The critic in the modern world : public criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood

273 Pages·2014·1.79 MB·English

by  Ley

The Critic in the Modern World
The Critic in the Modern World
Public Criticism from Samuel Johnson to
James Wood
James Ley
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 A Degree of Insanity: Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
2 Fire from the Flint: William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
3 A Thyesteän Banquet of Clap-Trap: Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
4 The Principles of Modern Heresy: T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)
5 ‘I do like the West and wish it would stop declining’: Lionel Trilling (1905–
1975)
6 The Secular Wood: James Wood (1965–)
Postscript
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Permission to quote from the work of T. S. Eliot courtesy Faber and Faber Ltd.
Excerpts from Selected Essays by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1950 by Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, copyright © renewed 1978 by Esme
Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company, all rights reserved. Excerpts from Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot,
copyright © 1975 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, all rights reserved. Excerpts from Notes
towards the Definition of Culture by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1949 by T.S. Eliot,
copyright © by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Company, all rights reserved. Excerpts from After Strange Gods: A
Primer of Modern Heresy by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1934 by Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company, copyright © renewed 1962 by T. S. Eliot,
reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, all
rights reserved. Excerpts from The Letters of T. S. Eliot, copyright 1988 by SET
Copyrights Limited, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company, all rights reserved.
Extracts from the work of Lionel Trilling copyright © Lionel Trilling, used by
permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Extracts from Sincerity and Authenticity
by Lionel Trilling, pp. 2, 11, 20, 26, 56, 63, 156, 157, 158, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1971, 1972 by the President and Fellows
of Harvard College, reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Quotations from the work of James Wood courtesy James Wood and the Wylie
Agency LLC. Quotations from The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the
Novel by James Wood, published by Jonathan Cape, reprinted by permission of
The Random House Group Limited.
Introduction
T. S. Eliot declared that criticism is as inevitable as breathing. Like so many of
his unequivocal pronouncements, the line is instantly memorable. Its rhetorical
force derives partly from the confidence with which it is asserted, but also from
its appearance of almost bland self-evidence. One instantly knows what he
means. The claim of inevitability would seem to rest on the unremarkable
assumption that we all respond, on some level, to the cultural artefacts we
encounter over the course of our lives. These responses naturally involve us in a
process of evaluation and interpretation, even if we do not bother to formulate
them beyond the recognition of an instinctive sense of like or dislike, even if we
never feel compelled to share our impressions with another person. Find
something meaningful or moving, engaging or irrelevant, beautiful or ugly, and
one is beginning to act as a critic.
Understood in this way, criticism does indeed seem to be a universal, even
definitive, human activity. Yet the inclusiveness of such a definition renders it
problematic in a way that limits its usefulness. If criticism is inevitable, if it is
simply the normal process of analysis and judgement by which we arrive at our
personal opinions, the critic is not in a position to claim any distinct cultural
function or identity. The many attempts that have been made throughout the
modern era to define the function of literary criticism, to align its practice with
some higher purpose or to justify its existence as an independent intellectual
discipline can be understood, at least in part, as responses to this uneasy sense
that the critic seems to have no stable, clearly defined purpose – that the cultural
position of the critic is self-created and must therefore be constantly scrutinized
and re-conceived. One of the most evident of the various cultural anxieties that
have shadowed the practice of literary criticism throughout its modern history is
a nagging sense of doubt about its necessity. What purpose does the critic serve?
Do we really need an intermediary between reader and text? Are we not
perfectly capable of making sense of the work for ourselves? ‘One of the
historical vulnerabilities of literature, as a subject for study’, Martin Amis has
observed,
is that it has never seemed difficult enough. This may come as news to the
buckled figure of the book-reviewer, and to the literary critic, but it’s true.
Hence the various attempts to elevate it, complicate it, systematise it.
