Suitable Criticism

Review Article Suitable Criticism LAURA (RIDING) JAC KS ON What I present here is in large part a review of the critical method used by Judith Kroll in Chapters in aMythology: The Poetry o{Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper and Row 1976; 303; $12.50). Her subject I find congealed in the premises and tenns of her criticism - impossible to treat of as a distinct subject, as what it is in her treatment of it. So, I have used heat of criticism of the criticism to unfreeze the solidified mass of subject: thus, I accomplish at the least, it seems to me, a restoration of the subject from its encasement in Miss Kroll's book to open view. This process requires a dispensing with some of the amenities of conventional reviewing. I shall perhaps seem to some to indulge a penchant towards ferocity. The case is that Jjudge Miss Kroll to have approached her subject with a mistaken sense of capability of dealing with a subject ofchoice correctly through a power of objectivity presumed to have been derived from academic apprenticeship. The presumption is a common one. It induces actual peremptoriness, and error damaging to all and everything concerned - to the humane values as inclusively personal, literary, morally comprehensive, values. What ] say here on Sylvia Plath and her poetic work, and on Ted Hughes, who was her husband, whose poetic work and attitudes to poetry became mixed pervasively with her own, is affected by the fact that the subject of Sylvia Plath and that of Ted Hughes associatedly have overdented the ground of contemporary literary consciousness. There must be some attention-payin g to this effect as an abnormity. The contemporary literary consciousness is of an unfirmness that allows of, and in its inherent character as a kind of generalized human consciousness invites, marking with sharp impressions - which work themselves into it as accidents of literary weather. As persona] cases, these subjects of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes are owed kind, protective embrace in the all-unifying human epic. As literary cases, they demand peculiarly careful individualized consideration because of the use of literature exemplified in them as a master-force with which to whip services out oflanguage that suppress its nature. Neither of these two viewed language as of a dignity demeaned in their pressing upon it sense-making against its sensestructure . And the contemporary literary consciousness has been too much UTQ , VOLUME XLVII, NUMBER 1 , PALL 1977 SUITABLE CRITICISM 75 exposed to exploits of literary subversion of language's principles of sense to be capable of identifying such procedure as pseudo-literary. I am writing here" then, although 1 regard literature as having lost in these times its traditional identity and a functional justification, as a defender of literature - as it might have new being in a new intellectual consciousness of its dignity as of one essence with the dignity of language. " Some subjects that present themselves for critical treatment have as a prime feature a unity of individual character that calls forconcentratedness of attention and evaluative procedure. Others are conspicuously diverse in their make-up, and the critical eye must keep shifting, and then compose a summarizing impression . I believe that human beings, and literary subjects necessarily comprising the fact of a human-being author, conform in the main to thls s~mple pattern of difference, and that, if criticism were faithful to the character of its subjects in the respect I have outlined, there would be a much healthier condition of comprehension of the content of literary work that has acquired standing as subject-matter appropriate for critical mention, treatment. What is literary criticism, properly, but understanding a work as a human work, the purposeful linguistic production of a certain human somebody? literary criticism, however, has suffered from conversion into a would-be science of analytical eclecticism, in which psychology, anthropology, sociology, languageanalysis methodology are made a composite background for a new criticial literateness. The result is a mess of viewpoints that, managed with however much systematizing will and effort for coherent results, cannot but make something of a mess of the critical subjects. I maintain that criticism is suitable to its subject only when it...