So let’s say you’re a student taking your first western literature class, and all is
going well and fine until the professor starts asking you questions about the great dread
dinosaurs of literature that maybe you haven’t gotten around to reading.
And you don’t want to admit you haven’t read these guys. Maybe you know that Captain
Ahab from hell’s heart stabs at thee…. and there’s a whale.
You know that Les Mis has a popular musical adaptation where people wave flags. There’s
a revolution, but, like, not the guillotine one. Right?
And you that War and Peace…. Well, it’s long. Hooboy, it’s long. Why is a bear being
tied to a policeman…? And maybe you ask yourself: Why have I not
read these books? Has anyone actually read these books? They are widely agreed to be
big, important books, after all.
And this begs the question: What makes a book important? And who even decided what’s “important”
in the first place?
Literary critics, writers, philosophers, bloggers -- all have tried to tackle where and why
and how an author may strike such lightning in a bottle that their works enter the pantheon
of “Classical Literature”. Why this book is required reading in high school, where
other books are lost to history. To try and sum up this historical process in a humble
6 minute internet video is nigh on impossible.
But hey we’re going to try.
There are lots of books that are trashed, unappreciated or simply not read early on
in their publication and only come into popularity years later.
Moby Dick is a famous example of this. Author Herman Melville died in obscurity believing
his opus forgotten. But In 1916, a popular contemporary novelist, Carl Van Doren, sang
its praises publically, the novel caught on with a more appreciative New York literary
scene, and a hundred years later we’re still meme-ing about Moby Dick.
Several decades later, another New York literary trendsetter, Arthur Mizener, championed a
little known novel about Awful Rich People as “a classic of twentieth century American
fiction.” Eventually enough English professors agreed, and now all high school students have
to read The Great Gatsby, Great American Novel™.
But not all Very Important Books go unappreciated in their day.
Victor Hugo was already a huge celebrity when he wrote les Miserables, which not only was
a sensation upon release, it has never been out of print.
So too with War and Peace, which enjoyed massive success upon publication and made Tolstoy,
according to his contemporary Goncharov, the “true lion of Russian literature.”
What do these books have in common?
Note that all of the above examples are heavily tied to themes of national and cultural identity
- be it American, French or Russian.
They have also been deemed important by established writers, critics and scholars--the intellectual
elite.
Which brings us to the literary canon: In the eighteenth century, people began to use
the term canon to refer informally to famous writers as a group. But In contrast to the
biblical canon and the canon of saints, the literary canon was never an official list
of officially recognized writers.
And lest you think these were meant to be read by the masses, well.. Nah. That’s the
thing about canons – who is excluded is at least as important as who is included.
So who decided what is important in the western literary canon? Well, historically, it’s
been old white men, usually authors or academics at learning institutions that during the 19th
century only admitted young white men, and taught books by … drag queens! Just kidding
they were mostly books by white men. According to University of Michigan professor
of English Jan Stryz, "Some scholars assert that writing has traditionally been seen as
"something defined by the dominant culture as a white male activity."
So in recent decades, there has been more skepticism around how the western literary
canon was constructed. That is not to say that big, portentous books like War and Peace
or Moby Dick are not important or influential, but that someone had to decide they were important
and influential, and everyone else had to go, “yeah, that sounds legit.”
With that said, defenders of the traditional western canon, like Harold Bloom in his best-selling
book “The Western Canon,” arguing that canon formation takes place as great writers
respond in their writing to the work of their predecessors, and dismissing criticism of
the canon as “the School of Resentment”
Yikes.
Fortunately, more diverse writers are slowly being added to this canon--writers like Virginia
Woolf, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright.
It goes without saying that the world has changed immeasurably over the last 50 years,
let alone the last three centuries since the old boy’s club sat down and told us what
was worthwhile. Our day-to-day lives, our technology, our understanding of people outside
of our own limited worldviews has changed, and with that, so to have the types of voices
that now get published.
This is the Great American Read. And while it’s not to say that Moby Dick or Les Miserables
or War and Peace don’t contain universal truths or are not worth the time to visit.
It is also to say that we are a diverse country filled with much more diverse literature than
you were encouraged to read in high school.
So I posit that what is “important” is less what history tells you it is, but what
inspires you want to keep reading in the first place.
So go on, and READ. Lose yourself in something that speaks to you--whether it’s towards
your innate curiosity about a subject, to your sense of fun that just wants something
to go with a beach chair and a red cup of sangria, or just because, hey, it’s got
robots. And robots are okay.
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