THE CREATIVE CRITIC

“Aeschylus and Euripides remained unsuccessful for a long time, until they had finally educated judges of art who appraised their work by the standards they themselves applied.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Creativity, genuine creativity, is all about taking risks, all about exposing oneself, risking censure, scorn, silence and even death for having ventured into those realms which ‘the tribe’ considers taboo. But it cannot be helped. Creative individuals are no more in control of these things than were the apes who came down from their snug abode in the trees and ventured onto the plains. They must go wherever the work takes them. They cannot hold back, though they may sometimes wish to cover their tracks.

As a poet, I often find myself in the position of questioning where a poem is taking me. Nevertheless, I rarely destroy a poem, unless I see clearly that it is botched or still-born. I will give it the benefit of my paranoid doubt and sit on it until I’m able to face it, or approach it from a more distant perspective. This is also how I approach the work of others. One should always be willing to see what’s at stake in a creative work and enter it where possible in the spirit in which it was wrought. If a critic or a reviewer does not give a work the benefit of his or her doubt, it could be because that critic harbours no doubts. Perhaps the work is unquestionably bad. However, it is just as likely to be the case that the critic’s views about art are so entrenched that, rather than call those views into question, the work itself must be damned. Reviewers rarely see what’s at stake in a work. They would rather try to fit the work into their own preconceptions. Artists expose themselves and, in so doing, they expose others, which is why they can meet with such strong reactions. But people whose views about art are entrenched, who are in no doubt regarding their own preconceptions, are precisely the people who never think in terms of giving a work the benefit of their doubt. They have no doubt to give it the benefit of. Besides, is it not always better to attack others than question one’s own preconceptions? Is it not better to keep those preconceptions intact than enter the spirit of something which doesn’t conform to them? That is the only way some people know how to protect themselves from the Other.

The Other, as it manifests itself in a work, has claims on us all, and the reason is that it is not out there in the world as something external to ourselves, but is ourselves in an unfamiliar guise. The Self is not something that simply belongs to you or to me as individuals. As Truman Capote once wrote, “We are all the same person.” The Self belongs to everyone; it is something we all share or participate in. Were there not a common self, we would all be windowless monads, unable to communicate one with another. However, it is not that this Self pre-exists us. It is more something we create in our encounter with one another, a field we generate in that encounter, a potential we all have in common. This is true of our encounter with a work of art as well, which is not just a thing, a dismembered artefact, but something which, despite everything Eliot has said to the contrary, has a personality of its own bequeathed by the artist. Perhaps that is why, all too often, new works of art, or new interpretations of old works of art, elicit hostile responses. I recall a wonderfully surreal piss-take of The Magic Flute at one Edinburgh Festival. Three posh national broadsheets all attacked it, saying, “This is not what Mozart intended!” as if they could know what Mozart intended or what Mozart intended mattered. Art is a very personal thing and our responses to it have personal roots, reaching down into our relationship with the Self we all have in common, but for various reasons we don’t always want to acknowledge.

How we are constituted is important to our reactions to art. A person in a position of power or influence, like a reviewer in a posh paper, may have a completely different response to a work from a person in no such position. A homophobe cannot be expected to have anything but a homophobic reaction to work which has a homo-erotic content. The Self, if you like, has a ground-state which contains the potential for real communication between all sorts of people. It doesn’t matter what the differences between them are. But entrenched habits, customs, mores, class-attitudes, ingrained beliefs, sexual hang-ups, cultural prejudices, linguistic practices and so on and so forth, may become barriers to our feeling at home in this ground-state. Artists create out of this ground-state, but if the content of a work of art created out of this ground-state is out of tune with these entrenched habits, customs, mores, class-attitudes, ingrained beliefs, sexual hang-ups and so on and so forth, it must be attacked, rubbished, superciliously dismissed or ‘ignored’ with a deafening silence.

The only adequate critical response to a work of art is one that emanates from the ground-state which the critic implicitly shares with the work under discussion. Another name for this ground-state response to a work of the imagination might be the Imagination itself. A person in touch with his or her ground-state is in touch with everyone else’s. Resonating at the frequency of this ground-state, one becomes capable of imaginatively entering the being of someone else. It is for this reason that the Imagination is essential for real communication between two or more human beings and why, therefore, art can help in establishing and perpetuating such communication. One must be able to stand on the ground of the other and allow the other to occupy the ground of oneself and live inside of oneself, as it were. This is surely what artists do, if they are genuine artists. They do not depict the Other as Other, but as Self, a self which is one with one’s own self and which, because of that, one’s own self can inhabit. This resonation of two selves become one is a function of the Imagination at work. It is as necessary for day to day communication as it is for the creation of a work of art and an adequate critical response to that work. And it very often happens despite oneself, and against the habitual grain of oneself, the self we may have been brought up to believe is the true self.

