What We Lose When Literary Criticism Ends

What We Lose When Literary Criticism Ends

 

With mainstream media uninterested in books coverage that doesn’t get clicks, writers and readers are being left out in the cold

 

Steven BeattieSteven Beattie

The Warlrus 

May 21, 2021

 

The Walrus/iStock/Wikimedia Commons

 

In his 1998 prose collection, Ripostes, Philip Marchand lays out the operative conditions for a working critic: “You have to know your mind, you have to have read widely, you have to have discarded or modified early enthusiasms for certain writers or modes of writing—it takes decades.” Elsewhere in the book, reviewing a poetry anthology called The Last Word, Marchand puts these principles into practice. “Much of the work in The Last Word,” he writes, “is ‘language poetry,’ a highly intellectualized form. Language poets attack the assumption that words point to external realities—the way, for example, the words ‘dairy queen’ in the line, ‘at the ladysmith dairy queen i want to get out,’ refer to a place where you buy soft ice cream. In these poets’ view, language refers only to itself, and their poetry tends to consist of phrases that have no semantic meaning.”

 

Whether or not one agrees with Marchand, it is clear that the analysis comes from a knowledgeable and considered place. Marchand was arguably the last person in Canada who made a living as a literary critic for mainstream newspapers—his work in the Toronto Star and, later, the National Post found its apogee in the 1990s and early 2000s. Marchand also espoused an increasingly rare approach: elevating rigorous close readings over affective or emotional responses. These days, the status of the professional critic—that is, someone who can earn a living writing criticism for the general public—has largely been subordinated to enthusiastic amateurs giving thumbnail reactions on Amazon and Goodreads. Compare Marchand’s sentences above to Goodreads “reviews” of Sharon Olds’s 2019 collection, Arias: “There are a lot of poems in this collection and some of them are quite weak,” or “I could use, like, a 50% reduction in poems involving body fluids [sic].”

 

Complaining about the state of literary criticism in 2021 seems somewhat futile. First because literary critics have always been viewed as parasitic or, more damningly, irrelevant. Ever since there has been literature, there have been critics. And, ever since there have been critics, there have been writers, readers, and others accusing them of all manner of sins: jealousy, pettiness, poor reading, ad hominem attacks. In an epigraph to her 2016 book, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, American novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick cites eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope, who referred to “those monsters, Criticks!” But the bellyaching is also futile because, after years of being seen, in contemporary discourse, as highbrow irritants, professional critics are well on their way to becoming extinct. As Mark Davis puts it in a 2018 article in the Sydney Review of Books, “Traditional literary gatekeepers now live a kind of half-life; representatives of a zombie culture: the walking dead.”

 

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Just look at mainstream review coverage in Canada. Or, rather, you can’t—there’s hardly any left. Those of a certain age will remember when our national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, had a pull-out weekend book section like that of the New York Times; currently, book coverage is limited to a handful of pages folded into the Saturday arts section (admittedly an improvement from the dark days of a few years ago, when the book reviews were consigned to “Pursuits,” so they appeared alongside the crossword and Sudoku puzzles). The books coverage at the Toronto Star, a newspaper with one of the largest circulations in Canada (and for which I occasionally write), has been similarly curtailed. The National Post, which, under former books editor Mark Medley, had one of the most robust and interesting book sections around (full disclosure: I wrote a column about short fiction for it), is now a virtual wasteland. The consensus appears to be that readers are uninterested in deeper coverage of books and literary culture, and newspapers are themselves uninterested in any coverage that doesn’t get clicks or otherwise drive online engagement.

 

True, there are small magazines, like Quill & Quire (where I spent more than a dozen years as review editor), the Literary Review of Canada, and Canadian Notes and Queries, that continue to produce book reviews on a regular basis, but these publications, alongside literary quarterlies usually tied to a university, are more specialized and reach much smaller audiences than the national newspapers or large-circulation periodicals. It’s also harder to make a proper living from these gigs. In 2018, The Writers’ Union of Canada found that, after factoring in inflation, Canadian writers are making 78 percent less than they were in 1998, a decade into Marchand’s career. It’s no surprise, then, that lack of outlets for literary critics to ply their trade, combined with Dickensian remuneration, renders popular book criticism unattractive to any but the most obsessive—or independently wealthy—practitioners.

 

All of this is occurring, paradoxically, at a time when more books are being produced than ever before. According to the Association of Canadian Publishers, over 10,000 books are published annually in this country (to say nothing of the scores of books self-published each year via platforms such as Amazon, iUniverse, or Wattpad). Even COVID-19 did not make a dent in the global scene: an August 2020 article in the Guardian indicated that more than 600 titles were scheduled for release in the UK on a single day that September.

 

In such an environment, with a glut of new releases vying for decreasing review space, the fate of most books is to be completely ignored. In an article for The American Scholar, Phillipa K. Chong, author of Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times, suggests that fewer than 5 percent of new books get any kind of coverage in larger media outlets. That’s obviously a tiny fraction of what gets released in a given year; in many cases, those books that do luck out and land a coveted review in a mainstream newspaper or magazine often fall victim to lazy or hurried readings that more closely resemble book reports or plot summaries and usually come chock full of reviewers’ clichés: the number