Continued - - - if you are interested - long reading - I should have read these advices before I edited a book last year :-)
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Now of course it is true that a good critic may form a correct estimate of a paper or a book without reading every word of it. - - - I am not, however, speaking of evaluations based on an imperfect reading, but of direct factual falsehoods about what it contains or does not contain. Negative statements are of course particularly dangerous for the lazy or hurried reviewer. And here, at once, is a lesson for us all as critics.
It would be wrong to leave this point without saying that however it may be with reviewers, academic critics seem to me now better than they ever were before. - - - On the whole we now do our homework pretty well - but not yet perfectly. I have an amusing piece of private evidence in my possession. My copy of a certain voluminous author formerly belonged to a great scholar. At first I thought I had found a treasure. The first and second pages were richly, and most learnedly annotated in a neat, legible hand. There were fewer on the third; after that, for the rest of the first poem, there was nothing. Each work was in the same state: the first few pages annotated - the rest in mint condition. Yet he had written on these works.
There is, of course, another lesson in it. Let no one try to do too many peer reviews. The fatal ignorance of the text is not always the fruit of laziness or malice. It may be mere defeat by an intolerable burden. To live night and day with that hopeless mountain of new papers and books (mostly uncongenial) piling up on your desk (or computer), to be compelled to say something where you have nothing to say — indeed much is to be excused to one so enslaved. But of course to say that a thing is excusable is to confess that it needs excuse.
I now turn to something which interests me much more because the bottom sin I detect in the reviewers is one which I believe we shall all find it very difficult to banish from our own critical work. Nearly all critics are prone to imagine that they know a great many facts relevant to a paper or a book which in reality they don't know. The author inevitably perceives their ignorance because he knows the real facts.
The critical vice I am talking about consists in yielding to the temptation they hold out and then, instead of telling us what is good and bad in a paper or a book, they create situations about the process which led to the goodness and badness. Or are they misled by the double sense of the word Why? For of course the question 'Why is this bad?' may mean two things:
a) a) What do you mean by calling it bad? Wherein does its badness consist? Give me the Formal Cause.
b) b) How did it become bad? Why did he write so ill? Give me the Efficient Cause.
The first seems to me the essentially critical question. The critics I am thinking of answer the second, and usually answer it wrong, and unfortunately regard this as a substitute for the answer to the first.
Simply to know what the critic imagines, and imagines wrongly, is of no use. Nor is it of much use to the public. They have every right to be told of the faults in my paper or book. But this fault, as distinct from a hypothesis about its origin, is just what they do not learn.
I now turn to interpretation. Here of course all critics, and we among them, will make mistakes. Such mistakes are far more venial than the sort I have been describing, for they are not gratuitous. The one sort arise when the critic writes fiction instead of criticism; the other, in the discharge of a proper function. At least I assume that critics ought to interpret, ought to try to find out the meaning or intention of a paper or a book. When they fail the fault may lie with them or with the author or with both.
I have said vaguely 'meaning' or 'intention'. We shall have to give each word a fairly definite sense. It is the author who intends; the book means. The author's intention is that which, if it is realized, will in his eyes constitute success. - - - Meaning is a much more difficult term. And especially when we differ and dispute as we do, about their real or true meaning? The nearest I have yet got to a definition is something like this: the meaning of a paper or a book is the series or system of emotions, reflections and attitudes produced by reading it. But of course this product differs with different readers. The ideally false or wrong 'meaning' would be the product in the mind of the stupidest and least sensitive and most prejudiced reader after a single careless reading. The ideally true or right 'meaning' would be that shared by the largest number of the best readers after repeated and careful readings over several generations, different periods, nationalities, moods, degrees of alertness, private preoccupations, states of health, spirits, and the like cancelling one another out when they cannot be fused so as to enrich one another.
As for the many generations, we must add a limit. - - To delay, even if we cannot permanently banish such interpretations, is a large part of the function of scholarly, as distinct from pure, criticism; so doctors labor to prolong life though they know they cannot make men immortal.
Of a book’s or paper’s meaning, in this sense, its author is not necessarily the best, and is never a perfect, judge. One of his intentions usually was that it should have a certain meaning: he cannot be sure that it has. He cannot even be sure that the meaning he intended it to have was in every way, or even at all, better than the meaning which readers find in it. Here, therefore, the critic has great freedom to range without fear of contradiction from the author's superior knowledge.
Cheers,
Paulo
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