Taste doesn't matter

In the last year, two articles about taste have circulated widely in my corner Substack.

Henry Oliver

’s “How to have good taste” is a defense of the objectivity of taste, while Scott Alexander’s “Friendly and hostile analogies for taste” is, mostly, an attack on the objectivity of taste.

Personally, I find myself agreeing with both writers. I believe that the preeminence of the Great Books is grounded by the inherent superiority of these texts over other texts. And, at the same time, I think this superiority would be difficult to demonstrate in any intellectually-satisfying way. I believe that taste is real, but I acknowledge that taste is quite difficult to defend against skeptical inquiry.

For instance, let’s say literature consists of those books that possess ‘literary quality’. We can’t quite define ‘literary quality’, but it’s something that a person with ‘taste’ is able to recognize.

This is an idea that I certainly believe to be true. When I look at the Great Books I perceive that they all have a certain complexity and intellectual integrity that’s missing from other books.

But a natural corollary of this idea is that people with ‘taste’ should also be good at perceiving ‘literary quality’ in contemporary literature.

And our society certainly has a group of people—literary critics—who claim to have good taste and claim to be able to recognize literary quality in contemporary books.

But, generally speaking, these people do a bad job. We just had the Gatsby centenary. There’s an example. This book was not particularly well-reviewed when it came out.¹ Few critics would’ve picked F. Scott Fitzgerald, at the time, as the author that could arouse a centenary celebration in a hundred years.

But literary critics’ biggest problem isn’t the false negative (criticizing a book that turns out to be great), it’s the opposite, the false positive. Critics tend to praise too many books that don’t last. Catherine Lacey had a great post about this recently, where she opened an anthology of the hottest young writers in 1967, and almost none of the names were familiar. The same is true when we look at awards lists: if you go back even thirty years, almost all the names are unfamiliar. None of these books lasted. None of these authors lasted.

This really calls into question the existence of taste as an independent capacity. Because if it exists, then it is extremely noisy and error-prone when it’s applied to contemporary literature. Someone with ‘good’ taste is only right a very small percentage of the time when they say a contemporary work is truly great and is likely to last.

And yet…this noisiness disappears when the ‘tasteful’ person applies their sensors to the great works of the past. For instance, during this Gatsby centenary, nobody posted a Gatsby takedown. Nobody said Gatsby is overrated. Why is that? Back when Gatsby came out, plenty of literary critics thought it was nothing special. Now, one hundred years later, literary critics unanimously agree that it is special. But does that really make sense? Why is the critic’s taste suddenly more accurate when it’s applied to works from the past?

The obvious answer is that taste is defined by the ability to appreciate these old books. You can dislike a few old books—everyone has a few they don’t like—but you only get a few. If you dislike too many, then your taste gets called into question.

And yet…we know that these old books did not get universal acclaim when they came out! How can we reconcile this problem? Are our modern critics better than the critics of the past? Or are our modern critics lying about liking books from the past?

That’s why I find the idea of taste to be somewhat insubstantial. It exists. I think great literature tends to possess certain virtues, and that taste is the ability to appreciate these virtues. But…we also appreciate a lot of other things. And literature can confer many pleasures that aren’t embodied by taste. Sometimes we enjoy a book just because we’re interested in the topic, or because it’s written by a friend, or because it confirms our prejudices. And it’s very hard to separate this kind of enjoyment from the enjoyment of its underlying literary quality.

Moreover, the way our society articulates ‘higher’ literary quality also changes. For instance, I’ve been reading all these sentimental novels, and I don’t think it’s bad to evoke strong, overpowering emotions. During the Romantic era, a book that evoked strong feelings would’ve been considered great literature. But nowadays, our literary culture prioritizes the beautiful over the sublime. As a result, when we read a book like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we might categorize the effect as powerful, but essentially non-literary. However, another culture could feel very differently. The book is the same. The effect is the same. What changes is whether we articulate that effect as being valuable.

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The Great Books can survive the death of taste

But what I love about classic literature is that we don’t really need the concept of taste to make it work. Because literature just exists. It consists of those books from the past that we still read. We don’t necessarily need to define why we read these books instead of other books. All we need is to trust that these books survived for a reason and to try and perceive that reason. Literature requires appreciation, not discrimination.

This is essentially what Oliver says in his post. Which is…you should not falsify your taste: literature only works if you genuinely enjoy it. But…you should try to genuinely enjoy things that are old and that have been held up as great literature.

It’s an argument from trust. It’s asking people to trust in the historical processes that preserved older books as objects that are worthy of our attention.

And in many cases, it is awe-inspiring that these books exist at all. Look at The Canterbury Tales. Where did this book even come from? Chaucer was a court poet—he was a part of the Queen's household, married to one of her ladies-in-waiting, and his dream-visions were popular with the aristocracy. But...The Canterbury Tales are quite different from those dream-visions. We do not actually know why and how the Canterbury Tales came into existence. It was probably circulated privately in manuscript form. Anyone who wanted a copy needed to pay to have it copied—something that must've been extremely expensive. It probably exists, first and foremost, because people read it for pleasure.

