A Word on Criticism from the Archives:
Vol. 10, No. 38, Pages 74–77 (January–June 1964)
It is often said of critics that they are people who have failed in making creations of their own, and my own beginning as a critic was due to a failure—a failure to get a suitable job after leaving the university. I believed at the time that I would have liked to go into big business, but the people who interviewed me quite rightly rejected me; and after a few months of uncertainty I was offered the part-time job of editing a literary programme for the BBC Caribbean service. It seemed to me then that I was perfectly qualified for such a position—I had after all studied literature at the university, but now I wonder at my audacity in accepting.
For now I see I fitted into none of the accepted categories of critics. I was not a gentleman, to whom criticism meant a display of sensibility and polished prose: an accomplishment, like a knowledge of pictures and wines, which might grace one in society. On the other hand I had no priest-like dedication to criticism as such. At the university I had been made aware of this attitude. But it did not attract me. I felt that it removed pleasure from reading. It was, moreover, heavy with a suggestion of duty, duty not to books but to an ideal of criticism. And since my knowledge of books at the time was limited anyway, I can see now that I became a critic under false pretences, trusting only to an unformed taste.
Literary knowledge and scholarship is one thing, but critical judgement is another. Judgement is, as I hope to show, a very complex business and is sharpened by experience, experience of books and experience of life. In criticism there can be no boy wonders. For the critic's gifts, I believe, are those of the artist, and the good critic is as rare and as valuable as the good artist. Much nonsense has been spoken about criticism in this century, and a tremendous amount of damage to taste has been done by the introduction of Literature as a university course. One has only to compare the writings of Hazlitt, say, with those of any contemporary critic to see the change that has come about. People like Hazlitt and George Saintsbury wrote of their response to books in a very personal way; reading the critics of today is like reading the results of a scientific experiment. In an age when more and more stress is being laid on science, it is not surprising that the professor of literature, who after all makes his living from the subject, should attempt to introduce this atmosphere of the laboratory into the study of literature. We hear, for instance, of the “critical apparatus”, words which suggest that sensibility and judgment can be measured like temperatures. We hear of definitions of the novel— when really everyone knows what a novel is—and we hear of rules for the novel. We hear much talk about “technicians” and “technique”. Such talk has its effect on the young man whose taste and judgement are necessarily unformed and who, puzzled by the intangibility of his response to literature, is only too willing to lean on the tangible props authorised by his professor and the critics. I remember, at my university, a young man rising from the library table after reading a book of criticism and saying with perfect seriousness, "Now I know what makes a good poem." The statement was of course absurd, for there is no one person who can say what makes a good poem: he can only report his own response to a particular poem, and the value of his response depends on the value or depth of his sensibility.
When I say that this approach to literature has done a tremendous amount of damage to taste I mean that this approach creates a whole lot of spurious attitudes, in which the true exercise of the critical faculty is forgotten. It encourages the suppression of the genuine response, and encourages the creation of artificial attitudes.
Not so long ago, when I was in India, I picked up a paperback edition of one of Jane Austen's novels. The most important point made by the blurb, the publisher's note, was that Jane Austen's use of simile was splendid. Now Jane Austen's use of simile has no importance at all in any assessment of her worth as a novelist. What matters is her analysis of certain human relationships, the depth of her insight, and whether her work is in some way illuminating of certain aspects of the human predicament. That the publisher should have chosen to speak only of Jane Austen's use of simile shows to what extent he had been conditioned by the semi-scientific study of literature; he read self-consciously, looking for certain approved things to admire; and in so doing missed the entire point and value of the novel. And again. Thomas Mann's novel The Holy Sinner in an English paperback edition (is offered to us) as "a work of stark horror", "an epic of arch-sinfulness". It is of course no such thing. It is in fact a ridiculing of hagiographical writing, and a ridiculing of the whole concept of sinfulness: it is a richly comic book. But the writer of the publisher's note, doubtless influenced by the current critical talk in England about good and evil, and its importance in the novel today, has seized on this aspect because it is recognisable. No novel, he has been told, which does not treat of the problem of good and evil is important. The Holy Sinner treats of this subject; it is by Thomas Mann, a notoriously serious and sombre German writer; hence the talk of "an epic of stark horror", and a failure to grasp the essence of the book.
