Some months ago I posited that ‘Hunter,’ by George Murray is one of the best poems ever written by a Canadian poet.

How Poems Work is a web zine that examines the nature and craft of [Canadian] poetry through ‘thoughtful, lively, accessible, analytical, and informative prose.’ Here’s my attempt at the latter, based on the aforementioned:

"This poem starts with a blow which jolts the reader urgently from peace to panic. It is delivered by a narrator who says ominously ‘hush, this lion sleeps tonight.’ The wind no longer blows. A sombre, yet tense, insistent tone is set. The reader’s attention is dramatically gained; the opening is intriguing. Why the frozen stillness?

This early tone grows loud with tension as the poem progresses. Good is set against evil; life against death; aridity, fecundity; forests, deserts; past , future. These juxtapositions serve to engage and delight the mind, to incite more questions. For example, many creatures roam these stanzas. Deer, bison, hoary goats, grizzlies, and blue foxes connote life, innocence, the pristine that faces destruction, death, humankind. Man himself, the rational savage, behaves stupidly…

Please click here for the rest.

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Harper’s Blogger Wyatt Mason responds to a reader:

"…sensibly, and, to my mind, scrupulously, a critic should attend to the sentences that offer some particular insights into why the characters on the page remain, well, only the page, and do not vault into the reader’s heart. Alas, that’s work the head must do, banging itself against sentences.

And, I should say, not entirely “Alas.” I happen to feel…that critics disappoint me for failing to offer enough specificity to bear out their claims that a book does not move them. Too often, a critic will see fit to dismiss a book in frustration without pointing adequately to the source of that frustration. Balance, as in everything, is needed, and infrequently maintained. And so, ultimately, I can’t believe… that “literary critics have become such ‘experts’ that they feel too important to discuss what real readers care about.” Rather, I’d say that the best literary critics feel properly astonished before works of literary art, and aspire, once that astonishment briefly clears, to attempt the (one hopes) interesting task of discussing the particulars of that astonishment, however often they fall short of producing such an astonishment themselves."

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William Deresiewicz  November 19, 2008 in The Nation:

Here we begin to glimpse the enormous gulf that lies between James Wood, the best we have to offer, and the New York critics, Wilson, Trilling, Kazin and Howe…What made these thinkers so distinguished, what made their criticism so significant not only for American literature but also for this country’s intellectual culture as a whole, was not great learning, or great thinking, or great expressive ability, or great sensitivity to literary feeling and literary form, though they exhibited all of these, but a passionate involvement with what lies beyond the literary and creates its context. Wilson, who wrote about everything during his teeming career, from politics to popular culture, socialist factions to Native American tribes, warned about "the cost of detaching books from all the other affairs of human life." Trilling’s whole method as a critic was to set the object of his consideration within the history of what he called "the moral imagination." Kazin, whose criticism, like Hardwick’s, focused on the literature of this country in particular, sought to illuminate nothing less than "the nature of our American experiences." The goal of Howe’s criticism, he said, was "the recreation of a vital democratic radicalism in America." The New York critics were interested in literature because they were interested in politics, culture, the moral life and the life of society, and all as they bore on one another. They placed literature at the center of their inquiry because they recognized its ability not only to represent life but, as Matthew Arnold said, to criticize it–to ask questions about where we are and how where we are stands in relation to where we should be. They were not aesthetes; they were, in the broadest sense, intellectuals" 

Johann Hari Columnist, London Independent Posted December 17, 2008 | 07:15 PM (EST) in The Huffington Post sounding awfully familiar:

Most overrated writer: James Wood. The New Yorker‘s literary critic has been fawned over all year as the heir to Lionel Trilling, and the last of the great critics. But for me, his writing is weirdly anemic. He is an extraordinarily brilliant critic of style and form – but he simply doesn’t see the other components of great fiction. He seems to think novels exist in a hermetically sealed vacuum, insulated from politics and culture and the great tides of humanity (other than theology, the most sterile of all disciplines). Wood understands novels only in terms of how they relate to other novels. The genuinely great literary critics of the twentieth century – Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin – were nothing like this. They saw the novel as a dialogue with the society: they knew no novel stands apart from the world. To them, this Wood would seem defenestrated and sparse indeed.

I don’t read literary critics for the views they hold on politics, I read them because of the ways in which they bring fresh knowledge to me about specific works of literature, so that I may experience new delight from, and get insight into, these works, and gain understanding of, and perspective on, the moral, political, social etc. topics and issues that each may bring to my attention.

Helen Gardner puts it nicely in The Business of Criticism:

Coleridge and Keats are great critics because of what they tell us of the nature of the poetic imagination and of the power of poetry, and because the things they have to say about certain poets, notably Shakespeare, permanently affect our own reading of those poets. The capacity to ponder works of art and to say something which enlarges our conception of their value, or gives them a fresh relevance, is the rudiment of criticism as an art. This explains why, on the whole, criticism which has survived its own day is rarely concerned with the critic’s contemporaries, unless, as with Coleridge on Wordsworth, the critic has been deeply implicated with his subject. Coleridge writing on Wordsworth cannot be said to be ‘responding to a new situation."*

(*refering T.S. Eliot’s : " The rudiment of good criticism is the ability to choose a good poem and reject a bad poem; and its most severe test is of its ability to select a good new poem, to respond properly to a new situation").