Every generation has rediscovered The Canterbury Tales and used it in different ways. Some generations viewed it as a work of literature—something that embodied the highest literary virtues. Others thought it was a work of entertainment. But however they conceptualized their enjoyment of this work, what matters is that they cared enough to preserve the work and pass it on to the following generations.

That, to me, is what underpins the Great Books. They didn’t survive because they were higher or better than other books. They survived because people cared enough to preserve them. In some cases these people articulated their motives as ‘preserving the best in literature’. In other cases, they articulated those motives differently. Many Great Books were preserved for non-literary reasons. For instance, the pieces of the Bible or the Mahabharata were preserved because they were old. Because they constituted some kind of inheritance from the past. Homer was preserved as a way of teaching people how to write Greek. The Great Gatsby has been preserved because it’s got these heavy, obvious symbols that make it easy to teach in school.

And when we read these books today, the aim is often aesthetic enjoyment, but there’s also other reasons to read them. I personally really like the rhythms of Middle English, and the way it defamiliarizes my birth-tongue. I just like feeling closer to my ancestors. Chaucer and Boccaccio in particular seem to portray a society that’s very recognizable, very similar, in terms of hopes and dreams and ambitions, to our own. They portray a bourgeois society that looks quite different from the society in heroic romances. That living connection to the past is a major part of why I read the Great Books.

In other cases, I want to be connected to an alien worldview. The Mahabharata is so startling because it’s a fully-realized world that is fully self-contained and makes no reference to the West. At one point, as I wrote earlier, it turns into something that’s halfway between theology and secular philosophy, but those two concepts really are meaningless when it comes to the Mahabharata, because the epistemology of this Vedic worldview is quite different—knowledge, in the world of the Mahabharata, comes both from sacred texts and from delving into your own adhyatma, your transcendental self—if this sounds similar to Schopenhauer’s concept of the Will, that’s because he got the idea from Hinduism.

And it’s quite hard to subsume all these reasons for reading classic literature under the heading of ‘taste’. Yes, it’s possible to make the case that there is an integrity that underpins The Mahabharata, The Iliad, The Great Gatsby, and The Canterbury Tales. I certainly believe this to be true! But…to try and articulate the nature of the similarity between these works would be difficult. And ultimately it would be a just-so story. We believe, intuitively, that because these books are old, and they have survived, and they tend to be enjoyed by the same community of old-book-enjoyers, that they must be inherently similar in some way. But…I don’t know if that’s something that can really be demonstrated.

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Literature is not under threat

I, personally, am not worried about the fate of literature. The Iliad, The Canterbury Tales, and The Mahabharata have endured, and they will continue to endure. If mankind goes to the stars, these books will go along with them. If robots supersede us, then these robots will read The Mahabharata. As human history stretches forward, then artifacts from the beginning of history will have a corresponding increase in value. Just like you can't make new childhood friends, you can't make new pre-modern books.

Personally, I do not think it’s useful for literary critics to guess which novels will still be read in 200 years. We all do it, we can’t help doing it. But a book is preserved by blood. It is preserved because people devote their life-force to perpetuating knowledge of a given book. And it’s impossible to tell if, in fifty or a hundred years, people will choose to devote their life-force to one book or another.

The literary critic’s job is to say whether a given book is worth reading right now, at this moment. And when it comes to that job, literary quality is only part of the picture. I think a literary critic just needs to be honest and to describe the experience of reading a given book.

Many critics are in the business of defending highbrow literary fiction, and they articulate the value of this fiction in very austere terms. It puts you in touch with some abstract, universal beauty. They’re always talking about Kant. They love that Kantian ideal, where contemplation of beauty puts you in touch with the thing-in-itself, the world of objects that underlies the world of appearances.

And I agree that this disembodied, aesthetic appreciation is real. But…I mostly get it from older books, older music, and older paintings. In the case of classical music, there’s no determinate content to distract you—it’s just relationships between sounds. In the case of older paintings, I have trust that this painting is actually good, and I can sit and stare and pay attention to it long enough that the determinate content falls away. In the case of older books, oftentimes the form is sufficiently alien—as with the Mahabharata—that the book isn’t traditionally enjoyable in the manner I’m accustomed to, so I’m forced to notice its deeper symmetry, deeper harmony.

Contemporary highbrow literature, in contrast, does not put me in touch with the music of the spheres, because the trust isn’t there. I don’t believe, with many of these books, that there is anything underneath that makes the book worth reading.

