Two Ways Novelists Can View Criticism

But before I get to that, a smattering of critical takes on ideas about criticism that are by and about and surround some of my favorite artists: Ezra Pound, Mezz Mezzrow, Marshall McLuhan,William S. Burroughs, and George Carlin:

Pound
Ol' Ez had a gazillion things to say about criticism, and often it was aimed at some sort of mass pedagogy for the "man" who still wants to learn; a "man" who has found himself alienated from the Bewildered Herd and would like some guidance from a no-nonsense tough-guy aesthete. Pound was happy to play the part. Here's some advice from Pound to one of these "men":

"All the 'critic' can do for him to is knock him out of his habitual associations, to 'show him the thing in a new light' or better, put it in some place he hadn't expected to find it." - from Machine Art & Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, p.83

It seems there are many cognate quotes like this from Pound in his voluminous oeuvre; I liked this one because it seems to capture the experimental Pound: a writer who tried to find structures and forms that worked on the mind of the Reader on more than a few levels. A critic can break habitual associations in the reader only with some sort of ju-ju that approaches a magickal operation, it seems to me. A simple way to unpack this: when Harold Bloom used the term "strong poetry" he meant someone (scientists and political revolutionaries included) who could use metaphors so well that they make the reader see the world in a new way. No mean feat; no small shakes, that.

Any criticism that accomplished this level must, it seems to me, attain to something like "literature" itself?

                                       Mezz: not the greatest player ever, but good enough,
                                    and he loved playing stoned. His book Really The Blues
                                    was influential in many ways.


Mezz Mezzrow
"Suppose you're the critical and analytical type, always ripping things to pieces, tearing the covers off and being disgusted by what you find under the sheet. Well, under the influence of muta you don't lose your surgical touch exactly, but you don't come up evil and grimy about it. You still see what you saw before but in a different, more tolerant way." - from Really The Blues, pagination lost in my notes because I was probably stoned?

No comment here; Mezz's observations about "muta" (cannabis) seem self-evident to me.

Woody Allen is a big fan of Mezz's book.

                                                  Burroughs, El Hombre Invisible

McLuhan on Burroughs
The New York intellectual Alfred Kazin had quasi-dismissed Burroughs's writings as a "private movie theatre." Here's McLuhan:

"It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed science fiction. It is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home." - originally from "Notes on Burroughs," The Nation, December 28, 1964; collected in William S. Burroughs At The Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989

Let me just say that the current way I see McLoon's meaning here is that we ought to look first at the performativity of Burroughs's bits, the way he tries to accomplish whatever he's trying for (saving Western civ), and not so much the garish content of his visuals alone.

Professor Carlin: On Film Criticism
"I'm never critical or judgmental about whether or not a movie is any good. The way I look at it, if several hundred people got together every day for a year or so - a number of them willing to put on heavy makeup, wear clothes that weren't their own and pretend to be people other than themselves - and their whole purpose for doing this was to entertain me, then I'm not gonna start worrying about whether or not they did a good job. The effort alone was enough to make me happy." - from When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?, p.106

                            Bobby Campbell's portrait of RAW and burger. Campbell is easily 
                           the best artist who has ever tired to capture Wilson's vibe: he's
                           steeped in RAW's work and has a mesmerizing, psychedelic style
                                 that fits RAW's work isomorphically. When I look at this 
                          piece, I think of the Discordian admonition: "Don't just eat a 
                          hamburger...eat THE HELL out of it!"

Two Writers: Very Different Takes on Criticism
First up, my favorite writer, Robert Anton Wilson, interviewed at his home overlooking the campus at Berkeley, possibly Spring of 1981, by Dr. Jeffrey M. Eliot:

Eliot: Are you affected by the critics? Do their opinions concern you?

