One of my friends--Garnette Cadogan--has been communicating with me about the post about book reviews and reminded me of Daniel Mendelsohn. (If you haven't read Cadogan yet, start with his terrific essay, "Walking While Black", you should read it right away: it's about racism, cities, the human desire to wander, and the resistance he faced at his efforts to enroll himself in the ranks of "the essayists, poets, and novelists who’d wandered that great city before me—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Alfred Kazin, Elizabeth Hardwick." His book on walking, on the history of walking, and on writers and walking, and just on walking, is forthcoming.) Cadogan gave me a list of other good reviewers, and high on his list, as it is on mine, is the name Daniel Mendelsohn.
I heard Mendelsohn this past spring, when he gave a series of lectures here at UVA, on Erich Auerbach's book Mimesis and his life, in exile in Istanbul, while writing it. It was one of the best performances (and most insightful and intelligent series of lectures) that I have ever seen, and I've seen some of the best--Peter Brown, Jean Elshtain, others. (Not everyone who is a great thinker is a great lecturer, and vice versa, by the way--Charles Taylor is a tremendous philosopher, but his lectures that I have seen are sprawling and sloppy affairs.) Anyway, this is a nice review of his latest book that makes a good point about what criticism ought to be--not just about the object under review, but about the larger thing that the object is attempting to live up to.
The review is nice; but the piece also has a link to Mendelsohn's own "A Critic's Manifesto," which is even more worth reading, as it is a terrific summa of a lot of things about reviewing, and about "criticism," and judgment, that I think are really important. In it he makes a number of good points worth considering. A good critic needs a knowledge base, a distinctive sense of "taste" (which will not be shared):
all criticism is based on that equation: knowledge + taste = meaningful judgment. The key word here is meaningful. People who have strong reactions to a work—and most of us do—but don’t possess the wider erudition that can give an opinion heft, are not critics. (This is why a great deal of online reviewing by readers isn’t criticism proper.) Nor are those who have tremendous erudition but lack the taste or temperament that could give their judgment authority in the eyes of other people, people who are not experts. (This is why so many academic scholars are no good at reviewing for mainstream audiences.) Like any other kind of writing, criticism is a genre that one has to have a knack for, and the people who have a knack for it are those whose knowledge intersects interestingly and persuasively with their taste. In the end, the critic is someone who, when his knowledge, operated on by his taste in the presence of some new example of the genre he’s interested in—a new TV series, a movie, an opera or ballet or book—hungers to make sense of that new thing, to analyze it, interpret it, make it mean something.
Mendelsohn here sketches a great model of what a critic should be and do. As I mentioned last week in another post, I think there are great critics of this sort out there, even ones as acute (and perhaps as prickly) as Christopher Ricks. (I'm also finishing a small post on Edward Said, whose remarkably generous perspective towards less scholarly participants in high culture struck me as exemplary, so you got that goin' for you, which is nice.) For me, so much of this goes back to the model of T.S. Eliot, whose use of multiple media to promote his artistic and intellectual vision--as a poet, a dramatist, a literary critic, a more popular critic, an editor, he'd certainly be on twitter and running a website today--still seems exemplary of the opportunities of the intellectual under conditions of modern mass production and mass culture.
Of course, this is one of the core tasks of the intellect in modern society more generally, which is why it's worth coming back to again and again. Which I will.