On Lit Crit

One of my favorite academic literary critics, Stanley Edgar Hyman (who was married to Shirley Jackson, an underrated writer who wrote the famously chilling short story "The Lottery") seemed to have read everything and wrote about his reading in a provoking and engaging way. I love his book The Armed Vision. Hyman quotes an earlier critic/academic, I.A. Richards: "To set up as a critic is to set as a judge of values." (I wrote about Richards long ago HERE.)

I find Richards fascinating for many reasons, one of which was that he was influenced by both Coleridge and the early anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Besides Richards's scientific foray into how literature is received by bright college students (as described in Practical Criticism), he thought critical evaluation functioned largely as "social communion." He explicitly saw his work as "phatic," and I tend to wish more critics had these values in mind. (Certainly someone like Dale Peck doesn't see the role of critic like this!)

Hyman seemed to not like teaching all that much, and "Professor X," who wrote In The Basement of the Ivory Tower quotes Hyman: "I've been doing it for years, and before every class, I take a piss, I check my fly, I wish I were dead - and I go into the room and begin."

Jacob Silverman
Two months ago in Slate Silverman made a complaint about too much "niceness" in literary criticism lately, and he thought it had to do with authors using Twitter, blogs, Facebook, Yelp, and Tumblr. They create a "fan base," tweet nice things about other authors, every other author is awesome, we're all friends here, authors create an aura of good feelings around themselves, and literary criticism suffers, due to the "mutual admiration society that is today's literary culture, particularly online." The level of criticism an author receives amounts to a literary culture in which "cloying niceness and blind enthusiasm are the dominant sentiments." Silverman would rather we cultivate an environment where we care less about an author's biography and who follows them, and more on the work itself. When no voices of dissent are heard about a work, it tends to chill a "vibrant, useful literary culture." He quotes Lev Grossman of Time, who admitted he won't review a book he doesn't like. Silverman would like us to act more like adults and not mix criticism for an author's work with criticism of the person who wrote the work. The last paragraph of Silverman's article sums his stance well: we ought to think more and "enthuse less."

Chris Collin
Around a year before Silverman's article, Chris Collin wrote a piece for Wired titled, "Rate This Article: What's Wrong With the Culture of Critique." I found and read this after I read Silverman's argument. Collin objects to online lit-crit's star-rating system, its thumb's up, its plus one, the number for how many times the article had been Tweeted (or re-Tweeted?), the number of "likes," etc. I couldn't agree more: go ahead and give some article four stars out of five, but don't pretend you're adding anything to the conversation. You're certainly not thinking. Well...probably not. Maybe a little, if the piece was good. Voting/giving symbolic feedback seems - to me - more a gesture along the lines of the consumer.

Hey, I dig good feedback and kind vibes - we all do - but in our writings as in life, we want to feel like we've been heard.

Collin quotes one of my favorite culture critics, Erik Davis: "Our culture is afflicted with knowingness. We exalt in being able to know as much as possible. And that's great on many levels. But we forget the pleasure of not knowing. I'm no Luddite, but we've started replacing actual experience with someone else's already digested knowledge."

(I wrote about "knowingness" not long ago, HERE.)

Collin says that "There's an essential freedom in being alone with one's thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else's. Diminish our aloneness and we start to doubt our own perspective."

This reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Buckminster Fuller: "Dare to be naive." In a culture of knowingness, where everyone is always online, I can't help but think that our interiorities are suffering. It's getting to the point where the act of not looking to see what everyone else is looking at, what's viral, what's hot, what's cool...and instead just following your own path and evaluating on your own...seems a bona fide radical act. 

Roxane Gay's Answer To Silverman
Not long after Silverman's piece appeared, Roxane Gay parried in Salon. And while I think she played a tad unfair by tsk-tsking Silverman over not actually reading Emma Straub's book - that really wasn't his point - I think her rebuttal quite fine, and I present these three points of view about literary kulch in our online-world as a possible opening to a conversation itself. About the role of criticism.

I thought Gay's best point was the analogy that literary culture is like school, and serious criticism is the classroom; social networks and all the mundane trivia and phatic (How would I.A. Richards see "evaluations" of literature on Twitter?) aspects of five stars and "liking" is the cafeteria. Gay pulled up an apt quote from 1846, by Edgar Allan Poe, on writing too sweetly about someone else's book. There's nothing new under the sun, truly, Ms Gay! She also takes issue with Silverman over too much niceness regarding women, people of color and writers who'd fall under the LGBT rubric: when they are reviewed, often their personal lives are considered fair game. Gay shows that she's able to give a good review to a book while noting some perceived problems with it, and at times she might even know the author personally. She urges that we stop thinking of reviews as "positive" or "negative" as this is the "wrong conversation."

Points all well-taken...until someone's feelings get hurt. Vicious, savage reviews by the aforementioned Dale Peck and his ilk: do these people thrive on shame? Are they thinly-veiled sadists?

And I bet that it's true that males - especially white males - get reviewed more often. But I also bet they are "savaged" more often by critics, too. And sometimes it might seem the reason they're getting savaged is precisely because they're male. I cop to being a lot like Lev Grossman, but my reasons for not writing negative reviews are due to the unpleasant mental states I'm required to be in to write that stuff. It's not worth it to me. NB Roxane Gay seems to evade the question somewhat by saying that everyone who read the book would see its flaws jump out at them, so why bother writing the bad review?(However, if someone wants to pay me to review Dick Cheney's or Paul Wolfowitz's or Rupert Murdoch's memoirs...I'd take that advantage. Some things need to be said, sometimes, no matter how unpleasant.)

