The role of critics varies greatly according to the mission they imagine for themselves and the audience they address. Academic critics writing for their peers will take a different tack from public critics speaking to a general audience, or from writers themselves using criticism to carve out a space for their own work. Surprisingly, novelists and especially poets have proved to be among our best critics. Poet-critics from Samuel Johnson to T.S. Eliot form the main line of the English critical tradition, while the foundations for a coherent criticism of the novel were laid by Henry James.
American writers are better known for their prickly aversion to critics rather than their just appreciation, even when critics contributed immensely to their following and reputation. My favorite example, one that set my blood boiling, was Saul Bellow’s likening of the critic to a deaf man tuning a piano. (Had he merely said “tone deaf” I wouldn’t have been so offended.) Then there are the old saws that continue to surface: “Those who can’t, criticize.” “No one ever grew up dreaming of becoming a critic.” All of this implies that critics, with little imagination themselves, are hardly more than dull-witted surveyors or failed writers, stewing in their inadequacy and taking out this resentment on their betters, the really creative spirits. As one wag put it, a critic is someone who arrives late on the battlefield to kill off the survivors.
In fact, really good critics are writers, with their own style and literary personality, though their works feed off other writing, as novelists and poets feed off the text of our common life. As writers, they must remain faithful to their subjects yet pursue their own angle of vision. They have to tell the truth, a truth we’ll acknowledge, but, like Emily Dickinson, “tell it slant.” They distill art into meaning, punish failure, and lionize success, but, like all writers, they work by way of selection, even distortion.
We remember critics for their temperament as much as their critical judgment: the pugilistic vigor of William Hazlitt, the digressive idiosyncrasies of John Ruskin, the clerical acerbity of Eliot, the transparent windowpane of George Orwell, the poetic conjunctions of Walter Benjamin, the Hegelian dialectics of Theodor Adorno. We can forgive a great deal in a critic who manifests a striking sensibility or a startling point of view, as we are seduced by writers who freshen our sense of the familiar world.
Some critics survive on the strength of their prose alone; some by promoting new artists and movements; by introducing seminal concepts (the objective correlative, the dissociation of sensibility); by demonstrating sheer intelligence or depth of learning; or by helping reorient the history and direction of an art form. As it happens, Eliot qualifies in all of those categories.
Since there can be no single profile of the ideal critic, let me lay down a bit of history and a few features of the kind of criticism I love to read and have tried to write.
It was only in the mid-20th century, thanks to the New Criticism, that criticism itself began to play a major role in the academic study of literature, which was previously focused on textual scholarship and factual research. Because of the new emphasis on close reading, most academic criticism grew too long, too pedantic and detailed. The critic felt obliged to lay out every step of the reading, rather than just the interpretive outcome, take-away, or upshot of disciplined attention. As the pressure to publish increased, such monographs too often became little more than stepping stones in the critic’s job search. Earlier critics read just as closely but luxuriated in writerly vices like aphorism, intuition, and apodictic summation. They kicked away the analytic ladder that brought them to their destination, their own way of reading.
Most journalistic criticism, on the other hand, is too brief and superficial, too poorly informed and weightlessly opinionated. Trapped by space limitations and deadlines, such pieces habitually default on context, ignoring much that undergirds the work and conditions its meaning. Apart from the longer, more intricate reviews that appear in little magazines and intellectual journals, journalistic reviews habitually reduce criticism to consumer guidance. They strike attitudes and ventilate feelings, fearlessly unsupported by argument or evidence.
If critical writing is to fulfill its purpose as illuminating commentary on works of art, then the best vehicle for criticism is not the extended monograph or the hastily written review but the literary essay—personal, reflective, attuned to a continuing conversation. That is why critical journals (like the avant-garde magazines of the 1920s and 1930s) and critical schools (the New York Intellectuals, the New Critics) were so important to 20th-century criticism: They kept a conversation going; they responded to new movements in the arts with strong revaluations and critical methods that met the challenge of difficult new writing.
It follows that the criticism I enjoy is more affective than cerebral, more empirical than theoretical. The glory of the essay, since Montaigne, comes in the way it generalizes from the concrete, raising “perception to the point of principle and definition,” as Eliot put it. Much of recent criticism works the other way around, setting up a template of theory or method and shoehorning arbitrary examples into it. It relies on analogy and ingenuity and has little truck with the demands of aesthetics, too readily dismissed as an ideology. In rare cases, this theoretical approach shines a different light on a problematic work or a vexing literary issue. Too often, though, it is counterintuitive, distorting literary works with its own ideological agenda or simply missing the mark.
Do we experience a shock of recognition when we read such a commentary? Does it open up a new path of understanding for us, or merely serve as a vehicle for our search for identity or our political or moral prejudices? Does the reading actually confront the power of the literary work or its agonizing failure to muster that power?
Love and hate are crucial for critics, along with deep-seated ambivalence. Those emotional engagements reveal that the writer’s work has really touched us. Authentic passion feeds the flame of good critical prose and supplies energy empowering the critic to bring light to the reader. That is why sharply formulated, deeply experienced literary judgments, not simply analytic arguments, are vital to the critic’s task. They track the movement of a genuine critical sensibility. Make-or-break evaluation shows that the stakes are high, that the critic is engaged, that the subject deeply matters. A critic needs an analytic mind but also something of a polemical style, for criticism is also a form of persuasion, with living issues at stake.
