Critical Mess

By KEN GORDON

There is a certain kind of person who takes literary critics very seriously. I'm thinking of a bookish sort of person. A young person. An ironist. Jewish. Okay, I'm thinking of myself in my mid 20s—just out of grad school, slowly adjusting to the harsh light of off-campus life. I used to be absurdly serious about literary critics. Why? I was under the impression that literary critics had important ethical lessons to teach. As the philosopher Richard Rorty once wrote: critics were "moral advisors not because they have special access to moral truth but because they have been around. They have read more books [than non-critics] and are thus in a better position not to get trapped in the vocabulary of any single book." My goal was to become so widely read, so critically informed, that I possessed a kind of calm understanding and mastery of all the vocabularies out there—vocabularies that lesser minds might mistake for, say, "truth" or "reality."

Well. Back then, critics, certain ones, seemed to possess a real authority. So much so, that they could, at moments, matter more to a reader, to me, than novels or poems or short stories.

For instance, there was the time I read an essay by Alfred Kazin on J. D. Salinger, who was one of my favorite fiction writers. Kazin once wrote that Salinger was "everybody's favorite." I read this and thought, "Them there's fightin' words" and clenched my fist, sneered my lip, and prepared to step outside with the critic. Six seconds later, however, I decided that if it was true, that Salinger was the literary equivalent of high-school class president, then I should maybe throw my vote to another, less audience-pleasing candidate.

Let's note that Kazin was a man who, in the middle of the 20th century—a time, the rumor goes, when books still counted—was one of America's most respected literary critics, and his opinion Mattered. (No less a personage than Philip Roth said that Kazin was "America's best reader of American literature in this century.") Here's his indictment:

But above all, [Salinger] is a favorite with that audience of students, student intellectuals, instructors, and generally literate, sensitive, and sophisticated young people who respond to him with a consciousness that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a language that is peculiarly honest and their own, with a vision of things that capture their most secret judgments of the world.

Thus Kazin's awesome reputation successfully ganged up with his rhetoric to intimidate my appreciation of Salinger.


A different sort of Kazin incident occurred on the evening of March 27, 1997. That night, on Charlie Rose, I saw something, heard something, that would change my attitude toward Kazin, and critics in general. It was a comment from David Foster Wallace. Those three trochaic names meant a lot to me, in 1997, as they did for virtually every literate member of my generation. DFW was a serious novelist, and his writing was learned and imaginative, a bit insane, and far more interesting than anything a critic, even the sharpest critic, might write.

Rose had recently interviewed Alfred Kazin, and so he asked Wallace about writing essays, his own and Kazin’s. Wallace said, “When you’re talking about Kazin, you're talking about something different, which is the art essay, the belletristic essay.”

Rose didn’t bring up the subject again.

But Wallace did. Later on, he was talking about how the Postmodernists had influenced him and he mentioned “the culture before the youth rebellion in the 60’s,” which was “very staid and very conservative and very Alfred Kazinish." Snort! Well, I snorted. This was a defining moment for me. The question suddenly posed itself: Who was more important, The Novelist or the Commentator? It became clear to me that if I had to pick one writer to stick with, it would be the Novelist.

Then I recalled something I read from Ezra Pound (that anti-Semite). He warned inexperienced readers to avoid "accepting opinions" from "men who haven't themselves produced notable work." This go me thinking: What was a notable work? Could a book of criticism, a book of essays, be as "notable" as a novel?

I wondered about this for a few minutes and concluded that I didn't have a real answer. Then, as was my habit in my early 20s, I headed out to the bar for a beer.

Today I am less, much less, of a literary absolutist. Much less of a critical mess. I take pleasure in good writing where I find it, and try not to make too many aesthetic rules for myself. There are moments when I glance around at our less-than-serious culture and feel a nostalgia for those Alfred Kazinish days of the past, but that feeling, like most feelings, comes and goes.