28 April 1999, 2600 words
Literary criticism is the second shakiest of all academic disciplines (the shakiest being Art Criticism.) Its professors expound only on ideas about other ideas, and boldfacedly purport to determine which of the original ideas have merit and which have not. While this to a great extent is also true of analytical philosophy, literary critics usually lack the logical rigor of philosophers. Nor does literary criticism apply the scientific method to its material - books - save in the most trivial fashion. Literature mavens reject induction (what has made most books most liked most often?) in favour of elitism (what most arcane values have caused the smallest cliques to praise selected books?) Its empiricism is severely limited, resting largely upon the assumption that what authors say has relevance to areas even outside the author's experience.
Moreover, the pillars upon which such assumptions rest are hidden in the undergrowth of academic analyses of form, style, theme, historical, sociological, psychological and political classifications. Indeed, between formalism, structuralism, semiotics, hermeneutics, Marxist, Freudian, and feminist interpretations, it often seems as though the pillars actually are the undergrowth.
This lack of grounding seems to me to be a philosophical deficiency. But it might be argued, and justifiably so, that literary criticism cannot be scientific and indeed should not even make the attempt. But, if this is the case, why should anyone place any faith in anything a critic says about a work of art? "Criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does," wrote Oscar Wilde, meaning that a good critic was required to have a more highly developed sensibility and a wider knowledge than the writer. Unfortunately, such critics are more the exception than the rule.
Despite these obvious shortcomings, literature enjoys more intellectual respect than any other academic field. This is so even though, in respect to individuals, a physicist is generally considered more intelligent than a literature professor. But if death was the topic of discussion at a cocktail party, the person who quotes John Donne - "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so" - impresses more than the person who quotes Rudolf Clausius - "A passage of heat from colder to a hotter body cannot take place without compensation" (the Second Law of thermodynamics, which defines entropy.)
While it is true that the first quote is more comforting than the second, it is also true that scientific illiteracy is considered excusable even in the best circles, whereas literary ignorance always attracts the raised eyebrow and curled lip. The foundation of this respect for literature is largely tradition, for literary work enjoys a longer intellectual history than any other academic discipline in Western civilization. And the older a particular literary field is, the more respect it tends to enjoy. This is not because of any intrinsic superiority in the literature itself. Instead, it is because of factors entirely disconnected from literary merit: translation gives the professors the academic respectability of linguistic proficiency, as does the historical research needed to interpret the literature properly. But more important than all this is the awe that the past holds in virtually all fields of human endeavour.
Tradition, however, is not a standard by which an intellectual discipline can rightfully be praised. Doing so gives the discipline the status of a religion (theology, of course, being the third shakiest academic discipline), and literature professors, like most priests, have been quite content to rest on their laurels, once they achieve tenure. Moreover, an aspiring professor would probably not be well advised to question too closely the tenets of literary faith. To a great extent, literary criticism suffers from the silence that attended the emperor's new clothes which, you may recall, only smart people could see.
This attitude has done great harm to literature and writing, for the irony is that there has never been a time when literary criticism is so necessary: the reasons being the sheer volume of books now being written and published; the competition for attention from other media, such as film, magazines and the Internet; and new social norms being established throughout the Western world. The literary critic is a crucial middleman in the modern book market yet, although virtually every literature professor would complain about the decline of reading and good writing, few seem constrained to defend - and, what is more important, extend - the range of their subject. I do not by this mean to revive that tired catechism about the novel being dead, as V.S. Naipaul, supposedly one of the form's better practitioners, confidently declared in a 1995 interview in the Observer newspaper. Literary practitioners and pundits have predicted the death of the novel for over half a century, yet it seems to have survived pretty well for such an indisputably terminal patient. In Britain, a 1996 Policies Study Report showed book sales to be up since 1989, with real-term spending increasing by 45 per cent. The percentage of Britons buying 16 or more books in a year rose from 28 to 30 percent. Moreover, fiction is still the biggest category of books bought. In the United States, the emergence of giant bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble, the buyover of a publisher like Random House by a German conglomerate, and the fact that bad novelists like John Grisham can become multi-millionaires, suggests that book reading is still an active practice among the populations of the Western world. Even the Internet has hundreds of sites devoted exclusively to books.
