Author: Amory Crane

When this writer was at university and still fairly green he was taught by a tutor who wrote regularly for the book review pages of a notable and esteemed publication and who, on occasion, would begin our seminars with comments about the world of contemporary letters. No doubt while he regaled us with choice anecdotes many of my fellow students’ ears pricked up as mine own did, hoping to catch whatever nuggets of career advice could be gleamed from between his affected exasperation and witty aperçu. He probably thought, as he told us about the regular barrages in print he received from one or another slighted novelist’s retinue (some very well known names), that he was reenacting in spirit the denuding scene from The Wizard of Oz. Yet somewhere along the way age steals from men knowledge of their salad days; knowledge which would remind them that the dreams of youth are very near inexorable, and feed from the romanticisation of failure as much as any potential success. So when he said such things as, ‘all book reviewing is, of course, log-rolling’ all we wanted to ask was, ‘yes, but how does one get a gig rolling the logs!?’

There is a note of jest in this, but not much. For behind this desire there was another: to be the one critic who could juggle the necessity of getting on in the world with an earnest application of one’s faculties. Inevitably, this coalesced with other grand designs: to be a novelist, a poet, a playwright, or an academic, bouncing between a book review here, a travel piece there, a literary festival, a conference, a gallery-opening. Yes, I know — entitlement drips forth from every syllable. Yet it is wrong to rob youth too much of its dreams. We needn’t take from Time a job. But reading this week a renewed concern with funding in the cultural scene, there will be floated — indeed there have been floated — the lurking questions of why exactly does all this matter? Why should the fact that young people (and not only young people) are made to work for free in, of all things, the world of cultural criticism, concern us?

I have of course written on this topic before, but I wish here to address more explicitly the nature of what a critic actually does, or perhaps, what he ought to do, and why the well-worn phrases in dismissal are, for the first time in many years, starting to sound thin. For we are all aware, are we not, of remarks like Hemingway’s, who regarded critics as ‘the lice who crawl on literature’? All the same, if you are reading this, then it’s likely you are someone for whom matters relating to art, literature, culture, film, and all their attendant attitudes and accoutrements have some significance. Yet there remains a question upon many lips: ‘why must I have critics? Why can I not be left alone and attend to myself?’

The answer to this is obvious: you may. For there doubtless remains a certain section of society who reads for pleasure, seriously or not, and for whom the opinions of others are as worthless as they are myriad. Of these people we need not concern ourselves. They are a breed apart — and are not necessarily any worse than any other reader. But they have no use for what we are discussing. They are true naïfs, and like the radical sects of unitarians, reject any single doctrinal requirement, any formal structure or orthodox hierarchy, and leave everything to the individual conscience. I need not draw too many parallels, except to say the libertarian in theology no doubt suffers from the same perils in matters of culture. He believes everyone, like himself, exists as a free and unrestrained agent of his own taste, and any aggregation which occurs happens organically and by coincidence. Of course, if it occurs by subterfuge, and he does not realise those with whom he agrees or disagrees are moved not by the same ideals as his own but the adherence to an orthodoxy, to trends formed by men of authority, then he will find that the critics have more power over his life than ever before, for his whole world will be conditioned by them without his realising. The matter then is almost always one of orthodoxy. The question is, to which do you subscribe?

This will no doubt appear a controversial statement to many of my free-thinking and open-minded readers. Fear not, however, for there is no contradiction inherent to the adherence to one perception of life over another and the desire to be individually minded. That it presents a series of prejudices is true; but, as Allan Bloom once pointed out regarding Plato’s Cave, one must first live in the cave to exit it, and one’s adherence to one orthodoxy over another is really only one step on an intellectual journey, and need not represent its nadir.

So we are talking then about orthodoxies, progressions, even traditions of thought, for which there must be some custodial class. And we must, all of us, recognise that with each passing day new orthodoxies are being formed, have been formed, and are currently taking their first tentative breaths; and, like those established vectors of culture, they too must have their churches, their priests and curates, their texts, and their means of dissemination. This is what people are complaining about, and the men issuing this complaint are like the many religious-minded of today, men with a tendency toward God but who can find no home to express it: they are prospective priests who desire parishes to administer, normal men and women who want churches of their own to patronise. They wish not necessarily to submit — though perhaps they do — to the mode of vision produced by the magazines and arts venues such as are proffered as example, but to have them form the yardstick by which they continually orient their taste. So what form does this yardstick take?

