I think all you can do as a critic or a reader, is honestly express how a book made you feel, maybe try to explain that feeling, and share the feeling and explanation with other readers. Out of everyone doing that, over time, consensus sometimes emerges.
I see a lack of confidence today, where everyone kind of wants to say, "Oh well I liked it, but that's just my taste, everyone has their taste, who can really say if it will last?" I find this boring. I'd rather have people share passionately when books moved them, and try to get others to read those books, to share that feeling.
Relativism seems to be the go-to thing these days, but I often think it's just an excuse to avoid conflict. I worry that if people don't clearly and confidently share their opinions, accepting that conflict may result, we will end up atomized, without any shared texts, unable to communicate.
It is common to see people claim Sappho survives only in fragments because Christians suppressed her writings for her deviant sexuality. But the real reason is that she wrote in the Aeolic dialect of Ancient Greek, while Byzantine scribes and scholars were mostly interested only in the Attic (Athenian) dialect of Ancient Greek, which they didn't speak anymore but was kept as the prestige dialect, like Latin in the west.
The more you focus on taste, the more abstract it becomes. I think this is because, first of all taste is rhizomatic, not hierarchical. The world of literature is so vast, that it would be impossible to compare the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and the Great Gatsby on something as vague as taste. Reading Mark Fisher’s essay on the weird and the eerie opened up the work of Philip K. Dick and Christopher Priest for me. Reading Robert Southern’s the Making of the Middle Ages lead me to find other medievalists in Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages, which lead me to read one of his ideological successors, Caroline Walker Bynum, on medieval Christian materiality. The more you read, the more the connections will form a network around you. I also think that taste is downstream of thought. Your could call David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet mystery novels, but he differs from any number of other mystery authors by his focus on the way corruption transcends individuals and takes root in a certain landscape, almost like a virus of evil that infects people decades apart. He renders his ideas in hypnotic, poetic cadences. Even if David Peace never becomes a “canonical” author, and is forgotten to time, this really wouldn’t affect the quality with which he explores his themes within his novels.
I agree. I don't think there is a master criterion like "richness" which actually stands up over all great books. I think there are a variety of ways for a book to be Great.
This really made me think of the phenomenon in classical music in which the works of certain composers haven't really become popular until several decades after their deaths. Gustav Mahler is the canonical example: by no means obscure during his life, but contemporary critics were frequently baffled by his music, and when he died it seemed likely his music would die with him. But there was a generation of younger conductors and musicians who kept pushing for his symphonies to appear in concert programs, and now his symphonies are a staple of the so-called standard repertoire. Something similar has happened with Shostakovich in the 50 years since his death.
One way to explain the phenomenon, I think, is that musicians have served as tastemakers who, through sheer enthusiasm, keep pushing certain works until the public gets it. And probably something similar has happened with the truly classic works like Moby Dick, with the tastemaker roles played by the unlikely combination of professional critics and secondary school English teachers?
I think this is a great example of longevity requiring blood. I would love to read a history of these cases in art history, where disciples through promotion ensure the longevity of their admired object.
I do think we broadly agree yeah and I really enjoyed this piece.
Here are two relevant beliefs I hold which I did not discuss quite as much in the piece I wrote.
a) Good taste should be catholic. It is quite possible to honestly not enjoy certain genres, but you should be able to appreciate those genres. Pure preference reading is often presented as good taste but it revealed as preference by the narrowness of what is acceptable. This is the problem with a lot of criticism imo. Critics aren't really able to say what makes the book if they simply dislike the genre. (A lot of highbrow critics of supposedly good taste only like literary fiction, for example, and usually certain sorts of that...)
b) I want to root taste in knowledge because it is therefore flexible, evolving, and not this Kantian inner sense which becomes vague and hieratic. One reason taste becomes more catholic is that as you read more and get older you become more able to see what something is, to properly know it, and therefore to enjoy it. And again, some critics show the mark of having a taste they developed young and which they stick to.
That footnote is hilarious: "If you skip the 'story' chapters and focus on the intricately detailed descriptions of whaling tools and practice, this is a good book." The exact opposite complaint about Moby Dick that I hear today, making it a perfect example of your point.
"For instance, during this Gatsby centenary, nobody posted a Gatsby takedown. Nobody said Gatsby is overrated. Why is that?"
The cringe factor, maybe?
I think The Great Gatsby is wildly overrated. I also think that suggesting it as The Great American Novel amounts to the bankruptcy of American literature. It's an accomplished novel. There are a lot of accomplished novels.
