Hittin licks was the only thing I knew besides grindin

((A bit late on this one, but I’ll go ahead and post it anyway because it involves DUMB STUFF IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, which everyone seems to like (or to like mocking); plus it gives me an opportunity to try out my new PUNCHED-UP SNARKY STYLE, which will maybe help me win back some of the goodwill I lost with postmodernismposts.  So anyway.))

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It must be my lucky year or something, because no sooner do I start this blog than the New York Times Book Review offers up a nice little roundtable on THE STATE OF LITERARY CRITICISM TODAY (here’s the intro), which, y’know, I guess means we have to talk about it!

I’ll start with SAM ANDERSON, for the completely arbitrary reason that his name is the MOST GENERIC-SOUNDING of the lot (although some might suspect me of ulterior motives because it also comes FIRST ALPHABETICALLY).  Right off the bat, Anderson assures us that he’s not one for “big, sweeping, era-defining statements”; nevertheless, our era is defined by a big sweeping change which has occurred in “the culture’s relationship to time”, a change which is “so obvious that it’s boring, by now, even to name the culprits: Google, blogs, texting, tweets, iPhones, Facebook” — he’s right, that is pretty boring, let’s just call it TECHNOLOGY for short.

Anderson goes on to describe something called TIME-SLICING, which sounds horrifying but apparently that’s just the way people do things these days.  Thanks to WEB2.0 or TWIDDLER or SOMETHING, “texts”, which I think means “web pages” and possibly “books” but not “text messages” or “.txt files”, are now “shorter and more flagrantly interconnected, with all kinds of secret passageways running into and out of one another.” We’ll come back to the secret passageways later on in the tour, but for now the important thing, according to Anderson, is that the critic “can no longer take readers’ interest for granted” when the latter are “half a second away from doing 34,000 other things”, like SOCIAL NETWORKING or MP3 BLOGGING or INTERNET PORNOGRAPHING.  Finding the path to his reader’s attention blocked by these menacing beasts, what is the lonely and despairing critic to do?  Should he gripe about technology, as critics have done ever since the dawn of recorded history, when they spent a lot of time complaining about this newfangled ‘writing’ thing that meant they were all going to have to learn how to read now in order to keep criticizing things?

(No, he probably should not.)

On the contrary: “We have to WORK HARDER to justify our presence on the page, our consumption of readers’ increasingly precious attentional units.” How?  By being GOOD WRITERS*, duh.  “To function as an evangelist [!?] , the critic needs, above all else, to write well. A badly written book review […] is self-canceling, like a BARBER WITH A TERRIBLE HAIRCUT.” Well, alright, I guess… but doesn’t this, I find myself wondering, basically concede the argument, often made by critics of criticism, that critics are just failed writers, wannabe novelists who (pardon the expression) couldn’t HACK it?

Things aren’t quite that simple, though; there is, according to Anderson, MAGIC at work here.  (Also, some kind of BUDDHISM?)  He quotes Martin Amis to establish the seemingly trivial point that literary critics, unlike music critics or art critics or theater critics or film critics, respond to prose with MORE PROSE.**  The encounter between the reviewer’s text and the text reviewed then gives birth to “a third, hybrid, ULTRATEXT“, which admittedly sounds pretty badass, although it also unleashes the “NIGHTMARE SCENARIO“ prophesied long time ago by noted CURMUDGEON Thomas Carlyle, in which “all Literature has become one boundless self-devouring Review.” That’s actually not a bad thing, says Anderson: Carlyle begat Joyce, who begat Beckett, who begat David Foster Wallace, whose books are basically websites anyway, so hey, why not check ’em out!

So, to conclude: “In the grand game of INTERTEXTUALITY — which is, after all, the dominant and defining game of the Internet era — critics are not just referees: they’re equal players.” Yes!  And literature is just like the Internet, because it is 1.) made of words, 2.) that refer to one another, 3.) some of which are made-up (seriously, “ultratext”???); books are awesome because they are full of hyperlinks to other books; a good critic is like a content aggregator combing through all those books for bloggable memes and tagging the ones that r most relevant to yr 2k11 concerns; we could go on but let’s not.

