[In the following review of An Artificial Wilderness, Parini illuminates Birkerts's critical technique with respect to contemporary, academic criticism.]

"The arrow of modern life and the arrow of private sensibility have passed in opposite directions," writes Sven Birkerts, one of the most independent critics now writing in America, in his first collection of essays, An Artificial Wilderness. This remark is made in the course of an "appreciation" of Cyril Connolly, a critic who in many ways Birkerts himself recalls. Connolly is praised for his awareness of literature as part of a larger historical process: "Implicit in his valuations, supporting and authorizing them, was an active recognition of historical process. This awareness was at once particular—he grasped the dynamic interactions of person, place, and milieu—and relativistic." He sets this concern for context against the "prevailing thrust of critical theory," by which he presumably means the formalist strategies subsumed under the title of post-structuralism.

The flight from history to "language"—that is, to a disembodied system of signs, a resonating void wherein meaning flickers, tenuously, and fades into an infinitely recessive dark—clearly obsesses Birkerts, as well it should, though one wishes he defined his objections more precisely and named deconstruct ion and formalism as the culprits. (In other words, his sweeping judgments do not take into account the neo-Marxist and feminist schools, both of which have refused the "flight from history") One has seen the formalist tendencies of criticism—from the New Critics and structuralists of an earlier era through deconstruction—driving a wedge further and further between word and object, between text and world. It is no wonder that, especially in America, the critical climate has worked against literature, against its very possibility. What gets singled out for praise is prose and poetry that exemplify the sense of exhaustion, of passivity, presupposed by critics. Thus, in his introduction to An Artificial Wilderness, Birkerts writes: "Postmodernism contends that everything has been done, that all artistic modes and genres have been exhausted. Innovation is no longer seen as possible. Style, therefore, is no longer bound to historical context … Art is to be viewed more as an arena for ingenuity than as an expressive necessity."

Birkerts laments what he considers the sorry state of contemporary fiction (pointing a finger directly at the so-called school of Gordon Lish, who remains a major figure only in the mind of Gordon Lish), concluding that literature is elsewhere. Though he admits to liking Thomas Pynchon, Saul Bellow and Walker Percy—major figures (except middle-aged Pynchon) of an older generation—his preferences are for Continental and South American writers. Indeed, he is like a radar station, scanning the horizon for major and minor figures: Robert Musil, Osip Mandelstam, Jorge Luis Borges and Eugenio Montale as well as Gregor von Rezzori, Eva Demski, Lars Gustafsson, and Blaise Cendrars. He notes that most of these writers are from countries where one cannot or could not hope to avoid "the sharp pressure of history." Writing of Mandelstam's "Fourth Prose," for instance, he observes: "'Fourth Prose' represents his decision to speak his mind and accept the consequences, and as such it is as courageous and historically loaded a document as has ever been written. Any one of its sixteen sections would have sufficed for his arrest. It is Mandelstam's credo, his moral integrity affirmed at a time when no one dared affirm anything." He continues, analyzing the prose—its "beautiful fury and invective"—withdue regard for its place in time, its sense of audience, its rhetoric in the older, nobler sense of that term.

In each of the essays, most of which were published as reviews, Birkerts takes great pains to describe the object before him. He is never less than adroit, and his descriptions occasionally rise to wonderful heights of suggestiveness and precision, as in his piece on Julio Cortázar:

Entering Cortázar's would, we leave behind our ordinary time perceptions. Sequence and succession, the lockstep of ticking seconds—these have almost no place in the fiction. The time of a glance or a caress is elastic: the psyche dilates and opens onto expanses of experience. And in the face of the experience, the sweep of the clock hands is irrelevant, if not absurd.

He is equally strong on the subject of Walter Benjamin, the German critic:

Benjamin's appropriation of the image of the flâneur for himself was to some extent an ironic gesture. He knew that the harmony between man and his world had been all but irreparably violated. But it was precisely this knowledge—this hopelessness—that forced him to effect a major transformation. Moving from the objective to the subjective, he brought the flâneur sensibility to bear upon the inside life.

