I was poking around on Plastic (which I want to write about a bit more, maybe later today) and found a -- now somewhat stale -- thread about this E-mail conversation about criticism between Jonathan Lethem and Dave Eggers which was published/posted in McSweeny's. It's a longish back-and-forth concerning what Eggers more aggressively defines as a sort of widespread critical irresponsibility, a self-serving need on the part of critics -- both professional and amateur -- to dispense judgement without consideration for the essential and indisputable value of any creative act. Eggers sees the Critic (and again, he includes the nonprofessional) who Seeks to Pan as part of an epidemic of ego-driven bad faith. He makes a passionate argument for the notion that our whole approach, as a community, to art/music/letters is fucked up by the desire to dismiss.
And he makes some interesting points. Lethem, in turn, makes a number of really thought-provoking observations which I won't try to summarize here. I'll mention that I think that in the conversation he seems more attuned to digging away at the core of why this issue generates heat, and he pulls together some very rich possibilities -- and constructs along the way a shrewd analysis of Eggers's line of reasoning.
There's a lot in the discussion that I found really engaging and somewhat provoking at the same time. For example, while Eggers is mounting what amounts to a campaign against negative evaluations, one of the writers on Plastic was quick to point out that Eggers doesn't seem to accord criticism the same status as he does other kinds of writing -- his distrust of critics and their writing, his sense that they "stand between the writer and the reader" condemns criticism to a kind of shadow existence.
But that said, I can't dismiss his case either, and he comes up with a couple of damning examples of the ways in which the critics goals often seem preset -- so that a critic who just hates a genre can write a vituperative essay condemning recent examples, with no honest intention of supplying that "disinterested" Arnoldean standard, which I still in some sense value (despite whatever suspicions of such terms I imbibed in grad school). Moreover, I'm quite impressed with the point of view that Lethem brings to the discussion, because I think he's very accurate about the inner struggle that we (at least I) feel between appreciation and the desire/need to assert the self in response to -- even in defense of -- the "plenitude" of created things.
I want to go on about this -- but not in a completely rambling fashion, which this already seems to be succumbing to. So I'll reutrn to this later. And of course I'm curious to know what others think.
Posted by B T at February 15, 2001 10:26 AM