Beginnings of an introduction
19 February 2008 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment
[Delacroix] was showered with insults more offensive and ignominious than would ever have been addressed to a thief or an assassin.” –Théophile Gautier, 1864
Why did Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, and the Impressionists, who also had their defenders, receive such virulent abuse? History shows that invective thrives when uncertainty prevails to such a degree that society’s basic foundations come into question. Consider Paris in 1844, where we begin our study. France had seen five regimes in sixty years. Men asked: what kind of government should we have? what role should religion play? the class structure? do we more highly value reason or emotion? the individual or the collective? Comment vivre? How to live? This no-longer idle question revealed that ground zero that had been reached. “All that is solid melts into air,” to quote a contemporary. At such moments, two things happen: culture seem to matter greatly — society turns to writers and artists to imagine the new future — and the personal can no longer be distinguished from the political. This opens the door to invective.
Because French censors kneecapped explicitly political commentary, cultural criticism mattered more than ever, art criticism especially. Art was dynamic, it embodied the era’s uncertainty; its audience, economic model, power structure, goals, genres, and styles were all changing. The state lavishly funded and carefully regulated art and artists, considered a national treasure, even a cornerstone of French civilization, which made art-world doings de facto referenda on state ideology and policy. Art’s spectacle commanded attention: the Salon drew thousands of men and women of all stations. Every publication from the daily newspaper to the women’s knitting journal to the union newsletter covered art. Intellectuals’ reputations were forged in those columns. Tempers could flare higher there, issues be debated more frankly, given the relative lack of censorship. When, in the early 1880s, censorship withered together with the state’s involvement in the art world, so too did invective art criticism. 1881, the year the École des Beaux-Arts ceded control of the Salon, seems a natural place for us to conclude.
The invective took its flavor from the uncertainty out of which it is born. In France, decades of tumult had ginned anxiety, over the fragility of the body (over violence, disease, and death) and the precariousness of social position (over illegitimacy, humiliation, and threatening marginal groups). These themes emerge time and again in the invective art criticism of this time. Also: apocalypse. Fear either paralyzed men, pitted them against uncertainty as such, or made of them utopians who embraced the chaos as an opportunity to start afresh. The latter two groups shared an apocalyptic fervor, that all might be lost should the wrong course be taken, a passion essential to mobilizing the still-paralyzed. Invective lashes out against uncertainty, drives toward resolution, even as it feeds off chaos. It exhorts action as bold as itself. It is a dramatic personal appeal from the terrified man to his fellow citizen.
Invective was a kind of surrogate violence, one that sought to erase one party to the confusion, to deny its very ability to signify. Between its periods of actual, violent struggle, which were brief, France contested its dilemmas in the periodical press, which had been greatly expanded by new technology. Littré’s 1863 dictionary defined “invective” as “discours injurieux, expression injurieuse contre quelque personne ou contre quelque chose” (1863). It is injurious, it is percussive, it is disjunctive, it is disorienting, it is silencing, it is erasing, it is humiliating. Its very length, its “going on and on,” is a kind of assault. How much misunderstanding of this material has resulted from its inevitable abridgement! The powerful used it as one more arm of power; for the weak, it was often their only arm.
Invective was a personal appeal, where historical uncertainty was obscured by personal certainty, whose authority derived from the gradual Western elevation of the individual that culminated in Romanticism. It told a personal story, if implicitly, drawing the listener into a novelistic narrative in which both are implicated. As one scholar has observed, “Polemic doesn’t unfold between two pure reasons, but between two desiring beings who want both to be right and to be right to … Polemic presupposes a dose of logic and one of ‘pathology,’ without which it dies – it dies if it is identified as insult, because that the zero degree of interlocution, and it dies if it is identified as logos, because it becomes a speech without a speaker.”
We begin in 1844 because that is the year that the French art-critical invective genre, pioneered by Denis Diderot, came of age, when Journal des Artistes editor Andre-Hippolyte Delaunay attacked Eugene Delacroix in a series of articles.
Impressionist Criticism
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“…I led him before the Ploughed Field of M. Pissarro. At the sight of this astounding landscape, the good man thought that the lenses of his spectacles were dirty. He wiped them carefully and replaced them on his nose. “By Michalon!” he cried. “What on earth is that?” “You see … a hoarfrost on deeply ploughed furrows.” “Those furrows? That frost? But they are palette-scrapings placed uniformly on a dirty canvas. It has neither head nor tail, top nor bottom, front nor back.” “Perhaps … but the impression is there….”Oh, Corot, Corot, what crimes are committed in your name! It was you who brought into fashion this messy composition, these thin washes, these mud-splashes in front of which the art lover has been rebelling for thirty years and which he has accepted only because constrained and forced to it by your tranquil stubbornness.”" [Louis Leroy, "L'Exposition des impressionistes," Charivari (April 25 1874) [ck], taken from John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, revised ed. (NY: MOMA, 1961), p. 11]
“The great French critics, watchdogs of the joint demands of idealism and naturalism on figurative integrity, violently opposed this free composition, which could only be interpreted as ‘disorganization’ and ‘disintegration of style.’ Simon Boubée, the author, who presented the new trend in the clerical Gazette de France, patriarch of French journals, described it as ‘a destructive system,’ the historian Henry Houssaye called it ‘the negation of art,’ and Paul Mantz ‘anarchy.’ Marius Chaumelin christened impressionism ‘the school of spots’ and complained that the abrupt technique thoroughly tried the eyes. To Charles Bigot, the painters’ canvases were ‘a shimmering chaos of brutal brush strokes’ and Émile Bergerat, too, accused them of brutality … In 1880, Huysmans was equally baffled by these ‘fluttering spots, luminous points distributed without reason.’ … Félicien Champsaur called them the clowns of painting; the dotting technique was their entry number. Philippe Gille interpreted it as the performance of a monkey who had got hold of a box of paints, while Roger Ballu, Edmond Lepelletier and Marc de Montifaud, the pseudonym adopted by the highly gifted Marie-Amelie Chartroule, attributed it to children daubing with paint … Many critics rejected the new touch as treachery. Richard Graul vehemently repeated that the ‘visible brushstroke technique’ of impressionism was humbug, Henry Houssaye described it as ‘charlatanism’ and Émile Cardon, pictured the impressionist entrusting the disciple with his recipe: ‘Dirty three-quarters of a canvas with black and white, rub the rest with yellow, then dash on haphazardly green, red or blue spots and you will finally attain a true impression of spring.” [Oscar Reutersvärd, Impressionism in Perspective {originally appeared in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism X, no. 3 (march 1952) pp 273-78}, 1952, pp. 44-46]
Manet Criticism
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“Throughout the twenty-four years of his active artistic life Edouard Manet continually sent his paintings to the Salon where he met criticism which in constancy and bitterness surpassed that directed against any of his nineteenth-century predecessors.” [George Heard Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, p. 4]
All the following quotations are taken from Hamilton unless otherwise indicated:
“[Théodore Duret, in his 1878 brochure Les Peintres impressionistes] And Manet! One could say that criticism has gathered up all the insults which it has poured on his precursors for half a century, to throw them at his head all at one time.”
“[Louis Etienne, in his brochure Le Jury et les exposants] A commonplace woman of the demimonde, as naked as can be, shamelessly lolls between two dandies dressed to the teeth. These latter look like schoolboys on holiday, perpetrating an outrage to play the man, and I search in vain for the meaning of this unbecoming rebus … This is a young man’s practical joke, a shameful open sore not worth exhibiting this way … The landscape is well handled …, but the figures are slipshod.”
“[Edmond About in the Petit-Journal on June 3, 1864] We shall not discuss the two duds which Manet couldn’t bring off. This young man who paints with ink and constantly drops the inkwell will eventually not even irritate the public. He may caricature angels or paint a wooden toreador killed by a horned rat, but the public will go its own way saying ‘Manet is still having a good time. Let’s see the real paintings!”
“[Charivari caption] Since he had to complain to his paint seller, Manet has decided to use only his inkwell.”
“Manet must suffer from an acute affliction of the retina.”
“[Gautier, in June 25, 1864 Moniteur] Manet’s [Angle at the Tomb of Christ] seems never to have known soap and water. The livid aspect of death is mixed with soiled half tones, with dirty, black shadows which the Resurrection will never wash clean, if a cadaver so far gone can ever be resurrected.”
“[Gautier, in June 25, 1864 Moniteur] …like the preliminary sketches of a master. Unhappily, Manet intentionally abandons them at this stage and doesn’t carry his work very far.”
“[Raoul de Navery in June 7 1864 Gazette des Etrangers] We have never seen such audaciously bad taste, the negation of scientific anatomy, spoiled color, lampblack abused and applied to the fact of the most beautiful of men, carried so far as by Manet in the Dead Christ.”
“[Ernest Fillonneau, in Moniteur des arts, on Olympia] An epidemic of crazy laughter prevails … in front of the canvases by Manet … [It is] a subject of general surprise that the jury accepted these works … Olympia is a nude, recumbent woman to whom some sort of Negress offers a bouquet voluminously wrapped in paper. At the foot of the bed crouches a black cat, its hair on end, who probably doesn’t like flowers since it cuts such a pathetic figure. Moreover, the heroine herself seems indifferent to the homage of the Negress. Is Olympia waiting for her bath or for the laundress?”
“[Ernest Chesneau, May 16 1865 Constitutionnel] I must say that the grotesque aspect of his contributions has two causes: first, an almost childish ignorance of the fundamentals of drawing, and then, a prejudice in favor of inconceivable vulgarity…. He succeeds in provoking almost scandalous laughter, which causes the Salon visitors to crowd around this ludicrous creature called Olympia … In this case, the comedy is caused by the loudly advertised intention of producing a noble work, a pretension thwarted by the absolute impotence of the execution.”
“[Jules Claretie, May 15 1865 L'Artiste] We find him again this year with two dreadful canvases, challenges hurled at the public, mockeries or parodies, how can one tell? Yes, mockeries. What is this Odalisque with a yellow stomach, a base model picked up I know not where, who represents Olympia? Olympia? What Olympia? A courtesan no doubt. Manet cannot be accused of idealizing the foolish virgins, he who makes them vulgar virgins. I had promised myself not to speak of it any more.”
“[Jules Claretie, June 20 1865, Figaro] “…you scarcely knew whether you were looking at a parcel of nude flesh or a bundle of laundry.”
“[Gautier, père] Olympia can be understood from no point of view, even if you take it for what it is, a puny model stretched out on a sheet. The color of the flesh is dirty, the modeling nonexistent. The shadows are indicated by more or less large smears of blacking. What’s to be said for the Negress who brings a bunch of flowers wrapped in a paper, or for the black cat which leaves its dirty footprints on the bed? We would still forgive the ugliness, were it only truthful, carefully studied, heightened by some splendid effect of color. The least beautiful woman has bones, muscles, skin, and some sort of color. Here there is nothing, we are sorry to say, but the desire to attract attention at any price.”
“[Zola in May 7 1866 L'Evénement] I also saw Olympia again, she who has the serious fault of closely resembling young ladies of your acquaintance. There, isn’t that so? What a strange madness not to paint like the others! If, at the least, Manet had borrowed Cabanel’s powder puff and powdered Olympia’s face and hands a bit, the young lady would have been presentable.”
“[Zola in May 7 1866 L'Evénement] You know what effect Manet’s canvases produce at the Salon. Quite simply they burst open the wall. All around them stretch the sweets of the fashionable artistic confectioners, sugar-candy trees and pastry houses, gingerbread gentlemen and ladies made of vanilla cream. The candy shop becomes pinker and sweeter, and the artist’s living canvases rake on a certain bitterness in the midst of this river of milk. Also, one must see the faces made by the grown-up children passing through the gallery. For two cents you will not make them swallow true flesh having the reality of life, but they stuff themselves like famished people with all the sickening sweetness served them…”
“[Zola in Jan 1 1867 Revue du XIXe siècle] I cannot repeat too often that we must forget a thousand things in order to understand and enjoy this work. It is no longer a question of the search for absolute beauty; this artist paints neither story nor sentiment. So-called composition does not exist for him. His self-imposed task is not to represent such and such a historical idea or event. For this reason we must judge him neither as a moralist nor as a man of letters. We must judge him as a painter.”
“[Zola in Jan 1 1867 Revue du XIXe siècle] Art is a solemn affair, it is profoundly boring. So it is necessary to enliven it a bit, to find a canvas at the Salon that can be made ridiculous. And recourse can always be had to an unfamiliar work which is the mature product of a new personality … The public has not even tried to understand the work. It has stayed, so to say, on the surface. What shocks and irritates it is not the essential structure of the work but the general and superficial aspects… The worst horror is originality. Unknown to ourselves we are all more or less creatures of habit who stick stubbornly to the trodden path. Every new road frightens us; we suspect unknown precipices and refuse to go forward. We always have to have the same view; we laugh at or are irritated by things we do not know…We are like skittish horses who rear in front of a tree fallen across the road, because they understand neither the nature nor the cause of the obstacle, and they don’t try to explain it for themselves.”
“[Zola in Jan 1 1867 Revue du XIXe siècle] Is it not profoundly sad today to think that Delacroix was hissed, that this genius who has triumphed only in death was driven to despair?”
“[Gustave Vattier in June 5 1868 Nain jaune] “coarse and ugly eccentricities, the fruit of vanity and impotence”
“[Stop, aka L.P.G.B. Morel-Retz, in cartoon legend, in May 25 Journal amusant] Without caring for the everyday bourgeois laws of perspective, Manet has had the ingenious idea of giving us a vertical section of the ocean so that we can read on the fishes’ faces their impressions of the battle taking place above them.”
