Books in Canada - January/February 2004:

Strawman Dialectics

The Malahat Review (#144)
Reviewing: A Special Issue
Edited by Marlene Cookshaw & Lorna Jackson
116 pages, $10.00 paper
ISSN: 00251216

by Zach Wells

In the Fall 2003 issue of The Malahat Review, philosopher-poet Jan Zwicky takes to task reviewers who take authors to task. Before I get to the individual dropped threads and loose ends of Zwicky’s essay, called “The Ethics of the Negative Review”, I would like to shine a light through a gaping hole in its overall fabric. This abîme is the fictional character, Negative Reviewer (let’s call him Negrev for short), who is the antagonist of her story, terrorizing—to death in the case of poor Junkets—the sensitive artists who are her tale’s heroes.  The problem with Negrev, however, is that he is a whole cloth invention and bears scant resemblance to any flesh-and-blood reviewer. Negrev proceeds like a semi-conscious juggernaut; he is a “hit-person”; he “trashes stuff”; he makes “power grab[s]”; he “trust[s] immediate impulse[s] to reject”; he attacks and lays waste like a barbarian in a Roman bath. He is a caricature, a composite perhaps of the more vitriolic sides of Solway, Sarah, Starnino, Henighan, Metcalf, Marchand, et al.  But Zwicky does not deign to name names in her piece—presumably because this would be “mean-spirited,” and would reveal her essay to be what it claims to repudiate—so all we’re left with is poor, silly little Negrev with his impoverished soul, myopic vision, and narrow mind, stuttering over and over his stunted critical credos.  He plays strawman student in this quaint dialectic to Zwicky’s sagely ignorant Socrates.

My first objection is perhaps a quibble.  Dr. Zwicky begins her essay with Byron’s championing statement that “the critics killed Keats.” This is an odd quote to use in this kind of essay because Byron—who called him “pissabed” of no real talent and a “tadpole of the Lakes”––was, in fact, highly unimpressed with Keats. For those unfamiliar with it, Byron’s satirical quatrain from “John Keats” reads:

Who killed John Keats?
“I,” says the Quarterly,
So savage and Tartarly;
“‘Twas one of my feats.”

This could, perhaps, with a generous leap of imagination, be interpreted as damning of the reviewers and not a lampoon of Keats, as it seems to be.  Why, then, would Byron ask his publisher not to print it, if not because it was in bad taste to make fun of a dead man. But in the name of fair play, let’s pretend that Negrev’s uni-dimensionality, and the inappropriateness of Byron as defender of the artist’s right not to be attacked, don’t fatally compromise Zwicky’s thesis. Do the rest of her points hold up under scrutiny? Let’s see.

Zwicky prefaces her disquisition with an Augustinian confession: she too, when she was young and foolish, was a Negrev, and now she regrets and repents the horribly negative things she once said.  She makes “this confession not to try to put the past behind [her], but to make it clear that [she] know[s], from the inside, where the arguments for negative reviewing come from, and that in [her] analysis of the issues [she’s] talking as much to [herself] as to others.” In other words, she is addressing us sinners as a sinner herself, from ground-level, and not as some impeccable saint on high. Implicit in this posture is the idea that the latter mode is the one adopted by Negrev and his ilk, by the small people crushed beneath their burdens of vitriolic ressentiment; but she is not such a small one, she is big in her smallness and the bigsmall shall inherit the earth (or, I suppose in her case, relinquish it). The fundamental flaw with this line of thought, as I see it, is that Zwicky falls prey to a common fallacy: she mistakes analogy for fact; from her intimate knowledge of her particular condition, she extrapolates a universal law; she assumes that her reasons for negative reviewing are the same as everyone else’s.  Already, she is on epistemological terra infirma.

She goes on to say that “the idea that we have a duty to be negative … assumes the existence of a canon or at least a standard of excellence.” But this is itself an assumption, is it not?  Might one not just as easily, and more plausibly, posit that the idea of this duty is the manifestation of a yen for, of a striving towards, such a standard of excellence? An impossible task, surely, but all human excellence stems from such impossible ambition.  Is this not what distinguishes us from other animals, for better or for worse? Is this not what makes us the singularly fascinating and terrible creatures we are?  Is our duty not to be as characteristically human as we can be and not, as Nietzsche famously phrased it, all-too-human?  Yes, the suggestion that the canon needs “a cohort of hit-persons … to maintain its authority” is “worse than silly,” and does not bear examination. But in her essay, this statement is made only by Zwicky, ventriloquized through the mealy mouth of her witless strawman Negrev.  Perhaps someone somewhere has made such a silly statement at some time, but the good doctor fails to establish this with any authority.

Next, Zwicky cautions us to make sure that if we do have the temerity to make a critical judgment, that it “stand the test of time.”  This is a patent absurdity, as I think she well knows—or should, at least. Just as well to tell the artist, ‘Before you publish your work, make sure that it will last for perpetuity.’  But Zwicky’s caveat is even sillier than this, for the vast majority of criticism, unlike the art it considers, makes no bid for immortality.  It is, by nature, a cultural ephemeron; its statements are for today and contingent on the circumscribed conditions of the here-and-now.  Zwicky might as well have mouthed the famous statement of one of her favourite philosophers, Wittgenstein: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” What we cannot speak about, in this context, is literature. And a sort of selective silence on the topic is exactly what Zwicky recommends, as we shall see later.

