Catriona Menzies-Pike on the art of literary criticism

ASTRID: Thank you so much for joining me today, Catriona. I am incredibly excited to be talking to you about literary criticism.
Firstly, congratulations on Critic Swallows Book. This is a collection of criticism published by the Sydney Review of Books over the last 10 years. I haven't discussed Sydney Review of Books very much on The Garret before, so I thought we could start there. You spent about eight years as editor. Tell me about Sydney Review of Books, and what the mission of that particular online journal is.
CATRIONA: I started at the Sydney Review of Books in 2015. The journal had been set up a few years prior by people at the Writing in Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. In 2013, that was a time of great media change. All of a sudden people were talking in really distressed terms about the diminution of space for arts journalism, and for critical writing, in the broadcast media, and in the newspapers. So where once there was perceived to be this communal space for talking about literature, that space was shrinking, that was the bad news. At the same time, there were fledgling digital journals, like the Los Angeles Review of Books, and established journals that were suddenly having a real digital impact that provided a model for a critical journal in Australia.
The SRB was set up, really on the smell of an oily rag, in 2013 with James Lee as an editor, and with a great deal of support from the literary community, because this sentiment – that there wasn't enough criticism, there wasn't enough discussion, particularly of new works of Australian literature – was widely shared.
James established the reputation of the SRB. He's a sterling critic in his own right, his work is collected here in Critic Swallows Book.
I stepped in in 2015 as a Sydney based editor, bringing experience working in digital media, and all kinds of experiences in the literary world to the SRB. At that time, funding was a critical issue. So too was a broader conversation about pay for writers in a changing media environment. Everyone likes getting published and having the work in circulation online, but how can we build a thriving sustainable community of writers and critics if we don't pay people enough for their work? And create space through paying people to keep working at critical writing, to keep thinking to keep this broader conversation?
ASTRID: All of those conversations are still alive, how we pay writers, the space online and in print for criticism, and Sydney Review of Books is a part of that. I'd like to delve into why this is important, though. I mean, we all know why it's important to pay writers. But why is it important to have this space to discuss literature? And how literature can connect to broader society and the world we live in? Like, why does it matter?
CATRIONA: Well, I see critical writing as a form of literary writing, as one part of the bigger field of literary practice. But also, as one of the ways that we build bridges between literature and the world, those of us who live in the literary world, which is to say, publishing your work or spending time with writers can sometimes feel like we're in a bit of a bubble. But in fact, there's a whole world out there of readers, there's a material world in which literature is produced, whether that's through the business side of publishing, there are many, many different contexts that produce literature. Critical writing matters, insofar as first it contextualizes literary practice, it puts it in the world. That can mean contextualizing a new work by Alexis Wright in relation to her prior prodigious output, it can mean establishing relationships between new work, between Praiseworthy and other First Nations writers, whether in Australia or internationally, it can look at how that work speaks to the lived experiences of First Nations people in Australia, contemporary Australia or historical Australia.
So, a critical practice contextualizes literary practice, it gives us frameworks for reading and for understanding, and that can be in relation to the cultural sphere and to the literary sphere, or it can be much, much broader.
Critical writing also gives us tools to analyse literary text, to think about how they work, to appreciate the craft of that for readers to understand, to take them apart in terms of our ideology, in terms of their aesthetic practice and to analyse them, to generate readings, to use them as tools for understanding the world. To me that's incredibly exciting, following a critic through a book and seeing that book become bigger through the lens of a great critical reading.
Probably the most controversial aspect of critical writing is evaluation. It's making judgments about books, it's making judgments about their aesthetic significance, about their achievement in terms of craft. It's entering into a conversation about value as it circulates in the world. One of the great things about the Sydney Review of Books… one of the things that I really sought to nurture at the Sydney Review of Books was a very promiscuous set of ideas about value, about context and about the ways in which analysis can work, so that it was possible to bring together critics who had very, very different ideas about what makes a book, a five-star book, or a good book or an absolute stinker. And for those ideas about value to be in conversation with each other, rather than they're just being like, ‘this is what makes a book good, and if you don't meet this benchmark it's terrible’.
ASTRID: Now, everything in that takes word count. One of the beautiful things about an online publication, the SRB, is that you don't get cut off at 750 words or 950 words or 1200 words, which you do in many publications. That's obviously a choice that is enabled by the digital format. But I'd like to kind of stop here for a moment. How do you, ell, how does SRB and you when you were the editor really work with critics in terms of, you know, what ideas come? Do you commission ideas? Do people pitch? Is it a mix? How does one make the grade essentially, to get published in SRB?
