Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

by Cynthia Ozick

  I stand accused, nevertheless, of misleading. Book club members, Amazon customers, postcolonialist English departments, canny publishing executives—are these what we mean when we speak of reviewers? Aren’t the real reviewers the people who do it for a living, the talented hired hands who write regularly for a single periodical, or the diligent scattershot freelancers? In brief, that body of readers-by-occupation whose expertise, we feel, ought to make up, collectively, a society’s cultural temperament. Were there space enough and time, it might be so—this notion of a powerful undercurrent of literary intelligences, streams crossing streams, all flowing out of one great governing critical headwater; but it is not so. The professional reviewer, given fifteen hundred words or less to consider a work of fiction, must jump in and jump out again: an introductory paragraph, sometimes thematic though often not, a smattering of plot, a lick at idea (if there is one), and then the verdict, the definitive cut—yes or no. A sonnet, with worse constraints, or a haiku’s even tinier confines, can conjure philosophies and worlds. A review, whose nature is prose, is not permitted such legerdemain. Nor is criticism. Yet what separates reviewing from criticism—pragmatically—are the reductive limits of space; the end is always near. What separates criticism from reviewing—intrinsically—is that the critic must summon what the reviewer cannot: horizonless freedoms, multiple histories, multiple libraries, multiple metaphysics and intuitions. Reviewers are not merely critics of lesser degree, on the farther end of a spectrum. Critics belong to a wholly distinct phylum.

  This is a phylum that, at present, hardly exists. When, a few years ago, and in the mode of a social experiment, the New York Times Book Review asked a pool of writers to name the best novel of the past twenty-five years, the results were partly predictable and considerably muddled. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a tale of slavery and its aftermath, won the most votes. Philip Roth, John Updike, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy were substantially represented. In an essay musing on the outcome of an exercise seemingly more quixotic than significant, A. O. Scott, a Times reviewer, noted that the choices gave “a rich, if partial and unscientific picture of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details.” Or call it flotsam and jetsam. You could not tell, from the novels that floated to the top, and from those bubbling vigorously below, anything more than that they were all written in varieties of the American language. You could not tell what, taken all together, they intimated in the larger sense—the tone of their time. A quarter century encompasses a generation, and a generation does have a composite feel to it. But here nothing was composite, nothing joined these disparate writers to one another—only the catchall of the question itself, dipping like a fishing net into the sea of fiction and picking up what was closest to the surface, or had already prominently surfaced. All these novels had been abundantly reviewed—piecemeal. No reviewer had thought to set Beloved beside Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (both are political novels historically disguised) to catch the cross-reverberations. No reviewer had thought to investigate the possibly intermarried lineage of any of these works: what, for instance, has Nick in DeLillo’s Underworld absorbed from the Nick of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? The novels that rose up to meet the Book Review’s inquiry had never been suspected of being linked, whether horizontally or vertically. It was as if each one was a wolf-child reared beyond the commonality of a civilization; as if there was no recognizable thread of literary inheritance that could bind, say, Mark Helprin to Raymond Carver. Or if there was, no one cared to look for it. Nothing was indebted to nothing.

  Many readers shrugged off this poll as entertaining trivia, or as run-of-the-mill editorial attention-seeking. Yet something culturally important came of it. It revealed, blazingly, what was missing, and has long been missing, in American letters: criticism that explains, both ancestrally and contemporaneously, not only how literature evolves, but how literature influences and alters the workings of human imagination. Here, to illustrate, is Harold Bloom, avatar and prescient forerunner, tracing—via Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself—just such a pattern of cross-generational transfusion:

  Like its major descendants—T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Wallace Stevens’s Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Conrad Aiken’s The Kid, A. R. Ammons’s Sphere, John Ashbery’s A Wave—Song of Myself is an internalized quest-romance, whose antecedents include the long English Romantic tradition of falling in love with the poet’s failure. That tradition goes from Wordsworth’s The Excursion and Coleridge’s nightmare Rime of the Ancient Mariner on through Shelley’s Alastor and Keats’s Endymion to Browning’s ruined questers and the daemonic defeats of poets by their antithetical muse in Yeats.

