit-crit approach enables him to make a crucial point. In response to the blogsphere's indignation at the lack of coverage of Colbert's performance, the MSM and Bush supporters responded by changing the subject. Colbert just wasn't funny, they protested. Thus, Wood opens strong by immediately distinguishing between "being funny" and being "ironic" and "satirical" before proceeding to justify Colbert's "brutal" tactics eloquently: "These issues are just too painful for humor."

Spot on, James. Spot on.

Wood proceeds to explain how reading the transcript of Colbert's routine differs from watching the performance and explains why the strongest moments in Colbert's act are precisely when he's not being funny and is speaking the ugly truth to the president, sitting a few feet away. But there's no need to summarize his essay. Go read it yourself.

I've been considering devoting a day, maybe two, in my Composition II course on media studies to discussing Colbert's performance. I thought the whole episode would fit it nicely in our discussions about media bias and provide some comic relief to what can be pretty dry stuff. I confess: I'd rather be teaching a course on literature, literary criticism, and theory. Thankfully, Woods piece provides me the opportunity to do a bit of lit crit: distinguishing between types of irony, the subversive potential of performative reiterations, etc..

So, thank you very much Mr. Wood.

I consider James Wood to be possibly the best literary journalist writing today. What makes him so good is that he is skilled as both a literary journalist and a literary critic. That is, he writes short (compared to an academic journal article) book reviews for a non-academic audience that manage to be packed with critical insights and claims supported with well reasoned evidence from the texts under consideration.

Unlike, say, Michiko Kakutani (who is probably the most powerful book reviewer in America), Wood's reviews aren't one dimensional. When Wood weighs in on a book, he does so by placing it within a larger literary framework where he can make comparisons. He's got a scholarly mind and the scholar's reservoir of knowledge, but he doesn't produce scholarship. Not that scholarship is bad, but within academia we need more eloquently written literary essays -- as opposed to the dry academese that is arguably becoming the norm -- and lord only knows that the arts and culture pages of our mass-circulation publications need more smart reviews.

(I have my own pet theories about why academics can sometimes write such dry, often obscure prose, and it's got everything do with the constraints imposed by a routinized, corporatized university with a "publish or perish" model of professionalism. But I'll save those for the proverbial faculty lounge.)

Having celebrated Wood's writing, let it be noted that I don't always agree with Wood. In fact, his preferred literary aesthetic is quite different and often opposed to mine. His assertion, for example, in a mixed review of Underworld, that the novel "proves... the incompatibility of the political paranoid vision with great fiction" wrongly conflates DeLillo's views with those espoused by his characters. Wood finds Underworld repetitive thematically, whereas I think he neglects to pick up on Underworld's subtlety, DeLillo's repetitions with a difference.

Fortunately, Wood is a much more attentive reader in the Colbert case. Would it be too much to insist that all professional journalists be such adept readers?