CATRIONA: Most of my commissions begin with conversations with writers about the work that they're going to do. Certainly I did some commissioning by reaching out to writers whose work I'd seen elsewhere, or who maybe I'd seen them on a panel, and I thought, I want to work with this person. I would reach out to them and say, ‘Are you interested in critical writing for the SRB? What is it that you'd want to write about? Where are the kinds of what are the topics that you want to spend quite a lot of time and intellectual energy thinking about?’ Or people would contact me saying, ‘I want to write for the SRB, I want to write about Helen Garner's diaries, or I want to write about this or that’. And that would start a conversation as well. Because most SRB contributors only write for the journal once a year, if that, I really wanted to make sure that the pairings between reviewers and books had a real significance or affinity. It wasn't just like, ‘Oh, look, I need someone who can write about writing by women so I'll just ask this person’, there is an affinity between the critic in the book. And by that I don't mean they love it and they're going to give it an absolutely soft run, but there's something motivating writing the essay, whether that's a lifetime of doing research in the academy, or being a practitioner and having a particular interest in this field, or having something that is connecting them to that work has been a part of the conversation, rather than ‘I want you to tell me whether this book is good or bad’, you know, what is it that's going to make you sit with this book and find a way to guide the reader through its many contexts, or some of its context, and to put together a reading and evaluation of the work?
So as an editor, really, my role is more determined by the needs of the writer. There are some people who will say like, great, I'm going to write a critical essay about this book, see you in a couple of months. Here's a great first draft and off we go. Others want to have a lot more editorial input early on, and we might have conversations, or a writer might send me an outline or a sample to get some feedback on how they're approaching the book. For me, what has always been important is finding ways to support critics to do work that's significant to them, but also to support critics to take intellectual risks to feel safe and supported as they do work that they might not otherwise be commissioned to do in their life as an academic or as a freelance writer.
ASTRID: I would love to talk to you about that idea of intellectual risk. I want to get into this question, Catriona, about what makes a bad review? Reviews that kind of mean nothing, and I'm going to add myself as a solid average critic. I think the more mature I get, and the more I practice and publish, the more I realise probably two thirds of what I’ve written, I wasn't the right critic for that piece, or that piece didn't even need necessarily criticism. And so, I don't think that a significant contribution was made, because a commissioner needed a book by a sick white woman reviewed by someone like me, you know, a book similar to me, so I got chosen, and I did it. And that's kind of meaningless. It doesn't mean they were bad reviews, in quotation marks, but they're also have no weight or meaning. And they had no value. And I'm talking about myself here, so I can be this harsh, but it is a really common practice, what you are describing is not that the idea of someone having a few months to think about an idea and develop an idea and work with an editor to improve that idea and to, you know, help it, you know, get it to reach that final form that does make a statement, that does make a contribution, that draws links that maybe haven't been drawn before… I find that a beautiful thing. But I would like your thoughts on the not great criticism and the industry that is quite small and underfunded, that is just producing not great criticism that I am a part of.
CATRIONA: I think you'd be harsh on yourself. I think I would like to give you two different answers to that question. One goes to how difficult it is to write critically from a place of ambivalence, right? Where you read a book, and you've had a review commissioned, or perhaps you're chairing a panel, or whatever the context, you read a book and your response is like, ‘this is fine, this is fine’. It's not ‘there's big problems here and I want to talk about them’. It's not ‘this has really shaken me up and is making me think about all these things’. It's like, ‘this is fine, this is a bit familiar’. That's a really hard point to start from. And, you know, if I were having conversations with SRB writers who, again, are going to be writing probably just once a year, I might say, if you don't want to write about this, don't write about it. Or start to talk about that ambivalence. And that ambivalence as a starting point for thinking perhaps about genres and publishing or groups of books that get published to meet a market demand, it's a harder point to start from without those kinds of big feelings and big aesthetic or emotional responses. It can, with a lot of slog and support, take it to an interesting place of exploring ambivalence.
But I wanted to ask you whether your response is a response to an industry that is not always taking great care with books, especially books published as a group or into a category that that can often to a critic feel, or to a reader feel like they've been rushed out into the market. As a as a critical reader who is in dialogue with writers who had some insight into how books make it to market, one can also experience a great sense of ambivalence around an author whose work has not perhaps been treated with the care due to through the publishing process. So holding a book in your hand and thinking that might mean this book is underdeveloped, this book needed to be redrafted, this book needed more time to develop into something that could be really, really, really, really captivating. And so that ambivalence, I think, is something that a lot of Australian readers feel when they come to new works, and a lot of critics feel too. I know exactly the genre of review that you're talking about, I don't think I read yours, where someone is just going through the motions. This is a book. It was written, you know, and here it is.
