It has been a season of literary takedowns, but then it often is. You can always get a rise out of the otherwise lethargic reading public by launching an offensive against one of its icons. In the past two months, we have had Kathryn Schulz disliking “The Great Gatsby” in New York magazine, Christian Lorentzen’s salvo against Alice Munro in the London Review of Books, and Joseph Epstein in the Atlantic Monthly, asking, “Is Franz Kafka Overrated?”
Literary takedown has a long and storied history. Perhaps the most celebrated of them all is Mark Twain’s hilarious “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” a flamboyant drubbing of the early American author of wilderness adventure novels. Surveying “The Deerslayer,” Twain observes that “in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record,” and then goes on to list the “nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction,” 18 of which Cooper has violated.
“When you strike at a king, you must kill him,” Ralph Waldo Emerson warned Oliver Wendell Holmes when Holmes, then a college student, sent him a paper in which he railed against Plato for “loose and unscientific” thinking. A corollary to Emerson’s advice: If you’ve got to strike somebody, don’t pick on the serving lad; that only makes you look like a bully. A good literary takedown selects its target with care. If Cooper was not quite a king, he did enjoy a good amount of popularity and critical respect, the latter of which Twain demonstrates by opening his attack with three examples of praise Cooper had received from professors and another novelist (Wilkie Collins).
To kill him, Twain offers a highly detailed dissection of the physical impossibilities represented in one of Cooper’s action scenes and several other instances in which the novelist was “splendidly inaccurate.” But Twain was not merely pedantic on practical matters related to sharpshooting and riverine navigation. He was also, as ever, funny — declaring, of Cooper’s uneven dialogue, “when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.”
Exasperation, rather than flaming rage, is the emotion that drives the best takedowns. A certain distance also helps. A pan of a single novel that has otherwise been admiringly reviewed and is by an author currently in his or her prime, doesn’t really count. First, living authors are never as revered as the dead kind, so the critic lacks the moral high ground obtained by attacking a sacred cow.
Furthermore, many a great writer has produced a mediocre book, and a takedown ought to encompass an entire career, even if it chooses to focus, as Twain did, on one exemplary title. Lastly, since so many critics are novelists themselves, an assault on the reputation of a living competitor, especially one who’s near the attacker in age, will usually be read as motivated by feelings of professional resentment and rivalry.
The most serious-minded takedowns detect a moral failing in the putative giant. Bertrand Russell, with a confidence that rivals Shaw’s, assailed no less a figure than Socrates in his wonderful (and deliciously readable) “A History of Western Philosophy,” writing, “He is dishonest and sophistical in argument, and in his private thinking he uses intellect to prove conclusions that are to him agreeable, rather than in a disinterested search for knowledge. There is something smug and unctuous about him, which reminds one of a bad type of cleric.”
This is more or less the tack taken by Schulz in explaining her inability “to derive almost any pleasure at all” from “The Great Gatsby.” Hers is by far the most thoughtful and most carefully articulated of the recent takedowns, which is obvious whether or not you agree with her when she writes, of Fitzgerald, “when you apply a strict moral code to the saturnalian society to which you are attracted — you inevitably wind up a hypocrite.”
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