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Why Criticism Matters

With Clarity and Beauty, the Weight of Authority

Is it time to write about the Death of the Critic, the proliferation of the app, the rise of the screen, the end of the discerning reader who curls up on a sun-dappled couch and devotes herself to serious books and their interpreters? Has the critic become a quaint and touching figure engaged in an irrelevant, positively medieval pursuit, like monks illuminating manuscripts?

Before the requiem begins, we have to admit that critics have always been a grandstanding, depressive and histrionic bunch. They — and by “they” I mean “we” — have always decried the decline of standards, the end of reading, the seductions of mediocrity, the abysmal shallowness and distractibility of the general public, the virtually apocalyptic state of literature and culture. Yet somehow the bruised and embattled figures of both the writer and the critic have survived lo these many centuries.

There is, for the critic, a certain romance in describing oneself as standing in the midst of a grave intellectual crisis, solitary, imperiled, in the vast desert of our cultural landscape. There is, in this stance of the underdog defender of all that matters, a certain pleasing drama, an attractive nobility. In 1958, Randall Jarrell wrote, “By this time you must be thinking, as I am, of one of the more frightening things about our age: that much of the body of common knowledge that educated people (and many uneducated people) once had, has disappeared or is rapidly disappearing.” In 1960, Dwight Macdonald wrote, “A tepid ooze of Midcult is spreading everywhere.” And Vladimir Nabokov observed in his masterpiece of criticism, “Lectures on Literature,” that some of his students’ ears were “merely ornamental.” Going back even farther, we can see the same tendency toward the dark, melancholic view: in 1865, Matthew Arnold wrote, “Yes, the world will soon be the philistines’ ” and “How prevalent all round us is the want of balance of mind and urbanity of style.”

So at this juncture we can take with a grain of salt our definite sense and encroaching fear that our audience of educated readers is shrinking. The world, as we can now inform Arnold, stubbornly resists going entirely to the philistines; the world is not finished with its Janet Malcolms and James Woods, its Harold Blooms and Michael Woods.

If the critic has to compete with the seductions of Facebook, with shrewdly written television, with culturally relevant movies — with, in short, every bright thing that flies to the surface of the iPhone — that’s all the more reason for him to write dramatically, vividly, beautifully, to have, as Alfred Kazin wrote in 1960, a “sense of the age in his bones.” The critic could take all of this healthy competition, the challenge of dwindling review pages, the slash in pay, as a sign to be better, to be irreplaceable, to transcend.

Now, maybe more than ever, in a cultural desert characterized by the vast, glimmering territory of the Internet, it is important for the critic to write gracefully. If she is going to separate excellent books from those merely posing as excellent, the brilliant from the flashy, the real talent from the hyped — if she is going to ferret out what is lazy and merely fashionable, if she is going to hold writers to the standards they have set for themselves in their best work, if she is going to be the ideal reader and in so doing prove that the ideal reader exists — then the critic has one important function: to write well.

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Katie RoipheCredit...Deborah Copaken Kogan

By this I mean that critics must strive to write stylishly, to concentrate on the excellent sentence. There is so much noise and screen clutter, there are so many Amazon reviewers and bloggers clamoring for attention, so many opinions and bitter misspelled rages, so much fawning ungrammatical love spewed into the ether, that the role of the true critic is actually quite simple: to write on a different level, to pay attention to the elements of style.

Of course, it is not considered nice or polite or democratic to take the side of the paid critic (though, to be fair, she is paid very little) over the enterprising amateur who would like to shout anonymously on the Internet, but that’s precisely what is called for — unless, of course, the enterprising amateur writes better than the paid critic. The answer to the angry Amazon reviewer who mangles sentences in an effort to berate or praise an author is the perfectly constructed old-fashioned essay that holds within its well-formed sentences and graceful rhetoric the values it protects and projects. More than ever, critical authority comes from the power of the critic’s prose, the force and clarity of her language; it is in the art of writing itself that information and knowledge are carried, in the sentences themselves that literature is preserved. The secret function of the critic today is to write beautifully, and in so doing protect beautiful writing.

If critics can fulfill this single function, if they can carry the mundane everyday business of literary criticism to the level of art, then they can be ambitious and brash; they can connect books to larger currents in the culture; they can identify movements and waves in fiction; they can provoke discussion; they can carry books back into the middle of conversations at dinner parties. Here I think of James Wood’s essay “Hysterical Realism,” which skewers the pyrotechnical trendiness of a certain generation of writers; or of Janet Malcolm’s “Silent Woman,” which exposes the psychological ambiguities at play in the production of biography; or of Virginia Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own,” which is essentially a dazzling novel on the difficulties of writing as a woman; or of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” which takes on the arduous, paradoxical labor of criticism attacking criticism. What separates all of these works from the din of opinion, from the impassioned amateur review, from the grouchy blogged snark or the Facebook status posting, is the beauty in the sentence, the craft itself.

Consider great and exquisite lines of criticism, from Jarrell: “If Picasso limited himself in anything he would not be Picasso: he loves the world so much he wants to steal it and eat it.” Or from Woolf: “Mr. Joyce’s indecency in ‘Ulysses’ seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows. At moments, when the window is broken, he is magnificent. But what a waste of energy!” It is the poetry of these descriptions that rises above, that describes, anatomizes and pins down. Here we can observe, in action, another secret purpose of the critic: to entertain. Great criticism is more fun, when it comes down to it, more passionate and more useful and more economical than scrolling the stars of the Amazon critic who reviews, say, Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” thus: “It seemed trivial and after getting my interest, it would end up talking about someone or a period in time totally different. It left me confused, but still interested. I should say I listened to an audiobook version. Possibly that contributed to confusion. This is supposed to be a really great book according to Oprah.”

To those who doubt the beleaguered but well-spoken critic’s influence, his ability to provoke or sway, I would submit a tiny piece of anecdotal evidence from the classroom. I have seen students rush out to buy “Anna Karenina” because an essay by James Wood made them feel that Tolstoy was essential. If it’s even just these couple of students, alone on planet Earth, who have read that essay and rushed out, those couple of students are to me sufficient proof of the robustness and purpose of the eloquent critic, of his power to awake and enlighten, of his absolutely crucial place in our world.

But let’s go back to the seductive and dramatic despair we in the business of writing and thinking about books continue to feel. Is the entire rich and textured English language really on the verge of being reduced to text messages? Can an 18-year-old really not understand why a sentence of Hemingway or Wharton is more charismatic than a tweet? I am not entirely convinced. We could view the sight of a well-dressed businessman in a houndstooth suit reading Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story” or David Mitchell’s “Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” on an iPad as he waits in the beige antechamber of the doctor’s office as a sign not of the death of the book, but of the irrepressibility of literature.

To the dangerously dwindling reading public — and to the serious, unshaven young man in a coffee shop somewhere in Brooklyn, just now shooting me a dirty look as he bangs out his essay on the death of the critic and the death of literature and the death of our attention spans on his shiny laptop — I humbly suggest that the situation is more stable than we suppose. The ancient power of a story well told will endure, along with its interpreters and critics, and technology will continue to evolve and unsettle, to dazzle and madden us, to create its cultural crises and elicit its handwringing. I think we can say with confidence that in 200 years Anna Karenina and her men will still exist. And the iPad — who knows?

Katie Roiphe is the author, most recently, of “Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages.” She is a professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and is currently at work on a book about writers’ confrontations with mortality.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: With Clarity and Beauty, The Weight of Authority. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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