“[Roger-Ballu in his book La Peinture au Salon de 1880; Les Peintres émus, les peintres habiles] “the whites [of the clothes] are dirty”
……………………
“[Berthe Morisot in a 1869 letter] I found Manet, his hat over his eyes, looking bewildered; he begged me to look at his painting since he did not dare himself.”
“[Berthe Morisot in a 1869 letter] Poor manet is unhappy. As usual his exhibition is not appreciated by the public, but for him it is always a new source of surprise.”
“[Baudelaire, in a letter to Manet:] What you demand is really stupid. They make fun of you; the jokes aggravate you; no one knows how to do you justice, etc., etc. … Do you think you are the first man put in this predicament? Are you a greater genius than Chateaubriand or Wagner? Yet they certainly were made fun of. They didn’t die of it.”
Courbet Criticism
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“To the exhibition of paintings by Courbet. I was amazed at the strength and relief of his principal picture–but what a picture! what a subject to choose! The vulgarity of the forms would not signify, the vulgarity and futility of the idea is what is so abominable, and even that might pass if only the idea (such as it is) had been made clear! But what are the two figures supposed to mean? A fat woman, backview, and completely naked except for a carelessly painted rag over the lower part of the buttocks, is stepping out of a little puddle scarcely deep enough for a foot-bath. She is making some meaningless gesture….” [1853 journal entry by Delacroix, taken from Neoclassicism and Romanticism, pp. 117-18.]
“Courbet is saying, ‘There is a bourgeois stopped before my picture. He is not having nervous attack. My show is a failure.’” [From a drawing caption, Anonymous?, taken from Courbet in Perspective, p. 43]
“‘He paints pictures,’ said du Camp, ‘as you black your boots.’ His anatomy, both human and animal, was incorrect; he had neither style, nor color, nor form; his figures were wooden; in short any child could do as well.” [Maxime du Camp, taken from Courbet in Perspective, pp. 43-44]
“Not only were they ugly; they were also revoltingly dirty. Or they were deformed and monstrous. Perhaps the most violent comment of this type emanated form the author of La Dame aux Camélias [Dumas]: ‘Sous quelle cloche, à l’aide de quel fumier, par suite de quelle mixture de vin, de bière, de mucus corrosif et d’oedème flatulent, a pu pousser cette courge sonore et poilue?’ The courge was Courbet himself.” [Courbet in Perspective, p. 45]
“[The caricaturists'] fury expressed itself, so far as their drawings are still intelligible, in the following charges. … (1) Courbet was insincere and painted his pictures to shock people … He was conceited, rude, exhibitionistic, and the victim of a persecution-complex … (2) The second accusation against Courbet dealt with artistic skill … “He paints pictures,” said du Camp, “as you black your boots.” His anatomy, both human and animal, was incorrect; he had neither style, nor color, nor form; his figures were wooden; in short any child could do as well. … This is especially interesting for it illustrates the fact that the opponents of realism could oppose it on the ground that it was not realistic enough. This was, in fact, the accusation of the Goncourts, who maintained that even Courbet’s Femme au Perroquet, was “aussi loin du vrai, du nu, que n’importe quelle académie du XVIIIe siècle.” … (3) When one passes to the subject matter of Courbet’s paintings, one finds that the caricaturists were united in finding it deliberately ugly, coarse, and vulgar … The Baigneuses according to David’s pupil, Delecluze, were such that “not even a crocodile would want one to eat.” … Daumier shows us two art lovers, of typical Daumieresque physiognomy, maintaining that no one in nature could be so ugly as Courbet’s figures. Not only were they ugly; they were also revoltingly dirty. Or they were deformed and monstrous. … (4) The fourth general charge which the caricaturists made against Courbet was his socialism….” [George Boas, Courbet in Perspective, pp. 43-46.]
Delacroix Criticism
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“Badly maimed horses in a more than foreign land, beneath an impossible sky, an incredibly dirty colouring and drawing which is wilfully inaccurate.” [by Vergnaud, taken from Art Criticism and Its Institutions In Nineteenth-Century France, p. 74]
Even his defenders seem horrified by him at times: “Quelle pâleur pestiférée ! quel ciel étrange et malade, vert et jaune comme un cadavre de ciel ! quelle lueur terne et plombée dans cette toile du Massacre de Scio ! Les lèvres violettes de mille blessures ricanent affreusement aux flancs des corps morts; des mares de sang figé et pris en caillots souillent un terrain lépreux, écorché, piétiné, rude à l’œil comme s’il était peint sur des limes ; des fragments d’armes rompues, des haillons hideusement tachés gisent çà et là ; c’est l’affaissement et l’abrutissement du désespoir rendu avec la plus sombre poésie” (”What plague-stricken paleness! What a sick and strange sky, green and yellow, as if it were a corpse of a sky! What dull, leaden light in this canvas The Massacre of Scio! The violet lips of a thousand wounds titter awfully upon the flanks of the dead bodies; pools of congealed and clotted blood stain a leprous, flayed and trampled landscape, jarring to the eye as if painted on [TK]; fragments of broken weapons and horribly stained tatters lie here and there; it’s the collapse and exhaustion of desperation rendered with most somber poetry.”)
[Théophile Gautier, "Exposition du Louvre", in La Presse, 22 mars 1838 (reproduced here)]
“Delacroix has gone down in history as having been especially brutally vilified by the critics. Yet the scathing tone of his critics’ rhetoric should not be read by contemporary standards. We have to relativise the “struggles,” conflicts and verbal explosions that characterised both the “Classicist” and the “Romantic” sides. The “massacre of painting,” executed with a “drunken broom” and “tartouillade” are some of the famous terms, quoted by Tourneux and by most reference texts, to indicate the tone of the “insults” which were said to have been levelled at Delacroix … Poisonous virulence is a weapon which, once removed from its immediate context, loses meaning. Criticism tells us less about the painter who is being eulogised or abused than about the critic himself. And too much aesthetic depth should not be attributed to these hasty and superficial judgements, for criticism is not a unified and consistent discourse. Nevertheless — and particularly in Delacroix’s case — these judgments are informed by certain recondite and recurring motifs: notably that of the two diametrically opposed camps which constituted a real dividing line between critics, along which cliché, banter and wit are used to fuel a profound underlying antimony.” [by Anne Larue, in Art Criticism and Its Institutions In Nineteenth-Century France, pp. 73-74]
(See also the first entry in this post.)
Corot Criticism
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Vol. 2 of Corot, raconté par lui-même et par ses amis (Vézenaz-Genève: Pierre Cailler, 1946) has a chapter entitled “Sottisier” [pp. 195-199]. I’ll include here my rough translations, sometimes together with the French originals:
C’est un malheureux qui promène sur sa toile une éponge qu’il a trempée dans la boue. (Définition de Corot par M. de Nieuwerkerke, surintendant des Beaux-Arts, entendue par Frédéric Henriet.)
An unfortunate man who parades across his canvas a sponge that he’s soaked in mud.
M. Corot ne parle la langue du paysage qu’en bégayant: sa touche est lourde et mate; la souplesse, l’humidité, le charme de la nature lui sont étrangers. (Ch. Lenormant, dans un journal de 1835.)
Mr. Corot speaks the language of landscape only in stammers: his touch is heavy and dark; the suppleness, moisture, and charm of nature are foreign to him.
Le Moine de Corot est profond de science,
De sa Fuite en Egypte on disait quelque bien,
Mais du Soleil couchant, l’auteur, en conscience,
Doit être fort heureux que l’on ne dise rien.
(Mauvais vers de J.-F. Destigny sur le Moine du Salon de 1840.)Corot’s Monk is deeply scientific,
Good things are said of his Escape into Egypt,
But of his Setting Sun, the author, in good conscience,
Should be quite happy if nothing is said.
Nulle vérité dans son invention, nulle variété dans son ton et dans ses lignes: sa composition est uniforme, sa couleur invraisemblable, son dessin faux et perpétuellement lâché. (Castagnary: Salon de 1859.)No truth in his invention, no variety in his tone and lines: his composition is uniform, his color unbelievable, his drawing false and perpetually neglected.
To tackle the sun, one must have some notion of form and color. Now, Mr. Corot has never been able to draw and his palette has only seen the color of (dare I say it?) bird shit… His trees dissolve into blobby masses, his fields are ashen, and his people, clothed or nude, scarcely belong to the human race. (E. de B. de Lépinois: L’art dans la Rue et au Salon, 1859.)
Corot’s work is perhaps poetic, but it’s not varied. (Th. Thoré: Le Temps, Salon de 1861.)
Turning round in a circle, Mr. Corot finally spun out. (Maxime du Camp: Salon de 1861.)
What is the Lake? A mess of blurred tones, which dirty the canvas the way a child’s scribbling dirties paper. And the Orpheus? Its landscape is the equal of the Lake’s, but the figures are even worse. And the Dance of the Nymphs? … The denizens of this wood, dolls stuffed with grain, barely covered up by rags, are truly painful to behold. (Olivier Merson: La peinture en France, Exposition de 1861.)
This odd doll [the Orpheus], followed by a Eurydice stiff as a doll, would occasion laughter if one could laugh at this excellent Corot, so infatuated with his art and so convinced. (Théophile Gautier: Abécédaire du Salon de 1861.)
The two canvases La Pastorale and Le Passeur are sketches exhibited as paintings. Ah! if a newcomer had brought them, the jury wouldn’t have hesitated to show them the door. Certainly Corot puts his heart into his art, but it’s a bachelor heart that has never suffered. Accustomed to stopping at the skin, at the bloom of nature, he only reaches the surface of our hearts, instead of joining with us. These evanescent unfolding mornings, as lively as the morning breeze, and these undulating setting suns, so peaceful, caress pure sensation but don’t set passion vibrating …. (Théophile Silvestre: Le Pays, sur le Salon de 1873.)
Art Criticism in the 1830s
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The notion of 1830 as a turning point toward virulence in French arts criticism seems born out by my reading. “Even Ingres, so often regarded as the archconservative, was disgusted with the treatment which the critics accorded his work at the Salon of 1834 and refused to exhibit there again.” [George Heard Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, p. 12]
(See also ”French Art Criticism and Problems of Change in 1831,” in the 1983 (v.6, n.2) Oxford Art Journal, wherein Nicos Hadjinicolaou identifies important tropes of the period such as ”transitional period,” “the decadence of art,” “fashion,” “individualism,” and “originality”.)
Is there an art of invective?
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In his article, “Comment fonctionne la polémique ,” Artur Greive argues that lexicographers have defined polemics as hostilities, excesses, or art.
In the Meyers Konversationslexikon of 1890, polemic is not dispute itself, but rather “the art of conducting a dispute” (”Streitkunst”). The majority speaker rebuking the opposition for indulging in “small-bore polemics,” does he think of those latter as art, if small-bore art? He has only passionately critiqued the form and results of a foreign voyage undertaken by a political figure in the government. And this expression “small-bore,” that we ourselves perceive as polemical, is it a testament to art?
The supposition that polemic is itself a testament to art awakens our skepticism. Does the expression “polémique de bas étage” say it all? However Meyer’s definition isn’t just a relic of the good old days. Others have had the experience that polemicizing produces a certain pleasure. There are, in polemic, veritable master craftsmen. It’s quite possible that there is such a thing as polemical technique and different ways of mastering this technique.
As I noted earlier, in Nicolas Wagner’s “La polémique et le ‘Code de la Nature’ de Morelly (1754),” in the 1985 collection Le Discours polémique: aspects théoriques et interprétations, he writes that “Paradoxically, literature manuals accord no place to the category of polemic; it’s never as part of a genre that a polemical text enters the French literary corpus. To speak more generally, the poetics of the polemical text seem to not exist at all …”]
In Jesse M. Lander’s Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England, Lander argues that “The demise of polemic as a legitimate form of writing is inextricably bound up with the birth of the literary.” He writes that in the later seventeenth century in England, the polemic genre that arose with the Reformation and the printing press
did not disappear, but it no longer commanded the respect that it had claimed before the Civil Wars. An important new feature of this changed landscape was a restricted notion of the literary. No longer conceived of expansively as that which is written, literature began to assume a recognizably modern form. Politeness and irony, which may work at cross-purposes, become the hallmark of the literary, which is now widely perceived as an antidote to polemic with its fierce enthusiasm and unsophisticated earnestness. [p.1]
See also Acocella / Shaw.
Observations on Invective Art Criticism
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
“Now that calm has settled over this grand name – of those that posterity will not forget – it is difficult to imagine the tumult, the scorching dust, in which he lived. Each of his works occasioned deafening clamors, storms, furious discussions. The artist was showered with insults more offensive and ignominious than would ever have been addressed to a thief or an assassin. All critical urbanity ceased with regard to him, and, when at a loss, authors borrowed epithets from the Catechism of Vulgarity. He was a savage, a barbarian, a maniac, an enragé, a madman who should be sent back to his birthplace: Charenton. He had a taste for the ugly, the ignoble, the monstrous; and then he did not know how to draw, he broke more limbs than any doctor could have set. He hurled buckets of color against the canvas, he painted with a drunken broom – this drunken broom was found very pretty and for a time made an enormous effect…. Thus it is that geniuses are greeted at their dawn: strange error that astonishes each generation after the fact, and that it then naïvely repeats.”
[Théophile Gautier, Le Moniteur universel, 17 novembre 1864 [ck - 18 nov?], taken from Delacroix: The Late Work, p. 36.]
