I once interviewed a self-described “humor educator.” He arrived at my newspaper wearing a suit, tie and red clown nose. Throughout our hour-long talk in a conference room, the nose remained in place. “Laughter is therapeutic,” he reminded me several times. He was earnest and never funny, except inadvertently, and laughed very loudly.
I thought of this fellow the other night as I was reading a novel I’m reviewing. The novelist makes no attempt to be intentionally funny. In fact, humor of the basest sort – fart jokes, that sort of thing – might redeem the dreary proceedings. His story has an italicized, literal-minded quality borrowed, I think, from Hollywood, where several of his earlier books have been turned into films. I thought of my “humor educator” because he, like every character in the novel (including the narrator), showed signs of what the American Psychological Association calls histrionic personality disorder. That my clown-nosed interviewee was a psychologist, I suppose, proves something.
How are we to respond, as critics and readers, to so misguided a book? Not an evil, stupid or even inept book, just blindly, humorlessly wrong-headed. The novelist in question is known for his devotion to “progressive” causes but, for once, it’s not preachy politics that make the book so dull. Rather, it reminds me of The Best Years of Our Lives, the William Wyler film that won eight Oscars in 1947. Who would bad-mouth a movie in which a real-life disabled Army vet, Harold Russell, plays a Navy vet who lost both hands during World War II? When Russell’s character, Homer Parrish, smashes a window with his prosthetic hooks, I cringed and giggled, and still cringe and giggle remembering it. Manny Farber called it “a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz.”
I resent Wyler heavy-handedly, so to speak, manipulating my emotional responses, and feel the same way about the novelist in question. Merely to criticize well-intentioned sincerity, however, seems a little too easy, especially when one has done it so often before. It can’t be good for us as critics or people to repeatedly feel superior to such stuff, pitying the slobs who enjoy reading it while congratulating our own enlightened tastes.
In his Paris Review interview, Geoffrey Hill said, “The first obligation for any real critic is to be self-critical rather than self-satisfied.” Actually, I think that’s the first obligation for any human being, but I’m uncertain what this means in practice for a critic.
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2 comments:
I am. It means, in critical practice, to maintain humility.
Terry Teachout, a very good critic, occasionally teaches criticism. He tells his students three things:
Always treat artists with respect. Most of them know how to do something you can't do.
Don't be afraid to be wrong.
Don't be afraid to be enthusiastic!
What I get from that, which is something greatly lacking in most criticism, is that the critic needs three things in order to be good at it: respect; humility; enthusiasm.
I dislike emotional manipulation as much as the next person—and when I am wearing my artist's hat, I much prefer to understate things rather than histrionically overstate them. At the same time, one thing one can say for Wyler is that he knew what he believed, and he wasn't afraid to say it at full volume. One sometimes thinks that the reason that's become so unfashionable is that we're supposed to treat everything with ironic detachment nowadays—a curse of the post-modern discourse, historically. One wishes at times for a good solid opinion in which someone DID lose their ironic detachment, and take a stand.
It's easy to feel superior to histrionics, but is it wise to feel superior, as a critic, to any work of art? I doubt it. Feeling smugly superior is one arena in which Dr. Johnson or Mencken can lead one astray. Wit is occasionally confused, even by the best of us, as fact.
I'm so glad Art mentions emotional manipulation, because it's something I wrestle with again and again, far too aware of my own tendency towards histrionics. What is genuine, what sentimental? Mostly I prefer an author like Aaron Appelfeld, who in his The Story of a Life only refers to the most traumatic events - his mother's death, for example - in what is almost an aside. The weight of what is not said is more potent than what is.
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