Volume 45, Number 14 · September 24, 1998
Depth-Sightings
By Joyce Carol Oates
Sight-Readings: American Fictions
by Elizabeth Hardwick
Random House, 284 pp., $26.00
'Criticism can talk,' Northrop Frye provocatively remarked in his introduction to Anatomy of Criticism (1957), 'and all the arts are dumb.' Yet in the hands of some practitioners, among them Frye, criticism itself aspires to art; a profane sort of art, perhaps, in Auden's vocabulary ('The value of a profane thing lies in what it usefully does, the value of a sacred thing lies in what it is')—in that criticism must always be a reaction, never quite an action; a secondary creation, and not an original. Unlike the venturesome artist who creates something out of nothing, the critic can only 'create' something out of something that already exists. In another, more cinematic distinction, 'Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea'—this from the foreword to Hugging the Shore (1983), John Updike's masterly (and massive: 900 pages of Updikean prose) collection of essays and criticism. At sea, amid a beautiful blankness, we risk disaster and death; hugging the shore, we never lose our bearings and can return to land easily.
Review, 3534 words
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