June 27, 2007
Re: “Sucker MC’s” Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:15 AM EST Fred Schwarz’s post “Sucker MC’s,” responds to Fred Smoler’s review of a new novel by Michael Chabon. Mr. Schwarz takes on a couple of Mr. Smoler’s assertions, namely that alternative history has lacked writers “of the first rank,” and that writers can effectively be organized into ranks at all. After discoursing on his personal dislike for the works of Ian McEwan, Mr. Schwarz concludes: “Will Chabon make the cut 40 years from now? At this point it’s a matter of guesswork. And—a different question—is [Philip K.] Dick not only major but ‘of the first rank’? Here, as with Chabon and McEwan and every other writer, past and present, it’s simply a matter of opinion.” At least part of this observation is well worth considering. As much as it is an engrossing and challenging activity to review new books, it is important to remain humble in one’s judgments. The overconfident literary critic risks ending up in the same academic dustbin as the self-satisfied reviewer who (quoting from Macbeth) called one of William Faulkner’s greatest works “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Yet at the same time as Mr. Schwarz is right to counsel a certain degree of restraint and humility in literary criticism, I balk at his assertion that the literary value of “every . . . writer, past and present” is “simply a matter of opinion.” This is a pretty sweeping thesis, and it’s arrived at a bit too hastily. Calling the evaluation of novels entirely subjective, and utterly without objective criteria, can be a serious proposition—or it can be the refuge of a fairly unreflective reader. I’m not saying that Mr. Schwarz’s argument falls into the latter category, but I do think it’s worth considering a couple of his points a little more closely. First: Ian McEwan. I tend to agree with Mr. Schwarz that McEwan’s work has been overrated. I thought Atonement was quite good, especially insofar as it attempted to portray tragedy and memory in the context of modern medicine. But having since read a number of McEwan’s other works, it’s clear to me that the man has shortcomings as a writer. He often relies on gimmicks—implausible or unsatisfying narrative twists grounded in complex biology—to give his novels gravitas; and Saturday’s allegory and parallelism were disappointingly obvious for a writer of McEwan’s technical capabilities. Looking at Mr. Schwarz’s assessment of McEwan, though, I’m not sure it’s really fair to the author. Citing a couple of phrases from the novelist’s latest, Schwarz writes: “To me, these sentences are no more impressive than saying, ‘I bought a hot dog and ate it.’ Does this make me a snob? No, I just don’t like Ian McEwan.” That’s okay, but it’s hard for me to see how this is a serious and respectful assessment of McEwan’s work; these words express a blunt, negative preference, not a studied judgment. It’s not totally unlike saying, “Thomas Jefferson was a bad man and I just don’t like him.” That would be a fine, emotional reaction to express, but it would be a reaction without intellectual or scholarly value. There is admittedly a lot of disagreement about what constitutes good literature, and even more about what constitutes great literature. But the fact that there can be multiple assessments of a single work—say, Atonement–doesn’t have to mean that all critical judgments are necessarily useless and slapdash. In his controversial essay “An Elegy for the Canon,” Yale’s Harold Bloom asks his readers to consider where humans got the idea to create “literary work that the world would not willingly let die.” The essay, and Bloom’s criticism in general, is unrelenting in its confidence that some literary works are, indeed, better than others. The criteria Bloom uses to judge them are broad but useful. Novels and poems that are cliché or unoriginal in subject or style, or created for a practical or political purpose, or tritely psychoanalytical, or wholly specific to a single identity group, are quickly thrown aside. Works that transcend cultural boundaries, endure over time, and demonstrate extreme aesthetic sophistication are candidates for greatness. This is, of course, only an incomplete list of Bloom’s demands upon writers. Bloom’s is not the only system by which criticism can be guided, but it’s a good example of an approach to judging literature that is more intellectually rigorous than the easy pronouncement of likes and dislikes. It’s a scholarly approach, that is, that forces readers to reflect on why some literature is of lasting force and why some is forgotten as soon as CVS gets a new shipment from Harlequin. We can still go into any decent bookstore and buy a copy of Tristram Shandy or Finnegan’s Wake, and the explanation for this is more complex than the preferences of the average reader. Bloom’s essay, despite its flaws, at least has the virtue of explaining why respected English professors teach Dante instead of Dan Brown, and Jane Austen instead of Danielle Steel.
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