objective truth Archives

A new essay or book review by critic William Giraldi has become something of an event. In a world where bloggers discuss how they “feel” about a book, and the online literati praise every new novel as if it were Ulysses, Giraldi has become the adult in the room, reminding us what true criticism can and should be.

In September Giraldi wrote “Letters to a Young Critic” in The Daily Beast after a review of his was singled out for being too negative. His Daily Beast essay was chock-full of no-nonsense opinions guaranteed to make him persona non grata on Twitter and in trendy Brooklyn bookshops:

“Much of what you will review will be written by those who have emerged from the MFA mill and who have been Pavloved into believing that every effort, no matter its anemia or inertia, deserves praise because the writer tried so hard and cares so much. You’ll be confronted by the preposterous sense of entitlement that the professionalization of writing has brought about…Don’t pander to the ‘literary’ snipes who live their dreary lives online, that legion of wonks who are mere tourists in the land of literature.”

In an age that rejects objective truth and vilifies judgment of any kind, Giraldi insists that there are objectively bad books, books that drag us all down as writers, readers and human beings, and that a critics’ obligation is to call a spade a spade. “Relax your standards in literature,” he writes, “and the relaxation of other standards will follow.” In the same vein, T.S. Eliot wrote that the function of criticism was “the common pursuit of true judgment.” (The problem of making objective artistic judgments in the modern world is something I wrote about for Full-Stop Magazine in June).

At the end of the essay Giraldi provides a kind of syllabus of great essays and books that any would-be-critic should read and ponder.

On November 30 Giraldi returned with a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books called “Rotten Reviews Redux: A Literary Companion.” Like his essay in September, this piece is full of wisdom and tough-love gems for the online literati. Giraldi surveys the enduring legacy of E.M. Forster’s book Aspects of the Novel along with the almost-forgotten one by critic Percy Lubbock The Craft of Fiction. He also focuses on the “pervasive suspicion that the best literary comment is always penned by those who are masters of the genre they comment on.” But, perhaps even more importantly, the review is worth reading because Giraldi’s acerbic wit is on full-display , and in the PC-world of book reviewing, there is nothing more refreshing. A sampling:

“A world with no deservedly antagonistic reviews would be a literary Disneyland: a wretched uniformity of pleasantness.”

“What a critic likes and feels is immaterial; it’s what a critic sees and thinks that matters. But that is precisely what you’ll find spattered across the Net and in many a newspaper east to west: unlettered opinions with scarcely more authority than the feral scratching in Cro-Magnon’s diary.”

“Literature to these online cabals is a social event and not an artistic endeavor; they congregate to swap recipes of cuisine no discerning person would ever care to eat. The idea that a novel can be garbage, and that a critic has the imperative to call it such, is anathema to their aspartame outlook; these vast middle-strata scribes have turned to writing, apparently, because Habitat for Humanity is too demanding.”

Lately I’ve developed a tenderness for essays speculating about the “death of the novel,” or that inspiring sub-genre, “why write novels at all?” I suspect they are proof that the form still has a modicum of relevance; the very existence of such essays proves there is still something left to kill off. Contrast this with say, poetry, which is so entirely deceased (I’m sorry if this offends the 32 Americans who buy new poetry volumes each year) that nobody would even considering announcing its death.

The latest backhand defense of the novel is Roger Kimball’s essay “The Great American Novel: Will There Ever be Another?” which argues that both the atomization of American culture and our lack of shared cultural assumptions makes it unlikely the novel will ever return to its former prominence.

Right from the start of his essay, Kimball admits he is less than enthusiastic about contemporary fiction:

“I read as few contemporary novels as possible, partly (here we get into cause and effect) because most of the novels that get noticed today (like most of the visual art that gets the Establishment’s nod) should be filed under the rubric ‘ephemera,’ and often pretty nasty ephemera at that. I do not, you may be pleased to read, propose to parade before you a list of those exercises in evanescence, self-parody, and general ickiness that constitute so much that congregates under the label of American fiction these days.”

photo credit: Doonvas

I’m tempted to agree that there are cartloads of forgettable novels coming out every day, however I don’t read enough contemporary fiction to make such a sweeping statement, and I do occasionaly encounter contemporary novels that have a shot at immortality.

In a culture without common moral assumptions, Kimball rightly believes there are no standards to subvert, critique or even support. In short, it never feels like there is anything at stake. As a a consequence, Kimball isn’t sure that we’d recognize our great American novelists if they were writing today—true enough—but it’s worth noting that Melville was not appreciated in his own time (it was only in the early 20^th Century that critics resurrected Moby Dick and enthroned it as a canonical book):

“My point is that even if a new Melville or Twain, Faulkner or Fitzgerald were to appear in our midst, his work would fail to achieve the critical traction and existential weight of those earlier masters. We lack the requisite community of readers, and the ambient shared cultural assumptions, to provide what we might call the responsorial friction that underwrites the traction of publicly acknowledged significance.”

He goes on to say:

“The novel in its highest forms requires a certain level of cultural definiteness and identity against which it can perform its magic. The diffusion or dispersion of culture brings with it a diffusion of manners and erosion of shared moral assumptions…The chief virtue of a well-defined cultural tradition for a novelist (for any artist) is not that it be beneficent but that it be widely acknowledged and authoritative.”

Right now, in an American civilization where there is no agreement on which wars are worth fighting (or not fighting), what marriage is (and isn’t) and whether there is such a thing as objective beauty or even objective truth for that matter—the novel may be doomed, or it may just freeze up and go the way of of “classical” music.

There is always new symphonic and chamber music being written (and some important pieces at that), but listeners restrict their listening habits to a few choice masters from a few well-trodden epochs (i.e., the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods) and thereby relegate modern compositions to a few lonely hours on Sunday afternoon public radio shows hosted by gentlemanly middle-aged men with beards and spectacles.