“Art is a solemn affair, it is profoundly boring. So it is necessary to enliven it a bit, to find a canvas at the Salon that can be made ridiculous. And recourse can always be had to an unfamiliar work which is the mature product of a new personality … The public has not even tried to understand the work. It has stayed, so to say, on the surface. What shocks and irritates it is not the essential structure of the work but the general and superficial aspects… The worst horror is originality. Unknown to ourselves we are all more or less creatures of habit who stick stubbornly to the trodden path. Every new road frightens us; we suspect unknown precipices and refuse to go forward. We always have to have the same view; we laugh at or are irritated by things we do not know…We are like skittish horses who rear in front of a tree fallen across the road, because they understand neither the nature nor the cause of the obstacle, and they don’t try to explain it for themselves.”
[Zola in Jan 1, 1867 Revue du XIXe siècle, taken from Manet and His Critics, p. 102]
“Have we not pretended long enough that Delacroix did not know how to draw and that his paintings were only a riot of color? Has not Millet been sufficiently accused of making ignoble and vulgar landscapes and drawings that were impossible to hang in a salon? And what hasn’t been said about Corot’s painting? It isn’t finished enough, it’s only sketchy, it’s a dirty grey, it’s done with palette scrapings….And Manet! One could say that criticism has gathered up all the insults which it has poured on his precursors for half a century, to throw them at his head all at one time.”
[Théodore Duret, in his 1878 brochure Les Peintres impressionistes, taken from Manet and His Critics, pp. 210-11.]
“… an article on cubism entitled ‘Le Fumisme’ appeared in the popular Les Annales Politiques et Litteraires, in which publicity was again described as the primary motivation of cubist painting. Here the cubist joins a larger community of struggling young artists, who despairing of recognition, are convinced that bad press is indeed better than no press at all. Moreover, artists will claim that ridicule often attaches itself to audacity and originality (the example of Manet and the impressionists is raised); speciously, bad criticism thus becomes a source of publicity and pride.”
[Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, New York: Yale, 1994, p. 59]
“Why has almost every progressive artist during the past two centuries encountered an adverse reception when his work was first exhibited to the public? Is continual antagonism between artist and public inevitable in the creation of modern art? Can it be explained on artistic principles alone or does it require an understanding of other cultural factors peculiar to historical time and place?”
[George Heard Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, pp. 2-3]
“Artists have always been threatened by destructive criticism — major 18th-century artists, such as Boucher, Quentin de la Tour, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, did not exhibit in 1767 out of fear of it.”
[Donald Kuspit, in online Encyclopedia Britannica online entry on "art criticism"]
“A hostile climate for new art is hardly new to cubism, and the provocation of modern style, since the generation of 1830 at least, is an obvious touchstone for the early twentieth century.” “It will be apparent to any student of the modern period that hostility to esthetic change had long been gathering momentum. Between Hernani (1830) and the Salon des Indépendants (1884), expressions and institutions of secession were leitmotifs embedded in the cultural dynamics of nineteenth-century Paris … In retrospect, resistance to the new has become the historian’s common repoussoir of innovation, a negative proof of originality in modern art”
[Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, pp. xvi, p. 52].
“We suffer, actually, from a kind of mass guilt complex. Because Delacroix was spurned by the Academy until he was old and sick, because Courbet had to build his own exhibition hall in 1855 to get a showing for pictures that are now in the Louvre, because Manet was laughed at, because Cézanne worked in obscurity, because Van Gogh sold only one picture during his lifetime, because Gauguin died in poverty and alone, because nineteenth-century critics and teachers and art officials seemed determined to annihilate every painter of genius — because of all this we have tried to atone to a current generation of pretenders to martyrdom.”
[John Canaday, 1959, taken from Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, pp. 119-21.]
“The terrible thing nowadays … is that nobody speaks ill of anybody. If we believe all we read, all’s well. In every exhibition there’s something”
[Picasso, 1966, The Grove Book of Art Writing, p. 521].
Insults
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment
Insults are of course related to invective. They are usually oral, whereas invective is usually written. as Robert M. Adams’ argues in Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side (Berkeley and L.A.: University of California, 1977). He notes that in the Greek epics, the hero insults his foes before battle, presumably to steel his nerves, then — if he lives — he praises them afterward, presumably to exaggerate the magnitude of his conquest. He notes that “It is in the highest degree curious that modern society has developed so few formal ways of distinguishing between friendly banter and deadly insult.” He notes the considerable prowess of Shakespeare in the realm of insult:
Between superficial jest and terrible deep earnest, characters in Shakespeare frequently abuse one another as vociferously, as grossly, and as inventively as any student of dysphuism could want. When Kent berates Cornwall’s steward, for example, it is partly because he wants to provoke a fight with a man he despises, but also because his (and perhaps Shakespeare’s) rage with this gross pragmatical pig of a world o’erflows all measure– he must unpack his heart with words, and so he does:
Steward: What dost thou know me for?
Kent: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; a one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.
…Outrageous insult is here in effect an explosion in behalf of one’s exasperated humanity.
One broaches no great novelty in proposing that insult is surrogate aggression, or that aggression embodies, as often as not, hostility to more than its immediate target, and likely more than hostility itself …
The “conditions of insult” are more numerous and particular than one might think offhand. For example, insult is always a face-to-face affair. You can slander a man in the public prints (and for that his recourse is the law), but you cannot insult him. Further, persistence is a great point of insult. The insulter must be advised, unless it’s completely obvious that he knows already, that what he says is offensive; if he then persists, the insult is “serious.” It’s no accident that the phrase, “Say that again,” plays so large a part in the forming-up of quarrels … Without personal intent on both sides, there can hardly be insult. It is difficult indeed to insult, thought you may despise or ridicule, a collectivity, a corporation, or a legislative body. You cannot readily insult a man who assumes his innate and therefore artificial superiority to you; for insult is an inherently democratic form of address, implying a relation, as we say, of “man to man.” To challenge a gentleman, you have to be a gentleman yourself; you can’t disdain a man whom both of you recognize as a social superior, and he can’t disdain you without rubbing in his advantage unworthily …
The really elaborate insult has to be playful in some degree if it’s not to perish under its own weight … Like stage duellists or antagonists in an opera vowing eternal hatred in an intricately woven duet, insult-contestants generally keep an eye cocked on the audience … Even though it can’t really avoid a tendency toward verbal oversupply, the invective mode needn’t fall victim to it, for self-mockery deftly converts a failing to a point of strength … He cannot repeat, he cannot hesitate, he cannot descend from the whirlwind of his language even to consider the occasion of it.
Ornate and vociferous insults may thus extend themselves magnificently, but at the expense of depth and dignity; the rush of particulars gives no time for implications to sink in, and the prominence of the insultor, as a mannered or even ridiculous speaker, slips him toward easy identification with the insultee. The Insult Majestic, or baroque insult, may or may not involve subtleties, but its weight and dignity set the speaker immediately on a plane wholly different from his victim’s …
A proper insulter rises above his own insult; it should be grossly rude, foul if possible, but happy in its delivery …
Below or alongside the insult direct (which, as we’ve implied, is a noble and therefore an increasingly peripheral art form) exist all sorts of slights and put-downs which rankle like insult but ought to be distinguished from it. Odious familiarity … abominable rudeness … The pseudo-listener and his counterpart the monopolistic nothing-sayer … the buried insult, or insult reflexive. It generally rises from the implied perception that the insulter is so far superior to the insulted that he must make enormous efforts to prevent that obvious fact from becoming socially painful. Yet he can’t be associated with the folly of the insultee; he must set himself apart. This he does by yielding to the victim’s aims and intents, endorsing them, approving them, and yet pushing them ever so slightly toward the ludicrous … An allied device (used, for example, when an outside is introduced into a group of insiders) is an excess of politeness, such a profusion of polite forms and formulas, that their purpose becomes plain–that is, the prevention of any other form of converse …
Stupidity used to be the ground-bass of insult …[but it] implies an assurance that an established wisdom exists … To say the least, that view is much less defensible now than it used to be. In addition, the whole notion of “wisdom” is a lot more dubious than formerly, since the individual has so much less command of his own destiny, and his own qualities count for less. In a tribal society, wisdom and experience yield a man authority; in a democratic megalopolis, they qualify him for social security and medicare. Stupidity has even taken on special positive values in our day [sincerity and unpretentiousness] … Finally, words like “cretin,” “moron,” and “idiot” have taken on new colorings as a result of a new humane attitude toward mental disease. They make us think of misfortune and misery, rather than complacent foolishness. Here, as with sexist jokes and insults, or racial stereotypes, we come up against the fact that “controversial” really is a disqualifying word, all by itself. This is simply because, amid explanations and qualifications and retractions, the joke and insult alike wilt and wither and lose point … holding mere stupidity against a man is certainly undemocratic and probably un-American as well.
The historical record is full of often amusing insults that were recorded, who knows how accurately, by judicial scribes. In for example Trevor Dean’s May 2004 Social History article (v. 29 n. 2, pp. 217-31), “Gender and insult in an Italian city: Bologna in the later Middle Ages,” we find catalogued the following imprecation:
You’re laughing and enjoying yourself, you rotten, shitty ruffian. Look to your wife and sister who are getting themselves fucked by friars and priests. If you were outside this area, I would hit you so hard you’d froth at the mouth. [p.219]
One 1352 insult, sadly not reproduced in Dean’s article, “combined references to bodily functions (farting), bastardy, animals, and social derogation (the victim was called the son of a water-carrier). Dean notes that much insulting was gender-specific:
Women were insulted overwhelmingly through their sexuality, through unacceptable sexual appetite and behavior. Men were insulted through their masculinity: their lack of mastery over their women, their failure to repay trust. This meant that men could use their sexual prowess and their knowledge of prostitutes to insult other men, but women could not. Conversely, both men and women could use accusations of prostitution and pimping to besmirch women. The game of sexual taunting was thus one in which men were always the winners and women always the losers.
[See also the December 2004 issue of Langue Française devoted to "Les insultes: approches sémantiques et pragmatiques" edited by Dominique Lagorgette and Pierre Larrivée.]
Censorship and Art Criticism
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment
I have a certain hypothesis: when censorship is applied much more strongly to political commentary than to artistic commentary, the latter will absorb some of the energy of the repressed political debate (Wrigley advanced a similar notion in passing). In one manifestation, the quality of a nation’s art is treated as a referendum the welfare of the state (see Haskell, Crow, Hoock). Usually, the maneuvers are more complex. How much political energy art criticism will absorb depends on several factors, including the perceived function of art at that time as well as the level of the state’s involvement with the art world. Francis Haskell argued in “Art and the Language of Politics” (Journal of European Studies 1974, 4, 215-232) that
It was, in fact, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century that the practice of applying political and social metaphors to art criticism first became really widespread. I do not, I am afraid, know who first used the word ‘revolutionary’ of a picture, but in 1825 Louis Vitet announced that ‘le goût, en France, attend son 14 juillet’; a year before this Stendhal began his criticism of the famous 1824 Salon by announcing stridently that ‘mes opinions, en peinture sont celles de l’extrême gauche,’ and significantly he goes out of his way to dissociate these from his political views which, so he says, are ‘centre gauche, comme celles de l’immense majorité.’ …
From the 1820s onwards the use of political metaphor in art criticism becomes so frequent that examples could be multiplied indefinitely … in the early stages of their adoption, say from 1820 to 1848, they are less important than they became later, just because their authors were aware of the novelty of what they were doing, and consequently imply that the expressions they use need not be taken too seriously. We have seen, for instance, how self-consciously Stendhal distinguishes between his political views and his political metaphors. But there is at least one example of a political phrase applied to art which, I believe, has confused the issue from the very beginning …
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of innovating painters were, however different from each other, moving away from the doctrines of neo-classicism to a whole variety of less ‘finished,’ less ‘idealized’ styles. From the artistic point of view, Géricault, Constable, Turner, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, Gauguin and so one were metaphorically on the left — i.e. were artistically ‘progressive.’ But in actual, historical fact, it was the real, and not the metaphorical, Left which was associated in many people’s minds with a highly ‘finished’ neo-classical painting … Writing of the early days of the [Durand-Ruel] firm, his son tells us that ‘mon père s’était établi, en effet, au moment des luttes ardentes entre l’Ecole néo-antique, née avec le développement des idées Jacobines de la Révolution et representée par David, et … [the impressionists].”
When Haskell included this essay in a later anthology of his writings, he added a footnote to William Weber’s “La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien Régime,” from The Journal of Modern History, vol. 56, n. 1 (Mar 1984), pp. 58-88. Weber notes that already by 1782
an administrative memorandum spoke of “the epoch of revolution in music” since 1774, and in 1783 another saw it as “a veritable revolution in musical taste.” That magical word révolution, implying the end of a cycle in taste, suggests the magnitude of what took place in Paris’s central theater during this time. If the most visible change was in the age of repertory, the decade after 1774 saw as well a rethinking of many aspects of the institution–its genres and productions, its administrative and authority structure, and its sense of artistic and political purpose. Thus departed in short order, fifteen years before the Revolution, the opera world which had begun under Louis XIV and was dedicated to the myth of his grandeur.
Invective Nostalgia
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment
Have we lost the art of invective? In the 1979 Traité d’injurologie, Robert Edouard wrote
One need only take a few steps down the street, travel a few kilometers down our clogged highways, receive a “free warning” from the finance minister, listen to the radio, watch the television … or even flip through certain women’s magazines to feel — painfully and profoundly — the disastrous poverty of our vocabulary for insult.
Or is the blogosphere again reviving the art?
Why Study Invective Art Criticism?
