| Critical Highs and Lows |
Critical Christmas Cracker |
| Critical Life in 2021 , Wales & United Kingdom , December 23, 2021 |
This sequence collates things that came my way over the year. Their only connection is that they stood out, whether for their insight, their expressiveness or their plain capacity to amuse. More came my way in 2021 for a simple reason; more time was spent constrained within the home. These were twelve that caught my attention. * * * * A new website popped up http://welshwriters.co.uk with an unusual tone it. "It is also worth pointing out to readers from outside the Principality that Wales is a funny old place, especially when we think of the current literature scene here. "Some Welsh writers have sold millions of copies of their books worldwide without having taking a single penny from the arts establishment here in Wales. Others, have been given tens of thousands of pounds (on several occasions) for books (if they get published at all) that fail to sell even a handful of copies. "And here’s the really crazy thing, these same ‘unsuccessful writers’ not only continue to get published by the same publicly funded, Welsh publishers but they win prizes of several thousands of pounds (that are awarded by the same publicly funded organisations)." No names are given. * * * * The critical assaults on fiction continued. One strand of thinking mingles public art-making with private virtue. Judgements on morality are antecedent to aesthetics. It has no historical grounding since some artists, if not many, were not good people at all. Most artists are like the rest of us, lives necessarily containing discreditable episodes and acts. The new critique even looks sourly on acts of infidelity. WALDEMAR JANUSCZCZAK tackled the issue: “To put it crudely: can bad people make good art? Intellectually, it’s not much of a conundrum. Art is one thing. Bad people are another thing. The two should not be yoked together in a false equation. But art has never been an arena in which intellectual positions must be supported. It’s an arena that privileges the senses and the emotions. And in that foggy stadium, the question of good and bad humanity receives conflicting answers.” * * * * Its roots are in the commingling of persona with artwork. It goes back some decades, ALAN BENNETT tackling it in his 1980's play "Kafka's Dick." Established writers are shaken at the restrictiveness and prescription. ROSE TREMAIN in interview in the Times 4th December described the solace of fiction in childhood unhappiness. "There is something hideously narcissistic about the present trend." * * * * Fiction as an outpouring of biography has an assumption that it has a virtue to it. There too it has a background. GORE VIDAL was on the case in 1974. In "The Great World and Louis Auchinloss" published in the New York Review of Books 18th July he wrote on what he called the trend towards moralising criticism: "What matters is not if a book is good or bad but whether or not the author is a good person or a bad person. It is an article among us that only a good person can write a good book." And on June 28th 1979 in the New York Review of Books: "I have often thought that one of the reasons why there have been so few good literary critics is that those Americans who do read books tend to be obsessed with the personality of the author under review...the American critic must decide in advance whether or not the writer he is writing about is a Good Person." * * * * Art is always up for reappraisal. That is one reason why future generations should be not bothered with; they are going to make up their own minds. But American novelists who were acclaimed in life found themselves disparaged in death. CLAIRE LOWDEN addressed the issue of the posthumous status of Roth, Updike and Bellow in the Sunday Times of 11th April this year. "The world is messy. Good novelists try to catch that mess on paper. Which is in itself a moral act- to look clearly and unflinchingly at what is. Judge them by what they wrote, not what they did. All three exposed their baser moments in their fiction. All three could write sensitively and intelligently about male and female desire. At the time their frankness was radical. Arguably it paved the way for debates we're having today. Read them, and others too. Your life will be richer for it." * * * * Richness is the word. One of those lost this year was MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, 29th September 1934-October 20th 2021. He was an academic in California who wrote "the Psychology of Happiness", a book of some profundity intended for a general readership. He described what he called the autotelic personality which is dependent on complexity in mental life. FRANCINE PROSE echoed him in her "Reading Like a Writer”: "the wider and deeper your observational range, the better, the more interestingly and truthfully you will write." That fiction-making is an escape from the confines of self also has a heritage. JOHN UPDIKE reviewing FRANCIS STEEGMULLER'S translation of FLAUBERT's letters cited: "I do not want my book to contain a single subjective reaction, nor a single reflection by the author." * * * * CHARMIAN SAVILL was author of the only heavyweight article on theatre in 2021. In Planet 243 she took to task the notion that art and the person are synonymous: "I don't want theatre to act as a therapeutic confessional for the theatre artist. Confessions may be shared with friends and family, counsellors, teachers, doctors and therapists, even strangers on trains. However, theatre is not our friend: it is a cruel vessel, exposing our fault-lines, demanding and anarchic, so very inappropriate for intimate revelations and confessions. Theatre events that ask for love, sympathy or uncritical agreement merely revert to old power structures... "I hope that future theatre-makers avoid both the banality of personal revelation, and the cosmetic use of technology to distract from trite content. The confessional statement (often of the ultimately triumphant self) is a constant motif on social media, resonant with sonic booms of injured narcissism: so let the theatre be different." * * * * NICHOLAS HYTNER spoke up for the necessary contrapuntalism of theatre. In interview Sunday Times 28th November: "Social media is what it is. it encourages instant, ill-informed and absolute responses. Theatre is all about contradiction, ambiguity and nuance. It has, historically, been a stranger to absolutism. You cannot make a scene, let alone a play, out of one point of view only. But drama is the place where you argue your way, not necessarily towards a position, but towards a embracing of some kind of irreconcilable differences. What audiences want is interesting, provocative, challenging, involving, entertaining, funny, wrenching evenings in the theatre and all human life to be represented on the stage." * * * * That sentence of Hytner's has a force and drive to it. The bad critical writing of 2021 has a common factor. Abstract nouns of Latinate origin agglomerate. That too comes with a lineage. GORE VIDAL writing in praise of V S PRITCHETT as a critic used a phrase: "the inability to master the language is a sign of intellectual grace." So an article in the Stage about reviewing: "Ethical accountability must come before performativity." The National was at the Turner Prize with wild punctuation: "It is this love, of justice and ‘of all existences’, that cuts through the cult of the individual artist that has dominated the art world – making it inaccessible to many – and ushered what the collective have called ‘doorstep revolution’, a neighbourliness that is also a slow and deliberate reckoning, a recalibration of societal power dynamics that is indeed gentle, but unquestionably radical." After this it is a surprise to find a big event for 2022 declaring: "As a team we are committed to racial injustice." They mean the opposite of course; only one organisation is capable of publishing this. * * * * MATTHEW ARNOLD in "Culture and Anarchy” wrote: “Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate...the set of ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own profession or party. But culture works differently...it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgements and watchwords. “ Arnold wrote in 1869. In 2021 Dylan Huw wrote for Planet 244 an article that pushed, in the vaguest of phrasing, for just this. Refuting any connection with Hytner above he asserted that public art-making be subordinate to the cause of private opinion. * * * * For sheer weirdness of writing a new book on DAVID GREIG took top prize. It is called "David Greig's Holed Theatre: Globalization, Ethics and the Spectator" and makes of a dramatist a "shamanic semionaut...Greig’s theatre works by undoing, cracking, or breaking apart myriad elements to reveal the holed, porous nature of all things...arguing for holed theatre as a response to globalization, for Greig’s works’ politics of aesthethics [sic], and for the holed spectator as part of an affective ecology of transfers." |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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