Interacting with literature is easy. Anyone can join in, because words (unlike
palettes and pianos) lead a double life: we all have a competence.1
One response to the uncertain cultural status of the literary critic is to claim
expertise, to position oneself as the person who is more knowledgeable,
insightful, cogent, sensitive and articulate than the average reader. Eliot often
makes a show of downplaying the intellectual ambitions of his criticism, but he
is, in fact, a master of this critical strategy. Everyone is a critic, according to
Eliot; the problem is that almost everyone is a bad critic. In his early critical
writings, in particular, he surveys a world awash with naive and sentimental
responses to literature. He chides critics who have not read well enough or
widely enough, who have failed to see the big picture, whose philosophies are
inadequate or unsound, whose definitions lack clarity and precision. He deplores
criticism that is merely subjective and piecemeal when it should always strive to
be objective and comprehensive.
In practice, Eliot never quite lived up to his own critical ideal of
comprehensive objectivity. It is doubtful anyone could. But as a means of
establishing his critical authority, his stance proved remarkably effective. His
success, to be fair, was the result of more than just self-confidence and a talent
for rhetorical assertion. Eliot really was more knowledgeable and insightful
about poetry than many other critics before or since; he really did have original
things to say on the subject (I am less inclined to credit him with sensitivity and
cogency, particularly with regard to his social and political views). Many of the
critical ideas he proposed found a receptive audience because he developed
shrewd and incisive ways to articulate crucial aspects of the emerging aesthetic
of literary modernism.
But Eliot’s donnish air of superiority has dated badly, and, as a result, it allows
us to recognize that putting on such airs is something of an occupational hazard
for the critic. For to criticize something is inevitably to assume a position of
intellectual mastery, to offer one’s interpretation as a form of meta-discourse. As
any number of literary theorists have pointed out, criticism cannot be regarded as
an innocent activity. The act of interpretation, even when undertaken in the best
of faith, is an exercise in selectivity; it involves an element of appropriation, in
which the critic overwrites the work in his own idiom and, in doing so, adapts it
to suit his own purposes. The problem that arises, then, is not simply the heresy
of paraphrase but the question of the critic’s underlying agenda, the intellectual
position he is seeking, perhaps rather sneakily, to advance.
Eliot’s pretence of reluctant superiority is apt to seem unsatisfactory to
contemporary readers because its dated quality highlights the ambiguous, even
contradictory, cultural position that the literary critic occupies. He appears to
affirm the democratic universality of the critical impulse, to demonstrate and
thus validate the authority of the individual judgement. But he also presumes to
act as a rather stern cultural policeman. As the person who takes it upon himself
to sort out the confusions of others and to correct, rather wearily, their errors of
taste, he cannot help but appear suspiciously aristocratic.
This awkwardness is not unique to Eliot, but it is exaggerated in his criticism,
partly because his views are indeed aristocratic, but also because of the way he
plays up to the role of gentleman critic. He affects to be both amateur and expert.
He is the perfect example of a literary critic who advocates critical rigour
without actually being rigorous, whose arguments are casual and impressionistic
but are presented as rational and authoritative. He claims for himself the high
moral ground of disinterestedness, insisting that his social and political views are
not implicated in the value judgements he makes about literary works, yet his
criticism clearly has a wider agenda. The self-conscious way in which he
identifies with the English critical tradition, his appropriation of many of its
mannerisms and commonplaces (his line about the inevitability of criticism is a
reformulation of John Dryden’s observation that to breathe is to judge and
Samuel Johnson’s maxim that judgement is forced on us by experience), throws
the internal contradictions of that tradition into sharp relief because he claims to
be philosophically opposed to its liberal-humanist orientation. Throughout his
critical writings, he bases his critical authority as an individual, paradoxically, on
his advocacy of an impersonal, anti-individualist critical position. As such, he
provides a particularly dramatic example of a critic attempting to solve the basic
problem of how to construct an effective public persona.
