05/21/07
Richard Shickel, a journalist who sees himself as a critic, took offense at one expression of a benign view of the decline of bookchat in newspapers:
THE MOST grating words I've read in a newspaper recently were in a New York Times report on the shrinkage of book reviewing in many of the nation's leading newspapers.
The piece suggested that this might not be an entirely bad thing. Into the breach, it argued, will charge the bloggers, one of whom, a former quality-control manager for a car parts maker, last year wrote 95 book reviews for his website.
"Some publishers and literary bloggers," the article said, viewed this development contentedly, "as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books."
Anyone? Did I read that right?
His argument, following this windup, is nicely expressed in in his commentary's blurb:
Sure, anyone with a blog can express an opinion about a book, but true criticism is more than just an opinion.
This is true so far as it goes, but two caveats are worth noting:
1. There's nothing to preclude a blogger from engaging in true criticism,
and
2. The bookchat published in newspapers almost never qualifies as criticism.
Indeed, this last point makes hash of pretty much the whole of Shickel protest. And yes, it's obvious that Shickel knows this, since he admitted both points in the essay. But his concentration on what reviewing ought to be proves nothing more than a waste of column inches.
He trots out three names for our consideration: George Jean Nathan (supercilious
and bad), and Edmund Wilson and George Orwell (both excellent). It should be obvious to anyone who is not himself a critic cultist that these latter two critics are not unassailable. Wilson was, as Nabokov sagely argued, too fixed on sociological and moral interests to catch the great literary fire. Wilson easily missed the point of authors grinding different concerns in a very different mill . . . Tolkien for example.
Still, it's always fun to recall, say, Wilson's characterization of The Lord of the Rings as a children's book that somehow got out of hand.
This is extremely funny, if not at all just or even perceptive. It's merely funny. Which reminds us why we read critics: for entertainment.
Perhaps Oscar Wilde's Critic as Artist should be required reading for journalists who aim to comment on criticism in the newspapers.
Great criticism is in short supply these days, and under attack, I agree. But the problem isn't the democracy of the blogosphere. The problem has been — for scores of years now — the dominance of the professors in English departments whose words haunt us like a spoiled enchilada, coming up dyspeptically hours and days later, and the ubiquity of reporters and shills in the newspapers whose words we can't remember a minute after reading them.
The newspaper world is itself a vast wasteland. Not as bad as the Academy, but bad nevertheless. That Shickel worries, instead, about a purely
that he sees as the real democratic literary landscape
wasteland,
shows, perhaps, more concern for his paycheck than his critical faculty. To assert that the Internet (for that's what we're talking about, no?) exists without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight
is so ignorant that we can disqualify it without much more argument.
Of course, there are some in the blogosophere who will dissect his assertions and evidence down to the last comma. Fine for them. I'll go back to reading books. Without benefit of Shickel.
The bottom line on Shickel's column is this: It is no better, and in fact much worse, than a hundred blog entries written every day by bloggers both famous and obscure.
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