The most interesting part of A. O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism is the Afterword. This is not to disparage his critical writing so much as to express my own preference for self-deprecating self-interviews as performed and staged by literary critics. What follows is excerpted from the thing in italics…
Q: Just to get us caught up: after years— too many years, maybe—of dishing it out you decided to see if you could take it. You wrote a book about criticism and tossed it, like a lamb into a den of lions, in front of your critical peers. How did that work out for you?
A: More or less as expected.
[…..]
Q: Your refusal to make a commitment, to take a stand, drove poor Leon Wieseltier (The Atlantic) into a paroxysm of rage. His erstwhile acolyte Adam Kirsch (Tablet) took your dithering as a sign of “anxiety.” They both accuse you of lacking the confidence, the sureness of judg-ment, that is the hallmark of true criticism. What’s more, you fail to articulate a credible defense of the critical enterprise, Instead, you splash around in the shallows of pop culture—Kant and Keats and various Greeks not-withstanding—and embrace the supreme postmodern vice of relativism. You’re a feckless dilettante and, much worse, the cause of dilettantism in others.
A: Well, I’m glad to see that you’ve been keeping up with your reading. Let me correct you on one small point. You say that I fail to articulate a defense of criticism as Kirsch, Wieseltier, and others of their kidney (notably Joseph Epstein in Commentary) define it, which is to say as the application of verifiable, externally existing standards to works of art. But I don’t fail to do that. I refuse to do that. I reject the terms of the assignment.
Q: Are you saying that they misread you? That sounds like the oldest, stalest anti-critical self-defense in the book.In this book, even. You’ve been misunderstood! Poor thing. But doesn’t that just mean you didn’t make yourself clear enough?
A: On the contrary. There are some reviewers, I guess, who wrote about a book I scarcely recognized as my own. They were obviously projecting their own biases and neuroses onto my work. But that’s perfectly normal, and part of the correct (which is to say the permanently and productively errant) practice of criticism. Recall [Oscar] Wilde: “The highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there.” The book’s most furious assailants, though, understand it perfectly well. They see it, correctly, as a betrayal of, an attack on, or at best an irresponsible departure from norms and canons they hold sacred. Wieseltier’s review, for example, is amusingly personal— a portrait of me as a vain, vapid dabbler, distracted by trivia like Hollywood blockbusters and Marina Abramović and lacking the spine to fight for what /I believe in. Not that I really believe in anything at all. Or rather, as Wieseltier puts it, “he believes in many things. But most of all, he believes in brunch. As opposed to, say, lunch at the Four Seasons, which is the kind of meal Wieseltier enjoys. “The battle for aesthetic integrity is not over,” he declares, “but I’m not a combatant, just ‘a man on the scene?”
Q: Brunch?
A: It’s a metaphor. Serious thinkers eat breakfast or lunch, and don’t need to invent reasons to drink before noon. But the thrust of his review is not that I’m just a twerp. I’m a symptomatic twerp, a sign of the rotten, relativistic, unserious times. Which in a way I am, given that the difference between Wieseltier and me isn’t merely temperamental. It’s philosophical. He and I have fundamentally opposed ideas about the nature and purpose of criticism. His “battle for aesthetic integrity” is essentially defensive. There is this knowable thing called beauty (or excellence or value) that is perpetually under siege. The critic’s job is to keep the bad stuff out, to police the boundaries, secure the gates, and correct errors of judgment.
Q: But isn’t that accurate? Doesn’t a critic function as a gatekeeper?
A: Certainly there are many people who perceive it that way, though I’m not sure most working critics do. Maybe that’s part of the source of Wieseltier’s despair— that modern critics, like modern parents, see themselves not as authorities but as friends. But the gatekeeper notion is an odd and oddly hostile way to think about art—as an enclosure that needs to be protected. A critic in this view is like the bouncer at an exclusive club, patrolling the velvet rope and turning the undesirables away. Of course what often happens is that the undesirables go off and start their own party. After a while the old establishment grows dull and stale and the crowd thins out. Eventually the place may be rediscovered, or else it quietly changes its standards of entry and welcomes the kind of customers that had previously been turned away.
Q: That’s quite a metaphor for someone who is usually in bed before ten. But this is where the charge of relativism sticks to you, I think. And also the accusation of aloofness. You stand at a remove from the daily rough-and-tumble of criticism, which often precisely involves throwing people out of the club, policing lines that should not be crossed. You do that all the time in your job, of course-you are hardly above a choke hold or a sucker punch when you think the occasion calls for it-but you’re shy about making a case for the value of what you do. Instead you take such a long, tolerant view of the history of taste that everything becomes equivalent to everything else just because at some point somebody liked it. You don’t have the guts to look at empty or meretricious work and say, as Leon Wieseltier does of Marina Abramović: “Who cares?”
A: Well, as you say, I make negative judgments all the time. I just don’t find them inherently more valuable than positive judgments, which is the implication of both Wieseltier’s view and his long record as a commissioner of hatchet jobs in the back pages of The New Republic. But What occupies me here, in this book, is the possibility that “who cares?” might not be a rhetorical question. Surely it’s worth asking in earnest who might care about performance art or video games or Beethoven’s late string quartets. Which is not to say that such things are interchangeable, but rather that they are all plausible objects of intense human interest. want to think about why people care about art, plea sure, beauty, and truth, and also to wonder if there can be judgment without prejudgment. What if we went into a given experience not knowing what to expect or how to think and had to invent our standards and reasons on the spot, with whatever conceptual tools we might have handy?
Q: That’s all very abstract.
A: Yes, but that’s part of what I mean when I say that this is a philosophical argument rather than a personal quarrel or a literary spat. At the risk of getting too academic, and also of drastically oversimplifying, I’d say that Wieseltier—and also Kirsch and Epstein—and I belong to antithetical traditions of thought. Although I try not to make a big deal about it in the book—I don’t want to bore readers more than is absolutely necessary-among my principal guides are Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey. If there’s an implicit allegiance here, a school of thought in which I might claim membership, it’s some version of pragmatism. That is, I believe that our understanding of art emerges from our experience of it, and that our notions of beauty and value are the result of our arguments about them, rather than the conditions of such arguments. Truth is the lovely echo of our noisy, contending ways of being wrong. And one big way to be wrong—perhaps one I should have addressed at more length—is to buy into the fantasy of critical authority, to confuse the decidedly democratic power of persuasion with other kinds of power.
Q: And yet you yourself are, according to Calum Marsh in The New Republic, “A. O. Scott, Last of the Power Critics.”
A: A title I’m only too happy to disavow. I’m not the last of anything, and I’m not interested in power. Marsh is, I think, succumbing to his own careerist daydreams. He’s entitled to them, of course. Writing is a tough hustle. Envy is part of the lingua franca of the guild, and so is the thirst for inside dope. A few critics, some but not all of them younger than I am (Marsh makes a point of mentioning my age in his review) may have looked forward to (or looked forward to attacking) a more polished account of my professional life, or a more forthright embrace of the prerogatives and perks of my day job. Some readers may have been nonplussed by my apparent lack of interest in such things, and smelled some bad faith in my disinclination to write explicitly from the position of a New York Times critic. My modesty could only be false and my optimism can only be forced given the prestige of my institutional connections and the abysmal state of the trade in gen-eral. It’s easy for me to promise “better living” when my living is easy.
Q: And what about that? In the age of social media, sponsored content, cultural glut, and rampant touchy-feely dumbness—
A: Leon, is that you?
Q: —at such a moment your equanimity is pretty jarring. Maybe even tone deaf. Even one of your champions, Daniel Mendelssohn, concludes his review in the Book Review section of your own newspaper) with the melancholy thought that you and he and the rest of your generation “may be the last professional practitioners” of the art of criticism. Your uptempo, major-key, sing-along anthem is really a funeral march, and you either don’t know that or don’t want to admit it.
A: To be honest, I have wondered sometimes if my faith is misguided. Maybe this time the declinists and nostalgists are not wrong after all. The sky really is falling. The wolf is descending on the flock. The great work has all been done, and the great critics are all gone. But if I really thought that—
Q: — you’d be Joseph Epstein, whose plaintive review has the headline “Where Have All the Critics Gone?”