What inhibits this ability to access our ground-state in that of another or others? In a word, some kind of intercepting belief-complex. The inability of the medieval monks - mentioned in my essay on Sartre - to imagine the plight of the dogs they were dismembering in order to find out where the bellows were that made the poor creatures howl was their belief that the dogs didn’t have souls and were therefore simply machines. That belief prevented a ground-state response to the ground-state plight of the dogs from emerging. It prevented the full functioning of the imagination, in other words, which is rooted in these ground-state responses. This ground-state is more than simply a human ground-state. It is part and parcel of the ground-state of everything - the electron or atom, no less than the dogs or ourselves. Being in this ground-state enables us to cross barriers of time and space, person and species, to be in other places, bodies, minds and historical periods, while still remaining firmly ensconced in our own. Near the beginning of Jean Santeuil, Marcel Proust writes, “A painter is as much astonished to discover a sensibility akin to his own in a ploughman or sailor, as we are when we come upon a delicacy worthy of our own refined sensibilities…in a letter of a laundress telling of the death of her son. The language of our own day striking at us from a passage in the Iliad, some crisis in the history of Egypt revealing a similarity with an event in our own humdrum lives_such things serve to show how the basic substance of humanity, often invisible and, as though intermitted, is still a living reality to be found where least we expect it.” This is not just true of “the basic substance of humanity”, but of “the basic substance” of everything that has ever existed.

This is the source of the Imagination at work, the Imagination that Blake equated with Christ, but so many Christians equate with the devil. (I would equate it with Dionysus or Shiva.) Seeing this ground-state in purely human terms is, of course, the fallacy of humanism in art. Not that we shouldn’t sometimes see it in human terms, but that we shouldn’t only see it in human terms. “Man” is not the measure of all things. “Man” is not even the measure of “Man”, as I recently discovered when I followed a camera travelling through my own large intestines and saw a part of me that was very alien to ‘me’. We are made up of these ‘little bits and pieces’ which we have had nothing to do with and which function perfectly well without our being aware of them.

We should all be able to vacate our ground and stand on the ground of the Other, even when the Other isn’t human. Creative criticism stands on the ground of the work it is dealing with. It doesn’t approach that work from outside, from its own superior vantage-point. It illuminates aspects of the work which it has seen from inside by using the Imagination. It makes serious efforts to arrive at the heart of the work without interposing its own preconceptions. It allows the work to teach it, not the other way round. Of course, if this means that critics cannot grandstand at the expense of the work - and how they so often love to - so be it. They must learn to rein themselves in.

Creative critics take similar risks to poets. After all, like poets, they are bound to meet resistance from those who have dedicated their professional lives to the artists or writers whose work they may have something to say about. The people who run the show, which include the ‘experts’, must not only have a monopoly of weapons and power, but also of knowledge, for knowledge is power, and it shouldn’t be allowed to get into the ‘wrong hands’, like weapons in the hands of a ‘terrorist’. Yet, the fact is that maverick outsiders always see what ‘experts’ never do. They are able to look at questions from non-institutionalised ways, which gives them an enormous advantage which the professionals lack.

Here I must make a slight digression. The film Good Will Hunting is by no means one of Gus Vant Sant’s best. The two central relationships in the film tend to be rather clichéd. However, I suppose that it is sometimes necessary for a director of Van Sant’s calibre to make commercially successful films like this so that he can go out on a limb with films like Elephant and Jerry. Nevertheless, despite being a commercial film, it does have one claim on our attention here. And that is that its chief character, Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon, who, along with Ben Affleck, also wrote the script) is an emotionally disturbed mathematical genius with pronounced delinquent tendencies who works as a cleaner at a university. He is an extremely bright working-class orphan from a rough neighbourhood who feels more affinity with others of his background than he does with the university dons, corporate executives and the military and intelligence personnel who are all falling over themselves to develop or employ his unique ability for the benefit of the institutions they serve. He is not taken in by them and refuses these institutions the benefit of his gift. In a sense, he is a kind of paradigmatic cinema-hero, who speaks for more than just himself in his truculent, almost Rimbaud-like relationship with academia and the military-(post-?)industrial complex of corporate America. His is the only truly authentic reaction one with his abilities and upbringing can have to the large alienating institutions which dominate the public sphere. He is keeping faith with himself in not joining the professional knowledge-mongers in order to exploit his own innate talent. That’s what makes him a paradigmatic hero. He is not so different from the poets and creative critics I have been talking about here who, in relation to the institutional frameworks of patronage of our society, prefer to keep their distance and become maverick outsiders, for this is the only way they can keep their integrity intact. Their kind of knowledge is, after all, a different kind of knowledge from that which the non-outsiders profess. And it is different because it is essentially creative; it will not fit the parameters of conventional knowledge; nor will it happily adapt to the uses to which conventional knowledge is normally put. This of course places these maverick outsiders at a distinct disadvantage in their dealings with the institutional frameworks of patronage in our society. So that, very often, they too are driven to taking jobs as university cleaners!

