Lit Crit

[Caius Marcius]

No: HPFGUIDX 7646

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, Catlady <catlady at w...> wrote:
> 
> 
> Catlady  cried from her heart:
> > It doesn't teach us why some stories are  objects of beauty that 
take
> one's
> > breath away and last 'forever' and why other stories are loved in 
one
> era and
> > considered unreadable garbage by other eras. And it doesn't teach 
us
> anything
> > about the human condition: not about honor, not about envy, not 
about
> battle
> > fatigue....
> > Which is working up to, somewhere in this post, I will ask you 
what
> is that
> > lit-crit stuff good for?
> 

Perhaps no one so eloquently defended the critic's role as did Oscar 
Wilde - his dialogue "The Critic as Artist" gives an excellent 
exposition of his view. A couple of excerpts: 

ERNEST.  But is Criticism really a creative art?

GILBERT.  Why should it not be?  It works with materials, and puts
them into a form that is at once new and delightful.  What more can
one say of poetry?  Indeed, I would call criticism a creation
within a creation.  For just as the great artists, from Homer and
AEschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to
life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and
legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that
others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative
form and colour have been already added.  Nay, more, I would say
that the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal
impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has
least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in
fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it,
in itself, and to itself, an end.  Certainly, it is never
trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude.  No ignoble
considerations of probability, that cowardly concession to the
tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever.
One may appeal from fiction unto fact.  But from the soul there is
no appeal


.

GILBERT.  Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses.
He can pass from his synthetic impression of the work of art as a
whole, to an analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in this
lower sphere, as I hold it to be, there are many delightful things
to be said and done.  Yet his object will not always be to explain
the work of art.  He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, to
raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is
dear to both gods and worshippers alike.  Ordinary people are
'terribly at ease in Zion.'  They propose to walk arm in arm with
the poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, 'Why should we
read what is written about Shakespeare and Milton?  We can read the
plays and the poems.  That is enough.'  But an appreciation of
Milton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward
of consummate scholarship.  And he who desires to understand
Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which
Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the
age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he must be familiar with the
history of the struggle for supremacy between the old classical
forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school of Sidney,
and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and Marlowe's
greater son; he must know the materials that were at Shakespeare's
disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the conditions
of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century,
their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the
literary criticism of Shakespeare's day, its aims and modes and
canons; he must study the English language in its progress, and
blank or rhymed verse in its various developments; he must study
the Greek drama, and the connection between the art of the creator
of the Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word,
he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of
Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare's true position in the history
of European drama and the drama of the world.  The critic will
certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a
riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed
by one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name.  Rather,
he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province
to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more
marvellous in the eyes of men.

And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens.  The critic will
indeed be an interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter in the
sense of one who simply repeats in another form a message that has
been put into his lips to say.  For,  just as it is only by contact
with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains
that individual and separate life that we call nationality, so, by
curious inversion, it is only by intensifying his own personality
that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others,
and the more strongly this personality enters into the
interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes, the more
satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.

ERNEST.  I would have said that personality would have been a
disturbing element.

GILBERT.  No; it is an element of revelation.  If you wish to
understand others you must intensify your own individualism.....


The entire dialogue, and much else in a similar vein, is available at 
the Project Gutenberg site - the above dialogue is bundled into a 
collection titled Intentions

 http://www.gutenberg.net

   - CMC