A: A piece of writing I will always cherish. I’m proud to have provoked such sustained and undiluted rage. Epstein begins by invoking Edmund Wilson and other great critics of the mid-twentieth century, a golden age that continues to cast a long shadow. Wieseltier worships at the shrine of Trilling. Adam Kirsch, a more cautious fellow, summons the shade of Stanley Edgar Hyman, a hardworking hack of the Eisenhower era. Compared to them, I’m a joke. I’m not even a critic, according to Epstein, but a mere reviewer, dispensing summaries and canned nuggets of consumer advice. (I’m also an obnoxious leftist, as evidenced by my use of the phrase “late capitalism.”) And, once again, I’m a noxious symptom of a much larger cultural catastrophe, which can be summarized as the shocking failure of the rest of the world to keep up with Joseph Epstein’s tastes and interests. Or rather, its failure to freeze in place and continue to worship at the shrine of high culture as he recollects it. Criticism used to be all about James and Dreiser and Eliot, and nowadays it’s all about movies and television and rock and roll and other things he doesn’t much care for.
Q: “Were he alive today, [Randall] Jarrell might have to seek work reviewing video games.”
A: Video games are to Epstein what brunch is for Wieseltier. Once upon a time there were titans like Jarrell and Wilson, who bestrode the world of letters far more coLossally than any of our current pip-squeaks could dream of. And there was also a culture worthy of them, even if it lay mostly behind them, in the masterpieces of previous centuries. But they were never so foolish as to imagine that the rising tide of popular culture Masscult,” as one of their contemporaries, the polemicist Dwight Macdonald, liked to call it—might toss up anything worth taking seriously. But what if Randall Jarrell was actually interested in video games, or at least found something interesting to say about them? (Not that he would have necessarily found a lot of paying work reviewing them, at least in conventional publications.) I don’t think that’s altogether far-fetched. As an admirer of Jarrell’s, I think it’s altogether probable. And I wonder, speaking of video games, if Epstein has read Tom Bissell or Anita Sarkeesian or Chris Suellentrop, all of whom have written very well on the subject. Okay, I don’t wonder that at all. Nor do I really wonder if he has read Emily Nussbaum or Wesley Morris on television, any of his own contemporaries (Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs) on rock, or any of the generations who have followed them. Or for that matter, any of the vigorous and contentious literary critics in our midst, some of whom (like Laura Miller, Christine Smallwood, and Laura Kipnis) didn’t even like my book all that much. If you define “all the critics” as “all the critics who mattered to me when I was in college,” then of course you’ll mistake ordinary mortality for mass extinction. But again, let’s take this question as something other than rhetorical. Where have all the critics gone? They’re all around you. You just refuse to recognize them.
Q: But can any of them match Edmund Wilson?
A: I’ve never said this to you before, but what a stupid question! Edmund Wilson, when he was alive and writing, couldn’t live up to the shibboleth his reputation has become. It’s not a very happy fate for such a resourceful and unpretentious writer to survive mainly as a cudgel to be used against later generations. He’s better than that. Far more interesting than Epstein gives him credit for being.
Q: And you are too?
A: That’s not for me to say. Criticism is an art of the voice, and I can’t complain if some people don’t like mine (that “of a man who vastly overestimates his own charm,” according to Epstein) or prefer the sound of their own. But I nonetheless insist that my version of criticism is stronger than that of my critics—in spite of their fetish for power and authority-because it includes theirs. The narrative of doom and decline is a story that must be told anew in every generation. But it will always crumble in the face of new and contrary evidence. To proclaim the end of criticism is really to express the wish that criticism would stop. But as we have seen, it won’t.
Q: Keats and Yeats are on their side....
A: But they lose, because Wilde is on mine. But I don’t fool myself that quoting Morrissey will convince anyone of anything, least of all an optimistic view of human possibility. Gloom is more appealing because it seems so much more serious, and fosters a feeling of lonely heroism.
Q: You’re prone to that as well. Haven’t you set yourself up as a heroic figure-the critic fighting for criticism in the face of disdain, indifference, and incomprehension?
A: No no no. You have misread everything! I’m not the hero of this book. You are.