Tabish Khair: Critics and Muggers

I prefer being called a novelist, which suggests a viable living standard, or even a poet, which does not. There was a time I did not mind being called a literary critic or reviewer either. These days I wince. That is so because these days the word ‘reviewer’ – from the evidence of the vast majority of reviews in mainstream magazines and literary supplements – seems to be a synonym for three very different vocations: 1. Schoolmaster, 2. Ad-man, and 3. Mugger.

I do not mean to denigrate any of these professions. I have the greatest respect for a couple of my school teachers, and I usually find the advertisements on TV far more watchable than the serials, films or documentaries. Muggers, too, I am sure, are admirable people in their place, and, as a reader, I am grateful for the one who enabled the plot of The Finkler Question. But I, for one, hesitate in conflating their no-doubt useful vocations with that of a literary critic.

But unfortunately most reviewers seem to have metamorphosed into one, or two, or (at times) all three, of these professional types. There is the schoolmaster reviewer, with his rules and building blocks in place. He wags a finger from his space of jaded certainties; he hits you with schoolmasterish statements like “This will not do.” You can hear him saying, “No, Joyce-boy, this will not do: there is no pop psychology in your characterization and as for your grammar, ah…!”

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Then there is the ad-man reviewer. He talks about what sells and what does not. Give him fifty shades of any colour and he will praise it or dismiss it solely on the basis of its market reception. You can hear him say, “Marcel, good fellow, why do you want to publish these voluminous novels in which nothing really happens?” Of course, the adman reviewer who does not himself write, ahem, ‘creatively’ is to be preferred over the one who does. Because the latter will also insinuate that he, himself, could do a better job: “Marcel, old chap, you totally missed the chance of depicting a torrid lesbian relationship in there.”

Then there is the mugger. He jumps on you from the darkness of his own mind. He is not really interested in reading you. He just wants to bash you on the head, either because it makes him feel powerful or because you are in his territory. “James, screw you, how dare you walk down my patent path of ghost stories!”

I thought, at least once I grew old enough to understand literature in all its complexity and difficulty, that a reviewer was someone who mediated between a work and its readers. This meant that a reviewer cultivated the ability to step out of his own shoes, and not just think of why he does not like a work but also of why some other readers might. A reviewer did not write just from his own convictions or to show off his authority, but strove to enter a different writer’s world. This did not mean being neutral or nice; but it meant resisting an easy impulse towards intellectual violence. I always thought that in order to be a good critic you had to be always ready to criticize yourself first. I never thought that schoolmasters, ad-men or muggers could be passed off as literary reviewers.

So yes, I wince if anyone calls me a ‘reviewer’ now. I even have reservations about being referred to as a literary critic.

Tabish Khair is the author of The Thing About Thugs and How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position.