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December 08, 2005
You can find something wrong with anything: Salman Rushdie on criticism
Just got around to reading the fine Salman Rushdie "Art of Fiction" interview, number 186 in the Paris Review's invaluable, ongoing, decades-long series (many of which are online in PDF form). One paragraph stuck out, illuminating an idea about the aims of reviewing that matches what I try to describe to friends. Rushdie converses: "I like the Randall Jarrell line: 'A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.' I think that's true. If you're going to write a hundred and fifty thousand, two hundred thousand words, perfection is a fanstasy. If you're Shakespeare and you're writing 16 lines, you can create a perfect thing. I suspect though that if Shakespeare had written a novel, there would be imperfections. There are imperfections in his plays—there are boring bits, if one's allowed to say this. If you're reading for the sake of reading, you look for what it gives you, not for what it doesn't give you. If there's enough there, a misstep is easy to forgive. That also happens in literary criticism. There are critics who approach work on the basis of what they can get from it, and others who approach in terms of what they can find wrong with it.
"Frankly, you can find something wrong with any book you pick up, I don't care how great it is. There's a wonderful riff in Julian Barnes' 'Flaubert's Parrot,' in the chapter called 'Emma Bovary's Eyes,' when he points out that her eyes change color four or five times in the book."
Posted by pride at December 8, 2005 12:03 PM
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