30 October 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment
So much invective criticism we now consider to have been badly wrongheaded. So why study it? In Bad Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989), Quentin Bell writes [p.9]
… history, so it seems to me, cannot afford to neglect any major historical phenomenon … [and] our perception of the goodness in art is determined by some opposite quality with which we compare it …
Polemic and Violence
15 October 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment
In their 1999 book Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace (NY: NYU Press), Benjamin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine write:
… argumentation should not be confused with a purely non-violent exchange between equals. From different perspectives Lefort and Fraser challenge the belief that speech is the sole medium of persuasion and that it cannot transmit inequality of power (Lefort 1988: 53-4; Fraser 1992: 119-20). Argumentation is marked by the asymmetry of the intervening parts, if only because of the unequal distribution of speech resources such as rhetorical skills or cultural proficiency. These strengthen the position of those who can master them and reveal that deliberation is not only a matter of rational persuasion, that force and power also intervene in communications between antagonistic parts. Laclau takes this further when he points out that persuasion itself includes an element of violence or force. It is there, he says, when we try to convince someone to change his or her beliefs through purely argumentative means, for this change involves the modification of the person’s initial beliefs (Laclau 1991: 89-92). While persuasion or rhetorical expertise might be seen as an implicit or even a relatively benign manifestation of force and power, the latter become more visible when the contestants summon non-deliberative — but perfectly democratic — means to engage their counterparts and press for a claim: for example, when they appeal to their institutional positions of authority; when they enter into alliances with other groups; when they use — or threaten to use — their capacity for disruption through demonstrations, strikes, pickets or legal action, and so on. Force is also present in everyday deliberative processes when the majority is invoked to deal with an impasse without resorting to physical violence. The decisionistic force of the majority … puts a limit to argumentation, even though its enactment is doubly constrained …
The willingness to use these resources indicates several things; firstly, that force is not an accident that befalls argumentation. It is in fact part of the structure of possibility of deliberation as such … (123-24)
In the Nancy Fraser article cited above (”Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT, 1992): 109-142), she writes that “deliberation can serve as a mask for domination. Theorists like Jane Mansbridge have argued that ‘the transformation of ‘I’ into ‘we’ brought about through political deliberation can easily mask subtle forms of control. Even the language people use as they reason together usually favors one way of seeing things and discourages others. Subordinate groups sometimes cannot find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, and when they do, they discover they are not heard …’”
Marc Angenot, La parole pamphlétaire
6 August 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment
From Marc Angenot’s La parole pamphlétaire (Paris: Payot, 1982):
This work is dedicated to the theoretical description of what is usually called the “literature of combat.” It’s built up from an examination of a corpus of polemical texts — pamphlets and satires — that appeared in France and the Francophone world in the modern era. They span one century more or less, from the spring of 1868 — when Henri Rochefort threw his firebomb La Lanterne at the weakened Second Empire — to the spring of 1968 when the “Events of May” also marked, ambiguously, the end of an era and were accompanied by an bright efflorescence of polemical writings …
In organizing this work, I had two goals. My immediate objective was to describe and analyse from a typological point of view a literary genre — the pamphlet, flanked by two contiguous forms, polemic and satire — that can, it seems, be defined by a cluster of typical qualities. Beyond this narrow objective, I tried to ascertain the elements of the “essayistic,” of a general methodology of the literature of ideas, in relation with a topique, and a doxology of modern ideological debates. I drew on this study of the pamphlet to help me attempt to reevaluate, reinterpret and integrate into semiotic research that kind of rhetoric, once essential, but today quite neglected (ever since the classical age) — Inventio. In particular, it seems to me that it may be essential to reinstitute as fundamental to all theories of discourse a topique whose intersubjective role was brought to light by Aristotle.
If one had to judge polemicists according to the criteria of aesthetic value and cultural impact that are ordinarily applied to literary works, the very enterprise would be rather questionable. Despite the “brio,” the wit, and the “grip” [patte] of certain pamphleteers, who’s still interested in the debates over Bergsonism or the participation of socialists in bourgeois government? All this unchained passion need no longer attract any attention save that of the specialist’s cold gaze … in the making of this study I found myself embarrassed to have to quite cursorily introduce the immediate circumstances that surrounded the analyzed works. My approach however neglects the anecdotal level: the critique of the ideological systems underlying the debates seems to me of a continual topicality …
Concerning the postulates of generic research, I postulate the equivalence of the notion of genre with that of ideological configuration. I don’t consider the genre “pamphlet,” and the adjacent genres of “polemic” and “satire” in our nomenclature), to be transhistorical and ideologically neutral forms in which political or aesthetic content was realized by one work after another … [pp. 9-11]
Later, in his chapter on “Rhetoric,” Angenot writes:
I don’t hope to classify and extract from the corpus of pamphlets every kind of stylistic modulation … In polemical texts we deal with phenomena that are more diffuse than the figures one can “isolate” in a poetic text for example. The rhetorical modality and its impact are only perceptible here in reference to a larger context. Certain phenomena inventoried, however characteristic they may be, correspond poorly to the subdivisions of ancient rhetoric … We cannot escape a foundational question. Namely, what allows us to identify certain phenomena as figures? The ancient criteria seem perfectly incoherent. The tropes of classical rhetoric group together rather clearly what the linguist would call “metasememes” …
1. FIGURES OF ASSERTION
We’ll call assertivité the emphatic modalization of the assertion. It’s not just a question of affirming but also authenticating the assertion, “authenticating the speech by saying it,” as O. Ducrot writes [Dire, 21]. A certain intensity in the assertion can be produced by varying means: pamphlet discourse, torn between evidence and paradox, seeks to make what it says present, intense, pregnant; it hammers its truth and its evidence, it conflates proof and aplomb. The repetition of a thesis eventually produces an effect of suggestion. Certain texts, nearly devoid of dialectical subordination, are just literally a series of juxtaposed assertions whose ideological presuppositions determine the sequence:
The Jews are our masters (…). The Jew is the king of gold, of the Bank and of Justice (…). It’s the Jews who command as absolute masters (…) the untamed blood alliance endures (…). The Jew is dictator of the soul. [Céline, Bagatelles, 50-51]
… Preterition, “figure by which one calls attention to an object while feigning not to,” should be counted among the assertive devices; in that it reinforces the magnitude of the speech’s evidence, in that it introduces into the discourse an element of urgency or hierarchies in the refutation, it has an eminently polemical function:
I’ll skip over the title, unwise in my opinion, that you gave to your response. I’ll also pass over two or three contradictions that I don’t want to exploit. [Camus, Actuelles, "Première réponse à E. d'Astier]
Professions of good faith: Elsewhere I’ve made allusion to appeals to posterity, the appeal to the qualified judge, that sometimes are just conventional means for declaring indisputable that which is alleged:
An objective mind would accept one saying that …
In a similar fashion, all professions of good faith are meant to radiate a certain assertive quality. One finds them in the form of denials:
…with no intention of polemicizing …
I say it without emphasis: …
The profession of good faith can lead, in [for example] the frenetic style of Léon Bloy, all the way to the welcoming of punishment:
I’d quite like someone to boil my ass if I find them a better job [Zola's Lourdes, to the latrines]
If this horrid macaroni hasn’t been served thirty times, I ask that my ass be flayed before a wide public.
Epanorthosis: “Feedback, or epanorthosis (…) consists of returning to what one said, either to reinforce it or to soften it, or even to retract it completely, depending on whether one affects to find it or have it found too slick or too strong, too unwise, or too inconvenient” … It can attract attention to a possible reversal of viewpoint. The “let me be well understood” demands of the reader renewed attention …
2. CONTRASTS AND PARADOXES
Oxymoron can be considered as a figure-symptom of pamphlet discourse. By that we mean a linguistic schema that … betrays a “manner of thinking” integral to the genre. The pamphleteer has the feeling of living in a “world upside-down,” submitted to a systematic perversion of values … The oxymoron is thus the condensed expression of this malaise … The degraded world realizes the conjunction of contraries. It’s as illogical as immoral, its partisans being incapable of perceiving their own contradiction … “hateful charity” … “comfortable violence” … “classics of the avant-garde” … “worldly proletariat” … “audacious conformism.”
Dilemma. Another figure-symptom. The dilemma isn’t a mode of reasoning; it’s an oratorical manner for presenting reasoning under the form of an alternative, squeezing the reader, such that no matter what solution he chooses he’ll find himself shown up or contradicting himself. It’s the paradigmatic weapon for trapping the adversary in absurdity …
If it’s glorious as you pretend, why don’t you want me to speak of it? If it’s not glorious, why did you do it?
… One shouldn’t confuse the dilemma with the alternative; in this latter figure, the immediate absurdity of one of the branches is the proof a contrario of the other proposition:
Either Bergson is a great philosopher and thus the concrete is not concrete and life isn’t life, or this is nothing but a charade of the concrete and life and thus M. Bergson is not a great philosopher.
Antimetabole. The antimetabole is another figure of opposition, a sort of chiasmus where the same words are repeated in the order A.B x B.A:
The press of freedom is, as we can see, the inverse of the freedom of the press.
I’ve led a dog’s life, not life’s bitch.
When a test is precise, it’s not interesting, and when it could be interesting, it’s not precise.
… Paradoxism. The paradox isn’t a rhetorical figure — it designates all propositions that go against certain received opinions but that intuition or experience nonetheless make us sense as true. At the “superficial” level of the expression, the paradoxical thought willingly expresses itself in the form of the limit or paradoxism, a statement where the polemicist recalls in contrasting terms the scandal he’s looking to denounce. He must “defamiliarize” the masquerade, present it in a raking light so that its absurdity is visible to the eye:
The populace thinks it’s pursuing liberty best when it’s threatening that of others.
3. FIGURES OF AGGRESSION
A. “Verbal violence.” As we’ve already established, the primitive and minimal form of the pamphlet is invective. The spectacle of scandal and masquerade demand the explosion of anger, the aggressive abreaction, no doubt all the more aggressive the more the pamphleteer feels overrun, threatened and impotent. However, the pamphleteer’s anger, at least that which appears in a composed discourse, can never be the “pure” expression of affect, as the myth associated with the genre would have us believe. The “virility” of the pamphleteer, his intellectual courage, and his violence must be signified and even over-signified, which doesn’t happen without a rhetorical guile that, in many cases, should arouse in the reader a certain unease. Less often an honest man, the outraged witness to scandal, the pamphleteer tends to frequently become a demagogic imprecator, for whom all blows are good ones — the nobility of the cause being a sufficient guarantee.
The Père Duchêne is here the model of this fundamental ambiguity. All political discourse, all ideological assertion is in itself violence. The rhetoric of discourse redoubles this violence in sprinking bougre and foutre amid the text’s demonstrative development. “These vulgarities, Roland Barthes writes, don’t mean anything but they signal. What? An entire revolutionary situation. Thus we have an example of writing whose function isn’t only to communicate or express but also to impose a [world] beyond language, which is at the same time History and the part we play in it. [Le Degré zéro de l'écriture, 1953, p. 7]
What interests us here is the coexistence in the text of argumentation and aggression, of enthymeme ["an informally stated syllogism ... with an unstated assumption"] and insult, or persuasion and intimidation — a fundamental ambiguity. It makes us remember that argument can itself be a form of violence.
In the pages that follow I attempt only to describe some specifical rhetorical facts. One must remember however that these are just some specific elements of this general terrorism — and by terrorism I mean all those means that are non-demonstrative, non-argumentative, looking to discredit the adversary, to disquiet the reader, to discourage controversy, to threaten without refuting. Certainly simple argumentation doesn’t suffice: the writer is always searching for a touching supplement that will guarantee him emotional support, if not the blind and visceral support of his listener. Balanced minds are carried away …
I have several times indicated how certain common types of reasoning carry a necessary terrorist dimension — the argumentum ad verecundiam [appeal to authority], the refutation by disqualification… We’ll see later varied dialogical means with which the polemicist takes hold of adverse speech, hooks it, cuts it down, stuffs it with insulting connotations, and boomerangs it upon his enemies.
Let’s note again that irony and sarcasm are indirect forms of aggression, that humor is destructive and that the satirical gives the double advantage of seeming benign and jovial while it gives in to aggressive passion.
Joking, irony, jesting — these are “political means.” There’s politics as soon as they appear. It becomes a affair of total destruction — which is to say, by way of expedients — without regard to true value. It’s not about opposing a thought with another thought, but rather a thought with a blow or a disorder. [Paul Valéry, Mélanges]
Another advantage of the “bon mot,” in a civilization such as France’s, imbued with a certain image of homme d’esprit, is the elevated degree of transmissibility …
The unrefined image that ideology offers of the “virile” and intrepid pamphleteer reflects this ambiguity that is his lot. It’s the dragon-slaying archangel who willingly changes into a cafe shouter, that one being a warning for this one. The feeling of possessing the truth, what an alibi, sometimes, for hate and bad faith! …
If demonstration is weak, outrageousness and a rush of vulgarity arrive to carry off converts.
Proust is the psychology of a butt hair cut in four. [Crevel, Dali, p.6]
… Provocation, in literature, never appears without a dose of complacency, and if the author shows his satisfaction overly, he risks annoying more than he intimidates:
Never having had the good taste to respect the bon ton, I can admit that, on the whole, the young piss me off. [Sternberg, Lettre, 100]
… B. Stylistic and Logical Discordances. I call “discordant” any statement that passes abrubtly from one code to another, from one logic to another, from one level of language to another, and notably from a “literary” level to a “vulgar” level. This last case is the most common. By transgressing the norm, by resorting to a popular, unrefined expression, polemic seeks to intensify its statement; it makes itself provocative in tone as much as in content. Note that “vulgar” here denotes an affective ornatus as much as a manner of “talking street,” that in printed discourse violence is identified with informal, plebeian, slangy language …
… Logical Discordance. Violation of the logic of connection and comparison, faulty linkages of causes with effects, feigned ignorance of axiological hierarchies, surreptitious movement from one type of determination to another, intentional paralogism. One would try in vain to enumerate all the humorous modes of subverting discursive logic … Rivarol said of Mirabeau: “For money he’s capable of doing anything, even something good.”
