Looking Beneath the Surface
Is criticism simply about deciding which books to read and which films to watch, or is the critic looking for something deeper?
When I was a kid — too young to know what exegesis was, but old enough to be reading novels with subtext — I was obsessed with lyrics. I spent hours reading the lyrics of the bands I idolised, poring over the flimsy liner notes pulled out of CD cases, taking them to heart until I’d learned the words by heart. Somewhere along the way, I started wondering what the songwriters meant by certain phrases and words. What was the meaning of this or that word beyond its definition?
I don’t know where I got the notion that there was something to be found beyond the words, something unseen in the visible, unknown but ultimately knowable. Maybe it was from those English classes where we had to go line by line through the poems of Carol Ann Duffy and Benjamin Zephaniah, underlining instances of internal rhyme and synecdoche. Perhaps it started much earlier than that, with the need to consult the dictionary when I didn’t understand the book I was reading. This taught me that although I wasn’t able right now to make sense of what I was reading, sense could be found if I looked for it.
In any case, lyrics — being, from those admired metal bands with literary pretensions, rough attempts at poetry — gave me plenty of opportunities to ask, “What do they mean by this?” This question led me into what felt like a private wonderland of meaning. Learning that a particular word had two meanings, I suddenly and unexpectedly gained two ways of understanding the lyric, and therefore sometimes the whole song. While the top-level narrative swept its reader along one stream of meaning, I was in the undertow, whirled upstream and down, against the current here and swiftly with it there.
As I dived deeper into the waters of interpretation, my toes would often touch the riverbed, feeling the philosophical bedrock beneath the shifting sands of interpretation. Paradoxically, discovering the multi-layered, occasionally contradictory ways of viewing my favourite songs led me to see that there was often a unified vision to be found within. I was learning that there were such things as better and worse understandings of a song, or a novel, or a movie. This knowledge, along with my ever-evolving ability to discover it, felt like a superpower.
In my family home, there was a general love of literature, but there wasn’t much patience for literary criticism. When I asked out loud, “What do you think these lyrics mean?” I often heard, “It doesn’t mean anything, it just rhymes.” This was in spite of the fact that my father could wax poetic in the most insightful ways about the multiplicity of meaning in Scripture. Maybe this was the actual origin of my rudimentary criticism. My father was the first literary critic I knew, even if he thought literary critics were professional bloviators. He could spin a verse from the Psalms into a variety of yarns, or expand a single word from the Gospels into a universe of spiritual significance. But when I brought him lyrics on which I was attempting the same intellectual magic, he often told me, “You’re reading too much into it.”
Still, I never stopped believing that there was more to be seen beyond the surface of what I was seeing, even in what others might dismiss as “mere” metal music and juvenile novels. Following my own Joycean “swerve of shore to bend of bay” in my late teens, I dropped into and then out of a carpentry apprenticeship, meandered through art school, and finally decided to study English literature at degree level. Here, I found my people. The tools I’d been clumsily handling were sharpened as I applied them to the classics, and I gained dexterity through practise. I discovered that I wasn’t alone in the way I saw literature and, through it, the world. Most importantly, I met many of the critics who continue to glance over my shoulder as I read, arguing (with me and each other) about what is signified by this sentence, that paragraph, the chapter, the book as whole or the whole of art itself.
My understanding of criticism — its purpose and practise — began as it does for anyone with a taste for categorical imperatives: with existential justifications for culture, rather than personal reasons for doing what makes one happy. I was seduced by the idea (variously ascribed to Albert Camus and Bernard Malamud) that the role of the writer is “to keep civilization from destroying itself”. I believed (and still believe) that art is the method by which civilisation is continually brought back from the brink of self-obliteration. Christopher Hitchens would later convince me that it’s also our defensive wall against philistine tyrannies that would replace irony with uniformity and creativity with compliance. This is why everyone concerned with the maintenance of civilisation is “from now to the end of consciousness”, in the words of Susan Sontag, “stuck with the task of defending art”.1
This idea of criticism as a defence of art is pervasive, especially given that each generation believes its own relationship with art to be uniquely precarious. When you believe that a majority of your neighbours are too selfish, or lazy, or uneducated to engage deeply with “real art”, it becomes a mission of existential importance to contribute your own fingertips to those desperately clinging on to art as it slides over the precipice of nihilism. Who doesn’t like a grandiose purpose to get them out of bed in the morning?
