A LITTLE MATTER OF SENSE
By JACQUES BARZUN; JACQUES BARZUN'S MOST RECENT BOOK IS ''A WORD OR TWO BEFORE YOU GO.''
Published: June 21, 1987
LEAD: FEW things are more characteristic of the modern mind than to take complication for improvement. We have automatic windows on our cars, which is a convenience; but on a hot day, or in an accident, they cannot be opened unless the engine is running. The paradox of inconvenient convenience repeats in all domains.
FEW things are more characteristic of the modern mind than to take complication for improvement. We have automatic windows on our cars, which is a convenience; but on a hot day, or in an accident, they cannot be opened unless the engine is running. The paradox of inconvenient convenience repeats in all domains. A literary example is the improved criticism of the arts, which has reached the point where it is so expert that it defies common understanding.
Let us look at a brief sampling:
* ''The formal interplay of colors and shapes creates forces of both harmony and tension . . . while the linear design composed of all the edges of tone and color-masses weave [ sic ] a unifying rhythmic network throughout the painting.''
* ''In the final scene the plot finally assumes its status as the crown of an intricate development of poetic resources.''
* ''Control of the subject, coupled with irony, gives astringency to both foreground and background of the emotion.''
* '' [ The hero's ] consciousness grows larger than life, or than death, to show that life itself is large and cannot be detached in the reclusive self, framed in the indefectibility of the portrait, which no longer attests to life, hung up in the closed consciousness.''
These examples come from ordinary sources -a newspaper, a literary journal, a popular encyclopedia, a book for college use. What would a candid judge call this Critics' English? Obscure, to begin with, and pompous besides. And both from a single cause: the incessant use of words in a figurative sense. To read about any of the arts nowadays is to slog through sentences full of tension, rhythm, control; structure, texture,dynamics; restraint, irony, lyricism; icon, epiphany, dimension, distancing, metaphor - above all, metaphor - and hardly any of these used in a literal or technical sense.
As a result, the language of criticism sounds identical with the prose of the advertiser of fashions: vague images create the sense of moving among luxurious things. The word ''metaphor'' itself typifies the loss of meaning. It has been so debased as to qualify even what does not exist. Thus in a recent review of a fine singer whose upper register has faded we are told: ''She turned this to her advantage, using it as a metaphor for the uneasy yearnings of the Mahler songs.'' Elsewhere, as a new book informs us, the word suggests that what we think about may not be the reality: ''What the hunter kills is not the deer but the metaphor of the deer.'' From which it follows, no doubt, that the subsequent chewing of venison is only an allegory of eating dinner.
Actually, metaphor implies a comparison among four terms. If one says ''the ship plows the sea,'' the meaning is that just as the plow in its forward motion divides the soil, so the ship moves and divides the sea. Without four terms, no metaphor. Hence there is no discoverable meaning in praising a sculptor for ''his way with three-dimensional metaphors'' or in saying that in literature the mention of food ''serves up many metaphors.'' Critics whose eye is clearly focused will choose among terms: symbol, emblem, sign, simile, metaphor, comparison, analogy are at hand, all distinct, not synonyms.
With these examples in mind, we may ask why critics, who are certainly educated people of uncommon ability, have adopted this style, this reverse English that destroys integrity and beauty at one stroke. I do not think they have been simply perverse. Rather, they have succumbed to certain widespread social attitudes. If that is so, a critique of their vocabulary points in two directions - on one side toward what everybody now does with language, and on the other toward what everybody thinks criticism is. What are these social attitudes?
First, the cult of creativity. Do something new, original, startling; above all, be yourself and therefore disregard common rules, feel free to violate usage, show off your imagination and your specialty. From this cluster of precepts come the new words and phrases that gain currency in business, government and the professions - orbit, dialogue, parameter, paradigm, quantum jump, interface - and metaphor. Notice that their metaphorical use is their only novelty -new labels stuck on old objects in hopes of exciting fresh interest. A recent news story announced that the removal of a chocolate factory from Belgium to Switzerland was ''the loss of a national icon''; and a book on the Southwest declared that ''man-made is the metaphor most fitting'' for the city of Houston.
We see here - shall I say the interface? - of the idioms of business and of criticism. Both are powered by the rage for figurative language, the compulsion to dress up what is felt as a too commonplace reality. In short, everybody wants to be a poet, not knowing that real poets do not dress up reality but transfix it. When the journalist, the novelist, the critic, the scientist and the stockbroker reject prose for imagery they also give up sense; when the whole world speaks in tropes, readers who care for prose and consecutive thought must seek their pleasure in the early pages of the telephone directory.
Obviously, this urge to poeticize matches the fact that in our present state only two social types, two human endeavors, enjoy any regard: art and science, the poet and the physicist, or their counterparts. Former heroes have vanished - soldier, statesman, divine, inventor, jurist, industrialist are of little account; their very occupation, we think, denies them moral worth and excludes them from the ranks of genius, which is for us the only democratic figure deserving the cult of personality.
