Ryan Ruby's "To Affinity and Beyond"

Great to see Bookforum back in business! There’s an absorbing piece in it by Ryan Ruby called “To Affinity and Beyond.” It touches on a lot of things I’m interested in – criticism, interpretation, argument, description. It’s a review of Brian Dillon’s new essay collection Affinities: On Art and Fascination. Ruby calls it “a kind of manifesto for an anti-critical criticism.” What’s “anti-critical” about it, says Ruby, is its lack of argument:

If nothing Dillon writes “pursues an argument” or is “built to convince,” it is, in part, an attempt to make a virtue of the limitation he confesses in Essayism: “I was and remain quite incapable of mounting in writing a reasoned and coherent argument.” He associates argumentation with the academy, whose procedures of making “judgments and distinctions” are foreign to a sensibility that prefers describing objects and noting correspondences between them. 

I relish argument. Many of my favorite critical essays are fiercely polemical, e.g., Martin Amis’s “Don Juan in Hell,” Janet Malcolm’s “A Very Sadistic Man,” James Wood’s “Hysterical Realism,” Pauline Kael’s “Circles and Squares.” Argument gives criticism a piquant bite. But I don’t think it’s essential to its effectiveness. Description, on the other hand, is key. “All first-rate criticism defines what we are encountering,” Whitney Balliett said in his Jelly Roll, Jabbo & Fats (1983). Peter Schjeldahl said something similar in his Let’s See (2008): “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap.”