Literary critics can take very little credit for this continued interest in books, though. What they can take credit for is the 500,000 pounds advance given in 1997 to Arundhati Roy for her novel The God of Small Things and for keeping Toni Morrison's six books in print long enough for her to be read on Oprah . (Morrison also won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years before this, but Song of Solomon still didn't become a bestseller until Oprah mentioned it on her talkshow.) But there has been a widening gulf in this century between the books that people actually read and talk about and recommend to their friends, and the books that literary critics like.
The reason for this is basically elitism. In literature, as in so many other areas of human activity, there is a wide class schism. P.G. Wodehouse, this century's acknowledged master of comic fiction, wrote with his usual benign humour in 1971, "I have always been alive to the fact that I am not one of the really big shots. Like Jeeves, I know my place, and that place is at the far end of the table among the scurvy knaves and scullions."
Ironically, it was Wodehouse's polished prose that helped make light humour literarily respectable, but nowadays a lot of what critics consider witty - well, isn't. Again, elitism has taken over - if everyone gets the joke, it probably isn't a good joke. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works , puts it this way: "The steadfast patrons of the arts are the aristocracy and those who want to join them. Modern and post-modern works are intended not to give pleasure but to baffle the rubes in Preoria."
The most common technique any elitist group uses to legitimize (and so preserve) its power is to pretend that its authority is innate. Thus, kings used to spread the rumour that they were appointed by God, and literary critics behave as though they are gods. There is this assumption in the critical canon that some absolute, abstract standard exists by which literary works can be judged. (Critics never actually say so, but it is implicit in their papers.) If this standard did indeed exist, there would not have been such significant differences between the lists of The100 Best Novels published earlier this year by the editorial board of Modern Library and by students of the Raqdcliffe Publishing Course. But in any case, even a hard science like physics claims no absolute criteria. Only mathematicians can claim a priori knowledge with any degree of certainty, and that is only because mathematics is essentially tautological. But such a position in literary criticism is intellectually indefensible, since literature itself is obviously not a priori and literary criticism is obviously even less so.
Thus, to say that art is for art's sake is to say nothing. Art, unlike mathematics, has no independent validity. An equation can be true even if no one but its creator ever knows about it (though the equation would be useless.) But good art is always a social construct (a fact bad artists generally don't appreciate.) Art lives through human interaction, through response, which is why most of what we now call great literature, from Euripides to Shakespeare to Twain, was popular art in its day. The Marxist/Pan-Africanist writer CLR James once noted, "It is a lesson in irony to compare what Greek drama is today - the subject of studies in universities or precious performances in small theatres in London, Paris and New York - with what it was in the days it was created - a tremendous popular production in which the people themselves were vitally interested and settled who should win the prizes." Wilde similarly noted that "the Greeks were a nation of art-critics."
This is a perspective that literature professors - though not book reviewers, except in the higher class of newspapers - steadfastly ignore. They pretend that the standards that apply to the literatures of past centuries and different cultures are universal. But fundamentalism in literature is just as pernicious as fundamentalism in religion, and has much the same root. Salman Rushdie, an excellent literary critic, defined the following criteria for judging the worth of a book: "language, voice, psychological or social insight, imagination or talent." Rushdie was making the point that criticism often leveled at Indian writers by Indian critics have little to do with literary values. "Its practitioners [he writes] are denigrated for being too upper middle-class; for lacking diversity in their choices of themes and techniques...for being deracinated...for being insufficiently grounded in the ancient literary traditions of India." Such criticisms are remarkably stupid, and Rushdie is entirely right in condemning them. But, in his essay Outside the Whale , Rushdie says, "works of art, even works of entertainment, do not come into being in a social and political vacuum." The subtle contradiction here, it seems to me, is that Rushdie in the first quote seems to imply that language, voice, psychology and social insight are, in fact, entirely divorced from that sociopolitical background - in other words, some sort of absolutes. (Whether this is so or not must be discussed elsewhere.)