The canon has always been an intensely politicized creature, not only for those works closest to our own day and age but especially for those. So many works are distorted or neglected, for piercingly political reasons, especially by those literary critics (though far from only) who actually believe they are not make political judgments or discriminations.
I think Tamara Pearson's recent novel The Eyes of the Earth is a great novel of the Americas, an important work. It is essentially unknown. Why is that? The reasons are plutocratic and political.
Would-be great American novels, especially as great novels of the people, face such barriers and challenges. Uncle Tom's Cabin needed to be published (serialized) in an activist journal and was an unexpected hit. No establishment publisher - with far more resources and other advantages - would touch it. The situation is roughly similar today in many respects, maybe worse - so why should skilled novelists who value being published and their work made visible attempt their own explicit great "American" novels of, say, today's blood thirsty imperialism, including of their own country, the death march rule of the plutocratic corporate-state and the lethal society that is its handmaiden - sprung from a gruesome and ongoing history of Native genocide and race-based slavery and imprisonment? Now that could deservedly be a great American novel.
While the situation is not monolithic, it is extraordinarily highly politicized right across the establishment spectrum (as I write about in detail and at length). The canon and thoughts on the canon are infected by this.
And thus, the canon is devasted in conception and inception, and in editing and publishing, let alone in potential and eventual appraisal.
The Great Gatsby skated right through all this, being written by an elite white author, about elite white interests and concerns, and then being eventually vaunted by elite intellectual handmaidens to Empire. So touching. So thoughtful. And containing very limited elite criticisms and longings.
I mean, come on. We live in increasingly populist times. People are sick of the white-gloved and thin, glancing and indirect, or lively but weak criticisms and views and dramatizations of the miserable and undeniably murderous state of society that the rise of people's media makes increasingly visible and felt to all.
These highly politicized canon-mangling political limits also greatly disfigure creation, production, and reviews of movies and TV shows - and the whole culture industry. The novel is very far from from being special in this regard or outside of these massive disfigurements, constraints, and wholesale eviscerations.
Time to put Gatsby back up there high on its decorative shelf and seek out and gut out far more, a good bit closer to the ground, in this blood-soaked and potentially terminal novel day of our lives.
The novel, it's an art. It takes some craft. And a lot more of value besides. Including more than is conventionally esteemed - or even readily understood or admitted in a historically supremacist and imperial country and culture. The multicultural and class expansion has been a partial testament to some good change in American lit, despite continual backsliding. As for revolutionary expansion and change in lit, badly needed, or even progressive populist change, not nearly enough. To the point where the whole scene, whether elite or imitation elite, can discredit the enterprise of literacy, let alone of advanced literacy.
Gatsby is not even the most lively, valuable, or artistic American novel written within 5 years of its male-dominated time, let alone of all time, not when compared variously to McKay's Banjo and Home to Harlem, and Gold's Jews Without Money, and other contenders. These less decorous novels don't fit quite so easily into the elevated sensibilities of what would do and not do to say in high culture.
This is a beautiful piece, and I don't want to think I'm just adopting your position entirely so much as you found the words for an argument that I thought was supposed to be kinda squishy and irresolvable/undefined.
Quick aside, though: I notice you've got a Norton Critical Edition in your photo for the article--I've been buying them up, over the past three or four years, as I take an autodidact shot at some stuff. I've found them kind of indispensable for the near-ancient classics (New Testament, Shakespeare...) but kind of underwhelming with semi-modern stuff (Frankenstein, Gatsby...). Any general thoughts about them?
I think it's a bit of an error to equate "taste" with "will still be read in 100 years." There just aren't enough slots in people's personal or educational curriculum for more than, I don't know, 1-3 books of a given decade? Especially if we aren't expecting much to get kicked off the current canon. Time is too precious a resource there, but that doesn't make the rest of our current books, the ones that don't make the historical cut, inherently less tasteful.
In other words, the ability to have good taste, to be able to recognize what is good, is distinct from the ability to accurately predict what will still be read in 100 years. The latter is likely impossible, just statistically.
I think the former is possible, but of course there's going to be far greater variation in which contemporary works individuals deem "good taste," because the winnowing process hasn't happened yet.
I've always wondered why colleges don't offer classes on books that didn't make the canon. My library is filled with inherited books from authors I've never heard of. I'm sure they were popular and, knowing my family, I'm sure they were well regarded as proper literature. And yet they've disappeared. I think classes discussing why something, a book, a musical piece, a painting, is inferior to one that's accepted into the canon of great works. That sort of exercise would really crystallize a lot of the points you're making here.
