We're All Pilots Here: Andrea Long Chu's Authority

Pans garner more attention than praises, and it's the pans in Authority that readers of the volume are most likely already to have encountered. At any rate it was primarily the pans (along with "On Liking Women") that I had encountered before, and who can blame me for knowing them better, or them for being better known? They've got zip. They're devastating. One detects a bit of relish. But one comes away from Chu's appreciation of Lexi Freidman's Inappropriation with perhaps a chuckle at its remark that "it's always nice to read a book with the right number of Holocaust jokes" and the sense that both the book, and the review, are probably fine. The destruction of Hanya Yanagihara's To Paradise, almost twice as long, has distinctly more verve; Chu seems to enjoy anatomizing the flaws of the books and its author, and in general she is a more engaging writer when holding something up as at best not very good, or an object lesson (as in her piece on Yellowstone, which is more the occasion for cultural criticism than a straightforward review), than when recommending its virtues. Sometimes the pans are a bit too successful: that of Yanigihara in particular is so sweepingly effective that I at least had to wonder why she'd bothered writing about it at all. What in it merits such an expenditure of critical intelligence? The fun of it? No doubt it is fun.¹ At least she ends her review of Ottessa Moshfegh and Lapvona, another book and author that emerge from Chu's treatment with little, seemingly, to recommend them, by saying that Moshfegh may yet become a great novelist, and credits her with technical mastery, though admittedly in neither case does she go so far as to explain why. (I say "book and author" because each seems to be under review. Chu does not omit to inform us, for instance, that Moshfegh said some awfully stupid stuff on, of all things, Bret Easton Ellis's podcast.) One comes away from several of the pieces (on Yanagihara, on Andrew Lloyd Webber, on Ellis) with the question: why not pick on someone your own size? Which is not to say that her net catches small fry exclusively; Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith do not escape it.

In truth, the negative reviews are not so interesting to revisit, not in themselves at least, largely because of their thoroughness. And since I have not read the works she praises, I can't say whether her reviews continue to offer interesting perspectives on them, though they aren't really, in the first instance, interpretive essays. It's the pieces that are not reviews collected here that, I think, have more to offer both the reader and the re-reader; they are more expansive, more interesting, and, whereas the reviews sometimes seem to fall into pyrotechnics, more cohesive and assured.² Some of these pieces I had read before, some I had not; nearly all of what follows will be concerned with the two brand-new essays written for the collection. Their topic is criticism itself: the introductory "Criticism in a Crisis" and the title essay, the collections' centerpiece. The brief attention to the reviews paid in the remainder is more to look at her critical practice in the light of her theoretical statements than to discuss the content of the reviews in relation to the works under review.

In these new essays she defends, among other things, her vision of criticism as ineluctably political (she practices an overtly political criticism, but anyone's criticism will evince their politics, no matter how wishy-washy). She defends her critical practice against the charge that she "reduc[es] the work of art to a ship's manifest of ideas"; or rather, she admits the charge and defends the practice. She discusses what we want from critics, what critics like her can provide their readers, and who "critics" even are in the first place: the "crisis" of the first essay is the ancient and eternal fear that "the mythological figure of the Bad Critic" will ruin it for everyone. The Bad Critic, like as not, is in fact no critic at all, but a mere reviewer—perish the thought!—a scribbling hack, simply Not Our Kind, Dear, and nothing like true critic. Chu will rightly have none of this critical WASPishness; a critic is a critic is a critic is a reviewer, for her, to the point, in fact, that later on in the same essay we read that what "the critic" knows of her reader is that the reader is reading "her review".

The critic's task is even narrower than that of producing a review, if we are to trust the opening of "Authority". In this essay the connection between criticism and the political imagination, sounded briefly in "Criticism in a Crisis", is developed more fully, as the concept of "authority" is traced through the millennia, beginning with the Roman Republic (though it takes us only two pages to reach Hobbes). She begins the essay by asking the question "why do we ask the critic to have authority?", though she is really more concerned at first with sketching what she takes to be the peculiarity of the authority we supposedly demand of the critic is. It is fine and dandy to ask the critic to know what he's talking about ("we hope she will not attempt Sondheim without knowing an arpeggio from an appoggiatura"), something we also ask of scholars, general essayists, and writers of all sorts. The critic, though, is in a tight spot, because while on the one hand we are rightly suspicious of claims of authority that boil down to "because I said so", on the other we both expect the critic to make claims that are binding on others (that is, the critic doesn't just say "I liked it", she says "this is good"), and deny that she can "prove the excellence of a novel or painting": therefore, she thinks, the critic is left to "declar[e] that a given work of art is beautiful while being unable to provide a definitive reason why … we are meant to take him at his word, and nothing more". (Then why does it matter if she knows what an arpeggio is? Robert Christgau, the modern critic who more than others I can recall generally did simply declare what was good and expect to be taken at his word, didn't truck unduly with technical musical vocabulary, and he reviewed music. But then I have to single him out because mostly critics don't just make a declaration and expect to be taken at their word.)

One very reasonable reaction to all this is to ask, well, do we ask the critic to have authority? In this sense? Chu mentions in the preface to the book that its title originates in a remark Frank Rich made to her after reading "The Opera Ghost", that "he admired the authority [she] had brought to a genre as arcane as musical theater". (Arcane?) Did Rich mean that she exhibited a pure authority which neither needs nor admits of justification? Or did he mean that she exhibited the kind of authority we expect, in Chu's view, of historians and sociologists—knowledge, expertise, a command of their subject, that she knows what an arpeggio is? (Don't we ask for accuracy, that "crucial" additional demand we place on scholars, from Chu as well, when she says that Andrew Lloyd Webber lifted this or that melody from this or that composer? And isn't that the sort of claim that could serve as evidence in making a judgment about his work?) Chu is curiously uninterested in convincing us that we do demand that the critic have this sort of authority. Surely, some people do; for a time, it was a favored complaint of the right wing that literary critics spent too much time doing interpretive work—and worse, political interpretive work!—rather than simply informing us which works were Great, but I doubt that Chu includes herself in a "we" with them.

The remainder of is almost a politico-critical tour of the times important figures in the history of English criticism have used the word "authority", and she is likewise not terribly interested in establishing that when Samuel Johnson, or whoever, uses the word, he means anything like what she means. (It is not absolutely certain to me that she means something consistent by it.) The not terribly satisfying conclusion is that "we ask the critic to have authority" because "we are inheritors of a history" of understanding the critic politically, e.g. "in the eighteenth century, [as] an enlightened king", or "in the twentieth, [as] a state bureaucrat". One reason this is not satisfying is that it is not clear why we would demand of the critic an authority "like that of a king" in the bureaucratic twentieth century, or even in the eighteenth, since on her telling the link between the critic and the monarch in that time was that the potential for rational criticism was a model for the possibility of a liberal, ie constrained, monarchy, so that the monarch's authority would be brought within reason, on the one hand, and on the other, the monarch would be understood by analogy to the critic, not vice versa; the authority she thinks we demand of the critic is that of an absolute, not a constitutional, monarch. ("When Locke that men freely entered into the social contract out of their need for a 'known and indifferent judge' with the authority to sort out their differences, he sounded as if he was describing a critic", writes Chu. He also sounds as if he is describing a bureaucrat.) The larger reason it's not satisfying is that it's circular: she begins the essay by speculating that the peculiar demand for authority we place on critics is "probably why" critics have understood themselves politically all along. Why do we demand critics have authority? Because critics have historically understood themselves on various political models, which they have done because we have demanded that they have authority. The supposedly historicizing investigation in fact turns on a conception of critical authority which does not seem to have emerged in time.

This makes sense, because her description of the critic's plight seems to emerge from the nature of the sort of judgment the critic is supposed to deliver, about the sort of object the critic is supposed to deal with. Why is Chu asking about the literary critic's authority and not, say, the textual critic's? We do not ask for the textual critic's mere opinion about how to read the manuscript, but a judgment; while there is a truth about what was written originally, we may not believe we can ever finally know it, so here too we might say "what she will never be is decidedly right". (After all, many critics and philosophers have thought that the critic really is right, when she's right; both Hume and Kant can agree on that much. It's not being correct that's at issue but being able to compel assent, or to demonstrate correctness.) The textual critic, though, can avail herself of arguments and evidence to support her reading, in a way that Chu seems to believe the literary critic cannot … at least not "definitively". It is in the putative demand for a definitive deliverance that the entire problem lives. (Can the textual critic make a definitive case? Perhaps sometimes, but likely mostly not. But we don't demand definitive cases from the textual critic.)

