Collective wisdom

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Twenty-Eight Artists and

Two Saints

Essays

Joan Acocella

Pantheon: 524 pp., $30

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Born in Flames

Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses

Howard Hampton

Harvard University Press: 474 pp., $28.95

WHAT is the role of the critic? It’s an unavoidable question in a culture where print space is receding even as the Internet has democratized the critical conversation so completely -- for better as much as for worse -- that the difference between critic and reader is no longer exactly clear. Does critical authority matter any longer? It should. Many things, after all, come clear only after in-depth excavation and reflection, after forging them (to steal a phrase from James Joyce) in the smithy of one’s soul. The best criticism, I’d suggest, operates in precisely such a manner, telling us as much about the critic as about the work under review. It is an autobiographical art, a record of our thoughts and fascinations, a portrait of how we apprehend the world. Indeed, this concept of a way of seeing permeates two new collections of essays, Joan Acocella’s “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” and Howard Hampton’s “Born in Flames.”

“Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” gathers 31 essays, most originally published in the New Yorker, for which Acocella covers dance and books. Although the title is a bit workmanlike, it’s also instructive, for at the heart of all these pieces is a notion of the sanctity of art. That doesn’t mean Acocella puts her subjects on a pedestal; she doesn’t, not even the actual saints (Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc) of whom she writes. No, for her, sanctity is a matter of commitment, of the dedication each of these figures brings to his or her work.

Perhaps the most explicit illustration of this comes in a piece on a volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s correspondence. “Most of the artists in Paris seem to walk through these pages,” Acocella tells us, “... breathing and real, working like crazy all day and, at night, going to bars and getting drunk and arguing and slapping each other and seducing each other’s lovers and then going off to rest for two months in the country. It is a portrait of the literary life from the inside, with the books born screaming.”

This is a key statement, for it reveals just how much Acocella’s concept of sanctity has its roots in the day-to-day. Writing about M.F.K. Fisher, who “[f]rom 1937 to 1949, through grief and hell ... published nine books,” she describes the 12-year drought that followed the death of the author’s mother, when she put her career aside and moved back home to care for her father. “Those who lament the dissolution of the American family,” Acocella declares, “ -- kids with no way to get to Girl Scouts, aging parents put into nursing homes -- should remember what it was that kept the American family together: women’s blood.” That’s ruthless writing, transcending criticism to become an inquiry into the collective struggle for meaning. “Art doesn’t start out hallowed,” she writes. “It starts personal: an emergency.” Too many critics fail to remember this, seeing art as somehow inevitable, rather than an expression of its creators’ lives.

Acocella never makes that mistake; what’s remarkable about “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” is its sense of breath and blood. Partly, this has to do with her eye for detail, but it’s equally a function of her desire to get at the nature of things. Although most of these pieces deal with literature or dance, they do so through a broad filter; her essays on ballet add up to a mini-history, from Diaghilev and Nijinsky through Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein and on to Suzanne Farrell and Baryshnikov.

Acocella deftly balances her critical acumen with an enthusiast’s love for the material. She opens a commentary about Andrea de Jorio’s 1832 treatise on Neapolitan hand gestures by describing how she discovered “a little sample” of it in Luigi Barzini’s 1964 history “The Italians”: “Upon reading this, you felt that if you could not get hold of de Jorio’s book immediately, you would bite your elbows.” This quality of conversation (Acocella in conversation with her subjects, with her readers, with her own mind) is a defining feature of the collection, which at times even seems to want to critique itself.

“Why do we bother to interview artists?” she wonders in a profile of Penelope Fitzgerald. “Why expect them, in two hours, to tell us their story, or -- what we’re really looking for -- a story that will dovetail with the work, explain it?” These same questions, of course, might be asked in regard to criticism in general, and fewer than 20 pages later, while discussing Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” Acocella comes up with an answer. “Not only did it serve what should be an essential function of criticism, that of introducing readers to new work, strange work, things they wouldn’t ordinarily encounter ... “ she argues, “it did so in a notably unstrange manner. Thoroughly trained in literature and philosophy, Sontag applied the standards of the past -- truth, beauty, transcendence, spirituality -- to the new art of the sixties, with its alienation, extremity, perversity. She talked like Matthew Arnold about things like Jack Smith’s ‘Flaming Creatures,’ a film that was closed down by the police.”

One of the striking things about such a comment is how vividly it applies to Acocella’s work and also to that of Hampton, who is, in many ways, her critical opposite. A longtime contributor to publications such as the Village Voice and LA Weekly, he spends much of “Born in Flames” riffing on the pop culture landscape that “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” overlooks -- television, rock ‘n’ roll and Hollywood. Yet Hampton and Acocella have more in common than it might at first appear, beginning with their ability to make connections, to uncover a territory where art and audience intersect.

With “Born in Flames,” Hampton moves from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to Thomas Pynchon, from the Clash to Plastic People of the Universe to Tiananmen Square. In one essay, he compares the proto-punk band the Mekons with “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson’s “ornate, pitiless mausoleum of a book.” In another, he uses the Clint Eastwood vehicle “In the Line of Fire” to develop a metaphor for the whole unsettling after-history of the Kennedy assassination, the film “rewiring the fatal moment, folding celluloid legend into real violence and chaos. Lee Harvey Oswald and Harry Callahan, together at last.”

Because there are so many pieces here -- 41 of them, plus an introduction -- the book can be uneven in places, with the negligible (a TV show like “Angel”) juxtaposed against the essential (Bruce Springsteen, Jean-Luc Godard). Yet ultimately this highlights Hampton’s eclecticism, one of his compelling charms. When, in an essay on Los Angeles music, Hampton cites the fictional Lola Heatherton, “the greatest of [Catherine O’Hara’s] SCTV characters, the second-tier alcoholic-pillhead singer-dancer-actress par excellence,” to illuminate the kitschy power of singer-songwriter Dory Previn, we get a vivid glimpse of the critic’s mind at play. This is writing that exposes an imagination’s workings, overlapping, a floating stew of reference points that encompasses high culture, mass culture and everything in between.

The key here is experience -- life as well as critical -- and the way it adds up to a complex and integrated point of view. That’s what criticism at its best has to offer: a sensibility, a notion of how all these observations and aesthetics fit together and we are transformed by what we know. In her 1996 book “Ruined by Reading,” novelist (and sometime critic) Lynne Sharon Schwartz frames the issue through a Buddhist filter: “A poet friend,” she writes, “after heart surgery, was advised by a nurse to take up meditation and reduce stress. ‘You must empty your mind,’ she said. ‘I’ve spent my life filling it,’ he replied. ‘How can you expect me to empty it?’ ”

Not very Zen, but then, the art of criticism is an art of accumulation, which is not to say it’s not a meditation in its own way. No, for Acocella and Hampton, accumulation is meditation, a cascading flow of ideas and information that reveals the inner life. In “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” and “Born in Flames,” they explore the depths of that interiority, producing in the process a pair of astonishing examples of the critic’s art. *

david.ulin@latimes.com