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Friday, June 06, 2008
The Canon, The Critic, The Fetish, and the Pink Slip
Briefly reflecting on the closing-down of mainstream critical venues, the relevance of the canon, and the question of whether you can evaluate art regardless of how much you like it, or even whether you should evaluate it as opposed to simply analyzing how it works.
Looking back on Bill and Rohan’s excellent series of posts on evaluative criticism and the “death of the critic,” I’m drawn to this particular statement by David Bordwell, which Bill also quoted: “You can recognize that some films are good even if you don’t like them. You can declare Birth of a Nation or Citizen Kane or Persona an excellent film without finding it to your liking.”
Meaning what?
Over time, I’ve developed a basically fetishistic theory of the role of the subjective in our responses to art. For example, two Bergman films: Wild Strawberries and Persona. I’ve seen Persona once; excepting the unlikely possibility that I’m doing some research project directly related to it, I probably will not watch it again. I’ve also seen Wild Strawberries once, recently, and will absolutely return to it.
The two films are roughly equal in quality. They both feature good character development, universal themes, intriguing cinematography, and revealing dialogue. The difference is that Persona is about the vicious human desire to take advantage of weakness by exploiting another person and subsuming them, whereas Wild Strawberries is about the way unresolved feelings of guilt, combined with a sort of protective arrogance, can estrange an individual from life and its joys. Both the feeling of missing out on happiness, and the surreal “vision quest” the main character undergoes as he works through his unhappiness, are fascinating to me. I suppose this is because my own experiences growing up had much more to do with feelings of exclusion and the substitutive virtual world of literature than with envy and exploitation.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the formal triumphs of Persona. They just can’t measure up to the feeling that a work comes close in spirit to something I myself might care to fashion. This is, I hope, what Bordwell means, rather than the common phenomenon of somebody joylessly endorsing something out of a desire to conform. The worst conversations I have had about art came from me (or some other person) actually finding a given work of art bad, but trying desperately to discover a saving grace that would allow them to join in the consensus. A friend of mine recently confided that it had taken him a full week to realize how much he disliked Iron Man, meaning not that another superhero got him hotter, but rather that he thought the film itself was poorly conceived and poorly executed.
The ironic thing about the seeming absence of “evaluative” criticism is that all criticism is essentially evaluative. You can tell right away whether or not a piece of criticism likes its object—for example, Derrida likes Rousseau, Stephen Greenblatt likes Shakespeare, and D. A. Miller does not like Dickens. Many dissertations are the painful result of a graduate student who has gone through a sort of torture that turns a previously beloved novel or poem into an object of scorn, usually because the writer becomes convinced that the work of art is politically irresponsible. As a result, at least as far as the tone is concerned, the text of the dissertation becomes a sort of ambivalent scar tissue. Having undergone this process, most academics become deeply afraid of exposing their enthusiasms to criticism, and the effect on the critical essays themselves is a pre-emptive harshness towards any and all aesthetic products.
The canon had a brief heyday at the moment when lists and works were maximally accessible but before Web 2.0 sites had emerged. By “maximally accessible,” I mean that the Internet made it easier for the American Film Institute, the Modern Library, as well as MSM like Rolling Stone and Spin to publicize their lists of the 100 or 200 best movies, books, and albums. It also became easier for people to get access to these things, in part because of explicit tie-ins designed to increase consumption. Blockbuster made a point of carrying the AFI titles, Modern Library released parts of its list in new editions carried by (relatively) new mega-chains like Borders, and so on. Bloom’s The Western Canon was published the same year Amazon.com opened up shop.
Now that the blogosphere (in conjunction with social networking sites) has decentered and diversified our knowledge of what’s out there (aesthetically speaking) to such an extreme degree, the idea of a consistent and well-policed canon has become ridiculous. The Rolling Stone 200 ballooned into the Rolling Stone 500, at which point it wasn’t worth much; the driving question becomes not “What should a well-educated person read over the course of a lifetime?”, a question now impossible to answer, but rather, “What’s next?” People make this decision on the basis of a huge number of different networked sources of evaluation—for example, a lot of people I know won’t get interested in an album until several people tell them about it (either in person or via some online connection) and they encounter some mainstream presence or endorsement. The forums for criticism that function through a claim to megalithic authority inevitably lost market share. For example, when I’m interested in critical reactions to a new film, I go to Metacritic, where my local paper (The Los Angeles Times) becomes just one blurb out of twenty. From a certain standpoint, critics are getting their walking papers, but it seems obvious that these statistics do not take into account the number of writers hired by blog-esque sites like Pitchfork or PopMatters, nor writers who get some income by selling advertising space on their blogs, nor critics who write “for free” but then get book contracts.
