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Friday, May 23, 2008
Links: Trilling, New Blog, Criticism, 1001 books
Cynthia Ozick reviews Lionel Trilling’s second and unfinished novel The Journey Abandoned (and discusses his first, The Middle of the Journey, as well) at The New Republic.
There’s a new blog in town, OnFiction, brought to our attention by Rohan in a comment to her most recent post. It’s a group blog run by a philosopher, Keith Oatley, and two psychologists, Raymond A. Mar and Maja Djikic three psychologists, Keith Oatley, Raymond A. Mar, and Maja Djikic. Purpose: “To understand how literary art enables psychological change to occur so that readers are responsible for that change. To put this another way: we don’t aim to understand persuasion, but we do aim to understand how people can use fiction to help transform themselves.”
Salon’s Louis Bayard and Laura Miller on the death of the literary critic. They’re discussing Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic. (Rohan discusses the book here.) Miller:
Which brings to mind McDonald’s complaints about the “democratizing” of criticism, the idea that anyone can and should do it and that no one opinion has more weight than any other. The blogosphere, as he sees it, is only the most visible manifestation of this broader, anti-authoritarian trend. Because academic critics have abandoned evaluation, the popular critics charged with saying whether a book is good or not have gotten “slack,” in McDonald’s eyes—deficient in rigor and scholarship. If anyone can do it, then surely it’s a skill that requires no expertise or cultivation. It’s true that anyone can dispense quickie, depthless, thumb’s-up/down judgments, but that doesn’t really enrich your experience and understanding of literature as a whole. And of course, that might be contributing to the impression that literature doesn’t offer anything special.
The horror, the horror!
The New York Times has an article about another one of those lists, in a book, Peter Boxall, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (Universe 2006):
If the “1001 Books” program seems quirky, even perverse, it’s no accident. “I wanted this book to make people furious about the books that were included and the books that weren’t, figuring this would be the best way to generate a fresh debate about canonicity, etc.,” Professor Boxall informed me in an e-mail message. And how.
The tastes of others are always inexplicable, but “1001 Books” embodies some structural irregularities. Arranged chronologically, it begins with the novel’s primordial period — everything up to 1800 — and then marches century by century into the present.
More than half the books were written after World War II. Already I feel my hackles rising. Does not the age of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy dwarf its earnest, fitfully brilliant but ultimately punier successor? And if the 20th century can put up a fight, the real firepower is concentrated in the period of 1900 to 1930. Like many others, I admire Ian McEwan, but does he really merit eight novels on the list, to Balzac’s three?
Comments
The claim that academic critics have abandoned evaluation seems curious to me, though McDonald is probably right about the two worlds of criticism are moving farther and farther from each other. But that increasing distance means that academic critics focus on very different books than popular critics; how many people within academia ever seriously address the stuff that was published within the last year (as it is the popular press’ job to do)? People’s jobs are in things like Shakespeare and Melville, who haven’t exactly been publishing up a storm lately. So to claim that the ways academia has stopped “evaluating” literature, whether or not that’s true, seems a bit beside the point: popular critics and academic critics are simply talking about different books, to different people, for different reasons.
I wrote at more length about McDonald over at ‘home’:
For various reasons, I find the straight-up pressure for critics to be more evaluative bizarre because it seems so obvious that you need to define “good” and “bad” in some way before you can move the discussion forward even a little bit. Most avid readers, as well as English professors, are probably devout pluralists in this respect anyway, able to recognize many varieties of excellence.
I liked Bayard’s reply that, “believe it or not,” he has learned from literary blogs and other nontraditional venues for criticism. I believe!
When I read “Louis Bayard and Laura Miller on the death of the literary critic” I picture them posed like Marines on the mountain of Iwo Jima.
a philosopher ... and two psychologists
Philosopher, aloud: “Why did I say that?”
Psychologists, silently exchanging glances: “What were we thinking?”
Actually, they’re all psychologists. Don’t know where I got the idea that Oatley was a philosopher.
”...but that doesn’t really enrich your experience and understanding of literature as a whole.”
Neither does reading “professional” criticism (that higher opinion bracket), automatically, either. How about reading lots of books, according to one’s own interests, and trusting one’s own conclusions to be of personal relevance… ?
A good literary critic should be more like a stranger on a street in a foreign country, giving brief directions, sending one on one’s way; not so much a tour guide (imagine seeing Paris for the first time with a tour guide) or a parole officer (ditto).
I sense a hint of the Obsessive Compulsive hovering around all these “lists”. And: instead of a critic’s vivisection (humane or not) of a text, why not make it more of a standard to have the writer her/his self pleading each respective book’s case in a couple of thousand words?
Who knows: doing away with some of these arbiters of style might even bring some of the pleasure of reading back to the “masses”.