Was it William Faulkner who said, (loosely
paraphrased), "I never meant half of what those critics said I
did?"
This brings up the tenuous and sometimes
conflicted relationship between authors and critics, both of whom, however,
must have the other to stay in business. Quite obviously the critic needs
the author: without a work to critically interpret, the critic has no
job. Less obviously, the author needs the critic: if a tree falls in
a forest, and no one hears or sees it, did it really fall?
OK, OK, there is the reading public of
course so perhaps the critic is superfluous after all...but I want to argue for
the necessity of the critic, at least for the very important and biased reason
that as a literary scholar and professor, I engage in criticism of literature,
however amateur or expert it may actually be, and so I put myself out of a job
unless I believe critics and their criticism/interpretations are useful and
serve some purpose in our existence!
Here is my argument: (and some of you may be
able to tell me into which school(s) of criticism these thoughts may fall...New
Criticism? Myth Criticism? I'd pull out my old Contemporary Literary
Theory class notes but they're in the basement at the moment....) ... that the
work transcends the author's intention. If indeed it is a "great work" of
art (whatever the medium) and finely done, intricately and beautifully woven
together, that speaks to diverse peoples across time and space and culture, then
it could not be pulled off merely be the author's conscious intentions.
Whether it is his personal unconscious, the collective unconscious, or the
Spirit of God Him (Her) self that the author is tapping into usually unaware
(call it what you will), the artist in the act of creation quite often enters a
sense of "flow" and then has a sense of the "rightness" or "wrongness" of a
passage/work by "feeling" or "intuition" quite often, that goes beyond the
logical and mental realm/intent, and so taps into something more, and so
the artist's creation works on many different levels for many different
people. (not too different from the idea of the sacrament, which
transcends the physical/logical realm as well and becomes a
"miracle".)
This is why the world's great religious
leaders spoke in parables (story) because the parable, imitating
life/experience, the only thing from which we truly learn (cf.
Coleridge), because it transcends mental precepts, speaks to each listener
wherever he/she is at any moment. (The power of "the story.") Five
years later, the same parable can have a different meaning to exactly the same
person because that person is at a different place and can "hear" a new message
(cf. Christ: "He who has ears, let him hear"). The story contains hundreds
of meanings at once, surely not possible for an author to accomplish through
conscious intent; the author tells a story that resonates for him as truth, but
it is in more ways than he knows.
The critic makes conscious what is already
speaking to the reader's unconscious; the story accomplishes its job whether the
reader has the critic; the critic can merely let him know consciously what is
going on.
To relate to Percy: while consciously
Percy wrote as a creative artist, a writer, and a philosopher and while
Percy did not intent to be a "spokesperson" for Catholicism or Southernness or
to proselytize to any cause, because he and his context is Catholic and
Southern, his writing informs us of this anyway and it permeates his
perspective. John Updike's messages are not too different from
Percy: in "Rabbit, Run," the Reverend Eccles' (a
social-club-Norman-Vincent-Peale-positive-thinking minister) encounter with the
chastising minister Kruppenbach is Percyesque in its message, yet is from
Updike's particularity, his Protestant/northern/middle class context; so
Updike's other messages are different.
While some writers such as Alice Walker (who
coined the term "womanist" for black feminism) may have had a greater
conscious intent to be spokeswomen for their causes and so inform us of their
socio-economic-cultural context and concerns, and while Percy's conscious
concerns were more universal, he still writes from a position of particularity
and so informs us of that experience as well as his more overarching
messages. Thus, the critics who find such (particular) messages do not
necessarily err because Percy didn't mean to convey them.
That being said, following is a
whimsical collection of authors' feelings about critics: We don't fare
very well, do we? Well, to quote Kurt Russell's words to Goldie Hawn in
the popular movie "Overboard" after she asserts he and his children have made
her life miserable: "But honey, WE like YOU!"
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- Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you've got a
pretty neck.
- Eli Wallach
- Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how its done, they've seen
it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.
- Brendan Behan (1923 - 1964)
- Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a
lamp-post how it feels about dogs.
- Christopher Hampton
- Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
- John Updike
Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a
statue in honor of a critic.
Jean Sibelius (1865 - 1957)
No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of
critics to find it fascinating.
Harold Rosenberg
PUBLISH, n. In literary affairs, to become the fundamental element in a cone
of critics.
Ambrose
Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's
Dictionary