C. Polemical Tropology.
a. Polemical use of metaphor. To every ideology there’s a corresponding phraseology composed of fixed images whose expressivity is eroded with use:
The military octopus and the Catholic vampire … [Darien, France, p. 87]
… In an abstract context, distinguishing the three primary tropological mechanisms – synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor — is often difficult … Metaphors that transpose a concrete object into an abstract context produce easier reading and more immediately effective polemic … Reader’s Digest as the “Coca-Cola of literature.” These images insinuate a certain number of ideological connotations that are here condensed: anti-Americanism, the implicit paradigm of “Coca-Cola vs. French wine,” depreciation of Coca-Cola as an insignificant, stimulating, anodyne and syrupy beverage, consumed indefinitely without profit but without risk. The Reader’s Digest-Coca-Cola connection initiates a global critique, obviously derisive were the author to explain it, of “American civilization.” It’s the nature of all ideological discourse to suggest such allusive extensions, to exploit prejudices at the same time that it pretends to exercise its independent judgment. We can see in any case that in polemical writing metaphor can’t be judged solely by criteria of analogical intelligibility. The polemic force of a metaphor is determined by the specific “quality” of the metaphorical medium, whose shocking, disagreeable, “improper” character produces a disturbing effect and on occasion a rupture of tone:
The radical party is the open sore of the Republic [G. Matzneff, Combat, I.X. 1964]
Then there’s Leon Bloy’s singular exclamation commenting on Zola’s interminable feuilleton Fécondité:
Makes you think of a corpse masturbating. [Bloy, Je m'accuse, 62.]
… What matters in analogy is that it substitutes for an abstract proposition; it introduces into the discourse a semantic discordance whose effects of shortcircuiting and intensification take the place of persuasive force …
The continuing metaphor or the prolonged comparison are the most common processes of concretization … This type of development is unfortunately “easy” … The “vigor” of the connecting conceals the absurdity of the point of departure.
Metaphor as underlying argumentation. … Henri Morier uses the word épitrope for that metaphorical figure that serves to justify an opinion:
Catholicism is an iron rod. One cannot reason with an iron rod. (E. Renan)
Very frequently a metaphorical field is constituted through a development that insinuates a banal analogy that takes the place of argumentation …
Warping and reinscribing the metaphors of the adversary’s discourse. Metaphorical remotivation often serves to draw out a banal image with depreciating connotations authorized by semantic contiguity. If in Christian phraseology, the faithful are designated as “the sheep,” “the flock,” “the herd,” the polemicist can speak of their “communal baaing” …
Note: Rhetoric and ideology: the case of metaphor. … the choice of the metaphorical field, far from being determined only by the “laws” of analogy,” can appear as an ideological symptom, and in extreme cases, as a failed act revelatory of imperfectly assumed presuppositions. Certain axiological postulates that betray an archaic mentality only appear in metaphorical displacement. The two most constant examples of recourse to these ideological fields signal a profound component of the thinking of the right — they are the bio-medical metaphors on the one hand and the “sexist” metaphors on the other.
The transformation of an historical phenomenon into a pathogenic agent in the “body” of the nation, it seems to us, always suffices to indicate a reactionary ideology. Already in 1792, Rivarol denounced the “peuple gangréné de mauvaises maximes,” an image that the right has reused consistently through the present: “The family, morals, work, pleasure, it’s all been infected with gangrene” … This biologization of history equally well produces antonymic images, those of “political health,” “political remedies” that must be prescribed, “healthy” talents … One could make the same remarks of the sexist images so abundant in Drumont, Bernanos, and Celine, images tired out by their banality certainly but obligingly repurposed:
France doesn’t have the virility of old.
Our politics is suddenly crumbling under female excitation and abandon.
Compared with the militant, the man from the totalitarian mass plays the role of the female to the male.
b. Polemical synecdoche. Theoreticians of rhetoric don’t seem to have at all studied tropological mechanisms in terms of exchanging abstract words with the same denotative nucleus but with discordant connotations. That is however the most elusive and the most constant procedure of all polemical attack. If one substitutes for “partisan,” “ally” or “defender,” the words “courtier” [thuriféraire, literally "incense carrier"], “faithful,” or “zealot,” one adds by synecdoche to the semes common to these two series the idea of religion and even religious fanaticism …
c. Mythologisms. … any evocation of an historico-mythical model to illuminate a particular behavior … Culture and history are treated as repositories of anecdotal monads whose significance is unequivocal …
d. Wordplay. … by offering a double meaning, by altering a fixed syntagm, such mechanisms cannot be distinguished from oratorical syllepsis and are to be considered as tropes …
e. Double entendre. A kind of wordplay that plays not on a chance encounter of phonemes but on polysemy/homonymy. By syllepsis, the word is employed in two radically different ways at the same time.
France comprises … 36 million subjects, not counting the subjects of miscontent …
f. Neologism. Neologism in pamphlets is exclusively functional. It’s born not of creative reverie within language but aims to stigmatize the adversary and his practices … The “-ard” derivation dominates; one finds it already in “chéquards,” in the era of Panama, and the “quarante-huitards.” There’s also the “-aille” derivatives:
la radicaille (portmanteau word compressing “canaille radicale“)
la blumaille (partisans of Léon Blum) …
D. Insult and its rhetoric… [invective] retains supporters, from Léon Blum to the surrealists — all those whose ideological exasperation makes them reject formal argumentation, suspecting it of tepidness, centrism, and spinelessness. Léon Blum is, of all the modern pamphleteers, the one whose discourse, devoted to prophetic malediction, moves with the greatest ease and the least demonstrative subtlety between the highs of angelic praise and the lows of excremental invective:
These ill-fated servants of Justice and Beauty (…) the most noble beings (…) elevated and proud souls (…) men starved for Beauty and the Infinite …
But, on the same page:
Pig-farmers … purulent idiots (…) countless little jackals (…) the filth that passed for their hearts (…) digestive entrails (…) sty … [see here]
This is what made traditional criticism say that the pamphlet is a matter of temperament. I’d prefer to say that the discourse is charged, not guilelessly, with pantomiming affective intensity — the discharge of “superego-ist” proscriptions (in the psychoanalytic jargon), the transgression of the rules of good conduct and sexual and scatalogical taboos grants the reader a release by proxy [par personne interposé].
a. Refused a name. To insult is first of all to refuse the attacked his “proper” name, to refuse to identify him. Very systematically polemicists of the right … anxious to exclude the adversary from the national community have practiced this type of dishonor — thus the Third Reich soon took it upon itself to “de-baptize” Jews endowed with Aryan names, to subsequently reduce the racial enemy to a number or a generic appelation … One cannot attribute a name to someone who belongs to a lesser humanity. If he’s prepared to, it’s with such masquerade and circumlocution that it fools no one
The Hungarian Jew who responds to the name of Victor Basch …
Such procedures … always anticipate the physical elimination of their object …
b. “Mister,” first name, tutoiement. “Mister,” this title whose omission in oral exchange is an imprudent or anomalous thing, becomes an offense when it’s printed,” J.-L. Borges noted [Fictions, 66]. The title permits in any case the establishment of a certain haughty distance … it can also be employed with irony …
c. Altered name, “etymological” speculations. …
d. Sobriquets. …
e. Blatant insult. … insult as a general rule has two domains of predilection, impossible to separate, that of obscenity or sexual implication, and that of scatology or excremental vocabulary. Polemic calls forth a sublimation of values that entails a representation of baseness identified with bodily functions — sexuality and excretion.
All the more “weak” insults would seem to converge on this pole of attraction … “sale, salope, immonde, goujat, puant, fétide, ignoble, odieux, merdeux, gateux, venimeux” … “castrat, pédéraste, impuissant, avorton” … The old idealist dichotomy is in full swing here: man is a mind that cannot have a sex, a body, or matter without regressing to the animal realm; the grotesque is precisely this odious melange of the human and the bestial …
f. Strings of invective. Insult, which is an explosion of aggressive intensities, tends to sprawl out, to “unspool” in lewd litanies where the pamphleteer exhausts himself in a sort of orgasm of aggression and opprobrium …
Albert Wolff, the Prussian virgin, the ancient weeping willow Laurent Thiboust, the outdated clown Villemessant, the only being whose hand the lowdown Valles ever refused to shake, the infinite eunuch, the frightful obscene monkey of Critique and the purulent Orpheus of blackmail! (etc.)
… The art of this consists of not running out of breath too soon …
E. Scatology. … scatology is a “political weapon” that can paradoxically lay claim to a noble tradition. It’s the paradigmatic means for taking down your adversary “by erasing all distinction of rank and virtue,” as noted by Hodgart who notably evoked “Swift’s fecal obsession.” Criticism little manages to distinguish it from obscenity — in both cases natural functions are rejected by the same taboo. The sublimated mind denies with horror the visceral, the sexual and the excremental; the ignoble other becomes the guarantor of the nobility of the ego.
The double advantage of polemical coprolalia is the power to say the forbidden all the while denying any relation with the excremental. The Freudian school well illuminated this process and N.O. Brown, in Eros and Thanatos, notably studied the “excremental vision” of the world.
What’s striking in pamphlet discourse is this journey between two poles — between demonstrative neutrality, disembodied appeals to principles and laws, and affective expression, unchained violence a discourse where the speaker hides behind enthymatic anonymity in order to reappear through speech of pure intensity, ambiguous discourse full of sublimation, of Verneinung, of resentment, of intermittent violence. Treating your adversary like a “scatophage” [shit-eater], as Baudelaire did for the French, this is apparently to deny your own relationship with excrement [Dr. Laforgue, L'Echec de Baudelaire (Paris, 1931).] Isn’t it obvious moreover that the insulting explosion with which one “covers” the adversary is a verbal substitute for defecation — a manner of separating oneself from the “bad object” …
4. METALOGISM
Following the Rhétorique générale, I’ll define metalogism as any apparent alteration of the logic of discourse, so long as the form of the statement doesn’t correspond to its function in the economy of the text (concession, chleuasme [feigned profession of modesty]), the literal meaning takes on a second indirect or lacunar (allusive) signification, or there appear intentional misinterpretations or paralogisms (antiphrase, metalogic humor). The context of the metalogic statement should permit the reader to reestablish a functionally hidden signification by a process of transformation.
a. Concession. … even when a statement actually concedes a point to an adversary, concession is most often just a tactical maneuver that aims to avoid engaging the enemy on disadvantageous terrain … It presents itself in the general form of “it’s possible that … but …” In an even craftier fashion, one can seem to concede to the adversary more than he even demands, in order to put in doubt the position he’s defending in retaliation.
Maurice Bardèche concedes in his Nuremberg (1947), or feigns to concede, that there was every reason to liquidate without trial Goering and the other Nazi criminals, but he does this to declare equally worthless and obscene the “judicial parody” they were submitted to.
Any concession to an individual can be an attack directed at him — with the secondary benefit for the polemicist of seeming generous and equitable — if I concede to him the complexity of the problems he had to face … I can still accuse him of not having hewn to the same standards that animate my own speech; had he done so, he would have overcome the obstacles. (We find here the ethical connection between truth and courage.) …
Certainly there are good excuses, we duly recognize that …
… The counter-attack often remains ironically implicit. When we read that “there’s obviously nothing to object to in lines this commendable,” we guess that Paul Sérant is insinuating that “these lines” are unfortunately just “commendable” — which doesn’t prevent them from being stupid.
b. Pseudo-retraction.
c. Chleuasme. In this figure the polemicist ostentatiously pretends to accuse himself in order to bring back to the surface his own righteousness and to indirectly attack his adversary:
I most humbly confess that I don’t have the mind to enter into the etherealities of our refined politics.
It’s one of my vices: I love to give to words and to receive from them the least imprecise meaning possible.
… Henri Rochefort, in order to respond to his adversaries, who accused him of enjoying ill-gotten luxuries …
It was a beautiful April morning. I’d just killed my father; two of my children, their feet tied to their bed, twisted with pangs of hunger, while I, happily seated before some silver plates stolen from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, sipped from a holy chalice a modest Moselle wine that I recommend to you …
One frequent mode of chleuasme is that where the author, instead of declaring that the writings attacking him are empty, confused or obscure, pretends to confess his stupidity …
The essence of all these feats of metalogic fiction and antiphrase is the reinforcement of the reader’s complicity, requiring him to participate in the discourse, to guess the hidden meaning.
In the chapter titled “Conclusions,” Angenot writes
1. Bilan et Perspectives.
“I feared that my pen would find itself compromised by descending into an arena full of the basest gladiators.” (Beaumarchais, Réponse….)
I’d like first to remind the reader that throughout this work, I have sought two ends that, I think, can support each other. I wanted to construct a typology of the pamphlet ending in a synthesis of the social function filled by the genre (to which we dedicate the chapters of this conclusion). We’ve also sought, beyond this first purpose, to construct a methodological ensemble, put to the test of the pamphlet corpus, but capable of illuminating the literature of ideas, the modern forms of persuasion and those of the ideologically probable or arguable.
