A Dissertation on Invective

An Introduction

From what fabulous crossing of a slug with a peacock, from what genital antitheses, from what sebaceous oozing can have been generated, for instance, this thing called M. Gustave Courbet? 

–Alexandre Dumas, fils (tr. T.J. Clark)

I’m writing my dissertation on “Invective in French Art Criticism: 1840-1881.” I love browsing big open-stack libraries such as NYU’s (which could hold so many more books if it didn’t have that silly hole in the middle). You go looking for Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, then suddenly you’re immersed in long forgotten tomes on tic-tac-toe-playing chickens or Serbian poetry instead. On one such occasion, I stumbled upon Nicolas Slonimsky’s 1953 Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time. Here was a man taking unabashed pleasure in those critics I had long been encouraged to despise, the ones who got it wrong, the ones who spat nails, the ones who made life so difficult for rebels such as Stravinsky or Gustave Courbet, the critics I secretly loved most to read. I thought, “Maybe there’s a dissertation in this.” Oh, how many times had I thought that before! This time, perhaps, it’s for real. Let’s hope so, since I’ve been working on this topic for almost a year now. I discovered, as I began rooting around, that very little has been written on invective in criticism, and just about nothing on invective in art criticism. Slonimsky, a genius of an anthologist, is not much help; his theory is that critics hate art simply because it’s unfamiliar.

I knew I couldn’t tackle all the nasty art criticism that’s ever been written. I needed a focus. But I began by reading as much negative art criticism I could find from any and every period, in search of the most venomous, and I will share the acidic fruits of that labor from time to time, to keep you amused when I find I don’t have much to report from my dissertating. Now, “the most venomous” is a subjective affair, I admit. One man’s jeremiad may be another’s disappointed sigh. What was grounds for a duel in Paris in the 17th century now just occasions giggles. But when critics began using terms such as “the worst artist ever,” or “Mephistopheles reincarnated,” nearly as readily as they wrote “the” or “and,” well, the smell of sulfur in the air became unmistakable. These critics I found in France in the mid-nineteenth century. Why that’s the case is a question I’ll explore later.

Having chosen a focus, I began amassing material. I went to the NYU library, the Columbia library, the New York Public Library, the Frick library, the Metropolitan library, the MoMA library. I ordered books over the Internet. I printed out articles. I requested interlibrary loans. Did I ever request interlibrary loans. They must loooove me at the interlibrary loan office. Finally, I went to Paris. Libraries and archives and art galore, there, I promise you. Also, the opportunity to (re)see the art that the critics denounced.

Finally, it’s time “to write.” I’m starting with my introduction, which will comprise a brief history of invective as well as a survey of possible approaches to studying invective. I hope to also consider the many reasons that invective is not studied. As Geert Jan van Gelder writes in the 1988 book The Bad and the Ugly: Attitudes Towards Invective Poetry (Hija’) in Classical Arabic Literature:

Modern criticism in the West, with its tradition of formal satire, generally looks down on invective and lampoon, often because they are supposed to be devoid of true wit. Invective is, at best, the ‘grim gruff old ancestor’ of satire, and ‘lurking near by is the smaller, weaker, but sometimes more dangerous mutant of Invective: … Lampoon, a parasite which has no life of its own and can exist only through destroying its victim.

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12 April 2007 | General Thoughts | Add A Comment

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