What makes art, and individual artworks, exciting? Whether it’s classical art inspired by the Muses, Romantic poetry by deep spiritual imagination, or punk rock by anger, art comes from the individual and enigmatic heart, making it singular and even mystical. But literary criticism and generative AI challenge this view of art – one pollutes mystery, the other implies replicability. Art is being deprived of its sanctity.

Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957), a book about literary theory, suggests the possibility of a unifying formula of criticism that could apply to all literature. It’s incredibly influential because of its central question: what if criticism is a science as well as an art? The thing is, we don’t study the arts hoping they will turn out to be sciences. Frye’s book might be a defence of literary criticism directed at someone who told him it isn’t a real subject, and every student of the arts has probably been told the same thing. I feel quite secure about my subject, but Frye’s approach begins to call it into question, doubting the self-rewarding nature of literature, implying some need for justification.

“What if criticism is a science as well as an art?”

This brand of criticism can sterilise its source material of mystery and singularity – this is not dissimilar to artificial intelligence. Nick Cave – rock-star, novelist, sculptor, the works – wrote in answer to a fan’s letter that “ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.” Despite his general vagueness, I think Cave summarises the discomfort well. The idea that our creative achievements might be replicated by a machine ties to an anxiety that’s troubled us since at least the 19th century – that we might be a lot less than meets the eye. And if we don’t have a transcendently singular significance, everything seems to vanish. The exchanges of life begin to look like mere chemical reactions; our identities are entirely destabilised. It might be unconscious, but we feel important, even mystical. AI is profoundly un-mystical because it finds its origin in us, while we are yet to find ours at all. AI replicates, and replication is a form of replacement. Maybe the creative struggle is not intrinsic to the process, but a sign of our inferiority to machines. Maybe our humanity isn’t singular but easily replicable. And magic and mystery will be gone, stripped from the great human experience the way that scientific criticism strips them from individual texts.

The urge in these disheartening times is to return to the simple and sincere. My personal remedy is Jack Kerouac, a 20th-century American novelist of the so-called Beat Generation group of artists. His narratives cover winding road trips and drunken parties in equally winding and drunken styles. Kerouac typed furiously onto big rolls of teletype paper or scribbled in pencil, resisting editorial intervention. He didn’t bother about grammar, nor much real consideration; his writing has an improvisational, jazz-like vitality.

“The urge in these disheartening times is to return to the simple and sincere”

Predictably, Kerouac’s was a counter-cultural intention, and the Beat Generation’s deliberate departure from artistic and social convention was married to a disdain for the literary establishment. Even as an English student, there are times when I agree with them. Poet Allen Ginsberg wrote of academia that “poetry has been attacked by an ignorant and frightened bunch of bores who don’t understand how it’s made.” Did he mean Northrop Frye?

Allen Ginsberg’s view is certainly very rock and roll, but since we’re self-respecting thinkers, we don’t want to end up total anti-intellectuals – reaction and regression are never a good look. We aren’t above academia, and not just because we pay great big tuition fees. There is obvious merit to analysis of the art we love, not least that it might make us love it even more. It’s just that if we go too far, we kill the love altogether.

I find it our responsibility as students to resist both the regressive and the reductive, both anti-intellectualism and dull scholarship. To preserve any kind of sensible view of life, we should never give up critical thinking like we’re somehow above it, but depriving life and art of passion like Northrop Frye only makes us feel easily replaceable and quite worthless. Though it will always be a compulsion for us to defend our subjects with the language of the sciences, such language infects the arts with boredom. Remember that art is an end in itself.