A new biography of Kurt Vonnegut has invoked a ill-tempered man consumed by bitterness and loneliness, a shadow of the avuncular persona well known to his adoring fans. The biography alleges that Vonnegut was convinced his work was undervalued by the American literary establishment despite the massive impact of such novels as Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. The biography raises an age-old question: should we judge a creative work by its creator?
In a recent Wheeler Centre event, literary critic Simon Leys argued that we mustn’t judge a writer by their work, nor a literary work by its creator. “The greatest creators in world literature,” said Leys, “literally do not necessarily know what they are doing. They may intend to do one thing, but what they actually achieve may be quite different.” Citing Cervantes, Gogol and Tolstoy, Leys noted that time and again writers have misunderstood their achievement.
But Leys identifies an even more perplexing conundrum, which he calls the problem of biography, citing several authors to testify to the dimensions of a great paradox. “Biography does not explain one damn thing,” wrote poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky. “Every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats, too humiliating to contemplate,” said George Orwell. The ever-controversial VS Naipaul said, “Everything of value about me is in my books only.” French poet Paul Valery wrote, “Every individual is inferior to his most beautiful work.” Hilaire Belloc wrote, “I never knew a man who was consonant with his work, when the work is of genius. When the work is of genius, he is far below it … it is not the mere man who does the thing, it is the man inspired. No man is himself a genius. His genius is lent to him from outside.”
Citing two great French writers with Fascist leanings, Leys goes on to ask, “How can one ever explain this contradiction between a work and its author? Greatness of the work, mediocrity of the man; beauty of the work, vulgarity or downright ugliness of the man.” Leys cites Proust’s theory of two selves to explain the conundrum: “A book is the product of a different self from the self manifest is our habits, in our social life, in our vices. If we would try to understand that particular self, it is by searching our own bosoms, and trying to reconstruct it there that we may arrive at it.”
“[I]n the early years of the 21st century, liberal America got its news from a satirical television program and its moral compass from a fortnightly journal of book reviews.” So writes Geordie Williamson in an essay this week in The Australian, asking why it is that after 9/11 the Daily Show and the New York Review of Books became such authoritative source of news and opinion for cosmopolitan progressives often described in the US – often derogatively – as ‘liberal’.
Williamson, the newspaper’s chief literary critic who this week accepted this year’s $15,000 Pascall Prize for criticism, suggests the unexpected rise of a book review magazine occurred during a period when other media outlets abdicated their journalistic responsibilities. “It is possible to disagree with the positions held by [Mark] Danner on torture [in a 2004 essay, ‘The Logic of Terror’], or by Jonathan Raban on the surveillance society, or by Joan Didion on domestic politics in the US. But what is undeniable is that the pages of The New York Review of Books (and indeed the books pages of newspapers and magazines across the world) have become, during the past 10 years, a powerfully effective means of interrogating the larger political claims of the day.”
Recent winners of the prize, administered by Music & Opera Singers Trust, include essayist Mark Mordue and theatre writer and blogger Alison Croggon.
Judy Horacek’s take on book critics
Two related pieces appeared in The Observer on the weekend, signalling more debate over the role of the critic. Neal Gabler, author of Walt Disney: The Biography, writes, “It is Twitter, Facebook, myDigg, Yelp and dozens of other sites where, sometimes just by sheer quantity of opinion, the people are overrunning the Winter Palace of cultural elitism.”
In a related piece, a group of artists and critics adds to the swell. Here’s Hari Kunzru, novelist: “Critics praise work that doesn’t upset them. So much looks like art but just tastes of cardboard.”
And over at the Huffington Post, critic Anis Shivani has asked major American critics the question, “"How can book reviewing be relevant to the new generation of readers?”
Regular readers of the Dailies may remember our story last week on the spat between playwright David Williamson and Crikey’s theatre critic Jason Whittaker (currently the subject of our Talking Point). Indeed, attendees of Wheeler Centre events will recall our Critical Failure series on theatre, film, books and music.
Andrew Weldon looks at how everyone’s a film critic. This cartoon is excerpted from Andrew Weldon’s I’m So Sorry Little Man I Thought You Were a Hand Puppet.
Image courtesy of Pat Allan
On Sunday the Wheeler Centre extended its Critical Failure week with an unconference looking at bloggers and online writers.
Unconferencers set the agenda on the day of the event so it kicked off with a discussion of the “amateur” status of bloggers. This was inspired in part by Alison Croggon’s article “The Return of the Amateur Critic” asking why bloggers are often thought of as amateurs. This led into a discussion of money and how bloggers can monetise their places on the web.