What these professors of conventional knowledge all too often prefer not to see is that there really are two types of knowledge, a fact which is rendered in Spanish by the distinction between conocer and saber, which doesn’t exist in English. The first is knowledge by acquaintance as in to know someone, the second is knowledge by reputation, as in to know about something, a fact, or a piece of information relayed second-hand, as it were. The first kind of knowledge may be associated with the word Gnosis. Gnosis is living knowledge. It can only be acquired through direct experience. It cannot be taught or conveyed, like the dead knowledge which the professors of knowledge trade in. Of course, dead things are necessary to sustain the living. It would be hard to eat a cow that was still alive, after all. But it is the living forms of existence which matter. They are - in a practical, if not ontological, sense - forms of Sartre’s Being-For-Itself living off the carcass of Being-In-Itself. The relationship between living and dead knowledge is like that between thinking and thought. Thought has value only in as far as helps provoke or sustain thinking in the present. Thinking is what is happening now. Thought is over and done with. This is true of literature. Literature is what is over and done with. Its existence is only virtual, like that of a virus. It can come alive again only through our living encounter with it. The important thing is not literature itself, but our side of that living encounter, the life we breathe into it in other words, apart from which it has no life of its own. That encounter may be a creative artistic encounter - e.g., a book being turned into a film - or it may be a creative critical one. Or it may simply be a reader’s living encounter with it. Academia, of course, treats this dead thing as an end in itself and preserves it in institutional formaldehyde for others to learn. It exists only as part of ‘our heritage’, like a museum-piece to be taught and passed on to their students. It isn’t living knowledge - knowledge by acquaintance - but dead knowledge - knowledge by reputation. It doesn’t sustain life, but inhibits it from discovering its fullest potential. Such forms of knowledge may suit the ends of the professors of knowledge and the institutions they serve, but in so doing, they are kept as their own preserve. Which means in the end that only outsiders may have a genuinely living encounter with them.

As I have suggested, our common ground-state, is the source of the Imagination. This ground-state is also the source of all genuine knowledge - or Gnosis. People who are in touch with their own ground-state along with the ground-state of everything else, experiencing the oneness implicit in everything, are accessing a form of knowledge - or knowing - which others are simply not able to access. Such people instantly latch on to the underlying connections between things which others do not. In poetry, this might express itself in the sudden fusion of two - or more - previously unconnected ideas through an image, which involves a crossing of boundaries from one semantic realm to another. But this ability to cross boundaries, to see unities and connections where none had previously existed is a threat to the professors of knowledge. This is one sense in which creativity is all about taking risks and exposing oneself. It leads to the only true form of knowledge - Gnosis. But those who stand in such forms of knowledge, who come to rest in them through acts of creation, always run foul of those whose conception of knowledgeis less than creative.

They also run foul of the guardians of the many and varied belief-complexes which hold a society together, the scientific no less than the religious, the academic no less than the political. These various belief-complexes are the source of every sterile conception human beings entertain. They are the antithesis of the creative. Not only are they the antithesis of the creative but, owing to the conservatism implicit in all of them, they are fundamental enemies of the forms of knowledge creativity leads to. Gnosis, as I have said, is the kind of knowledge which grows out of our common ground-state. You might discover it in a poem or novel no less than in a mystical experience. And it is a form of knowledge, not mere belief, a form of knowledge which is essentially creative in its inspiration, setting at nought the forms of ‘knowledge’ and belief which are already established. And this is what makes it such anathema to the guardians of every kind of established belief-complex and why one always takes risks in giving it utterance.

Richard Livermore. Copyright © 2007