The typological description of pamphlet discourses constitutes but one fragment of a work that remains to be accomplished in this domain of the “literature of ideas.” As we indicated at the beginning, the current state of research in this domain is hardly satisfactory, in particular among French-language researchers. At the risk of repetition, this isn’t just to excuse the lacunae and shortcomings of my project …
3. Genre, Social discourse, Ideologies.
A. The politics of the pamphlet.
In seeking henceforth to reintroduce the social subject into the typological description that I’ve given of the pamphlet genre, I risk presenting the genre as a correlated ensemble of instances of false consciousness. The pamphlet, as a cultural tradition, appears to us as a fixed form and thus can be associated with a certain ideological modus operandi whose reach is larger, with a “latent” ideology, the opposite of what can be critical thought. The paradoxical image that the pamphleteer gives of his mandate, the crepuscular vision of the world that is axiomatic for him, the coexistence established between persuasion and “verbal violence,” the connection between truth-liberty-solitude, the fact that the pamphlet presents itself as a discourse opposed to that of Authority and Power all the while reproducing its features in a terrorist fashion — all these characteristics have the effect of blocking or distorting critical capacity …
[The pamphleteer says:] There’s scandal (triumphant error imposed upon the Powers and travestied in truth). I must denounce it, with no mandate for my action other than scorned truth. Finally, this mandate is at once urgent and futile – it’s already too late to reverse the course of the degradation of values (this is what we have called the “crepuscular” vision of the pamphleteer’s world; III, 4). We’ll now attempt to show the internal logic of the recurring expressions and to interpret them as political practice.
Scandal and truth.
The pamphleteer offers an image of himself of a solitary conscience, courageous if not reckless. The mandate he attributes to himself as defender of truth returns to sublimate the absence of social mandate that he suffers. A social contract has been broken: the pamphleteer is, let’s remember, always in conflict with the subgroup from which he borrows his principles and imperatives, and not at all with his “natural” adversaries. The pamphlet will structure this conflict using a series of shows of strength [coups de force] which permit the ideological agent to give himself a sublimated image of his relation to historical contradictions …
It follows from all this that, if the pamphlet presents itself on the surface as a tragic and pessimistic discourse, if nonetheless affirms and reinstalls a strong positivity, of powerful certitudes, therein lies part of its political efficacy: autonomy of thought, accessibility of truth, the transcendence of this over historical conflict, dialectic of violence, contradiction between success and justice, metaphysical identification of the powers with the usurpation. The pamphleteer communes with his public with resentment and indignation, but he also recuperates essential maxims that permit him to hide the reality of his ideological project.
Violent speech.
I’ve shown how the pamphlet, even outside the insulting abreactions of ad hominem invective, requires violence, verbal violence, argumentative terrorism, warlike conceptions of the clash of ideas and of refutation — not only does the pamphlet conflate persuasion and violence, but it’s essential to the genre to wrap itself in the glory of this and to moralize it …
Innocent violence, pure violence, they suggest to us, because it’s just a reaction brought about by institutional violence. Honest violence because it’s direct, the opposite of propaganda’s indirect, hypocritical, cunning violence, of clandestine persuasion …
Ambiguous admirer of homespun terrorism and later of state terrorism, the pamphleteer makes of terrorism the rhetorical texture of his discourse. The pamphlet is a spectacle; the pamphleteer “makes a scene,” in the hysterical sense of the phrase … Confronted with the violence of the machine, the pamphleteer deploys a verbal violence that should clear his name. To this violence, which is from the beginning completely political, he tends to add a series of mystifications. The pamphlet is a theatrical act, the spectacle of the destruction of false idols …
The spectacle of freedom. …
The power of common sense. Another cultural “myth” is fired by pamphlet practice: that of cognitive humanism, of the uselessness (if not harmfulness) of specialized knowledge. It’s not without demagogy that the polemicist forever reminds you that he isn’t a specialist, not a “professional politician” when speaking of politics, not a professor when pronouncing on aesthetics, nothing but an honest man …
The crepuscular vision of the world. …
B. The pamphleteer as “problematic hero.” …
The novel conceives of individual desire as a radical lack and draws from this state of lack the necessary quest for an authentic world … G. Lukacs saw in Don Quixote the original paradigm of the novel as a specific historical form; the pamphleteer, a knight-errant, nostalgic for a lost golden age amid a degraded society, great destroyer of windmills, has frequently been referred to, in derision and in elogy, as a “Don Quixote” ready to put his disinterested pen in the service of noble causes …
C. Genre and ideological polarization: pamphlets “of the right”, pamphlets “of the left” …
D. The pamphleteer, the intellectual …
The pamphlet, symptom of the contradictions of the intellectual in modern society and the faux overcoming of these, appears as a simulation of an attitude of radical spirit, a travesty of analytical work in confusion and resentment. Or rather it must be said one last time that the “pure pamphlet” doesn’t exist — the subjectively true indignation of the polemicist can lead him to varying degrees of lucidity, but the contradictory conditions of his intellectual status, the varying modes of his alienation, the inability to survive rationally in the middle of the contradiction, produce a blockage of critical work of which the “pamphlet” type is the result. To paraphrase Cioran, I’d say that the pamphlet takes root when “the passage from logic to epilepsy” is consummated by will-to-power, Manichaeism, and need alienated from legitimacy [lorsque se consomme "le passage de la logique à l'épilepsie," dans la volonté de puissance, le manichéisme, et le besoin aliéné de légitimité.].
[my rough translation]
‘Polemic: Critical or Uncritical’
24 July 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment
When did critical reading, criticism, and critique begin to be discussed? Is there such a thing as “uncritical reading”? Hypercritical reading? (Viewing?) Is this (mere) entertainment?
Is there room in scholarship for discussion of “character”? Amanda Anderson:
We have become accustomed to hearing pragmatists called smug, or rationalists depicted as defensive and uptight. The hermeneut of suspicion is paranoid; the p.c. brigade oppressively pious … such ascriptions often seem not to be an integral part of the formal argument; indeed, it typically remains unclear, when they appear, whether they are gratuitous or crucially significant, descriptive flourish or evaluative death blow. On the one hand, as terms of critique, such statements seem to dismiss without examining, to imply deficient psychology rather than misguided argument. On the other hand, such judgments are assumed to matter, to need saying, to carry some vital explanatory force.
This is obviously related to the debate over ad-hominem argument. [Perhaps this was a relative non-issue in classical times, because of the “Aristotelian conception of ethos as character, which stresses the elements of self-cultivation and confirmed habit that can be said to shape and define any successfully realized ethical practice.”]
“Can Polemic be Ethical?” Jonathan Crewe:
Polemic has a bad name in the humanities academy … polemic disrupts the shared endeavors of the academy and preempts the civil or technical discourses of professionalism; polemic is a shortcut to professional recognition … polemic is a cheap, often trivial, substitute for real intellectual production; polemic belongs to the sphere of public journalism … polemic caters to the unseemly pleasures of cruelty and malice; polemic tends to become compulsive and consuming … During the past three decades or more — say the post-1960s decades — a trend to devalue, disavow, or, on occasion, disingenuously deny polemic has intensified in the academy … post-1960s demands for civility, professional respect, negotiation, and collective endeavor have prevailed to a marked degree over forms of unbridled militancy … The widespread embrace of “critique” as the term defining our endeavors is revealing: however radical critique may aspire to be, its philosophical antecedents temper aggressivity and presuppose some level of respectful engagement with, or even continuing dependence on, the object of critique … I will suggest that the question of polemic is ultimately and disturbingly inseparable from that of belligerence or violence more broadly: from their effects; from their reasons or lack of reason; from their redemptive potentialities or lack of such potentialities (by which I mean both their wished-for redeeming power or capacity to be redeemed); from their implicating troublesomeness, even when intellectual justification is claimed … In what, then, does the troublesomeness consist? An important part of the answer is suggested by the derivation of the term “polemic” from Greek polemos, polemikos (war, warlike). If, in fact, polemic has become increasingly discredited in the academy during the past thirty years, is it just a coincidence that the trend coincided with a broader academic rejection of violence in the post-colonial, post-Vietnam era … the very issue Foucault wishes us to take seriously, namely the unsettling continuity, despite all buffering or transforming decorums, between verbal aggression and annihilating warfare …
The polemicist proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game consists not of recognizing the person as a subject having a right to speak but of abolishing him, as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue.
… Foucault’s statement, by separating polemic from ethically sanctioned, intellectual discourse—by making polemic, in effect, the Other of such discourse—at once relegates polemic to a lawless outside and paradoxically pre-empts it as an inferior genre in which intellectual aggression, ipso facto unprincipled whatever its excuses, can be cordoned off, at least in principle. That double move of expulsion and tacit enclosure … is the crucial one for a radically anti-polemical ethic. It not only constitutes such an ethic as one of non-violence, but precludes any further discussion of what one might call the tempering, regulating, or mediating sub-genres and decorums of polemic … [For Foucault,] polemic has no constitutive role in intellectual history, or in bringing about intellectual change. Is legitimate intellectual history then also a history of non-violence? Can we just detach ourselves from the apparent fertility and even pleasure as well as the implicating troublesomeness of polemic? How, by the same token, are we to negotiate between the demands of an ethical universal and those of historical understanding[?] … The logic of Foucault’s own arguments regarding the double effect, both oppressive and productive, of disciplinary violence might suggest the need for a more complex view …
[Books by Foucault and Shuger] have what might be called the meta-historical effect of placing ‘madness,’ passion, sacrifice, and ‘redemptive’ violence at a safe remove. Those unassimilable intensities are relegated, not wholly without regret, to diminished worlds within or worlds apart, but they are no longer located in the world in which, as Shuger puts, persons are [now] at home … Insofar as we are repeatedly blindsided by violence and passion, specifically including those animating warfare, it is partly because our historicizations convince us that these dangerous intensities do not belong to our world, or because we are ethically convinced that they shouldn’t …
The options of preemptively cordoning polemic off as a genre, or disengaging, or of situation oneself in a position or history of non-violence seem more conducive to denial and disavowal than ethical efficacy. I would therefore suggest that ethical considerations can most profitably come into play … in the somewhat disappointing guise of ethics as usual, in which ordinary questions of necessity, justification, harm, and the rights of others have to be negotiated … it is far from true, as is sometimes apparently supposed, that the participatory acknowledgment of aggression preempts the ethical; on the contrary, it can help to motivate an assumption of responsibility for verbal contention that will be extremely chary of announcing itself as an ethic of non-violence or non-involvement. Perhaps that is the only way in which polemic can aspire to be ethical.
Louis Menand:
… polemic is a genre defined more by its cultural function than by its formal elements … a polemic is likely to be the product of what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. Several features we would expect to find in a polemic … are, first, the sense that the polemic is being used as a weapon in a struggle for primacy in a particular field of endeavor, and, just as crucial, the sense of a surprise attack … If Kael had written an unmodulated attack on Bosley Crowther, the piece might have been read with pleasure by her admirers, but it would have been ignored by everyone else … The polemic announces a break where no one had suspected a fissure … Kael’s polemic gave her an instant identity, and saved her from being lumped in with Sarris conventional lists of serious film critics: she was, eternally, the not-Sarris. Second, the polemic, must rest on a substratum of, as it were, shifting sociological plates–political, institutional, demographic, even geopolitical–none of which it needs to address or even to acknowledge … It is precisely its triviality that makes the polemic a polemic, and not a reconsideration, or an editorial, or a scholarly intervention. There needs to be something scandalous, a scorched-earth quality, as well as something personal and petty, to distinguish the polemic from these ordinary markers of cultural change … Third, the writer who tries to live by the polemic must be prepared to die by the polemic. A failed polemic is a self-inflicted wound, often a mortal one; as Emerson said, when you shoot at a king, you must kill him. The great polemicist is, after all, taking on the conventional wisdom, and must bank on changes in the larger culture no one, including the polemicist, can entirely see.
[Critics accused Delacroix, Courbet and Manet of seeking controversy for the mere sake of publicity, fame and career advancement. But there were so many surer paths to advancement, so many failed controversialists. Likewise, polemical critics cannot be necessarily be imputed with mere pandering to an entertainment hungry readership.]
Morini on Invective
19 July 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment
In her preface to L’invective: Histoire, formes, stratégies (Saint-Etienne: Université de Saint-Etienne, 2006), Agnès Morini writes:
All the contributors to the colloquium whose proceedings we’re publishing here ran up against the same paradoxical reality: namely, the great bibliographical poverty surrounding this “genre of discourse designated as invective [...] without ever finding attached to this term a clear definition of the rhetorical object it corresponds to” …
First of all, there resulted an abundant harvest of rhetorical figures and modalities: those of hyperbole, escalation and all forms of exaggeration, those of denigration and blame, humiliation and degradation (animal, often…), of grotesque or obscene physical representation, indignation and anger, those of derision, ridicule, irony, paradox, and overthrow…
It’s again apparent that invective, inextricably linked to apostrophe on the one hand and calling witness on the other, bears the stigmas of orality and the recurring signs of theatricality itself. Stamped with the seal of dialogism, it’s even sometimes clearly inscribed in a game of “botta e risposta” …
In all cases, it’s clear that invective establishes a polemical relation with a third party, intra- or extra-textual, real or fictive — and the game sometimes places the author in the position of the target, like Palazzeschi, lending the indignation and the disapprobation that invective directs toward him to he who sees it or reads it…–, a third in any case blamed for himself and/or what he represents: religious, political, ideological or even moral, cultural and literary deviance. The goal of the attacker is thus always denunciative. He is, wrong or right, the one who places himself in possession of a Truth — witness the triple dimension, enthymatic, doxological, and agonistic, of …
In the name of the holy anger that fathers all lesson-givers, reminding us by the way of the roots of invective in anathema and prophetic speech, they fashion it into a weapon of war against the impious and the unfaithful — we’ll encounter several times in these works the terms “deadly speech,” “warlike,” “violent,” “destructive” … One can go so far as to say that the legitimacy of the invective-bearer and his means result from a “legitimate attack” deserving a legitimate defense. Against the other’s lies, calumny, and bad faith, insult literally justifies itself: according to your location at one end or the other of the invective, you are thus on the good or the bad side, as determined by the invector, because he claims to be the only one justly invested with divine right, one way or another: his speech is sacred … Now, let’s remember, it’s with the christian authors of the 4th century, St. Augustine and Jerome in particular, that the word invectio appears, enshrining the birth of invective, if we leave it to Todorov as to the conjoined birth of genres and reflection on genres. All invective assumes, explicitly or not, a sovereign auctoritas, with it being understood that in certain cases our authors somewhat take themselves to be gods.
