Perhaps the most important convention, next to grammar, keeps some tortured for years. The wonder; why? These individuals are much like omnivores with an uncultivated sense of taste. They are loathsome from the beginning to older brutish novelists, and agitating to the core to those of their peers in the later years of bad taste. They scour the floor of the woods. Finding only scraps and bits of widely accepted and regurgitated trash they try their best to build their muscular structure. This they cannot do because, after all, they are eating from the gutter. Surely, the critic says, surely you've seen their work, some of the most financially successful, touted by the big art houses and forced down the throats of millions in translated editions and overseas made for tv versions. Yes, we have seen their work. But what are we to do about its impact? The critic knows to turn the willing to criticism helps sort out the bad from the art. We're to rush out, a storm of sea creatures from the depths, and seek out criticism to encourage our direction, and through a modest helping we should continue on, he believes, to the interviews and there we are allowed to suss out the human in relation to their work. This, he knows, is impossible. But to try sharpens the skill of the flipping and flopping sea creature, and in some ways the interviews help to calm it when weakness and vulnerability are visible and toll taking in authors of repute. This novel, the building of situations, characters and form, sound and sense and all therein relying on the reader's partaking, the mystery of this interaction to the novelist; all helps to create a master text of learning. We're to seek out the entire life of the work, the life of the writer, the interaction with all the texts in their lives, and in the end we know only a little more than what we've read, and that little bit is the charm of what we've learned about ourselves through all this research. Simple as it may sound, the path to good taste relies on constant...he couldn't find the word, he felt it in his throat but just as the chatter of a word came it was wrong. Simple as it may sound, the path to good taste relies upon constant self effacement? No. Self contact? No. Self interaction? Close. Self criticism. Yes. And the criticism of others loving you enough to tell you the truth. Sometimes a teacher, more often not a family member, but let's part paths on teachers and allow ourselves a second reader who is also a damn good writer.
The critic removes all self criticism from his thoughts in this capacity as this project intends a blathering rather than a sensible course.
The exception to this, always, comes in the form of timelessness. What is timelessness? What is immortality? They are different. Timelessness implies a timeless art, one appreciated through the ebb and flow of fashion, war, culture and change. Immortality simply implies the abstract positive conclusion to a very different outcome, death. We can know nothing of either, for they are both unattainable through reasonable means, and to attain immorality by force is to become notorious. Timelessness, the critic understands, in his own realm, literature, stands a book up against its last three hundred years of readable novels. Stood there, the critic assumes it does what a timeless book would do; fall, laugh, point the finger, vomit, stand at ease ignoring, follow them in their own falling gesture while truly being strong enough to appear to fall but truly then standing straighter, and maybe pointing a weapon toward the vast stack and without pulling the trigger or thrusting the blade the text shows pitfalls and how this one, a new one, has improved upon the art.
Conor Robin Madigan