But before we get to Dr. Zwicky’s prescription, we must navigate a rather treacherous divagation she steers into the waters of free speech.  She argues that “opinions about theses and arguments are qualitatively different from opinions about artistic achievement”; that one cannot make analogies between reviewing and political debate.  Although she discourses at great length on this topic (she herself uses the word “prolix” to describe this passage), she never quite explains why such analogies are untenable, or even why this comparison is relevant to her own thesis and argument, which become vague and tendentious in the extreme at this point. If anything, public policy must be discussed alongside art in this country, where next to no art goes unsupported by one form of government subsidy or another. In our Canadian context, then, the reviewer can be a sort of watchdog, an ombudsman on the lookout for rash gaspillage of tax-payer’s cash.  Better a Negrev in this role than some semi-literate zealot from the political right, such as spring up from time to time, denouncing funding for the arts on the basis of Purdy’s “The Blue-Footed Booby” or Molly Starlight’s Where Did my Ass Go?  Speaking of waste, Zwicky at one point says that negative reviews “kill trees.” If we’re going to get ecological about publishing, how many more trees are killed by the proliferation of dull, unaccomplished fiction and verse? Far, far more than by a few column inches of review space.  Should the reviewer not assault this gross and unjustifiable depletion of natural resources? Zwicky’s terminology throughout her essay brings to mind another trenchant political analogy, the abortion debate. By insisting on the term “negative reviewer”, where a more neutral and less judgmental term like “critical reviewer” could—and in my view should—be employed, she is doing the same thing that Pro-Life activists do when they call Pro-Choicers “murderers.”  The term “negative reviewer” is in and of itself a condemnatory distortion of an aesthetic and ethical sensibility—in other words, exactly what Zwicky claims to dislike.

Zwicky’s argument goes from makeshift to gimcrack when she compares negative reviewing to telling a friend that she’s fat. Our fair professor doesn’t seem to realize that art is something that is done more or less intentionally, whereas very few people opt to be overweight on purpose (though Robert DeNiro has been known to do this in the name of art); people don’t generally become obese as a public act.  And there is no obligation—in fact, it should be avoided in most cases—for the reviewer to have a personal relationship with the author whose work—not person—is under review.  Any further comment on this unfortunate analogy would give it far more credit than it deserves.

If we do tell our friends they’re fat, Zwicky remonstrates, we should at least do so using the first person singular, in order to “focalize the reviewer” and eliminate any “illusion of authority.”  This is one of the only points on which I agree with her, but really, it’s a stylistic preference and not terribly significant.  Zwicky does not give the anonymous reader much credit for critical judgment, and gives the almighty reviewer entirely too much for his ability to sway the public.  It is manifestly clear that any statement a reviewer makes is a subjective opinion, and as such open to debate, whether he says “I think” or “it is.” A failure to recognize this truth is, I think, a by-product of our culture of mindless consumption.  An embargo on negative criticism can do nothing but lard such a decadent culture.

Zwicky says that the harshest judgment a critic can pass on a work is silence, and that we should “keep our mouths shut” about books we don’t like. Very true. As Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray:  “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”  But if you regard this vow of silence within the framework of Zwicky’s argument, you start to realize—or at least I do—that it rubs against the grain of earlier statements she has made. Think back on her admonition that we make sure what we say stands the test of time.  If we ignore certain books altogether, how can we possibly know if our opinions, or the works to which they pertain, have lasting merit?  Is it not the height of egotism to not review a book because one doesn’t like it, and let it slip into obscurity without comment? Does one not owe it to one’s art to give everything that aspires towards it a fair shake?  To me, this kind of advice reveals Jan Zwicky’s programme for what it really is: passive aggression. This is not, I believe, an intentionally vicious Zwickian strategy.  Rather, the opposite:  it signals an insufficient critical consciousness of the agenda she advances, which is fundamentally anti-intellectual (an odd position for a philosopher to put herself in) and based on the fuzzy-wuzzy realm of feelings and emotions. Not that emotions should play no role in criticism—quite the opposite, for good criticism depends on passion for its success—but if they’re not complemented by razor-sharp thinking, what you get is mush.

In the final section of her essay, we get the good doctor’s prescription for healthy reviewing, which involves “listening” and “appreciating” as opposed to “speaking” and “judging.” She tells us that the responsible reviewer will be a sort of “literary naturalist”—a precious metaphor which she proceeds to beat to an unseemly death, analogizing meanwhile what she earlier said should be left separate and distinct (i.e. politics and art)—and advances Hass, Heaney and Dragland as avatars of this desirable style. And I can’t fault her choices.  Heaney’s prose, in particular, occupies a place of honour on my lit-crit shelf. But heaven help me should I be so dogmatic as to assert that his is the only valid mode, or even the best. What I find most pernicious about Zwicky’s thesis is its impulse towards homogeneity, towards orthodoxy, towards the erasure of personality:  thou shalt not is the tone of the piece, however humble it pretends to be. Yes, I love Heaney’s criticism, but I also love Layton’s. One is avuncular, the other irascible, but I love them both for the same basic reason: each man’s prose is an emanation of the unique and vital personality of an important artist. 

All of us in our lives require a certain amount of praise, but also a modicum of tough love if we are to develop into well-formed beings. Art, in this regard, is no different. Zwicky says, quoting Rilke, that we must evaluate art with love, not criticism. But, as is the case with a good many sensitive Rilkean proverbs, the point that criticism and love are not mutually exclusive is missed altogether. Montreal poet Carmine Starnino, it seems to me, is an unspoken presence lurking behind the arras of Zwicky’s essay.  His forthcoming book of criticism is entitled A Lover’s Quarrel—and for good reason: anyone who doubts his love for, and commitment to, his chosen art-form is sorely deluded. Yes, he is perhaps guilty sometimes of partisan affection, of less-than-rational jealousy and protectiveness. But such is a passionate lover’s wont. His opinion is not gospel, and anyone who believes that he, or any other serious-minded critic, believes otherwise, suffers from a surfeit of thin-skinned insecurity, or a fear of engaging in the debate.

Zach Wells' first book of poetry, Unsettled, will appear in 2004 from Insomniac Press.

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