528
RICHARD POIRIER
would be of importance not just for popular music but for all the
arts. People who listen to the Beatles love them - what about that?
Why isn't there more talk about pleasure, about the excitement
of witnessing a performance, about the excitement that goes into
a performance of any kind? Such talk could set in motion a radical
and acutely necessary amendment to the literary and academic club
rules. Since the exalted arts (to which the novel, about a century
ago, was the last genre to be admitted) have all but surrendered the
provision of fun and entertainment to the popular arts, criticism must
turn to film and song if it is to remind itself that the arts really
do not need to be boring, no matter how much copy can be made
from the elaboration of current theories of boredom.
Critical confrontations initiated in this spirit could give a new
status to an increasingly unfashionable kind of criticism: to close-up,
detailed concern for performance, for enactment and execution in a
work of
art.
Film and song, the two activities in which young people
are now especially interested, and about which they are learning
to talk fairly well, may yield something to other kinds of scrutiny,
but they yield much more to this kind. So does literature, on the very
infrequent occasions when it is so treated. The need is for intense
localization of interest and a consequent modesty of description, in
the manner of Stark Young's dramatic criticism, or Bernard Haggin's
writing about classical music and jazz or Edwin Denby and, more
recently, Robert Garis on ballet. Imagining an audience for such
criticism, the critic thinks not of a public with Issues and Topics at
the ready, but rather of a small group of like-minded, quite private
people who find pleasure in certain intensive acts of looking and
listening. Looking and listening to something with such a group, ima–
ginary or real, means checking out responses, pointing to particular
features, asking detailed questions, sharing momentary excitements.
People tend to listen to the Beatles the way families in the last century
listened to readings of Dickens, and it might be remembered by
literary snobs that the novel then, like the Beatles and even film now,
was considered a popular form of entertainment generally beneath
serious criticism, and most certainly beneath academic attention.
The Beatles' music is said to belong to the young, but if it does
that's only because the young have the right motive for caring about
it - they enjoy themselves. They also know what produces the fun
