Young's Guns
"I cannot think of anything wise or deep to say, here at the end, so I
will just stop." With these words Elizabeth Young concludes the
epilogue to this posthumous collection of her prose writings, reviews,
interviews and columns. Young died in 2001, and with her the worlds of
literature and the arts lost one of their most acerbic, creative and
honest critics. Young has quiet rightly been described by The
Times as "the late high priestess of Post-Modern lit crit", and
Pandora's Box offers some indication of the extent of her wisdom
and depth of critical engagement with the contemporary culture in which
she found herself living.
Young's range of reference and the breadth of her reading shine through
all the pieces here, each of which is prefaced by after-the-event
comments that introduce the essay and aid the reader's orientation.
Sometimes her writing can be almost unfairly abrasive, but the
consistently genuine responses that she offers mean that each piece
comes up as a gem of committed criticism. Young tirelessly notices the
significant new thing, pays attention to the unjustly neglected old
thing, and looks harder than other people at the commonly neglected
thing, in order repeatedly to shake up the conventional reader's
conventional truisms, and to expose how deeply orthodoxy penetrates
even the most ostensibly 'radical' of worlds.
Her relentless championing of Brett Easton Ellis's American
Psycho is the most conspicuous of a series of causes that she
pursues here. From her initial review of the novel in City
Limits in 1991, Young is writing against the flow of conventionally
skeptical critical opinion, insisting on the novel's worth and
attempting to establish a set of parameters within which that worth can
be measured:
Like Scott Fitzgerald, Ellis takes a risk in trying to
capture the spirit of a decade. Will the book endure? Brand-names date
before the ink is dry but this very fact underscores Ellis' hellish
vision of the unappeasable hungers that drive us and our ever more
extreme, tormenting desires, designed never to be sated. [...] In
literary terms the book is outstanding as a portrait, an indictment of
the anorexic soul of the eighties. It demands that we attempt moral
redefinition.
Young returns to Ellis' novel much later in Pandora's Handbag in
an undated piece on 'Censorship'. Here she notes that
"feminists...provide the only new twists in the censorship debate", and
"fortunately there are women novelists who are able to broaden the
debate beyond any simplistic feminist imperatives", citing Jane Delynn
and Mary Gaitskill as examples. In contrast, her abrasiveness is in
evidence when she discusses "bafflingly popular" writers like Alice
Hoffman or Ann Patchett ("This is a nice, too nice book, bland and
frothy as a competent restaurant soufflé and just about as slow.").
Young consistently opts for the marginal or excluded figure to support
her own critical self-positionings -- she is, for example, a fan of
writers like Alasdair Gray, Alan Warner and Irvine Welsh, thereby
establishing an ideological solidarity with two generations of Scottish
literature and their implicit (and sometimes explicit)
anti-Englishness. She is as comfortable celebrating Derek Raymond's
"hellishly bleak and desolate novels" in an ostensible interview with
the swamp-rock band Gallon Drunk as she is profiling and interviewing
Terry Pratchett, whose attitude towards what he describes as "literary
wankers in London" is, one feels, shared by his interviewer.
Elizabeth Young is ultimately a book-lover's reviewer rather than a
conventional industry hack. She has a reassuring contempt for
normality, and can, when necessary, display impressive credentials (for
example in a short piece on The Clash, "the only lastingly listenable
punk band"). She can review academic tomes on Situationism (Sadie
Plant's The Most Radical Gesture) alongside such ruthlessly
anti-academic writers as Stewart Home; her comments on American
conspiracy theories ("So what does this farrago of folk-art signify?")
are as pithy and incisive as her reviews of English artists like Dora
Carrington and Christopher Wood.
Above all, Young's value as both literary critic and cultural
commentator resides in her absolute faith in the abilities of new,
young artists to produce work of lasting value, and her willingness to
invest her own time and energies in drawing her readers' attentions to
these artists. Such qualities are, ultimately, forms of intellectual
bravery, as the critic must nail her colours to various unproven masts
of creativity, and continuously reassert the courage of her
convictions. Will Self's short and highly crafted introduction to this
volume offers some background to Young's life, but also draws attention
to the vital up-to-date-ness of her writings:
Reading this book is an opportunity, for anyone who has
been a spectator of the last few decades (as opposed to merely living),
to mount a myriad of aesthetic and critical trigonometric points and
from these to join Liz in the act of surveying the
territory.
Self also worries, in the same way as Young does over Ellis' novel,
about the market for this book ("I wonder who the hell will read this
book? And I wonder whether it will sell?"). Such uncertainty comes with
the territory of the immediately contemporary, which is always
shifting, uncertain, deceptive. Young's vibrant, honest prose sets a
standard in the establishment of the authentic gut response as a viable
critical method, and, on the evidence of the pieces collected in
Pandora's Handbag, her judgement is unerring.
— 19 March 2003
