What’s wrong with literary criticism today? That may seem like a loaded question, but if, like me, you read any amount of what passes for criticism today, you’ll notice some trends: a general unwillingness to pass judgment on anything other than a writer’s politics or personal life, a penchant for equivocation, a lack of curiosity and a tendency for cant, a lack of wide reading, which, in turn, leads to an overuse of personal anecdotes (“I received Samuel N. Rosenberg’s new translation of Verlaine the day before I moved to Brooklyn…”) and an inability to recognize literary echoes and allusions. We have example after example of stilted prose riddled with banalities and jargon, embarrassing gush, over-cleverness, and so on. That’s not to say that there are no good critics out there. Clearly there are, but it’s still depressing.

Another way of putting this is that criticism today is boring, though David Mason reminds us that great criticism has, perhaps, always been rare. Here he is in The Hudson Review on the criticism of the late Clive James and John Burnside—two poet-critics who got quite a lot right:

Here’s a thought: literary criticism ought to entertain as well as illuminate. That puts most critics out of business on two fronts. So much of our exegesis reads like the minutes of a country club meeting in which we are all agreed on the value of this and that, so little of it chases the vitality literature itself is devoted to. Readers easily offended by anything remotely transgressive ought to toughen up and face the world in all its bloodiness. No one has permission to do anything in this life, so you might as well see what you can see, say what you can say, and hopefully do so as beautifully as possible.

These ruminations arise from a reading of two extremely good poet-critics, one a displaced Australian, the other a Scot. They could hardly be more different from each other in their tastes and the tenor of their prose, but neither commits the sin of being boring, and both keep life itself clearly in their vision of poetry and its purposes. We may remember T. S. Eliot saying that a poet’s criticism exists to elucidate the poet’s own taste and ambitions. Certainly this is true of both Clive James (who died last November) and John Burnside (still very much with us). Neither of them wields career-making power; both are masters of appreciation, a quality not so highly valued in the academy. Burnside is a good storyteller, a reader for whom context is everything, James a delectable raconteur whose prose (and verse) delights in antithesis. Both have spent their writing lives immersed in multiple genres, eschewing specialization. They are, first and foremost, writers.

In other news: Andrew Higgens writes about how Yuri Dmitriev found one of Stalin’s mass graves. He is now in jail.

Life and death in Bergamo: “A classic short story by Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen—notorious in his time for its pessimism—offers a surprising kernel of hope in our own time of plague.”

When airplanes and zeppelins competed to rule the skies.

Anthony Daniels writes about the Melbourne of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and the Melbourne of today: “It is said that the first crime novel to sell half a million copies in the English-speaking world was The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume. It outsold by far the first efforts in the genre by Conan Doyle who, however (or is it therefore?), had but little regard for it. Its story is set in Melbourne, where it was first published in 1886. There it did quite well, and Hume then sold the rights to an Anglo-American publisher for £50. This was a commercial mistake on his part, for it went on to sell prodigiously on both sides of the Atlantic. Hume was not the first author, nor probably the last, to have made a fortune—for others. He wrote dozens of novels afterwards, but none with anything like the same success. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is interesting for what it tells us about early Australia, or at any rate early Melbourne. It is informative precisely because it is trying to entertain rather than to inform: for very few people try to inform without distortion, or without having an axe to grind, a point to make. We seldom give ourselves away more completely than when we are trying not to do so. The Melbourne of the book was only half a century old. What struck me most about Hume’s depiction of it was how solidly founded it already seemed to be. Its institutions were strong. The law, for example, was as firmly established as in the then mother, now stepmother, country. The story could have been set in England, except for a landscape or two.”

The realists of the Soviet fantasy: “The Central Committee dissolved all independent artistic groups in 1932, replacing them with official trade unions. Socialist realism, a slippery genre purporting to depict the Soviet world “in its revolutionary development”—as it ought to be rather than as it actually was—became the official genre of the USSR. The “socialist” part mattered more than the “realism.” A work passed muster if it was deemed an adequate expression of Soviet values, however they were being defined at a particular moment—and the definitions changed frequently. The more prestigious or well connected the artist, the more he or she was likely to get away with. “Formalism,” which was understood as a preference for form over political content, became a term of abuse, liable to be lobbed at even remotely abstract works. Movements like Constructivism were sidelined or eliminated. But modernist techniques remained visible in official Soviet art, notably in the work of Deineka and Samokhvalov, figurative painters deeply marked by avant-garde movements.”

Photo: Komiža

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