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KATIE ROIPHE‘s piece strikes many of the same notes, albeit in a more TRADITIONALIST, less techno-delirious register.  “Has the critic become a quaint and touching figure engaged in an irrelevant, positively medieval pursuit, like MONKS ILLUMINATING MANUSCRIPTS?” she wonders.  The anxiety is quickly assuaged as Roiphe, like Anderson, reminds us that “critics have always been a grandstanding, depressive and histrionic bunch.”*** At any rate, no matter how bad things seem to get, “The world […] stubbornly resists going entirely to the philistines”, which means the critic still has some WORK LEFT TO DO.

Whereupon Roiphe proceeds to erect a rather silly FALSE BINARY between the legitimate professional critic (whose years of education and experience culminate in the tautological task of “[writing] beautifully” in order to “protect beautiful writing”) and a variety of menacing, NEAR-ILLITERATE amateurs and pretenders to the throne (“the angry Amazon reviewer who mangles sentences”, “the serious, unshaven young man in a coffee shop somewhere in Brooklyn […] on his shiny laptop”).  How are we to tell the TRUE CRITIC from the false?  Again, she echoes Anderson:

the critic has one important function: to write well. […] There is so much noise and screen clutter, there are so many Amazon reviewers and bloggers clamoring for attention, so many opinions and bitter misspelled rages, so much fawning ungrammatical love spewed into the ether, that the role of the true critic is actually quite simple: to write on a different level, to pay attention to the elements of style.

But of course, it’s not just critics vs. angry internet ppl; there has to be something for these two to fight over, which turns out to be, predictably enough, the souls of YOUNG FOLKS.  “Can an 18-year-old,” Roiphe pleads, “really not understand why a sentence of Hemingway or Wharton is MORE CHARISMATIC THAN A TWEET?” Indeed, there is still hope; despite their atrocious grammar, the young people aren’t all bad; with the proper guidance, some of them could even grow up to be literary critics themselves.  Where the danger lies, there too grows the saving power:

I have seen students rush out to buy “Anna Karenina” because an essay by James Wood made them feel that Tolstoy was essential. If it’s even just these couple of students, alone on planet Earth, who have read that essay and rushed out, those couple of students are to me sufficient proof of the robustness and purpose of the eloquent critic, of his power to awake and enlighten, of his absolutely crucial place in our world.

So the role of James Wood, I guess, is to use BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE (presumably, the students wouldn’t have responded as well to a friend posting “okay you have to read Anna K. after i’m done with it, this book is INCREDIBLE” on their Facebook) to persuade people to read Tolstoy.  Then they go read Tolstoy, and… get blown away by language that is EVEN MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN A JAMES WOOD ESSAY??  I’m not exactly sure.  For all the stress she lays on the near-mystical concept of “WRITING WELL” (helpfully specified as “[concentrating] on the excellent sentence” and “[paying] attention to the elements of style”) in order to stand out from the crowd of bloggers, hacks, kids and trolls, Roiphe has curiously little to say about the READING of literary works.  It’s this experience of reading, after all, about which the critic is writing, towards which she is attempting to orient readers, and from which she draws her norms of ‘good writing.’  But Roiphe completely takes for granted the status and value of Literature, never poses the question of reading, and ultimately arrives at a position that strikes me as a bizarre and untenable mimetic variation on the standard CRITIC-AS-GATEKEEPER argument — the main difference here being that, rather than the cultured/educated critic explaining to us why we ought to read Great Book X and pass on Trashy Bestseller Y or Degenerate Experimental Novel Z, it’s the books themselves that are reaching out to us, with the truly great ones leaving stylistic imprints of their greatness on the prose of any critic who has been lucky enough to come into contact with them, like the scattered traces of reflected goodness where Al-Mu’tasim has passed among the common thieves in a Borges story.****

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PANKAJ MISHRA begins with the same sort of distancing gesture we’ve seen from our first two critics: he does not, he tells us, “think of [himself] as a literary critic”, as he prefers to look “beyond the literariness of texts”, viewing works within their (historical, political, cultural) horizons.  This is promising enough, and I agree with many of the points he goes on to make about the need for POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, the demise of PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS, and the “mass depoliticization” of American culture in the face of “political and economic arrangements [that] seem depressingly unalterable”.  In this “postpolitical” situation, literature becomes a consumer good like any other, albeit one marketed to a slightly more “refined” audience.*****  “Compared with their realist predecessors,” he writes, “most contemporary fiction writers in America and Britain appear to be cultivating THEIR OWN GARDENS“ — the critic’s job being, I suppose, to be the Maria of this Metropolis, gatecrashing the garden parties and filling them with dirty orphans until everyone agrees to feel bad about themselves.

