"EB - Edward L. Ferman - The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction 23rd EditionUC - SS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)
"Why didn't you go to a hospital or something?" I asked, feeling enormous pity for the wretched boy.
He smiled faintly. "I didn't know much about anything then. Too many people were already dead. If I'd gone to a hospital, they'd have wanted to know how I'd stayed alive so far. Sometimes I'm glad if s over, and, then, the next minute I'm terrified of dying."
"How long?"
Tin not sure. I've never been more than three days. I can't stand it any longer than that. He knew. He always knew when I had to have it And he got it for me. I never helped him."
"Can you stay alive if you get regular transfusions?"
He looked at me sharply, fear creeping back. "Please. No!"
"But you'll stay alive."
"In a cage! Like a freak! I don't want to be a freak anymore. It's over. I want it to be over. Please."
"What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. I don't want you to get in trouble."
I looked at him, at his face, at his eyes, at his soul. "There's a gun in the glove compartment," I said.
He sat for a moment then solemnly held out his hand. I took it He shook my hand, then opened the glove compartment He removed the gun and slipped out of the car. He went down the hill into the brush.
I waited and waited and never did hear a shot
Novelist and critic Joanna Russ teaches English at the University of Washington. When our starting book reviewer, Algis Budrys, tires, our favorite relief reviewer is Ms. Russ. Here she offers a fascinating article (in response to some critical letters) which tells why critics are such snobs and are so vitriolic, among many other things.
Books: In Defense of Criticism
by JOANNA RUSS
Critics seem to find it necessary, at least once in a career, to write a statement defending criticism per se. Shaw, Pauline Kael, Eric Bent-ley, and James Blish have all done it. That I'm doing it too, doesn't prove I'm in the same league, but it does indicate the persistence of the issues involved and that they occur outside, as well as inside, science fiction.
I have tried to speak to general issues rather than "defend" my own criticism. Issues are, in any case, more important than personalities, although there is a (small) section of fandom which sees in aesthetic or political disagreement nothing but personal squabbling motivated by envy. It's not for me to judge how good my criticism is; if enough readers think it's bad, and the editor thinks so too, presumably hell stop printing it although writing book reviews (except for places like the New York Times) is underpaid, overworked, and a labor of love. The problem is usually to recruit reviewers, not discourage them.
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Here are some of the complaints that keep coming up.
1. Don't shove your politics into your reviews. Just review the books.
I willЧwhen the authors keep politics out of their stories. But they never do; in fact, it seems absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of assumptions about what human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on. Once fiction gets beyond the level of minimal technical competence, a reviewer must address these judgments of value. Generally, readers don't notice the presence of familiar value judgments in stories, but do notice (and object to) unfamiliar ones as "political." Hence arises the insistence (in itself a very vehement, political judgment) that art and politics have nothing to do with one another, that artists ought to be "above" politics, and that a critic making political comments about fiction is importing something foreign into an essentially neutral area. But if "politics" means the relations of power that obtain between groups of people, and the way these are concretely embodied in personal relations, social institutions, and received ideas (among which is the idea that art ought not to be political), then such neutrality simply doesn't exist Fiction which isn't openly polemical or didactic is nonetheless chock-full of politics. If beauty in fiction bears any relation to truth (as Matthew Arnold thought), then the human (including social and political) truth of a piece of fiction matters, for aesthetic reasons. To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards to fiction is bad because the standards are rigid, stupid, and narrow, not because they are political. For an example of (to my mind) profound, searching, brilliant, political criticism, see Jean-Paul Sartre's Saint Genet.
2. You don't prove what you say; you just assert it.
In Defense of Criticism
53
3. Then your opinion is purely subjective.
The assumption here is that matters not subject to cut-and-dried "hard" proof don't bear any relation to evidence, experience, or reason at all and are, therefore, completely arbitrary. There is considerable indirect evidence one can bring against this view. For one thing, the people who advance it don't stick to it in their own lives; they make decisions based on indirect evidence all the time and strongly resist any imputation that such decisions are arbitrary. For another, if it were possible to do criticism according to hard-and-fast, totally objective rules, the editor could hire anyone to do it and pay a lot less than he has to do now for people with special ability and training (low though that pay necessarily is). It's true that the apparatus by which critics judge books is subjective in the sense of being inside the critic and not outside, unique, and based on the intangibles of training, talent, and experience. But that doesn't per se make it arbitrary. What can make it seem arbitrary is that the whole preliminary process of judgment, if you trace it through all its stages, is coextensive with the critic's entire education. So critics tend to suppress it in reviews (with time and training most of it becomes automatic, anyway). Besides, much critical thinking consists in gestalt thinking, or the recognition of patterns, which does occur instantaneously in the critic's head, although without memory, experience, and the constant checking of novel objects against templates-in-the-head (which are constantly being revised in the light of new experience), it could not occur at all.* Hence angry readers can make the objection above, or add:
