More than 170 years later, that word - "crepuscular" - is back in the news. Here is how Webster's magnificent 1828 dictionary defines it: "pertaining to twilight; glimmering; noting the imperfect light of the morning and evening; hence, imperfectly clear or luminous." More often than not, however, it refers to those last, shining rays of a setting sun that can penetrate the gathering gloom for a few bright moments. Either way, Webster managed to go out with le mot juste.
Not so, perhaps, some of the writers at The Paris Review, who seem reasonably fond of the word. Andre Aciman used it to describe John Sloan's painting, The City from Greenwich Village. I've seen the painting, at the National Gallery in Washington, and it doesn't look imperfectly clear at all. But Mr Aciman had a larger point about changing cityscapes to make, had already used "twilight" once and "twilit" once, and so perhaps felt he had no option but to, well, crepuscule. Joshua Cohen, writing a month earlier on the phrase "open sesame", uses it even more inexplicably: "I first heard Ali Baba's cry not as a reader of Scheherazade's crepuscular, mortal, entertainment, but as a pajamafied fanatic of weekend TV."
It turns out that one such use of the word "crepuscular" in The Paris Review enraged somebody on the internet. This aam aadmi insisted that it was self-indulgent to use the word, and an example of "elitist writing". The sort of complaint that usually goes unnoticed - except that this one caught the attention of Booker Prize-winning novelist Eleanor Catton, who used it as a peg to discuss accusations of "elitism" in writing. And, by extension, the difference between reading a book and drinking bottled lemonade, as well as The Problem With People Who Review Books On Amazon.
Ms Catton's argument is powerful. In many internet reviews, "the book in question is evaluated as a product, and because the product has failed to perform as advertised, it is judged to be deficient". We are encouraged by a society structured around consumerism to evaluate every experience thus; to imagine that there is no standard more important than the one that we, as individuals, intuitively apply. We are all elitists, in fact: "We will never agree on a single definition of 'elite'. And nor should we." Because multiple critical voices encourage diversity of writing, and the arguments that make criticism interesting.
There's much to what Ms Catton says. I'm not sure it's consumerism that's as responsible as she claims, though. I'd say there's also a flattening of other hierarchies of taste, driven by a post-1960s glorification of individual "feeling", and a very American tendency to defer to another's particular experience - and of course, the famed democratisation and incivility bred by that home of horrors, the Internet.
Consider a recent essay that largely agrees with Ms Catton, written by Laura Miller of Salon: objecting to writing and word-choice as elitist, she suggests, means that you're "less interested in championing good writing than you are in grabbing any chance to feel superior to somebody else". Actually expressing anger at what you think is bad writing, she suggests, is born entirely of "intellectual insecurity" and ignorance. As someone who has expressed large amounts of anger at various forms of bad writing in the past, I think Ms Miller severely underrates the effect of pure and simple irritation.
In effect, Ms Miller's argument is a symptom of the problem Ms Catton identified. For Ms Miller, to even suggest that a particular important standard is not being met in a work of literature must be the consequence of "a highly charged personal history". Again, personal experience must be exalted - if not approved of, then at least granted extraordinary explanatory power.
There's no doubt in my mind that both Ms Miller and Ms Catton are only partially right. Ms Miller is right in that personal experience counts for a lot in how we judge writing - as it does in how we judge anything. But that doesn't get us very far, truly; because it's how any criticism justifies itself independent of individual experience that's really interesting. Ms Catton, meanwhile, is bang on about the idea and importance of multiple elitisms. She is perhaps wrong in saying that describing a book as "confusing" and "boring" is not a coherent act of literary criticism. It is, as long as it is argued from something more than one's own unassailable preferences.
Ms Catton's basic point, however, that criticism can be elitist but literature can't be, is both elegant and unanswerable. More: literary criticism can be a bit snobbish; and, in today's egalitarian, long-tail world, we're all snobs - about music, about food, and certainly about books. And there's nothing personal about it at all. Never has been, actually. Writing his indispensable geography of snobs in Punch in the mid-nineteenth century, the incomparable William Makepeace Thackeray stoutly denied literary snobbishness could exist: "The critics of England and the authors of England are unrivalled as a body, and hence it becomes impossible to find fault with them." Any "literary man abusing his brother", he says, "does it not in the least out of malice, not at all from envy, merely from a sense of truth and public duty." Yes. Quite. Absolutely.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in