Mild controversy erupted on Twitter early this month after Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg released a list of his ten favorite books. To me, the list felt a little like Buttigieg had gazed into my mind and selected the books that he knew would appeal specifically to me—there was Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (which I’ve mentioned on this blog twice before), Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk (which I also recently wrote about), Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and even Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red. To many on Twitter, though, the list reflected Buttigieg’s out-of-touch elitism, specifically because his number one book was Ulysses, a novel many disparaged as being long and overly difficult and which now functions more as a way to virtue-signal intelligence than as a book one can genuinely like.
As a writer, I found the backlash against Ulysses troubling, to put it mildly. I’d read the book only once, about five years ago, and I found it a difficult but ultimately rewarding experience and was in fact genuinely moved by the penultimate chapter, in which Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus go outside to piss and stare up at the stars and reflect on their place in the cosmos. Had our miserable contemporary culture reached such a level of anti-intellectualism that having read and liked Ulysses was now a reason for scorn? Even The New Yorker belatedly jumped into the pile-on, declaring in a recent article that “in the current political environment, name-checking the writing of James Joyce… [is] a dog whistle, meant to appeal to refined impulses,” or that, more succinctly, “Joyce is a snob whistle.” The controversy reminded me of a more distant Twitter dispute, a thread that began as a way to express controversial literary opinions that very quickly devolved into people bashing canonical authors and trying to argue that the whole idea of literary taste is inherently elitist.
In the face of such aggressive criticism, I felt suddenly like a reactionary, trying vainly to argue that, no, there was in fact such a thing as literary quality, and that certain books were part of the canon because they actually deserved to be there. I can understand, of course, the importance of criticizing a certain kind of literary canon, especially as a writer of color, and in particular the very conservative canon articulated by scholars like Harold Bloom (the “Western Canon” he calls it, a formulation which I think very obviously betrays his Eurocentric ideological project). But maybe the problem here isn’t the canon itself but simply the fact that scholars like Bloom use it to reinforce a flawed idea of “Western” civilization. Maybe the problem isn’t that there’s a “canon” but that there’s a “Western canon.”
This is the point in the essay in which a writer would describe the origin of the word canon and historicize the concept more generally, but I’m just going to quote from Arthur Krystal’s 2016 essay collection This Thing We Call Literature, which begins with an essay from Harper’s in which Krystal defines the canon in order to defend it:
The word canon, from the Greek, originally meant ‘measuring stick’ or ‘rule’ and was used by the Church Fathers to differentiate the genuine or canonical books of the Bible from the apocryphal ones….in effect, the canon formalized modern literature as a select body of imaginative writings that could stand up to the Greek and Latin texts. Although exclusionary by nature, it was originally intended to impart a sense of unity; critics hoped that a tradition of great writers would help create a national literature. What was the apotheosis of Shakespeare and Milton if not an attempt to show the world that England and not France, especially not France, had produced such geniuses? The canon anointed the worthy, and by implication, the unworthy, functioning as a set of commandments that saved people the trouble of deciding what to read.
Now, in general, I didn’t actually like much of Krystal’s book. To me, he came across as conservative and frustratingly old-fashioned, breezily dismissing genre fiction and holding up as examples mostly white male authors and lamenting in vague terms that literature today just wasn’t as good as it once used to be, before inevitably blaming postmodernism for this decline (or the “antinomian forces,” as he anoints them, the “mixed bag of politicized professors and theory happy revisionists—feminists, ethicists, Marxists, semioticians, deconstructionsts, New Historicists, and cultural materialists of the late 1970s and ‘80s.”). Overall, Krystal’s argument came across as a more intellectual version of Bret Easton Ellis complaining about millennials not reading, and his defense of literature, noble as it might be, fell flat in the face of his unwillingness to recognize that postmodern scholars like Foucault and Derrida had a point with their critiques and that even after them, people have continued to write interesting novels.
Still, I felt there was a fundamental truth in the way Krystal sought to define literature: unabashedly and unhesitatingly, he argued that there is in fact a distinction between good and bad books. “This is something that seems to have gotten lost in the canon brawl,” he argues, “i.e., the distinction between a list of Great Books and the idea that some books are far better than others.” Or, to put it another way:
…one may regard the canon as a convenient fiction, shaped in part by the material conditions under which writing is produced and consumed, while simultaneously recognizing the validity of hierarchical thinking and aesthetic criteria. Writers may not be able to ‘escape from contingency,’ as the New Historicists used to say, but those sensitive to their respective prisons can transform the walls that confine them—a transformation that requires an awareness of the great poets and novelists who preceded them. Influence can be both confining and freeing.
This, ultimately, this emphasis on influence, is the best argument for the need for a literary canon. After all, as writers, how can we expect to learn how to write and to improve our own writing if we don’t first accept that there is a distinction between good and bad books? And making that distinction inevitably means we are creating a canon—elevating certain books above others for their literary merit, however we define that. More broadly, I think tradition is necessary even for the most experimental and avant-garde. After all, you need to know what you’re rebelling against in order for your rebellion to have any meaning.
The other thing about the canon is that ultimately, most writers recognize that there is such a thing as great literature, the kind of books we’re all striving to write—books like Ulysses, honestly, or some of the others on Buttigieg’s list. The first essay in Krystal’s book ends with his articulation of what great literature is meant to do, and I think it perfectly captures what makes some books better than others: “That’s what literature is—isn’t it?—a record of one human being’s sojourn on earth, proffered in verse or prose that artfully weaves together a knowledge of the past with a heightened awareness of the present in ever new verbal configurations.” Some books ultimately do this better than others, and it’s not wrong for us to recognize them when they do.