We should still pay heed to the intention of the intensity of the language, because it emerges from the various texts studied that invective is deployed to varying degrees: from overt, provocative, menacing violence, to devious persiflage and “syrupy” protestation … Moreover, in its most virulent forms — on many occasions we encounter the rhetoric of “escalation,” “exaggeration” and “excess” — as in its most contained, it reveals its proper limits: silence or reticence (Marino, Fischiata XLVII) and at the other extreme, hyperbole, where we find obscene language of course. No doubt it’s in this context that invective has been able to be interpreted as the “weapon of the weak” …
You’ll find in each of the contributions to this volume a distinct connection between invective and the identity question: it never effectively escapes from the foundation and even refoundational dichotomy between destruction (of the adversary, it goes without saying) and construction or reconstruction (of oneself). Insulting and lethal for the person or thing under attack, invective nonetheless projects the invector into a time following his crusade, into a space of potential reconstruction — of oneself, of one’s image, of the “faith” being defended (think of the representative example of Verdian opera, where invective coincides with the highest affirmation of self). And it’s no doubt one of the most stimulating — and least expected — reflections that emerged from our colloquium’s debates, namely that of invective as an (often exorcising) overcoming of denigration [to arrive at] a sort of refertilizing … Making a tabula rasa of one’s enemy, burning all bridges with him, he who invects rebuilds himself, regains — one speaks of “war booty” — an image of oneself expunged of the other. From this perspective, one easily sees that it matters little that the image in question be “true”: its truth … can obviously be nothing but a borrowed truth, nonetheless brandished with virulence in the service of what one would live to have believed about oneself. Consequently, invective can be nothing but an exercise in style, and a mask. Marino, the destroyer of Church enemies in his Sferza and the ardent accuser of “vizio nefando” proves, if it was necessary, that invective is an art. An art of which we can only demand that which it can give — an artis factum! This is what determines, according to us, the question of the invector’s sincereity …
… the notion of “modalità invettivale” or “invective register” … is by far the most efficiently for showing how invective on the one hand pre-exists the word itself and its genre (see Petrarchian invective), and on the other hand can be identified in varying literary forms … To put it differently, each of the invectives considered by the authors of these articles constitutes a “incarnazione storica del modo ‘agonique’.” We can thus accept without embarassment that those of Dante, Cavour and Malaparte belong to the same differently reincarnated “register.” In poetry or in prose, our invective, if it is a “modality,” because it transcends genres, can thus ” ‘irrigarli’ o ‘fecondarli’ o ‘contaminarli’ tutti,” taking on the colors of parody, satire, pamphlet and sermon, and then, without renouncing its influences of all kinds, christian or profane — the Bible and the Holy Writings as well as the Latin epideictic oratory …
[my rough translation]
Zola, Mes Haines
18 July 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment
Here is a piece Zola published in May 1866 in Le Figaro, which became the preface to his 1866 collection Mes Haines, tr. Palomba Paves-Yashinsky and Jack Yashinsky, My Hatreds (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1991), pp. ix-xiv:
Hate is holy. It is the indignation of strong and determined spirits, the militant disdain of those angered by mediocrity and stupidity. To hate is to love, to feel one’s soul warm and generous; it is to live well on the scorn of shameful and foolish things.
Hate is confrontational. Hate renders justice. Hate is ennobling.
I have felt younger and more courageous after each one of my revolts against the platitudes of my time. I have made pride and hate my two companions. I have taken pleasure in isolating myself, and in my isolation, hating all that violates measure and truth. If I am worth anything today, it is because I stand alone and because I know how to hate.
I hate empty and uncreative people; they offend me. They have heated my bile and shattered my nerves. I know of nothing more irritating than these bores who go waddling about on their two feet like wide-eyed geese with gaping beaks. I have not been able to take two steps in my life without meeting three imbeciles, and that is why I am sad. The highway of life is full of them; the masses are made up of fools who stop you on your way in order to drool their mediocrity in your face. They walk, they speak, and their whole person, gestures and voice, offend me to the point where I prefer, as did Stendhal, a scallywag to an idiot. I ask, what can we do with these people? They impede our progress as we struggle forward in these embattled times. Emerging from the old world, we hasten toward the new. They hang onto our arms, they hurl themselves between our legs with inane laughter and absurd maxims; they render our path slippery and difficult. We shake ourselves in vain; they press upon us, stifle us, chain themselves to us. What then? We are living in a time when railroads and telegraphy carry us away, body and soul, to the infinite, to the absolute, to a serious and unsettled age in which the human mind is giving birth to a new truth; and still there are empty and stupid men who deny the present, who wallow in the constricting, nauseating, stagnant pool of their own banality. Horizons are expanding, light rises and fills the sky while they sink with pleasure into the tepid slime where they ruminate with retarded voluptuousness. They cover their owls’ eyes which cannot stand the light; they scream that they are being disturbed and that they can no longer lead the easy life, feeding like cattle on grain which they find in the trough of general stupidity. Give us lunatics, we will make something of them. Lunatics think; each one of them has had his intelligence strained to the breaking point by an idea; they are sick at mind and heart, poor souls, yet full of life and strength. I want to listen to them, for I keep hoping that in the chaos of their thoughts a supreme truth will gleam one day. But, for the love of God, let us kill the fools and the mediocre, the uncreative and the imbeciles; let there be laws which get rid of these people who, because of their blindness, deny the light of day. It is time for courageous and energetic men to have their 93: the world is tired of the insolent reign of mediocre men, they must be hurled en masse into la place de Grève.
I hate them.
—
I hate men who are penned in by a personal idea, who travel in herds, bunched together with eyes lowered toward the ground in order not to see the brightness of the sky. Each herd has its god, its fetish on whose altar it sacrifices great human truth. There are several hundred of them in Paris, twenty to thirty in each district; they each have a tribune from whose heights they solemnly harangue the masses. They go their common little way, walking gravely, platitudinously emitting desperate cries from the moment their puerile fanaticism is disturbed. My friends, poets and novelists, scholars and the simply curious, all of you who know them and who have gone to knock at the door of these grave people who shut themselves away in order to contemplate their navel, dare to declare with me, loudly in order that the masses hear you, that like frightened, intolerant sextons, they have thrown you out of their little church. Tell how they have mocked you for your inexperience — experience being to deny all truth which does not grow from their errors. Recount the story of your first piece of criticism, when you came to them with your convincing and honest prose only to come up against the following comment: “You praise the talent of a man who, in our opinion, is untalented, and therefore has talent for no one.” What a beautiful spectacle their equitable, intelligent Paris offers us! There is in heaven or in hell, on a truly distant star, a unique and absolute truth which governs the world while pushing us toward the future. But here on earth there are a hundred conflicting truths which shatter each other, a hundred schools of thought which revile one another, a hundred bleating herds which refuse to advance. Some lament a past which can never return, others dream of a future which will never come to pass; those who think about the present speak of it as though it were eternal. Each religion has its priests, each priest has his blind followers and his eunuchs. No thought is given to reality; a banal civil war, an urchins’ skirmish in which they machine gun one another with snowballs, an immense farce whose past and future, whose lies and stupid acts, whose God and men become servile, grotesque puppets. I ask, where are the free men who live above pettiness, whose thoughts are not contained in the narrow circle of a dogma, and who walk openly toward the light with no fear of going back on their word tomorrow, caring only for justice and truth? Where are those men who are not sworn members of a claque, who do not applaud on command from their leader, God or the prince, the masses or the aristocracy? Where are those men who live alone, far from the common herd, who welcome all great things, who scorn coteries and love free thought? When those men speak, the gravely stupid become angry and overwhelm them by their numbers; then they settle back to their ruminating, they are solemn, among themselves they triumphantly prove to each other that they are imbeciles.
I hate them.
—
I hate the sickly scoffers, the petty young men who snicker, not being able to imitate the weighty seriousness of their papas. There are outbursts of laughter more meaningless than diplomatic silences. In this anxious age, we have an anguished, nervous gaiety which irritates me painfully, akin to the sound of a file being drawn across the teeth of a saw. Ah! be still all of you who undertake to entertain the public, you no longer know how to laugh; your bitter laughter sets one’s teeth on edge. Your jokes are painful; your delicate bearing has the grace of poses struck by disjointed puppets; your uncertain leaps are grotesque somersaults ending in pitiful pratfalls. Are you aware that we mean what we are saying? Just look, you yourselves are weeping. What is the use of straining, of whipping up enthusiasm for pseudo humor which in reality is morbid…? We did not used to laugh like that in the days when we could still laugh. Nowadays, joy is a spasm, gaiety an unnerving madness. Our humorists, those who are reputedly gay, are gloomy fellows who take in hand any story, any man, and squeeze them until they burst; they are like spoiled children whose greatest pleasure lies in breaking the toys with which they play. Our mirthful moments are reflected in people who experience side splitting laughter when they see a passerby fall and break a limb. We laugh about everything even when there is not the slightest reason to do so. We are therefore a lighthearted people; we laugh at our great men and at our villains, at God and at the devil, at others and at ourselves. In Paris, there is an entire army which keeps public hilarity at a high pitch; the farce lies in being as stupidly gay as others are solemnly stupid. As for me, I regret that there are so many witty men and so few who are truthful and just. Each time I see an honest fellow being humorous simply to entertain the public, I feel sorry for him, I regret that he lacks the means to exist without writing, without being indecently humorous. But I have no sympathy for those who exhibit only laughter and who have no tears. I hate them.
—
I hate the fools who feign disdain, the uncreative who cry out that our art and our literature are dead and dying. They have the most vacuous brains, the most arid hearts; they are buried in the past; they scornfully leaf through living works which bear the imprint of our time only to declare them valueless and narrow. As for me, I see differently, I have little concern for beauty or perfection. I scorn the grandeur of the past; I am concerned only with life, with confrontation, with ardor. I am comfortable with my generation. It seems to me that the artist cannot wish for a different milieu, a different era. Masters and schools no longer exist. We live in an age of anarchy and each one of us is a rebel who thinks for himself, who creates and fights for himself. The hour is breathless and full of anxiety; we are waiting for those who will strike the most vigorously and the most accurately, whose fists will be powerful enough to still the others’ mouths; and each new fighter will harbor a vague hope of being tomorrow’s dictator, a tyrant. And then, what vast horizons! How strongly we feel the truths of the future fermenting within us! If we stammer, it is because we have too many things to say. We are on the threshold of a century of science and truth, and we totter momentarily, like drunken men, when faced by the blinding light rising before us. But we are working, we are preparing the task of our sons, we are at the hour of demolition in which plaster dust fills the air and ruins fall crashing. Tomorrow the edifice will be rebuilt. We will have had the burning joys, the bittersweet anguish of childbirth; we will have discovered the impassioned works, the unfettered cries of truth, all the vices and all the virtues of the great ages in their cradle. Let the blind ones deny our efforts, let them be interpreted as the last spasms of our dying struggles; it does not matter since these struggles are the first faltering cries of birth. They are the blind ones.
I hate them.
—
I hate the bigots who dictate to us, the pedants and the bores who reject life. I am for the free demonstrations of human genius. I believe in a continuous series of human expressions, in an endless gallery of tableaux vivants, and I regret not being able to live forever in order to be a spectator at the eternal comedy with a thousand different acts. I am but a curious man. The fools who dare not look ahead, look back. They fashion the present on rules from the past, and they want the future, its men and its works, to be modelled on bygone times. The days will come to be what they choose to be, and each one of them will bring forth a new idea, a new art, a new literature. So many societies, with so many different works, and the societies will evolve eternally. But the impotent have no wish to push back the limits; they have drawn up the list of works already produced and have thus obtained a relative truth which they take as absolute. Do not create, imitate! And this is why I hate stupidly grave people and stupidly cheerful people, artists and critics who ignorantly want to turn yesterday’s truth into today’s truth. They do not understand that we are moving and the scenery is changing.
I hate them.
—
And now you know what my loves are, my beautiful loves of youth.
Paris, 1866
“What’s Good About Bad Reviews?”
9 July 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
[According to this source, Joan Acocella's piece below "originally appeared in the now-defunct Dance Ink in the spring of 1992."]
Criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic. The artist who accounts for my disparagement by alleging personal animosity on my part is quite right: when people do less than their best, and do that less at once badly and self-complacently, I hate them, loathe them, detest them, long to tear them limb from limb and strew them in gobbets about the stage. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Whenever political sentiment runs high, the idea of a free criticism is called into question. That is the situation right now. Multiculturalists have pointed out that esthetic values are culture-bound. Therefore (it is said) critics, in order to avoid unfairness to things outside their conditioning history, should write a purely descriptive criticism, devoid of judgment. The censorship controversy has added its fuel to this fire. Here the argument is that all art is endangered; therefore the critic who says bad things about any art work, particularly any experimental or controversial art work, is merely aiding the enemy.
