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.  

Best of 2017: The Critics

Riccaardo Vecchio, "Bill Knott" (2017)

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2017 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. James Wood, “The Other Side of Silence,” June 5 & 12, 2017 (“What animates his project is the task of saving the dead, retrieving them through representation”).

2. James Wood, “All Over Town,” November 27, 2017 (“In ‘The Waves,’ Woolf returns, at regular intervals, to painterly, almost ritualized descriptions of the sun’s passage, on a single day, from dawn to dusk: wedges of prose like the divisions on a sundial”).

3. Alex Ross, “Tank Music,” July 24, 2017 (“Gusts buffeting the exterior created an apocalyptic bass rumble; lashes of rain sounded like a hundred snare drums”).

4. Peter Schjeldahl, “Full Immersion,” July 31, 2017 (“Cradled in a hammock the other day, I couldn’t imagine anywhere in the world I would rather be, tracking subtle variations in the changing slides: for example, a matchbook first closed, then open, then burning, then, finally, burned”).

5. Dan Chiasson, “The Fugitive,” April 3, 2017 (“He is, at his best, a poet of home-brewed koans, threading his philosophical paradoxes into scenes of slacker glamour”).

6. Claudia Roth Pierpont, “The Island Within,” March 6, 2017 (“Bishop, who complained of the ‘egocentricity’ of a confessional poet like Sexton, found deliverance in gazing steadily outward”).

7. Anthony Lane, “Pretty and Gritty,” March 27, 2017 (“ ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is delectably done; when it’s over, though, and when the spell is snapped, it melts away, like cotton candy on the tongue”).

8. Adam Kirsch, “Pole Apart,” May 29, 2017 (“But, where Eliot often used this kind of moral X-ray vision to express contempt and disgust for the world, Milosz had seen too much death to find skulls profound”).

9. Adam Gopnik, “A New Man,” July 3, 2017 (“The stoical stance and the sensual touch: that was Hemingway’s keynote emotion, and his claim to have learned it from Cézanne looks just”).

10. Leo Robson, “The Mariner’s Prayer,” November 20, 2017 (“If irony exists to suggest that there’s more to things than meets the eye, Conrad further insists that, when we pay close enough attention, the “more” can be endless”).

11. Louis Menand, “The Stone Guest,” August 28, 2017 (“Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of monomania”).

12. Emily Nussbaum, “Tragedy Plus Time,” January 23, 2017 (“Despite the breeziness of Breitbart’s description, there was in fact a global army of trolls, not unlike the ones shown on ‘South Park,’ who were eagerly ‘shit-posting’ on Trump’s behalf, their harassment an anonymous version of the ‘rat-fucking’ that used to be the province of paid fixers”).

September 4, 2017 Issue

What’s this – a TV-themed New Yorker? Cancel my subscription. Just kidding. I’ll get over it. TV isn’t the only subject covered in this week’s issue, thank God. “Goings On About Town” brims with wonderful items. For example: “cinched whirlpools of deconstructed menswear and gingham frocks deformed by asymmetrical humps” (“Art: Metropolitan Museum: Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between”); “drumbeats soft and clipping, synths modulated into shivers, with vocals sneaking acid-dream motifs in through the fuzz” (“Night Life: Neon Indian”); “malab iyo malawax, sweet crepes soaked in honey and dusted with cinnamon, and a mug of steaming qaxwo, pungent black coffee spiked with ginger” (Nicolas Niarchos, “Tables For Two: Safari”).

I also enjoyed the two book reviews – Adam Kirsch’s “Voices from the Void” and Dan Chiasson’s “Merry War.” Kirsch’s piece is illustrated with an exquisite Riccardo Vecchio portrait of Fernando Pessoa that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker artwork.

