by David Lodge
Life and the world being in modern times very complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it.2
And he goes so far as to say that in a period of creative sterility or mediocrity, such as he perceived the second half of the nineteenth century to be in English literature, it might be more useful to be a critic than to be a creative writer. For Arnold, criticism was more or less synonymous with the pursuit of humane knowledge. It was, he said, “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”3 T. S. Eliot, writing his own “Function of Criticism” essay with Arnold’s very much in mind, used criticism in a more restricted and more familiar sense, to mean “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.”4 Speaking of his experience of teaching adult education classes, he says, “I have found only two ways of leading any pupils to like anything with the right liking: to present them with a selection of the simplest kind of facts about a work—its conditions, its setting, its genesis—or else to spring the work on them in such a way that they were not prepared to be prejudiced against it.”5 Eliot thus gave his blessing to two very different schools of academic criticism which have often been at war with each other—on the one hand, traditional historical scholarship, and on the other hand, the close reading of unattributed poems pioneered by I. A. Richards at Cambridge under the name of Practical Criticism, from which evolved the so-called New Criticism in England and America. Both these schools claimed to be trying to make criticism more “scientific”: historical scholarship by focusing on hard empirical facts about the literary text, and the New Criticism by focusing on the verbal structure of the literary text itself. What Eliot most distrusted was what he called “interpretation”: “for every success in this type of writing there are thousands of impostures. Instead of insights, you get a fiction.”6 This is a slightly puzzling observation—what were his students supposed to do with the poems he sprung on them except interpret them? To read a poem is to interpret its meaning. By interpretation Eliot seems to mean something more personal and assertive: the effort to explain an author or a work in terms provided by the critic; criticism that offers itself as a kind of key that unlocks a mystery.
The theorists of the New Criticism were always struggling with the problem of how to define the limits of legitimate interpretation. Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1946 article entitled “The Intentional Fallacy” is a classic case in point. They assert:
“Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work.”7 One can see in this analogy the desire to put criticism on a quasi-scientific footing, to make its judgements objective by viewing the literary text in terms of functions. But clearly a poem is not like a pudding or a machine in many important respects. It is a verbal discourse, not a material object, and discourses have complex and multiple meanings. The meaning of a pudding or a machine (a clock, say) is inseparable from its utilitarian function, but a poem does not have a utilitarian function. You could discover how a clock was made by taking it apart, and with this knowledge make yourself another clock which was just as useful; but if you take a poem apart, you may learn something about how it was made but you cannot infer a set of instructions for making an equally good poem—unless it is a replica of the poem you started with.
Wimsatt and Beardsley continue: “It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of an artificer.” True enough. Literary texts are obviously intentional objects—they do not come into existence by accident. The critics then quote Archibald MacLeish’s famous line, “A poem should not mean but be,” and comment: “A poem can be only through its meaning—since its medium is words—yet it is, simply is, in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant. Poetry is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once.”8 Some lyric poems may give that illusion, but we know that they were produced in time, and we certainly experience a poem’s meaning in time, not “all at once”—and differently every time we reread it. This is even more obviously true of long complex works like novels.
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s article was a brave and salutary, if ultimately unconvincing, attempt to situate the literary text in some public space unconditioned either by its creative origins or by its individual readers:
The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge.9
This is a more abstract formulation of the idea of the impersonality of artistic creation which Eliot expounded in his enormously influential 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where he said that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates,” and that “honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.”10 Eliot’s cultivation of the idea of “impersonality,” however, like his attack on “interpretation,” was in part a manoeuvre designed to conceal the very personal sources of his own poetry from inquisitive critics.
Here we begin to touch on the second view of the relation between creation and criticism: that they are not complementary but opposed, even antagonistic. As the case of Eliot reveals, it is quite possible for one writer to hold both views, according to what kind of criticism is in question; or to hold both at different times, with different hats on. I must admit to this inconsistency—one might almost call it schizophrenia—myself. For instance, I generally avoid reading criticism about my own work, especially academic criticism of the kind I used to write myself, and taught students to write, because I find it hinders rather than helps creation.
