Fate Of Literary Criticism At Present

Brutal yet gracefully objective criticism guarantees the evolution of great literature.

Take the European Renaissance, for instance. Many scholars think the creative products of the Renaissance attained their poignancy because there were brutal critics who would not tolerate even the slightest flaw. We have never had another renaissance, not because we never had artists but because we lost the aura of such brutal yet gracious critics.

There is a class of scholars that thinks literary criticism is falling apart today, and to a great extent, I agree with that. There are multiple reasons behind this. The "author function" (to borrow a Faucauldian term) of a critic springs out of three things.

First, people ask who he or she is by training: a learned academic, a seasonal exuberant, or a mere enthusiast who writes under peer or media pressure. This is a question of ethos. This counts a lot, because unless a critic is evidently well-versed in the critical tradition, literary and critical theories, and writing practices, the degree of reliability dwindles.

Potential Critics

In the past, our academic spaces, including universities and academies, were places that groomed potential critics. These days, these spaces have been hijacked by political appointees, whose mission is something other than literary excellence. Therefore, in our own days, our critics lack authenticity and reliability, as they do not spring from hardcore critical and theoretical schools.

They come from back channels and either last only for a season or end up proving themselves to be mediocre critics. Secondly, one needs a lot of courage to speak the truth. A critic is expected to speak the truth, unearth the merits, and expose the demerits as they are.

Truth may be contextual and relative, yet it needs to be sustained by reliable logic and justifications. A person who drools for popularity cannot take the risk of speaking the truth if the truth is grim and potentially repulsive. But these days, I see a lot of celebrity syndrome at work, and people are after the glitter of name and fame. In such a case, it is natural that people do not take up a thankless task like that of a critic.

In recent times, I have seen four sorts of people hijack criticism. The first line is that of the journalists, who are well-versed in writing news stories or features, but since they have a paper, online, or a journal with easy access, they write "criticism."

Such criticism obviously tends to be either appreciative or cursory. The second line comprises "missioned critics," who belong to one particular school of thought or interest group and write to praise or eulogise another member of the same school of thought or group.

The third category comprises academy-commissioned critics, who come from the academicians’ comfort zones and work as directed or dictated.

The last group, and perhaps the worst, comes from the universities, where the faculties publish books of criticism overnight to get a number, 1 or 2, for their promotion inside the university. We must look for the fifth category, free of avarice, ill will, and bias, and untouched by celebrity syndrome. Such critics are really few.

Another grim reality is that the younger generation is not seen as inclined toward criticism, and this hints at a bleak future in this discipline. Some possible explanations include compartmentalised courses, fragmented teaching, and underqualified professors in our academia. Our youngsters know many things, yet they are confident in very few things. Worst of all, they don’t want to pull themselves into an unsolicited debate. The actual rub lies here.

This is what went wrong with our criticism. I don’t think this is the case everywhere. What gets published in Nepal is determined by the writers’ relationship with the publisher or editor.

In our case, seeing an article rejected is unusual. If one paper is rejected, another is accepted and published. You name a critic, and I can, to a large extent, tell which national daily or journal will publish his or her writing.

We knew these schools, pools, and coteries. Overseas, one has to really undergo a lot of trials and tribulations to get a single good-quality journal article published. Once published, it creates a fervor.

What is published here rarely matters to anyone other than the author or a small group of people who know what they are talking about. In later decades, such practises effectively murdered the soul of our criticism.I was unsure if I was cynical alone, but when I went to interview Prof. Basudev Tripathi on the same issue for a Nepal-Academy magazine, he told me the same thing. I convinced myself then, saying this is a big reality of our times.

Fallacious

Readers’ criticism is often cursory and fallacious, whether affectively or intentionally. They seldom go beyond mapping out their expectations and scrutinising what a book delivers. Such "impressions" do not contribute to the volume of our criticism.

Therefore, we should not be complacent. Though there is a lot of hue and cry about the readers’ response theory, its multi-edged and ambiguous nature makes it quite fishy. We need to groom a generation that is free of the avarice for popularity, open in mentality, literal in spirit, and well-versed in literary and critical theories and traditions. I have little or no hope from academia, so groups and individuals outside academia should shoulder this responsibility.

However, blaming criticism alone won’t do. We must, in the first place, anneal and streamline our creations. We must see global standards and try to lift our quality to a respectable level.

When we, the writers from Nepal, stand on a global stage, we are not expected to reproduce the universals, be they in terms of ideas, values, feelings, styles, or standards. We are expected to present the local uniqueness and represent ourselves with things that are uniquely ours, be it in content, style, philosophy, or approach. People will undoubtedly wonder what philosophical foundation or national and cultural character our writing carries or implies.

Allow me to elaborate.Have we ever pondered on what our nascent, unadulterated, exclusively Nepalese cultural or civilizational character is? We find ourselves in civilizational traditions: the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Kirat, or the pantheist or animistic indigenous civilizations. We are people who grew up hand in hand, sharing gods, borrowing incarnations and inscriptions, celebrating each other’s festivals, and visiting shrines together.

Certain religions in the world arose from the same crucible but remained antagonistic, and their adherents launch crusades to sweep away adherents of other religions.What defines that extraordinary measure of tolerance and harmony in us that contrasts with the intolerance and animosity elsewhere? Does our "common civilizational crucible" have an answer? When almost all of Asia was colonised by the Western powers, Nepal remained free. What did we have in our character that kept the colonisers at bay? Our meagre military might was certainly not the reason.

It cannot be, for it did not matter in front of sophisticated guns and cannons. Was it our shrewd diplomacy? Or our "extremely loveable" character? If yes, that is our invaluable treasure. Has that been researched, established, and celebrated in our literature? No. 

One more thing! We always had conflicts at home, but an outside factor—a mission or an intermediary—never resolved our issues. We did it ourselves. What is that particular trait in our genetics that makes us the best peacekeeping community in the world? Can we cash in on this surest model of conflict resolution and share it with the world? Has our literature anywhere written this? No. What are we writing, then?

Untapped Resources

The folk assumptions and the folk collective unconscious of the Nepali countryside, towns, and hamlets are an untapped resource to a huge extent. At home, too, our folk literature is quite bleak. We often hanker after Hindu-Buddhist scriptures and mythologies to define us, but they no longer represent the exclusive Nepali identity, for the Hindu legacy is shared across the whole of South Asia and the Buddhist legacy across North and South Asia, Oceania, and the Far East. In that case, the folk aspect of Nepali life exclusively gives us a Nepali identity. How much have we explored this?

We are heavily plagued by Western metaphors in our writing.

The adjective "Herculean" comes to mind when we think of a massive, nearly impossible task.We use symbolic figures like Helen, Athena, Sisyphus, Apollo, and Adonis and adjectives like Epicurean, Hedonistic, Machiavellian, etc. to talk about various attributes.

Don’t we have our own cultural figures, epithets, and icons to talk about these things when we have such a voluminous scriptural legacy to take pride in? I mean, how much is our literature rooted in our own heritage? Or, do we even know our heritage contains symbols and images to talk about anything on earth, for that matter?

(Paudyal is an assistant professor of English at Tribhuvan University)