The disappearance of criticism, part two

A friend mentioned to me that he felt alienated by the articulacy of a literary critical book he was reading; by its neutrality of tone, by its calm. Unruffled was another word he used. We all might recognise this feeling while assuming it is admiration, respect, perhaps even envy. We become convinced without noticing that command over what one has read defines the value of criticism, and that the object serves a purpose only the critic may determine.

His comments made me realise that I am often similarly alienated by book reviews: “We know everything,” they say, “nothing can surprise us.” The critic may be disturbed by the content, offended, made angry, impressed, amused, surprised or delighted, but these result only in the language of reproach or approval, in hachet jobs or raves, each accommodated under the alibi of industrial evaluation. Literature is again subordinated to its public uses, so that for the critic to experience a separation from that regular accommodation is to experience self-doubt and the suspicion of incompetence. Asking fundamental questions is not advisable.

Alienation is the residue of those unasked fundamental questions. Their repression is only one of many symptoms of the despair of contemporary culture in its dealing with literature; a despair that manifests in newspaper book pages desperately seeking an aura for what we must call post-literary novels. The fierce policing of despair is manifest in this newspaper's report of the stern rebuking of Barry Pierce for his appropriately tongue-in-cheek review of some generic ephemera.

For the critic to become ruffled, it would be necessary for them to become aware of that which makes it possible for a work to become a work of art, and for their criticism to be subject to that experience. When art is completely absent, or used as a keyword for elegance and good taste, the only thing left to say is said by Barry Pierce.

By “makes it possible”, I’m thinking not of the conditions of a literary work’s production, the biography of its author, or the poetic or experimental quality of the prose, but of what Maurice Blanchot’s writes paraphrasing Rilke’s lament for a dismembered Orpheus: “The work is Orpheus, but it is also the adverse power which tears it and divides Orpheus.” The work is that of mastery and of mastery’s undoing, which means, he adds, that the work belongs to an order that we do not associate with achievement. Articulacy would then risk betraying the work by ignoring, dismissing or, more likely, remaining completely unaware of the part that distinguishes art from other human creative activity; the part taken by fire, to adapt Blanchot’s title for a collection of his essays; that which is non-essential, useless, even destructive. Instead, articulacy emerges in firm judgments on technique and the utilitarian aspects of the work. As the 2020 Booker shortlist also reveals, this tendency also now dominates the production of novels.

While this domination is perhaps inevitable, as the work itself draws attention to such uses, the reason why art has such an aura, and why the review pages regard literature with such uncomprehending reverence even as they abuse it, is as much to do with its adverse power, the part taken by fire, as its demonstrable uses. Criticism might reappear as a means of approaching the clearing taken by fire even as it is appropriated by reportage or self-expression.

 
In the same essay (from The Space of Literature), Blanchot pursues the aspects of art that define its remove from what he calls “daytime clarity”. When we know nothing of the history of a work’s creation, he says, “the work comes closest to itself”. It’s a curious phrase, as we tend to think of works of art as moving towards us in order to give. Why should it go in that direction? And what is a work’s ‘itself’ anyway? A timely explanation comes in The Magnetic Fields, newly translated by Charlotte Mandell, obstensibly by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, but written in such a way as to distance the writer from masterful agency. As the publisher describes it:

They would write for a week on every day of the week and they would write fast, as fast as possible, in complete secrecy. When the week was over, the writing would be done. No touching up.

From a page chosen as fast as possible:

Vegetable gardens are surrounded by various fences and trees of May or October which let the wind wander through. What are the dingy houses that open their shutters only to broad daylight? The major chimneys and iron doors of monotonous buildings allow shouts and the whir of machines to run freely. You still have to turn your back.

The sentences are grammatically correct and the words make sense as words, but context withdraws as the sentences proceed. There no destination for meaning. While we know the conditions of the production of The Magnetic Fields and the biographies of the authors, we cannot use them to trace a route back to daytime clarity. The work comes closest to itself then by exposing to the reader to what Blanchot calls our “bilingualism in a single language” – everyday “raw” language and “essential” language, or language in itself. The closeness of a work to itself is the appearance of that essential language, an impersonal reality that is “far more or still less than any reality” with which we are familiar. The words become their appearance and begin to become “the elemental depth upon which this appearance is opened while at the same time it closes”. 

Mention of ‘elemental depths’ is enough to raise concerns about the direction this is going – those pesky fundamental questions, such as Jacob Taubes’ question about the sur in surrealism: “What meaning can this prefix have in the context of a purely profane, immanent, and materialist experience?”. This is the question of life itself I detected in volumes one and two of Knausgaard's My Struggle, whose mainstream reviews are the ideal example of criticism's alienating force. We can answer at least that it means literature’s utile correspondence to the immanent world is not enough for a satisfactory definition. 

