A critic on a critic

• William Deresiewicz on James Wood in The Nation.

Wood's unwillingness to confront the contradictions in his thinking about these matters--to distinguish between realism and reality, artifice and experiment, character and person--points to a larger problem. Wood is a daring thinker, but he is not a particularly rigorous one. His powerfully associative mind tends to run him into logical cul-de-sacs that his supreme self-assurance prevents him from noticing. He often wanders from topic to topic, always too willing to be seduced from his path by the dappled description, the blooming detail. The general question tends to make him especially approximate; reading his critique of the gaseous George Steiner, I sometimes feel like I am watching two men beat each other with balloons. As at the larger scale, so at the smaller. Wood asserts that Mann's fiction is childlike because, among other things, it contains a lot of children. He says that human free will is not necessarily important to God, since God could have made us less free. While we might grant him enough room to argue that Morrison loves her characters too indulgently and then, four pages later, that she loves them less than she loves her language, we must draw the line when he tells us that Hamsun's characters "lie both to themselves and to us" and then, later in the same paragraph, that in his work "a character can lie neither to us nor to himself."

Wood's critical authority has become so daunting, it seems, that even he is afraid to challenge it. His argumentative method rests far too heavily on hand-waving, and while he is superb at turning a phrase, the fact that something sounds good doesn't guarantee that it makes any sense. Wood never stops to ask himself what his favorite formulas actually mean: characters who feel "real to themselves," who "forget" they're in a novel and so forth. These are obviously only metaphors, but metaphors for what? What, for that matter, does "lifeness" mean? And to what extent is Wood willing to take responsibility for his assertion, near the end of How Fiction Works, his new treatise on novelistic technique, that we should "replace the always problematic word 'realism' with the much more problematic word 'truth'"? Is something true (or beautiful, or good) just because James Wood says so?

Serves you right for Googling yourself

• Garth Risk Hallberg looks into Amazon's review practices at Slate.
  

Hallberg, thankfully, doesn't make the Franzen mistake of biting the hand that pats his head. Not that you should take an Amazon review seriously, of course -- you should leave that stuff to the real pros, right?

Absent the institutional standards that govern (however notionally) professional journalists, Web 2.0 stakes its credibility on the transparency of users' motives and their freedom from top-down interference. Amazon, for example, describes its Top Reviewers as "clear-eyed critics [who] provide their fellow shoppers with helpful, honest, tell-it-like-it-is product information." But beneath the just-us-folks rhetoric lurks an unresolved tension between transparency and opacity; in this respect, Amazon exemplifies the ambiguities of Web 2.0. The Top 10 List promises interactivity—"How do I become a Top Reviewer?"—yet Amazon guards its rankings algorithms closely. A spokeswoman for the company would explain only that a reviewer's standing is based on the number of votes labeling a review "helpful," rather than on the raw number of books reviewed by any one person. The Top Reviewers are those who give "the most trusted feedback," she told me, echoing the copy on the Web site.

See the title of this blog

• Tom Lutz details the history of the "how to read" genre at Salon.

I don't want to stir up the dying embers of the theory wars or the culture wars, but why do Prose and Bloom open their guides with attacks against these mythical creatures? Bloom has them organizing into "covens" of gender and sexuality and multiculturalism. These boogeymen and boogeywomen and boogeytransgenderedpeople have destroyed reading, Bloom argues, by destroying irony, and "the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures." Itself sorely lacking in irony, this kind of talk sets up a dire narrative in which what Bloom calls "the restoration of reading" is needed, not just because literature is worth saving, but because civilization is at stake. This is a somewhat whorish old story, pressed into all kinds of service over the last century and more, not always to the most savory ends.

To save civilization, Prose and Bloom turn to that New Critical mantra any seasoned reader first heard in English lit 101: "the text itself." The phrase is one that all the most crotchety English professors have used over the last 30 years to counterattack the critical rabble like me and my old pals who dethroned the old guard with our malevolent theories. The conceit that Prose and Bloom share is that these new kids (however grayed at this point) are all looking at something besides the text itself, by which they mean a book that is read without theory, without reference to other values, and without mediation of any kind.

The novelist's curse

• Michael Dirda reviews Milan Kundera's newest book of essays in The Washington Post.