  This is Bloom’s familiar messianism at work: the dazing fulfillment of a desired critical project before it has properly begun. And here also is James Wood, elucidating the design of that desire, not in one of his grand critical essays but merely in a short public letter making the case for Flaubert as the founder of the modern novel:

  Our indebtedness, whether we like it or not, extends to, among other things: the fetishizing of visual detail; the inverted relationship between background and foreground detail (or habitual and dynamic detail); the sacralization of art; the privileging of the music of style over the recalcitrance of “unmusical” subject matter (Flaubert’s famous desire to write a book about nothing); the agonizing over aesthetic labor—all this looks pretty new, and different in many ways from Balzac’s great achievements and solutions, not least because these new Flaubertian anxieties cannot be solutions. You might say that Flaubert founds realism and simultaneously destroys it, by making it so aesthetic: fiction is real and artificial at once. And I could have added two other elements of modernity: the refinement of “free indirect style”; and the relative plotlessness of Flaubert’s novels. All this is why different writers—realists, modernists and postmodernists—from Stephen Crane to Ian McEwan, from Kafka to Nabokov to Robbe-Grillet, all owe so much to Flaubert.

  The key, then, is indebtedness. The key is connectedness. If Wood cannot read Flaubert without thinking of McEwan, neither can he read McEwan without thinking of Flaubert. In this single densely packed paragraph (though he is not usually so compact), Wood reflects on how scenes are constructed; how art imitates faith; how aesthetics can either combine with or annihilate what passes for the actual world. And also: the relation of story to the language that consumes it, and the descent of literature not only from one nation to another, but from one writer to another—all the while clinging to a unitary theme, the origin and nature of the modern. Such an imperial analysis has both a Darwinian and a biblical flavor: evolution mixed with Genesis.

  Perhaps because Wood is partial to realism (though not to “magical” or—his term—“hysterical” realism), he is sometimes faulted for narrow sympathies, and for deprecating those styles and dispositions that escape the bounds of his particular credo. Yet a critic is nothing without an authoritative posture, or standard, or even prejudice, against which an opposing outlook or proposition can be tested. To keep to a point of view is itself a critical value. The grand historic example of critical authority is Samuel Johnson, whose unyielding mastery of a position was such that to affirm it wholly was never easy, while to dissent from it was still more difficult—but the assertion itself roused the mind. In just this sense of instigating counterbalance, Wood is a necessary contemporary goad.

  For an extended period—an anomaly in a culture of kaleidoscopically rapid shifts—he stood alone, a promontory of notice and prestige. A stimulus and a goad, yes, but companionless. On the American scene, from the New England Transcendentalists to the Southern Agrarians to the New Critics to the New York Intellectuals, linkages and public movements have been more nearly the norm. At least part of the reason for isolated renown may be what has come to be called a “platform”—the critic’s identification with a single
journal. George Steiner’s hierarchical elitism, for instance, once dominated the New Yorker, defining for its readers what criticism ought to do. Consistency of this order has its public benefit (steady access to a singular mind), but after a time an evolving disadvantage creeps in: the pace, the voice, the tone, the habits of phrasing, have grown too familiar. (And also the occasional verbal tic: older readers may recall Steiner’s evocation of lofty models, such as “an Aristotle,” “a Mozart,” as if there might be several of each to choose from.) Where dazzlement is routinely expected, it ceases to dazzle. A critic is fresher when less territorial, a restless pilgrim bird with multiple nests.