RAW: As William Butler Yeats said, "Was there ever a dog that loved its fleas?" Critics have been very kind to me, personally. Of all the reviews of my published books, something like 90 percent have been highly favorable, so I have no personal grudge against critics. On the other hand, in an impersonal
way, I have a strong moral objection to critics. Whenever I see a critic tearing a writer or actor or any artist to shreds in print, I feel a sense of revulsion. I write a lot of criticism myself, but I only review things I like. I don't admire the desire to tear other people apart. I can think of two unfavorable reviews I've written in my whole life, and I regret them. One was about a book in which a woman gets raped and is said to enjoy it; the other was a review of a very dogmatic book on UFOs, in which the author described those who disagreed with him as neurotics. People who like to write witty, nasty
things about other people are not generous or charitable, to put it mildly. We should all try to give out as much good energy to other human beings as we possibly can. I honestly believe that every bit of bad energy we put out has adverse effects that go on forever. This is the Buddhist doctrine of karma. The
Buddhists believe that every bit of anger, resentment, hate and so on that goes out passes from one person to another, without stopping. The same is true of good energy: every bit of good energy one puts out makes someone else feel a little bit better. I think if people were really conscious of this
psychological fact, they would try to put out nothing but good energy, no matter what happened to them. They would certainly not be so casual about passing on bad energy. All the bad energy in the world builds up like a giant snowfall, until we have a huge war. Nowadays, it can mean total nuclear
Armageddon. This is traditional Buddhism, as I say, but I think it's materialistic common sense, too. One only needs to study human behavior to realize it. I regard those people who make a career out of being nasty as emotional plague carriers.
-from an interview in Literary Voices #1, p.54

Near the end of his life, RAW saw fit to re-publish snippets of various interviews he'd given over the years in his book Email To The Universe. The above was included in that 2005 book (albeit RAW edited it using E-Prime), see p.216. RAW wrote that his wife Arlen read the interview and she guessed he was stoned at the time. On p.216 of Email, which includes this bit on Buddhism and criticism, RAW included a footnote which reads: "Yeah, Arlen got it right: I must have toked a bunch o' weed before delivering myself of that sermon."

Aside from RAW's take on criticism here, his overall view on the subject was far more complex (he was not able to remain emotionally distant from unfriendly reviews), and someday I will try to flesh it all out a bit. Moving on...

Nonetheless: let us take Robert Anton Wilson(1981) as one view of critics. I would like to contrast this with Lawrence Grobel's interview with James Ellroy, who once described himself as the "demon dog" of literature.

Grobel asks Ellroy in 1998:

LG: Kirkus Reviews called you the comic-book Dos Passos of our time.

Ellroy: I never read Dos Passos. Kirkus can suck my dick. Fuck them up the ass with a faggot pit bull with an 18-inch dick and shoot a big load of syphilitic jism up Kirkus's ass.
-from Endangered Species: Writers Talk About Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives

Here's Ellroy on Brit TV from not long ago. He's always creeped me out in an entertaining way. If you ever get a chance to see him do a reading, even if you're not into his stuff, CANCEL everything else and see him read. Trust me on this. Also, as disparate from Robert Anton Wilson as I find Ellroy's bearing and attitude towards...life, note they have one musical love in common. This will take about 2 minutes of your space-time:

On Lit Crit

One of my favorite academic literary critics, Stanley Edgar Hyman (who was married to Shirley Jackson, an underrated writer who wrote the famously chilling short story "The Lottery") seemed to have read everything and wrote about his reading in a provoking and engaging way. I love his book The Armed Vision. Hyman quotes an earlier critic/academic, I.A. Richards: "To set up as a critic is to set as a judge of values." (I wrote about Richards long ago HERE.)

I find Richards fascinating for many reasons, one of which was that he was influenced by both Coleridge and the early anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Besides Richards's scientific foray into how literature is received by bright college students (as described in Practical Criticism), he thought critical evaluation functioned largely as "social communion." He explicitly saw his work as "phatic," and I tend to wish more critics had these values in mind. (Certainly someone like Dale Peck doesn't see the role of critic like this!)

Hyman seemed to not like teaching all that much, and "Professor X," who wrote In The Basement of the Ivory Tower quotes Hyman: "I've been doing it for years, and before every class, I take a piss, I check my fly, I wish I were dead - and I go into the room and begin."

Jacob Silverman
Two months ago in Slate Silverman made a complaint about too much "niceness" in literary criticism lately, and he thought it had to do with authors using Twitter, blogs, Facebook, Yelp, and Tumblr. They create a "fan base," tweet nice things about other authors, every other author is awesome, we're all friends here, authors create an aura of good feelings around themselves, and literary criticism suffers, due to the "mutual admiration society that is today's literary culture, particularly online." The level of criticism an author receives amounts to a literary culture in which "cloying niceness and blind enthusiasm are the dominant sentiments." Silverman would rather we cultivate an environment where we care less about an author's biography and who follows them, and more on the work itself. When no voices of dissent are heard about a work, it tends to chill a "vibrant, useful literary culture." He quotes Lev Grossman of Time, who admitted he won't review a book he doesn't like. Silverman would like us to act more like adults and not mix criticism for an author's work with criticism of the person who wrote the work. The last paragraph of Silverman's article sums his stance well: we ought to think more and "enthuse less."