In fact, criticism is exploding. There are new critical celebrities, like James Wood and Chuck Klosterman, as well a renewed emphasis on novelists writing criticism (e.g. Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem). But the real story are the endless reviews like this one, from Netflix’s page on Iron Man:
I entered the Theater today to see yet another comic book movie. THIS IS MORE! To my surprise this breathtaking superhero/action/drama was so much more than I could have expected. Spectacular doesn’t even do justice to Jon Favreau’s brilliant direction! The character development is deep and authentic. The casting choice of Robert Downey Jr, to play the role of Tony Stark, was brave and perfect! He fits the role to a tee and delivers a great performance. He plays a genius weapons designer billionaire playboy who has a change of heart, both literally and metaphorically, in the film. Yes, this is an ‘origin of Iron Man’ film but the background is as essential to understanding the character as it is to establish the franchise future. There are a few acceptable updates from the comic; it worked so well in this story, I believe they are only improvements. Gwyneth Paltrow is a perfect Pepper Potts, Iron Man’s Lois Lane. She is charming and lovable in the role. Jeff Bidges was unexpected here; maybe not the only choice but a good one for sure, and Terence Howard also never loses a step. Great acting aside this is also a terrific story! Stark is captured by terrorists, tricks them, and secretly builds his own escape weapon. After the death of his friend, he sent forth with the words “Don’t waste you life Stark.” Additionally he witnesses, first hand, the atrocities committed with his own weapons. He has a becomes a new man. Finally, fueled further by a harsh betrayal, he sets out with his new convictions to make amends for his past. There is something for everyone to love. The movie does spend some time on the science/robotics involved but not too much to lose pace with the action. It also has many laughs but again they fit in place just right. Of numerous comic book adaptations few have seamless CGI, spectacular script, great direction, stellar casting, and endearing characters, along with the kickass action. Iron Man has is all! This is a must see! Hope this is Helpful!
Here is a person who can barely write a sentence without making grammatical mistakes, whose perspective on the film is fundamentally uncritical, and yet who is using all the forms of professional criticism. If you are the sort of person who can be won over in a second by “kickass action” and moral clichés, why bother writing that Jeff Bridges was “unexpected here”? Why the concern with the “franchise future”? Why describe the changes to the story as “acceptable updates”? In the name of critical legitimacy, which has become entirely democratic.
Criticism has also become decentered in the sense that it no longer has to be all things at once. Since we are no longer dependent on cranky critics like Anthony Lane for all our information about what to go see, we can read them with much greater pleasure; likewise, IMDB and Wikipedia have been able to satisfy demand for plot summaries and other basic information. Political critiques of Juno thrive because somebody else can handle the job of saying whether the film’s wisecracks were funny.
Now get out there and surf the web for some criticism of something! And then blog about it! Your micro-community of hundred readers, one hundred RSS collators, are hungry for more. You could be, dare I say it...the tipping point.
Comments
"Now that the blogosphere… has decentered and diversified our knowledge of what’s out there (aesthetically speaking) to such an extreme degree, the idea of a consistent and well-policed canon has become ridiculous.”
Despite the blogosphere, there continue to be widely publicized lists of ‘great works’ coming out...The Times in London recently...the Telegraph( i think) did one on crime fiction, books continue to be published along these lines too...1001 Books you must Read, etc. One thing that sticks out is that although they may disagree at the edges, and in the rankings, the canon is very well represented in these lists...don’t know about ‘policing’ but it seems to me the list is pretty well established. I notice that a book called The Top Ten Books (or some such) which came out about a year ago, polling a hundred or so contemporary authors for their top tens, again when the numbers were compiled their collective top ten had a striking resemblance to the one Somerset Maugham drew up 50 years ago.