  And the contrapuntal—contrapuntal, that is, to Wood’s prevailing clef—has begun to assert itself, as will happen when a notable critic commands an overriding baton. A case in point: as long ago as 1925, Edmund Wilson, in an essay on Henry James, took issue with Van Wyck Brooks, a leading critic of that burgeoning if quarrelsome era. Wilson’s subject, it turned out, was not so much James as it was Brooks’s influence on the critical idiom of the hour. Brooks had disparaged James as “an enchanted exile in a museum-world”—a fore-echo of Naipaul’s “from the top of a carriage or the top of a coach” (that oddly redundant vehicular sneer). “The truth is,” Wilson wrote, “Mr. Brooks cannot help expecting a really great writer to be a stimulating social prophet.” And again: “It is precisely because Mr. Brooks’s interest is all social and never moral that he has missed the point of James’s art.” In arguing that James eschewed overt societal indictment because he was “preoccupied simply with the predilection of moral character,” Wilson was intending to unseat Brooks’s position as arbiter of what a significant literature should properly pursue: Brooks, he insisted, was a “preacher.” Certainly Wilson was pushing against a view that in the following decade would support the rise of the blunt and blatant proletarian novel. And whether or not it was Wilson’s dissent, in combination with gathering mutations of taste, that finally deposed him, the fading of Brooks as a preeminent critic was such that today he is mainly forgotten. Not, however, that Brooks was deprived of an ironic victory. Wilson in all his expansiveness went on to become, among manifold other literary paths zealously trod, a conscious social critic. And as a multivalent pundit, he argued with Nabokov over the nuances of Russian translation, popularized the complex history of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and wrote reverberatingly about everything from burlesque shows to the stock market crash to what he termed “the special psychology of reviewers.”

  Wilson-versus-Brooks represents a purposeful clash of differing temperaments; but the contrapuntal critic can also turn up in the absence of deliberate opposition, out of the communal air, out of contrasting literary intuitions that begin now to be widely heard—and unlike Wilson, with no intent to diminish a lauded critic. The contrapuntals have, finally, appeared; they are here, and Wood is no longer lonely in his eminence. For Wood, the animating force, his engine of origins, is the crisis of belief and unbelief, of reality and sham: a metaphysical alertness. And something else, unspoken but speaking for itself: the conviction that criticism must be able to stand as literature in its own right.

  The contrapuntals I have in mind (because they are visible everywhere, winging from nest to nest) are Adam Kirsch and Daniel Mendelsohn. Like Wood, each comes from—as in the ideologically minded exploratory phrase “Where are you coming from?”—a background of early, and deeply embedded, preoccupation. Mendelsohn is that uncommon contemporary presence, a master of the literature of ancient Greece. Kirsch is a poet, and more than that: he is in serious possession of the very thing that long ago alarmed John Blackwood, George Eliot’s publisher, when, on first reading Daniel Deronda, he unhappily discovered “the Jewish element.” (Kirsch is also in possession of what might be termed “the George Eliot element,” the capacity to embrace intellectually, and inhabit sympathetically, discrete yet crucially intertwined cultures.) Both Kirsch and Mendelsohn follow Wilson in breadth, ranging at will beyond the immediately literary, Mendelsohn more peripatetically than Kirsch. Kirsch is closer to Wood in scrupulous attention to language, as one would expect of a poet, particularly one of formal inclination. Mendelsohn’s paragraphs will freely employ relaxed popular speech, sometimes even tending toward the breezy, while at the same time tightly analytical. Having fully assimilated the postmodernist leveling of high and low, he approaches film and television with the same brio as he might bring to a play by Euripides; or he will mingle the current with the classical, pointing out parallels (viz., “As Seinfeld and Aristotle both knew . . .”). Neither Mendelsohn nor Kirsch is as fierce a close reader as Wood, or drills into the work under inspection with the same fanatical eye. Kirsch has undertaken to penetrate the oceanic pages of the Talmud (albeit in English translation), daf by patient daf. He has published a biography of Disraeli and a comprehensive study of Lionel Trilling: impossible to conceive of Wood’s being drawn to either figure. (Kirsch has, in fact, been described as Trilling’s heir.) And Mendelsohn is the author of The Lost, a moving, exhaustive, and revelatory history of his family’s Holocaust-devoured Polish branch that stands starkly apart from the critic’s role.

