Maybe I'll Read That: Art in the Time of Ignorance

Installment the first

being a review of “Art in the Time of Fascism” by Alex Preston

being itself a review of Watching Over Her by Jean Baptiste Andrea

In my time of reading reviews, I have surmised that it is the job of the reviewer to make explicit whatever is already clear implicitly in the work he is reviewing. Allow me now to make explicit the implicitly clear fact that in his review Mr. Preston neglects to make explicit the implicitly clear fact in the book he is reviewing that it is an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. I know this only from the details Mr. Preston shares of the characters’ names and from his noting that Viola calls the sculptor Mimo her “cosmic twin.” Tell me Mr. Preston skipped pointing out the Shakespeare reference because he assumed his audience would know without him having to spell it out. But I will respond, No! Every truly cultured individual knows that as soon as a Shakespearean reference takes shape in the world, the race is on to point it out. To not participate in the race is to surrender your right to say that you recognized the reference on your own. To not participate, therefore, is to surrender your dignity, Mr. Preston. Therefore, whether you participated or not, I win.

Aside from the one great big missing piece, the review is fine. Give him a few consolation points for at least remembering Mussolini’s name from history class.

I did appreciate his invocation of the “carnivalesque,” although it filled me more with  lust for Rabelais than for whatever the book was that he reviewed.

I appreciated his use of “picaresque,” too, but it only induced daydreams of the swift and biting tongue of the Spanish Golden Age.

But I was not impressed that Mr. Preston used another text (Michel Tournier’s The Erl-King) as a recurring comparison—without even hinting at the parallels to Twelfth Night. At least the author of the book seems cultured, even if the critic is not. … Maybe I’ll read it.