A little grave reflection shows us that our first duty is to establish a new and abusive school of criticism. There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger.
I have no idea when exactly this essay by Rebecca West was written, but it should suffice to say that it was many years before the Snark Wars of '03-04 and before the blogs won over the hearts and mind of the critical establishment.
You can guess what she would say today, but I can only imagine she wouldn't deign to give the matter much thought, brushing off the noise of the internet, thinking that no one was left who cared.
But it brings to mind an important aspect of writing online - that is the fact that nothing that is written is in a vacuum. In Ms. West's day, even if writing in a well known publication, opportunities for discussion and rebuttal were limited.
Now of course the opposite is true and for people who are serious in any way about criticism the people who they write about may very well be their technological next door neighbor, releasing their fury (as we saw with two recent incidents), or rebutting the very next moment after something is published, either in their own space, comments, or some other venue.
It's an interesting dynamic, one that I would hope would make people more thoughtful, but that's still not always the case, particularly with the wild variety of backgrounds, temperaments and time constraints of all of us writing online.
I think as I get older I am more susceptible to being a harsher critic. Partly that's from writing and blogging for a while - I "think" it made me think better - and partly from exposure to more literature, whereas a decade ago my reading was confined to a much more safe class of literature.
I recently read a book by Alejandro Zambra. There was much to recommend about the book (and the fact that this Chilean writer was even published here made him still a relatively safe bet having been through the gauntlet of two markets), but the flaws in the book made me angry when reading it. I haven't written about it yet because the onus of writing critically is much more difficult than cheer-leading. I know the publisher of that book, both online and offline, but even if I didn't, I know that what I write may very well be read by them. Whether or not they care is another matter, but is influenced by not only by the venue it's written in, but how thoughtfully or valid the writing is.
But still, there's the question that should I just not write about something if I don't have the time to be thoughtful? The literary world of Ms. West was much smaller. For whatever its flaws, Zambra's book is likely better than 9/10s of the books being published today. Shouldn't I promote that book, being enthusiastic about literature in translation or good literature in general in a world that always seems to be losing out to the cultural black hole? Well these are the thoughts her article dredged up in my mind.
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