MANICHAEAN
09-24-2010, 07:32 AM
When you submit something on Lit Net, its always a nice feeling when someone responds and says they liked it.
Sometimes suggestions or pointers are made and once these are weighed, considered & absorbed, they are invariably of great use.
Finally, there is criticism. The initial knee jerk reaction is annoyance, even hostility, especially if you think the critic does not understand what is going on in your head & your imagination.
I once read that criticism is like pain, in that it draws attention to an unhealthy state of things. But then, do not critics take it upon themselves to weigh and judge from their own pedestals, their own aesthetic principles and their own ethical convictions.
This to my mind is the real danger. What we require is an honest, downright and quite personal articulation, as to how a piece of writing hits us when it finds us for the moment, natural and off guard.The object should be, not to convert the writer to whatever opinions one may have formulated as a critic. It should be to divest oneself of such opinions and to give ones self up to the vision and temperament of the writer.
No one has a right to be a critic whose mind cannot, with versatile receptivity, take first one form and then another i.e as a mirror, a medium, a go-between or a sensitive film plate.
And yet we are all perhaps more multiple-souled than we care to admit. The weakness lies in our pride of consistency, our desire to be "constructive," whatever that may mean.
How many books can you read once and never read again? Quite a few. They may have flexability, originality, cleverness & insight, but they lack distinction.
Two final aspects that come to mind regards critics & criticism are;
1.The fact that you might feel a need to criticise a piece. Is that a form of worship (albeit perhaps negative)? Or even a metamorphosis?
2. Aside from us mortals, the great writers had their critics too. There were critics, (mainly of a masculine bent it seems) who opposed Dante. Goethe cared little for him; Voltaire laughed at him and Nietzsche called him "an hyena poetizing among the tombs." Likewise, Shakespeare whose personal genius has at times almost been buried under the weight of popular idolatry, perhaps as a reaction invited "incoming fire" from critics as diverse as Voltaire, Tolstoi and George Bernard Shaw.
Sometimes suggestions or pointers are made and once these are weighed, considered & absorbed, they are invariably of great use.
Finally, there is criticism. The initial knee jerk reaction is annoyance, even hostility, especially if you think the critic does not understand what is going on in your head & your imagination.
I once read that criticism is like pain, in that it draws attention to an unhealthy state of things. But then, do not critics take it upon themselves to weigh and judge from their own pedestals, their own aesthetic principles and their own ethical convictions.
This to my mind is the real danger. What we require is an honest, downright and quite personal articulation, as to how a piece of writing hits us when it finds us for the moment, natural and off guard.The object should be, not to convert the writer to whatever opinions one may have formulated as a critic. It should be to divest oneself of such opinions and to give ones self up to the vision and temperament of the writer.
No one has a right to be a critic whose mind cannot, with versatile receptivity, take first one form and then another i.e as a mirror, a medium, a go-between or a sensitive film plate.
And yet we are all perhaps more multiple-souled than we care to admit. The weakness lies in our pride of consistency, our desire to be "constructive," whatever that may mean.
How many books can you read once and never read again? Quite a few. They may have flexability, originality, cleverness & insight, but they lack distinction.
Two final aspects that come to mind regards critics & criticism are;
1.The fact that you might feel a need to criticise a piece. Is that a form of worship (albeit perhaps negative)? Or even a metamorphosis?
2. Aside from us mortals, the great writers had their critics too. There were critics, (mainly of a masculine bent it seems) who opposed Dante. Goethe cared little for him; Voltaire laughed at him and Nietzsche called him "an hyena poetizing among the tombs." Likewise, Shakespeare whose personal genius has at times almost been buried under the weight of popular idolatry, perhaps as a reaction invited "incoming fire" from critics as diverse as Voltaire, Tolstoi and George Bernard Shaw.