Opinion The critic is dead. What comes after might be worse

In her lifetime, the Critic was both reviled and revered. She led a complicated life. She was (pardon me, but it is only fitting to be honest if a bit indelicate at a critic’s remembrance) not much loved. Whether she wrote a favourable review or a scathing one, she was bound to be bombarded with flak and allegations of being bought, biased, or just mad. Artistes resented her, readers suspected her, publishers tolerated her only when she was useful. “Parasite”, “snob”, these were among the kinder epithets. “Those who cannot do, critique,” they would guffaw snidely behind her back. But, in moments of crisis, when art seemed too strange or too new, it was the Critic who explained, mediated, and defended.

In her youth (the 1950s and ’60s), the critic positively flourished. Kenneth Tynan of The Observer discovered playwrights such as John Osborne (Look Back in Anger), Clement Greenberg made Jackson Pollock possible, and Pauline Kael’s “witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused” film reviews made The New Yorker essential reading.

Even before this heyday, giants such as Matthew Arnold argued that criticism should seek out “the best that is known and thought in the world”, and T S Eliot declared that criticism had two functions: “Elucidation of works of art” and “correction of taste”. He believed that “honest criticism… is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry”, and that the critic, “if he is to justify his existence, should endeavour to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks.” For Arnold, Eliot, and their heirs, criticism was a creative act, in and of itself. Writing a review was an art, a form of literature in itself. It is no accident that literary criticism remains a mandatory course in most university syllabi. After all, culture without criticism is like a library without catalogues.

But alas, the Critic grew old. As the elderly are wont to, she demanded deference just as the culture stopped deferring. Roland Barthes had famously declared the “death of the author”. The public, it turned out, was happy to declare the death of the Critic. Once upon a time, only the Critic could have a column, but now everyone does. “We are all critics now,” as Rónán McDonald put it in his book The Death of the Critic.

Whether Amazon reviews, BookTok, Bookstagram, or Substack, judgement is everywhere. BookTok can sell more copies in a week than the Times Literary Supplement manages in a year. Bookstagram has made book jackets more important than the books themselves. Substack newsletters promise “honest, unfiltered” thoughts. YouTube offers 20-minute “monthly wrap-ups” in which earnest 20-somethings hold up fantasy trilogies with the solemnity once reserved for Ulysses.

The brooding ghost of the critic would have to admit (even if begrudgingly) that her usurpers have energy. They build communities, they make books feel exciting, they draw in readers who might never read a review. But enthusiasm is not the same as evaluation. The Critic, bless her, believed in standards. Call her arrogant, but she truly believed some works were better than others, and that it was her duty to make the case.

Without her, who will tell us to persist with the baffling novel, to try the poet who resists us, to see beyond our limited taste? BookTok, charming though it is, recommends what we already like. Algorithms flatter us with more of the same. The Critic annoyed us precisely because she would not flatter. She insisted the unfamiliar might matter. She dragged us, heels digging in, away from what is comfortable (the Romantasy genre comes to mind) and toward greatness.

It is tempting to say good riddance. After all, the Critic could be pompous, prejudiced, and occasionally disastrous. But as we consign her to the grave, let us remember the role she played in keeping culture more than commerce. Would Waiting for Godot have survived its disastrous opening nights without Harold Hobson championing it? Would Virginia Woolf have found readers without sympathetic explicators? The Critic was often wrong, but sometimes, crucially, right.

And so we bury her with relief, but also with unease. For what rises in her place is not democracy but an algorithm. In the Critic’s absence, the loudest voices win. Bestseller lists grow narrower, dominated by the handful of titles boosted by viral trends. Independent presses, innovative writers, and awkward geniuses risk drowning in the din.

Remember the Critic when you encounter a book that resists you. Remember her when you feel algorithms nudging you toward more of the same. Remember that art is not always easy, and that sometimes we need someone to argue its worth.

The Associated Press’s decision to end weekly book reviews marks not just an editorial shift but a cultural burial.

The Critic is dead. Long live criticism.

aishwarya.khosla@indianexpress.com