Djelloul Marbrook

The daily online Writer’s Almanac of the American Public Media Organization is a national gem. Last Saturday, observing the poet John Ashbery’s birthday, it quoted him saying something that pickets ought to brandish on placards outside every MFA program in the land:

“To create a work of art that the critic cannot even begin to talk about ought to be the artist’s chief concern.”

The dirty little lie of the popular media is that the critical apparatus serves the culture, whereas in fact it serves the marketers and elevates them to the stature of cultural arbiters, a position for which they are eminently unsuited. What sells is not necessarily what is good, witness the vast amounts of crap we buy from China.

Somewhere along the line in the history of literary tastemaking the ideas of egalitarianism, clarity and terseness merged with the marketing imperative. The works of Ernest Hemingway, that great purifier of the language, were seized upon as exemplifying this ideal, while writers like William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust were said to represent a wordy pretentiousness that ill represented the Zeitgeist.

Hemingway was put to the harness of the dumb-down machine. Writers who were said to be difficult, like the underrated futurist poet Hart Crane (inset), were disparaged. Writers who insisted that ambiguity reflects our own lives were sent to the guillotine in favor of writers who tied everything up in bows. Anything that couldn’t be understood at an eleventh grade level was said to be grandiose, overdone.

In poetry, The New York School, and the structuralists, poets who were concerned about how poems looked on a page, how they sounded, how their sounds conveyed experience, were pooh-poohed as precious and elitist.

To become a successful critic one had to learn how to disguise one’s Luddite inclinations in literary smirks. After all, one had to make a living, even if the damn-fool poets were willing to starve for art. None of this has been any good for the culture, because a glory-bound culture will always have an alchemy of popular art and art that demands more of its audience.

To say, for example, that so-called referential literature, writing that asks a certain amount of knowledge in a reader, is for this reason bad is fatheaded.

I, for one, know as much as I do know, which is an iota of what I would like to know, because I accept the challenge of such writers and bother to go to references and to the source literature. How else do we rise to challenges? What else is learning about? Ah, but now we stumble on another silly notion: the idea that literature is entertainment, implying of course that learning is not entertaining. In other words, don’t bother us with having to learn anything. Such a culture is bound to be obese and dull, which of course suits the marketers just fine.

I mentioned Hart Crane because when I was in college in the 1950s there was a notion afoot that he was not merely a difficult poet but in fact an obscurantist, and therefore did not warrant our attention. Gerard Manley Hopkins suffered the same rap for a while, and yet today when we read him he seems not half so difficult or demanding.

There were complaints about Crane’s hopelessly impenetrable lines. The complaints about those lines have now generally given way to admiration, even from those who still can’t decipher him. I used to recite him out loud, much the same way I listen to North African rai. I can’t understand the words, but I appreciate everything else about the music. And that’s just it, a poem is not just its words. What the critical apparatchiks have been telling us in the popular media is that we shouldn’t have to try to understand something, it should offer instant gratification, like a good massage. Fast-food criticism. Buy now, pay later, pay in the usurious terms of having sold our culture for a song.

This may, however, amount to tilting at windmills, because it’s quite possible critics are about to go the way of calligraphers. We used to rely on them to open doors to marvels (they often abused the privilege by indulging their nastiness), but now we have the Internet, and I’m not sure critics will ever establish in cyberspace the footholds they enjoyed in print.

—DM