STATE OF CRITICISM
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is already known, new vision, but as a maneuver within the already
existent, the stockpile, stretching the formula a bit, for example, or
rearranging the conventions so that they may cover new subjects or be
made to include new ideas (usually taken from high culture, as we
know). Such a type of originality can be seen in the way so-called
"adult" westerns altered the arrangements of the older genre while
remaining basically within them. I'm aware of the challenge to the idea
of originality that has been posed by recent French literary thought,
but this seems to me another matter: in Derrida, for example, the attack
upon originality is directed toward the writer, or rather the idea of the
writer as demiurge, in the interests of
writing,
whose originality, or
lack of it, seems to me to be unaffected by anything the theoreticians
have said.
The necessity to stay within the realm of the known is the
condition, as I say, of all popular culture or, as I shall begin to call it
now, entertainment. The heavy commercial and social pressures that
affect entertainment can be described as the demands of democracy as
both a spiritual and a material system and it is these demands that
reduce so radically the area of freedom to invent, to be personal. Since
this is so it makes great sense that an approach like that of the auteurs
should recommend itself to the critics of entertainment. For if the only
area of freedom remaining to the makers of entertainment is that of the
smuggler's cove, where illicit goods, goods that have escaped paying
the taxes due on them, are brought in, then to trace the careers of these
smugglers is indeed a fascinating enterprise. Whether or not it is
criticism is another question.
We know that Andre Bazin himself came to have serious doubts
about the uses to which some of his suggestions had been put. The
question so many seem to be ignoring, he said, is just the one of what is
the quality of these themes and patterns that are being traced. I haven't
the time for it, but I would like to be able to examine the practice of
3uteurism in the case of a director like Hitchcock, in the attempt to
justify someone upon whom so many intellectual malfeasances have
been perpetrated.
Implicit in the idea of entertainment I have been offering is a
crucial truth that goes to the heart of my subject. I said at the beginning
that we have to ask ourselves how criticism deals or can deal with
creations that do not qualify, for good or ill, as art or culture in an
older sense. In this regard I want to quote John Cawelti once more
when he offers a definition of entertainment (his word) as "a highly
controlled experience which puts us through an intense series of