In subsequent pages of "The Curtain," Kundera discusses humor, 19th-century fiction's discovery of the "scene," an author's rights, the main problem of modernity -- "the 'bureaucratization' of social life"-- and how such masters as Broch and Musil used the novel as a vehicle for real thinking about society, politics and human purpose. Throughout, Kundera writes plainly but with passion. He bewails our current "ethic of the archive" -- the conviction that every scribble from a writer's hand is important -- and urges instead an "ethic of the essential." Only the aesthetic project itself truly matters, the fully achieved novel, poem or play. In this light, the desire for artistic fame isn't mere egotism:

"Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produced books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional -- thus non-useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious -- is contemptible. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania."

One may disagree with this -- surely, there is a place in our lives for entertainment and escape -- but, as the French expression goes, Kundera always gives you furiously to think.

Hannibal deflated

• John Crace rakes Thomas Harris' latest opus over the coals in The Guardian.

I've never liked Harris' stuff. He's a good storyteller, but the stories themselves are luridly pretentious and usually completely ludicrous. Even the movies have left me cold; The Silence of the Lambs has its fans but it's never done much for me. One has to wonder when Harris will put the ridiculous Lecter character to bed and move on to something else.

The Lecter family survived in the woods for more than a year, with young Hannibal wiling away his days memorising Euclid, until they were captured by the Nazi collaborators. Only Hannibal was found alive by the Soviets, a chain still attached to his neck.

"The poor boy has been left mute," wept Hannibal's uncle Robert, a noted painter. "Indeed," replied his wife, the impossibly beautiful and exotic Lady Murasaki. "He has suffered unimaginable horrors that readers can all too easily guess. We must take him back to our French chateau."

The fall, as the French don't call autumn, was late that year as Lady Murasaki nursed Hannibal back to speech. First, a farting flubber sound; then fully formed words.

See how Hannibal looks at Lady Murasaki. Hear how he cries out, "Mischa" in his nightmares. Notice how the text switches to italics and the present tense. Recognise the hand of a master storyteller with no editor.

Here's what real criticism looks like

It's always nice to read a well-written book review. Two have caught my eye of late:

• Malcolm Gladwell reviews Charles Tilly's Why? at The New Yorker.

Gladwell returns, this time training his lens on humanity's innate need for justification:

When we say that two parties in a conflict are “talking past each other,” this is what we mean: that both sides have a legitimate attachment to mutually exclusive reasons. Proponents of abortion often rely on a convention (choice) and a technical account (concerning the viability of a fetus in the first trimester). Opponents of abortion turn the fate of each individual fetus into a story: a life created and then abruptly terminated. Is it any surprise that the issue has proved to be so intractable? If you believe that stories are the most appropriate form of reason-giving, then those who use conventions and technical accounts will seem morally indifferent—regardless of whether you agree with them. And, if you believe that a problem is best adjudicated through conventions or technical accounts, it is hard not to look upon storytellers as sensationalistic and intellectually unserious. By Tilly’s logic, abortion proponents who want to engage their critics will have to become better storytellers—and that, according to the relational principles of such reason-giving, may require them to acknowledge an emotional connection between a mother and a fetus.

...Tilly argues that these conflicts are endemic to the legal system. Laws are established in opposition to stories. In a criminal trial, we take a complicated narrative of cause and effect and match it to a simple, impersonal code: first-degree murder, or second-degree murder, or manslaughter. The impersonality of codes is what makes the law fair. But it is also what can make the legal system so painful for victims, who find no room for their voices and their anger and their experiences. Codes punish, but they cannot heal.

• James Wood reviews Frederick Brown's Flaubert: A Biography at The New York Times.

Much of the time Flaubert's influence is too familiar to be visible. We so expect it that we hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert. And after Flaubert, it sometimes seems, this is all you can find.

This really makes me want to read Madame Bovary now. It's been sitting on my shelf for months now, tempting me. That's the great thing about Wood's essays; they charge you up with the appetite for rediscovery. He published a marvelous collection of them in 2000 called The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief; there's a particularly sharp essay on Nikolai Gogol's work which is endemic of his approach on the whole: fond yet unsentimental, practical yet hopeful. He doesn't hold much sympathy, however, for modernists like Toni Morrison or Thomas Pynchon (and he makes a strong argument for it, too), but you can't have everything in life.

Counting words & criticizing critics

Two good reads over at Slate this week:

• Jesse Sheidlower tries to clear up the debate over exactly how many words are in the English language.

Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, once wrote a great book called The F Word, a very entertaining dissection of our favorite four-letter expletive. It's out of print now but it's worth digging up a used copy; Sheidlower dissects the etymology, usage and social stigma associated with the word and comes up with more than a few surprising factoids. The Slate article is similar in approach, and is just as enlightening a read.

• Ben Yagoda tackles the criticism of Michiko Kakutani.

