Elif Batuman: Why Criticism Matters

Of all the forms of writing, literary criticism is my favorite. Last week, The New York Times Sunday Book Review featured an interesting article titled “Why Criticism Matters: Six Accomplished Critics Explain the Importance of Their Work” (December 31, 2010). One of the six critics is The New Yorker’s Elif Batuman. I avidly read her piece called “From the Critical Impulse, the Growth of Literature.” It contains this amazing sentence: It’s as if, having devoured too many books about evolutionary psychobiology and hard-wired behaviors, Anglo-American culture fell asleep and dreamed a giant dream that Mrs. Dalloway had Gerstmann’s syndrome. I chuckled when I read that. It’s such a delightful, surprising concoction of words and ideas, abstract and specific at once – the verbal equivalent of a miniature Rauschenberg combine. And to think that it resulted from an application of ideological criticism! Who can argue with results like that? Well, I’ll give it a shot. Batuman, in her essay, proposes a Marxist application of Freudian theory to literature. She says, “Aesthetic features almost always indicate a hidden level of meaning, a richness of signification, which is itself the very thing that we perceived as beauty to begin with.” She views the function of criticism as a Freudian search for hidden meaning. But the meaning she’s searching for has nothing to do with sex. She says, A more productive and more faithful (albeit less literal) application of Freud’s theory to literature may be found in Marxist criticism, which searches the work of art for signs not of the writer’s personal sexual history, but of history itself. I’m not sure I find this “hidden level of meaning” stuff very convincing. Art is pure surface. It seems to me that to disregard the story in favor of a presumed story-behind-the-story is to disregard what Helen Vendler has called “the primary sensuous claim of every work of art, the claim made precisely by its ‘surface’ (these words, these notes, and no others)”: see Vendler’s Introduction to her 1988 essay collection The Music of What Happens, which includes a number of her great New Yorker poetry reviews. There’s a passage in Janet Malcolm’s “The Purloined Clinic” (The New Yorker, October 5, 1987) that supports my point. Malcolm proposes Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” as “the quintessential allegory of both psychoanalytic therapy and deconstructive critical theory.” She says, As the detective Dupin went straight for the most negligently obvious place that the government minister could have selected for the “concealment” of the compromising letter, so do the analyst and the deconstructionist know that the secrets of human nature and of works of art lie on the surface and in the margins, and that the metaphors of depth, delving, unearthing, plumbing, penetrating are irrelevant to their work. As an alternative to Batuman’s ideological criticism, I suggest aesthetic criticism. The aim of aesthetic criticism is not primarily to reveal the meaning of an art work. It’s aim is, as Helen Vendler has ably stated, “to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration”: see Vendler’s Introduction to The Music of What Happens, above-said. Vendler, in her essay “The Function of Criticism” (included in The Music of What Happens), also says, “No art work describes itself. Only by repeated casts of the critical imagination is the world around us, including the world of literature, finally described and thereby made known, familiar, and integral.” Batuman has shown herself to be a gifted describer (see, for example, her wonderful “The Memory Kitchen,” The New Yorker, April 19, 2010). I’m hoping that she’ll eventually adopt aesthetic criticism as her raison d’être.