The work of criticism is a juggling act, a discourse without clear borders. The critic must play the role of what I once called a double agent, balancing text and context, a sensitive grasp of form along with a feeling for the social currents that effectively shape art. F.R. Leavis is usually seen as a formal critic, yet he insisted that “one cannot seriously be interested in literature and remain purely literary in interests.” In principle, nothing is alien to the critic: the writer’s biography, the history of ideas, the social history of the times, the tools of philology, the evolution of formal conventions, the parallels to other arts, the insights gleaned from literary history but also from other disciplines.
Those blurred boundaries have been unconscionably abused in recent years, as critics squander their authority by poaching on fields they know little about, pronouncing on subjects they know even less about. One result is that a stereotyped progressive mind-set—the well-meaning agendas of political correctness—has become critics’ received wisdom, and more open-minded scholars are unable to take their work seriously. Historians recoil from the anecdotal evidence of New Historicism, for example, just as social scientists resist ideological position-taking in social criticism. Research gives way to fashionable cant, currently some form of postmodernism and anti-essentialism, which caricatures the wisdom of the past, sanctions relativism, and effectively assumes what needs to be proved.
Mindful of the trap of critics’ borrowing from fields they haven’t mastered, I call myself a generalist, a public critic, which is simply another name for an intellectual, someone whose first love was the exchange of ideas. As an undergraduate at Columbia, I learned to pillage literature for ideas, to quarry it crudely for momentous themes, but somehow I also imbibed a strong historical sense, what Philip Rahv called the sixth sense of the critic. Eliot, in reshaping the canon, noted that this historical awareness “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” For him, this was as essential to poets as it was to critics.
That sense of the present permeated the work of the New York Intellectuals. Intrigued by the ambitious reach of their writing, its crossing of conventional boundaries, I became attuned to the politics of literature, of literature as an actual intervention in the world. But it was only as a graduate student at Yale, its English department still under the influence of the last stages of New Criticism, and later at the University of Cambridge, still under the influence of Leavis, that I learned more about how literary works were put together, how they were made of language and exploited formal conventions.
I was then better able to appreciate two books that had particularly dazzled me in high school—A Tale of Two Cities and The Scarlet Letter. As a teenager, I had been amazed by their craftsmanship. They seemed ingeniously tooled, shaped to endure, yet their stories were also full of arresting details, resonant symbols, and vivid recreations of earlier times and places. They gave me intimations of both literary form and the pressure of history that I understood only years later.
Despite the importance of craft, works of art are not so much objects as experiences. Critics are not anatomists who murder to dissect but seismologists attuned to every rumble in the terrain of art and their own inner lives. When Matthew Arnold called poetry a criticism of life, he meant that life itself, the stream of felt experience, is what gives art meaning and value. Before 1900, no one would have questioned that. But in the 20th century, we grew so concerned about the mediations of art—the conventions of realism, the techniques of modernism, the movements that congregated into different schools—that we sometimes lost sight of art’s purpose and enduring appeal.
Art reshapes life into staged experiences, truthful inventions, which further blurs the boundaries of criticism, creating an opening from purely aesthetic criticism into moral and social criticism. That was the trajectory of the great Victorian critics—Thomas Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin—though it was also resisted by the successors they influenced, including Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, who disliked moralizing yet themselves wrote in that sweeping prophetic strain. They had their own social gospel, founded on art and sensation as liberating forms of experience.
For me, the arts offer invaluable clues to the inner configurations of a culture, its intimate depths of mind and feeling. The alienating effects of industrial society created the conditions for a social criticism grounded in aesthetics, for art pointed to a potential for human fulfillment that modern life had undermined. Twentieth-century critics like Orwell, Leavis, Edmund Wilson, and Lionel Trilling were heirs to that tradition, which has few successors today.
Despite its ambitions as a critique of ideology, postmodern relativism lays down a path of acquiescence to commerce and power rather than effective resistance. It turns its back on moral judgment, seeing it as a form of hierarchy and elitism, though criticism has always demanded a trained sensibility, capable of doing the necessary work of discrimination. Eliot described criticism, simply but memorably, as “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.”
“Correction” rings oddly in contemporary ears, for it hints at exalted standards and suggests that the few who know more or feel deeply might offer instruction to the many, and might improve society in the process. Yet keen taste and discrimination remain the ultimate tests of the critic. They are forms of intimacy without which there can be no penetrating insight.
Instead we have today the democratization of criticism, represented by customer reviews of books and films on the Internet. Critical judgment increasingly resembles what we find on Web sites where hotels and restaurants are usefully rated by people impelled to write in or sound off. Their irritations and enthusiasms are unedited, and we know nothing about where they come from. We must turn into critics ourselves to weigh their worth. Criticism becomes a form of polling, in which we look for enlightenment from the man in the street.
In that context, it becomes wildly anachronistic to hold on to the Victorian notion of the critic as social or moral guide, or to the modernist vocation of the critic as mediator and expositor of difficult art, or even to the more general view of the critic as an informed intellectual who thinks hard about art and society, who has developed the faculty of focused attention, along with the rhetorical skills and the cast of mind to craft perceptions into argument.
That remains the mainstream of the critical tradition, and it speaks to the passions that drew me irresistibly to art and critical writing in the first place. At bottom, criticism is personal, agonistic, however thoughtful and measured its tone. It is Jacob wrestling with the angel, an existential encounter in which the full being of the critic confronts the full power of the work, which invites, yet also resists, critical translation.