Criticism - a serious business

by Sumithra RAHUBADDE

Riegi Siriwardana

Martin Wickremasinghe

There is a tendency among critics to emphasize on the writer’s dependency for comparative information and their creative usages. Very often a writer’s literary reputation reflects not only the variety, quality and modern nature of writings but also his attitude and language skills. If a writer is conversant with world literature, new and old corpus of literature of the land and is capable of presenting them in creative manner, then he can be called a writer, poet or artist.

In Sri Lanka, there are no critics to guide readers about a good work of literature; a novel, anthology of short stories or any other form of literary work. However, there are hundreds of publishers who are ready to publish any rubbish with absolutely no editing.

When selecting a book, what are the standards and values we should place on a book? Literary criticism gives standards for this. Literary criticism is the study, evaluation and interpretation of literature, may it be a novel, collection of short stories or a drama or a film. Actually a criticism is a philosophical discussion of a work done by a writer or an artist. For the last thirty years, any responsible criticism or appreciation of drama or art has not offered justifiable and valid criteria for readers in selecting good literature or good drama.

Instead of offering a set of standards, there are several groups dominating the field of literature by false standards. Though there were weaknesses, universities in the 1960s played a positive role in promoting literary criticism. Readers had also faith in the critics of the day. In fact, those critics were well read, bilingual and open-minded personalities. Though G.B. Senanayake came under the attack of those critics, they could not continue their campaign for a long time. If there is no standard in criticism, personal tastes and relationships are reflected which can be seen in Sinhala literary criticism today.

The literary works of Martin Wickramasinghe, Ediriweera Sarachchandra, Gunadasa Amerasekara, Siri Gunasinghe are considered as good pieces of literature. It is basically due to wide publicity given by critics for their works through criticisms. However, a comprehensive study or criticism has not been done on successive generation of writers. The critics seem to entertain the notion that old literature is always good and new literary work is bad. However, no critic has described why ‘new’ is bad.

There is a concept of ‘responsibility of judgement’. A writer pens a work on his own conviction. ‘Responsibility of judgment’ is something up to the critics. A critic can throw off a book or a piece of art overboard or appreciate them.

Appreciation would motivate writers, however, substandard book or books of no standard should not be appreciated. What are the standards?

A critic should be a well read person. It is obvious the more a critic reads and exposed to the socio-economic, cultural and linguistic backdrop of a society , more he will be equipped with an intimate knowledge of that society and issues that the writer addressed. More you read and expose to, you can feel the heartbeat of the life of the land, the pattern of the universe created by language and rhythm of the social order. Critic should feel the heart beat of the land and if he feels this order, he could make objective criticism. If a critic does not know the craftsmanship of a creation, may it be a poem, novel or a drama, he who engaged in criticism is definitely not a critic.

Thanks to the cluster of literary circles and so-called critics destroyed literary work, writers who have little or no vocabulary have, now, become award-wining writers. If you are a responsible critic, you should be able to separate milk from water. For this, the critic should know the standards and language. For an artist or a writer, language is a thread.

It is a multi-coloured and strong thread for writers. A critic should not praise a book or condemn a work of literature either for pleasure of it or to please friend or to hurt an enemy.

A critic should be objective. Most of the critics praise books even without reading it. A critic should back up the arguments in favour or against a work with examples, literary theories or real life situations and also citing modern trends. Saman Wickremarachchi is one such critic who possess these qualities.

He is a well-read critic extremely forceful in his arguments in criticizing a work at hand. He had never made a criticism without backing up his arguments with literary theories, examples and other readings. He treats new writers without malice and is not a critic who is glued only to the works of the 1950s and 1960s. Though there are critics with such qualities, they merely do their job.

They serve only for their circle of friends irrespective whether the work is good or bad. It is doubtful whether there are professional critics in Sri Lanka. If we consider the film industry of Sri Lanka, it has entered a golden era with a new batch of young film makers producing impressive films, including Prasanna Vithange, Prasanna Jayakody, and Enoka Sathyangani.

There are film critics like Gamini Weragama, Tissa Premasiri, Ranga Chandrarathne, and some others who criticize their films and they analyze, authoritatively, dissect or contextualize their works.

Unfortunately, when it comes to literary field no critic will analyze or contextualize any literary work done by the new generation of writers. They only think of literary works done before the 1960s.

In the 1960s, almost every major newspaper ran a separate literary review section. Today it is very rare to see a professional review in a newspaper.

All our visual media do not know that there is a word called literature. As a consequence of the absence of established literary criticism, the new generation of writers has no choice but to align with the clique of established figures in the literary scene in the hope of securing favourable reviews of their books. But what they write in reviews are raw and impressionistic comments with no theoretical foundation to back up any claims. What is important is that they should know that literary criticism is a serious business.