Perhaps those of us patronised as booklovers appreciate this even as we misunderstand it. Industry influencers speak of another world opened up by a novel and celebrate the escapism it affords us, but we sense it is more than that and cannot condescend to our experience and deepest needs. Is it only an empty transcendence, local redemption, or a secularised excuse for an impossible salvation, publicly mitigated or misunderstood as gaining instrumental knowledge of the world, an empathy for others and, of course, escapism? It should be an open question.

There is much more to write about this, which I hope will emerge over the coming months.

Blanchot describes poetry as a temple from which the gods have departed. When the temple was in use, the poem named the sacred, only it was the sacred that was heard, not the poem. And yet, now that the sacred has departed and we have forgotten even that it has departed, the poem remains as the imposing obscurity of a stone ruin. The poem, the novel, the work of art, is the “abode of the gods’ absence”. In regarding the ruin as our own, the home of our own meaning, we have fallen into a narcissism that cannot recognise what Krzysztof Michalski calls revelations of eternity – "irremediable fissures or intervals … interrupting the continuity of lived time” but which are now unintelligible without the control of science and the coercion of politics. But each time we read, our meaning is exposed to the 'sur' in surrealism. Jacob Taubes answers his own question:

Poetry is the only beyond, not because it bridges 'this world' and the one 'beyond'. It is the beyond itself. The word does not bear testimony, rather it is itself transcendence.

This was clear to the San people of southern Africa whose ancient cave paintings “were not representations of spirits but the spirits themselves”. 

This is why we are alienated. 

The disappearance of criticism, part one

Critic's block

"Criticism is as inevitable as breathing," wrote TS Eliot, "and we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it". Nothing uncontroversial about that, as the proliferation of online book reviews suggests.

But what if breathing is difficult and you don't know what passes in your mind? I've often wondered why certain books by certain authors fascinate me without any satisfactory means of saying why. I don't mean only those with complex arguments that require careful precis or that are especially 'poetic' or 'experimental', but something less tangible, connected to the style and content but connected to something else too. There are many books that invite the terms of discussion – In Search of Lost Time, for example, because it is the narration of its own coming into being – and yet, even then, accepting the invitation seems beside the point.

It's an obscure problem, as what is stirred in the reader is soon displaced by inviting aids. Eliot presents one in the same essay when he emphasises the author's continual surrender to the order of tradition. The otherwise blocked critic might then seek a slot in the filing cabinet of what's gone before and call that articulation. Focusing on a book's genre designation and its faithfulness or not to that genre is a prime example of this iron lung approach, as is, say, the more aspirant tasks of excavating The Waste Land's relation to the Great War or explicating Proust's philosophy of time.

Can criticism ever be more than bureaucratic evasion? Perhaps not. Perhaps instead criticism saves us from art, filtering only an illusion through to us, mistaking epigones for the thing itself. What I mean is explained by John Banville in his essay Survivors of Joyce in which he distinguishes between works of art from which one can learn because they allow glimpses of how they were made – Proust again, though Banville's examples are Beethoven and Henry James – and those from which one learns nothing and leave one speechless, ready to abandon writing altogether:

The greatness, or part of the greatness, of an Aeneid, of a View of Delft, of a Don Giovanni, of a Ulysses, rests in the fact that they are, in an essential way, closed. By this I do not mean to say that these works of art are difficult, or obscure – what could be more limpid than the light that hovers over Delft? – but that they are mysterious at their core.

Banville acknowledges the last example is problematic, excusing Ulysses from the first group because "knowing a thing, however intimately, however deeply, is not always the same as understanding it", and all the facts about Ulysses do not capture its "quality of the numinous":

To repeat: great art, I am convinced, does not 'reveal' itself to us, does not open outward to our needs; on the contrary, it is great precisely because it is closed against us.

Criticism saves by ushering us beyond what ever is closed and tells us that the book deals with X, tackles themes of Y or is a meditation on Z. Distance is its Beatrice. To imagine an alternative, we should remember what happens to the writer Bergotte as he gazed at the yellow wall in Vermeer's painting.

Banville's selection comprises only accepted classics, so to me it has the air of received opinion rather than a personal encounter, which is unfair, so, to counter the aura, I should select a few random examples of my own that refuse expression: Peter Handke's Repetition, Paul Celan's poetry and Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London. Except, when I do, I realise I have written about all three – so perhaps I wrote to mitigate my ignorance of what sets these works apart and convinced myself it was articulation while knowing all along it was self-deceit. Criticism is then not so much bureaucratic evasion than a protective wall.