Again and again, reading Birkerts, one sits up and says, "Yes, that's it exactly!" This is a rare experience for readers of professional "Lit Crit," which tends to be jargon bound and nervous, wary of what somebody at Yale or Johns Hopkins might think or, worse, say when they read this or that. Birkerts cites R. P. Blackmur's famous definition of criticism as "the formal discourse of an amateur," thus (quietly) describing his own view of his critical project. He is unabashedly belletristic (though, of course, most theorists would say that Birkerts is naive in assuming this role, which is not as free of bias as it presupposes).

Critics quite often betray their own positions when describing other critics; in fact, they ought to, Birkerts does not hide his admiration for Connolly or Benjamin, for George Steiner or Roger Shattuck—all of whom he discusses here—but he carefully shows where his own ideal reader (every critic's Platonic self) goes beyond the critic under discussion. Thus, writing of Shattuck, he concludes: "Shattuck's stance at the end of The Innocent Eye leaves no doubt about his profound antipathy for the so-called postmodern developments. I would like to see him roll up his sleeves and engage in some real polemics—we may not be able to change history, but we can certainly argue with it."

Oddly enough, Birkerts rarely engages in polemics except on a fairly quiet level, by implication. The most explicit gestures in the direction of polemics occur in the last section of An Artificial Wilderness, which contains six lucid essays on general cultural topics, such as the function of television in the creation of the "mass age." His argument is not original. He thinks, quite logically, that the more hours we spend "before the pullulating tube, the fewer are the hours spent in contact with the stubborn grain of the world." The intellectual pyrotechnics of a Marshall McLuhan are blessedly absent from this essay, which is nevertheless full of subtle observations about the development of modern technology—television, the computer, information processing—and its consequences, which (he suspects) will not be benign.

Where Birkerts most obviously parts company with theoretically oriented critics is in his enthusiasm for reading itself. Here the amateurism is engaging. In "Notes from a Confession," for instance, he writes:

The world is covered with words, and I go about reading them. The urban surface. Signs, billboards, graffiti. I read and reread the same idiotic slogans on the cereal box morning after morning. If I require more variety, I study the jam jars, breaking apart and recomposing the letters in the lists of ingredients.

Going beyond this ephemera, he comments: "Gustave Flaubert, Graham Greene, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Robertson Davies, Thomas Hardy—each author allows me to experience sensations that I find nowhere else. Each novel is a differently cut and differently tinted lens that I turn upon myself." The voice behind this prose recalls an earlier time, when the act of reading was not plagued by an obsession with intertextuality, when critics could be blissfully ignorant of their prejudices and presuppositions. (On the other hand, there is something frightening about the notion of a return to male-biased, elitist readings of the kind generated by three decades of New Critics.)

The theme of reading as self-discovery surfaces repeatedly throughout the book. Reading, for Birkerts, has much to do with the location of self in time: a theme rarely sounded in the pages of Diacritics or Glyph, Nevertheless, contemporary criticism is poorer for its loss. Criticism—at its best—remains an act of moral comprehension, an effort to locate the place of a text in the world, to identify its leverage, to calculate its angle of approach. By locating the self in history, the critic (however tacitly) admits the necessarily flawed, partial view of any stance. The flight from history to language can only result in moral deadness and political lethargy. It is symptomatic of a culture on the run, on the wane. This is true enough of imperial America, which seems to have run out of excuses. It seems equally true of academic criticism, which serves the society at large by remaining elitist, self-referential, and dull.

One hopes that criticism such as Birkerts's—outside the academic mainstream, hit-and-run, "belletristic,"and rashly personal—can find its place and readership. It is promising that his essays have acquired a major publisher. In general, the high quality of writing in An Artificial Wilderness is a testament to its genre, which is too often spoken of in derogation as "literary journalism." I grant that the Sven Birkerts of the journalistic world are rare. Nevertheless, with the abdication of academic critics from the culture at large, with their withdrawal into coteries and schools, the everyday work of "appreciating" books has to fall on someone's shoulders. These shoulders, at least, are strong.