George Steiner's Draconian Ban

James Wood (Illustration by Mark Ulriksen)

One of the most wrongheaded ideas I’ve ever read is George Steiner’s proposition that literary criticism should be banned. In his Real Presences (1989), he imagined a “counter-Platonic republic from which the reviewer and the critic have been banished; a republic for writers and readers.” He viewed criticism to be “secondary and parasitic.” In his republic,

There would be no journals of literary criticism; no academic seminars, lectures or colloquies on this or that poet, playwright, novelist; no “James Joyce quarterlies” or “Faulkner newsletters”; no interpretations of, no essays of opinion on, sensibility in Keats or robustness in Fielding.

To which the only possible response is “Oy!”

“Response” is the key here. What is the point of creating art if we aren’t allowed to express our own response to it? Adam Kirsch, in the Preface to his Rocket and Lightship (2015), says, “For criticism, too, is a kind of literature: the critic expresses his own sense of life through his responses to other minds and sensibilities.” Exactly. John Updike, in his review of Wright Morris’s On Fiction, called Morris “a responder to writing” (“Wright on Writing,” Hugging the Shore, 1983) – a wonderful description that applies to all great critics.

Here, for example, is James Wood responding to the writing in Per Petterson’s novel I Curse the River of Time:

In the first passage, what is strange is not just the way the function of that linking “and” changes (sometimes “and” is used to connect sequential details; sometimes it is used to shift from one temporality to another) but also the way that information expands and contracts. We go from the precision and banality of the uncle with his 8-mm. camera to the almost placeless, blurred lyricism about the grey grandparents from an unnamed but “more puritanical town . . . standing windswept and grey on the quay.” There is something wonderful about the passionate reality with which, in the second excerpt, the narrator invests a liquid that is at first fictional but which becomes absolutely alive, a golden nectar flowing “in multiple streams.” Notice, too, that, in a spirit of free association, the narrator’s thoughts about the book are bound up with taste: golden Calvados to begin with, and then the bitter taste of the novel, which leads to the “bitter gift of pain” mentioned in the old hymn, and on to the “bitter gift” of the funeral.

How many people think like this? Probably as many as think like Leopold Bloom or Mrs. Ramsay or one of David Foster Wallace’s characters. Petterson is remarkably gifted at capturing not so much randomness or irrelevance (habitual catchments of the stream of consciousness) as the staggered distances of memory: one detail seems near at hand, while another can be seen only cloudily; one mental picture seems small, while another seems portentous. Yet everything is jumbled in the recollection, because the most proximate memory may be the least important, the portentous detail relatively trivial. Petterson’s interest is pictorial and spatial rather than logical and interrogative. His sentences yearn to fly away into poetry; it is rare to find prose at once so exact and so vague. Yet Petterson is novelistically acute about human motive and self-deception. In both passages, our needy, self-involved narrator hovers over his memories, and finally pokes his way back into the narrative with local assertions of self: “and sometimes I, too, was in that taxi”; “which in fact I did at a funeral not long ago.” [“Late and Soon,” The New Yorker, December 10, 2012]

Those two splendid paragraphs convinced me to read Petterson’s novel. Today, I count it among my favorite books. Without Wood’s piece, I doubt I would’ve found it. Is that not one of the great benefits of reviews and critical pieces? They lead us to discovery of new works. They help us see in fresh ways. They add meaning to our reading experience. They enhance our enjoyment of life.

A republic in which literary criticism is banned is not a place I'd want to live.