I think that many classes offer such things in effect, even if they aren't billed as such. Any class about 17th century poetry ends up recommending Milton. Any class on Milton ends up recommending Paradise Lost. The same with a class on the 19th century novel and Eliot. Or a class on Eliot and Middlemarch. Zoom in at all and you will see why the most canonical works of a period endured.
My favorite quote regarding what makes a "great" / lasting book-
"There are, indeed, few kinds of composition from which an author, however learned or ingenious, can hope a long continuance of fame. He who has carefully studied human nature, and can well describe it, may with most reason flatter his ambition”. – Samuel Johnson Essay, 23 March, 1751
I enjoyed every part of this essay and agree with essentially all of it — but the point that landed most squarely in the centre of my being was one you made at the top of it:
"I believe that taste is real, but I acknowledge that taste is quite difficult to defend against skeptical inquiry."
You've given me the precise words to articulate an idea I required far too many sentences punctuated with "um... ah..." and "y'know" and "maybe, I think possibly that perhaps..." And this dissonance between what's believed and what can be logically graphed out extends beyond literary taste. As I get older, I find that more of the things most vital to my sense of being human — love, family, the soul, ideals and values — I feel deeply, but make me blush to defend intellectually.
Your line about how Gatsby has survived in part because it is a good novel to teach in high school literature classes made me wonder about the history of high school reading lists. Someone should write this dissertation.
I posted a Gatsby microprose pastiche on Substack. Your Gatsby Centennial pastiche was linked in the preface. This is a fact--- unless you disagree, or you didn't notice, in which case I'm lying, wasting space in comments, and should have the courtesy to vanish. You've much bigger fried fish to opine about. After all, it's a republic of letters---not some twee Podunk democracy.
On your point about Chaucer and people having to pay quite a lot to have the manuscript copied out - I read, in my Norton Chaucer that books at that time were very expensive: 'Though modern estimates of late medieval book prices fluctuate wildly, there seems to be a consensus that buying a book in late medieval England would have been a considerable investment, comparable to buying a car today.' I just found this a fascinating insight into the act of reading pre printing press. Sorry - a bit off topic.
Nice piece, liked reading it. One reason I trust your pieces is because I see you asking questions on Substack like "We still like X, yeah?" Or "What's the consensus on Poe?" and don't use these to decide your opinion but rather to listen to 'the people' and stay in touch with them, rather than pronouncing judgment from a high throne. I've found that I trust the taste of people whose process is transparent, and it's worked so far.
Also, I grew up with the Mahabharata as one of the basis texts of my moral education - not the original, but abridged versions of it, anecdotes, ideas from it, etc. so that it's always been around like background noise - while I was also familiar with Western culture. So it's interesting to see how the Mahabharata comes across as something fundamentally alien in some sense to a reader not familiar with it.
I think all you can do as a critic or a reader, is honestly express how a book made you feel, maybe try to explain that feeling, and share the feeling and explanation with other readers. Out of everyone doing that, over time, consensus sometimes emerges.
I see a lack of confidence today, where everyone kind of wants to say, "Oh well I liked it, but that's just my taste, everyone has their taste, who can really say if it will last?" I find this boring. I'd rather have people share passionately when books moved them, and try to get others to read those books, to share that feeling.
Relativism seems to be the go-to thing these days, but I often think it's just an excuse to avoid conflict. I worry that if people don't clearly and confidently share their opinions, accepting that conflict may result, we will end up atomized, without any shared texts, unable to communicate.
It is common to see people claim Sappho survives only in fragments because Christians suppressed her writings for her deviant sexuality. But the real reason is that she wrote in the Aeolic dialect of Ancient Greek, while Byzantine scribes and scholars were mostly interested only in the Attic (Athenian) dialect of Ancient Greek, which they didn't speak anymore but was kept as the prestige dialect, like Latin in the west.
I love this fact.
The more you focus on taste, the more abstract it becomes. I think this is because, first of all taste is rhizomatic, not hierarchical. The world of literature is so vast, that it would be impossible to compare the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and the Great Gatsby on something as vague as taste. Reading Mark Fisher’s essay on the weird and the eerie opened up the work of Philip K. Dick and Christopher Priest for me. Reading Robert Southern’s the Making of the Middle Ages lead me to find other medievalists in Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages, which lead me to read one of his ideological successors, Caroline Walker Bynum, on medieval Christian materiality. The more you read, the more the connections will form a network around you. I also think that taste is downstream of thought. Your could call David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet mystery novels, but he differs from any number of other mystery authors by his focus on the way corruption transcends individuals and takes root in a certain landscape, almost like a virus of evil that infects people decades apart. He renders his ideas in hypnotic, poetic cadences. Even if David Peace never becomes a “canonical” author, and is forgotten to time, this really wouldn’t affect the quality with which he explores his themes within his novels.
