Everyone's A Critic

In the best possible world, one far removed from talking points and quick hits, that strange discipline known as art criticism-sometimes now called Arts & Leisure-would itself be an art. Of late, it's primarily poets who've shared this calling: Borges' micro-essays are fictions fabulated about the artists essayed; Charles Olson's manifestos are suffused with a sense of his poetic form; Frank O'Hara's screeds were glorified prose poems. Today the tradition continues mostly underground, perhaps best exampled by Stephen Rodefer's recent essay/lecture "The Age in Its Cage," most easily found at pragueliteraryreview.com.

Aidan Higgins and Viktor Shklovsky, authors of two recently released books of criticism, are two very different writers. The former was born in Ireland, 1927, heir to the Hyperborean mantle, and author of Langrishe, Go Down and Bornholm Night-Ferry, worthy novels that picked up the modernist conversation where Joyce and Beckett left off; the latter was perhaps the leading light of Russian Formalism and spent a prolific life (1893-1984) vilified by Soviet authorities, largely unpublished in the West. What these writers have in common, besides these new volumes from estimable Dalkey Archive, is that old, lost sense of criticism as art, of criticism as participation in the very process these writers are attempting, not to address and evaluate, but rather to change, forever.

While Higgins is perhaps the better reader-an erudite, amiable type who claims every last book read his favorite-Shklovksy is the more consistent, almost too. While Higgins' criterion is reducible to pleasure principles, Shklovsky comes to any work with mores that must be satisfied. Here we have the duality with which art still wrestles. On one hand, the pleasure-people, lotus-eaters who demand that literature "engage" if not merely "entertain"; on the other hand the moralists, the people who believe that art should be purposeful, affective, a conduit for change.

Here is Higgins' intro to Faulkner:

"Chronicler of a land despoiled, he had a keen nose for liars and the fix; space was his chosen theme, the wilderness, the human heart at odds with itself. Firearms figure much in his fiction, after game and retribution; General Grant had just left burning down Jefferson and gone riding away."

His intro to Milan Kundera:

"In the larger context of the ineffable, epistemology gives me the creeps. It is not good for man to keep reminding himself he is man. Lukacs, Adorno, Benjamin, Goldmann, Karl Kraus, Chomsky, what good did they ever do us?"

To John Updike:

"The fiction of John Updike is as American as molasses or the Gross National Debt."

This is passion, relish, the high vista; Higgins flipping through literary history with an eye to the story, the anecdote, the fun and its meaning.

Now hear Shklovsky "Regarding Art and Revolution":

"The most serious mistake of contemporary writers about art is, in my opinion, their tendency to equate the social revolution with the revolution in the arts. [?] All the authors suppose that new forms of daily life create new forms of art; that is to say, they consider that art is one of the functions of life."

Whereas Higgins gives us smoking-jacket jawing on what academics would call the Anglo-American avant-garde, Shklovsky is revealed as a reformer, straight out of the 19th century, attempting to build the modern out of the burnt remains of nationalism. Whereas Higgins breezes by Joyce and Barnes, Bellow and Faulkner, assuming all the while that these people and their literatures are the people, and the literatures, Shklovsky bombs us with names like Leonid Andreev, Vissarion Belinsky, Aleksandr Blok, Velimir Khlebnikov, with Mayakovsky and Merezhkovsky perhaps the most familiar.

Cultural imperialism aside, what unites these books is the approach. Writing about art as art-writing, as object in and of itself, criticism becoming a just response to the entropy literature experienced after modernism died: After we can't write literature anymore, we can always write about it. Just as Melville is sometimes a rehash of Shakespeare, as Dostoyevsky is often Dostoyevsky plagiarizing himself, Higgins and Shklovsky critique art by rewriting both its history and its essential material.

The fact that both are foreigners-simultaneously "European" and European outsiders-should be instructive, as should the fact that the vast majority of material collected in both books originally appeared in daily newspapers, in countries both free (Ireland) and unimaginably repressive (USSR). As cultural criticism in this country runs an ever-narrowing gamut between academic essays parenthesized in the high colonic and headlines announcing celebrity gossip in 36-point pink font, we should understand what we as Americans have lost.