ASTRID: You have made me feel so much better. Thank you.
I would like to talk about your criticism now. Last year in 2023, you won Australia's highest honour, the Pascal Prize for Criticism, and that was for two individual pieces that you wrote. A work called ‘Critic Swallows Book’, which is on Trent Dalton and his first two works, Boy Swallows Universe and All Our Shimmering Skies, and also another piece called ‘Fool's Gold’ on ‘Blurb Your Enthusiasm’. I remember the first time I read your review of Trent Alton's book, ‘Critic Swallows Book’, I squealed, I had a physical reaction. I may have gasped. I'm like, ‘Holy shit, someone's doing it’. Oh my gosh, it was intellectually breathtaking. It was a pleasure to read. I adored the way you linked the storytelling industries to a greater cultural moment, you know, and politics and Scott Morrison's Australia. But I was also astounded by – and I have a problem with this word, but I'm going to use it – your bravery of basically going after publishing's beloved cash cow. And I don't know if I could do that, because this is the age of social media. I admit I'm on social media, and I just would worry about Trent Dalton fans. But I guess Catriona, I wanted to ask you how you went through that intellectual work to criticize what is incredibly popular and obviously struck a chord with so many people. But through your criticism, you're able to articulate why that might be a bit of a problem for us all.
CATRIONA: I first read Boy Swallows Universe a few years before I wrote my big review of it, and I was pretty unimpressed. I read it I think before Dalton mania gripped the literary world, I read it as his star was rising, I think maybe just after the Miles Franklin long listing, and I thought this is not great. But you know, we live in a cultural world in which there's room for lots of different types of books. What really struck me though, was that the profile of this book kept on rising and kept on rising in spaces that are often very critical around race and representation, around use of language, around nationalist discourse. The second book came out and I was really, really shocked by some of the orientations of that book. And by that time, Trent Dalton had been embraced by the media in Australia and had become synonymous with Australian literature.
As someone who has worked in Australian literature, I found this remarkable and a bit depressing, because even though I've just been talking to you about books that generate an ambivalent response, as we know, there are a ton of inventive, original, adventurous, brilliant writers plying their trade trying to connect with readers, connect with communities. It felt like it was really letting those writers down and selling them short, just suddenly to be elevating Trent Dalton as the be all and end all of Australian literature. I couldn't help noticing that nobody was writing about him, that the reviews for All Our Shimmering Skies were more like features. There were Q and A's, there were thematics, there were stories about the writing of the book, there was no critical engagement with this work. Because it had sold so much it was taken to be synonymous with the best in Australian literature. I set out to write this essay driven by a sense of the gap between the reputation and the work itself, and my own sense of the shortcomings of the work. But also, my incredulity that the work had achieved this level of cultural visibility and wasn't really being looked at that closely at all and was being given this unquestioned celebration.
I was nervous when the review was published. I don't know if Trent Dalton's fans… you know, no one has knocked on my door and told me that I need to knock it off. But there is a real anti-elitist thread in Australian culture – and I was aware that I might well come across as this university ivory tower taking down Trent Dalton, who by all accounts is a lovely guy, and seems well liked – and taking down these books that have brought so much pleasure to so many people. In fact, the response was really, positive. The day the piece was published, I got a call from an old flatmate from my uni days who had become a News Corp journalist. I saw the number on my phone and I thought this is it. I took a really deep breath and thought I'm this is it, this is the bollocking that I knew was going to come. My friend was very complimentary, and I was extremely relieved. The feedback to it has been very, very good.
There's nothing personal in writing a review like this. I know that it's not one of life's great experiences to get a negative review. For most writers, the connection to the work that they've done is so intense, that it's not much consolation, if you strenuously focus on the book and say, ‘This is not about the author, it's about the work’. But I do think as a culture, we need to be willing to undertake negative evaluations and to dispute them, but also that we need to really look closely at works that attain this huge cultural visible visibility, this huge impact, and not be beguiled into thinking that commercial success equals aesthetic achievement, and not be reflexive and foolish and think that commercial success eliminates the possibility of aesthetic achievement. Both can absolutely be possible.
ASTRID: I'd like to ask you about some of the ideas that you raise in the introduction to Critics Swallows Book. One of them is the idea of who gets to review and how that has changed over time in Australia, to an extent. For example, very few First Nations writers would ever had been asked to review a book in the 1990s or before. We're now in 2023. Much has changed, much hasn't. I'd like your reflections on essentially, who gets to be a reviewer, which is a very big and broad question.
