[Sublunary Editions; 2023]
In his book on the Victorian bourgeoisie, Pleasure Wars, historian Peter Gay writes that criticism became more popular as a burgeoning middle class sought out art and music to distinguish themselves culturally; they also needed, Gay argues, a kind of tutoring to learn that mark of distinction, taste, to stave off their own anxieties about class slippage. This doesn’t seem wrong so much as it seems a bloodless account of criticism and what it does, both for critics and our readers. A.V. Marraccini’s We the Parasites, by contrast, takes a more erotic tack—the critic not as an aloof tutor, but perhaps instead as a tick, “feeding away, mouth to flank” until the critic “explode[s] and the thin walls of my body will seep out.” If not a tick, perhaps the critic is a wasp boring into a fig, only to be dissolved, or a louse who cuts out the tongue from the mouth of a fish. The critic as a parasite is an alluring proposition, if for no other reason than its function as self-deprecatory autobiography, though its other function as imago is to suggest that nothing short of art will nourish and sustain the critic. The (life)blood of the work is metabolized and made something else, that it is emaciation by one cynical view, but more generously, reads as transformation.
Marraccini recounts the parable of Rindy Sam, the Cambodian French artist who kissed Cy Twombly’s painting Phaedrus (“a sort of cannibalism or parasitism on Theocritus . . . Most of the panel is this white, the absence of the dead beloved that is the mourning.”). Sam was ordered to pay 1,500 euros to a gallery (and a single euro in nominal damages to the artist himself) after leaving the bone-white canvas with a red lipstick mark. Sam protested, arguing that “I just gave it a kiss. It was a gesture of love, when I embraced it, I didn’t think, I thought the artist, he would understand.” I didn’t think, I thought the artist would understand—the contradiction only reveals how art’s threat to transform its viewers can lead viewers to threaten the same in kind. In fact, the metaphor is nearly overwhelming—the kiss could not be removed. Sam, as a critic-artist, destroyed and remade the painting—transformed it, as love is apt to do.
As I read this critic writing about criticism, myself a critic writing about criticism, I thought about Ryan Ruby’s recent suggestion that we live in a golden age of criticism. His explanation is mostly materialist, rather than artistic, namely that the platforms that once housed and siloed criticism, such as newspapers, magazines, and universities, have fallen apart. Simultaneously, critics have found a platform and an audience through X (née Twitter) and Substack, allowing critics to practice their work in public and surrounded by a ring of onlookers. He takes an institutional view, but I’ll be more plain and even personal: Being a critic today ends up being one part of a longer hustle; I am a graduate student paid a stipend (sizeable compared to other graduate student peers, but that really only speaks to the privations of graduate stipends) who also tutors, translates, writes criticism, and takes out student loans to eke out a life. Even where I am not paid, I am harvesting the phantasmic currency of exposure in order to a make a name for myself in the hope someone might see someone worth tossing a coin to. I am working in the twilight of Peak TV, Peak PhD, perhaps even, Peak Criticism—and this gives the present a curious cast: There are critics everywhere, and some of them are bound to be good. At the same time, who would pay for critics when, as the saying goes, “Twitter is free?”
The epigraph to Part 2 of Marraccini’s book is from the Greek theologian Xenophanes—“The following are fit topics for conversation for men reclining on a soft couch by the fire . . . Who are you, and what is your family? What is your age my friend? How old were you when the Medes invades this land?”—and recurs near the middle of the book. “The Mede is the stock Athenian word for Other sometimes,” Marraccini tells us, suggesting the infinite substitutability of Medes for the Befores and Afters we have just lived through: Before and After the first wave or the second or Omicron or the vaccine, Before or After the stable permanent academic jobs dried up and the private equity firms bought up and shut down the newspapers. There are no soft couches now, as Marraccini would be the first to admit: The most comfortable chair I own is a Herman Miller office chair I bought from the mass liquidation of tech offices last year; it is ergonomic, letting me work longer before my fingers go numb than my last chair did.
There is something ruthless at the core of the critic’s task, perhaps because a critical sensibility can be one that insists no work is above the careful evaluative powers of the critic. This might make some of us cynical—if nothing is truly transcendent, then our work relies on good and bad as nothing more than relative terms. In the alternative, one might give up that meager critique, consisting as it does of shucking flesh from bone, and resign oneself to the fact that “[i]f you try to make a Twombly your Twombly too much, it conquers you . . . you know, you know you have been marked out somehow, tainted. Is it bad to be tainted?” That is, another type of critic might submit to art’s powers of possession, the battle to best or be bested by the work, its expression, the puncture that collapses the artist’s time with the viewer’s—the task of one type of critic, the critic Marraccini feels warmer kinship with—might be to allow for this puncture, to continue boring into the work as the work bores into the viewer, so that the critic can help other viewers see the world from within an artwork’s viscera, the history-culture-language that sustains it. This is bloody work, such that its participants cannot avoid being tainted. This criticism is a tactile one reliant on sensation; it might beleaguer the critic who takes criticism as nothing more than an instrument for politics or ideology, that is, who treats criticism as anesthetic preparing the work to be gutted, rather than as aesthetic rapture. For Marraccini, the politics are important—but only as one set of lenses in the optician’s toolkit, alongside more aesthetic and tactile ones. This can be disorienting, if only because the critic-surgeon has become the popular figure of the moment—think Lauren Oyler, Ann Manov, Christian Lorentzen, Andrea Long Chu, which is only to name the most popular critics whose fame arises from a mass (internet-mediated) love for literary bloodsport. An avid reader of the internet might be misled into thinking that this is what criticism is, or should be.
For a different type of critic, the type Marraccini hails, the absorptive sense of surrender and being possessed by a work is nice enough; it has to be if we’re to continue it while all the shelters collapse around us, exposing us to the elements. “The wasp doesn’t choose to need the fig, nor the tapeworm the gut,” writes Marraccini. I don’t take this to mean only that criticism is an avocation—though it may be that—but rather that criticism is a bequest of birth, that the capacity to pass judgment is natural and merely honed, rather than sown and cultivated ex nihilo. Put differently, critique (critiquer, kritisieren) is an act; we surrender too much in making it a status or a job.
The future of criticism, I think, may be the critic’s demise. This is wishful thinking, not regretful prediction, both on my part and perhaps Marraccini’s. We critics have sought to teach the world something, not of taste, but of what it means to be possessed, to make a gesture of love and surrender to the pleasure of the work, and how it is that one finds a place to burrow and dissolve inside a fig. Won’t the viewer join me?
Sohum Pal (he/they) is a graduate student and critic(?) in New York City. His work appears in Full Stop, The New Inquiry, Lux, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
This post may contain affiliate links.