Just because everyone is yammering on about what they’ve seen or read, and why they like or dislike it, doesn’t mean I don’t think that the canon is in jeopardy. As long as there are sensitive, intelligent readers and commentators, which we have in abundance, at work, important works will continue to be read and revered.
What’s ridiculous about this?...we may be aware of more works of art, but ‘great’ work will I think always remain relatively rare...and therefore easy to identify…
Good post.
Someone, I wish I could remember who, said that only a few texts are ambiguous and complex enough to allow a critic to really go to work on them.
This has been really affecting my recent film reviews as I now can’t get away from the feeling that the likes of Bergman are effectively PT Barnum-type figures who manage to make their films LOOK intelligent while actually being evasive, indecisive and unclear.
Critics then flock to these kind of films because they can import a load of pre-conceptions about stuff they like and claim that a) Bergman’s a genius and b) they’re pretty damn clever too for ‘getting’ Bergman.
Iron Man sells a similar line of bullshit. There’s some stuff about Afghanistan inviting people to think it’s political, there’s some stuff about redemption, responsibility and stuff like that but it’s never more than words or half-ideas. The writers and director never actually make any of these words fit into a proper dramatic narrative or philosophical point. BUT because we get loads and loads of screen time of people just talking and we have ‘proper’ actors, we’re invited to think that it’s a character-based film with a brain. I sympathise with your friend as Iron Man’s a con, it just took him a week to walk go “Hang on!”.
The role of conformity in criticism is also a fascinating one. The example of the Iron Man review is a great example of it as the guy writing it clearly wants to go “WOOOOO! Kick ass action!” but he knows that ‘there’s more to the film’ and so he rehashes some of the concerns more nuanced critics have about it. It’s conformity not just of evaluative judgment but also of terms of engagement.
It seems to me, Joseph, that your post raises the question of whether or not evaluation is intrinsically social or only contingently so. Do we arrive at judgments all by ourselves and then, and only then, share them with others, or are we always “calibrating” our judgements with respect to the judgments of others, always sharing?
Duncan Watts has been investigating this question, among others. Here’s an informal piece he published in the NYTimes.
Do we arrive at judgments all by ourselves and then, and only then, share them with others, or are we always “calibrating” our judgements with respect to the judgments of others, always sharing?
Wayne Booth coined the term “co-duction” for the process by which we assert and then revise our evaluations in discussion with other readers (or viewers--his first example is actually about a film); I’ve always thought he hit on something importantly true about criticism with that idea.
Do you recall where Booth coined the term?
Bill: Coduction is one of the central ideas of The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Here’s an explanation of it I posted at Dan Green’s blog a while back:
His explanation of this (specially coined) term has several components, including comparison ("Every appraisal of a narrative is implicitly a comparison between the always complex experience we have had in its presence and what we have known before"), conversation ("The term must imply a communal enterprise rather than a private....The validity of our coductions must always be corrected in conversations about the coductions of others whom we trust. They will thus always be subject to the corrections of time...") and re-reading ("if [the reader] takes seriously the task of explaining his initial appraisal, he enters a process that is not mere argument for views already established, but a conversation, a kind of re-reading that is an essential part of what will be a continually shifting evaluation").
I haven’t read any of the critical work on communities of readers, but I’ve always implicitly felt that criticism only made sense with reference to such a community. Which is only a special case of a generality, really. Hardly anything that people do makes sense otherwise.
When seen in the context of a particular work, evaluation may look like a judgement about aesthetic value; when seen as a community activity, it may look more like a discussion about which works the community values and why. In either case, replacing it with descriptivism or even historicism just wouldn’t be good enough; something important would be lost.
Nigel,
You’re absolutely right that new lists of the best books ever written (the best films, etc.) continue to come out; in fact, they probably appear much more frequently now than before, and list books certainly seem to haunt the Borders discount section tenaciously. In recent years, publications like Spin have taken to putting out whole “list” issues—the top 50 punk bands! The top 100 songs about cheesecake! The top 25 new artists you must hear!