The critic, in this situation, instinctively sees a double chance. He naturally identifies himself with the artist; and he soon thinks he is one; and because his task is analytic, he readily begins to talk like a scientist. As we saw, his favorite words have the aura of technicality. Scientism also lurks in his use of the little word as: theater as myth; nature as gesture; costume as sculpture in motion. This play with interchangeables recalls the metaphor habit, but it also smacks of the equations of science - heat as motion, mass as energy -where there is warrant and utility in the substitution.
Shameless manhandling of the vocabulary can also yield a scientific aura. When, in writing of pictures, the critic refers to negative space, or when in dealing with literature he throws in mimesis (because imitation would be too crude), he feels he has gained status in the world. When inspired to go further and erect the theory of a genre or an art with the aid of new Greek names, then he has won his place between Yeats and Einstein. That is how the architecture and planning of cities became Ekistics, and why, just recently, the ''Poetics of Ekphrasis'' have begun to codify ''the literary representation of visual art.'' Ekphrasis is from a Greek verb meaning ''to tell it all,'' so perhaps we should not complain. But we are free to wonder again how these additions to the language would strike a self-respecting reader. I think we would hear a murmur of: ''Pretentiousness. Pedantry.''
In truth, nothing in the nature of criticism justifies these shenanigans. Criticism is not an art; it is not a science; it has no method and no theory. It is a craft with varying maxims and devices; a difficult craft, but always subordinate to the arts. That is why it must vary as they have varied. The critic is properly a servant, of the public and of the artist, both. He removes barriers to understanding and enjoyment, a task that can be performed in many different modes. Or rather, I should say that there are several kinds of criticism but only one mode - the indicative mode. The critic always points, with his finger on the diagnostic spot.
Good criticism is rare and it comes in many shapes, from annotation to dialogue and from poem to epigram, including the essay and the anecdote along the way. We must welcome it and read it in whatever form it takes. The essential is that the critic should speak in what I have termed the indicative mode and should address the common reader.
The high theorists of our day -structuralists, semioticists, deconstructionists, and others -therefore belong to some other guild. For among them, as well as between them and the public, communication is rare. Each practitioner has a vocabulary of his own making and believes it alone capable of producing profound discoveries. Lucid explanation has no place and no merit. The late Roland Barthes expressly disparaged clarity, saying that after Marx and Freud complexity had ruled out the clear and simple. The argument is naive. One could also say that after Pythagoras or after the medieval scholastics, the human mind was doomed to eternal complexity and perplexity.
The argument is also specious, because it assumes that art is a riddle to unravel, like what goes on in the outer reaches of the cosmos. Art is on the contrary something shown - it is by definition exhibitionist, and whatever hides in it is hidden coyly, with the hope of being found, like a small child playing invisible behind a curtain. Even when a work is, as we say, difficult, it is the critic's duty to make the form or meaning clearer, not more opaque.
This once done, it is also the critic's duty to leave the beholder's soul to its adventure, to its enjoyment. It is not the critic's business to disembowel the work by applying to it a doctrine, which leaves the reader feeling that the critic's essay is so complete that viewing the work itself would be at once superfluous and less comprehensive. The critic, we must never forget, is but a handmaid.
Does this mean that the modern critic should abstain from using technical words and from inventing new terms and images? Not at all. To talk about art for the beholder's benefit one must use the technical names of its elements; dozens of such terms have entered the general vocabulary. But the critic's guiding thought should be to use as few as possible, indeed to replace designation by description whenever he can. In discussing the Shakespearean sonnet he need not say ''the couplet ending''; he can say ''the last two lines.'' To avoid the simple and familiar is not only a critical but also a moral fault, as William Hazlitt said of his inferior colleagues: ''A critic's object [ nowadays ] is not to do justice to his author . . . but to do himself homage and to show his acquaintance with all the topics and resources of criticism.''
If a critic is to point unmistakably to a feature of the work, or an idea about art, or a trait in the artist, all his words must be used with technical precision. It is as great a blunder to write metaphor for symbol or tension for conflict as it would be for a physicist to use photon for proton. But current criticism indulges in cliches that blur meanings and deserve the discard. Let us think straight and talk sense: the facade of a building is not a statement; a painting in various shades of one color is not a symphony; a sculptured group does not show any rhythm, which is strictly a division of the passage of time; and if a critic cannot resist the vogue use of strategy, he should not say: ''at this point, the poet's strategy is. . . . ,'' because the words ''at this point'' show that he is dealing with tactics, the strategy applying to the whole poem. And there is no need to call in the military anyway.
When he is literal and therefore exact, the critic finds that for him, as for the historian, the effort to tell the truth makes every word into a technical term. Noun, verb, adjective, and their combinations refer unmistakably to the evidence.