The two walls for criticism

The merits and problems of criticism are discussed by Maurice Blanchot in his 1947 review of Jean Pouillon’s study Time and the Novel. He praises Pouillon for avoiding the vagueness he says is common to literary studies, but then follows Banville by doubting the value of the novel as an instrument of knowledge when it is "knowledge with its starting-point in the void of fascination". He describes the novel as a form as "the most striking product of bad faith in language," in that at its best we experience something very powerfully that at base doesn't exist and thereby requires "an ignorance peculiar to art" to fully appreciate. Criticism would appear then to demand vagueness in order to pay ultimate respect to such ignorance, and the failure to satisfy the need to identify the fascination would be entirely appropriate, or else it would destroy art. But this does not escape the problems of knowledge either: while applying precision and rigour to a study of the novel is an act of bad faith because it will not accommodate ignorance, respecting that ignorance is also bad faith because it cannot accommodate its own inevitable knowledge of that distance.

Critic's block would appear then to be the proper condition, even more so than critical vagueness, and we might accept this as proof of the harm of criticism and thereby wish for its disappearance, as it causes more damage than, say, dancing about architecture, because it sullies the language of literature with crude, everyday words and ideas. Except this would itself be a disguised form of criticism, equivalent to a prideful disdain for anyone who attempts to articulate the fascinating void, which actually reinforces respect for this aspect of art it is supposed to be dismissing; a tactic so common in English culture that it is as invisible as breathing. Eliot himself said his essay would "halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person". But to what is this being responsible?

We might test this with Blanchot's characterisation in the same review of the novel as "an absence that seeks to be everything and become real in the dual and paradoxical form of absence and absence of everything". Not a sentence you'll ever see in a crime fiction round-up and perhaps a prime example of the irresponsibility Eliot resisted, except to me it does that rare thing of challenging us to appreciate the strangeness of this enchantment in which we allow ourselves to cross a frontier.

Wozu Kritiker in dürftiger Zeit?

To answer the original question then, it might be that some books resist satisfactory critical approach because criticism cannot contain a dual and paradoxical form, cannot follow the novel over the frontier. This would explain Banville's sense of mystery before certain works, in that those that allow approach foreground the paradox while those that don't, embody it. And while the value of such a distinction might appear to be small beer and irredeemably subjective, it might provide a better context for any critical block.

Twelve years after his review, Blanchot applied an historical dimension to the question in a series of essays asking "Where is literature going?", which informs how criticism might then follow. It begins with Hegel's claim that art is a thing of the past because it can no longer support the need for the absolute, which Blanchot recognises in the Romantic movement and its focus on the artist and his or her accomplishments in the world, rather than to, say, the glory of God, while we can recognise it not only in the sense of what Banville identifies but also in a critical culture in which judgments about art are arrived at by means of commercial standards, technical prowess, relevance to current affairs, the advance of a minority group within 'the industry' or by the vulgarities of celebrity ("the new Coetzee"). Blanchot contrasts this with a disconnected movement against it, using the emblematic names of Mallarmé and Cézanne whose works, he says, pursue what is concealed by their worldly achievements – what we might see as Banville's mysterious core and Hegel's absolute:

What attracts the writer, what moves the artist, is not directly the work; it is the search, the impulse that leads to it, the approach of what makes the work possible: art, literature, and what these two words conceal. [Translated by Charlotte Mandell]

It is a pursuit that the world generally finds incomprehensible (substitute 'incomprehensible' with the word 'experimental') and also prompts a certain self-destructiveness in the artist as they struggle to reconcile the quest with a futility larded by success: "For a work can never take as its subject the question that sustains it. Never could a painting even begin if it set out to make painting visible."

Blanchot then suggests the "anonymous, authorless language" of the mass of documents that have no literary intention and disappear as soon as they appear might alert us to something the more familiar works are also seeking, the speech of "an impersonal neutrality", perhaps that which elevates a work in our eyes, as it does not allow the extraction of everyday value. This is not to endorse the reality hunger of recent times, because it is not the informational content that is being highlighted, but something closer to the destitution of the sublime Jeff Fort identifies in The Imperative to Write.

So, the answer Blanchot gives to where is literature going is that it is going towards this blank space, towards its essence in disappearance. Except we might look at current conditions and complain that literature has more or less disappeared anyway, in that it is now almost as anonymous as any other mass of documents, with novel upon novel being written and published without any curiosity as to its meaning outside of daily commerce; that is to say, there is no resistance to the easy victories of the form, no curiosity let alone horror at how they're relying on the absence of everything to create meaning, and there are very few writers apparently prepared to wax their ears and strap themselves to the mast to go beyond the siren call of worldly accomplishment. I suspect my assumption about critic's block is really only the wish to be challenged more often; for this to be the rule rather than the exception.

Blanchot sees the task of criticism in the Kantian sense of "interrogating the conditions for the possibility of scientific experience" except, in terms of literature it is not only theoretical but "the very process constituting the literary experience", that is, criticism should be a creative act that, by straying from the path, "opens up the darkness". Critics should be, he says, like the priests of the wine-god in Hölderlin's poem "Who in holy Night roamed from one place to the next". In this sense, perhaps it is time writers became critics and critics became writers so that such distinctions disappear.