May 29, 2017, Issue

Reading Adam Kirsch’s absorbing “Pole Apart,” in this week’s issue, I recalled his “Czeslaw Milosz” (included in his 2008 essay collection The Modern Element), a bizarre piece, in which he criticizes Milosz’s poetry for its specificity. He writes,

Poetry is ill suited to grasping “particular existences.” Painting does it much better; even fiction does it somewhat better, because it can afford to be lavish of description, to dote on differentia. But no poem could remain interesting at the length necessary to describe something – be it a leek or a woman – with even moderate specificity. What remains is the bare act of indication, which paradoxically diminishes the particularity it claims to affirm, through endless repetition of the gesture.

To which the only possible response is “Och!” No such nonsense mars his new piece. Kirsch takes a different view, praising Milosz’s art for its “instinct to strip away the inessential, to zero in on the heart of the matter.” He says of Milosz,

He could see “the skull beneath the skin,” in the words of T. S. Eliot, whose work he knew well. But, where Eliot often used this kind of moral X-ray vision to express contempt and disgust for the world, Milosz had seen too much death to find skulls profound. Instead, he sought a poetry that was truthful and perceptive enough to be trustworthy even when annihilation seemed imminent.

That “Milosz had seen too much death to find skulls profound” is brilliant.

Postscript: Three other lines in this week’s issue that I enjoyed enormously:

Shroudlike disguises figure into her work from subsequent decades, too, counterbalanced by absurdly tailored pieces, including cinched whirlpools of deconstructed menswear and gingham frocks deformed by asymmetrical humps. [“Goings On About Town: Art: Metropolitan Museum”]

It causes the wasp-waisted barmaids in strappy green minidresses to grunt audibly as they muddle handfuls of cherries, and scoop ice as if shovelling a driveway. [Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Fishbowl”]

The Thai Tea (Belvedere vodka, Thai tea, orange bitters) is refreshing and strong, but the Rum Cannonball (Bacardi, pineapple, grenadine) has the toothachy sweetness of an alcohol-soaked Jolly Rancher. [Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Fishbowl”]

The Pleasure of Description (Contra Kirsch)

Elizabeth Bishop, 1956 (Bettmann/Corbis)

Adam Kirsch, in his absorbing "Full Fathom Five" (The New Yorker, February 3, 2014), a review of The Poetry of Derek Walcott, says,

The visual and the literary make uneasy partners, since they operate according to different temporal regimes: everything at once versus one thing after another. As a result, when a poet takes to describing what he sees, the result can be boring and static. Visual descriptions are usually the most skippable parts of any poem.

I strongly disagree. I devour visual descriptions. Far from being the most “skippable parts of any poem,” they are, for me, an immense source of reading pleasure. Take for example the exquisite description of the beach in James Merrill’s “Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-Of-War”:

A mile-long vertebrate picked clean

To the palms’ tall seableached incurving ribs.

And Elizabeth Bishop’s depiction of fog in her great “The Moose”:

shifting, salty, thin,

comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals

form and slide and settle

in the white hens’ feathers,

in gray glazed cabbages,

on the cabbage roses

and lupins like apostles.

And Seamus Heaney’s unforgettable description of the Grauballe Man:

As if he had been poured

in tar, he lies

on a pillow of turf

and seems to weep

the black river of himself.

The grain of his wrists

is like bog oak,

the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.

His instep has shrunk

cold as a swan’s foot

or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge

and purse of a mussel,

his spine an eel arrested

under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts,

the chin is a visor

raised above the vent

Of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened.

The cured wound

opens inward to a dark

elderberry place.

I could multiply examples endlessly. The point is there’s a blind spot in Kirsch’s criticism. The pleasure principle is lacking.

Kay Ryan's Democratic Élitism

I’d like to briefly compare two reviews of Kay Ryan’s new poetry collection The Best of It: Adam Kirsch’s "Think Small" (The New Yorker, April 12, 2010) and Helen Vendler’s "The Art of Flamingo Watching" (The New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010). I’m going to focus on the way Kirsch and Vendler treat one of Ryan’s best known poems, “Outsider Art.” This is because “Outsider Art” challenges my belief, based on the poetry of Whitman, Bishop, O’Hara, Heaney, Schuyler, Simic, and others, that almost everything that exists deserves equal reverence and can become the subject of poetry. In “Outsider Art,” Ryan seems to be saying that this is certainly not the case in respect of certain folk art objects, which she describes as follows:

Most of it’s too dreary
or too cherry red.
If it’s a chair, it’s
covered with things
the savior said
or should have said –
dense admonishments
in nail polish
too small to be read.
If it’s a picture,
the frame is either
burnt matches glued together
or a regular frame painted over
to extend the picture.

