The writers, pathological liars: Pietro Citati recognized them and with his criticism he joined them

Does criticism really have the task of pointing out the truth? The answer is no. And it is precisely this idea of ​​order-defying criticism that is magnified in “The Girl with the Golden Eyes”, the latest essay in the bookstore.

If for more than seventy years we have been mourning the death of the novel, literary criticism does not enjoy better health. The uncertainty about what makes sense or even can be narrated also invests the tools and canons by which to judge what is narrated: the great ideologies collapsed, and while we wait for the newborn girls to pass the weaning phase, it is not at all clear what the task is. of criticism. Convinced of her innate omniscience and proven moral superiority, she once entrusted to herself the task of illuminating, guiding, improving humanity; today, on the contrary, much more dangerous, it is looking for new props. He thus finds himself at a crossroads: to yield to the instinct of a renewed enlightenment or to seek other avenues with less sense of melodrama and a more intense degree of humor. Not that this is an unprecedented crossroads, if it is true that towards the end of the last century the above uncertainty took the form of an opposition between sides: those who understood criticism as light and sifting, aimed at settling true and untrue , against those who made it a lively instrument of literature on literature, which must not straighten any crooked wood, but rather create worlds upon worlds.