Criticism is the art we need most today. But not, don’t you see? not the “if I’d done it myself.” Yes, a, a disciplined nostalgia, disciplined recognitions but not, no, listen, what is the favor? (William Gaddis, The Recognitions, p. 335)

In my musing about “American drama: A personal history,” Wyatt Gwyon’s stuttering half-formed thoughts about the function of criticism strike a chord. I’ve never been interested in that “if I’d done it myself” kind of review or criticism — it is not a very far cry, not a very difficult extension, from the intention-based detective work, or the so-called objective blank-slate perspective of evaluation and assessment, that many critics and reviewers have been considering. “This is what I perceive the Platonic Ideal of this work to be, this is how it diverges or stands away from that Ideal”: I don’t have the psychic ability to dredge these up, and I don’t have the presumption to impose my own suggested corrections to these perceived errors.

If as Gwyon suggests criticism is indeed an art, it, like other forms of art, elicits recognitions from the spectator and the viewer. That criticism does so from a second-degree — that it stands between the artwork and the spectator, like a know-it-all pest standing next to you at a gallery and pontificating on the abstraction on the wall — makes it no less an art, only different in its mechanisms. For the artist, the world is the subject of art; for the critic, the art itself is the subject. Both are interpretive, but the second at a further arm’s-length from the world.

He also suggests that it is not appropriate for the true critic to merely vomit out his opinion. Disciplined nostalgia, disciplined recognitions: the discipline inhering in the care taken to shape this opinion, this insight, through a variety of interpretive prisms, not least of which are linguistic or rhetorical, historical or aesthetic. And, if George Jean Nathan is to be taken at his word, the personal prism as well: “The great critics are those who, recognizing the intrinsic, permanent and indeclinable egotism of the critical art, make no senseless effort to conceal it,” he puts it rather strongly, but his point is the far less malignant observation that all criticism, like all art, is a personal, individual expression of an opinionated personality who brings his own experience not only to the work but to his interpretation of it. He is not a judge who sits in one of Parnassus’ courtrooms, but one and the same with the rest of us, the audience member and the artist alike.

This recognition also constitutes the difference between reviewer and critic, as Mr. Brantley’s essay in this Sunday’s New York Times instructs. Though it is an intriguing idea to consider the odd popularity of Shakespeare’s King Lear in the US over the past few years, Mr. Brantley writes less on King Lear than on those figures who have played King Lear in US stages, and more precisely those actors Mr. Brantley has actually seen in the flesh. (I should note that I don’t fault Mr. Brantley or this column as such; to do so would be to blame it for not being something it was not intended to be.) It is essays like this (and other reviews and essays by others; Mr. Brantley is not alone here) that have led to the accusation that so much journalism about drama and theatre in the US is driven by celebrity and media to the detriment of the play or drama itself. In any case, Mr. Brantley breezily passes over the drama as such, likening its lead character to “that homeless guy on the corner who talks to space aliens and throws rotten fruit at passers-by.” I’m happy to allow Mr. Brantley and other reviewers, who spend a lot of time in dark rooms watching bad plays (for which they deserve our pity rather than our contempt), a lighthearted smack at a dramatic masterpiece — masterpieces can take such smacks easily enough. But you may search high-and-low in Mr. Brantley’s essays, and in those reviews and essays of others, for a single clue as to what insights or recognitions King Lear has drawn from them personally, if anything. If a critic’s work is to have any lasting value, it appears, it must demonstrate that it has engaged with the play on that personal, aesthetic, and historic level. No, I’ll go further — if a critic’s work is to have any value, lasting or otherwise, it will demonstrate that engagement on a regular basis, if not every day. Otherwise it is mere consumer reporting, for which there is a place. But it is not an art.

So much for the “personal” in “American drama: A personal history.” For the rest: Well. As much as I admire contemporary European drama, I am not and have not been in a place where I can experience that first-hand; if I am to gain personal experience of any drama it will be that of the country in which I live, and it is only there that I can expect to gain any broad competent knowledge of it. (I have acquired the reputation of being a “well-read” critic, but I believe that I am just “differently-read” than others.) The first thing one learns from a survey of European drama from an American perspective is just how different it is, and one is more privy to the subtleties and nuances of the language into which one is born than to a language and culture acquired second-hand later in life. And “history,” yes: American drama has been an important part of my life for more than three decades, and whether I like it or not, the intellectual, emotional, spiritual and aesthetic strands of my engagement with it are a tight Gordian knot of tough titanium wires that, inextricably tied, challenge the sharpest and strongest scissors. As I implied in my post on O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff yesterday, any experience I have with the play will be consciously or unconsciously informed by the experiential context in which I first came across it. If I am to be true to Nathan’s injunction to admit this egotism, I may as well confess to it.

I have been writing and reading (and writing about) American drama since the age of 14. Whether or not I see any other of my plays staged — or written — in my remaining years, 35 years of drama and theatre as the central attraction and value of my life to date, an attraction and value which colors my personal life as well as my professional life, cannot be abandoned. In the coming years, it can only be reconciled. So this is only for those who will have it, and it is one of the great virtues of middle-age that one doesn’t much care if too many people read it, so long as they’re the appropriate people: the small band of those who share the appreciation of that attraction and value.