Edition: U.S. / Global

REVISIONS; Critics Judge, and Are Judged, Across the Centuries

By Margo Jefferson
Published: August 21, 2000

Just a few days ago I came across these lines from a letter Nietzsche wrote in 1884 about an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nietzsche was having it translated into German, he said, adding this lament: ''I do not know how much I would give if only I could bring it about, ex post facto, that such a glorious, great nature, rich in soul and spirit, might have gone through some strict discipline, a really scientific education. As it is, in Emerson we have lost a philosopher.''

Why did this stay with me? Because of Nietzsche's near pity for the man American scholars and critics deem a founding father of our literature and thought. Nietzsche is telling his philosopher friend that Emerson is wonderfully gifted but untrained, even culturally deprived. And, oh dreary irony, this is just what many academic champions of Emerson today say when they hold him up to face down lesser-known works by American writers they consider faddishly multicultural.

These words also struck me because I had been reading some Emerson a few months before, and without pretending I could judge him as a philosopher, I had decided that his prose moved frustratingly among the glorious, the earnest and the mushy.

It's my belief that pioneers of American literature like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Hawthorne matter not because of the perfection of their method (Poe's stories come closest to formal perfection) but because of their need, given the content of their lives and imaginations, to invent or alter language and form. To an American scholar Emerson is making his way through answers and toward questions in a form he invents as he goes along. To Nietzsche he was meandering across ideas, a bit like the White Queen in ''Through the Looking Glass.''

This kind of criticism can be depressing or infuriating if you happen to worship its object. But it's also useful. It shows how even a radical genius like Nietzsche abided by some of the standards of his day, standards that would eventually be challenged or thrown out. We all know how the laudable artistic and intellectual standards of one age become the limiting conventions of the next.

Readers and writers of the past -- not just the geniuses, either; the intelligent, alert ones who kept current as we all like to think we do -- remind us how culture and taste change. And why. What aesthetic, social and intellectual needs do beliefs serve in their time? Which ones serve us now, and why?

The United States was just an upstart culture to the Europe of 1884; today it is a world power. Americans have long since produced their own definitions of the strict discipline and formal perfection Nietzsche invoked. But I believe (and I'm hardly alone) that what distinguishes American art in all its variety is idiosyncrasy, improvisation and a willingness, even at the cost of imperfection, to break old forms and try new ones.

And I think American critics need to live by the same criteria. For instance, just what do we mean when we use the phrase ''serious art'' or ''high art''?

Does a minor work by a major composer (Mozart, say) -- played no more than adequately, in a respected hall under an unremarkable conductor -- qualify as truly high or serious? No, I'd say: it's ho-hum entertainment and middlebrow art passing as high art. The difference between it and a respectable but unexceptional television show? The Mozart exudes cultural virtue; you are meant to feel worthier because you paid attention to it. It might send you back (or forward) to better works and performances of Mozart. And if you're alert enough to be dissatisfied, the television show might send you on to to better television, film or theater.

What are we to make of works that flaunt their highbrow credentials in a style clearly meant to capture a mass audience? Consider Harold Bloom's best-selling book ''Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.'' (Riverhead). It gives us many, many pages of educated, entertaining and highly particular observations on the plays. And then Mr. Bloom lards them over with a polemic against all critics who dare to read Shakespeare with the politics and ideologies of his age -- and ours -- in mind.

Idiosyncrasy belongs as much to criticism as to art. And on those grounds I can accept sentences like ''Whether we are male or female, old or young, Falstaff and Hamlet speak most urgently for us and to us . . . When we are wholly human, and know ourselves, we become most like either Hamlet or Falstaff.'' But Mr. Bloom doesn't appear to think he is just showing off for us; he calls this universality. It seems that when an academic wants to become a star, he must become a vaudevillian, performing so outrageously that to enjoy his skills we must be able to laugh at his absurdities.

It's interesting how often we critics believe ourselves above and beyond the fallibilities of artists and audiences. In The New York Observer last week there was a stern denunciation of the artist Barbara Kruger and her retrospective show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The critic, Hilton Kramer, insisted that Ms. Kruger's satire on cultural greed and pretension, embodied in her photograph of a Howdy-Doodyish face with the slogan ''When I hear the word culture I reach for my checkbook'' written on it, was hypocritical. Why? Because her work is commercially successful.

He wrote, ''We all disapprove of other people's greed, but most of us don't get paid for saying so.'' The ''most'' is all right, but the ''us'' is a big problem. Critics get paid regularly for disapproving of other people's greed, taste, judgment and skill. And some make more money than many of the artists they (excuse me, we) judge. What will future readers make of us? It's foolish to hope they will find us infallible. Let's hope they find us ferociously curious and eager to be educated again and again.

Photo: A Barbara Kruger work, in her show at the Whitney Museum, satirizes cultural greed with the words ''When I hear the word culture I take out my checkbook.'' (Whitney Museum of American Art)