Literature and criticism drifting apart

The challenge of the media

BY TOMAS FORSER

About two years ago, I published a book with a title inspired by Thomas Thorild, Kritik av kritiken ('Criticism on criticism'). It was a 'status report' on Swedish literary criticism in daily newspapers, its idiom and journalistic criteria, and also a historical overview of how literary criticism has changed. This was an attempt to distinguish things and examine them in order to be able to both support and question them, analyse them and place them in context. It was investigative criticism, and one of the results was that I was able to point out that we are living today in an era in which literature is doing better than the once prevalent type of literary criticism, that is to say, an authoritatively weighty longer text which scrutinized the literary work, assessing its value according to criteria which were universally acknowledged by those who defined the arts scene. Today that type of criticism is increasingly neglected and we should ask ourselves if perhaps the world of literature and the world of criticism are drifting apart. They are no longer a mutual sine qua non in the literary world. A review in Svenska Dagbladet cannot make or break a writer such as Stig Larsson, for instance.

The powerful critics of old are becoming increasingly powerless. At least if they wish to set the national standards and act as arbiters of taste. Their activity begins to resemble the work of a salesman or entertainer to an ever greater extent. The critic becomes a journalist and his or her text is just one of the many sensational articles in a newspaper.

As a result of the demands of the media, we are getting critics of a new kind, people who are far more likely to appear as main characters in their own stories than to perform an analysis of someone else's text.

Criticism is being adapted to the general demands of journalism: human interest value and newsworthiness. Star journalists know no limits and refuse to bow to elitist culture. One of the foremost Swedish examples of this new type, Per Svensson, now the arts editor of Expressen , writes about having his cataracts removed, as well as about the decay of the Swedish welfare state or professorial competitions in literary theory.

The 'entertainment section' is a common term in the US for the part of the newspapers where so-called 'reviewers' have replaced the genre-based academic critics. Reviewers are capable of examining and analysing cultural phenomena on a broad front, especially those that do not respect the boundaries between mass culture and high culture.

It is in this new cultural state, characterized by partial cultures instead of one unified culture, that the arts section of a newspaper must try to define its mission and find new forms of expression. In this new state of public dynamics, almost any culture-related contemporary phenomenon can become the subject of exciting observation. But there is also an obvious risk that the arts section begins to take a defensive approach to its task as critic, handing over the initiative to those who are wily enough to exploit the need for cultural entertainment.

The 'tabloidization' of criticism was what I called this contemporary cultural predicament of literary criticism. It is a state which is subject to limitations dictated by the media and the principles of public life. But there is also potential, in defiance of these limitations, to introduce books to new readers in new types of text, showing that close reading is possible and that literature is something worth writing about.

If Linda Skugge had not written her review of Björn Ranelid (Expressen, September 19, 2003), it would have been possible to invent it based on these premises. Certain crucial paragraphs of that review and the debate which followed illustrate all that can be said about a media-fixated type of literary criticism which focuses primarily on the personality of the writer at the expense of the work and permits itself to be drawn into a sphere of gossip and parasitic intimacy rather than maintaining a suitable distance. "I was at the same writers' party as Björn Ranelid once. He sat there with his curly blond hair, quite still in a rigid pose. He was tanned, his arms were shaven, he was wearing a sleeveless top and lip gloss." Ranelid's book was outshone by his makeup and fashion choices.

However, more interesting than the content of Skugge's text was the way it was presented. It was a suggestively egocentric column but it was featured as a review; it was a feeler testing a new type of literary criticism in the arts section of Expressen . It ought to have been debated as radicalization of the literary debate on 'life and letter', as a review of an individual, bereft of the relative autonomy of fiction. A high-profile example of a new logic which has begun to dominate the arts section.

A few months later, Skugge showed up again in Expressen's art section with a review of three books for young people about queer girls and survival guides for cheeky teenagers (December 29, 2003). But this time, the review, distinctive mainly through being in Skugge's flamboyant hallmark style, was featured as a column. On the same page, Mårten Arndtzén wrote about a book for all ages about Jackson Pollock. His article was featured under the title 'Literature'. Thus order was temporarily restored to the arts section. But for how long?

Today, Sweden's leading daily, Dagens Nyheter , puts together an arts section which tries to cross what was formerly considered the boundaries of the cultural field, and the high and low standards of taste. This is done at times with such ostentatious gestures that the critics burst their seams. Which is the inevitable consequence of the paper trying to cater to the young and old, the integrated and unintegrated, the culturally disenfranchised and those who are up to speed on contemporary culture. Not only to these but also to the remains of an educated public in a grand inviting gesture of the kind that nobody can quite trust to be genuine. Hip hop and 'identities in jeopardy' one day. The literary canon the next.

This task is as difficult as - and it has to be said - it is unavoidable from the viewpoint of cultural democracy. The arts section of Dagens Nyheter is annoying to many in my generation and it is even more annoying for even more people in the older generations. But there are plenty of people in their 20s and 30s who speak about it as the only paper that 'speaks their language' and is clued up about their world.

It goes without saying that no critic can make a solo career in this patchwork of partial cultures, or become what was once a possibility, the leading critic of a specific newspaper. Instead, a paper needs an entire staff of young critics who keep abreast of the times -- in addition to a couple of older, cosily predictable 'caretakers' for the literary heritage. But all these new types of critic are still required to be capable of the same thing: to strike a balance between subjective views, rhetoric that carries clout in the media environment, and close reading or other forms of competent literary analysis.

It is still true that it is the task of literature to bring unwritten reality to light through writing and it is still the task of the critics to interpret these new texts. But what is new is that critics are now expected to do this for readers both new and old, known and unknown in the multicultural environment that the arts scene is today.

At the turn of this new century, the body of critics is changing. On the whole, critics are now younger, and many of the new critics are women, although there are not as many women as people with a sore conscience would like to believe. This brings an unpredictable dynamism to the arts section of any newspaper: how should it be structured and how should the reviews that remain be written? Although trends in the daily press have their own logic and their journalistic formats and literary criticism has its shrinking domain, we cannot predict what the arts section as a concept will be like or what kind of criticism it will contain with what significance. It is not enough that the texts retain the length that they used to have. They must also be good. And the reverse is also true: a short text is not necessarily a bad thing as long as it is a good text!

When I ask my students in literary theory whether they read the arts section and literary criticism, I receive answers which are worrying for both arts editors and critics. A clear majority of the students say that they do not read the arts section of any paper on a daily basis. They find the texts on these pages to be difficult to understand, someone talking past them about other people's concerns. Others choose not to read them simply because they find them boring and characterless, they say.

But there is also a minority, which grew ever smaller during the 1990s but which seems to me to have revived somewhat by now, which says that the arts section is their preferred reading in a newspaper. They say they use it to find their way in exciting, partly new territory. They say they read literary criticism because those texts contain a 'resistance' which demands tenacious work from the reader and is thought-provoking in the process. There are one or two people who can see that although the arts section is branded by 'media logic', it can still be a place where the 'pre-processed' light consumist idiom generally spoken and propagated by the media is actually challenged, contradicted and held at bay. It is in this state of friction with society that both literature and criticism is written and gains new, alert readers.

There are certain claims which could be put forward by someone who has thoroughly examined Swedish literary criticism as a hundred-year-old practice:

•  It was neither better nor worse in the old days. But it was different.

•  The texts used to be longer.

•  The pictures used to be smaller and there were fewer of them.

•  It was more entertaining and less academic. And what was academic was more entertaining than what is academic today, which is more abstract.

•  It was as venomous in the old days as it is now. But never before or since has it been as wittily venomous as Stig Ahlgren's writing, nor has it been as witty since. Nobody has had his knack for sharpening a point, dipping it in fast-acting poison and firing a barb at the enemy with such diabolical accuracy. Take what he once wrote about Harry Blomberg. Blomberg had published a small devotional handbook under the title Sköna morgonstund ('Beauteous morn'). Ahlgren reviewed it in Aftontidningen under the heading "God's little goldfish". Blomberg never wrote another devotional work.

•  It used to be more personal. It was not just Sven Stolpe and Olof Lagercrantz who put recognizable signatures on their texts. It seemed that no one recommended a quiet hanging in the years of cultural radicalism in the 1930s and 40s. "A writer should always enjoy the noble privilege of being executed by the sword, in broad daylight in the presence of all the people. A beheaded writer may often grow a new and better head by the next year, but a hanged man may be broken for life," as an insolent critic once wrote. And yes, it was Ahlgren.
There are, admittedly, one or two reviewers who write as personally if not as elegantly today. Take Kristian Lundberg, who criticized his fellow poet Niklas Törnlund last year, suggesting that he be included forthwith in Bertil Petterson's anthology of 'pekoral', inadvertent doggerel. "It is always possible that Petterson has already considered him for inclusion but found him wanting - after all, truly great pretentious trash demands a certain measure of sincerity and courage from its creator. I cannot find much of that in Niklas Törnlund's latest poetry collection. It does contain many other things, though." That is personal -- and venomous. Somebody had put a headline to the piece along the lines of "Doesn't quite measure up to pretentious trash". Törnlund was featured on a photo with the review.

•  The impact was greater before.

•  There were fewer critics.

•  More of them were men.

•  There are still fewer women. Literary criticism is a genre which has given a great deal of space to gentlemen, young and old, out of the force of tradition and in terms of rhetoric. Forceful initiatives, straight answers and the incontrovertible art of bald statements were and still are marked for gender. Admittedly many women critics have entered the field and won themselves a position over the past ten years. Their approach in doing this has included deconstruction of male literary discourse and pointing out the risk of misleading information on the system level. But pick up the arts section of Dagens Nyheter , not to mention Svenska Dagbladet , and you will find that the balance of power in literary criticism still proves to be the old accustomed one, though perhaps less markedly so. Women have usually been left to deal with cultural features. Göteorgs-Posten has made the best progress among the big Swedish dailies in changing this.

•  It paid better in the old days - for a small number of critics. Fredrik Böök once made 35,000 Swedish kronor from the articles he wrote for Svenska Dagbladet in one year. He received 500 kronor for each feature he wrote during the 1920s, and he wrote one a week. That was a lot more money than he could have earned as a professor at the University of Lund. It was one of the reasons he quit his post as professor, in fact. A friend of mine got 125 kronor per text in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning when he wrote for it in the late 1960s. That covered the monthly rent for a furnished student flat. Olof Lagercrantz promised us 1,000 kronor per text in Dagens Nyheter in the early 70s. About fifteen articles would have paid for a brand new Volvo. Today, Dagens Nyheter pays 4,000 kronor for a big article. Twenty-five such articles would barely pay for a tiny Polo. Other papers pay even less.

•  Even so, it was largely the same type of text, the same rhetoric, the same type of composition and the same idiom then as now. Literary reviews in the 20th century were a stable genre after all. There are signs which seem to indicate that the reviews of the 21st century will be less stable.

•  Culture was unified before. But like before, the perspective is non-global, in fact nationally defined.

The more the old identity of the arts section dissolves, the better its chances are of operating in a new cultural climate. That is no comfort for literary criticism. But it is a paradox that anyone who wishes to work for the survival of literary criticism in the daily press has to face and be able to deal with.

Tomas Forser is a professor at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Göteborg, with a long career as a critic and arts editor in Swedish dailies.

Translated by Nicholas Mayow and Monica Sonck, The English Centre