However, these lists have become themselves part of the postmodern universe of overlapping recommendations. A great demonstration of this is the Metacritic site, which puts together a list of all the year-end lists, detailing what films and albums appeared on how many lists. If a list of “greatest books” hasn’t changed since Somerset Maugham’s time, then it obviously doesn’t include Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, or other artists who have had an enormous impact on contemporary literature. Nor can it address the question of whether you should read The Plumed Serpent or Ada or Ardor (second-string books by first-rate authors), or literary biographies, or collections of letters. If you are interested in a given author, you certainly should, but at some point that will foreclose your ability to also be conversant in every classic of Western medieval literature and the novels, plays and poems of Yukio Mishima and his followers. So the lists, which always trumpet some claim to universality and finality, end up becoming just another way for a given individual at a certain moment to come up with an answer to “What’s next?” (In the context of her different reading communities, certainly, as Rich and Rohan suggest.)
Speaking as a reader with a limited life span who is interested in getting the best experience for the browse, I look to others for advice. Others meaning those who have read widely; whose approaches to evaluation make sense to me; who have thought deeply about what they’ve read. Roth and Morrison may have had an impact on contemporary literature, but the fact remains that 120 talented contemporary writers, a community of those who are creating today’s novels, generally agree that they don’t cut it. That others are more influential; better. They generally agree that a solid, unchanging core of writers deserve, require and reward attention.
The point I am making is that, far from ‘another way for a given individual at a certain moment to answer ‘What’s next?” the canon is a timeless, widely acknowledged list of the best texts ever written. As for what’s next...in order to join this list, generations of readers must judge and discuss before membership is privileged.
Nigel, I see what you’re saying, but here’s the problem. First of all, contemporary writers are naturally going to undervalue other living writers. If they weren’t trying to outdo their competitors, they probably wouldn’t have become successes in the first place. How many of these authors have seen their careers bolstered by favorable reviews in The New York Times, which rated Beloved as the best book of the past several decades?
Furthermore, the list of best books is naturally going to favor books that have accrued additional reputation over time, without being so old that they start to become a little obscure. Diderot is, in my view, a much better writer than Evelyn Waugh, but Waugh is more with us because he is closer to our time.
Furthermore, you have the problem of qualifications. Are contemporary writers really better suited to answer the canonical question than Harold Bloom, who has read a lot more than they and is paid to read rather than to write? Or why not devote your life to reading the books that Montaigne considered canonical, which certainly can take a lifetime (it took his), and are not of lesser quality simply because many of them are Greek or Roman. Somerset Maugham wrote, at most, two canonical books in his lifetime (and that’s including The Moon and Sixpence, to which I personally am over-partial), whereas Montaigne’s collected works have had an enormous impact on Western civilization. Furthermore, Maugham lists David Copperfield in his top ten of all time, a book many people (myself included) find virtually unreadable compared to Bleak House or The Pickwick Papers.
No, it won’t do you any harm to read The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace. But that fact, the unimpeachable greatness of those books, does nothing to decide the question of the canon—which I suspect must be given up as undecidable.
I think the question of a canon is a distraction. Or, rather, it’s a particular approach towards evaluative criticism that’s suited towards didactic purposes.
There are important books that certain people should read that aren’t on any canon. Or, perhaps, they owe their place on a canon to their position with regard to a particular community. Case in point—I can only give good examples from my own experience, sadly—Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream. It’s probably the best book of a middling good SF writer. It’s an annoying, deliberately grating and repetitive book. But there is a certain group of SF fans that should be highly urged to read it, perhaps even strapped down Clockwork Orange style. For that matter, any critic who wants to understand some of the root material of SF should read it.
Would that make The Iron Dream one of the books on an SF best 100 books list? Maybe. But as the SF community gets further away from those roots, it gets less relevant. Its position in the canon is self-limiting.
Be careful, Rich, if you continue too far down that road you’re going to start thinking like a literary academic (for whom evaluation is a secondary matter).
Joseph,
First of all, contemporary writers are naturally going to undervalue other living writers. If they weren’t trying to outdo their competitors, they probably wouldn’t have become successes in the first place.
Yes. They’re hardly distinterested judges. Though “disinterest” is not a qualification for this particular gig. Rather, they have a conflict of interest.
Furthermore, the list of best books is naturally going to favor books that have accrued additional reputation over time . . .
Not only that, they will have had a longer time to influence what we are. Montaigne influenced the cultural milieu that rather later coughed up Maugham and Morrison. But is such influence necessarily a good thing? What if, for example, Shakespeare is to human possibility what the Dvorak keyboard is to keyboard layout? Reasonable at the time, but in retrospect, less than optimum.
* * * *
What is the nature of supreme literary excellence if it takes generations of readerly discussion to decide the matter? Why isn’t contemporary evaluation adequate to the job?
"Be careful, Rich, if you continue too far down that road you’re going to start thinking like a literary academic (for whom evaluation is a secondary matter).”
I don’t even know what point you’re trying to make. My point is that I’m evaluating texts while keeping in mind the community for whom I’m doing the evaluation. Literary academics too often either reject the idea of evaluation because it can’t be an evaluation for everyone (to which my response would be a mixture of observational disproof—e.g. the Epic of Gilgamesh once again—or a “so what"), or they go cryptonormative and insist that they aren’t evaluating, when what they really are doing is just that, they just call it “choosing books for class” or some such and don’t examine how their community really differs from many non-academic reading communities.
"What if, for example, Shakespeare is to human possibility what the Dvorak keyboard is to keyboard layout? Reasonable at the time, but in retrospect, less than optimum.”
Literary studies are historically contingent. People who like scientism often don’t like historical contingency, but there it is.
I remember a conversation with an evolutionary biologist who really disliked the “Sim Earth” game. Why? Because you’d simulate evolution, and always end up one of a limited number of real-Earth-style animals, such as a dolphinoid for instance. But evolution doesn’t work that way; it’s not a pseudo-predictable process where you put in a few animo acids and always get at the end something that looks like a dolphin. It’s a process in which the present can only be understood through looking at the concretion of more or less random historical events, each of which closed off certain future paths and opened up other ones.
Literary studies are historically contingent.
Yes. And whatever the “canon” is, it is an accumulation of historical contingencies. Evaluation is an attempt to influence those contingencies going forward.
...they just call it “choosing books for class” or some such and don’t examine how their community really differs from many non-academic reading communities.
Um, err. . . I don’t follow this comment at all. Why should the selection of books in a college (or high school) literature class have much of anything to do with non-academic reading communities? The traditional justification for college literature class is to expose students to the best that has been written. While that reason has become a bit battered, it’s still in place.
I bought Netherland today because I was impressed by the extremely positive things James Wood had to say about it in his New Yorker review. I didn’t even finish the review (sort of because I didn’t want to learn to much about the book before I read it). As soon as I thought to myself, “wow, James Wood is praising this thing to the skies, I better go out and grapple with it”, I put the magazine down. That was a few weeks ago. I happened to be at the book store today and I saw the name of a scandinavian author and that jogged my memory about Netherland, so I sought it out. I found it. It had a lovely cover, with these sort of old-fashioned-illustrationy and autumnal images of various characters standing in a park around a lot of foliage. I read some of the blurbs, which gave me the impression that I wouldn’t have to work to hard to stay engaged with it. (I happen to be reading The Plague of Doves, which I bought because I liked the cover and because I thought it was time to see what Louise Erdrich was about and I find that I’m having to work to stay engaged with it.) I also read the synopsis and the first few paragraphs and further satisfied myself that it wouldn’t be a slog.
That was the extent of my pre-purchase critical analysis. In light of the above commentary, I’m eager to think about how those brief, pre-purchase impulses influence the opinion I hold of the book after I’ve read it.
For instance, will I be inclined, after having found sufficient evidence for it, to judge the book harshly, since that will (in my mind in some ridiculous way) take James Wood down a peg or two? Or will I given sufficient evidence in the other direction be inclined to endorse the book so that my opinion, being one shared with James Wood, will somehow be validated? Or will the novel be so delightful or awful that I will love or hate it accordingly with no sense of the possibility that my opinions are the result of bad motives?
