Who killed the literary critic?

In the age of blogging, great critics appear to be on life support. Salon's book reviewers discuss snobbery, how to make criticism fun and the need for cultural gatekeepers.

By Louis Bayard and Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Laura Miller, Newspapers, Criticism, Novels, Books Features, bloggers

May 22, 2008 | Has the role of the professional critic become obsolete in an age of book clubs, celebrity endorsements and blogs? A new book, "The Death of the Critic," says no, and argues that there are still reasons to regard some opinions as better than others. We asked Salon's own book reviewers, Louis Bayard and Laura Miller, to consider its case.

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Louis Bayard: The signs are ominous, Laura. Book reviews are closing shop or drastically scaling back inventory. Film critics at newspapers all over America are getting tossed on their ears. TV reviewers are heard no more in the land. All the indicators suggest that America's critics are becoming an increasingly endangered species.

Or maybe something a little more than endangered, judging from the title that's just come across our desks: "The Death of the Critic." Ronan McDonald, the author, is a lecturer in English and American studies at Britain's University of Reading, and he's particularly exercised by what he sees as the loss of the "public critic," someone with "the authority to shape public taste." It's only in the final chapter that the mystery behind the critic's disappearance is solved. The culprit is none other than ... cultural studies! (With a healthy assist from poststructuralism.) By treating literature as an impersonal text from which any manner of political meaning can be wrung, cultural studies professors have robbed criticism of its proper evaluative function -- the right to say this is good, this isn't, and here's why.

So, Laura, it seems that, if we aren't quite dead, we critics are on something like life support.

Laura Miller: I suppose it's only natural that McDonald, being an academic himself, would blame the academy. He believes that substantive scholarly criticism acts as a foundation for serious non-scholarly criticism -- such as reviews and essays in newspapers and magazines -- lending credibility to the idea that criticism (specifically, literary criticism) is a job for trained experts. When academia falls down on the job of, as you put it, saying what's good and what's not, then all criticism starts to look arbitrary and dispensable. We don't have celebrated "public critics" now because critics don't care about the public, not because the public doesn't care about critics. What do you think: Is criticism responsible for its own demise?

Bayard: I think critics are just the canary in this particular coal mine. It's no accident that McDonald locates the "Golden Age" of criticism at the midpoint of the 20th century, which was also the apogee of the modern novel, particularly the American novel. Novels -- and novelists -- mattered then in a way they simply don't today. (William Styron's posthumous essay collection is a potent reminder. The man got invited to the Kennedy White House on the strength of one novel!) Even if you think critics are parasites, you have to acknowledge they can only survive when their host organisms thrive. In this regard, I think McDonald is right: If we want to bring the critic back to life, we first have to resuscitate the novelist.

Miller: I agree that it's hard to argue for the centrality of literary criticism when literature itself has become marginal. Most people in publishing chalk this up to the availability of too many other entertainment options. What brings people back to books tends to be the belief that they offer something especially meaningful, and it's true that academic criticism has busied itself with undermining that belief for the past 50 years. However, even the criticism that McDonald admires for its reach -- the New Criticism of the 1950s -- may have contributed to the public's lack of interest. Thanks to McDonald's really excellent historical overview, I was reminded of how crucial critics were to modernism -- all those difficult, even gnomic poems and novels needed to be explained to readers who were used to conventional narrative, meter and rhyme. The idea that to be worthy of serious attention, a literary work has to tear down or revolutionize the forms of the past -- well, that makes literature exciting and criticism galvanizing and oh so Important for a while, but at a certain point there's nothing left to dismantle. And meanwhile, the readers wandered off to read Stephen King or watch TV. Having gotten the "fuck you" message loud and clear they just stop listening to intellectuals.

Bayard: I think McDonald argues convincingly that the complete trashing of the traditional canon -- of the very idea of a canon -- has created a kind of inverse reaction: People are now hungering to be told what's good. So maybe there's hope for criticism after all? And as for the "fuck you" aspect of modernism, I agree with you as far as poetry goes. But when you think back to the great novelists of the mid-to-late 20th century, they were working largely in the naturalist vein. Even Philip Roth, for all his postmodern games, grounds much of his work in the closely observed realm of Jewish Newark. And James Wood, who most nearly approximates McDonald's ideal of "the public critic," is a standard-bearer for classical realism, as conservative in his way as Matthew Arnold.

Miller: Despite what the critics who championed modernism claimed about the obsolescence of the traditional novel, that's more or less still what people want to write and read; fiction didn't, for the most part, follow the example of "Ulysses." And poststructuralism doesn't have much to say about this one way or the other; the radicalism it promoted is political rather than artistic, a matter of whose voice gets heard and whose story gets told. In cultural studies, whether or not a work by a member of a previously silenced group is "good" or not is the wrong question: "Good" is understood to be a suspect term based on the self-interested values of those in power.

So the only critics left to evaluate most contemporary fiction are journalists, ranging in seriousness from someone like Wood to your average newspaper freelancer who mostly delivers plot summary. There are no critical movements evident today. James Wood has a well-formed, if rather austere aesthetic but he seems to be the only one who actually adheres in it. Of all the people I've met who admire Wood's criticism I've yet to encounter anyone who actually subscribes to his fairly restrictive standards or taste. They like his writing and seem to feel braced by his rigor, but at the end of the day, they go home with Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith instead.

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