The Critic as Philosopher and Poet: A Polemic against Secondary Literature

There are no Facts, only interpretations —and that is an interpretation.
F. Nietzsche

Literary Criticism has often times been seen as a minor or subordinate endeavor. This is evinced by the inadvertently depressing term that academic lingo uses to describe it: secondary literature. The designation almost seems to hint towards a slightly modified version of that old adage hated by teachers everywhere: those who can’t write, criticize. At best, the critic is seen as an illuminator: someone who sheds light on an obscure text, a “pointer out” of interesting details. At worst, he or she is seen as a vampire: someone who lives off the works of others, sucking on the genius-blood of great men and women —a pathetic surfer on the grand waves of Art, Beauty, and Truth. It is my contention, however, that this vision of criticism is unnecessarily narrow, and must be reevaluated. The critic’s business is interpretation —and interpretation should be more than mere elucidation. The critic must go beyond the studied text. His role, I believe, should be closer to that of the philosopher than to the one of the commentator.

This is especially important today, when academic philosophy —especially in the English-speaking world— has become a technical discipline with little relation to life. The critic, if he is to fulfill the immense potential of his profession, must make the interpretation of life through texts his declared mission. He must search for answers to ethical, political, religious, epistemological, metaphysical, and ontological questions in literature, film, and art. The critic must transcend the meaningless distinctions of university disciplines and enlist the help of history, philology, and even the social sciences in his inquiry. If the understanding of philosophy as the examination of life is not to perish under the vain disputations of the new schoolmen, the critic must become the new philosopher

It should not suprise us that in our day and age philosophy should begin with interpretation: our cultural inheritance is so vast and intertwined that it would be foolish —impossible, even— to begin from scratch. The critic interrogates past writers —past artists, past humans— because art and writing have become the stuff of life. To say that the world is a text has become commonplace, but that detracts nothing from the fact that art shapes the way we live and think in unfathomable ways. The critic begins with tradition —and then proceeds to question it, champion it, tear it apart, defend it, discard it, or expand it. In a word: make it new. If this implies lifting a text from its context and killing the author, so be it. If this implies historicizing a text and carefully exploring the biographical and psychological circumstances of the author, so be it. The point, after all, is to extract all the possible meanings from a text: to liberate words, not pin them down.

There is nothing too insignificant to escape the gaze of the critic. TV advertisements, Internet forum firestorms, misspelled blogs, madmen’s pamphlets, graffiti, technical manuals and scientific databases —everything is subject to interpretation, everything contains meaning just waiting to be revealed. The critic must have sharp eyes: he is an observer, a watcher, an endless note-taker. The critic notices what others do not notice, and he makes sense of what appears to be senseless.

The critic, moreover, must also be a poet. To the critic, form is as important as content. Each interpretation becomes itself a text subject to interpretation, and as such is to be held to the same standards as the texts it interprets. Critical language must be beautiful: Immanuel Kant’s greatest failing and ultimate downfall is his style. A critic must take his reader for a dance, constructing his text with the elegance and artistry of a great architect. A critic must avoid academic conventionalities —those murderers of good writing— like the plague. He is entitled to an individual voice: his texts can be everything but the ascetic, aseptic, unthreatening pieces that academic factories mass-produces every day. The critic must rescue the first person singular —that mark of true authorship, the unashamed “I”— from the timid, frigid, vague “one” or the falsely modest “we.” Whether explicitly or implicitly, every work of art is an interpretation of its predecessors —and so it is only fitting that writing that acknowledges this interpretative function explicitly should recognize itself as art and hold itself to the appropriate standards.

What I am putting forth is not new or revolutionary: today, the words “critic” and “philosopher” are often used interchangeably, if sometimes mediated by that vague third term that seeks to create a false separation between philosophy and interpretative writing: "Theory". Literary critics already do the most exiting philosophical work of our time, and the most important writers of our generation are informed by and in conversation with the work of these critics. After all, it is only fitting that Criticism should be the essential thought-mode of an age of crisis. My only request is that we do away with that idiotic term: secondary literature. The critic is the interpreter of the human condition. What the hell is secondary about that?

Sinceramente,

NMMP