CATRIONA: I mean, I think the reviewer constituency looks different to what it did ten years ago, and certainly, very different to what it did in the 1990s. And that is a good thing. In the 1990s, you know, there weren't a lot of women reviewing, there were almost no people of colour reviewing and certainly no First Nations writers reviewing, so the ideas about taste that were in circulation were very much aligned with a group of white people, mainly men, mainly middle aged, mainly living in the city, and mainly associated with universities in one way or another. That has changed a lot.
There has been, I think it's fair to say, a lot of hand wringing about who is and what qualifies someone to be a critic, what credentials you need to be a critic, if your credential is not you've got a PhD. What is your credential for being a critic and for making an intervention into the domain of public taste? I tend to take a broad view of credentials and talk to critics about what they bring to the scene of criticism, which might be education, might be practice as a writer, might be a lived experience, might be a history of reading, might be practice in another in another field, and especially with emerging writers who often feel a great sense of insufficiency or deficiency in that they'll say, ‘I don't have a PhD in auto fiction’, or ‘I've got a PhD in auto fiction, but I wrote about Sheila Heti and not about Ben Lerner, I don't know what I'm doing here’. Yeah, who worry about not having the right credentials, you know, ‘I don't have the right cultural background, I can't write about this’, or ‘I don't speak German, I can't write about this’ instead of focusing on what it is that they bring to the scene of critical reading into the scene of critical writing, to really talk about what it is that they do bring, what are the resources experiential, intellectual, cultural, artistic, what is it that they do bring to the senior reading? And how is that going to shape a particular writing? How is that going to delimit a reading? How is that going to, you know, draw a line around what you can and cannot speak to with authority?
And on that point of like speaking a language for example, you know, if you're reviewing new work by Judith Herman in translation and you don't speak German, don't comment on the translation. Leave that out of your review. I'm rambling on a little bit about who gets to be a reviewer, but I do think it's worth spending some time thinking about what it is that reviewers bring to the scene of writing. I think it's healthy to have a lot of disagreements about cultural authority in Australia. I think we like consensus, we'd like people to agree. We'd like… you know, there's a reflexive recoil from conflict and from disagreement. A lot of the disagreements that don't take place in public, they take place in grumpy late night sessions at bars or in WhatsApp groups, they're not really aired publicly. I guess whether by experience or by temperament, I'm less concerned by public conflict around ideas, actually I think it's not a bad thing for the culture when two reviewers come to a book and come to different conclusions. Every now and then the SRB would publish a negative review and a positive review would be published in a prestigious international publication, like the New York Times. I think like, as a reader, as a critic, as someone interested in a culture of ideas, having a bunch of competing and maybe as a post-modernist to having a bunch of competing interpretations is a good sign of life, it's a good sign of a diverse culture of ideas.
You're alluding to, you know, ongoing disagreement about where cultural authority should lie, who should hold it, what credentials people purporting to make evaluations should have. I kind of think we just keep talking about this, we keep bickering about it, you know, there are those who want purely formal training. There are others for whom a personal approach… I think we need to make space for more critical conversation. And we need to make space in our culture for disagreement over aesthetics, over politics, and keep the stakes of our culture high and impassioned rather than winding down to a double consensus.
ASTRID: The idea of several conflicting reviews being published at the same time on one work is so deeply exciting to me, I wish that happened so much more frequently than it happens.
Catriona, my last question for you is, can you give an example or talk about the experience of picking up a review and knowing that it's going to have an impact or has an impact on you? I described how I felt I squealed when I read your evisceration of Trent Dalton written so well. What has been your experience when you read something, and you're like, wow, that made me think something different.
CATRIONA: I've had such great experiences working with SRB writers. Sometimes, you know, there have been moments where you take a punt on someone or haven't worked with them before, or you've just had a hunch that it might be a great thing to pair this person with this book and they say yes and then they really, really, really run with it. For me, that is so exciting and invigorating. And again, the same goes for the criticism that I continue to read out in the world is when you read a critical essay, and you have a sense of someone inviting you to go on intellectual adventure with them. They're just saying, follow me, and then you do and you do not know where you're going, and this person is showing you, taking you through a set of ideas. I mean, Tom Clark's magical essay on Tolkien in this anthology is a good example of that, because you know, what's an essay on Tolkien doing in the Sydney Review of Books? But it's all about music and sound and it goes to so many different places. You get to the end of it thinking completely differently, having had a sense of being taken somewhere intellectually, and I love that that exhilaration. It is what happens in the second draft, you can see that someone's going somewhere with their thinking.
ASTRID: Criticism can be beautiful. Catroina, thank you so much for talking to me today.
CATRIONA: My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on to ramble.
ASTRID: Not to disagree, but it's a podcast! We're allowed to ramble.