The Critic as Memoirist

At its best, criticism is itself a form of indirect self-expression. To read, say, Walter Benjamin or Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes is to encounter a sensibility as distinctive, and a voice as powerful, as any in 20^th-century literature. ?The motive of the critic who is really worth reading,? as H.L. Mencken put it, ?is not the motive of the pedagogue, but the motive of the artist.? Mencken certainly regarded himself as a critic worth reading, so he was referring at least as much to his own work as he was to criticism generally. Books like Batuman?s, Lethem?s, Dyer?s, Baker?s, and Wilson?s bear out Mencken?s claim, while also revealing the motive of the critic as the motive of the autobiographer. Our experience of art can, after all, never be anything but subjective. To write about that experience in an explicitly autobiographical way might therefore be the most natural form of criticism, even if at the same time it is the most artful.

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