You like any book if you want to. You dislike any book if you want to. I believe literary criticism is useless, and I believe literature has no metaphysical significance. If I do literary criticism, I do it because I have nothing else to do. I do not feel I am committed to the things written today. I do literary criticism, usually negative, because my spirit is visibly bent toward evil, to annoy, to measure up my skill in contradicting, to play tricks, and to please the envious, the jealous, and the author's abandoned girlfriend. I am very sorry that a young man imitating me kind of competes with me, if not owing to his dialectical ability of intellectual flexibility, then owing to abundance and attitude, which belong to me, I feel like saying it. I was very keen on my singularity, which no longer exists, which I have been robbed of. Because in this country it is enough to persist and, after a purgatory of ironies and insults, you are raised to the paradise of the consecrated. In this country, impertinence does not need the support of intelligence, neither does enthusiasm need the support of lucidity. (…) A critic is a stupid animal. There are two ways of being stupid, which identify with each other basically: to say, do, and think things that do not encounter the reality and to say, do, and think commonplace things, true by chance or not true (in fact commonplace things are never true). The stupid man is the man to whom realities are opaque. The literary critic has to be stupid. In fortunate cases, the critic is stupid by obligation, because of professional habit, and some other times the critic is stupid by vocation. A professional with a vocation is somebody who cannot have any other profession except the one he has and who, if that profession does not exist, invents it. Critic by professional habit: Mr. Şerban Cioculescu. Critic by vocation: Mr. Pompiliu Constantinescu. Everything a critic says is inappropriate. Or it is too individual and it has no general value. Or it is too general and arbitrary. (Any generalization is arbitrary, and it is not valid for individual cases). The critic is a gentleman who condemns himself to stupidity of his own accord. He is a castrated man who appreciates, evaluates, and selects beautiful women, according to weird and accessory criticism, valid for all castrated men and aesthetics professionals and not valid for beautiful woman. The "professional" art consumer is also a castrated man. What a critic says cannot be true, because he judges works of art according to arbitrary criteria which can be changed at will and which cover the literary reality in an exterior and insignificant manner, the same every time. And because – is it not so? – axiomatically he cannot have a hunch of literary essences. The critic establishes valid frameworks for an endless number of contents. Vladimir Streinu, deputy, proved this to Mr. Şerban Cioculescu, literary critic, by a flagrant substitution of quotations. But a framework valid for several contents is actually non-valid. Any critical judgment is neutral, emptied of meaning. Literary criticism is indifferent. In fact, without a pun, a critic must be indifferent. He is not allowed to participate, is not allowed to make a commitment, because he must not become a slave, must not subordinate himself to the vision of the poet, because he has to master that poet, to comprise him, from the height of a solemn attitude. And, not participating, he gets isolated, he is separated again from the poet's lyrical vision, he does not experience it, and he cannot talk about it. He could not, he should not talk about it. But he talks about it without being able to, because this is why he is a critic. The critic is a gentleman who accepts and observes laws that govern nothing, deployed in an absolute void (the only case when absolute void can be attained), and who stumbles on any substance, and gets broken. The critic is a gentleman who thinks in proverbs, with a non-individualized and inappropriate mind. In fact, I have done literary criticism, too, and I will continue to do so, why should I not? Some people even told me I had a formidable critic's mind. Others said I was not worth anything in literary criticism, which means exactly the same. One can synthesize a content for the former assertion and for the latter as well. Anyway, the two assertions, on an equal footing, make up a colossal urge for me to continue to do literary criticism. And I will probably continue to do that as long as I have fun. However, I will have the common sense to do simple shoe-making. Or, more accurately, when I make shoes I will never imagine that those shoes are the symbol, or the image, or the synthesis of the universe, or that the chevreau leather pertains of the very divine substance. I will know a shoe is just a shoe, which is only useful as a shoe, which can be replaced with another shoe, and therefore it is not unique, irremediable, or irreducible. (Replace the words: shoe with literary work, leather with lyrical substance, shoemaker with poet, and so on, as long as you have fun playing this game). Ladies and gentlemen, let us stop making theory. I will give you "cases" of literary criticism. The critic reads a book, he likes it or not, he participates in it or not, but this first reading is gratuitous and is due to curiosity, the man is interested to see what his stupid fellow men see. This first reading must be forgotten. Completely forgotten, under threat of not understanding anything out of the second reading. The second (or still the first, since the other was one forgotten, thrown away) reading is a critical reading. Something else that I will extensively deal with also happens. The critic reads the book and he wants to disapprove for a simple reason: nothing ties him to that work now – because he alienates it from himself through his critical attitude and nothing compels or tempts him anymore to be kind to an alien he has no ties with, an alien that is even his enemy, to a certain extent, because any alien is an enemy to a certain extent. He could read the book from the beginning with a deliberately positive view (this view is as artificial as the former), and write a eulogy. But why should he? He has no reason. On the contrary. In fact I believe this is the only way to do literary criticism. And all critics do the same consciously (I congratulate them) or unconsciously (I am sorry for them). A literary work can bear any view and any light not damaging its substance in any way. Perhaps very late its color will fade in the sun, the way it happens to old furniture. The tone of literary criticism is infallibly dictated by the impression made by the first line, by the eye glancing at the first page. Otherwise it is not even possible – because there can never be disagreements and contradictions in the organic critical vision, which has to be clear and unitary. The critic's unfavorable view does not actually belong to him. It has belonged to critics since the Flood. They go along. Otherwise, his literary criticism would cease being literary criticism. The favorable eye belongs to everybody, too. There is a common legacy, and one dozen pairs – at the most – of critical eyes, deteriorated by storms, sun, time, and furies. One pair is usually chosen. The entire second reading inevitably leads to some critical judgment that anybody, any critic could have come up with. I chose the sharpest eye. The new meaning you get after the second reading is fundamentally different from the first one. I had the clear impression that it had nothing to do with any reality. It is revealing, especially the fact that I could prove anything. This is the infallible sign that whatever the critic says is not true. You can only prove what is not true. Axioms are true, and this is why they cannot be proven. I will doubt them when they can be proven. Because nothing makes me more distrustful than human intelligence. First, in order to do criticism, you must accept that arbitrary, general, and limited language. Write one word about seven different notions. In fact this is the only way criticism can exist. Otherwise everything would be precise and poor. The critic must be on neutral bridges. This cannot be done except by eliminating the essentials (when he tries to keep them they slip through the critic's fingers like water), and keeping non-essentials – namely the material to define, to make a hierarchy of, to classify, to select, and to valorize. And I realized it was not the book, not the lyrical existences that dictated meanings to me, I was the one dictating value, unreal notions, without any content, without any possibility to apply them, of finding a justification in reality. In fact, criticism is systematization in the void, which disappears when it bumps into reality. My entire effort consisted of not bumping into that reality. Staying away, very cautiously. Only then is criticism beautiful, presentable, relevant, and offering interesting suggestions. Nothing is falser than what was offered to me in an interesting suggestion. An interesting suggestion is by all means fantasy, and this is why it is a suggestion, and this is why it is interesting. Because, indeed, literary criticism is run by arbitrary principles, therefore it is a construction parallel to the researched object, the one presumably known by intuition – an architecture of suggestions that has nothing to do with the object.
Nu, 1934
by Eugen Ionescu (1909-1994)