As for adding new terms or inventing images, the critic has the same freedom as any citizen, coupled with the duty to be a critic of his own productions. Any new terms should be few, clear at sight or after a sharp definition, unambiguous, memorable and if possible beautiful. Each of these tests rules out Greek and Latin compounds or precious twists given to words familiar in another sense. Too often the new is an escape from the old difficulty of describing. That is why the critics change adjectives every generation. We now praise with distance, control, irony, and even with literate, which properly means able to read and write. Turn to Fowler on usage and you will find the words in vogue during the first quarter of this century. They include: inevitable, cachet, sympathetic, distinguished, and they seem feeble to us. They were feeble then, as ours will seem shortly, but they were a little less pretentious.
Among latter-day phrases, ''the intentional fallacy'' is a model of what not to do. It would have been so easy to say ''the fallacy of intention;'' and much clearer to make it ''the fallacy of author's intention.'' Another coinage, T. S. Eliot's ''objective correlative,'' sins both by its ugliness and by its pomposity. Eliot evidently did not think of the shorter form correlate, which is a noun as well as a verb; or consider that the simple word object was enough. Had he settled for ''corresponding object,'' he would have impressed on the reader's mind the neglected fact that a poem is an object on the same footing as a painting, a statue or a sonata.
Images and formulas for making or clinching a point cannot be specified in advance. They occur at inspired moments and are best when they cap a demonstration in plain language. Coleridge, who distinguished between the fancy and the imagination, or Oscar Wilde who, in his famous paradox that Nature imitates Art, pointed out that art changes the way we see things, supplied formulas with which we can think and observe better. In a collection of essays just published, Robert Lowell says that he is ''not a practiced critic and has no gift for the authoritative and lucid comment that can make a quotation sail.''
This splendid sentence is another example of the apt critical image and a sign of the very gift he denies having.
No doubt such a thought comes unbidden as the critic writes, but freshness is not enough. The image may seem as brilliant as it is new, but is it solid? Does it work in all the directions suggested by facts? Goethe told his young friend Eckermann that ''architecture is frozen music.'' If Eckermann had had the nerve, he might have asked whether music was to be regarded as melted architecture.
Mentioning Goethe brings up an idea that is always popular with artists and their friends, the idea that those best qualified to be critics are the artists themselves. The notion has an insidious appeal and can arouse heated discussion. I will say only this, that if freely offered, statements by artists about their work or their art are valuable - and dangerous: they can mislead unless interpreted.
It is only during the last 150 years that the public has expected artists, famous or aspiring, to disclose their aims and visions. The periodical press, and especially the newspaper interview, have fostered the obligation for each artist to have ''ideas,'' original and unique to himself. The natural curiosity thus aroused among the public is now a steady appetite: what does Dali think about Dali?
But many artists would rather not talk or write, especially painters and sculptors, and when forced to do so, they say things that are likely to be trivial or foolish. At best, what artists supply is an inkling of their exclusive intent; that is the valuable nugget that criticism can use, as given or with interpretation. As for remarks uttered by artists under the pressure of competition for publicity, they are generally worthless - conventional jargon, echoes of vague ideas in the air: read the catalogue of any one-man show at a leading gallery. WE are thus brought back to our beginning. When critics began to think of themselves as artists, they abdicated their role and corrupted their speech. This in turn corrupted the minds of many artists and much of the public l until it became, as George Orwell said, ''normal to come across long passages [ of art and literary criticism ] which are almost completely lacking in meaning.'' And often the passages on each side of those voids need a translator. This service was once performed in France by a true critic who saw the beginnings of the anarchy I have tried to illustrate. Quoting him by way of conclusion may serve as a pattern for the common reader to follow. The exercise concerns a book about the ''primitive'' painter Rousseau.
''For Rousseau a painting was a primary surface on which he relied physically as a means for the projection of his thought. [ Translation: Rousseau wanted to paint on canvas. ] But his thought consisted exclusively of plastic elements. While structure and composition constituted the base, the pictorial substance was distributed gradually as execution progressed. [ Translation: He painted bit by bit, since one cannot cover the whole canvas at one stroke. ] In his work, what simplicity! Nothing descriptive - only surface relations on the given primary surface. These relations are infinitely varied and, without losing their inherent reality, they can also compete with nature within the limits of the painting. [ Translation: He drew natural objects in two dimensions; or, rather, to avoid tautology: he drew objects. ] Rousseau does not copy the exterior aspect of a tree: he creates an internal rhythmic whole conveying the true, grave expressiveness of the essentials of a tree and its leaves in relation to a forest. . . . But his style was established neither derivatively nor in obedience to fashion. It stemmed from the determination of his whole mind as it incarnated his artistic aspirations. [ Translation: Rousseau painted just as he liked and he liked painting trees. ] ''
Surely the test of a critic is that he does not need another critic to explain him. Language was not invented for monologues, and a critic is the last man who should be caught talking to himself. This essay is based on the keynote address delivered last month at the Ceremonial of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