Now, I don't think that there's much in the preceding that is made much more perspicuous by the claim "in the twentieth century, the critic was thought of as a sort of state bureaucrat", especially since that analogy is more about studied facial impartiality than inscrutable deliverances. (The bureaucrat's deliverances may or may not be unappealable but they should at least be scrutable.) On the other hand, the formulation is not without its historical roots. In particular, the contrast between the giving one's opinion and making a judgment, and the implicit thought that when I make a judgment, something that seems to be making an objective claim, that's the kind of thing that ought to be provable definitively, in principle at least, are redolent of Kant's presentation in the third Critique, and it's no accident that Kant gets the most sustained treatment of any one figure in the essay. It's not only the beginning of the essay that has that Kantian flavor.

After following post-Kant English-languages discourses of authority and criticism to the present, Chu concludes by proposing that we abandon authority as a "governing concept" for criticism. She is very reassuring that doing so would not mean abandoning "the word authority", or "the authoritative style", or "scholarship, tradition, history, wit, or charisma". We will only "have to reckon with our longing for authority". This concluding thought, that overcoming the idea of "authority" in criticism means giving up exactly no actual critical practices, merely (merely!) the desire for someone to tell us what to think, to relieve us of the burden of exercising taste and discernment and thought, risking error, whatever error would mean when we have given up the idea that there is a fact of the matter about beauty, or about whatever aesthetic qualities of a work interest us, echoes the concluding thought of the first essay: "for who is to say if the critic is right? The rest of us, of course. The only measure of judgment is more judgment". Now to be clear, I think this is completely correct, just not quite as novel a call as one might have gathered from her presentation. One might even summarize it thus: the embrace of criticism à la Chu is "our emergence from our self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Sapere aude!"

It's not just that Chu ends up in a place that fits neatly with the beginning of "What is Enlightenment?"; it's also a place that fits neatly with the Kant of the third Critique. The treatment of Kant in the essay is really quite peculiar; one would never have guessed that Chu's position will end up being so close to Kant's. Or rather, to a Kant-inspired one; something else one would never have guessed is that any application of Kant to literary criticism, or really criticism in general, will end up being more a matter of inspiration than strict textual fidelity, since for Kant the judgment of taste that forms the topic of the first part of the third Critique really is just "this [singular object before me] is beautiful" (at least, if we ignore the discussion of the sublime, which isn't relevant here). He has much less to say about the fine arts in general than he does about the beauties of nature, and it has never been clear to me how one would directly apply his account to something like a novel. (He himself discusses poetry, and even that has always struck me as a bad fit with his system. It is interesting to note that while something like Friedrich Schlegel's essay "On Goethe's Meister" has a definite third-critical flavor, it savors less of the first than of the second part, dealing with teleological judgment, with its emphasis on organic form and the reciprocal influence of part and whole.) Part of the problem is that her presentation is riddled with errors, some of which are unfortunate but not really important (the account of what Kant means by the "free play" of the faculties is not quite right), but many of them seem distinctly motivated, efforts to make it seem that Kant is talking about what she's talking about, or to get him to fit nicely in the narrative she wants to tell.

Kant does not "picture[] the art critic as exercising free lawfulness in the face of an unknowable law", partly because Kant has remarkably little to say about such a figure as "the art critic" at all, partly because he does not describe the person making a judgment of taste as "exercising free lawfulness". She says quite a bit more about the "law" in the context of aesthetic judgments than Kant himself did; the most charitable interpretation, to me, is that she is thinking of the lawful character of concepts, but even then, the presentation is deceptive. Her "maxim for the critic", "always assume that beauty has a rational explanation, but never pretend to know what it is", is puzzling: first because Kant was, again, not in the business of giving critics advice (except in §34, discussing "what critics can and should reason about": "the investigation of the faculties of cognition and their functions"), second because Kant in the third Critique does explain how the feeling of beauty arises in us, and what kind of judgment we make when we say that something is beautiful. Kant certainly did not think that disagreements about the beautiful were "inevitable, insofar as beauty consisted of nothing but the free lawfulness of the imagination"; the entire argument that even though judgments of taste are subjective, they have universal validity, comes from their basis in nothing but the free play of our shared faculties, so this statement is pretty much exactly backwards. She writes, as if this is Kant's belief, that the critic cannot attempt to make a "definitive answer" about what is beautiful "without abusing his authority": not only is Kant not generally interested in "the critic", he does not speak at all of the "authority" of the person making a judgment of taste; similarly, Kant does not solve any paradoxes by arguing that "the critic's authority originated in human reason"; the judgment of taste owes its possibility and validity to human reason and faculties, yes, but this has little do to with "authority".