Games writer Paul Callaghan led a discussion of how criticism could be applied to video games, including concepts such as establishing what makes a “good” game and how appropriate it is to create a canon of games or get non-gamers to review games because they bring ideas from film or arts criticism. Reference was made to a New Yorker article by Nicholson Baker in which he looks through the eyes of a gamer and non-gamer.
Angela Meyer led the discussion on Twitter and how it can be employed as a critical tool. She’s had some success getting followers to write reviews and then retweeting them.
After a lunch break, Richard Watts raised the idea of sustainability of blogs wondering if some blogs have a natural lifecycle and how do you continue a blog when other work calls. Ben Eltham brought some insights into the cultural economics of blogging particularly how the cheap technology of blogging has democratised publishing. There was a discussion of commenting before Estelle Tang led the last session about blogging as an individual or institution with reference to her recent experiences of blogging for the Melbourne Writers Festival.
Many thanks to Pat Allan from Trampoline for facilitating the event.
WH Chong’s sketch of unconferencer Alison Croggon
If there was one intention for the week of Critical Failure it was that it would create debate – either in the event itself or spilling out onto the web or newspaper pages in the following weeks.
Critical Failure: Books panellist Rebecca Starford
By way of right of reply, the participants have already begun penning some further thoughts. Book critic Peter Craven called the event a “successful merging of critic with fan” and called criticism “the way we set about registering and memorialising those representations of human life that have supreme significance for us”.
Rebecca Starford blogged that she came away “frustrated and disappointed (in myself, it must be said)” from the same books panel. She believes “many readers are turning from the books pages because they aren’t reading about books they are interested in” and are increasingly looking online. In part it’s a response to the Australian’s Bugger the Bloggers article.
Theatre panellist Alison Croggon published a “quick hit” promising a longer response later and pointing to Curtain Call’s review.
Andrew Weldon considers a different kind of critical failure.
Blogger, designer and visual artist, Culture Mulcher has been keeping a scrapbook of his visits to the Wheeler Centre and this week of Critical Failure he’s been particularly busy with sketches capturing both quotes and characters from the sessions.
Here’s a selection:
Adrian Martin debates the point at Critical Failure: Film
Fenella Kernebone offered her view on Critical Failure: Film
Peter Craven talked about what makes a good review at Critical Failure: Books
Hilary McPhee said she was “not as despondent as Gideon”
(Haigh countered that he was “not despondent, I’m quite cheerful!” at Critical Failure: Books
We’re looking forward to what Master Mulcher comes up with for tonight’s session on the visual arts.
Yesterday’s ALR in the Australian, ran an article on the state of Australian criticism by Geordie Williamson calling for a return to old-style reviewing and scholarship.
Williamson has a hit list of what to keep from critical theory (“Greater circumspection in making broad or universalist claims” and “A healthy suspicion of fixed literary canons”) as well aspects to throw out notably “a disregard for literature’s special status, lumping it with every other form of writing, from bus tickets to bumper stickers”. It’s a bold piece of writing in which Williamson lays a blueprint for the future of criticism.
While he acknowledges the importance of the internet as “ridiculously cheap, blisteringly fast and the online community it engenders is one that thrives on argument and constant to-and-fro”, he doesn’t see it as the democratic saviour of criticism. While he sees the potential of the web as a tool, he hasn’t seen this potential met, decrying that “For every brilliant new blogger that has emerged, 100 pallid yes-men (and women) have sprung up.”
It’s a view supported by ALR editor, Stephen Romei, in his last blog post as editor (he moves on to become the Australian’s literary editor). Romei defends the piece because “the internet age means we need old-fashioned literary critics, humanist thinkers such as Geordie, more than ever”.
Judy Horacek has mischievous books turning the tables on critics. Her cartoon collection, If you can’t stand the heat, is due out in October.
Author Gideon Haigh
Everybody wants to go to heaven, as they say, but nobody wants to die. So it is in the world of book reviewing. Everyone is in favour of frank and fearless criticism, up to the point where a work of theirs might come off the worse for it.
It was, arguably, ever thus. But the books pages of Australian newspapers and magazines have become such a wasteland that traditional timidities no longer suffice as a satisfactory explanation. Sections that should contain some of a publication’s sharpest, shrewdest, most incisive and irreverent writing have become hodgepodges of conventional wisdom and middlebrow advertorial.
Newspapers bear some blame for this. Although you’d imagine that anything contributing to an informed and discriminating print culture would be advantageous to them, newspapers publish books pages with a grudging air, regarding them as a financial burden because they attract little advertising support.
Reviewers, by extension, are the lowliest of contributors. Some newspapers and magazines in Australia have ceased paying for reviews at all, believing that the thrill of a free book alone will summon the definitive notice. Others are winnowing costs away by on-selling reviews to sister publications, buying reviews from overseas (usually of books three people in the country might read) or using staff journalists (generally, whether out of incompetence or envy, the dopiest reviewers of all).
