Grievances against critics often stir up debate about the proper role of arts criticism, and, indeed, a recent complaint by an American actor prompted the British critic and editor Lola Seaton to contemplate this question, focusing mostly on book reviewing. In her New Statesman article, Seaton frames the issue as an inquiry into the relationship between critic and author, but her real subject is the critic's own underlying conception of reviewing itself as a literary form.
Seaton offers the critic Adam Mars-Jones as an especially rigorous exponent of the review as a self-sufficient composition. The goal of a review, according to Mars-Jones, is to address a "potential reader" who is "being guided to pleasure or warned against disappointment" although "a reviewer isn’t paid to be right, just to make a case for or against, and to give pleasure either way." In Seaton's words, criticism "is not an unerring ranking system but a form of personal expression, and a good review is not right (or not only right) but convincing, fresh, entertaining, satisfying, perceptive." In my words: according to this view, a reviewer has autonomy in his/her judgment, separate from any consideration of the author of the work, but also can assert an autonomy separate from any ultimate consideration of the work under review, or any particular critical principles that should be applied to it. If the review is "satisfying" as a piece of writing, it has succeeded in the only requirement this notion of criticism imposes.
Seaton suggests that reserving some consideration for the author might temper the potential abuses of this approach to reviewing, but otherwise seems to accept the Mars-Jones position as an accurate accounting of the goals of criticism. She brings in other critics, such as Elizabeth Hardwick, who seem to agree with the Mars-Jones view (although Hardwick is really more concerned that the critic's autonomy result in “the communication of the delight and importance of books, ideas, culture itself”), and she quotes approvingly James Wolcott's characterization of reviews at their best as the source of "thunder and illumination." Ultimately Seaton does seem to side most with Hardwick, suggesting that the author and the critic should be a "mutually advantageous collaboration," the author and critic "reciprocally at work at shaping taste."
I am myself unsympathetic both to the idea that the critic's job is "shaping taste" and to the underlying assumption that the critic's overriding task is to "guide towards pleasure and to provide it," to act on the one hand as a judge and on the other as a performer. The latter two functions are in conflict with each other, the attempt to combine them often responsible for empty "snark" or overwrought, vacuous praise. But the alternative to a labored liveliness is not to assume the gatekeeper's role, to fancy oneself a high cultural influencer or a guardian of eternal verities. All of these roles are really an attempt to elevate the critic to a position of prominence equivalent to the writer, but I don't see why this is necessary. The writer and the critic have different jobs to do, although they certainly do converge around the literary work the writer has offered. But the writer has indeed offered us something with a claim to being a work of art, a compelling work of nonfiction, or a contribution to some intellectual discipline. At this point, the writer can't really expect to be able to control the responses to the book, and the critic provides (or ought to provide) an especially well-considered response, drawing on that critic's presumed knowledge and experience.
In my view, the critic should be expected not to educate the reader's taste or to engage in rhetorical display but to bring to the literary work his/her fully engaged attention and be able to describe the salient features of the work that careful reading discloses. If the critic's appraisal is to have weight beyond facile judgments that treat works of literature as if they were just another consumer good (albeit of a culturally refined sort), evaluation is actually secondary, even subservient, to the depth of such description. The critic does not owe the author a positive judgment, but does owe both author and reader the application of whatever intelligence and insight that critic can summon in the attempt to more keenly discern the work's fundamental features. A particularly scrupulous exposition of the work's character can itself serve as an implicit assessment of its success or failure, without the addition of a conventional act of judgment at all. To perceive the literary work's formal and stylistic elements clearly is at the same time to recognize its achievement.
Some might regard the kind of critical approach I am advocating as too fussily "academic," but academic criticism has in fact long since abandoned interest in aesthetic evaluation as something that is unavoidably subjective and irredeemably hierarchical. If book reviewing is to be the only remaining source of what was once known as literary criticism, and reviewing is to be regarded more as an exercise in self-expression than a focused contemplation of literature, then for me criticism has essentially ceased to exist. Of course there are critics who defy the current strictures in academic criticism against "formalism," as well as those among reviewers who resist the pressure to act as a judge or a consumer advocate, and offer astute, closely observed literary criticism. It is, however, discouraging that such critics stand out as exceptions to the general practice.
It won't be surprising if I say that I myself identify with these recalcitrant critics who persist in considering the aesthetic standing of the literary work itself to be the object of their attention, not its convenience as a cultural index or as a prompt for the critic's own discursive fancies. I have written the kind of criticism that attempts to explicate what it is like to read a work or an author while also as fully as possible approaching the work on the terms it sets up for itself. This does not entail insisting that all concerns "outside the text" are irrelevant, but it does presume that considering such concerns--cultural, historical, political, biographical--is not the immediate task the critic should perform, as has become the default assumption in most academic criticism, although they inevitably influence the "content" a work of fiction turns to its own purposes through form and style. Reducing a literary work to what it might "say," might "tell us" or "reveal" is not, in my view an act of criticism; no amount of "close reading" devised to arrive at such formulations can make this activity "critical" in any way that is adequate to the allusiveness and indirection inherent in both fiction and poetry that distinguish them from ordinary forms of expository discourse.
Admittedly I have adopted my particular critical strategy in part because I focus so much (not exclusively) on adventurous or experimental fiction, which especially requires, it seems to me, an approach emphasizing description and explication. Although in most cases I do make clear the extent to which I think an "experiment" has succeeded or not, such a judgment is really not very meaningful unless it is accompanied by evidence of careful reading. If I had more interest in covering the contemporary literary scene as a whole (which might possibly have gotten me a larger audience), perhaps I would have developed a style more agreeable to Adam Mars-Jones, but I don't think this would make me a better critic. I might have more book review assignments than I have right now, however.
Comments