The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,23

do it.”

I think there is some ambivalence in our perception about individual quality and individual artists. On the one hand, we can identify it because it is rare and limited in its appeal to a few. We know how difficult it is to execute excellence in art (although I am convinced that for the true genius the things that look difficult to us are easy and effortless for him). But while we recognize quality by its rareness, on the other hand we consistently moan about the absence of quality from the hearts and minds of the masses. We talk about a crisis in literacy; we are upset and disquieted about pop art; we talk about airport sculpture; we are unnerved, and legitimately so, about the sensational play as opposed to the sensitive one. Each of us has a group of phrases that identify for us the mediocre in an art form.

I sometimes wonder if we really and truly mean it. Do we really mean that the world is the poorer because too few appreciate the finer things? Suppose we did live in a world in which people chatted about Descartes and Kant and Lichtenstein in McDonald’s. Suppose Twelfth Night was on the best-seller list. Would we be happy? Or would we decide that since everybody appreciated it, maybe it wasn’t any good? Or maybe if the artist himself had not begged for his life—begged and struggled through poverty, perhaps on into death—perhaps his art wasn’t any good. There seems to have been an enormous amount of comfort taken in some quarters (in print and in conversation) that when thousands and thousands of people stood in line to see the Picasso show, only 4 or 5 percent of the people who saw it really knew what they were seeing.

First novels shouldn’t be successes—they are supposed to be read by a few. They are not supposed to be profitable—they must be limited. If a first novel “makes it,” then there is some suspicion about its quality. A minority artist in this game and in this climate of ambivalence is required either to abandon his minorityhood and join the prevailing criteria, or he has to defend and defend and defend ad nauseam his right to hear and love a different drummer. That’s part of the romanticism that clings to the idea of the individual artist—the artist as beggar. It keeps him begging, and when he is successful, he should feel guilty—even apologetic.

There is danger inherent in being an artist, always—the danger of failure, the danger of being misunderstood. But there are some dangers now that are not inherent; some new dangers are being imposed. Be patient with me for a moment while I describe one that is of particular interest to me in the field of literature. There is a most exciting feud and public battle going on at Cambridge University at the moment—a fight between the traditional critics and the postmodernists, or the structuralists. It is a pyrotechnic delight in issues of The Times Literary Supplement, and scholarly debates are continuing in full force. I will not go into the details of the nature of the fight, but in oversimplified terms, there is a core group of traditional critics who believe that “literature and life” practical criticism is the way in which to teach people how to read the great works of literature, and then there is a newer, younger group, sometimes called “pluralists” by the British, that attacks and ignores traditional British criticism. This newer group is accused of being obscure and difficult and limiting in their perception of criticism.

What’s interesting about the feud to me is that in it the writer has no place at all. Structuralists and proponents of semiotics and proponents of deconstruction perceive the written work as a phenomenon—but not central to the act of criticism or “reading.” It’s interesting that this fight goes on in literature studies, as opposed to theology and philosophy and other areas in which it belongs, but I think there is a reason for that. In the contemporary world of art and scholarship, literature is, I think, the only discipline in which the scholars do not produce what they criticize. The chemists, the social scientists, the historians, the philosophers—all of those people produce what they teach, they produce what they question, they produce what they change. In literary criticism, the critic now produces the criticism that he teaches; he produces the discipline, and the subject of the discipline—which is the