Zoilus was the man who dared say that the author of the Odyssey wasn’t all that he was cracked up to be. It was the role of Zoilists (lovely word) to “carp” (another lovely word). Like their modern version, “flyters” (traders in literary insult), they had only one mission in critical life: to piss on the work of art. The only qualifications for the job were a full bladder and a brass neck.
Do we need these professional nay-sayers, lice on the locks of literature and art that they are? Yes, we certainly do. The rise of reviewing 300 years ago coincided with the birth of modern capitalism and the commodification of the work of art. We don’t just read novels, watch films, scrutinise pictures, listen to records We buy them. Commercial literature, theatre, art, film swamp the market with many more than we can buy.
They want us not just to consume, but to over-consume: to spend, spend, spend until, like Monsieur Creosote in the Monty Python sketch, we explode in a shower of banknotes. If you believed the advertisements in the Review Section of The Independent, for example, you’d be watching 20 movies and reading 50 novels a week. Reviewing’s main task is to cull the vast surplus of creative products in the marketplace to manageable proportions, to help us spend our time and money well. We need these modern-day Zoilists to piss on the latest offerings as an antidote to all that sunshine which the advertising industry, with all its millions, is blowing in our faces in order to get its hands on our billions.Negative reviewing can, in fact, be constructive, if we take a long enough view on it. Kenneth Tynan made his name in the early Fifties as the London theatre critic on The Observer in that paper’s pioneering Review section (the first to bundle together all the week’s arts commentary). Tynan made his name by dumping, with magnificent sarcasm, on all the sacred cows of English theatre (his most famous barb was his two-word critique of Orson Welles’s 1952 Othello: “Citizen Coon”). At the time Tynan looked like a smartypants on the make fresh out of Oxford, and nothing more.With historical hindsight we can see that what he was doing was the equivalent of demolition.
His broadside negativity was clearing the theatrical ground for the revolution that arrived at the Royal Court in 1957, with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger Everyone remembers Osborne Harold Pinter is still going strong and so is Tom Stoppard Their place in cultural history is secure Tynan, regrettably, is already forgotten. No one, as they say, ever built a statue to a critic.Zoilism – negative criticism – has always been resented by writers and artists. Those practitioners, that is, who feel the sharpness of the cutting edge on their throats and in their wallets. It’s painful (not to say ruinous) if you have spent two years writing a novel, a year making a film, or six months mounting a West End production, exhibition or concert, to have some swine devastate it in 500 words (and know that your friends are sniggering about it behind your back – everyone loves a hatchet job as long as it’s not their own neck on the block).The rage of criticised artists is legendary. Ken Russell would appear on television with the Evening Standard’s film critic, Alexander Walker, only if he (Russell) could bring a stick with him. Walker, as I recall, wisely declined the invitation – but he was right about Russell’s movies.