4. Everyone's entitled to his own opinion.
Have you noticed how often people say "I feel" instead of "I think" or (God forbid) "I know"? Kids who discover "It's a free country!" at seven graduate to "Everyone's entitled to his own opinion" by fourteen. The process of intimidation by which young people are made to feel humanly worthless if they don't appreciate "great literature" (literature the teacher often doesn't understand or can't
* I used to inform people of the endings of television playi (before the endings happened) until my acquaintances gently but firmly informed me they would rather the endings came as a surprise. When asked bow I knew what was coming, by friends who enjoyed such an odd talent (and some do), I could explain only pan of the time. The cues people respond to hi fiction or drama are complex and people are not always fully conscious of them.
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explain)! is one of the ghastly facts of American education. Some defenses against this experience take the form of asserting there's no such thing as great art; some, that whatever moves one intensely is great art. Both are ways of asserting the primacy and authenticity of one's own experience, and that's fine. But whatever you (or I) like intensely isn't, just because of that, great anything, and the literary canon, although incomplete and biased, is not merely an insider's snobbish conspiracy to make outsiders feel rotten. (Although it is certainly used that way far too often.)
The problem with literature and literary criticism is that there is no obvious craft involvedЧso people who wouldn't dream of challenging a dance critic's comments on an assoluta's line or a prima donna's musicianship are conscious of no reason not to dismiss mine on J. R. R. Tolkien. We're all dealing with language, after all, aren't we? But there is a very substantial craft involved here, although its material isn't toes or larynxes. And some opinions are worth a good deal more than others.
5. / knew it, You're a snob.
Science fiction is a small country which for years has maintained a protective standards-tariff to encourage native manufactures. Many readers are, in fact, unacquainted with the general canon of English literature or the standards of criticism outside our own small field. Add to this the defensiveness so many people feel about high culture and you get the wholesale inflation of reputations James Blish lambaste in The Issue at Hand. Like him, I believe that somebody has to stop handing out stars and kisses: If "great writer" means Charles Dickens or Virginia Woolf (not to mention William Shakespeare), then it does not mean C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien, about whom the most generous consensus of mainstream critical opinion is that they are good, interesting, minor authors. And so on.
6. You're vitriolic, too.
It's true. Critics tend to be an irritable lot Here are some examples:
"That light-hearted body, the Bach Choir, has had what I may befittingly call another shy at the Mass in B minor." (George Ber-
t Or oddities that entered the curriculum decades before and refuse to be dislodged, like 'To a Waterfowl." For some reason students often end up with the most sophisticated, flawed, or least-accessible works of great writers: twelve-year-olds reading Romeo and Juliet, toe example, or Silas Marntr.
In Defense of Criticism
55
nard Shaw, Music in London, v. ii, Constable & Co., Ltd.. London, 1956, p. 55.)
" This eloquent novel,* says the jacket of Taylor CaldwelTs The DeviTs Advocate, making two errors in three words. . . ." (Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder, Advent, Chicago, 1967, p. 29.)
". . . Mr. Zirul has committed so many other failures of technique that a whole course in fiction writing could be erected above his hapless corpse." (William Atheling, Jr. [James Blish], The Issue at Hand, Advent, Chicago, 1964, p. 83.)
Why do we do it?
First, there is the reactive pain. Only those who have reviewed, year in and year out, know how truly abominable most fiction Is. And we can't remove ourselves from the pain. Ordinary readers can skip, or read every third word, or quit in the middle. We can't We must read carefully, with our sensitivities at full operation and our critical-historical apparatus always in high gearЧor we may miss that subtle satire which disguises itself as clichг, that first novel whose beginning, alas, was never revised, that gem of a quiet story obscured in a loud, flashy collection, that experiment in form which could be mistaken for sloppiness, that appealing tale partly marred by (but also made possible by) naivete1, that complicated situation that only pays off near the end of the book. Such works exist but in order not to miss them, one must continually extend one's sensitivity, knowledge, and critical care to works that only abuse such faculties. The mental sensation is that of eating garbage, I assure you, and if critics* accumulated suffering did not find an outlet in the vigor of our language, I don't know what we would do. And it's the critics who care the most who suffer the most; irritation is a sign of betrayed love. As Shaw puts it:
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