What critics do

One of my favourite writers is Gwyneth Jones, who writes sophisticated, feminist, politically complex literature which some people might call fantasy or speculative fiction or science fiction. She also writes SF and horror for teens, under the name Ann Halam, and has published a volume of critical essays.

She blogs here, and you can find some free e-books of her work here.

This is how she describes her critical work in a fascinatingly weird interview, and it resonates with me.

“I’m an intellectual. I can’t help it, I was born that way. This doesn’t mean, alas, that I’m highly qualified or highly intelligent, it just means when I see something made of words (or images, or ideas) I just have to take it apart, to see how it works, to see how it evolved; how the different parts are joined up. Exactly the same as some geeky kid who has to take the back off his or her toys; ruins watches, tinkers with the software and hardware of any hapless useful appliance. Ever since I’ve been a writer, I’ve been a critic, which is not the same as being a reviewer, because usually I’m not really interested in whether the book should sell or not. I just find the activity of dissecting all kinds of narratives (trashy or literary, I don’t care), completely fascinating. I keep trying to give it up, because it’s trouble. You take somebody’s treasured novel, some revered best-seller, apart, you put it back together not exactly the way it was before, naturally readers and writers are going to get annoyed. . . But somehow criticism keeps sneaking back into my life. I really must quit. 

I'm no great thinker, far from it, but I've always wanted to work out the how and why of a text. I remember graduating, and people saying things like 'I can never enjoy a book again, because now I can see how they work', or 'I can't switch off and enjoy a book'. I can see their points, but I always loved the kind of detective work of tracing how a collection of words becomes a character, how a plot hangs together or falls apart. I'm still capable of reading and discarding a book without a moment's thought, but I do like to re-read, to discover the deep structures and significances I missed before.