Cultural and Practical: Criticising Criticism

One of my appearances at Can*Con was on a panel entitled Criticizing Criticism. The description of same in the (online only) programming book asked: In a world of Amazon and Goodreads reviews, is there a still a need and a place for the professional critic?

The tl;dr is Yes, of course there is*.

Naturally, I had a lot more to say than that. (I almost always do.) The first point that has to be made, though, is that there are in fact two different (though occasionally overlapping) types of criticism, in both SF/F and in the creative arts overall.

The first type (and the type I don't have much to say about) is what I call cultural criticism and some call academic or literary. This is the sort of criticism that seeks to place a work or body of work within a greater cultural context, and to examine the creator's place within that context in addition to examining the creator's activity. This sort of criticism is examplied in the SF/F field by John Clute, Jo Walton (who is mostly a writer of fiction but who has written some wonderful criticism, as in What Makes This Book So Great), Farah Mendlesohn, and the writers on The New York Review of Science Fiction.

The second type is what I call consumer criticism and Clute calls practical criticism. (Since I think Clute's term is much better than mine, it's what I will use going forward.) Practical criticism is very much of the moment, examines (usually) a single work, and instead of trying to place it into some sort of cultural context, tries instead to answer the question Does this thing deliver good value for your time and money?†

It is practical criticism that risks being subsumed by such crowd-sourcing critics as the members of GoodReads and the purchaser reviewers of Amazon. And on the surface there's no reason why readers couldn't simply turn to these crowds for all their consumption-oriented critical needs. If said readers were prepared to do a lot more work, in terms of matters of personal taste, in order to be certain of getting what I will (with some reluctance) call professional-quality criticism.

Because, I believe, the correct analogy between professional and crowd-sourced criticism is that between professional and self-published fiction. In both cases, what is missing is what I'll call a gatekeeper, someone whose job it is to provide an independent assessment of the quality (usefulness?) of the work in question.

(I will interrupt this post here to mention that I have a long-standing beef against the use of the words professional and amateur in senses positive and negative. But if I have to use those words, or at least one of them, I will argue very strongly that "professional" work does not have to imply payment. I will use this word only to imply that a third party, a gatekeeper, acts between the creator and the consumer of a piece of writing.)

Yes, there is a lot of quality fiction being self-published today. (I am hopeful my own justifies use of the word quality.) But unless Sturgeon's Law has been repealed, and I don't think it has, that volume of quality is going to be obscured by the sheer volume of, um, less-than-quality fiction being published. My editor friends can be quite voluble on the subject of self-publishing authors who refuse to avail themselves of corrective editorial advice.

The same thing applies, I think, to practical criticism. The truth is, there are a lot of reviews on these crowd-sourced sites that provide little more than a plot summary (sometimes quite a lengthy one) and a sentence or two of generic opinion ("I liked this book a lot"). Criticism that has to go through a gatekeeper cannot get away with this. There are expectations a critic must fulfill when writing practical criticism that goes through a gatekeeper, and meeting these expectations makes for a better piece of critical writing.

Because when all is said and done, criticism is writing. In fact it is creative writing, and the best practical criticism can be read and enjoyed completely outside of its consumer-advice content.

I have more thoughts about the role of the professional critic, but I will leave them for a subsequent post‡ in which I might offer practical suggestions for finding a practical critic who can work for you.

*This is why my editor, when I first worked as a broadcast journalist <koff koff> years ago, had as his Rule Number One, Do not ever ask a question that can be answered simply Yes or No.

†The role of the practical critic in the field of live performance is a most peculiar one, and I haven't yet figured out exactly what the point of it is. I spent several years writing criticism of live music, in what were essentially one-off situations: by the time my review appeared in print, just a few hours after the show ended, the performer in question was usually on her way to some other venue, making my opinion of dubious value to a would-be consumer. The big exception to the preceding is theatre criticism, because while the performance is live it is also, all things being equal, going to be available again and again after the review appears. Interestingly enough, there is a consensus that practical theatre criticism, at least in Manhattan, still has an amazing power to make or break the commercial success of creative artists.

‡Which I may or may not ever get around to writing.