Everyone's favorite cranky literary critic gets some of her own medicine. Yagoda's piece is mostly even-handed in its dissection of the pros and cons of Kakutani's black-or-white critical approach, and makes a lot of sharp points about the nature of criticism along the way:

As a student at Oxford, the future drama critic Kenneth Tynan got back a paper with this comment: "Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives—They shd diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise.)" Tynan's tutor, who happened to be C.S. Lewis, was offering a lesson Kakutani could have benefited from. "Utterly devoid … wonderfully acute observations … debut novel … savvy social and psychological insights … cringe-making … embarrassing new low": Virtually every word or phrase is a cliché, or at best shopworn and lifeless, and evidence of Kakutani's solid tin ear. ...That's what can happen to a writer when she merely praises and merely blames. Kakutani appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do. Here, she tries to energize the prose with lapel-grabbing intensifiers like "utterly" and "wonderfully" and "superfluous" adjectives like "savvy" and "embarrassing," but they just make her look like she's protesting too much.

The biggest problem with Kakutani's criticism, it seems to me, is that she approaches it as a job, and not as something that can be a form of art in and of itself. It should be said that being a full-time critic is a punishing job, and nowhere near as fulfilling as you might think; imagine a stack of thirty to forty books or CDs or DVDs or whatever else staring you in the face every morning. You look at it and know without even sampling anything that one might be pretty good, a few others might show promise and the rest is likely garbage. One of the easiest pitfalls to fall into when writing criticism is having an opinion before you even begin, and counting the words as you write it, just so you can make your quota and go home. So much criticism ends up being about summarizing and insulting the work, rather than exploring its pros and cons, and it's usually because the very nature of the job is a serious test of your love of the form, and your interest in it. I look at Yagoda's list of "label-grabbing intensifiers" and all I can do is wince with recognition. Criticism has its own unique demands, and it's the bad critics that sully its reputation. But you could say that about so many other things...

After 2005, the only way to go is up

• Archaeologists have discovered the earliest known form of Mayan writing.

Too bad “the writing is mostly indecipherable.” But it does make you wonder what strange, wonderful combination of circumstances compelled humans to start writing. Some strange new desire to create, to make your mark... that, or to scrawl angrily, “For a good time, stop by Kukulcan’s tent.”

• Chapters from 1970s-era novels are rejected by 21st century publishers.

This is just hilarious:

Submitted to 20 publishers and agents, the typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of two books were assumed to be the work of aspiring novelists. Of 21 replies, all but one were rejections. Sent by The Sunday Times of London, the manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970's. One was "Holiday," by Stanley Middleton; the other was "In a Free State," by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Middleton said he wasn't surprised. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," he said. Mr. Naipaul said: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."

Like I always say, the only constant in the world is change, but there’s still no accounting for taste. Book buyers aren’t looking for, you know, writing; they’re looking for a multimillion-dollar cash cow they can turn into a movie, a record album and a theme park.

• Lit-crit is turning to science for new ideas.

An interesting read, from a different perspective. Author Nick Gillespie’s most intriguing point follows:

Both cognitive and evolutionary approaches to lit-crit have been gaining recognition and adherents over the past decade or so. Cognitive critics are less interested in recurring plots or specific themes in literature, but they share with the Darwinists an interest in using scientific advances to help explore the universally observed human tendency toward creative expression, or what the fascinating anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake called in Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, “making special.” This unironic -- though hardly uncritical -- interest in science represents a clear break with much of what might be called the postmodern orthodoxy, which views science less as a pure source of knowledge and more as a means of controlling and regulating discourse and power. The postmodern view has contributed to a keener appreciation of how appeals to science are often self-interested and obfuscating.

Criticism being the exploration of a personal reaction, it follows that the self-examination that it entails would lead some down a more scientific path, ostensibly to find data with the cold hardness of fact to support their own feelings and interpretations. But it figures just as much that those very “facts” are actually quite specious -- any statistician will tell you that you can find any amount of data to “prove” your “theory,” no matter how insane. Simple old willpower can bring any nutty notion to light but the ideas that strike a deeper, more logical and rational chord within us -- theories like evolution, for example -- tend to take on lives of their own, far beyond what their discoverer ever intended or even understood themselves. I remember a bit from Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy where he talked about how a philosopher in ancient Greece -- Anaxagoras, I believe -- came up with a version of heliocentrism, long before 17th-century scientists like Copernicus and Kepler proved it so; the point being, sometimes the answer sits right in front of people for a long time before anyone notices. Lit-crit might come up with some fancy new terms but unless they’re really, really challenging the status quo, it’s just gonna be old wine, new bottle.