Then there is the popular institution of the capsule review, one hundred words or less, executed for beer money, and there to convey the illusion of comprehensiveness by breaking up the page, one superficial but reverberating assertion at a time.
In his classic essay ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’, a touchstone for every ‘down-trodden, nerve-wracked creature’ who has toiled in the craft, George Orwell opined that one thousand words was the ‘bare minimum’ for a review of consequence, and that the ‘standard middle-length review of about 600 words’ was ‘bound to be worthless’. Yet in newspapers today, six hundred words constitutes a veritable meander.
It’s no wonder, then, that there’s little incentive for sticking one’s neck out, for actually taking a position, for arguing that a book is bad, or sloppy, or stupid, or two or three iterations short of finished – an affliction staggeringly common among Australian books. Who needs the aggravation?
Far easier to summarise the contents, recapitulate the blurb, describe the author’s reputation, or examine the author’s politics in a thinly veiled op-ed – is he or she ‘one of us’? After all, the author might be reviewing us one day, or perhaps already has. In which case, it may, of course, be payback time.
Yet there’s much less of this last phenomenon – both the time-tested revenge fanging and the newfangled pre-emptive fanging of the sort recently perpetrated in The Monthly – than is commonly imagined. The besetting sin of Australian book reviewing, curious in an age in which newspapers are chock-full of try-hard humourists and blow-hard opinionistas, is its sheer dullness and inexpertise.
A successful review has two qualities. First, it is a lively and engaging piece of writing. It informs and invigorates. It detains and delights. Yet how often in Australia do you read a book review that is a sparky, spunky, memorable bit of prose? And how many reviewers can you name whose work you would cheerfully read regardless of the book being discussed?
Second, a competent book review should be a form of inquiry into what makes good books good – an inquiry with, as unfashionable as it sounds, the courage of its elitism. Without a benchmark of what constitutes excellent writing, scrupulous research and intelligent discussion, a reviewer is locked into a world in which ‘liking’ and ‘not liking’ are the only options – the Beavis and Butthead world, as the American literary critic Curtis White has put it, in which ‘this sucks, that rocks, this is awesome, and everything is just finally a lot stupid’.
As well as setting standards, a competent review gives context, deepens understanding and clarifies debate. This requires some discernment, some rigour, even some dedication. If you’re reviewing a work of fiction, it might be expedient to have read, or if not, to read, the author’s earlier publications; if you’re critiquing a work of non-fiction, it will require an acquaintance with the subject in question, even if it is a general one. Whatever the case, reviewing is a discipline, a form of argument demanding logic and evidence as well as ‘taste’ and ‘opinion’. And it is a discipline in barely acknowledged decline.
What is perhaps just as troubling as the lacklustre infomerciality of so much Australian reviewing – gushing over the latest vogue, avoiding anything that cannot readily be pigeonholed – is that the situation suits so many vested interests in Australia’s small, snobbish, fashion-conscious, self-celebrating literary scene. 
It veils the publishing industry’s lazy, parsimonious, hidebound practices. It reinforces the everyone-has-won-and-all-must-have-prizes racket of festivals, fellowships and grants. It makes our culture a cosy, matey, happy, heavenly place, while reminding us of Mark Twain’s dictum: ‘You go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.’
This essay was originally published in Kill Your Darlings.
The Observer announced its top ten cook books on Sunday creating a stir in culinary circles.
Many of the big names missed out. Our Stephanie Alexander came in at 31 with her cooking bible, The Cook’s Companion, and relative newcomers like Jamie Oliver only got a single mention at 15 for Jamie’s Italy. Even Nigella barely scraped in at 42.
So who did make the top ten? Aussie chef David Thompson got a guernsey at 7 for his Thai Food and at number 1 was The French Menu Cookbook. Both great books but we couldn’t help but notice that Thompson himself is listed as a judge for the list.
The sauce thickens even more when you look at the judges who also have their books in the list: Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop at 9 and Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson at 5. Of course on a team of more than 15 judges there’s bound to be some overlap, but we wonder if Fuschia Dunlop is the best person to comment on her fellow judge David Thompson’s book as “one that opened the door to a new appreciation of Thai cookery among readers of the English language”. It seems a comment that lacks objectivity.
Alison Croggon (Image courtesy Jacqueline Mitelman)
“As an artist, my relationships are experiential rather than theoretical. I certainly share with scientists and philosophers a desire to make sense of my existence. It is just that my approach is poles apart. It is a fragile, highly intuitive process, in which sensory acuity and memory are subtly intertwined.”
