Poisoning the Well

To kick off BEA, the NBCC and Bookforum held a panel at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City about the intellectual history of the book review. The panelists included novelist, poet and critic Joyce Carol Oates, Bookforum editor-in-chief Eric Banks, Columbia University professor and author James Shapiro, FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi, and NBCC member Lindsay Waters, executive editor of the humanities at the Harvard University Press. Lindsay recently sent us an extended form of his remarks. We're pleased to be able to present them here today.

The newspaper owners are killing the book reviews. It’s a fad among the owners, sweeping the nation. The review sections seem in danger of going in a short time. Will the disappearance of the book review sections be like the moment when we realized the elm trees were going? One day, as I remember it, we got the news a lot of them were dying in towns across the country, and the next moment the cities were sawing them all down and carrying the dead bodies away. “Bring out your dead!!”

The disappearance of criticism from the daily papers in the United States poses a problem that goes way beyond the problems that are most immediately apparent, such as few reviews means fewer ads for books and fewer sales of the sorts of books I publish at Harvard University Press or of the sort most publishers of serious fiction and non-fiction produce.

Since Day One as an editor I have always thought about which book review editors can I or the publicists I work with reach personally to make an appeal for a book to be covered. I know a goodly number of newspaper people—maybe more than some editors—because I just feel I have to have personal ties. I want to know someone is going to be on the other end of the phone line when I call. So, it seems like a nightmare to think that those lines are being pulled out. If the papers shut down reviews, it’ll be like having the door slammed in my face and the door removed.

In those glorious days of yesteryear just a little more than a century ago, when the future seemed to belong to the West, Walter Pater urged sensitive souls to always burn with a keen, gem-like flame, but what do we do now when the disappearance of the book reviews from so many papers portends the extinguishing of the critical flame? I would urge you to realize that the disappearance of criticism from our papers is not the cause, but the symptom of vast changes in our cultural ecology. It signals changes so long in gestation that they may be irreversible; and they are symptoms as indicative of momentous change as the discovery of hole in the ozone layer, the disappearance of the plankton from the sea, of the bees from fields, and the permafrost from Alaska. Oh, fine, the bosses might say, a literary person so besotted with books and their paraphernalia that he’s crying out like Chicken Little that the sky is falling when all we’ve done is closed out a few unproductive accounts! Boo-hoo!! But I’m warning you: the problems are bigger than they seem and they’re not solveable by getting a few newspaper excecs to restore the book pages.

Beware, I say, lest the whole edifice of modern democratic society collapse if a stake is driven through its heart. That’s what killing books and arts reviewing means. We must constantly be indulging ourselves in the freeplay of critical intelligence. Is the new De Lillo book good? What about Pynchon’s Against the Day? Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica? Is the new Arcade Fire really good? And what about the new Electrelane album, No Shouts, No Calls? We modern humans need to be able to read critics wrestling with their own feelings about such works of art. We don’t want them to be invoking authorities who have sent down the word that a particular work is worthy. And we don’t need authorities recognized as such by society telling us to tune out of works of art the way the self-styled “Dean of America” Stanley Fish does. You don’t need to give a work of art the taste-test, he’s written. All you need to know is whether it comes to you by a card-carrying writer; your reactions to the work are irrelevant.

What we get in newspaper book reviews are critics testifying to what their first encounters with a work were like, before any other people have experienced the work. There can be something awkward in such encounters that gives rise to some of the fun and sometimes frustrations of the readers of book reviews. It is like having a chance to watch someone struggling in the dark not having the faintest idea what sort of creature there might be with him or her in the room. “I feel these fleshy protuberances. Could this be the lithe proboscis of an elephant?” “Ooh, this is icky, sticky, yucky. What have I stepped into?” Awkward, yes; edifying, maybe; but this is one of the most important ways we humans manifest our freedom and model it to one another from one person to another and from one generation to another.

If we prohibit the critical encounter the way some in the academic world want to do, or if we declare it an expendable extra in the newspapers the way many owners of newspapers are doing, the loss to the citizenry of America will be permanent and lead to surprising results. The Law of Unintended Consequences is more basic to human life than the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Criticism is Tom Paine; it’s Lester Bangs; it’s Robert Christgau, Ed Park, Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis, Howard Hampton, Paul Goodman. It can be as silly as some of the lists of “top 10” movies or novels are; and it can be as serious as Manny Farber and Pauline Kael reviewing the movies. The core of it is always judgment, the judgment of the critic on the judgment of the artist that the work has been made and is ready to go out into the world. The reason — deep, subtle, easy to miss — that acts of critical judgment are acts that are central to human life is that they are activities that lead to the creation of new brain cells. Killing the book reviews is like poisoning the water system right at the city well.

The leaders of America have taken to strutting about in recent years with a certain thuggish manner. Television newscasters scream at their guest and threaten them physically by leaning over them and flexing not their minds, but their muscles. Americans used to be worried they’d come across as “ugly.” No more. A certain authoritarian bullying has also entered the critical world both in terms of manner and substance. The bullying manner cuts across left and right, red state and blue state divisions. No one is content to play things out, and we all try to control the outcomes of events. We work as hard as we can to assure that determinism is the rule in life while claiming that freedom ought to be and maybe even is. We don’t have freedom; we have just the opposite. We tell ourselves freedom is the rule when what really is the rule is conformism, and we get away with it because ideological disguise has been the fashion for years.