Academic criticism is the demonstration of a professional mastery. It cannot help trying to say the last word on its subject; it cannot help giving the impression that it operates on a higher plane of truth than the texts it discusses. The author of those texts therefore tends to feel reduced, diminished by such discourse, however well meant it is. In a way, the more approving such criticism is in its own terms, the more threatening and unsettling it can seem to the writer who is its object. As Graham Greene said, there comes a time when an established writer “is more afraid to read his favourable critics than his unfavourable, for with terrible patience they unroll before his eyes the unchanging pattern of the carpet.”11
Academic criticism may pretend, may even deceive itself, that its relation to a creative work is purely complementary. But it also has its own hidden agenda: the demonstration of a professional skill, the refutation of competing peers, the claim to be making an addition to knowledge. The pursuit of these ends entails a degree of selection, manipulation, and re-presentation of the original text so drastic that its author will sometimes have difficulty in recognizing his or her creative work in the critical account of it. But it is not only in relation to criticism of their own work that creative writers often feel alienated by academic criticism. Inasmuch as it aspires to a scientific, or at least systematic, knowledge of its subject, criticism can be seen as hostile to creativity itself. D. H. Lawrence took this view of the matter:
Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values which science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason . . . All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and usually dull jargon.12
On such grounds it is sometimes argued that it is a bad idea for an aspiring writer to do a university degree in literary studies. I came across a remark to this effect in a newspaper interview with the Irish filmmaker and novelist Neil Jordan (director of Michael Collins). Jordan went to University College Dublin because he wanted to write, t
he interviewer reported, but quoted Jordan as saying: “I found the academic study of English very depressing, and strange that something so personal could be analysed so coherently.” It is interesting that whereas Lawrence was scornfully dismissive of the pretensions of academic criticism, it was the very power of the critical process, its analytical coherence, that Jordan found intimidating. He accordingly switched to medieval Irish history, which he found more conducive to creativity, since almost nothing for certain is known about it. “You’re studying a society where history is invention, a kind of fiction really.”
This issue has been raised in a new form by the proliferation, first in America, and increasingly in Britain, of creative writing courses in universities, often pursued in tandem with courses in literary criticism. Is this healthy, is this wise, is it likely to nourish the production of high-quality writing? I can only say that it all depends on what kind of writer you are or want to be. I have certainly never regretted studying English at university and making an academic career in that field. There were sometimes problems in reconciling the social roles or personae of professor and novelist, but I never found any intellectual or psychological incompatibility between the two activities. If I had done, I would have retired much sooner from academic life. Neil Jordan undoubtedly made the right decision for him. It would not be the right one for everybody.
I have been focussing on the relationship between creative writers and academic critics, but tension is just as likely—perhaps more likely—to occur between the creative writer and his journalistic critics, since they have a more direct impact on the writer’s career—his status, his financial prospects, and his self-esteem. Reviews are the first independent feedback the writer gets on his or her work, as distinct from the reactions of friends, family, agent, and publisher. But of course they are not totally objective or disinterested. Reviewers, like scholars, have their own hidden agenda, which explains why their judgements are often so extreme. Extravagant praise, especially of some obscure or exotic work, is often a means by which literary journalists assert their professional mastery, attempt to steal a march on their peers, and draw attention to their own eloquence. Extravagant dispraise can have the same effect when directed at a well-established reputation. When the reviewer is also a practising or aspiring writer there may be a political motive—political in the literary sense—with one generation of writers seeking to oust its seniors, as in the speculative anthropology of Freud. The reviewing by the Angry Young Men writers of the 1950s, for instance—Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and others—had behind it a determined effort to displace the existing literary establishment, the faded remnants of prewar Bloomsbury and cosmopolitan modernism.
There has always been this Oedipal drama played out on the review pages of newspapers and magazines; but today—at least in Britain—its tone seems particularly spiteful. Salman Rushdie—who has, of course, been subjected to a much more lethal form of criticism—has described the public discussion of contemporary literature in Britain as “the culture of denigration.” I think this has something to do with the extent to which the literary novel has recently become big business and the object of intense interest to the mass media. That didn’t seem to be the case earlier in the century. It is clear from Virginia Woolf’s wonderful diaries, for instance, that she never expected to make much money out of her novels, and that she cared more about her standing among her peer group than about her success or failure with the reading public. “I have made up my mind that I am not going to be popular,”13 she says at one point. But she is plunged into deep depression and loses faith in her novel in progress because at a party T. S. Eliot seemed to neglect her claims as a writer and spent the whole evening raving about James Joyce. In those days literary reputations were made first among a small elite, and through the medium of small-circulation literary magazines. Structural changes in the economics of publishing and the insatiable appetite of the mass media for information have made it possible in our own day for a gifted literary writer to become rich and famous quite quickly. This then provokes a backlash of envy and spite in the media against the very figure they created, which can be an uncomfortable experience for the subject. Whereas post-structuralism has asserted the impersonality of creative writing in the most extreme theoretical terms—the so-called “death of the author”—literary journalism has never been so obsessed as it is now with the personality and private life of the author.