I hope it will be this last thing—the certainty that the thing is good and that I like it. When it happens, it is a real pleasure, but I find that instances are few and far between for a slow and lazy reader like myself.
"No, it won’t do you any harm to read The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace. But that fact, the unimpeachable greatness of those books, does nothing to decide the question of the canon—which I suspect must be given up as undecidable.”
On the contrary Joseph. The presence of unimpeachable greatness provides us with a benchmark against which to measure other works. Close analysis of greatness provides criteria needed to evaluate merit.
Iron Man is a comic book movie.
It is supposed to appeal to 13 year old boys. I saw it and enjoyed it out of the nostalgia I have for reading comic books. This was the purpose of a movie like Iron Man. It had a few interesting scenes, like the scene where he sat down and ate a hamburger with the press cross legged. Is that brilliant? No, but it fought against cliché a bit. Maybe I need to see it again but I didn’t have the bitter aftertaste many here have. While I agree with the premise that we should respect art we don’t like, I think Iron Man should be seen more as a fun, entertaining film. It should be looked at favorable when placed up against a really horrible comic book movie, like Batman and Robin (The one with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze)
Wild Strawberries may be flawed but I disagree with Johnathan M. that it’s a sort of con job created to look intelligent. I think Bergman was genuinely trying and he sometimes succeeded. Similarly, a movie like “There Will Be Blood” is created to “look” intelligent but Paul Thomas Anderson is genuinely swinging for the fences. In the process, the director creates a flawed masterpiece. It’s those flashes of brilliance that can be isolated and evaluated along with the flaws.
It’s off topic, but I’m struck by the comparison of Wild Strawberries and There Will Be Blood. I have great respect for what PT Anderson was attempting with There Will Be Blood and I believe the film has great stylistic merit, but my feeling is that at it’s core is a small set of not fully formed intuitions about the connections between ambition, the extraction of resources, of all kinds, from the world that surrounds us (ie social and physical), and religious psychology—the preacher kid, for example, could have come out of a bad episode of The Twilight Zone. The movie itself was then erected, deliberately, to represent those intuitions. (I got the feeling from it that PT Anderson was trying to recreate his experience of works of art he didn’t quite understand.)
Wild Strawberries on the other hand seems to me to—forgive this vagueness of language—think through itself as you watch it. It just feels, to me, much less pieced together than There Will Be Blood. In a similar way, I often remember the village scenes in the early part of The Seventh Seal, amazed anew at each remembrance by the degree to which that film’s concerns are fluently addressed in a work of fiction. It seems wrong that I can just say “existential dread” to capture those village scenes when the emotion is so much richer, but, in the end, I believe there’s something importantly different about the theme as its embodied in the experience of a narrative and the theme when its expressed explicitly in language.
To sort of return this to the subject of the original post, it’s interesting to me that Johnathan M finds Bergmen a charlatan whereas I, and I think I’m being honest here, watched Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal the way a kid watches cartoons—with relish, feeling as if I were understanding perfectly, almost as if I were having a conversation with the film. Our sympathies are just, clearly, different, and I suspect that those initial sympathies would govern almost entirely any discussion of Bergman’s merits that we embarked upon.
It’s also interesting to think about what might actually change our sympathies toward Bergman. My guess is that it would take some long accumulation of experiences in one direction or another—living in a different country say or a strong relationship with another person. Something like that.
(Incidentally, it took me a week or two to come, after feeling initially positive, to the conclusion that Iron Man was basically just a nullity. Not sure why.)
Your “What’s next?” formula is excellent, Joseph. I don’t believe I’ve encountered a more concise description of the growth of a personal canon. (My last two essays considered Son of Paleface and a couple of pseudonymous 1950s porn novels, and so I believe I can be considered an authority on personal canons if on nothing else.)
Nigel writes: “On the contrary Joseph. The presence of unimpeachable greatness provides us with a benchmark against which to measure other works. Close analysis of greatness provides criteria needed to evaluate merit.”