Nowhere has ideological disguise been the rule more in the critical world than in the fighting about the significance of the poetry of John Milton. Not a subject for the daily papers, you might say, but search your papers. The debate about Milton brought out big guns in the 1950s, in the 1960s, and even recently in the disputes about Stanley Fish’s How Milton Works. That book got reviewed in all the major papers and none of the reviewers were lukewarm. Of course, what Milton did in his life and what his writings say matter to everyone in the newspaper business, because it was Milton who wrote what became the “declaration of independence” for newspapers on the very eve of the emergence of the newspapers as we know them, or as anyone in the West had ever known them, “Areopagitica.”

Milton is important because he rose up to fight authoritarianism of the kingship at the very same moment the culture of newspapers as we know it arose. The seventeenth century is when our world of newspapers and book reviews came into existence. From the beginning the review and the critique took on a role out of all proportion to the amount of space they took up and their location in the paper. The fact of criticism was important in and of itself. How could reviews — bickering, infighting, expressions of fine sentiment and feeling — how could this fetid swamp become the ground on which to build the skyscrapers of modern life? Newspapers were part of the political solution to a century and a half of fighting about religion that seemed impossible to end. But in 1688 peace was established. The day after the departure of James II was marked by the appearance of three newspapers. What had happened was that the people of England said they would stop talking about religion in public because the had noticed they had the bad habit of killing one another whenever they did so, but every other topic was fair game. After 1688 the world of papers and journals came alive, and what the thinker Jurgen Habermas calls the public sphere came into being. Daniel Defoe began The Review in 1704, Steele The Tatler in 1709, and Addison and Steele The Spectator in 1711. This is how and when criticism arose in papers in English.

No-holds barred criticism really began in Renaissance Italy with Lorenzo Valla. Valla’s On the Donation of Constatine used the newly developed philological method of textual criticism to destroy the authenticity of the most important document justifying the papacy’s claims to temporal rule over a large swathe of the Italian peninsula. Sir Frank Kermode would have no trouble imagining that his work is a continuation of the tradition of Valla. All reviewers of the arts in the daily papers should understand they too are part of a critical tradition that goes back to Valla. As Glen Bowersock writes in his new edition of the Valla what Valla does is he “rips apart the Latinity of the text of Constantine to prove, brilliantly and decisively, that Constantine could not have written it.”

Criticism begins in slow, close reading; it begins in textual criticism; and it is written in language often zingy, tasty, bitter, and totally deconstructive. Imagine the most notorious acts of deconstructive criticism, like the writings of Derrida and de Man, and you can have a sense of how critical writing was from the beginning loathed, feared, and frequently effective. The critical flame, once lit, spread through Europe like in fits, starts, and sometimes like wildfire. After decades of practice, engaged practice done for political purposes to throw over the authorities, criticism got theorized by David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant.

As David Hume showed, there can be no standard of taste, and because there cannot be, we readers must fight things out in the critical pages of journals and our papers. And it is in those pages that we dare express our deepest imaginings. What is happening when critics criticize artworks is an expansion of the human capacity to think. The world we live in literally gets larger every time an artist makes a new work and everytime the critic responds in writing to it in the pages of the papers. Every time? Yes, because without the blanks, there’d be no bull’s eyes. So the world made by criticism is as grand and imposing as the LA Times building in downtown LA or the Tribune Tower on North Michigan Avenue.

Kant mapped out the whole picture: we respond to an artwork and simultaneously we want to tell others about it and argue with them about it. To cut off critique — which must take place not in our minds, but in the public space of reasons, in newspapers and journals — is to commit suicide. We need to be able to see critics wrestling with their own feelings about an artwork. And part of the sensational joy of it is seeing them respond with the time limits of the daily paper. It matters that the reviewer must repond to the work without knowing what others think about it yet and must state their judgment publicly. This is a blood sport. What is key is that the critic not invoke authority to justify their judgment but that they claim the authority to judge for themselves.

We need physical exercise? We need spiritual exercise even more. Engaging in critical judging of art works is “an exercise of responsible freedom,” as Pitt philosopher John McDowell puts it. If we don’t exercise those muscles, they will atrophy.Key thing in criticism is the virgin encounter, me stumbling in the dark. Criticism and modern science grew up together in the 17th century, critics and scientists alike trying to discern order out of the chaos before their eyes.

Is this too much of a burden for the newspapers to bear? The owners are just business people. What responsibility do they have to the country they live in? Their job descriptions say only talk about their responsibility to the bottom line. If we want to give up free thinking, let’s do so intentionally. Criticism of the arts has been the most conspicuous way in which we manifested our freedom, and the critics model freedom for us, show us how it’s done, with panache, without fear. The writings of critics are the way we teach freedom from person to person, generation to generation. If we prohibit it in the academic world the way some leaders of the academic study of literature are doing, if we declare it an expendable financial luxury the way the newpaper owners are doing increasingly, the loss will be all ours and have a lasting effect unforeseen by the people of this generation.

Criticism is Lester Bangs. It’s Frank Kermode, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary McCarthy, Thomas Merton, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Michael Dirda. It is Lorenzo Valla, and it oozes from crack in the pavement in the other HUP book I brought to show you today (beyond our brand-new Donation of Constantine—Howard Hampton’s Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses (HUP, 2007). It’s lists, of course, it’s lists. It’s judgement upon judgement. It’s gut reponses, and it’s argument. When we engage in the process of arguing about art, we devise new reasons, new ideas, new forms of thought. This is a central human activity, one that leads to the creation of new brain cells. Killing the book reviews is—a phrase I’ve used elsewhere—Chernobyl for the Life of the Mind.

--Lindsay Waters