  In an analogy that is certainly inexact as to particulars, but nevertheless interestingly suggestive of how oddly and unexpectedly forked a life can be, Mendelsohn brings to mind the career of A. E. Housman, who as a ferociously contentious dry-as-dust Latin scholar was devoted, among others, to Manilius, a minor and mostly overlooked Roman poet and astrologer. All that side of Housman is half obliterated; what lasts are the lyrically bucolic verses that erupted from an unsuspected and yearningly tender inwardness. And for Mendelsohn, a disciplined early immersion in the rigor of the classics has somehow drawn out an appetite for the most tumultuous, even circus-like, aspects of the present scene: from Sophocles and Aristophanes, say, to Mad Men and Downton Abbey. Yet while this exuberant transmutation from one species of perception to another can never be predictable or stodgy, it can sometimes come at the cost of depth. The commanding if graver Kirsch, meanwhile, has moved with conceptual agility from the innate structural enclosures of the poem to elasticity, history, connectedness; and to steadfast literary authority fed by a sympathetic intellect. His ability to enter into the political, the societal, the moral—to leap from Reinhold Niebuhr to Harper Lee—distances his reach from the narrower channels of most contemporary critics.

  Wellsprings are not always signposts; sometimes they are mazes. A classicist becomes a ringmaster of all the arts. A poet—a man of subtle letters—becomes a cultural interpreter.

  But where, in all this, is Susan Sontag, who before her death at seventy-one was for more than forty years an inescapable omnipresence, named by the New York Review of Books as “one of the most influential critics of her generation”? She took the compliment as too easily obvious, and also obtuse; she preferred to think of herself as primarily a novelist: “I’m a storyteller,” she proclaimed. Wood, skeptical of the historical novel as a form, lauded her final work of historical fiction, In America, as a successful exception. (His seemingly spirited endorsement, caught between a principle and its exemption, somehow ends feeling tacitly lukewarm.) Yet because Sontag was, incontrovertibly, that marmoreal edifice, a Public Intellectual, her self-recognition as such lofted her stature well above her plentiful essays, and surely beyond her four novels: it could not be said that she strove in the common critical stewpot. She knew herself to be royalty; she was no one’s counterpart, and no one, she made plain, was her peer: she countenanced neither her like nor her unlike. She organized her own exile by ordering her burial in the venerable Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where Balzac, Proust, Colette, Gertrude Stein, and countless legendary luminaries are interred. And having lived as an American lioness of unsparing ambition, she willed herself to end as a foreigner in a foreign land: a literary, perhaps also a political, declaration. To formulate—to contribute to—a viable critical infrastructure, one must first be willing to be a part of it.

  If Sontag�
�neither critical competitor nor critical confrere—made certain to steer clear of the hope for such an infrastructure, Leon Wieseltier has been its tutelary spirit and facilitator. As literary editor of the New Republic for more than three decades (until its transmigration into a digital afterlife), he presided over the magazine’s matchless book section, inviting largeness and depth, imposing no constraints on space or theme. Himself a distinctive stylist and a revivifying cultural critic, he gave a moral shape to questions of aesthetics, and brought humanist perspectives to political thought. Under his influence, the critical essay flourished, whether touching on literature or philosophy or history or painting or music. It was under Wieseltier’s eye that Kirsch started out, and it was Wieseltier who recruited Wood—then chief critic for the London Guardian—and introduced him to American readers.

  As more and more review journals give up the ghost or, like the New Republic, turn cybernetically anti-literary, the shallower digital venues proliferate. There, where the long essay makes for uneasy reading, and reviews are mostly random and trivial and shrunk to fit the hither-and-yon notice of cafeteria-style readers, what chance is there for the notion of a serious and sustained critical surround? Yet large projects do not relate to chance, nor are they prone to be stymied by prevailing circumstances. Instead, they germinate out of necessity and will.