I agree. I don't think there is a master criterion like "richness" which actually stands up over all great books. I think there are a variety of ways for a book to be Great.
This really made me think of the phenomenon in classical music in which the works of certain composers haven't really become popular until several decades after their deaths. Gustav Mahler is the canonical example: by no means obscure during his life, but contemporary critics were frequently baffled by his music, and when he died it seemed likely his music would die with him. But there was a generation of younger conductors and musicians who kept pushing for his symphonies to appear in concert programs, and now his symphonies are a staple of the so-called standard repertoire. Something similar has happened with Shostakovich in the 50 years since his death.
One way to explain the phenomenon, I think, is that musicians have served as tastemakers who, through sheer enthusiasm, keep pushing certain works until the public gets it. And probably something similar has happened with the truly classic works like Moby Dick, with the tastemaker roles played by the unlikely combination of professional critics and secondary school English teachers?
I think this is a great example of longevity requiring blood. I would love to read a history of these cases in art history, where disciples through promotion ensure the longevity of their admired object.
I do think we broadly agree yeah and I really enjoyed this piece.
Here are two relevant beliefs I hold which I did not discuss quite as much in the piece I wrote.
a) Good taste should be catholic. It is quite possible to honestly not enjoy certain genres, but you should be able to appreciate those genres. Pure preference reading is often presented as good taste but it revealed as preference by the narrowness of what is acceptable. This is the problem with a lot of criticism imo. Critics aren't really able to say what makes the book if they simply dislike the genre. (A lot of highbrow critics of supposedly good taste only like literary fiction, for example, and usually certain sorts of that...)
b) I want to root taste in knowledge because it is therefore flexible, evolving, and not this Kantian inner sense which becomes vague and hieratic. One reason taste becomes more catholic is that as you read more and get older you become more able to see what something is, to properly know it, and therefore to enjoy it. And again, some critics show the mark of having a taste they developed young and which they stick to.
That footnote is hilarious: "If you skip the 'story' chapters and focus on the intricately detailed descriptions of whaling tools and practice, this is a good book." The exact opposite complaint about Moby Dick that I hear today, making it a perfect example of your point.
Yeah, that's what people liked back then! They just wanted to know about whales and whaling. It was a strange, fascinating world to them.
"For instance, during this Gatsby centenary, nobody posted a Gatsby takedown. Nobody said Gatsby is overrated. Why is that?"
The cringe factor, maybe?
I think The Great Gatsby is wildly overrated. I also think that suggesting it as The Great American Novel amounts to the bankruptcy of American literature. It's an accomplished novel. There are a lot of accomplished novels.
The canon has always been an intensely politicized creature, not only for those works closest to our own day and age but especially for those. So many works are distorted or neglected, for piercingly political reasons, especially by those literary critics (though far from only) who actually believe they are not make political judgments or discriminations.
I think Tamara Pearson's recent novel The Eyes of the Earth is a great novel of the Americas, an important work. It is essentially unknown. Why is that? The reasons are plutocratic and political.
Would-be great American novels, especially as great novels of the people, face such barriers and challenges. Uncle Tom's Cabin needed to be published (serialized) in an activist journal and was an unexpected hit. No establishment publisher - with far more resources and other advantages - would touch it. The situation is roughly similar today in many respects, maybe worse - so why should skilled novelists who value being published and their work made visible attempt their own explicit great "American" novels of, say, today's blood thirsty imperialism, including of their own country, the death march rule of the plutocratic corporate-state and the lethal society that is its handmaiden - sprung from a gruesome and ongoing history of Native genocide and race-based slavery and imprisonment? Now that could deservedly be a great American novel.
While the situation is not monolithic, it is extraordinarily highly politicized right across the establishment spectrum (as I write about in detail and at length). The canon and thoughts on the canon are infected by this.
And thus, the canon is devasted in conception and inception, and in editing and publishing, let alone in potential and eventual appraisal.
The Great Gatsby skated right through all this, being written by an elite white author, about elite white interests and concerns, and then being eventually vaunted by elite intellectual handmaidens to Empire. So touching. So thoughtful. And containing very limited elite criticisms and longings.
I mean, come on. We live in increasingly populist times. People are sick of the white-gloved and thin, glancing and indirect, or lively but weak criticisms and views and dramatizations of the miserable and undeniably murderous state of society that the rise of people's media makes increasingly visible and felt to all.
