V a l u e1 8 9sign up to such judgements. There comes a point at which
not recognising that, say, a certain brand of malt whisky is of
world- class quality means not understanding malt whisky. A true
knowledge of malts would include the ability to make such
discriminations.
Does this then mean that literary judgements are objective? Not
in the sense that ‘Mount Olympus is taller than Woody Allen’ is
objective. If literary judgements were objective in that sense there
would be no arguing over them, and you can wrangle far into the
night over whether Elizabeth Bishop is a finer poet than John
Berryman. Yet reality does not divide neatly down the middle
between objective and subjective. Meaning is not subjective, in the
sense that I cannot just decide that the warning ‘Smoking Kills’ on
a cigarette packet really means ‘Nicotine Helps Kids Grow, So
Share These Ciggies with your Toddler!’ Yet ‘Smoking Kills’ means
what it means only by force of social convention. There may be a
language somewhere in the cosmos in which it means a song for
several voices, typically unaccompanied and arranged in elaborate
counterpoint.
The point is that there are criteria for determining what counts
as excellence in golf or fiction, as there are not for determining
whether peaches taste better than pineapples. And these criteria
are public, not just a question of what one happens privately to
prefer. You have to learn how to handle them by sharing in certain
social practices. In the case of literature, these social practices are
known as literary criticism. This still leaves a lot of room for dissent
and disagreement. Criteria are guides for how to go about making
value judgements. They do not make them for you, any more than
following the rules of chess will win the game for you. Chess is
played not just according to rules, but by the creative application of