Well criticism, if it is an art at all — and I believe it is — is nevertheless a secondary one. It must lie always upon the work in question like a temporary glaze or a spot of light, emphasising here and there imperfection or illuminating instances of exquisite technique. This, it appears to me, is its chief purpose; and if you are one who finds pleasure in reading another man test his powers of discernment upon a work of art, and perhaps testing your own against his, then you are one for whom the critic writes. That criticism relies for its primary object another work of art is what lends a phrase like Hemingway’s its veracity, but that does not detract from this pleasure. One might as well criticise the historian by saying Alexander the Great did things; you, Robin Lane Fox, only write about them. Alas yes, there is some truth to this, but it is the petulant truth of the savage.

For in the end, criticism really is just conversation, and like all conversation it has its varied shades: the witty, the dull, the illuminating, the opaque, the weird, the mundane, the common, the patrician — even, above all, the good and bad. All these and more are registers by which the critic may grasp the reader’s attention and extend his pleasure. For pleasure, while it may not be his chief concern, is nevertheless the effect upon all those who wish to enter the conversation. Not all conversation is amenable to everybody, of course. Much of today’s is anathema to great swathes of people, for they have come to reject those visions of reality that remain ubiquitous and against which they examine their taste. This explains the increasing call for such novel centres as would allow for different forms to occur. Nevertheless, it remains the job of the critic to amaze not — or not merely — by his acuity, his apt deployment of knowledge, or his own facility with language, but to draw attention to that which is worthy of amazement, to explain by what means the writer or artist produces his effects, and to infect his readers with some little of that temperamental inclination toward the notice of minute particulars as is required to be a connoisseur of great art.

Imagine now a man for the first time in his life reading a book or poem and on finishing it being distinctly moved but having no grasp, no foothold by which to understand this nebulous pleasure. This man then turns to finding more out about the book. Perhaps he takes a volume out of the library or reads reviews to see what other men are thinking — hoping, perhaps, for some answer. There are, of course, myriad ways by which this set of events can play out, but allow me to present this one. In his search he comes across a piece of criticism that, while not exactly explaining the manner by which his pleasure was aroused, nonetheless gives him some idiom with which to grasp this question for himself. No doubt the essay or book from which he gained this modicum of help had much he didn’t care for, but sometimes this is as good as a consensus, for it helps push by contrast the man in question toward honing his own thoughts, forming them into some kind of coherence, and before he knows it he is taking part in the conversation. He wonders why he disagrees with parts of what the critic says and not others, and ponders how he appears to have missed so much in the book he read, and why much of what he noticed was ignored by the critic. What’s more, he found in the critic’s approach — his general assumptions toward life, by which he must make any meaningful comments about the veracity of a work of art — to not deviate so much from his own as to be incompatible. This, then, is what people are asking for.

Now there remains one other job of the critic, for he is a Janus-faced creature, and this one, in many ways, is the more fraught. For the job of the critic is to make a valuation not only for the benefit of the general reader, but, in a twist of vanity, for the artist of the work in question. This is a thorny issue, for it is perhaps here where the critic’s greatest pitfalls lie. His pretensions may be fed by his readership, but these are a diffuse and (God willing) innumerable bunch, and his powers over them are rarely quantifiable. But a writer or artist is one man whose products he can hold up to the world and evaluate with the pretension of instruction. This serves a great purpose if the critic is rigorous of approach and generous of mind, but it is where human passions come to rise nearest to the surface. For the critic may know the artist, he may admire or be jealous of him, he may bump into him at parties or be generally well-disposed toward him — perhaps he wants to sleep with him or her! Yet it is the job of a good critic to remain as aloof as possible from such matters. He may bring as many preoccupations to his work as he wishes, however idiosyncratic, as long as they are illuminating, but he must not allow these others to affect him. That said, if the critic is so capable, he does not only set a standard to be reached, but one to be broken, to be leapt over. For while he should never be the horse or the rider, he may be the hurdle, which helps display the skill and dexterity of both.

The critic then, everywhere and always, is a man of encouragement, of controlled but concerted adversity, and we need not have many to produce the desired effect. One outlet by which a few good men can congregate and work feverishly and by the lamp, to produce such as I have outlined, is what is necessary. But here we are moving into questions of bricks, mortar, and the ways of making rich men part from their money — a skill which, if this writer had any aptitude for exercising, would have long ago effected a state of affairs by which such humble words as these would have as the background of their composition the enchanting atmosphere of the Amalfi Coast.

— Amory Crane

Amory Crane is Editor-in-Chief at Decadent Serpent. He covers such topics as Art, Literature, and the more broadly Cultural, reporting straight from the chamber of what Shelley once called the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. You can follow him @LaughingCav1 on X or on Substack. He also writes fiction.