Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
I have often wondered about the age-old enmity between artist and critic: why does it live on? One intriguing answer came unexpectedly in an Independent article by David Lester. They are, as the title of the article says, "natural enemies", a point Lester amply illustrates with innumerable historical examples. The case of James Whistler and Ruskin is one such example. In 1878 the former took the latter to court for accusing him of flinging "a pot of paint in the face of the public". Such antagonism is repeated almost daily in the art world of today. Artists (often justifiably) see critics as vultures whose favourable reviews are few and far between.
"For when it comes to critics and artists," Lester explains, "we are talking about fragile egos and over-the- top reactions." A gulf of mistrust, as he describes it, separates artists and critics, with the two professions occupying a similar space but at the same time having little common ground. Someone once commented that theatre critics in particular suffer from a peculiar alienation during performances; they feel they don't belong anywhere. They are neither part of the theatre nor really among the audience. And perhaps this sense of alienation could be generalised to include critics of other arts as well, partly explaining their predatory tendencies, inevitably directed at the artists at whose work they are looking in a kind of structural animosity.
Yet mutual antagonism notwithstanding, artists and critics still need each other. Indirectly, they help pay each other's wages; this notion came to me as I read vitriolic reviews of Martin Amis' latest novel, The Yellow Dog. Even before it appeared Sarah Lyall had proclaimed in the New York Times that "London's literary knives are out." One vicious attack on the novel had appeared in the Daily Telegraph. Tiber Fischer, its author, had let loose what Lyall describes as "a bit of bad temper" that was bound to cause a ripple effect on newspaper pages and e-mail windows. The debate would involve rival authors and critics as well as judges deliberating the fate of the next Booker Prize.
Peter Kemp's review in the Culture Supplement of the Sunday Times is a case in point. At bottom a personal piece in which the author administers as much bitterness as literary discrimination, it traces what Kemp sees as the downfall of Amis, which he believes has accelerated with every novel published since Money (1984). The Yellow Dog, he says, marks a further plummeting in Amis' literary trajectory: "staleness of content" combined with "torpidity of treatment" is one accusation in a series of charges levelled by Kemp.
Such a savage response drove me, as it nearly always does, back to T S Eliot's The Perfect Critic and The Function of Criticism. In these two articles Eliot lays down the rules of the game, distinguishing between the professional and academic critic, and differentiating between the sentimental critic (in whom the work evokes emotions that have nothing to do with the artist's intention) and the critic who successfully suspends his personal prejudices to seek out an accurate judgement -- the latter being a rarer and more helpful creature.
There are critics whose job it is to lay down a rule, a system, and their obsession with finding aspects of that system in the work they are judging at least partly explains the "violence and extremity" they are capable of wielding. Yet the perfect critic must not coerce, must not make judgements of better and worse. His job is to elucidate the work to the reader, who can then make a judgement for himself. Eliot's views, however comforting in terms of one's own convictions, can make you wonder whether what the newspapers offer today is really criticism at all. Critics may be the artists' natural enemies, but must they express this enmity in such unpleasant ways?
