The critics bear it away

Frederick Crews has been a force in American literary culture ever since his hilarious spoof of criticism, The Pooh Perplex, made its way onto the bestseller lists in 1963. Now, in The Critics Bear It Away, he turns his attention to the way key American novelists - from Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Twain to Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Connor, and Updike - are being apprehended, and misapprehended, by the academic avant-garde. As Crews shows, recent theoretical discourse takes a justifiably hard line toward the liberal humanism and formalism that dominated the discussion of American classics for many years following World War II. As academics have become more distrustful of the social attitudes that produced a largely white-male, New England-based canon, they have developed a dramatically altered account of standard authors - sometimes indicting them for ideological deficiencies, sometimes attempting to render their texts more congenial through "decentered" techniques of analysis.^

With relentless logic and a keen eye for the telling detail, Crews shows what is gained and, more often, what is sacrificed by such well-intentioned maneuvers. Are we really better off, he asks, with a Mark Twain who has been stripped of his idiosyncratic wit and reduced to the level of contemporaries whose prejudices he may have shared? Conversely, should we rejoice when methodological sleight-of-hand makes Faulkner's blatant sexism and Flannery O'Connor's Catholic pietism disappear? This is not to say, however, that Crews exercises his skepticism only on proposals from academic trendsetters. The Critics Bear It Away is just as unsparing toward traditionalists who want the cultural clock to be forever stopped at 1945. Crews's purpose is not to support a faction but to expose critical illusions.^

"And the particular illusions I will be examining," he announces, "originate in conservative as well as radical impulses - in, for example, New Critical formalism, orthodox intentionalism, Christian or Agrarian moralism, and outright hero worship of the sort that transforms an Ernest Hemingway or a John Updike from a spiteful, ethically confused, yet often compelling writer into an icon of pure masculinity or matchless sophistication." Taken together, Crews's chapters - many of which derive from controversial essays he has published in The New York Review of Books - make a coherent stand, not for any one ideology or method, but for a nuanced, biographically aware criticism that faces troubling issues without retreating into dogmatism. The Critics Bear It Away is a major statement from a critic to whom books and authors, with all their limitations on view, matter far more than cliques and trends.