~ Jonathan Mills, State of the Arts lecture 2010
I had an English teacher in high school who one day strode into class, looked around belligerently at his students, and demanded to know if any of us read poetry. I did. I had read the dusty anthologies we had at home from end to end, and supplemented them with random buys from school jumble sales. I was a passionate and indiscriminate reader, devouring Alfred Noyes and TS Eliot with equal enthusiasm.
But this teacher so clearly thought that no one – and especially no one in this class of scruffy 13 year olds – could possibly read poetry for pleasure, that I didn’t dare to raise my hand. I sensed that he himself didn’t like poetry much, and that the price of outing myself would have been his unexpressed contempt. Certainly, he was a bad teacher of poetry.
I guess it wasn’t all his fault: the pedagogical approach to poetry was discouraging. I don’t know if schools still do this, but back then a staple of English comprehension lessons was the question: “What is the poet trying to say?”
This question enraged me. I didn’t think the poet was trying to say anything: the poet said it. The poem was what it said: it wasn’t there to be nailed down to an unambiguous message, but instead, like life itself, shimmered in its sensual ambiguity.
The meanings of a poem exist as much in its sounds and rhythms as in its semantic sense: but it was precisely those material aspects of language that were dismissed in the insistence on a particular kind of comprehension. After all, the suspension of certainty that is at the heart of any work of art is not easily translatable into exam questions.
Later, when I read Baudelaire’s insistence that “a poem must be a debacle of the intellect”, I knew exactly what he meant. Poetry is the place where the legislating impulse of language, even to its very grammar, is exploded from within, where our desire for order and control meets the anarchy of existence.
This subversion of the human wish to control reality is where art finds its power. It isn’t always a comfortable power, but it is always liberating, opening the consciousness to new perceptions of the world we live in. As Jonathan Mills claims in his lecture, art is one place where the many possible ways of perceiving and understanding can be articulated.
It resists paraphrase, claiming for itself a primacy of experience that is parallel to, if not the same as, life. And like life, its liberations are too often chained by the insistence it conform to a very limited idea of what “meaning” is.
In her famous 1964 essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag called for an erotics of art. “What is important now is to recover our senses,” she said. “We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”
All anyone needs to understand art is to look, to listen, to feel: all else follows. They are, not uncoincidentally, exactly the same skills we need to love. Yet our education system leads us to believe that this is not enough. I’m sure that this is the primary reason for the hostility so many people, including my English teacher, feel towards art. Having been taught that they ought to look for meaning in the wrong places, art makes them feel stupid, as if they are found wanting.
That’s not the fault of artists nor of those who reject their work. But it does express a terrible failing in our culture, a constriction of our thought, that has far wider implications. And as Mills suggests, if we are to face the challenges of our future world, it’s a failing we need to address.
Alison Croggon is a theatre critic, blogger, poet and novelist. Her blog Theatre Notes is one of Australia’s most respected reviews, criticism and play news.
Mandy Ord looks at our critical animals and finds a lot of marsupials. Her exhibition, Dark Contrasts, opens at Hawthorn Town Hall in September.
Gideon Haigh has released another salvo in his campaign against Australia’s critical culture on Killings (the blog of journal Kill Your Darlings).
In part Haigh’s response to Rosemary Neill’s piece in the Australian Critical Mass. Haigh objects to the snobbery of ignoring online critics, saying “Despite being set explicitly in ‘the age of the bloggers’, Rosemary managed not to mention a single blog by name. Could this, perchance, be another dodging?”
But overall Haigh is asking for a return to a more considered reading culture rather than a thumbs-up simplicity of scores which he likens to “consumer guides, who condense everything to a ratings system rather like a Choice survey of vacuum cleaners”. Haigh prefers reviews that are a conversation around a book and its ideas. “A thoughtful review permits disagreement; a number seems to brook no argument”
The Australian’s Review magazine examined Australia’s arts criticism in an age when it is challenged by bloggers and the struggle to make the web profitable.
Since 2006 more than 60 full-time critics have been sacked in the US including Variety’s shock dismissal of its chief film critic in March. In Australia we’ve seen the Herald Sun cull its arts writers and News Limited’s film critics reduced from four nationally to one Melbourne-based writer.
The finger of blame is pointed at blogs and internet aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes, which hoovers up reviews from across the web and creates an overall rating. Theatre blogger Alison Croggon praised the internet’s ability to allow everyone to be a critic but also saw the sheer mass of content as a problem. She said “What is awful is just being drowned by sludge.”
Age writer Marcus Westbury continues the conversation today with his editorial. He believes that the future of arts criticism lies in better understanding your audience. Westbury concludes “It’s becoming less about being an expert to a mass audience and more about becoming the reconnaissance party for a niche one.”
The Wheeler Centre is presenting Critical Failure, a series of events on the state of arts criticism in Australia.
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