Chris Collin
Around a year before Silverman's article, Chris Collin wrote a piece for Wired titled, "Rate This Article: What's Wrong With the Culture of Critique." I found and read this after I read Silverman's argument. Collin objects to online lit-crit's star-rating system, its thumb's up, its plus one, the number for how many times the article had been Tweeted (or re-Tweeted?), the number of "likes," etc. I couldn't agree more: go ahead and give some article four stars out of five, but don't pretend you're adding anything to the conversation. You're certainly not thinking. Well...probably not. Maybe a little, if the piece was good. Voting/giving symbolic feedback seems - to me - more a gesture along the lines of the consumer.

Hey, I dig good feedback and kind vibes - we all do - but in our writings as in life, we want to feel like we've been heard.

Collin quotes one of my favorite culture critics, Erik Davis: "Our culture is afflicted with knowingness. We exalt in being able to know as much as possible. And that's great on many levels. But we forget the pleasure of not knowing. I'm no Luddite, but we've started replacing actual experience with someone else's already digested knowledge."

(I wrote about "knowingness" not long ago, HERE.)

Collin says that "There's an essential freedom in being alone with one's thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else's. Diminish our aloneness and we start to doubt our own perspective."

This reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Buckminster Fuller: "Dare to be naive." In a culture of knowingness, where everyone is always online, I can't help but think that our interiorities are suffering. It's getting to the point where the act of not looking to see what everyone else is looking at, what's viral, what's hot, what's cool...and instead just following your own path and evaluating on your own...seems a bona fide radical act. 

Roxane Gay's Answer To Silverman
Not long after Silverman's piece appeared, Roxane Gay parried in Salon. And while I think she played a tad unfair by tsk-tsking Silverman over not actually reading Emma Straub's book - that really wasn't his point - I think her rebuttal quite fine, and I present these three points of view about literary kulch in our online-world as a possible opening to a conversation itself. About the role of criticism.

I thought Gay's best point was the analogy that literary culture is like school, and serious criticism is the classroom; social networks and all the mundane trivia and phatic (How would I.A. Richards see "evaluations" of literature on Twitter?) aspects of five stars and "liking" is the cafeteria. Gay pulled up an apt quote from 1846, by Edgar Allan Poe, on writing too sweetly about someone else's book. There's nothing new under the sun, truly, Ms Gay! She also takes issue with Silverman over too much niceness regarding women, people of color and writers who'd fall under the LGBT rubric: when they are reviewed, often their personal lives are considered fair game. Gay shows that she's able to give a good review to a book while noting some perceived problems with it, and at times she might even know the author personally. She urges that we stop thinking of reviews as "positive" or "negative" as this is the "wrong conversation."

Points all well-taken...until someone's feelings get hurt. Vicious, savage reviews by the aforementioned Dale Peck and his ilk: do these people thrive on shame? Are they thinly-veiled sadists?

And I bet that it's true that males - especially white males - get reviewed more often. But I also bet they are "savaged" more often by critics, too. And sometimes it might seem the reason they're getting savaged is precisely because they're male. I cop to being a lot like Lev Grossman, but my reasons for not writing negative reviews are due to the unpleasant mental states I'm required to be in to write that stuff. It's not worth it to me. NB Roxane Gay seems to evade the question somewhat by saying that everyone who read the book would see its flaws jump out at them, so why bother writing the bad review?(However, if someone wants to pay me to review Dick Cheney's or Paul Wolfowitz's or Rupert Murdoch's memoirs...I'd take that advantage. Some things need to be said, sometimes, no matter how unpleasant.)

Intellectuals and Critics: The Mafia?
Woody Allen once said that intellectuals are like the Mafia: they only kill their own. As much as this culture of criticism chugs along, let's not pretend that a large portion of the critical class - the fine writers, the intellectuals, the "chattering classes," congenitally bookish bloggers - let's not pretend that they don't consider evaluations of a rival or a political foe's work as something akin to a blood sport.

I have never published a book to scathing criticism, but can easily imagine what it feels like, especially if one feels they've produced a fine work, filled with long hours of sweat, tears, inspiration, elation, actually getting themselves to believe that they were contributing something of value to society, that they might even inspire a handful of people not blood-related in a very deep way.

The cultivation of a Nietzschean sensibility seems in order, although 'tis probably easier said than done.

Finally, I can't help but think that most of us are taking ourselves and our evaluations far too seriously, and while I surmise that many of us give critics far too much power over our choices, this seems as virtually nothing compared to forming your opinion based on relatively faceless/nameless others' likes and thumb's ups and plus-ones and re-Tweets. Fer crissakes! Let us dare to be naive! I have tried it and found it quite invigorating. Am I preaching to the choir here? I suspect so...