Some of these are perhaps venial gaffes; others strike me as more serious. The most serious, from the standpoint of basic scholarly practice, is an actual tendentious misquotation. Chu correctly observes that the German word "Kritik" may be rendered in English both as "criticism" and as "critique", but it may not be rendered, certainly at least when talking about, much less translating, Kant, as either, willy-nilly, just as one likes. "Critique" in this context is jargon; it refers to Kant's philosophical strategy of (this will be ridiculously compressed) investigating what in our experience derives merely from our faculties. When Kant himself uses the word "Kritik", it is of course possible that he means "criticism", and arguably he means it in this sense in §34, when he mentions "Kritik als Kunst" (translators differ in how they treat this). When in §44 he writes that "es gibt weder eine Wissenschaft des Schönen, sondern nur Kritik …" ("there is neither a science of the beautiful, but only critique …") he is summarizing, as he turns to the subject of fine art, the findings of the earlier sections, and "Kritik" can only responsibly be translated "critique". Chu however writes "there is neither a science of the beautiful, only criticism". None of the four translations I consulted makes this choice (three use "critique"; the fourth punts and leaves "Kritik" untranslated); since this is not a scholarly book, there is neither bibliography and nor notes, so it's can't be known if Chu is amending an existing translation, using her own translation, or quoting someone else's mistake, a possibility that is partly exculpatory (she didn't make this mistake) but partly inculpatory: who would think to attempt to write with such an "authoritative style" without consulting the primary sources? (That said, it seems likely that she is either using Pluhar's translation or quoting someone using it.) As with the suggestion that Kant opines about the critic's authority, the effect here is to suggest falsely that she and Kant are both talking about, well, authority and criticism and the critic's authority, while suppressing the actual ways that his philosophy really does intersect with her topic, not to mention her sympathy with him. She would rather finger Kant as the point at which the critic began to be charged with purging his criticism of moral concerns (in the process misrepresenting what he meant by beauty's being the symbol of morality, though in fairness this has puzzled many commentators).

What is that intersection? Consider the state of play, as we might understand it from her presentation, prior to Kant. The critic's task is to let it be known which works are beautiful, but it is proving quite difficult to figure out how to tell which those are, in any sort of systematic way, or to find, as Chu quotes Samuel Johnson, "the stability of a science". (Chu acknowledges that these 18th-century English critics looked to science as a model, but the idea that criticism might have looked to science for a model of its authority in judgment appears only in the watered-down form of references to "rationalism".) At least some of them thought that, at least in principle, some such stable footing could be found; Hume, in his essay "Of the Standard of Taste", makes much of what he calls "a noted story in Don Quixote", in which Sancho's kinsmen, derided for their assessment of a barrel of wine, which each find good with one reservation, one detecting the taste of leather, the other of iron, are proved right when a "an old key with a leathern thong" is found when the barrel is finally emptied: the "general rules or avowed patterns of composition" which he seems to believe in are like this key with its thong, capable of being used to demonstrate decisively who has taste and who hasn't. (Of course Hume doesn't tell us what those rules are. He's no fool. Chu gives the essay unfortunately short shrift—she doesn't even name it.) Now, insofar as one does think that such principles can be found, the critic actually is not figured as an absolute monarch whose decrees must be heeded without justification, nor must the critic be metaphorized as a liberal monarch (who, anyway, Chu has already said was somehow analogized to the critic) rather than as a claimant to the title of scientist. Comes now Kant arguing that there is no science of the beautiful, and that their goal was misguided from the jump: if someone else's judgments of taste were authoritative for me, that would be "heteronomy", but "taste makes claim merely to autonomy" (§32); I will judge for myself, thankyouverymuch. In §57: "To provide a determinate objective principle of taste, by means of which its judgments could be guided, examined, and proved, is absolutely impossible; for then it would not be a judgment of taste". If Kant provided a solution to the problem of the critic's authority, it was this: there is no such thing. Authority, in the sense that Chu has been tracing, is a chimera.

Since he was never interested in this problem explicitly to begin with, he does not, as Chu does, recommend giving up the desire for authority, but he can certainly agree with her that no critic, or anyone else, should seek it. (In this light Chu's statement that for him the critic cannot seek a definitive demonstration of beauty without exceeding authority is one of the more venial errors; indeed, no one can seek such definitiveness, just not with that proviso.) Chu is not terribly forthcoming about what her vision of a post-authority criticism entail, though we may, as I already have done, reasonably connect it to her thesis from "Criticism in a Crisis" that the only answer to one judgment is another, which, as she elaborates, "is what it means to try to live together with other human beings". Just so; we post-Kantians no longer have Hume's faith that aesthetics will produce the key and thong to criticism, and are thrown back on ourselves in the event of disagreement, either lamely rebutting "de gustibus non est disputandum" (relegating either our, or their, judgment to the realm of the Kantian "pleasant"), or trying to produce an argument, a reading, a re-presentation of the work that will not prove to the other party that we have it right, but will enable them to see it for themselves as we do. That's a vision of life with each other, one without domination or absolute authority. While Chu asserts that for Kant the critic becomes sort of a model citizen, Kant in fact goes beyond her, since she remains fixedly wed to the idea that the critic is somehow set apart from the rest of us, whereas he is describing a critical citizenry comprising all who encounter a work of art.

Of course it is only natural for Chu, a working critic, to be concerned with the activities of the working critic, and to think about criticism in the context of reviews, which are produced for others to read, and with a certain evaluative purpose, even. But this focus, in addition to leading her to be, at best, misleading about Kant, fits awkwardly with her conclusions in both essays. Who, after all, is the critic? Whose judgment is the only measure of judgment? And in what circumstances do they make these judgments? As I said, for Kant, it would seem that the answer is anyone who has encountered the work (or natural item) in question. Consider the imagined dialogue Cavell gives in "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy" ("B" gets two possible replies in Cavell's text; one may take either):

A: He plays beautifully, doesn't he?

B1: Yes, too beautifully. Beethoven is not Chopin.

B2: How can you say that? There was no line, no structure, no idea what the music was about. He's simply an impressive colorist.

Cavell continues:

Now, how will A reply? Can he now say: "Well, I liked it"? Of course he can, but don't we feel that here that would be a feeble rejoinder, a retreat to personal taste? Because B's reasons are obviously relevant to the evaluation of the performance, and because they are arguable, in ways that anyone who knows about such things will know how to pursue.

On the one hand, this is a concise illustration of what Kant was getting at with the difference between judgments of agreeability ("I like it"), which are personal and inarguable, and judgments of beauty, which purport to make a claim on the agreement of others. It is simultaneously a concise challenge to the problematic Chu sets up on which "the critic" is to be taken "at his word, and nothing more", since B is manifestly offering considerations that A can take up, disputatiously or in agreement, or not. This is not to say that B has proven that the player exhibited an aesthetic fault, or that A could prove that the player did not; as Chu says, they can only make more judgments. But in this post-concert confab neither party says, simply, "it was beautiful—obey!".

On the other, though—who are A and B? Neither of them need be the sort of critic that writes and is published, and they are talking about something they have both just experienced. (Because they have both already experienced it, there is much less room for the exercise of arbitrary, kingly authority: who am I going to believe, B or my own ears? But B might instruct my ears to hear better.) I submit that they are engaging in criticism, though, insofar as they are thinking through the work they have just experienced. All of us can do that, and many of us do. Chu does not seem to think as highly of her readers as that:

There is no reason to insist on a false mutuality of reader and writer: it is odd, and probably not very ethical, to insist to the passenger that she is the one flying the plane. What the critic always knows for sure about her readers is that they are not, at this very moment, reading the book under consideration; they are reading her review of it. These are the only readers worth writing for: one’s own. I do not write to persuade the reader; I write to give her a chance to experience herself as the subject of thought, as if I am reading aloud what is already written on the inside of her own skull.

This is the view of her readers that a critic who wishes to give up the dream of authority has? Yes, the review-reading scene is one in which the reader cannot be assumed already to have experienced the work being reviewed, and the reader who hasn't does more or less have to take the critic at their word as far as the adequacy of their descriptions goes. That is as much as to say, to adapt Chu's metaphor, that the critic is the one presently at the controls. But we're all pilots here, ma'am. We are all, I dare say, capable of experiencing ourselves as the subject of thought!³ How can we reconcile idea that the reader of "Hanya's Boys" needs Chu to "give her a chance" so to experience herself with the idea that it's up to "the rest of us" to say if the critic is right, as she says mere pages later? The rest of us don't even know what it's like to think for ourselves, the poor dears. Belay that sapere aude!

Let us consider the bizarre identification of "one's own readers" with anyone who happens to be reading one's writing at any moment and the nonsensical assertion that it's even possible to write for readers thus identified, even though they are completely without specificity. (It is also not true that the critic knows for sure about her reader that they are reading her review of a book, because critical activity is not confined to the production of reviews. No one reads Mimesis to find out if To the Lighthouse is good or worth reading; someone who did might be confused by the fact that Auerbach spends all his time with only a small portion of the text.) It is not a bad example of the glibness to which she is prone. Chu is often quite breezy, and I certainly don't mind breeziness; I find the breezy prose style of Kenneth Rexroth's essays and reviews quite pleasing, and the lack of laboredness they share contributes something to the authoritative air Rexroth exhibits and Chu says she aims for. But, although she asserts defiantly that she attends primarily to the ideas that novels body forth, treating them as advancing arguments, she is a bit careless of the ideas in her own work. How else can she move from stating that the thesis that "the critic is an artist in her own right" is "a transparent bid to increase the prestige of criticism with the public" to, in the very next paragraph, stating that it is thanks to the critic's work that "art will mean something for us"? If we are all critics, then this is true but inevitable; if only Chu and her comrades in reviewing are, it's surely as grandiose a claim as any to be found in "The Critic as Artist", the text she takes (in both new essays) as the sole exponent of the critic-as-artist thesis. (Or—well—grandiose, anyway. Wilde's text makes some fairly large claims.) It is also peculiar that she believes that the thesis "locates the critic’s worth in the formal qualities of her prose rather than her judgments", when, on the one hand, she herself has just explained that her evaluations of novels have at least as much to do with the ideas they advance, and, on the other, that conclusion is not unequivocally to be found Wilde's text: she has just quoted Gilbert⁴ saying that the critic is to the work as the creator of the work is to "the visible world of form and color". She is not formalist enough to think that all the creator does is stylize what was there anyway, and neither is Gilbert, who sensibly insists both on the critical dimension of all creative work, and, pace Chu's conclusion that he must lack faith in "criticism as a genre of assertive prose", that the critic "will be an interpreter" who gives "an analysis or exposition of the work itself".⁵

In fact, when we look at the claim of Chu's I called grandiose more closely, she and Gilbert don't seem too unalike, not only as regards the size of their assertions but also as regards their content. Gilbert admittedly has a wide sense of who critics are or might be in the first place:

It seems to me that, while the literary critic stands of course first, as having the wider range, and larger vision, and nobler material, each of the arts has a critic, as it were, assigned to it. The actor is a critic of the drama. He shows the poet's work under new conditions, and by a method special to himself. He takes the written word, and action, gesture and voice become the media of revelation. The singer or the player on lute and viol is the critic of music. The etcher of a picture robs the painting of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of a new material its true colour-quality, its tones and values, and the relations of its masses, and so is, in his way, a critic of it, for the critic is he who exhibits to us a work of art in a form different from that of the work itself, and the employment of a new material is a critical as well as a creative element. … When Rubinstein plays to us the Sonata Appassionata of Beethoven, he gives us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely--Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic nature, and made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality.

One recalls Schlegel's discussion of poetic criticism occasioned by the appearances of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister:

What else but a poem can come into being when a poet in full possession of his powers contemplates a work of art and represents it in his own? This is not because his view makes suppositions and assertions which go beyond the visible work. All criticism has to do that, because every great work, of whatever kind, knows more than it says, and aspires to more than it knows. It is because the aims and approach of poetic criticism are something completely different. Poetic criticism does not act as a mere inscription, and merely say what the thing is, and where it stands and should stand in the world. For that, all that is required is a whole and undivided human being … if he takes pleasure in communication, by word of mouth or in writing, he will enjoy developing and elaborating an insight which is fundamentally single and indivisible. That is how a critical characterization of a work actually comes into being. The poet and artist on the other hand will want to represent the representation anew, and form once more what has already been formed …

Schlegel is not saying that all criticism is poetic criticism, but he is saying that there is such a thing as poetic criticism, at least. Or, careening now to an apparently quite different corner of philosophy, one might think of Donald Davidson's closing remark in "What Metaphors Mean", that "the critic is, so to speak, in benign competition with the metaphor-maker". The stakes here are lower and the scale, an individual metaphor, smaller, but it is still apt to speak of a "critic" here, who is interposed between the artist (the metaphor-maker) and the reader, and who attempts to redo the metaphor in such a way as to render the artist comprehensible to the reader. Can anyone deny that doing so requires taste and creativity, in addition to insight into what it does or could mean, even beyond the fact that, in general, paraphrase of a metaphor remains firmly metaphorical? It is not simply a matter of finding the one correct prosaic way of understanding the poetic figure of which the author, for generic reasons, could not avail themselves, the critic as positivistic detective.

Victorian critics were fond of digestive metaphors, figuring reading as ingestion and incorporation into one's artistic self, the literary inputs being bodied forth, when well digested, in new (or not-so-new—defenses of plagiarism abound) works.⁶ Rubinstein gives us, when he plays, a particular view, or hearing, of Beethoven; when B, in the dialogue from Cavell above, says "Beethoven is not Chopin", he may be taken as criticizing the "criticism" the piano player offered—stating the the player has misunderstood Beethoven and thus given us a poor recapitulation.

Surely, however, one might say now, Rubinstein and Goethe are doing criticism only in an extended sense. Literary critics are not really engaged in "representing the representation anew" like that; your everyday non-poetic critic is more in the "mere inscription" line, and there's nothing wrong with that. But some degree of representing anew is inevitable, since otherwise we would just read the work itself, and we don't look to the critic simply for a declaration "it is, or isn't, beautiful", but to tell us about the work and to justify their assessments. Just look at what Chu herself says about too much of what passes for political art: "the artist is trying too hard to be her own critic, premasticating the work so that all we have to do is swallow." If the bad political artist's contra naturam act of self-criticism is pre-mastication for the reader's benefit, doesn't that suggest that in the natural order of things the author prepares, the critic ruminates, and the reader gets regurgitated pap, though at least in the second she could read the original text, too, if she has a strong stomach? In either case, the reader of critical output is getting something already gnawed upon. Isn't it, after all, part of the critic's job to enable the text to go down more easily for the reader? Certainly Chu, the thinker of her readers' thoughts, must agree with that, to some extent.

It is because, I think, of the critic's post-Kantian plight that the "critic as artist" thesis pulls on us, not because in this way the critic can poach some esteem from the artists. One way to read Gilbert's denial that the critic is to see the work "as in itself it really is" is as on a par with Chu's that the only "measure" of judgment is more judgment: no one is going to produce the skeleton key-and-thong that shows once and for all that one reading is correct and there's an end on it. There's no outside to reach; no guarantor of correctness; nothing transcendent; it's just us: no wonder we have to shore up fragments. Ironically, given that Chu in these pages denies that "criticism could participate in modernism itself", this loss of a shared external standard that would vouchsafe the validity of an artistic (!) activity is precisely how I read Cavell and Gabriel Josipovici on what modernism is in the first place—making criticism not only a participant in modernist attitude, but among the first. As for Gilbert's statement that criticism is "impressive only" (sc. only a matter of the work's impression on the critic), well, doesn't Chu herself say of "the higher critical act" that the critic undertakes it "because it will crack open a view onto unconscious processes within herself" (her emphasis), which she can then show to us, the readers of her review of Maggie Nelson's On Freedom? Perhaps it's just because Chu is writing an essay in response to a book of essays, but she seems here to be giving us not only her judgment of Nelson's accomplishment, but to intend to show us what the better version of Nelson's own work would have been.

But I was talking about Chu's habit of permitting herself glib little tidbits, which give one the impression, just a bit, that she really does think that a piece of criticism is judged by the verve of its prose and not the cogency of the arguments it advances. Here she is at the close of her review of Zadie Smith's The Fraud:

Ethics asks us to recognize that the other has a soul; politics asks us to reject the soul as a precondition for moral interest. In this sense, fiction has always been an exercise in political consciousness. It asks me to care about people I do not know and will never meet, people who might as well not exist as far as my own life is concerned but whose destinies are nonetheless obscurely intertwined with mine. Not for nothing do we call it the third person.

(Emphasis in the original.) Now this is a pretty familiar sort of line about the moral (excuse me, political) upbuildingness of novels, albeit idiosyncratically stated (is that the distinction between ethics and politics?). Finely aware, richly responsible, yadda yadda. But wait, people who might as well not exist? Novels are peopled, mostly, with characters who don't exist, but on the other hand one does tend to imagine them as ensouled. It is, however, the culmination of the paragraph that is sure either to give one the impression that deep insight has here been expressed, though one may not be able to articulate it oneself. Not for nothing do we call it the third person! Truly. But—what? For what significant something, I wonder, would Chu say we do employ that bit of originally grammatical terminology (in which context, as you may recall, "the third person" is used with non-persons and even non-entities ("it's raining") as well as persons who are not speaker or addressee) latterly adopted into the typology of narration, and does our using it thus indicate that other sorts of narrative are politically impaired?⁷ Take that, Lorrie Moore!

The granting of permission to say something because it sounds nice, even though one perhaps doesn't mean it—even though it's not clear what it would mean, if someone meant it—is explicitly thematized at the end of the Nelson review. Chu has just lamented Nelson's limits: it is "disappointing … when a writer of stature and skill who genuinely wants us to think more carefully, as I believe Nelson does, manages not to extend that care beyond the limits of what she finds interesting, right, or true." One way Nelson has failed to extend due care is in not realizing that Hannah Black's open letter, as an exercise in public rhetoric, may not have meant literally everything it called for. Chu is aware that she is thereby "plac[ing] on her arguments a demand for logical consistency that I implore her … to spare other people", since one could just as well argue that Nelson's essay is an exercise in public rhetoric and shouldn't be assumed to mean its claims entirely literally. Is it not disappointing that Chu doesn't extend the care to Nelson that Nelson doesn't, according to Chu, extend to her targets? Evidently not, because Chu, on noticing that she isn't being entirely consistent, shrugs and moves on:

I exercise judgment … I gather the indeterminacy of a thing into the inconsistency of having an opinion about it. Indeed, opinions can be formed no other way. When I make a judgment about a work of art, or a political act, or a book like this one, I change not knowing what to think about it into not knowing why I think it.

Opinions can actually be formed in other ways, but whatever. Chu doesn't even extend the gift of thinking carefully to herself.⁸ It is one thing, and an inevitable and thus plausibly blameless one, to harbor inconsistent beliefs. It is another, less worthy, to note inconsistency in one's own beliefs, and shrug and move on; still another to do so in a critical essay; quite another to do so when the inconsistency lies precisely in accusing another of careless thought while being careless oneself. It isn't hard to speculate on why Chu is forgiving of Black and stern toward Nelson: she basically more sympathetic to the one than to the other, and thinks little of catholicity in criticism. Hasn't Chu earlier in the collection remarked that "we find it only natural today to rate a critic on the basis of her mental attitude … rather than the ideological content of her judgments"? Perhaps that is because we want not only ideologically correct but also well-reasoned and, well, intellectually generous criticism, the same which Chu dings Nelson for exhibiting too little, and (more or less explicitly) others for exhibiting too much. It is surely fair, at a minimum, to expect criticism to produce some sort of persuasive case for the judgments it makes, and to judge it on the basis of that case. (Recall: we aren't giving that up, when we give up the yen for authority.) When Chu wrote that "the critic always had to assume the possibility of meaning, even as the modernist realized he didn't. (This is what made him a modernist!)", I think she's wrong about modernism, and wrong about the division between critics and modernism. But I'm willing to say something related, which is that the critic should mean it when she makes and justifies her judgments (and she should justify them). Wasn't criticism supposed to be a genre of assertive prose? The irony of the closing of the Nelson review is that in the preceding pages Chu has any number of self-consistent criticisms, and appreciations, of Nelson's essay to record, making the final self-undermining tack she takes quite unnecessary—and it wouldn't even be self-undermining if she were prepared to argue that Black's text must be read non-literally while Nelson's must be read literally. But that would get in the way of neatly ending her piece with a callback to Nelson's invocation of "practices of freedom", a structural nicety with more artistic than critical merit: is not knowing why you think what you think really a practice of freedom? Is that an attractive vision of criticism, even a non-authoritative criticism?