But, extrapolating from the kind of books they praise, the standards that critics typically apply to modern novels are neither the first set that Rushdie approves of, nor the second set that he rejects. My own observation is that literary excellence as defined by critics rests on the following criteria: (1) sparse or no description; or, opposingly, (2) description that is metaphorical and full of imagery; (3) many shifts in consciousness and/or time; (4) characters who are quirky, odd, eccentric, weird or outright freaks; (5) a thin plot or, better yet, no plot at all.
The result of this is that the books critics tend to favour are books that the majority of readers consider unreadable or simply boring. When I put this view to one professor, she said, "Perhaps. But the books are more 'mine-able' - there is lots of potential in them for literary critics to theorize and get published and hence stay employed." One cannot ignore this motive of self-interest, especially when it comes to those books that are feted by critics for literary prizes.
There is, of course, an obvious alternative explanation for readers finding critics' choices unreadable: that the average level of intelligence among readers is so low that mediocre books will always be more popular than good ones. Certainly, Danielle Steele, Robert James Waller (The Bridges of Madison County) and Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook ) provide inarguable evidence for this. At the same time, average intelligence is not as average as intellectuals would like to believe. The Gaussian curve, a bell-shaped graph that maps averages, when applied to IQ predicts certain percentages of retardation and high intelligence. But the predictions are not borne out by actual tests. Instead, researchers find excessive retardation by mathematical averages, but also excessive high scores. In any case, the examples of great writers who were not popular in their day are far fewer than those who were. The drama company run by William Shakespeare usually played to packed houses, people rushed the docks to await the latest installments of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist , Mark Twain was the most famous and well-paid writer of his day and, in more modern times, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time stayed on bestseller lists for months.
Stephen King, who might quite accurately be described as the world's most popular writer, has this to say about the more intellectual critics who have dismissed him as a hack: "an intellectual's definition of a hack seems to be 'an artist whose work is appreciated by too many people.'" I want to suggest that an author like King, who has written over thirty books, several of which have topped the bestseller charts across several oceans and languages, cannot be dismissed by anyone who wishes to truly understand 20th century writing. The standard critical argument that popular literature aims merely to entertain and that literary works have a more serious intent is not, I think, a defensible one. Who is to say that intellectual people don't read primarily because difficult prose gives them a cerebral rush? This elitist perspective of critics might have been valid a century, or even a half-century, ago when writers almost always came from a socioeconomic elite, as did most of their audience. But that world no longer exists. Admittedly, the changes occurred with astonishing rapidity. By 1941, as Hitler attempted to establish his Third Reich, the number of democratic countries in the world had fallen to about a dozen. But the Axis was defeated and, five decades later, 60 percent of the world's nations have democratically elected governments. Moreover, although one billion people in the world are still illiterate, if present trends continue, the United Nations Development Fund estimates that 4-5 billion people should have access to basic education by 2001.
What, then, will be the place of literature and literary criticism in the new millennium? With over half the world functioning under democratic systems, with literacy rates of over 70 per cent in most Western nations, and with the rapid spread of information creating a culture both more global and more personalized, I think literary criticism must take a hard look at its standards, values and techniques if it is not to become as outmoded as the abacus. The first step in doing so is to question all the tenets of literary faith, abandoning those articles that no longer apply in a world vastly different to the one in which the novel was born four centuries ago.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
James, C.L.R. - The C.L.R. James Reader, Blackwell Publishers,
1992
Jenkins, S. - "A bookworm fights back", Internet Times, 1996
King, S. - Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Signet Books, 1994.
Pinker, S. - How the Mind Works, W.W. Norton & Co, 1997.
Rushdie, S. - Imaginary Homelands, Granta Books, 1991
- "Damme, this is the Oriental Scene for You!", The New
Yorker, June 23&30, 1997.
Wilde, O. - The Works of Oscar Wilde, Spring Books, 1963
Wodehouse, P.G. - Vintage Wodehouse., Penguin Books, 1975.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh