In the spring of 1946, George Orwell, writing in the London Tribune, opened with a view from underneath the rock:
Orwell had just published “Animal Farm,” written while he was working as a critic. It was, perhaps, the most prolific period of his career: from 1943 to 1944 alone, he reviewed more than eighty books for the Tribune. Yet those efforts must now rank among his least-read work. “The prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job,” he wrote in the same essay. No honest hack could compose so quickly and from such weak grounding without shame. Orwell’s consolation, as a literary critic, was that he could have been something worse. “Everyone in this world has someone else whom he can look down on,” he explained, “and I must say, from experience of both trades, that the book reviewer is better off than the film critic, who cannot even do his work at home.”
Self-hating scribes have never been in short supply. But self-hating critics—writers who, like Orwell’s hack, sample new art and issue judgments for a buck—have always seemed to inhabit their fifth circle with special chagrin, scurrying out to work, then sliding back to states of existential loathing like newts seeking refuge in a swamp. “I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States,” Gore Vidal, who worked as one constantly, said. In recent years, film reviewers have increasingly been turned out among the ranks of the unemployed. Everybody likes a movie critic; no one, it seems, needs one. If you went to see the new “Star Wars” installment, it probably wasn’t because of the writeup in your Thursday paper. If your local critic cast a no vote on “Carol,” you could find a friend to set you straight. Even friendless people can use Google. Run an online search, and you will tumble down a wishing well of user comments, aggregated user comments, and blogs by tax accountants with free evenings.
What’s the point of a reviewer in an age when everyone reviews? A common defense of the endeavor centers on three qualities: expertise, eloquence, and attention. Critics have essential skills that Blogging Bob does not. They know more. They are decent writers, who can give a fair encapsulation of a work and detail their responses. And they’re focussed: since their job is studying and explaining the object at hand, they are especially alert to its nuances.
This case, unfortunately, doesn’t hold up in the age of Yelp. Professional critics are knowledgeable, sure. But amateurs are hardly less so: film buffs have enjoyed easy access to their canon since the V.H.S. era. Reviewers write with skill, but so do lots of tax-accountant bloggers. And the claim that critics bring unique attention to their work seems inattentive to the tenor of an age that brings us Genius (an open online tool for annotating pop lyrics and other vital cultural texts in the manner of “The Norton Shakespeare”) and what’s been called “recap culture” (a redoubt of erstwhile English majors poring over last night’s TV in a flutter of summary, analysis, cross-analysis, and intertextual concordance). We’ve reached peak criticism; a peacock spread of hermeneutic attention has become our basic greeting for creative work. What are the professionals doing for us today?
Since joining the Times, as a film critic, in 2000, A. O. Scott has come to lead what sometimes seems the earth’s last sovereign generation of mainstream reviewers. In the daily paper, he’s a virtuoso of the short-form judgment, turning out work that’s insightful, unfussy, and pyrite-flecked with bons mots. Sometimes he writes essays about broader topics in the arts, and those are usually some of the Times’ best weekend reading. In his first book, “Better Living Through Criticism” (Penguin Press)—a title to stir every Jewish mother’s heart!—Scott works to make a case for his embattled craft. He probes its past; he states his goals. He wonders, “Will it sound defensive or pretentious if I say that criticism is an art in its own right?”
It does sound a little defensive, though one understands the impulse. When Duke Ellington composed “The Queen’s Suite,” he was working from the blank page; he brought a previously unimagined musical offering into the world. Orwell’s hack, by contrast, produces his review by standing shakily on other works. Critics justifying their trade like to say that the judgment aspect of the job—the thumbs-up or thumbs-down—is the least interesting part: really, they just love movies or whatever it is they review. This sounds a little like a butcher claiming to have gone into the meat-slicing business because he likes working with animals. It is possible to honor and enjoy new work without grading and dissecting it. That is how many people live.
Scott recalls that he faced accusations of bad faith in writing about “The Avengers,” in the spring of 2012. He didn’t hate the movie, but he was irked by what he saw as its overprocessed, profit-seeking slickness. When the review appeared, Samuel L. Jackson, one of the film’s many stars, singled him out on Twitter (“AO Scott needs a new job! . . . One he can ACTUALLY do!”), and fans piled on. “The Avengers” went on to be one of the fastest movies ever to gross a billion dollars.