But such arguments will not serve the cause of art. All they will do is wall art off from any living relation to the public — isolate it in a little bubble of noli me tangere sanctity beyond the reach of common love or common understanding. (Try to justify public funding once that happens.) Furthermore, such an approach traps the critic in a lie. However relativist we may be in our theories, we are absolutist in our actions. The anthropologist who knows that values regarding interpersonal aggression are culturally relative nevertheless comes home from work and tells the children to stop hitting each other. Critics who know that esthetic values are culturally relative nevertheless still have a better time at some performances than at others, and to lie to the public on this matter is irresponsible.
It is also a misrepresentation of the very nature of esthetic experience. A criticism that emulates the objectivity of science, has been attempted before–for example, by the French positivists of the nineteenth century. What they tried to do with literature was simply to state the nature of each novel or poem, describe the conditions that gave rise to it, and classify it according to type, just as scientists of the time were classifying living beings according to genus and species. The result was a very boring criticism that nobody reads anymore. It was also a criticism that was untrue to what people actually feel in the face of art. People do not go to the theater as scientists go to the microscope, studying every detail before them, weighing their observations dispassionately. On the contrary, they go to the theater full of hope, like dogs to dinner, and their experience of what they see there is naturally selective, subjective, and evaluative. If the thing moves them, it does so in flashes of illumination, memory, and association. Whole parts they forget, in favor of other parts. By the next morning they may have forgotten the whole thing except for certain images, which they can’t forget for days. They have had a big experience. That reaction in the viewer is what most artists seek. So a purely descriptive criticism is contrary not only to the audience’s experience but to the artist’s goal.
Actually, what this kind of criticism amounts to is the imposition of a specifically Western mental habit, scientific method, on an experience that is probably in large measure universal. Science is an excellent thing, but it is a point of view that is only a few centuries old and that, in terms of general acceptance, is limited to a very small portion of the globe. Nothing could be more Eurocentric than the idea of value-free experience, let alone a value- free artistic experience.
But if we allow ourselves to write a value-based criticism, will this lead us to denigrate styles of art different from the ones we grew up with? I don’t know what kinds of art other people grew up with, but my parents’ idea of music was My Fair Lady. Their idea of theater was Gilbert and Sullivan. Their idea of dance was no idea — they didn’t go to dance. My values are different. The people who worry about culture-bound criticism seem to me to have a very poor idea of people’s ability to learn. Art that people see a lot of they generally come to like.
There is therefore little need to worry about the fate of “black dance,” for example. It is everywhere around us. The Alvin Ailey company has been seen by more people than any other dance company in the world. And African lessons about dancing-syncopation, weight, hips–have so infiltrated “white dance,” both ballet and modern, that it is really wrong to speak of mainstream American dance forms as Euro-American. They are EuroAfroAmerican. (Some of them are AfroEuro-American.) In consequence, it is no stretch for American critics to appreciate “black dance.” That is what they grew up with, insofar as they grew up with dance. And because they grew up with this, the purer African-American forms, such as tap dance, look more familiar to them than, for example, most contemporary European modem dance. The formalist esthetics of most American dance critics — the idea that dance is a story of rhythm and phrasing, like music — is based in part on their familiarity with the deep musicality of African-American dance. Compared to that, the essentially literary character of European dance, its reliance on the logic of language rather than the logic of music, looks like something from Mars. Maguy Marin’s work looks as much like dance to me as it would, I think, to the average Senegalese. That is, not much. The problem for the American dance critic today is not to understand Africa, or Afro-America. It is to understand Europe.
Of course, if we allow ourselves to have values, certain things will seem strange to us. Take, for example, the Dancers of the Court of Yogyakarta, which toured the United States in 1990. These Javanese dancers definitely looked exotic to me–beautiful and glamorous in a foreign way. The exquisite flowering of the hands, the minutely calculated pivot of the feet, the way the dancers pulled little cloths out from under their belts and batted them around delicately and then stuffed them back under their belts–what is this to me, on one viewing? Something wonderful, but not something I know a lot about. And neither did most of the critics who wrote about these dancers know much about their dancing. Hence the Javanese dancers got the kind of reviews that we normally accord to the exotic: genteel praise, admiring and distanced.
Fine. The multiculturalist argument is based on the belief that what people regard as foreign they naturally hate, or at least try to exclude. I know there is a great deal of historical evidence for this belief, but it need not be forever true. We don’t have to be primitive all our lives. Indeed, our only hope, now that different peoples are so much thrown together, is in learning to regard what is foreign to us as nevertheless having a right to exist. We cannot wipe out the experience of foreignness, and to think that we can is a species of Western arrogance. Eventually, perhaps, the operations of the global village will render all peoples’ experience uniform, but not in our lifetime. So for the moment we are different, and we have to learn to act about that in a polite and honest way.
But the dancing that looks truly foreign to the reviewers is not what gets the bad reviews. We save our bad reviews for our homegrown products. And plenty of them deserve bad reviews. just as there are dogs that bite and restaurants that give you indigestion, there are dances that bore you to death. For the critic to say otherwise is not only to tell a lie but to place him/herself in a relation of bad faith to the public, the very people critics are supposed to be serving. This is a particularly urgent matter when it comes to experimental dance–dance that is hard to understand or that takes on taboo subject matter or looks strange or ugly by conventional standards. The public already believes that this work is a protected industry, shielded and coddled by snobbish people who don’t understand it any better than they do but who support it because to do so makes them feel stylish. Surely, in the face of this public skepticism, we should be especially scrupulous in saying what is good and bad in experimental art, to show the public that we are actually looking at it, not just supporting it. If all artists who pull their pants down or shoot themselves as part of their art get good reviews, then the public will conclude, rightly, that artistic value is no longer the question.
Aside from the fact that they tell what is often the truth, or the truth for that reviewer, bad reviews have a secondary virtue: they lay bare the critic’s values. In the critic’s mind, to some extent, bad art is all alike, and every good piece of art is good in its own way. The experience of bad art and the experience of good art are not comparable experiences. When a dance seems good to us, that means it lives for us, taking on a kind of autonomy and unmanageability similar to what other human beings have in our eyes. To explain such a work takes all our mental powers, all our disinterestedness, for we are trying to show what it is, separate from ourselves. But when a dance seems bad to us, that means it has not come alive for us–literally not come into being–and therefore has never acquired a kind of reality that we can describe with any sincerity. So we are thrown back on ourselves, on the task of enumerating the values that we hold and that this work fell short of. When we write about good art, we write about the art; when we write about bad art, we write about ourselves. This is why bad reviews are easier to write.
The more personal character of bad reviews can be attested by anyone who has ever gotten one. What do artists think upon receiving bad reviews? That the critics didn’t “get it,” that they just went off on their own track. And that is exactly right, though the critics in question may have tried with all their might and, having failed, went off on their own track only in order to explain the failure.
What this means, however, is that in negative reviews the critic’s values are revealed with a kind of naked clarity that one never finds in positive reviews. When I look back on bad reviews that I have written, I am surprised that I was able to make them sufficiently interesting to get past the editor, for the complaints are always the same. I think I have four: that the work was oversimple, that it didn’t have anything to say, that it was sentimental, or that it was pretentious. Basically, that is just a portrait of my values and, I think, of many critics’ values-that art should be reasonably complex, that it should have something to say, et cetera. It is useful to have such portraits. Readers can find out from them who the critic is and whether they want to pay attention to him or her.
But this compensation is not the only thing a reader can get from a bad review. At their best, negative reviews can tell us what good art is and reassure us that it exists–that we had it before and we’ll have it again. Indeed, paradoxically, they do this almost more feelingly than good reviews, for they are on surer, Platonic ground, speaking about good art in the abstract rather than in the more confusing particular. George Bernard Shaw, whose fierce words were quoted at the opening of this essay, wrote many good bad reviews of this kind in the course of his career as a music critic. Emboldened by a thorough knowledge and a fiery love of his subject, Shaw can tell you, in the course of condemning a singer or conductor to eternal torment, exactly how Handel should be played or how Don Giovanni should be sung. He tells you with joy, vividness, and precision. You can hear the trumpets; you can hear the tremolo in the strings; you can hear the voices come in–the sopranos, the altos. He practically sings it for you. The luckless musicians whose concert Shaw attended may fall, but Handel rises resplendent. Shaw gives him to you again. This is why W. H. Auden called Shaw “probably the best music critic who ever lived.”
Edwin Denby often performed the same service in dance. Though he was a much sweeter-tempered man than Shaw, he could be sharp. When he was, he made it instantly clear what great dance was. Here is Denby writing in 1939 about something that bothers him in certain modern dance troupes: “They don’t … look as if they enjoyed dancing. We all know that expression of sobriety they wear not only on their face but on their body, too. It covers a group of them like an unattractive army blanket.” Indeed, we all do know that expression of modern-dance sobriety, but part of the reason we know it is that Denby told us, and threw in the army blanket too, thus teaching us to place modesty and joy among performance values.
This is the ideal bad review. The critic is showing you what he loves, and offering it up for you to love. That a little nastiness is involved is no crime. Self-righteous performing manners deserve a little nastiness, and so do a number of other things. If criticism tries to avoid meanness altogether, it simply becomes warm mush-boring, dishonest, and prissy. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. That’s what people feel, perhaps, when they’re on drugs or when they take the veil. Otherwise, they like some things better than others and would do well to say so.
[Update: I tracked down the original -- it's spring 1992 Dance Ink vol 3, no. 1, pp. 35-37 -- and I fixed a few typos in the text. I also tracked down the Shaw quote, which should begin "...a criticism" and should end "stage or platform." -- it's from his review of "Captain Thérèse" in The World, 3 September 1890. See the 1981 collection Shaw's Music, v. II, pp. 164-170. Shaw, by the way, goes on to parenthetically profess to having fantasized about killing conductors and artists.]
[Second update: I found an article by Barnett Newman in the Summer 1968 Artnews, “For Impassioned Criticism,” in which “scientific” criticism comes under similar blame:
Baudelaire has said that criticism should be partial, passionate, political. But, for the most part, these qualities are disappearing in present-day criticism. Today, criticism is becoming neutral, dispassionate, “scientific.” It is political only among these art critics themselves, in the eagerness to cater to, rather than to destroy, the bourgeoisie … That writer who practices dispassionate, “scientific,” objective, descriptive, analytical, formal criticism openly declares that he is eliminating himself from his own act, that it is his intention to hide, that the work of art is a thing out there, unrelated to him … Sitting on Olympus, the critic comes down from his mountain again and again to explain, to teach, but never to say … The “scientific” art critics … in the name of “method,” does not hesitate to use every crude weapon to kill the in-vivo quality of a work of art. And instead of isolating its uniqueness, he tears it to shreds …
To write passionately, the critic must invent, or, to use a more accurate word, he must create his criticism so that it reveals a work of art, through the critic’s feelings. But more than that, it reveals the critic himself. In that sense, art criticism becomes a parallel work of art. As Baudelaire said, “The best account of the picture may be a sonnet or an elegy.” If it cannot be a poem, let the criticism at least be poetic.
“Invective” by Desmond McCarthy
9 July 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment
“THE late Lord Morley, when he was editing the Pall Mall, was amused by a young journalist who, when asked his particular line, replied `Invective.’ `Invective? May I ask against what?’ `Oh … anything—general invective.’ One recognizes that impartial faculty for getting angry. It can produce sneers, tropes, tremendous metaphors; out of it some pages of memorable prose have been written. Such anger is delicious to experience, for it is accompanied by a glowing sense of superiority, and it can be an immense stimulus to composition. But it can only be cultivated at the sacrifice of some spiritual honesty: that is the price which must be paid. Success depends upon rapidly draining into general channels the contents of your private reservoir of resentments, vainglory, thwarted ambitions, wrongs and grudges. Such emotions are ductile. It is particularly easy to make; for instance, a little current of envy turn furiously the mills of righteous indignation. But then the writer must be unconscious of the sources of this energy. Hence the necessity of a certain dishonesty or lack of self-awareness which, whether inborn or acquired, may sooner or later make a fool of the specialist in invective.
Again, invective which has become a habit is apt, like charm, to lose its virtue, for both depend for their effectiveness on spontaneity. Personal charm which has been extravagantly used for personal ends, from winning hearts to securing corner seats in railway carriages, in time grows blowsy. It gradually loses the brave delicacy and sweet candour proper to it, though its possessor may be quite unaware that this is happening. In the same way the adept at invective does not notice when something has crept into his style which makes it ineffective. His attack may still amuse, even impress the detached reader, but it has become incapable of giving pain to the victim, which is its proper end. A self-delighting exuberance in animosity, a too obvious contentment in the sleek sarcastic phrase, actually bring balm to the wounds which deadly statements ought to inflict. The victim is relieved by observing that the writer is licking the chops of his own malice, and executing a war dance instead of thrusting at the vitals of his enemy.
Swinburne was master of a glorious exuberant invective, but I doubt if his fiercest tirades gave much pain even to Dr Furnivall or Robert Buchanan. The first effect of his `Under the Microscope’ is to convince the reader that it must have been immense fun to write it; he is sure that the author, after giving rein to his emotions, must have enjoyed a sunset calm of mind. This, of course, is fatal to the proper purpose of invective.”
[By Sir Desmond McCarthy, reprinted from Experience (Putnam, 1935), in The Oxford Book of Essays, edited by John Gross (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1998).]
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