And, to me, the concept of taste really exists to prop up contemporary highbrow fiction. It feels like a lot of people have studied older books and claim to enjoy them, and they use that authority to anoint a bunch of newer books as being the heirs to those older books. But…I question whether that premature successorship is really meaningful or even possible. Certainly, the failure rate of people who have, in the past, attempted to conduct such an anointing seems to be very high.

Meanwhile, if someone just says, “Hey, this is a good, enjoyable book. I liked reading this book. It entertained me,” then that recommendation tends to be much more useful to me. For all the shitting on popular books, I find it much easier to see the good in a popular book than I do in a book that’s merely critically-acclaimed. With a popular book, I can almost always derive some enjoyment from it. With a critically-acclaimed book, I usually can’t see what’s supposed to be good.

With an older book, I can almost always see what’s good. But that’s also because I try harder. I trust more in the process that gives me older books.

And yet that trust is hard-won. It’s underpinned by the fact that when I was twenty-three, reading Tolstoy for the first time, my mind was blown. When I started out reading all these contemporary much-hyped literary releases, I approached them with the same trust, but too often my mind was not blown, and I found them to be rather mediocre. As a result, my belief in older books was strengthened, while my belief in newer books was weakened.

I do not hold myself up as a person with superior taste. Rather the opposite, I generally enjoy whatever it is that most people enjoy. That’s how you know you can trust me! Something like the Bible or Middlemarch—these are books most people can enjoy. Other authors, like Proust or Chaucer or Lady Murasaki, are more difficult, but they just require more patience and trust. Many people don’t have that trust, but if they did, they would probably enjoy these books.

Now there’s a whole other question which is…why expend the energy? If a book is hard to read, why read it?

But with older books, I tend to think the answer is self-evident. We read these books because they have power. Because they have endured. If you want to make contact with the wisdom of the past, then you read these books.

I don't think Henry Oliver would disagree with that. Reading his article, I can tell that the reasons he and I read these older books are the same. That our understanding of what books are and what they mean—it’s the same. But we articulate that conception in somewhat-different ways.

In my case, I mostly just hate highbrow literary culture so much that I feel compelled to attack this word, taste, that is so heavily associated with its pretensions. There is a certain kind of reader for whom the idea of taste is attractive—it’s a lodestar, drawing you to the great books. For another kind, like me, the idea is a bit repulsive. But both readers will find what they’re looking for in the Great Books.

Afterword

I recently made an index to my Substack posts. And this inspired me to try and articulate some of my literary preoccupations. And one of those preoccupations is that I am very resistant to according any place of privilege to contemporary highbrow literature. During my life, publishers like FSG and Knopf and Riverhead have cloaked themselves in a lot of rhetoric about their aims and the quality of their books, but I don’t think the novels put out by these publishers necessarily deserve to be regarded as ‘potential Great Books’.

Contemporary highbrow literature is just an epiphenomenon—it exists because at some point our culture decided to elevate Jane Austen and George Eliot and Charles Dickens to the high literary place that was once occupied by the Greek and Latin classics. And that unseating of the Greek and Latin classics created vast energies that contemporary writers sought to harness for their own gain.

But we’ve reached a point where every year hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in an attempt to foster the next great novel, even though the results don’t really seem to bear out the immense expenditure of time, energy, and attention that’s involved. And now all the people who write and market and acquire and extol highbrow literature are upset that their books are being ignored, and, as a coping mechanism, they have developed a theory that equates their own obsolescence with “the death of literature.” But…Jane Austen is fine. George Eliot is fine. Even the novel itself is fine. It’s just a particular kind of highbrow literary novel that’s in trouble, and it’s in trouble because for too many decades it’s been propped up by a lot of untrue rhetoric about the ability of people with ‘taste’ to pick books that would endure.

1. In looking at the initial reception to a classic that was underappreciated in its time, usually you don’t find that it was universally panned. Instead you find a lot of mixed reviews—people saying “This is promising, but…” Here’s an example for Moby Dick, from the New York Albion:

“Not only is there an immense amount of reliable information here before us; the dramatis personae … are all vivid sketches done in the author’s best style. What they do, and how they look, is brought to one’s perception with wondrous elaborateness of detail; and yet this minuteness does not spoil the broad outline of each. It is only when Mr. Melville puts words into the mouths of these living and moving beings, that his cunning fails him, and the illusion passes away … The rarely imagined character [Ahab] has been grievously spoiled, nay altogether ruined, by a vile overdaubing with a coat of book-learning and mysticism; there is no method in his madness; and we must needs pronounce the chief feature of the volume a perfect failure, and the work itself inartistic. There is nevertheless in it, as we have already hinted, abundant choice reading for those who can skip a page now and then, judiciously … Mr. Melville has crowded together in a few prefatory pages a large collection of brief and pithy extracts from authors innumerable, such as one might expect as headings for chapters. We do not like the innovation. It is having oil, mustard, vinegar, and pepper served up as a dish, in place of being scientifically administered sauce-wise.”