Intellectuals and Critics: The Mafia?
Woody Allen once said that intellectuals are like the Mafia: they only kill their own. As much as this culture of criticism chugs along, let's not pretend that a large portion of the critical class - the fine writers, the intellectuals, the "chattering classes," congenitally bookish bloggers - let's not pretend that they don't consider evaluations of a rival or a political foe's work as something akin to a blood sport.

I have never published a book to scathing criticism, but can easily imagine what it feels like, especially if one feels they've produced a fine work, filled with long hours of sweat, tears, inspiration, elation, actually getting themselves to believe that they were contributing something of value to society, that they might even inspire a handful of people not blood-related in a very deep way.

The cultivation of a Nietzschean sensibility seems in order, although 'tis probably easier said than done.

Finally, I can't help but think that most of us are taking ourselves and our evaluations far too seriously, and while I surmise that many of us give critics far too much power over our choices, this seems as virtually nothing compared to forming your opinion based on relatively faceless/nameless others' likes and thumb's ups and plus-ones and re-Tweets. Fer crissakes! Let us dare to be naive! I have tried it and found it quite invigorating. Am I preaching to the choir here? I suspect so...

Tomorrow I'll note an example of polarized approaches to the role of critics and criticism by two novelists, and I hope you'll get a nice laff then.

Practical Criticism

In my previous warblings I addressed the idea that some of us (although no one who's reading this blog, probably?) may be inundated by the easily-accessed opinion of the virtual crowd, and how this might be stifling the at-times exhilarating experience of interacting with some thing and one's own nervous system, and...evaluating for oneself?

I could let on that if I find out something is wildly popular and much "liked" by the crowd, I probably will not like it, but that's not true. I'm sure there are some very popular things that I "digg" too. Anyway...

Anyone heard of I.A. Richards? By the mid-1920s, as an English professor at Cambridge, he was tired of theorists writing about how poems were received by readers; he wanted to find out. He set out to make the apprehension of poetry as a scientific endeavor. It was the spirit of the times, and Richards was something of a mad man; in some ways he was England's version of Pound.

                                     I.A. Richards (1893-1979), a serious character

So, with some of England's brightest students on hand for field-work, he collected poems by Shakespeare, Ella Wheeler Cox (who?), John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and poets with names like Philip James Bailey, Wilfred Rowland Childe, J.D.C. Pellew, and even a person named "Woodbine Willie."

He handed the poems in groups of four to his students and asked them to read each poem as many times as they pleased, and to count how many times they had read each poem. And he asked his students to record their perceptions on a separate sheet of paper, which they handed in. Richards called the handed-in sheets "protocols."

Here's the catch: none of the poems had their author's name attached to it.

Caveat: with people like Donne and Shakespeare, Richards updated the language so that it wouldn't be a dead giveaway that these guys were from the 17th century.

Richards records his findings in his 1929 book Practical Criticism. You would think these students - majoring in English at one of the greatest universities in the world - would've seen Donne for how profound he was, and that Woodbine Willie fell short in a few ways. Or you might have guessed - because I'm the one bringing this up - that these bright people gave horrendously inane comments about the nameless poetry.

Richards actually wonders, if any of us were in the same situation, would we have done any better? Because his students seemed to not tell Shakespeare from Ella Wheeler Cox. Richards himself never gives an outright critique of any of the poems he selected, but his scattershot remarks based on the endlessly non-insightful comments the students made reveals a master of the close reading of poetry, and indeed Richards was one of the pioneers of "close reading."

(I recently read a delightfully candid and ultimately deeply lugubrious book that came out earlier this year or late last: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, by "Professor X." He didn't want to tarnish the good name of the schools in which he functioned as an adjunct professor, teaching English 101 for maybe a tenth of what a tenured professor would get. And his college students often can't write a coherent English sentence; they shouldn't even be in college. I doubt things have gotten much better on campuses since Richards's time, but maybe I'm wrong...)

Now: here's my question, and I hope you enjoy pondering it as much as I do: when we read Richards, he's not taking on the tone of some jackoff NeoCon like Allan Bloom (he of the best-seller in the 1980s in Unistat, The Closing of the American Mind), or any academic scold of any sort. He truly does seem to conduct the material that ends up in Practical Criticism like a scientist would treat his data. Now the question: if the readers seemed to enjoy J.D.C. Pellew far more than John Donne, isn't that right for them? Just because Oxford dons and Yale professors have been telling everyone that Donne, Hopkins, and Shakespeare are far far FAR better than the other obscure names...who's to say what's great?

It's a funny and profound book of literary criticism, and I just thought some of you might want to look at it if you haven't already. Pound did some similar experiments, which I'll write about some day soon. Pound's virtuoso student Louis Zukofsky wrote A Test of Poetry, which seems in the same vein as Richards, albeit much later, and more playful and not so much the "science" experiment.

From blind taste tests of $50 glasses of wine versus $5 glasses (some very interesting findings there, by another intellectual prankster), to the the Can You Tell If This Painting Was Done By An Abstract Expressionist or an Elephant? tests, here are some situations in which we cannot fall back on the "wisdom of crowds" (the jury's still out on the ontology of that "wisdom") or "experts."

I say: the hell with it. So it turns out I liked the $5 wine more than the $50 stuff. Big effing deal if I actually prefer the elephant's work to Jackson Pollack (or someone closer to an elephant's style). And why should you care if you you're not supposed to like Ravel's Bolero more than Schubert's Trout Quintet? 


Quoting Robert Anton Wilson, "Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy, and don't take crap from anyone!"