James Wood
speaker
815 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It has a very interesting interrupted form.
It sort of moves chronologically, but there are amazing sort of flash forwards and interruptions.
We'll come to that in a minute.
And it has very interesting self-reflexive elements.
Both Panin and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie are not just books that narrate a life, Professor Panin, Miss Brodie, but they're books that reflect on the narrating of a life.
They're books that make you think about how one goes about telling the story of a life.
And both of them ask an important question, which is, what do we know of people?
Insofar as these books ask the question, what can we know of people?
They also, of course, ask the question, what can we know of fictional characters?
We often assume in a kind of caricatured realist way, the mirror going down the middle of the road, the window pane.
that reading a fictional character is a window into reading a human being, that there's a proximity there between the fictive character and the human being.
And that's why people talk about characters growing and changing and so-and-so is just like me.
Both Pinin and the Prime Minister Jim Brodie put a kind of obstacle in the way of what we can really know about these characters.
And insofar as they do that, they not only make us think about how difficult it is in ordinary life to know people, but they also cause us to reflect on those assumptions and premises that we often bring to realist texts.
Why should we assume that a character made up of words on a page is
has a direct connection to a human being.
Why should we think that we should know what a character is in a novel just because we're told a lot of things about her?
The French nouveau romancier, that's to say French postmodern avant-garde writers like Nathalie Sarraute, were quite interested in Muriel Spark, as it turns out, in the 1960s.
Because they detected, I think, amidst a kind of solid British post-war realism, think, say, Kingsley Amis.
They detected in Spark someone who was more interesting and radical and self-reflective about the processes of writing than her peers.
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