“The worst of writing,” Virginia Woolf observed in her diary, quoting a friend, “is that one depends so much upon praise.”14 Which is to say that a writer, like any other artist, is continually offering his or her work for public assessment, and it is only human to want to be praised for one’s efforts rather than blamed. Virginia Woolf’s diaries give a wonderfully vivid account of this side of a writer’s life—the way her spirits go up and down, in spite of her efforts to remain detached, as favourable and unfavourable verdicts on a new book are received from friends, colleagues, and reviewers. She notes that George Eliot “would not read reviews, since talk of her books hampered her writing,” and Woolf sounds envious of such self-control. But one can’t help wondering whether George Eliot’s partner, George Henry Lewes, didn’t make sure that she saw or knew about the favourable reviews.
My own ideal review was exemplified when a former publicity director of my publishers reviewed one of my books under the simple headline, “Literary Genius Writes Masterpiece.” Unfortunately it was published in an English-language Hong Kong newspaper of very small circulation.
I turn now to the third of my perspectives on the relation between creation and criticism: that criticism is itself creative, or that there is essentially no difference between the two activities. T. S. Eliot considers this idea only to dismiss it. “No exponent of criticism . . . has I presume ever made the preposterous assumption that criticism is an autotelic activity,” he wrote in “The Function of Criticism.”15 But of course the preposterous assumption has often been made—by, for instance, Gilbert, the speaker in Oscar Wilde’s dialogue called “The Critic as Artist,” who seems to be a mouthpiece for Wilde himself:
Criticism is in fact both creative and independent . . . The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticizes as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought.16
This view is antithetical to the view of criticism as complementary to creative writing, aiming at objectivity, striving “to see the object as it really is,” as Matthew Arnold urged, or discovering its hidden meaning by what Eliot disapprovingly called “interpretation.” Criticism, Wilde’s Gilbert says, is “in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another.”17
Criticism as the expression of subjective response is of course an essentially romantic idea and implies a romantic theory of literary creation as self-expression. It is often associated with the lyrical and impressionistic, musing-in-the-library style of critical discourse, which I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, and the American New Critics, sought to discredit and expunge from academic criticism from the 1920s to the 1950s. But more recently the idea that there is no essential difference between creation and criticism has been given a new academic respectability, and a new sophistication, under the aegis of post-structuralism, and especially the theory of deconstruction, which questions the very distinction between subjective and objective.
A fundamental tenet of deconstruction is that the nature of language is such that any discourse, including a literary text, can be shown under analysis to be full of gaps and contradictions which undermine its claim to have a determinate meaning. If poems and novels have no fixed, stable, recuperable meaning, then clearly criticism cannot pretend to have a duty or responsibility of truth-telling towards them, but is inevitably involved in producing their meaning by a process to which Jacques Derrida gives the name “play.”18 In this perspective, criticism is not complementary to creative writing, but supplementary to
it, with “supplement” used in a double sense to denote that which replaces what is missing, and that which adds something to what is already there. The absence that criticism fills up is precisely the illusory fixed stable meaning of traditional criticism, and what it adds is the product of the critic’s own ingenuity, wit, and resourcefulness in the exercise of semantic freeplay. It is not surprising that Derrida has admitted to being a creative writer manqué. His work is a kind of avant-garde literary discourse—punning, allusive, exhibitionistic, and teasingly provocative to those who are not simply baffled and bored by it. Harold Bloom has developed his own idiosyncratic version of creative criticism based on the idea that the apparent misreading of texts by “strong” critics (like himself) replicates the process by which strong poets struggle with the intimidating example of their precursors and liberate themselves from the anxiety of influence. No wonder that in reading Bloom we are so often reminded of Wilde, to whom he refers in The Western Canon as “the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything.”19
It is, I think, possible to concede that there is a creative element in criticism without collapsing the distinction between creative and critical writing entirely. A good critical essay should have a kind of plot. Some of T. S. Eliot’s most celebrated essays were critical whodunits which investigated such mysteries as “Who murdered English poetic diction?” (The culprit turned out to be Milton.)20 Modern critics of the anti-foundationalist school, like Paul de Man or Stanley Fish, are masters of the critical peripeteia, by which the conclusion of the essay turns upon and undermines its own arguments. And there is no reason why criticism should not be written with elegance and eloquence. I try to do so myself. But when I write criticism I feel that I am involved in a different kind of activity from when I write fiction, and part of that difference is that everything in writing a novel has to be decided—nothing is given—whereas in the case of criticism the prior existence of the work or works to be criticised, and the prior existence of other critical opinion about them, places limits on the development of the critical discourse, and makes it on the whole an easier and less anxiety-provoking process.