and another thing...
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Thu, 12 Mar 1998 19:36:12 +0000
Well now, Jim, you may call it literary theory if you like.
But count me out. I wasn't making any sort of critical point.
I was simply saying I liked Salinger's stuff when he was telling
me engaging stories about memorable characters. And found
him unpersuasive when he waxed windily with drugstore versions
of Eastern philosophy.
I haven't the smallest inclination to defer to anyone else for
advice on how I should read or understand a piece of fiction.
And I've an even smaller inclination to put some academic
or critic's view before whatever the writer himself may have
chosen to tell me.
(Such English literary friends as I have tell me, incidentally,
that this strange arrogation of the critic to a place of equal
authority to that of the writer is one of those weird French
conceits which have been enthusiastically embraced by
the American academic establishment - I hope not for their
own self-serving reasons. I can well believe it, though, having
been told on at least two other mailing lists by contributors
with American .edu addresses that the critical function in
literature is more or less indistinguishable from the creative.
What a cheek.)
By the way, I don't accept your analogy between first-aid &
literary appreciation. Professional criticism is really much closer
to pathology than medicine. If I had to chose between having my
wounds bandaged by Sister in Casualty & some formalin-smelling
lecturer in morbid histology fresh from the morgue, I know which one
I'd chose.
The one feature medicine *does* have in common with academic
criticism is an enslavement to fashion. Remember Proust's
description of the discipline as `a compendium of successive &
contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners..'
Scottie B.