Criticize This

My most recent adventure on the random book reading trek was another one of Josh's books, Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Originally published in 1962, enlarged edition in 2001). It has been awhile since I've gotten so excited about a book of critical essays. This edition of Warshow's collected writings, published in journals in the late 1940s and early 1950s before his death in 1955 at the age of 37, has a focus on film, but also explores literature, theatre, communism, intellectualism, and Americanism. And regardless of the subject of each individual essay, he manages to discuss almost all of these things to some extent in each one.

His writing is so sharp and well-thought-out that you will have to indulge me as I do some extensive quoting. Believe me, you'll like it:

"“A critic may extend his frame of reference as far as it will bear extension, but it seems to me almost self-evident that he should start with the simple acknowledgment of his own relation to the object he criticizes; at the center of all truly successful criticism there is always a man reading a book, a man looking at a picture, a man watching a movie."

"“And the question to be asked is not: What is my opinion of all this? That question is easily answered, but those who ask only that have fallen into the trap, for it is precisely the greatest error of our intellectual life to assume that the most effective way of dealing with any phenomenon is to have an opinion about it. The real question is: What is my relation to all this?"

[This might be my favorite one - written in response to "The Crucible"]
"“Mr. Miller'’s steadfast, one might almost say selfless, refusal of complexity, the assured simplicity of his view of human behavior, may be the chief source of his ability to captivate the educated audience... He is the playwright of an audience that believes the frightening complexities of history and experience are to be met with a few ideas, and yet does not even possess these ideas any longer but can only point significantly at the place where they were last seen and where it is hoped they might still be found to exist. What this audience demands of its artists above all is an intelligent narrowness of mind and vision and a generalized tone of affirmation, offering not any particular insights or any particular truths, but simply the assurance that insight and truth as qualities, the things in themselves, reside somehow in the various signals by which the artist and the audience have learned to recognize each other."

[This one is a great example of Warshow's ability to seemingly praise a work while simultaneously cutting it down.]
"Hemingway's supreme virtue --– I think it might almost be said, his only virtue --– has been the clarity and immediacy of his relation to language... To be sure, this near-perfection is the product of certain gross simplifications, but in general the simplifications belong to the writer'’s personality rather than his ideas -- –Hemmingway has always tried to protect himself from ideas -- and are in that sense 'natural' and therefore convincing; he has often (though not always) had the good fortune to see only as much as his prose is designed to express, and because of this he could make it appear that he had seen all that was relevant."”

And I haven't even mentioned my favorite essay in the book in which Warshow explores his own dislike of the comic books that his young son loves to read and compares his feelings to the over-reactions and simplified arguments of a psychologist who has published extensively on the dangers of comics on young minds. Warshow delicately works through his own arguments, concedes some of the psychologist's points, and then proceeds to discredit the man's entire premise while still holding on to his own dislike of the comics. And yet, in the end, he has enough respect for his son to let him keep reading the comics that he likes.

So, yes: This book is great. I keep thinking about his arguments and going back to his wonderfully written sentences. If you feel like you need an injection of criticism into your life, by all means, pick up these collected works of Robert Warshow.