authors and critics

From: Karey Perkins (karey@CHARTER.NET)
Date: Thu Aug 23 2001 - 16:22:30 EDT


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



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