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What role for the academic literary critic?

You could see it coming. Mark Wallinger wins this year’s Turner prize for his recreation of peace campaigner Brian Haw’s protest opposite Westminster Palace and all the newspapers lead with a picture of him dressed up in a bearsuit. The message is clear: Mr. Wallinger is a joke, the judges are pretentious people, and Britart is rubbish.

Now, Mr. Wallinger may be a joke, the judges might have spent too long in trendy London hotspots, and most of Britart might be rubbish — but very few of us are qualified to make an informed judgment one way or the other.

It is tough being a serious critic in these relativist times and many thought John Carey, emeritus Merton professor of English literature at Oxford University and distinguished literary critic, who has twice chaired the Booker prize judging committee, had done for the profession completely with his 2005 book What Good Are the Arts? in which he argued that there are no objective aesthetic standards.

Two years on, Professor Carey stands by what he wrote. “There are only opinions,” he says, “albeit some more informed than others. The idea of evaluation — what I like is better than what you like and my feelings are more important than yours — is just illogical. You cannot know the state of another person’s consciousness, so you can’t make those judgments. I also got taken to task for apparently suggesting that literature was different — that it responded to the rationality of criticism in a way that no other art form did. But I never said any such thing. I made it clear that my ideas on literature were mine alone, and that I was writing from a personal perspective.”

The latest person to defend the critic is Ronan McDonald, lecturer in the school of English and American studies at Reading University and director of the Beckett International Foundation, in his new book, The Death of the Critic. “The days when people venerated critics, such as Leavis, as arbiters of taste are long over,” he says. “I don’t want to get too golden ageist about this, because Leavis could be rebarbative and prescriptive, but he did strive to take criticism beyond the ivory towers and we have lost something. Scientists, philosophers and historians all seek to reach a wider market and we should do the same.”

Mr. McDonald goes on to argue there is no one root cause of the critic’s decline. It is partly a result of the egocentrism of the 1980s where everyone’s voice is equally important, partly a reaction to the evidently self-serving practice of friends reviewing each other’s books in the media, and partly the legacy of the Oedipal desire of the generation of critical theorists who learned at the feet of men like Leavis to kick aside the old values of their teachers. But the effect has been to make criticism an outpost of the social sciences; art now exists only to be understood within a political, social and cultural context — with all considerations of creativity and aesthetics marginalised into non-existence.

“In a world of celebrity critics and blogs, there has to be place for a more evaluative response of the academic,” he continues. “The relativists are making judgments, even if they insist they are not, and if every artistic activity is merely subject to the less challenging consensus view, it’s a recipe for dull uniformity. We all want to avoid elitism, but without a critical hierarchy, all we achieve is conservatism. I would like to see more of an overlap between critical and creative writing, and so avoid the worst attributes of both — deliberate mystification or wishy-washy impressionism.”

Colin MacCabe, distinguished professor of English and film at the University of Pittsburgh and professor of English and humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, takes issue with parts of Mr. McDonald’s argument. “I’m not sure there was ever a time when people hung on a critic’s every word in the way he suggests they did with Leavis.”

But he agrees that the role of the critic has become marginalised. “I can date it precisely in film,” he says. “It was when Jaws came out. For the first time a film had a simultaneous rather than a staggered nationwide release; it was done to maximise studio revenues, but a knock-on effect was to negate what little influence the critic held.”

Many, though, would argue that the overall effect of relativism has been detrimental to criticism, both in the wider and academic worlds. “People now just talk of critical thinking as something formulaic, a transferable skill that will help you get a job,” says Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent. “So we have ended up turning it into an unthinking mechanical response rather than an intellectual and emotional engagement. The promiscuous notion that everyone’s view is equally important also makes us dishonest. For instance, the Golden Compass is primarily a children’s film, yet we have heard very few children expressing their thoughts about it in the media.”

The knock-on effect of all this is that criticism is often seen at best as a trivial activity and at worst as a parasitical one. No one dares call himself a critic pure and simple any more; it has to be writer and critic or artist and critic or nothing.

Curiously, it is Mr. Carey, the man who has been vilified by critics for his relativism, who remains the most optimistic about the discipline’s future. “If we can get away from the wilful obscurantism of a few academics talking to each other in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement it can only be a good thing,” he laughs. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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