Re: here's what he meant
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Tue, 07 Jul 1998 12:11:28 -0400
Scottie Bowman wrote:
> `... And are you certain that writers themselves know,
> even in general, what it is they want to express or communicate?...'
>
> There's something delicious about that `... even in general...'
Thank you.
> There's the rather clear indication where they should apply for
> further enlightenment.
Not a clear indication by any conscious intention of mine. This
misunderstanding should do nicely to illustrate my point, and the point
of many another person who has recently suggested that writers don't
always succeed with what they mean. And there is perhaps the happy
possibility that I did indeed "mean" that "clear indication," after all.
> I expect the same authority can also tell
> us what Dejeuner sur l'herbe or what Beethoven's final quartet
> are ACTUALLY about.
>
> All those hard-won lines of Salinger. A modest start. Now the
> real work can begin.
>
> Scottie B.
An attempt at further clarification: part of the point to the little
joke about artists and critics I recently sent to the list was that
neither holds privilege over the other. This belief of mine stems in
part from the fact (opinion, I should say) that some of our finest
writers and thinkers stand clearly on neither side of the artist-critic
line. From Dr. Johnson, who had a splendorous creative spirit, to Eco
to even Derrida, people with a drive to write (and the fortune to be
published and pondered over) tend not to be exclusively creative or
critical in stature and inclination.
Everyone from Milton to Heaney earned advanced academic degrees that no
doubt required writing cold, critical treatises of various lengths and
ambitions. I don't especially like Arnold's poetry, but it is usually
accounted good enough to be called poetry, and it's possible that "Dover
Beach" is anthologized on the strength of its own merit as well the
merit of its writer. Yet Arnold suffered himself to excrete volumes of
academical prolusions. John Ruskin is probably the loudest self-elected
and self-promoted critic of Art in the tradition, and yet his prose has
a pleasant flair that surely both Henry James and Mark Twain learned
something from. Carlyle's social criticism is equally enjoyable taken
as fiction or allegory as it is when read as social criticism. And of
course, you could read him in all three spirits simultaneously. Critics
and artists can cohabitate in the same writing subject.
Some time ago, you suggested that the difference between criticism and
art could easily be seen in many a random sample--you chose Cezanne as
the artist and a person writing an essay on him as the critic. A valid
and sturdy example of the difference between artist and critic. Many of
the people on this list could sit down and tinker with definitions,
etymologies and embellished hypothetical situations and succeed in
cleverly deconstructing the difference between Cezanne and the
essay-writer. But the distinction obviously stands, on more than just
an intuitive level.
[ObSal] Even though Salinger might council unlearning differences, and
even though we might, in good spirit or in good fun, succeed in doing so
from time to time, completing such a task on a scale of any significance
would require sea changes bigger and far more catastrophic than Noah's
silly, soggy little flood. Barthes killed the author (or at least
discovered the body), but my professors still arrive at work every day
to teach, and they don't seem convinced that they're all Baudrillardian
ghosts whisping about in post-reality. Poststructuralism did away with
Agency and the writing subject, but I still arrive at school every day
to teach freshman composition and assign grades, with Agency, to my
writing subjects.
Most of the controversial bits of theory we've been discussing here
derive from the same post-logic of poststructuralism. But hardly
anybody takes the idea of erasing differences or of the death of the
author entirely seriously, with the full range of implications. Those
who do, if they are out there, aren't likely to be participating in the
various metropols of empirical reality, of which this list is one. So
we aren't likely to hear from them.
Above, though, to compliment the Cezanne/essayist scenario, there are
examples of people who are both artists and critics, and there is also a
broader definition of "critic" than the one suggested by your
essay-writer. Isolated instances can point to fundamental differences
between artists and critics, but such fundamentals, especially when
founded on complacency and elitism, do not obtain universally.
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu