Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Putting down a put-down …

… Today in silly book reviews: Let’s all fight about Alice Munro - Salon.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

There is one thing in the review that Lorentzen gets right, a thing worth broadcasting far and wide: No writer deserves reverence. A story or novel might earn a kind of reverence, but if the critical starting point is reverence, then it is impossible to describe what in the work prompted the reverence, because if the starting point is reverence, then reverence is a state of mind the reader brought to the work before the work did anything to the reader, so it’s not any more at issue whether or not the writer made anything to inspire reverence, because it’s not the thing the writer made that inspired the reverence. It is, instead, the reader’s idea of the writer as genius or master or fount of wisdom or great artist, which precedes the reading of the writing, which inspires the reverence. Too often, this means that every move the writer makes is seen as a manifestation of said genius or mastery, rather than being taken on its own terms, sentence by sentence, page by page, chapter by chapter — a strategy that better honors the great writer, anyway, because the great writer’s hardest true labor was always in the direction of the thing that was being made, not the abstract offering of the personal myth of the great writer. If this is true, then Lorentzen’s grievance is projected in slightly the wrong direction. The trouble doesn’t arrive when a writer is “overpraised.” The trouble arrives when a story or a novel can no longer be read, because the reader is too busy reading his or her own preexisting idea of the writer.

1 comment: