"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it"
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Lawrence is picking a fight with the cozy idea that art comes with an owner’s manual signed by its creator. “Never trust the artist” isn’t a smear on individual integrity so much as a warning about authors as salespeople for their own work. The artist has motives: vanity, self-mythmaking, the desire to be praised for the “right” meanings, the urge to domesticate what might otherwise stay strange. If you let the maker become the final authority, the work gets reduced to biography and good intentions.
“Trust the tale” pivots the power away from personality and toward the artifact: the texture of language, the pressure of scenes, what characters do when the author isn’t standing behind them explaining. Lawrence’s phrasing makes the story feel like an organism with its own instincts, often smarter than its creator. That’s also a quiet jab at the era’s moralizing gatekeepers. Early 20th-century literature was being policed for propriety, and Lawrence knew firsthand what it meant to have a work tried in the court of public virtue. Elevating “the tale” over “the artist” becomes a defense of art’s autonomy against both censorship and PR.
Then comes the provocation: the critic’s job is “to save the tale from the artist.” Lawrence casts criticism not as parasitic commentary but as rescue mission. The critic protects the work from being overmanaged by authorial explanation, and from the author’s temptation to tidy up its contradictions. It’s an argument for reading as a form of emancipation: the story gets to outgrow its parent.
“Trust the tale” pivots the power away from personality and toward the artifact: the texture of language, the pressure of scenes, what characters do when the author isn’t standing behind them explaining. Lawrence’s phrasing makes the story feel like an organism with its own instincts, often smarter than its creator. That’s also a quiet jab at the era’s moralizing gatekeepers. Early 20th-century literature was being policed for propriety, and Lawrence knew firsthand what it meant to have a work tried in the court of public virtue. Elevating “the tale” over “the artist” becomes a defense of art’s autonomy against both censorship and PR.
Then comes the provocation: the critic’s job is “to save the tale from the artist.” Lawrence casts criticism not as parasitic commentary but as rescue mission. The critic protects the work from being overmanaged by authorial explanation, and from the author’s temptation to tidy up its contradictions. It’s an argument for reading as a form of emancipation: the story gets to outgrow its parent.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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