Ryan couldn’t find the poetry in these objects, but she wrote a poem about them anyway, calling it “Outsider Art,” in which she says, “There never/seems to be a surface equal/to the needs of these people…./We are not/pleased the way we thought/we would be pleased.”

There’s no delight in this poem. “These people” reeks of condescension, affirming superior knowingness in the poet. “Outsider Art” does not effect what Seamus Heaney has called “the redress of poetry.” If Heaney was writing this poem, he would not have flinched from describing the ugliness of this “outsider art,” but he would have gone on to do something positive with the ugliness. Ryan simply looks at the objects, describes them in her bare bones style, and says, “We are not pleased.”

Adam Kirsch, in his New Yorker review, says that, "Reading The Best of It, it becomes clear that Ryan, like all genuinely gifted poets, is a democratic élitist, believing that many are called but few are chosen.” Based on my reading of “Outsider Art,” I would say that “democratic élitist” is an excellent description of Ryan. But it seems that Kirsch considers democratic élitism a poetic virtue, a quality shared by “all genuinely gifted poets.” I strongly disagree. Whitman is a genuinely gifted poet. In his verse, as John Updike has observed, “An ideal equality is extended not only to persons but to things as well” (see “Whitman’s Egotheism” in Updike’s Hugging the Shore, 1983). Just about the last thing you would think to call Whitman would be “élitist.” The same goes for the other poets I named above.

Kirsch, in his review, says Ryan “has no patience for the clumsy sincerity of what she calls, in one poem, ‘Outsider Art.’” I think he’s right. I suppose this is another example of her wonderful “democratic élitism.” What about respect for what she’s seen? It seems to me a better poet, a real poet, would’ve explored the otherness of that picture frame made of “burnt matches glued together.” The details of “Outsider Art” are fascinating, too fascinating to warrant Ryan’s deplorable de haut en bas “we are not pleased” attitude. Kirsch should’ve had the backbone to say so, instead of trying to make a virtue of Ryan’s superiority in relation to her subject matter.

Turning to Vendler’s review, I hoped she would say she disliked “Outsider Art.” After all, she has in the past approvingly described “an American pastoral aesthetic of the found, the cared-for, and the homemade” (see “New York Pastoral” in Vendler’s Soul Says, 1995). However, in "The Art of Flamingo Watching,” Vendler comes out in support of Ryan's elitism. Regarding “Outsider Art,” she says, “But like any aesthete, she is repelled by incompetent creation; and for all her well-wishing she draws back.” “Like any aesthete”? What about the aesthete who cherishes American pastoral? What about Stevens’s Tennessee gray jar and home-sewed, hand-embroidered sheet? What about Bishop’s doilies and hand-carved flute? “Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?” says Bishop’s Crusoe. Right there is the point that Ryan ignores – she’s as home-made as the chair “covered with things/the Savior said …/in nail polish/too small to be read” that she so snobbishly dismisses. In explaining and upholding the elitism of “Outsider Art,” Vendler shows an elitist streak of her own when she says, “Ryan is, despite her desert beginnings, a lover of Satie, a reader of Brodsky and Bishop; she cannot disavow her own talent, her intelligence and achievement.” Oh, please. Bishop was certainly not lacking in talent, intelligence, and achievement, yet she didn’t hold herself out as being superior to the homemade objects in her poems. Quite the opposite. As a poet, she empathized with them. As a poet, Ryan’s powers of empathy appear to be blocked.

Credit: The above portrait of Kay Ryan is by Jody Hewgill; it appears in The New Yorker (April 12, 2010) as an illustration for Adam Kirsch's "Think Small."