Art is defined by Noel Carroll in his recent book On Criticism as ‘the intentional production of the artist,’ with the artist as an individual creator of value. Criticism, he says, is the discovery of value, not the clinical dissection and interpretation of various codes, or signifying systems or regimes of power. Description, contextualization, classification, elucidation, interpretation and analysis all contribute to the articulation of what is most important in criticism: the reasons upon which evaluation is based. 

Several posts ago I wrote that great works of literature encountered by a curious mind chart near infinite courses of interpretation and meaning. Blinkered schools of thought rob great writing of its diversity and richness. Much that passes for criticism is in fact thievery, where ‘meaning’ is hijacked and re-cast in light of: Foucault, Marx, feminism, Derrida, Queer Theory, whatever the cheer might be. Each may reveal valuable truths, but often at the expense of author intent.

Edmond Caldwell at Contra James Wood hijacks meaning and willfully misreads the intent of James Wood’s criticism.

Here’s Fredric Jameson at the conclusion of Marxism and Form:

“…it has been said that literary criticism was a privileged instrument in the struggle against nineteenth-century despotism (particularly in Czarist Russia) because it was the only way one could smuggle ideas and covert political commentary past the censor. This is now to be understood, not in an external, but in an internal and allegorical sense. The works of culture comet o us as signs in an all-but-forgotten code, as symptoms of diseases no longer even recognized as such, as fragments of a totality we have long since lost the organs to see. In the older culture, the kinds of works which a Lukacs called realistic were essentially those which carried their own interpretation built into them, which were at one and the same time a fact and commentary on the fact. Now the two are once again sundered from each other, and the literary fact, like the other objects that make up our social reality, cries out for commentary, for interpretation, for decipherment, for diagnosis.”

Mr. Caldwell, hearing this rallying call, has cleverly chosen to attack leading ‘establishment lackey’ James Wood, in an effort to help us all ‘see’ again.  In so doing, he picks over Wood’s oeuvre each week, seeking at every turn to diminish and discredit; to paint him as stodgy reactionary- defender of the status quo – stooge for mass consumer culture and those who rule it, in hopes of undermining Wood’s credibility as an arbiter of literary merit, and, I assume, in so doing, to incite revolution.

Caldwell’s criticism is not free-range; it’s hatched all from the same template. There is no objectivity. Reasoning is hostage to an ulterior motive, the servant of a larger purpose. It is propaganda; predictable cant; which, because it engages with Wood, makes for interesting, if troubling, fare.  Troubling because his pickings while insulting, also border on the calumnious.  For example:

 “Those who encounter “Toni Morrison’s False Magic” in its place towards the end of The Broken Estate may become aware of an odd contradiction.  So many of the earlier essays find Wood going into raptures about how good (realist) fiction conjures our belief, how it plumbs the mysteries of the human “soul,” etc.  In one essay he lauds Virginia Woolf as a fundamentally “mystical” writer; in the next essay he calls D.H. Lawrence one of the greatest “mystics” writing in English.  Suddenly, however, when it comes to Paradise, he is on the side of skepticism and reason against the seductions of “magic” and “superstition.” 

Why is this?

“…when Morrison appears (to Wood, anyway) to be handling the “necessary superstitions” of African-American history in a suitably detached manner, her prose is “dignified” and “distinguished” – i.e., it has the bearing of a Negro you can bring home to meet your parents, like Sidney Poitier or Joe Biden’s “clean, articulate” Barack Obama.  But when Morrison appears uncritically to embrace this history and participate in it, she is rolling in the aisles of a superstitious “choir.”  Woolf and Lawrence come out of a Judeo-Christian and European tradition; their magic is a limpid, beautiful “mysticism.”  Toni Morrison’s magic brokenly traces its lineage to Africa; it is “superstition” which must be treated with distance and skepticism.  It should come as no surprise that the magazine James Wood worked for when he wrote these words was the same one which, a few years earlier, had published the initial installment of The Bell Curve.”

The implication is clear. Wood is a racist. Why? According to Caldwell’s willful misreading, it hinges on Wood’s use of the word ‘dignified,’ which supposedly means the opposite of ‘uncritical embracing and participating in history.’   I read it differently. Here’s the sentence that contains ‘dignified.’ prior to the one Caldwell uses to commence the first quote:

“Morrison’s talent- and she certainly has great novelistic talent – has been to combine magic, myth and history, and to make of this a dignified superstition.”

Several sentences later Wood clarifies:

“…superstition – a myth, made of oral telling and retellings.”

‘Dignified’ thus refers to writing. Superstition is dignified because of the talented manner in which Morrison has written about it.

***

I highly doubt that James Wood’s  (conscious or unconscious) intention in writing this review was to denigrate the African American experience. I’d suggest that it was simply to provide reasoned argument in support of his opinion that Paradise lacks the same level of literary merit that some of Toni Morrison’s earlier works possess; works which in fact Wood included years ago, when in his mid-twenties,  among those he loved the most.

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