Such critical attitudes would not matter if they did not affect the writer. But they do. When critics and a fairly large section of the intelligent reading public look for recognisable marks of quality—it might be the use of simile, or the noticeable technique—it is not to be wondered at that the writer tries to make the task of his readers lighter. Take this business of technique. Consider it at its lowest level: the use of the flashback. It is instantly recognisable and can be handled in all sorts of tricky ways, so that the reader, who is told that such and such a writer is a good technician, instantly seizes on this and self-consciously reads a book taking a spurious delight in what he considers to be technique. Hence the number of stylish approaches to the novel nowadays. Some of these have no intrinsic validity but they can always be relied upon to impress those who, because of their training at the universities or their reading of critics, find it difficult to approach a book unselfconsciously, find it difficult to expose themselves purely to the experience, which is what a reading of a book should be. There is the Conrad technique, the story within a story within a story, about which so much has been written. There is the current fashion for having various narrators, each section headed perhaps by the name of the narrator. In fact technique is precisely the absence of such mannerisms and such showing-off. Technique ought not to be noticeable except to the practitioner or the percipient critic; for true technique consists in a number of unnoticeable things, the most important of which is the ability to reduce to a simple, even, easy flow a series of fairly complicated observations. If there is one rule about the novel it might be this: that the moment anything on the page, whether it be language or technique, calls for admiration and by so doing isolates itself, as it were, then it must be treated with suspicion.
The novelist's craft is a complex one; every novelist has his own way of writing a novel; but his aim is always to communicate, and the critic who tries to break down each novel into neat compartments of language, plot and characterisation is not really doing his job. Language is indeed important, as is plot and characterisation, but these things must be regarded as no more than the necessary disciplines of a writer. It is no use mentally awarding marks to the writer for his success in each compartment. What is it that we look for when we go to the work of a favourite writer? It is, I feel, a peculiar type of adventure—an adventure with a mind, a sensibility, that appeals to us. A certain way of looking and feeling, which we think amusing or illuminating. We do not go for characters or for language so much as for the writer himself. A writer stands or falls by his sensibility and our assessment of his work depends on our response to his sensibility. For, make no mistake, nothing is so revealing of a person as the fiction he attempts. From his fiction we can see his attitude to the human predicament; we can see what he thinks is funny, what he thinks is sad: and we can see how he sets about achieving his effects. He might be subtle; he might be ponderous. The writer who can only tell us that it is terrible to be poor, and will write stories in which he will try to break our hearts by descriptions of poverty and sickness, really has very little to offer us.
How often it occurs that intelligent people, successful in their own affairs, become dreadfully vulgar when they attempt fiction! For this sensibility of which I am speaking is not a quality of intelligence but a quality of feeling. The ancient Greek dramatists told stories that were well known, the pleasures of characterisation; they offered instead the adventure of their analysis of a well-known situation, and in this analysis the quality of their own feeling, their sensibility, was what mattered. So with Shakespeare. His plots are all borrowed, and many are quite ridiculous; but in his plays we are always aware of a special type of feeling, a special type of sympathy at work. It matters little whether there is a purpose behind this sensibility; it is so easy to write moralities; much harder to illuminate certain aspects of the human condition. The simple detective novel has very little to give me; very little too the romance or western.
The critic's response to any work has to be direct; his analysis complex. For his analysis must embrace all the disciplines of language and technique as well as his response to a writer's sensibility. The simple or vulgar critic will respond to the simple love drama; he will be unable to distinguish between the good and bad. I use the word vulgar—meaning here a cheapness of thought and feeling—because for a critic truly to appreciate the sensibility of the writers whose greatness is universally acknowledged, for a critic to do this, he must in some way partake of the sensibility of that writer.
So often, in his response to a book, the critic passes judgement as much on himself as on the book. And just as the most difficult thing for the writer is self-knowledge—without which his writing will never cease to have some element of the artificial and even the dishonest—so too the critic must have self-knowledge. He must learn to trust to his own feelings, to analyse them for their truth and sincerity; for without this his judgement will also be dishonest and artificial. This is why I feel that great critics are as rare and valuable as great artists. For the business of both is truth.