In Better Living Through Criticism (2016), A. O. Scott writes about the “universal capacity of our species” to both “find fault” and “bestow praise”. “That’s the bedrock of criticism,” Scott asserts. “How do we know, or think we know, what’s good or bad, what’s worth attacking or defending or telling our friends about?” Part of criticism, in Scott’s estimation, is a process of winnowing the glut of content available, to discover what deserves our attention. Because nobody wants to waste their time, everybody has some set of standards by which they estimate the worth of a book or a film, and thinking like that is, Scott says, “where criticism begins”:
“As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged toward either the defensive group identity of fanhood or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. Meanwhile, as citizens of the political commonwealth, we are conscripted into a polarized climate of ideological belligerence in which bluster too often substitutes for argument.”
This often leads to a feeling of being overwhelmed, from which we attempt to hide:
“We can fantasize about slowing down or opting out, but ultimately we must learn to live in the world as we find it and to see it as clearly as we can.”
This is the task and reward of criticism. Rather than removing ourselves from the world, we learn to remove from our world that which clutters rather than enriches it. This kind of analysis — measuring art against a standard to determine its beauty, purpose, and value — is where I began as an amateur critic. But as the years went by, and books, films, and music passed through my personal filter, it no longer seemed enough to simply ask whether a particular cultural product was “good” or “bad”. I moved on from the beginning of criticism to what I believe is its main purpose, which I can explain using The Moonlight Principle.
The Moonlight Principle came out of a conversation with a close friend who — because I love If Beale Street Could Talk — gave me Moonlight for my birthday. We watched it together, and the film broke me apart then put me back together, and afterwards we discussed it. I conceded, gladly, that Moonlight was in every technical sense a better film than Beale Street. The writing is more consistent, there isn’t a single duff moment, and there’s a certain restraint that’s lacking in Beale Street. And yet, despite acknowledging Moonlight’s superiority by my own critical standards, Beale Street remains my favourite Barry Jenkins film.
Is this simply a bloody-minded refusal to match my emotional preferences to my intellectual standards? Stubbornness is one of my character traits, but something else is going on here. Moonlight is the better film on the page, but Beale Street speaks more profoundly to me. It’s saying things and asking questions I’m interested in; it reflects something true about my life, while critiquing the world I’m familiar with; it’s preoccupied with many of the things that preoccupy me. Beale Street is a house for my ghosts to wander and simultaneously an exorcism of what haunts me. It’s the kind of film that answers, as Scott writes, “our bottomless hunger for meaning and pleasure”. And criticism is how we address “the way we understand our responses to those beautiful, baffling things”.
True criticism isn’t about creating a hierarchy of quality and spending the rest of one’s life positioning and repositioning art on that scale, constantly comparing one thing to another. Criticism is about discovering what any given piece of art is attempting to do (and, yes, acknowledging whether it succeeds or fails at it). It’s about asking what the piece of art is asking — of us and about the world. Even “lowbrow” films and books can sometimes observe something well, or ask an insightful question, or prompt an invaluable internal journey. I often cite in my essays for Art Of Conversation books that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend to anyone I liked, but that nevertheless provide a route through the surface of things, to the depths where real solace and insight can be found.
This was what those lyrics first opened up to me: a metaphysical plane that felt truer than literal reality, where sojourners in the land of art could be renewed, a world of meaning beneath the surface of the world. To read a novel is to get to know its story and characters; to engage in criticism is to get to know yourself, your culture, and your values. It is to meet with more than the novel or film itself and to better understand all that we call its context. In other words, we come through art — guided by critical analysis — to a better, deeper, truer understanding of the world. It’s not a case of reading too much into things, but of reading as much as possible out of them.
Against Interpretation, and Other Essays, Susan Sontag (1966)