Not so. The greatness of War and Peace doesn’t manage to limit the canon, which is what one would need in order to align the canon and the readerly life. Tolstoy’s novel is not sufficient grounds for determining the greatness of something like Catch-22, which is also about war, but is completely different in structure, tone, and approach. Whether you should read Heller or Tolstoy depends on who you are—for example, it is very evident that Maugham was fairly indifferent to comedy, and so omitted works like Don Quixote from his Top Ten.
Of course, this is a false choice—you can read Heller and Tolstoy. But then some third author is the excluded one: Blake, or Frank O’Hara, or Mark Twain, or Apuleius.
Someone who thinks Bergman is trying to put on a con job would seem to have no way of identifying a non-con job. It’d be like watching Hamlet and claiming Shakespeare is trying to give the impression of being profound but just winds up making no sense.
Perhaps that’s the definition of the canon: works where if someone fundamentally questions their worth, the only possible reaction is, “Oh, come on!"
Tim, I very much agree with you on all fronts. Here’s what I said about There Will Be Blood.
Christopher, while I feel with you the nostalgic pleasures of the genre, life is too short for reduced expectations. If you want to see a comic book movie, then Iron Man is a decent choice. But if you’ve already seen all the great comic book movies, such as Batman Begins and Spider-Man 2, and you still want to also see Iron Man putting on his airshow and monster truck rally, then at least we should be able to agree that superb aesthetic quality isn’t the point. It’s actually a non sequitur to respond to somebody calling Iron Man bad by calling it entertaining, since (used in that way) entertainment is subjective. It’s also a non sequitur to compare Iron Man to the film with California’s governor in it, because most films, regardless of genre, are better than Batman and Robin, just as most governors are better than Schwarzenegger.
Joseph,
I said the presence of greatness, and meant in all its variety, its strangeness, originality...not just Tolstoy...a canon should be broad and flexible enough to accommodate many different kinds of genius...from The Iliad, to Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote to Endgame and Catch 22; Morrison, Barthelme and Barth.
Of course opinions are going to differ, that’s part of the process...but without valuation and some form of agreed upon criteria there isn’t a conversation.
Nigel:
You’re not describing a “conversation” so much as a culture-wide monologue in which minor variations of taste (on the consumer model, in which “Pepsi” and “Coke” are a counterfeited range of free will) burlesque a tolerance for “healthy dissent”. But your dream of “agreed upon criteria” (ratified as a formal treaty between James Wood and Harriet Klausner, perhaps?) is no longer possible, for at least three reasons: 1) the disappearance of a culturally status-anxious middleclass, vulnerable to normative bullying re: Taste; 2) the shifting of bookchat so far from center stage in the aggregate mind of the “West” that only extremists with irreconcilable differences bother to sink much effort into arguing the point (eg, you and I); 3) the Benneton Effect of blurred-or-fragmented-or-even-schizoid aesthetic criteria along race/gender/nationality/age/ language lines as they flood the lecture halls, bookstores, support groups and chat rooms.
The crucial point you miss is that that list of yours (citing Heller to Sterne, et al) must leave room for material that you not only have never heard of, but that you should *hate*, *necessarily*, in order to be more relevant or valid. A canon loses its special connection to Art when it’s nothing but a nornative cudgel.
Retrograde dreams of 19th century near-hegemony are doomed to remain just that, when it comes to the state-of-the-art *Imagination of Das Volk*. The best that you (and your co-quasi-religionists) will manage to pull off is a local amplification of FuddyDuddyismus as it pertains to Lit.
Actually, let me amend that summing up to note that a critic-proof embodiment of new forms such as “Iron Man” could teach you a thing or two about Hegemony.
Steven,
As a purely academic exercise your non-evaluative/non aesthetic approach may have some use in the classroom; but for those driven by the pleasure principle, and a desire for self enhancement and self discovery...those who can’t spend their entire lives reading...advice from ‘wise,’ well read critics whose arguments in favour of what should be read are sound, is welcome and necessary.
Of course seeking out and trying to appreciate and understand what you ‘hate’ is an important aspect of developing taste. A canon is not a normative cudgel, rather its a valuable measuring stick, against which merit can be judged.
The point you are missing is that without some agreed upon evaluative criteria, there is no conversation; all you are doing is pissing in the wind, crying that taste is indisputable.
I think that agreed-upon texts are more important than evaluative criteria. However much we’d like to believe that the criteria determine the texts, I’m afraid they’re post hoc rationalizations of textual preferences.
Nigel,
Of course you’re right about the importance of aesthetic criteria; in general, I would rather listen to a well-reviewed album of instrumental rock than a panned album of hip-hop, despite the fact that I like hip-hop more, because I know I’m more likely to enjoy the album that received critical praise.
That’s not the problem; the problem is that you can’t read everything good in a lifetime. If you try to get around this by reading only the “solid gold classics,” then as Steven points out, you will read a disproportionate number of 19th Century novels for no better reason than the year of your birth. And that is dreary.
Steven, I agree with most of what you say here, and especially like the closing note about hegemony. Two reservations. First of all, the way you use the term “they” in your discussion of “Benetton” identity canons definitely reads as phobic of those others who do not share your race and culture. Second, while I agree that books are somewhat marginalized, other media are not, and the problems of canonization apply there too.
Joseph:
“Two reservations. First of all, the way you use the term ‘they’ in your discussion of “Benetton” identity canons definitely reads as phobic of those others who do not share your race and culture.”
Ach, the inherent problem of inflection in blog thread comments; I’m definitely among the “they” in that comment! But it’s difficult to make that clear.
As far as the “problems” of canonization go: there aren’t any, as long as we can accept that (paradox alert) there are as many canons as there are humans. The canon is dead; long live the canon, and so forth. Evaluative tools/criteria can be passed on without a set of evaluations.
Nigel:
“...advice from ‘wise,’ well read critics whose arguments in favour of what should be read are sound, is welcome and necessary.”
The best safeguard against normative results would probably be “advice” from a (possibly conflicting) variety of purviews. Isn’t that the essence of a “well-rounded” education?
Anyone reading “populist” critique these days has to notice that the most visible critics seem, largely, to be coming out of the same bag, which is the danger of capitalist skew: capitalism doesn’t offer a variety of choices; it’s the filtering process by which we arrive at the sharp end of the pyramid (call it the “one-president rule"). So, at the moment, critical scolds are ruling the roost (do they sell more newspapers? laugh).
The ideal classroom would unearth and resucitate critics who reward wild experimentation and present them along with the scolds (and I’m fully aware of my prejudicial language, but it’s not my responsibility to teach). The student would decide for her/his self; it’s not impossible to suggest that Captain Beefheart, Cee-Lo Green and Johann Sebastian Bach are equally valid, wherever the teacher’s true sentiments are to be found. All it takes is a teacher dedicated to leaving her/his personal preferences out of it; don’t we ask that of Supreme Court judges? The fact that the Supreme Court is too often a partisan tool doesn’t indict the system, but our perversion of it.
Bill:
“However much we’d like to believe that the criteria determine the texts, I’m afraid they’re post hoc rationalizations of textual preferences.”
I think that depends on how “clean” we keep the evaluative criteria. Which is why *actual* writers should be involved in the process of designing them. There’s a directed force peculiar to strong writing (density of idea; attention to word choice; vitality of creation), developed on the job, so to speak, that transcends the question of taste.
Here’s another way of connecting the four points:
Whether we like it or not, a canon, whether personal or external to oneself, will always be in place, given the reality that there are too many works to read and that one will not have the time and money to read all or most of them.
That is why some critics are needed, given the fact that they will view, listen to, or read more works than we can in a year or even in our lifetime. They are in a better position than we are to evaluate works of art.
We ignore them because too many works are produced each year and many of those that are popular are marketed heavily. Our fetish, then, is mass entertainment.
Unfortunately, this proliferation of entertainment, like cars, appliances, and many other things that are part of the conveniences of middle class life, is also leading to rising debts and resource depletion. Given those, we are now also facing what might be a severe credit crunch, rising unemployment, and rising prices for food, oil, and minerals: our “pink slip.”
In the long run, then, we might be forced to cut down on resource use and localize. The middle class lifestyle, which consists of mass entertainment, appliances and cars, mass-produced food and other products through cheap oil, might soon come to an end, and with that the factors that caused us to question the idea of literary canons and critics.