Eliot, like the five other critics discussed in The Critic in the Modern World,
practices a version of what George Watson called ‘descriptive criticism’ – a
mode of writing Watson traces back to the criticism of Dryden and whose
informal combination of personal responsiveness and literary analysis has
predominated for more than three centuries.2 One of the defining features of this
kind of critical writing is its element of subjectivity. To the extent that the
critic’s arguments involve explanations and justifications which evoke matters of
individual judgement, they establish themselves on the unstable ground of
aesthetic preference. It is this necessary involvement in the subjective that turns
modern literary criticism against itself. Northrop Frye makes the distinction in
the sharpest of terms in his polemical introduction to Anatomy of Criticism.
Accepting Eliot’s premise that literature should be regarded as a discrete object
of intellectual scrutiny, Frye argues that genuine criticism should have nothing to
do with personal appreciation. It must be disentangled from what he calls ‘the
history of taste’, which he goes on to mock (along with Eliot himself) by
describing the reputations of poets booming and crashing in an imaginary stock
exchange: ‘That wealthy investor Mr. Eliot, after dumping Milton on the market,
is now buying him again; Donne has probably reached his peak and will begin to
taper off; Tennyson may be in for a slight flutter but the Shelley stocks are still
bearish.’3
Frye’s classic study is a heroic work of systematization and one of the more
noteworthy historical attempts to place the practice of literary criticism on a firm
intellectual footing. His dismissal of apparently arbitrary and impermanent
assertions of cultural value invites easy assent. Yet, viewed from a slightly
different perspective, it is precisely the unstable, subjective, presumptuous
quality of descriptive criticism that makes the literary critic a cultural figure of
particular interest. Edward Said observes that ‘one of the hallmarks of modernity
is how, at a very deep level, the aesthetic and the social need to be kept, and
often are consciously kept, in a state of irreconcilable tension’.4 If we take the
salient features of western modernity to be the rise of secularism and liberal
democracy, the achievement of near-universal literacy, the creation of the public
sphere and the mass media, the notion of individualism and the sense of cultural
enfranchisement these phenomena have engendered, then the ambiguous
position of the critic takes on a symbolic significance. The tradition of
descriptive criticism has emerged in parallel with the transformations of
modernity and is itself a product of those transformations. Criticism might be
inevitable as breathing, but becoming a critic is not. For the critic is the person
who takes the ‘inevitable’ critical impulse and performs the secondary action of
publicly articulating his ideas. He addresses his audience as an individual and
thus faces the problem of presenting his views – which extend beyond merely
aesthetic questions to touch on social, political, philosophical, psychological and
theological issues – in an effective manner. He must individuate his voice, find a
way to cut through, to project his ideas with authority. In his engagement with
the modern agora, he embodies the problem of the enfranchised individual who
must address the particularities of his immediate cultural context while
remaining apart from that context, who must find a way to negotiate the tension
between his own sense of personal conviction and the destabilizing cultural
forces and shifting values of modern secular society.
My exploration of these issues has its origin in my own background in literary
criticism. In many ways, this book is the culmination of more than a decade
spent scratching out an uncertain living as a freelance critic. It is inspired by a
desire to investigate the history of the inherently precarious profession of literary
criticism in some depth, and also by a desire to explore the possibilities of the
long essay as an accessible form of critical writing.
The six writers discussed in this book – Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt,
Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling and James Wood – have been
chosen because they have three features in common: they all write in English,
they are all literary critics (among other things) and their criticism has been read
by a sizeable non-specialist audience. That they are all public critics is very
much the crux of the matter. The point of departure for the essays that form the
body of this book is my interest in the way each of these well-known literary
figures has chosen to present himself to his audience. They assume an intimate
connection between their subjects’ rhetorical propensities – their habits of
expression, the strategies of argumentation they use – and the individual critic’s
need to develop an effective public persona, to distinguish himself as an
authoritative critical voice.
The chapters are conceived as essays. They are also intended as examples of
the kind of writing they set out to investigate. That is, they are themselves works
of descriptive criticism written in a familiar style with minimal recourse to
technical language and abstruse theorizing. They are, of course, longer and more
involved than the average magazine or journal article, but I hope that their style
is such that – hypothetically, at least – they would not appear out of place in the
pages of one of the innumerable literary periodicals that have bloomed,
flourished and withered over the past three centuries – the same kinds of