Why I Hate Literary Criticism and You Should Too

This is a generalization, but it is a generalization against generalizations. To apply a theory to a book - feminist, Marxist, deconstructionist, whatever - is to arrogantly assume the writer even knows what the hell those terms mean. It shocks and appalls me when I see essays about Cormac McCarthy's "Freudian Conscience in the Move Westward". What the hell does that even mean? To me it is the equivalent of people who said Jar Jar Binks is racist. I mean fine, he's annoying to a lot of people. But that there were those who interpreted it as an attack on Asian culture just the pinnacle of absurdity. Inevitably, the meaning of great novels will be argued over, but it should be based on their CONTENT - excuses should not be made to broadly apply these overarching, generalizing, confining critical philosophies that just have nothing to do with the actual content of the novel. To study great books is not easy. To pick out a few incidental passages separated from the whole and give them the veneer of neo-nazism or some nonsense is the simplest (and most degrading) pasttime. It is so rare these days to read a critical essay about a novel that addresses what the entire novel means and what it was trying to do; instead, the reference section of any classic will be jam-packed with 90% of its pages comprising, "Feminist Theory in The Sun Also Rises", or something along those lines. How can you read a book like Sun Also Rises and somehow think Feminist Theory is the most important thing to take away? That's being judgmental, but I'm not asking for a unity of opinion. Only relevance and a respect for the author and the art he or she has created.


Things I have learned from some time in an MFA Program:
1) It is apparently considered widespread and popular, and thereby unsatisfactory, uncool, and somehow naive, to write a story with Hemingway's Iceberg Principle in mind (show only 1/8th of the story).

2) The white whale in Moby-Dick has no symbolic meaning.

3) No book on your bookshelf leaves you with questions or ambiguities not answered directly by the author (apparently Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel 'The Road' (of which the author said "I don't know" in response to a NY Times query about what the unnamed environmental disaster in the book truly was) is not on anyone's bookshelf).

4) Because mediocre writers go through 100 drafts of their work, and great writers go through two, you should be taught to go through 100.

5) All dialogue must be subtext (seems to incriminate rule #3).

6) Refer to simple things in complicated ways. Example: "inactive narrator", "unreliable narrator", "comma splices", etc.

7) All novels must be about three things. A journey from innocence to experience, the influence of society upon characters, and the effect of time upon characters.

As a quick response, number one stems from a need to feel as though something greater has been recognized - that the theory of "show do not tell", is the general fault of this generation of aspiring writers - that the 'secret' has been discovered, and that secret is to avoid the greatest influence on the sentence in the 20th Century (Hemingway). Two falls into the same kind of pretension. Saying Moby-Dick is only Moby-Dick may be trying to prove a point of some sort. I don't know. The only point it proves to me is that you read the Bantam Abridged Classics edition instead of Melville's full text. Have some respect old Herman. Hell, for Ishmael. Three underestimates the reader and supports subpar writing. Four, every writer is different. You can't apply broad rules. Everyone should be encouraged to discover their own formula. Insisting upon dozens of revisions leads to over-thinking; the greatest crime, in my opinion, for anyone creative. Five, take a look at any scene from anything McCarthy, anything Faulkner. Lines are included for the sake of establishing a brutally realistic scene, but they aren't saying anything deeper. Six, an inactive narrator can be a literary device and in and of itself is not a valid criticism of a creative work. Talking about a narrator's unreliability is a two minute discussion and is brought up by people who do not understand what the novel is really about - if the narrator can't be trusted, it is blatantly obvious. Move the hell on. Seven, how fascinating would it be to turn those 'rules' on their heads? Satisfying, in the very least.


What I've learned from a lifetime of reading every single book I can get my hands on, and reading everything I can find about every writer I want to imitate, is that for great writing, there must be no rules. Any writer that accomplishes anything beyond their decade makes their own rules. The 'rules' are self-learned and self-taught in any self-respecting high school and by a few years at the public library. And as soon as they are learned they should be broken.

If you are seeking to write only as a profession, if you are looking just to learn to write what other people want to read, if your sole interest in the art of literature is to have a job that you like more than what you have now, then these rules aren't such a bad thing. But by and large - and here come more generalizations - I don't think these rules, these ideas, aim for greatness. They aim for the general. They assume from day one that a future John Updike is not sitting in that room and they aim to teach with that determination in mind. That classes continue to focus on irrelevance is to me an incredible pretension. So often, in the literature classes I have been in over the last few years, someone will not know what they are talking about and speak as if they were. In early years of college undergrad, when I was not as adept at seeing this deception, I just thought everyone was understanding something that I didn't. That I had somehow read all of this literature wrong because I came to different conclusions. Slowly I came to realize that somewhere between 50 and 80% of the class discussion has involved bullshitting. People saying things THEY don't even believe. All that's fine and dandy, too, if you want to join a bookclub. But bookclubs don't put you into 100k of debt.