JOLLY DAYS

Mr. Show Me

This discussion with Frederick Crews is worth every second of your full attention. Crews is popularly noted as a critic of Freud. A long time teacher at Berkeley he represents the value of empiricism — of distancing yourself from trends — an approach that is worryingly becoming less common. Our society wants to sell us things and that requires a population that is given to passive consumption, not critical thinking.

Besides having a wonderfully resonant clarity as a speaker, the points Crews makes are like the sharp hammer blows of an expert carpenter. He knows what of he speaks. Some points Crews makes in this interview:

• Students of the arts often come to schools feeling they have things to say. They don't understand that openness is the gold standard; that they have to allow the process of exploration of what they thought they wanted to say be open to contradictions — which is manifested as multiple drafts in the literary arts. Experiencing something new, with no help from received notions, is the way of the arts, for both artist and audience. He mentions the way current criticism so often defers to the narcotic of theory rather than facing the daunting prospect of thinking and feeling for oneself.

• He noted that at Berkeley as theoreticians (postmodernists) began to take over that the mindset changed from demonstrable value in a work of art to one of power and cliquishness. You were supposed to make fashionable references and defer to authority rather than allowing the authority of the work of art itself to determine your reactions. A more difficult, if more rewarding course.

• He discussed the way Melville refused to toady to anyone's values, but followed his own vision. But the misperception of his writing as popular travel pieces left Melville with writer's block, mute until near the end, when he wrote Billy Budd.

Balanced between science and the arts — Crews' parental inheritance, a mother involved in literature and a father with science — Crews is that nearly extinct species: the person of integrity.