But Mishra’s dismissive reference to “the cloud-cuckoo-land of LITERARY THEORY and its weird cults of academic technicism and tenured ideologues” tempers my enthusiasm a bit — those “weird cults” have long been among the most stubbornly vocal critics of depoliticized American cynicism and the powers that it serves.  It’s one thing to call, as Mishra does, for a return to engagement; and another thing altogether to THEORIZE, with Fredric Jameson, about the REASONS WHY such engagement might have disappeared in the first place, and the representational problems that impede its speedy return.  Which is not to say that Jameson’s is always the better option, for the two are by no means mutually exclusive.  Mostly I resent the anti-intellectualism, of which America already has quite enough, thanks; but I also think that Mishra underestimates the difficulty of the repoliticization he’s calling for.  So when he offers his own solution, which is basically to READ DIFFERENT THINGS… :

To examine the work of Lu Xun, China’s foremost modern writer, is to be taken through his anguish deep into Chinese self-perceptions, from the long Confucian past to the weirdly hybrid capitalist-Communist present. It is to understand not only his experiments with many different aesthetic forms and genres, but also his country’s tormented recent history, not to mention the implications these developments hold for the rest of the world.

… I don’t wanna say I’m skeptical, but I think the argument is a bit more complex than ‘Read Chinese novelists’ –> ‘Understand China’.  To the extent that such a thing does happen, it relies on a whole network of categories and background assumptions that allow us to mediate between the work of narrative fiction before us and the picture of the ‘world-system’ we carry around in our heads.  Unfortunately, without theoretical reflection on the literary object and the act of reading, this mediation tends to produce only empty platitudes of the ‘Great Family of Man’ sort (“Look, Chinese people love their children too!”).  So again, I find myself basically agreeing with Mishra’s diagnosis of the problem; but his proposed solutions, less so.

((Okay, that was exhausting, so I think I’ll stop here for now.  Part 2 comin’ on the next album.))

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NOTES:

*: i.e. the kind to whom the words “precious attentional units” would never in a thousand years occur.

**: For my own part, I think the specificity of literary criticism can be framed in rather more mundane, historical-materialist terms: before the advent of the Internet, TV, film, recorded music, lithography, and whatever other things I’m forgetting, the written (printed) word possesses an unrivaled power when it comes to the dissemination of identical (or near-identical, anyway) works over a wide geographical area…  which means that, if you’re a critic who is interested in writing for and about “the nation” in its broadest cultural terms, you’ll find your audience more receptive to discussion of those popular printed works than to reviews of performances in London they’ll never be able to see.

***: Robert Frost’s exemplary criticism of this tendency is worth quoting here:

We have no way of knowing that this age is one of the worst in the world’s history.  Arnold claimed the honor for the age before this.  Wordsworth claimed it for the last but one.  And so on back through literature.  I say they claimed the honor for their ages.  They claimed it rather for themselves.  It is immodest of a man to think of himself as going down before the worst forces ever mobilized by God.

… but on the other hand, as my friend B. likes to say, not only have people always worried that the world was ending, most of ’em have been right.  Someone who thought Elvis’s hips would lead to the downfall of American values would shit a brick if they could see Lil Wayne and Jersey Shore, no?  There have been many worlds throughout history, and many apocalypses.

****: I suppose this position could be reworked into a sort of pluralist/pragmatist hypothesis: different readers like different books, critics who like the same books I like will also like writers I like and subtly borrow from or emulate those writers stylistically, assembling a distinctive style which signals to me that our tastes more-or-less line up and this person might be worth listening to.  But I find nothing in Roiphe’s piece to suggest that she herself would accept such a heterogeneous conception of literature — indeed, she seems much more interested in protecting the ONE TRUE LITERATURE from violation at the hands of UNCOUTH SAVAGES like, I guess, me.

*****: This situation isn’t totally without historical precedent; to quote from a book which I’ve finally gotten around to reading, Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:

The court aristocracy of the seventeenth century was not really a reading public.  To be sure, it kept men of letters as it kept servants, but literary production based on patronage was more a matter of a kind of conspicuous consumption than of serious reading by an interested public.  The latter arose only in the first decades of the eighteenth century, after the publisher replaced the patron as the author’s commissioner[.]