"Edward L. Ferman - Best From F&SF, 23rd Edition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ferman Edward L)

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. [ Or oddities that entered the
curriculum decades before and refuse to be dislodged, like тАЬTo 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 Marner.]
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 Bernard Shaw, Music in London, v. ii, Constable & Co., Ltd.. London, 1956, p.
55.)
" This eloquent novel,* says the jacket of Taylor Caldwell's The Devil's 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 gearтАФor we may miss that subtle satire
which disguises itself as cliche, 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) naivete, 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 criticsтАЩ 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:
". . . criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good
or bad art a personal matter that makes a man [sic] a critic. . . . when people do less than their best, and
do that less at once badly and self-complacently, I hate them, loathe them, detest them, long to tear them
limb from limb and strew them in gobbets about the stage or platform. ... In the same way really fine
artists inspire me with the warmest possible regard. . . . When my critical mood is at its height personal
feeling is not the word; it is passion. . . ." (Music in London, v. i, Constable ft Co., London, 1956, pp.
51-52)
But there are other reasons. Critical judgments are so complex (and take place in such a complicated
context), the vocabulary of praise and blame available in English is so vague, so fluid, and so constantly
shifting, and the physical space allowed is so small that critics welcome any way of expressing judgments
that will be both precise and compact. If vivid be added thereunto, fineтАФwhat else is good style? Hence
critics, whenever possible, express their judgments in figurative language. Wit is a form of condensation
(see Freud if you think this is my arbitrary fiat) just as parody is a form of criticism (see Dwight
McDonald's Modern Library collection thereof).
Dramatization is another. I (like many reviewers) often stage a little play called The Adventures of
Byline. Byline (or "I") is the same species of creature as the Kindly Editor or the Good Doctor, who
appear from time to time in these pages. That is, she is a form of shorthand. When Byline rewrites story
X, that doesn't mean that IтАФthe real, historical personageтАФactually did or will or wish to rewrite story