Rónán McDonald
THE DEATH OF THE CRITIC
160pp. Continuum. £14.99 (US $21.95).
978 0 82649 279 1
Many will remember when the jewellery tycoon Gerald Ratner destroyed his
company by publicly deriding its products (and therefore those who bought
them). Over the past three decades, many English Literature academics have
acted just like this, believes Rónán McDonald, and to similarly
self-subverting effect. In the English departments of British universities,
the professors have been strenuously denying the value of literature; these
candidates for critical authority have waived their rights. It is no wonder,
McDonald observes, that academic literary critics are no longer public
critics, for if you abandon literary value then, in the eyes of those
outside the campus boundaries, the value of the literary critic goes too.
The “Ratner moment” would probably not belong in a conventional study of the
status of literary criticism. In McDonald’s deft polemic, The Death of the
Critic, it seems just right; for there has been something comical about the
eagerness of academics to scorn the notion that some books are better than
others. The analogy is characteristic of McDonald’s tone, a kind of humorous
exasperation that runs through his book. “The critic” has never had a good
name, and McDonald admits that when he told people what his book was to be
called, “they immediately assumed I was writing a celebration” of the
critic’s demise. But this is a polemic in favour of the critic as a
“knowledgeable arbiter”. In McDonald’s account, it is a reason for sharp
regret that no one cares any more about “the critic”, that no one outside
universities reads books of literary criticism. We need expert evaluative
critics. In its fresh and energetic opening chapter, The Death of the Critic
shows how adventure and experiment in literature benefit from the existence
of such critics. McDonald draws a nice example from a rich harvest of
scornful remarks about critics by dramatists: the exchange of insults
between Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, which ends with
Estragon’s unanswerable “Crritic!”. Vladimir “wilts, vanquished” specifies
Beckett’s stage direction; but, as McDonald points out, Waiting for Godot
owed much of its success to critics. First Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson
writing in newspapers, and later a series of high-profile academic critics,
helped create the play’s reputation. The public was tutored by the critics.
Other such examples are not hard to find, from the sponsoring of difficult
modernist works by critics like Edmund Wilson and R. P. Blackmur, to the
“discovery” of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by
Ronald Bryden.
Nowadays, there are more critical responses than ever, but critical authority
has been devolved from the experts. McDonald surveys the rise of blogs and
readers’ reviews, of television and newspaper polls and reading groups,
under the heading “We Are All Critics Now”. He argues that the demise of
critical expertise brings not a liberating democracy of taste, but
conservatism and repetition. “The death of the critic” leads not to the
sometimes vaunted “empowerment” of the reader, but to “a dearth of choice”.
It is hardly a surprise to find him taking issue with John Carey’s
anti-elitist What Good Are the Arts? (2005), with its argument that one
person’s aesthetic judgement cannot be better or worse than another’s,
making taste an entirely individual matter. McDonald proposes that cultural
value judgements, while not objective, are shared, communal, consensual and
therefore open to agreement as well as dispute. But the critics who could
help us to reach shared evaluations have opted out. The distance between
Ivory Tower and Grub Street has never been greater. While other academic
disciplines have seen the rise of the professional popularizer of art, music
and film, literary expertise has sealed itself off in the academy. McDonald
believes that the main reason for the gulf between academic and non-academic
criticism is “the turn from evaluative and aesthetic concerns in the
university humanities’ departments”. He does not bemoan the influence of the
Richard and Judy Book Club or the internet; he blames his fellow academics.
This has been long brewing. The Death of the Critic takes us on a rapid
historical tour of attitudes to the value of literature, from Plato and
Aristotle, through the leading critics in English of the past five
centuries. (McDonald allows himself a digression into the Kantian theory of
the “disinterestedness” of aesthetic judgement, with which he clearly has
much sympathy.) His concluding survey of the academic literary criticism of
the twentieth century is hardly novel; it is a story that has been told
before, by Chris Baldick and Patrick Parrinder among others, but it gives
McDonald the chance to show that there were good reasons for the status of
its leading figures, such as T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, Lionel Trilling
and the New Critics, and he invites us to find insights rather than
delusions. “These critics are still paraded before each generation of
university students as ideologically befuddled, or reactionary bogeymen.” To
our loss, he believes.
McDonald himself does not exactly have heroes and villains. His estimates of
the influence of particular critics certainly involve value judgements, but
these are often surprising and engaging. He relishes Northrop Frye’s
critical eloquence, though he charges him with helping to split academic
criticism away from higher journalistic criticism. By contrast, F. R.
Leavis, whose austere narrowness McDonald clearly finds unsympathetic, is
praised for “spilling the energies of academic criticism out into a much
wider arena”. McDonald has a case to make, but does not put all his evidence
into making it. Even where he regrets the influence of Raymond Williams in
stripping aesthetic value from the arts, he cannot help admiring his
commitment as a public intellectual.
In his final chapter, McDonald gives his highly condensed account of the
influence of structuralism and post-structuralism on the academic critic.
Yet it is not the heady obscurity of literary theory that he blames for
“killing off” the critic. The culprit, as he sees it, is Cultural Studies,
which requires that any cultural artefact be evaluated politically rather
than aesthetically (aesthetics being revealed to be covert politics).
Cultural studies may have been anti-elitist, refusing distinctions between
high and low, proper and popular, but it doomed the academic to irrelevance
outside the academy. “If criticism forsakes evaluation, it also loses its
connections with a wider public.” He is a tolerant enemy to anti-evaluative
criticism. Reviewing the rise of Cultural Studies, he even concedes that it
might for a while have been salutary to have “an amnesty on the idea of
objective quality”. Neglected works and unheard voices have been recovered.
Even though he dislikes Cultural Studies, McDonald relishes much that we
would call “popular culture”, and clearly believes that cinema, television
and pop music deserve good critics too.
The virtue of this book is that, while it is a strong protest against what has
been a prevailing climate in English departments, it is neither blimpish nor
complacent. The author’s reasonableness requires him to acknowledge,
finally, that all is not woe. The last pages of the book contain a swirl of
examples of a growing openness to “questions of value” in academic
criticism. Here the force and wit of his polemic do falter a little. Looking
to some better future, he places a strange faith in Creative Writing
programmes in universities, because they treat literature “seriously as an
end in itself . . . . Rapport between artist and critic can create energized
contexts for artistic innovation and creativity”. Tellingly, he here lapses
into the kind of critical prose he himself deplores. But if his concluding
hopes are not quite convincing, his regrets have been expressed with
irresistible clarity.
John Mullan’s books include How Novels Work, 2006, and Anonymity:
A secret history of English literature, 2008. He teaches English at
University College London.