Author profile: Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael should have been a standup comic. She wrote film criticism instead; lucky for us. Not so lucky for the films, filmmakers and performers she zeroed in on:

On Return of the Jedi: “Even the scene that should be the emotional peak of the whole mythic trilogy -- the moment when the young protagonist, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) removes the black visor and the helmet that have concealed Darth Vader’s face -- has no thrill. There isn’t a gasp to be heard in the entire theatre. Luke looks into the eyes of his nightmare father, and he might be ordering a veggieburger.”

Kael was born in California in 1919. She was a philosophy major at the University of California, Berkeley, and parlayed that lucrative diploma into a patchwork career as a movie theatre manager. She flirted with radio and filmmaking early on, but it was her written descriptions of the films playing at her theatre that first caught attention. A notorious early stint at McCall’s, during which she famously trashed The Sound of Music, led her to The New Yorker, where she spent 23 years. She retired in 1991 and died after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease on Sep. 3, 2001.

The act of deconstruction is a vicious thrill to every critic, and Kael’s writing style often convinced her readers that there was more bitter vitriol in her than celebratory adulations. She was a physically small woman (under five feet tall), which was a marked contrast to the authoritative boom of her writing. Automatic audience goodwill was a fallacy to her; what mattered most was the intoxicating, intensely vivid personal experiences that, she believed, only the movies had the power to convey. More than anything else, she valued films that were honest and direct in their intentions; she was as quick to celebrate pop filmmaking that went unashamedly for the gold as she was to denounce excessive self-consciousness and pretension.

She was, of course, controversial, not to mention undeniably influential. Peter Biskind’s gossipy Easy Riders, Raging Bulls depicts Kael as a starstruck member of the New York literati elite who was subject to hyperbole when it came to the work of filmmakers she was familiar with on a personal level, like Robert Altman, Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese (claims Kael subsequently dismissed as specious), but it’s generally agreed that her insistent support of films like Bonnie & Clyde, MASH, Mean Streets and The Godfather helped play a crucial role in the film movement of the 1960s and 70s. She also was one of the first film critics to cross over to a job in the film business, as an “executive consultant” for Paramount, a job which lasted all of five months and inspired her most incisive, and prescient, piece on the state of the art, “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers” (June 23, 1980):

“There are direct results when conglomerates take over movie companies. At first, the heads of the conglomerates may be drawn into the movie business for the status implications -- the opportunity to associate with world-famous celebrities. Some other conglomerate heads may be drawn in for the girls, but for them, too, a new social life beckons, and as they become socially involved, people with great names approach them as equals, and it gets them crazy. Famous stars and producers and writers and directors tell them about offers they’ve had from other studios and about what ideas that they have for pictures, and the conglomerate heads become indignant that the studios they control aren’t in on those wonderful projects. The next day, they’re on the phone raising hell with their studio bosses. Very soon, they’re likely to be summoning directors and suggesting material to them, talking to actors, and telling the company executives what projects should be developed.”

Film criticism can sometimes be a lucrative gateway; Stephen Schiff, Rod Lurie, Stephen Hunter and Elvis Mitchell have followed in her footsteps, but few have Kael’s ferocious gift for it. You get the sense that her best work is done when she’s picking apart something that she can’t help but to love. What is most striking about Kael is her voice: passionate, tough and uncompromising. Alongside critics like Andrew Sarris, she brought artistic legitimacy to the form and captured, in her body of work, the electric excitement of creative revolution, and the crushing sadness of its increasingly-commercialized decline. In her introduction for For Keeps, a 1996 anthology of her work, she wrote:

“I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.”

Bibliography:
I Lost It at the Movies (1965)
Going Steady (1970)
Deeper Into Movies (1973) (winner of the National Book Award)
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1976)
Reeling (1977)
When the Lights Go Down (1980)
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982) (collected capsule reviews)
Taking It All In (1984)
State of the Art (1985)
Hooked (1989)
Movie Love (1991)
For Keeps (1996) (collected reviews & essays)

Featured in:
The Citizen Kane Book (1972) (essay “Raising Kane”)

Subject of:
Conversations with Pauline Kael by Will Brantley (1996)
Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me by Craig Seligman
Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael by Francis Davis (2002)
- read excerpts at Salon

Further resources:
Ken Tucker surveys Kael’s career at Salon
Choice Kael quotes from BrainyQuotes
NPR’s collection of audio tributes to Kael from All Things Considered, David Thomson and Elvis Mitchell