My Latest Pet Peeve

Another in a long line of my pet peeves, the phrase “open to/beyond criticism” has really started to tick me off. I’d first come across the term “beyond criticism” in the context of Oprah endorsing a book into her elite class of Oprah Book Club (does she have anything in her life whose title doesn't contain her name in it, that self-indulgent, narcissistic bitch?), and I didn’t give it much thought back then for reasons I can neither recall nor, if could recall, justify. But with the increasing frequency of this term in print – used often by critics and reviewers of literary, cultural, religious and political phenomena – my peeve detector has finally rung the alarm.

Since I came across this phrase exclusively in literary context, I’ll stick to what I know. Calling a book or some other work of literature as beyond criticism categorically submits that any opinion or point of view that opposes the established awesomeness of the work can be either discredited because the (insecure) majority who pushed it past the unsafe zone of criticism disagree with it, or restricted from being uttered altogether. Now, “open to criticism” can superficially come off as a critically superior term that, as it manifestly suggests, opens the book to criticism and allows novelty and variety of opinions to be expressed unlike the other phrase; but really, it is just an elastic extension of ‘beyond criticism’ that when let free returns back to the intolerant connotations of its base phrase, ‘beyond/above criticism.’ Being ‘open to criticism’ insinuates that it can also, at some time in the future and with sufficient consensus attained, reach the point of being ‘closed to criticism’ – just a fancy way of saying it is now beyond criticism. Well, fuck that! A phrase which fundamentally grants any work of art that privilege is illiberal and despicable in equal measure. At what point, may I ask, does a work go from being ‘open to criticism’ to ‘beyond criticism’? In my book, never. As long as I am alive, no book ever written is above or beyond or closed to criticism!

This pet peeve, however, as I mentioned earlier, is highly context-specific. I have no qualms with this phrase being used in a few other areas of human affairs, such as science. That earth goes around the sun and not the other way around is above and beyond criticism, and that evolution is true hasn’t been open to criticism for well over a century and a half now.

I want to go on about how blinkered we Indians are about other people’s outlook towards something that is different from our own and how closed we make our objects of praise to criticism. But that could, true to our Indian form, make this into a pissing contest and flame war, so I’ll conclude the pet peeve with my original intention of just expressing the peeve, and nothing more.

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