What valuable function did Scott’s review serve in this case? It certainly didn’t talk moviegoers out of seeing or enjoying the film. It didn’t persuade the film’s producers to change course. (There was a sequel.) What such reviews do, he suggests in his book, is to contribute to a climate in which creative work is taken seriously, and thus dignified as a pursuit. “It is my contention here that criticism, far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood; that criticism, properly understood, is not an enemy from which art must be defended, but rather another name—the proper name—for the defense of art itself,” he writes. Criticism sets a standard that artists can strive for or resist, he says, echoing an old defense by the poet-critic Matthew Arnold. According to Scott, “A work of art is itself a piece of criticism.”
Criticism is art; art is criticism. A critic might point out that neither term means much without a good definition. The short-form book reviewing that Michiko Kakutani does at the Times has a purpose different from that of Alfred Kazin’s historical arguments in “On Native Grounds” or of William K. Wimsatt’s scholarly work on Samuel Johnson’s prose. Yet all these pursuits are known as criticism, and Scott approaches such genres largely indiscriminately. His sense of “art,” which would seem to include everything from Marina Abramović to “WALL-E,” assumes a gaping straddle, too. The challenge facing “Better Living Through Criticism” is not just to defend his craft’s strengths but to define its limits.
Scott is qualified for this task. He was brought up by two humanities professors, and he was a book critic before taking his film-reviewing job at the Times. He has an easy, avid knowledge of the Western canon; his book scarcely addresses movies, and occasionally reads like fragments from lectures delivered at one of our great universities. (Scott has taught at Wesleyan.) “Better Living Through Criticism” is clearly a labor of love from someone who thinks deeply about his work and wants to pass along the flame. That said, it’s a mess of a book, fuzzy, disorganized, and maddeningly undirected. Scott presents himself as a warrior against naysayers, but his central claim—that adept critics strengthen the culture of art—isn’t actually contentious. What’s subject to debate is more specific: who’s adept, where these people get their taste, and why we trust that they will lead us through a landscape we can’t see.
Beyond institutional affiliation, critics usually gain authority in three ways. They can be first responders: if they called the genius of Patti Smith before she was Patti Smith, their taste in other new music is probably of note. They can be scholars: someone who knows the canon backward and forward seems a sound gatekeeper for esteem. Or they can be seducers: they’ve wooed and won you with their work; you follow them because you like the way they think. The trouble is that each virtue is unreliable, and almost nobody fully embodies all three. We give critics broad mandates, and they’re constantly betraying our trust.
A major problem is the steep, shadowy presence of posterity. People arrive in history at once late and early; they rely on critics to help them see beyond their time. We can be grateful for the first responder who says that an unknown artist is going places—that critic’s gift is to cast out ahead of her era. We can defer to the scholar who suggests that J. K. Rowling is no C. S. Lewis. Yet reviewing also reflects an era’s biases and blindnesses; even food writers’ tastes shift with the times. (One wonders what Craig Claiborne, the postwar Times critic with a soft spot for foreign fare and fried chicken, would have made of upstate kale and melon foam.) Reviewers are supposed to give us bird’s-eye guidance, but they, too, live within the garden maze.
And so the history of criticism, as Scott notices, is filled with bad verdicts. “It is impossible to enumerate all the important literary works which were ignored, jeered at, or savagely slashed by critics in the nineteenth century, ‘the age of criticism,’ ” the Yale French professor Henri Peyre observed, in a delightful diatribe from 1944. When “Moby-Dick” came out, it was called “trash.” Jane Austen went largely unnoticed, and, in 1857, a reviewer at Le Figaro bluntly dismissed a début novelist: “M. Flaubert n’est pas un écrivain” (“Flaubert is not a writer”). The book under review was “Madame Bovary.” Take a look, Peyre wrote, and you will find that criticism has rarely accomplished even its most basic mission of identifying and supporting important work. “Keats was not killed by a few venomous reviews; but is it unreasonable to suppose that a little more recognition would have encouraged him to write more poetry in the last year of his life?” he asks. Why persist in such a cruel pursuit with such bad odds?
Peyre was obviously being selective. Our beatitudinal myth of posterity—blessed are the unknown geniuses, for they shall be super-famous after they die—is a canard. We like to hear that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Zora Neale Hurston were buried in unmarked graves, but Mozart was celebrated all his life, and Hurston was on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, the mainstay of her era’s newsstand. Criticism, for that matter, can sin in generosity as well. In 1959, Elizabeth Hardwick published a famous broadside in Harper’s lamenting treacly book reviews. “A genius may indeed go to his grave unread, but he will hardly have gone to it unpraised,” she wrote. “A universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns.”
Hardwick was pushing back against complaints from the Romantics and their sympathizers, such as Peyre, who might have bridled at her harshness but who shared her feeling that something was fishy in the business of reviewing. Career critics are siloed, Peyre pointed out. They’re led alone into hermetic rooms; fed a stream of new work, to be digested cold; and told to publish whatever they happen to think, a role that sets them up to look ridiculous. Overworked, Orwellian reviewers were not necessarily wrong to hate themselves, but the problem was endemic; it emerged from the professionalization of the reviewer job. Peyre’s solution was to bring in academics. He imagined reviewers and the professoriat joining forces and elevating each other in their voices and their knowledge. His ambitions were vast; revisiting the topic in the late sixties, he imagined literary reviews funded in the manner of space research. “The benefit to American culture, to American prestige, and—the word is not too big—to mankind would be immense,” he wrote. Confoundingly, the funds have yet to arrive. For now, the job of criticism still sits on earth, with all its imperfections.
Much of “Better Living Through Criticism” finds Scott looking in the mirror, and he is not always happy with what he sees. (In one of the book’s more entertaining tangents, he caricatures himself as “a Gen-X baby in the throes of middle age, flailing between the Kübler-Ross stages of denial and acceptance.”) The generalized crisis of criticism becomes, at various points, personal. Scott is self-conscious about his authority as a critic, and uneasy about the mechanism by which his taste becomes a judgment. He cites the pipsqueak voice, in “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” who answers a crowd chanting “I am an individual!” with the words “I’m not.” Like that character, he says, critics must not claim to represent the universal public. But they also shouldn’t become knee-jerk contrarians against mainstream taste. In the long run, he suggests, nobody is anything more than “another voice in the chorus.” His solution to the authority problem is to emphasize that it is out of his control.
Pointing toward interesting problems and promptly running away is a regrettable tendency of “Better Living Through Criticism.” To the extent that the book has a structure, it resembles a Rubik’s cube that has not been solved. The components of a cumulative argument exist, but they are broken up and scattered randomly throughout the book. We had been reading about the individual-universal paradox more than a hundred pages before the Monty Python line cropped up, but that first discussion ended inconclusively, and is never resolved. When we encounter a lengthy explanation of formalism, near the end of the book, we realize that it might have been useful near the beginning, where Scott worked to pinpoint the ideas questioned in Marina Abramović’s art.Between these squares are other squares, many interesting. We are taken on a tour of ways that the great minds have framed the work of criticism, which is helpful. (Professor Scott’s reading list is superb.) We receive wildly abstracted ruminations on the nature of the craft, which are less so. (“Hard cases have a way of multiplying, until the boundaries become invisible where once they had seemed obvious, and what had looked like empirically grounded definitions turn out to have been airy suppositions all along.”) When the going gets tough, Scott has a tendency to bow before the mysteries of the universe. “There are so many ways to go wrong!” he writes:
Readers might hope that Scott will lead them through these perils. But he doesn’t. “Every good critic, every interesting critic, will commit some of the crimes enumerated above, whether brazenly or unwittingly,” he concludes. “A great critic will be guilty of all of them.” Is this provocation or evasion? A book without centering characters or stories is like a ski run down the virgin face of a mountain: it’s thrilling to watch a master zigzag through the landscape, but, if the turns aren’t sharp and well judged, he goes nowhere at alarming speed. Scott is often less Roger Moore on the slopes in “A View to a Kill” than Chevy Chase on his saucer sled in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” You want to see where he goes with it, but you also want to get out of the way.
The paradoxes keep coming, page after page after page. One of the ailments of our hermeneutic age is an overemphasis on “tensions”—as if noting problems excused us from having to follow them through—and Scott is not immune. He is much taken by what he calls the “internal antagonism” of critical judgment, caught between id and superego, scold and saint. No one should trust a sour, fault-seeking critic, but even worse is a smiling enthusiast who sends you to lame films because he thinks it’s cruel to dismiss other people’s work. Hitting the sweet spot between them is the hard part. It demands more than just an interpretive reflex; it requires a standard for case-by-case evaluation. The boldest tastemakers among the scholar-critics sometimes solve the problem by working up big ideas—overarching theories of quality that govern their evaluations, regardless of what the public, and perhaps even their own private affinity, favors. (F. R. Leavis and Clement Greenberg displayed this mode at its most strident.) The trouble with this approach is that the criticism is useful only as far as the theory holds; its practitioners tend to fall out of touch as art, inevitably, alters its premises. Another group of reviewers solves the problem differently, by eliciting authority from readers rather than by claiming it. This third kind of critic, the seducer, is in some ways the most revealing of them all.
Seducers are rarely hung up on posterity or on their own self-justifying theories. They’re about evaluating in the now and showing you a good time tonight, baby. If Scott’s Times work didn’t already mark him as one of these, it would be apparent in how lightly he frets about his record. (“The only genuinely helpful guide to the practice of criticism would be a compendium of error and misdirection,” he writes, amiably.) Some people describe newspaper reviewing as “improvisational” criticism; you respond to what you see without the distraction of special preparation or theoretical commitments. A writer who can do that with charisma and insight, again and again, is a marvel. That is why it doesn’t much matter that “Better Living Through Criticism” is more slalom than argument. Building unified theories is not Scott’s job.
Why do we follow him, then? Scott did not go to film school. He has not made any movies. He may or may not have a detailed knowledge of the complete œuvre of Claude Chabrol. His powers of suasion come from his ability to make you feel that his experience was, or will be, yours. What the first responder and the scholar demand from us—“Defer to me; I see more than you do”—we give voluntarily to the seducer, who woos our consent. Possibly, this is why the “Avengers” misadventure so flustered Scott. We need not agree with every move a seducer makes—far from it—but the moment we decide that we’re no longer cool with this arrangement is the moment when authority disappears.
What criticism shares with art, in other words, is a particular kind of magic: an exchange through which we transfer our attention and our trust to a different imagination, hoping that, by some transfiguration on the page, another person may begin to speak our minds. It’s not something we do for Amazonians or Yelpers, whom we trust only in numbers. And it grants an authority of judgment that recappers cannot claim.
When that authority comes, the bond is strong. Scott, like many professional writers, thinks that he is valued for his “voice.” “Criticism is not a matter of technique or form so much as it is a matter of personality,” he says in one of four long Q. & A.s, addressing questions from an imagined interviewer. He isn’t wrong, and yet Blogging Bob also has a charming personality in prose. The thrill we get, in work like Scott’s, is more specific to the medium. Reading Scott on “Magic Mike XXL” is knowing that a lot of other people are doing the same that morning, possibly grinning at the same lines (“You can take the dude out of the dance, but you can’t take the dance out of the dude”). Through reading his reviews, we find our place in a group of strangers brought together on that day; he doesn’t speak for the opinions of humanity, but he speaks to us, the people who have given him consent.
These convergences of audience around some lines of text in time are precious on news desks, and they’re rarer still in the reviewy blogosphere. But they happen regularly in the culture pages, when a beloved critic drops a high-profile piece. This is why publications that fire their critics shortchange themselves: making a shared event of writing is the one thing that print, unlike the constant pooling of Web commentary, still does best. We read, and often resist. But we take pleasure in the moments when the critic leads and gives us voice. We may even be glad to acquiesce. Sometimes it’s nicer lying down. ♦
