Eat the dust

Søren Kierkegaard compared reading reviews of his books to « the long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese. » John Steinbeck’s advice, « unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise », was to « ignore the bastard. » The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, when it came to critics, noted that « no statue has ever been erected in honor of any of them. » Noël Coward maintained that critics never bothered him, except when they were right, but that, he said, « does not happen very often. » Such a tradition has created the illusion that between writers and critics a combat is waged. (And not only critics: George Bernard Shaw, for example, called Ulysses « a disgusting record of a disgusting phase of civilization », and Virginia Woolf saw in Joyce’s novel « the effort of a filthy student popping his pimples ») But my project—Flaubertian, I must admit—of accumulating useless and erroneous nuggets was not borne of hostility toward any critic, past or present: it was an effort to reach a certain perspective on the critical landscape, and to see whether another kind of criticism was possible and, if so, which one.