Nick
Catalano is a TV writer/producer and Professor of Literature
and Music at Pace University. He reviews books and music for
several journals and is the author of Clifford
Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter,
New York
Nights: Performing, Producing and Writing in Gotham
and A
New Yorker at Sea. His latest book, Tales
of a Hamptons Sailor, is now available. For Nick's
reviews, visit his website: www.nickcatalano.net
Critical
reviewing began with the ancient Greeks and soon became one
of the most controversial of all voluble writings. Most of their
ancient pronouncements were intended to instruct and not to
sermonize; they have remained pivotal in helping people to understand
and enjoy the creative process. Aristotle’s Poetics
and Polyclitus’s Canon brilliantly succeeded
in helping learners to absorb the genius of drama and sculpture
respectively. Their work still towers over other early efforts.
Incisive Roman critics followed – Longinus, Horace, Seneca,
Ovid, Virgil, and others – continuing the idealism of
instructive, educative reviewing.
Reviewing
and much art for that matter went into hiding during the Dark
Ages. As the Renaissance came into being, helpful reviewing
arrived on the scene mostly in England and France. Montaigne’s
essays led a host of English critics -- Philip Sydney, Thomas
Rhymer, Ben Jonson and others -- whose writing came about because
of the cascade of drama and poetry during Shakespeare’s
time.
Regrettably,
this is the time that hubris and pedantry creep into reviewing.
In English circles, erosion of divine right monarchy and the
advent of parliamentary republicanism at the end of the seventeenth
century encouraged freer opinionated writing. Magazines came
into being (Blackwood’s, The Critical Review, The
Spectator) and with them new aesthetic power in the hands
of reviewers. Predictably, newly hatched critical egos ruled
over much commentary and objective analysis suffered.It can
actually be amusing to see how reviewers (some very distinguished
names) could be snobby and ridiculously shortsighted. Here are
some classics:
Many
reviews did real damage. With cruel hubris, the Edinburgh
Review condemned Lord Byron’s brilliant satire, and
the Quarterly Review destroyed John Keats’s revolutionary
poems. The Odessa Courier greeted Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina as “sentimental rubbish . . . show me one
page that contains an idea,” and the San Francisco
Chronicle observed that Rudyard Kipling “just doesn’t
know how to use the English language.”
After
decades of sophistic critics whose considerable magazine readership
gave them a sense of importance that evaporated their objectivity,
the Age of Romanticism gave new impetus to the craft of reviewing.
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge led the way elevating Shakespeare’s plays
to a new level of greatness. Earlier neo- classicists insisted
that the Bard could never attain the heights of Ben Jonson and
other Elizabethans because he violated the classical rules of
unity (time/place/setting). Coleridge showed how Shakespeare’s
expansion of theme gave his plays a universality far beyond
the narrow rules his peers followed. Thomas De Quincey, in his
pivotal essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,”
punctuated Coleridge’s insight showing how a drunken comedy
scene after a bloody murder illustrated how diverse and mysterious
reality could be. Indeed, violence does occur in one place where
people are partying next door.
The
romantic reviewers (Hazlitt and Lamb stand along Coleridge and
De Quincey) insisted on three simple questions to be asked of
an artist and to educate lay observers: What is the artist trying
to do? How well does he do it? What is the significance of his
creation? With this approach art criticism returned to focus
on the artist and away from wanna-be critics. (“Those
who cannot do, teach.”). After the giant leap of the Romantic
critics, the craft assumed a predictable human evolution: great
reviewing continued but alongside the truly gifted critical
writers stood the pedants who much preferred insisting that
their critical reactions were far more important than the work
they were writing about.
Given
the maze of reviewing that abounds in our present-day media
blitzes, how is the modern audience supposed to know who the
best reviewers are? That is a tough question never easily answerable.
An
example of the difficulty is discoverable in The New
York Times Book Review – very important because of
its long-standing reputation of uncovering talent, indicating
creative shortcomings, and doing an excellent job of educating
readers. Yet even here there are no guarantees.
Recently
Geraldine Brooks wrote negatively about Pat Barker’s novel
The Silence of the Girls which explores the subject matter
of Homer’s Iliad and uses the voice of Achilles’
famous female captive Briseis to show the myriad horrors undergone
by women as the Greeks and Trojans fought their pointless war.
In addition to the raping, total physical and psychological
dominance, and human ignominy the women undergo, Barker realistically
describes the foul-smelling, disease-ridden, garbage that was
strewn daily on the plains of Troy. The author’s painstaking
description of all of this in addition to the sculpting of female
characters whose lives are inarguably horrific in any war is
provocative. And, as you read Barker’s prose a huge irony
looms; despite his unchallengeable greatness, Homer never attempted
to focus on the sordidness of war: his theme is the epic panorama
of war, the achievement of larger-than-life warriors, and the
omniscience of the Olympian Gods. His epic is titanic but he
doesn’t tell the whole story. It is left to a contemporary
novelist to fill in gaps that aren’t always fun but certainly
part of the cosmos of war.
Brooks’s
review ignores the irony, and disavows the characterizations.
The voices employed by Barker in a useful point of view shift
are “flat” and “banal.” Breiseis’
description of her ambling on her home streets of Lyrnessus
contains “jarring inauthenticity . . . characteristic
of the novel as a whole.” This is pedantic language. Barker’s
description of Achilles’ revenge is labeled “blokey.”
The cries of the epically violated women are “dissonant
and unpersuasive.”
Barker
won the 1995 Booker prize for her mastery in describing World
War I. If you read The Silence of the Girls you’ll
understand why she won. In a later issue of The New York
Times Book Review comes a truly brilliant review, written
in the old tradition of educating the audience. John Adams,
a noted composer whose Pulitzer prize-winning career includes
the critically acclaimed operas, Nixon in China and
The Death of Klinghoffer has turned reviewer himself
and, not surprisingly, contributed adeptly to our appreciation
of Claude Debussy. Although long admired as the master of Impressionism,
the mystical Frenchman’s revolutionary musical transformations
have never been properly explained. Adams’ review of Stephen
Walsh’s new bio Debussy: A Painter in Sound astounds
because it manages to illuminate the specifics of Debussy’s
genius without using prolix musical terms that would go over
the heads of even ardent music lovers. His review hearkens back
to the days when reviewers were teachers and not pedants.
It
becomes clear in the reviewing world of subjective opinionating
that there is no template readers can utilize. Because art transcends
factuality and relies on imaginative and emotional instrumentation
to convey meanings and themes, scientific evaluation is not
achievable. But, of course, that conundrum is welcome because,
as the great reviewers of yore have taught us, art is the greatest
expression of the human spirit. And, in the context of spirit,
readers must always be wary of pedantry, snobbishness and hubris
in a reviewer. Educational aim and empathy are primary qualifications
for any reviewer worth reading.