Tomorrow I'll note an example of polarized approaches to the role of critics and criticism by two novelists, and I hope you'll get a nice laff then.

Practical Criticism

In my previous warblings I addressed the idea that some of us (although no one who's reading this blog, probably?) may be inundated by the easily-accessed opinion of the virtual crowd, and how this might be stifling the at-times exhilarating experience of interacting with some thing and one's own nervous system, and...evaluating for oneself?

I could let on that if I find out something is wildly popular and much "liked" by the crowd, I probably will not like it, but that's not true. I'm sure there are some very popular things that I "digg" too. Anyway...

Anyone heard of I.A. Richards? By the mid-1920s, as an English professor at Cambridge, he was tired of theorists writing about how poems were received by readers; he wanted to find out. He set out to make the apprehension of poetry as a scientific endeavor. It was the spirit of the times, and Richards was something of a mad man; in some ways he was England's version of Pound.

                                     I.A. Richards (1893-1979), a serious character

So, with some of England's brightest students on hand for field-work, he collected poems by Shakespeare, Ella Wheeler Cox (who?), John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and poets with names like Philip James Bailey, Wilfred Rowland Childe, J.D.C. Pellew, and even a person named "Woodbine Willie."

He handed the poems in groups of four to his students and asked them to read each poem as many times as they pleased, and to count how many times they had read each poem. And he asked his students to record their perceptions on a separate sheet of paper, which they handed in. Richards called the handed-in sheets "protocols."

Here's the catch: none of the poems had their author's name attached to it.

Caveat: with people like Donne and Shakespeare, Richards updated the language so that it wouldn't be a dead giveaway that these guys were from the 17th century.

Richards records his findings in his 1929 book Practical Criticism. You would think these students - majoring in English at one of the greatest universities in the world - would've seen Donne for how profound he was, and that Woodbine Willie fell short in a few ways. Or you might have guessed - because I'm the one bringing this up - that these bright people gave horrendously inane comments about the nameless poetry.

Richards actually wonders, if any of us were in the same situation, would we have done any better? Because his students seemed to not tell Shakespeare from Ella Wheeler Cox. Richards himself never gives an outright critique of any of the poems he selected, but his scattershot remarks based on the endlessly non-insightful comments the students made reveals a master of the close reading of poetry, and indeed Richards was one of the pioneers of "close reading."

(I recently read a delightfully candid and ultimately deeply lugubrious book that came out earlier this year or late last: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, by "Professor X." He didn't want to tarnish the good name of the schools in which he functioned as an adjunct professor, teaching English 101 for maybe a tenth of what a tenured professor would get. And his college students often can't write a coherent English sentence; they shouldn't even be in college. I doubt things have gotten much better on campuses since Richards's time, but maybe I'm wrong...)

Now: here's my question, and I hope you enjoy pondering it as much as I do: when we read Richards, he's not taking on the tone of some jackoff NeoCon like Allan Bloom (he of the best-seller in the 1980s in Unistat, The Closing of the American Mind), or any academic scold of any sort. He truly does seem to conduct the material that ends up in Practical Criticism like a scientist would treat his data. Now the question: if the readers seemed to enjoy J.D.C. Pellew far more than John Donne, isn't that right for them? Just because Oxford dons and Yale professors have been telling everyone that Donne, Hopkins, and Shakespeare are far far FAR better than the other obscure names...who's to say what's great?

It's a funny and profound book of literary criticism, and I just thought some of you might want to look at it if you haven't already. Pound did some similar experiments, which I'll write about some day soon. Pound's virtuoso student Louis Zukofsky wrote A Test of Poetry, which seems in the same vein as Richards, albeit much later, and more playful and not so much the "science" experiment.

From blind taste tests of $50 glasses of wine versus $5 glasses (some very interesting findings there, by another intellectual prankster), to the the Can You Tell If This Painting Was Done By An Abstract Expressionist or an Elephant? tests, here are some situations in which we cannot fall back on the "wisdom of crowds" (the jury's still out on the ontology of that "wisdom") or "experts."

I say: the hell with it. So it turns out I liked the $5 wine more than the $50 stuff. Big effing deal if I actually prefer the elephant's work to Jackson Pollack (or someone closer to an elephant's style). And why should you care if you you're not supposed to like Ravel's Bolero more than Schubert's Trout Quintet? 


Quoting Robert Anton Wilson, "Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy, and don't take crap from anyone!"