These highly politicized canon-mangling political limits also greatly disfigure creation, production, and reviews of movies and TV shows - and the whole culture industry. The novel is very far from from being special in this regard or outside of these massive disfigurements, constraints, and wholesale eviscerations.
Time to put Gatsby back up there high on its decorative shelf and seek out and gut out far more, a good bit closer to the ground, in this blood-soaked and potentially terminal novel day of our lives.
The novel, it's an art. It takes some craft. And a lot more of value besides. Including more than is conventionally esteemed - or even readily understood or admitted in a historically supremacist and imperial country and culture. The multicultural and class expansion has been a partial testament to some good change in American lit, despite continual backsliding. As for revolutionary expansion and change in lit, badly needed, or even progressive populist change, not nearly enough. To the point where the whole scene, whether elite or imitation elite, can discredit the enterprise of literacy, let alone of advanced literacy.
Gatsby is not even the most lively, valuable, or artistic American novel written within 5 years of its male-dominated time, let alone of all time, not when compared variously to McKay's Banjo and Home to Harlem, and Gold's Jews Without Money, and other contenders. These less decorous novels don't fit quite so easily into the elevated sensibilities of what would do and not do to say in high culture.
But that's an essay for another comment!
This is a beautiful piece, and I don't want to think I'm just adopting your position entirely so much as you found the words for an argument that I thought was supposed to be kinda squishy and irresolvable/undefined.
Quick aside, though: I notice you've got a Norton Critical Edition in your photo for the article--I've been buying them up, over the past three or four years, as I take an autodidact shot at some stuff. I've found them kind of indispensable for the near-ancient classics (New Testament, Shakespeare...) but kind of underwhelming with semi-modern stuff (Frankenstein, Gatsby...). Any general thoughts about them?
I think it's a bit of an error to equate "taste" with "will still be read in 100 years." There just aren't enough slots in people's personal or educational curriculum for more than, I don't know, 1-3 books of a given decade? Especially if we aren't expecting much to get kicked off the current canon. Time is too precious a resource there, but that doesn't make the rest of our current books, the ones that don't make the historical cut, inherently less tasteful.
In other words, the ability to have good taste, to be able to recognize what is good, is distinct from the ability to accurately predict what will still be read in 100 years. The latter is likely impossible, just statistically.
I think the former is possible, but of course there's going to be far greater variation in which contemporary works individuals deem "good taste," because the winnowing process hasn't happened yet.
I've always wondered why colleges don't offer classes on books that didn't make the canon. My library is filled with inherited books from authors I've never heard of. I'm sure they were popular and, knowing my family, I'm sure they were well regarded as proper literature. And yet they've disappeared. I think classes discussing why something, a book, a musical piece, a painting, is inferior to one that's accepted into the canon of great works. That sort of exercise would really crystallize a lot of the points you're making here.
I think that many classes offer such things in effect, even if they aren't billed as such. Any class about 17th century poetry ends up recommending Milton. Any class on Milton ends up recommending Paradise Lost. The same with a class on the 19th century novel and Eliot. Or a class on Eliot and Middlemarch. Zoom in at all and you will see why the most canonical works of a period endured.
My favorite quote regarding what makes a "great" / lasting book-
"There are, indeed, few kinds of composition from which an author, however learned or ingenious, can hope a long continuance of fame. He who has carefully studied human nature, and can well describe it, may with most reason flatter his ambition”. – Samuel Johnson Essay, 23 March, 1751
I enjoyed every part of this essay and agree with essentially all of it — but the point that landed most squarely in the centre of my being was one you made at the top of it:
"I believe that taste is real, but I acknowledge that taste is quite difficult to defend against skeptical inquiry."
You've given me the precise words to articulate an idea I required far too many sentences punctuated with "um... ah..." and "y'know" and "maybe, I think possibly that perhaps..." And this dissonance between what's believed and what can be logically graphed out extends beyond literary taste. As I get older, I find that more of the things most vital to my sense of being human — love, family, the soul, ideals and values — I feel deeply, but make me blush to defend intellectually.
Your line about how Gatsby has survived in part because it is a good novel to teach in high school literature classes made me wonder about the history of high school reading lists. Someone should write this dissertation.
I posted a Gatsby microprose pastiche on Substack. Your Gatsby Centennial pastiche was linked in the preface. This is a fact--- unless you disagree, or you didn't notice, in which case I'm lying, wasting space in comments, and should have the courtesy to vanish. You've much bigger fried fish to opine about. After all, it's a republic of letters---not some twee Podunk democracy.
On your point about Chaucer and people having to pay quite a lot to have the manuscript copied out - I read, in my Norton Chaucer that books at that time were very expensive: 'Though modern estimates of late medieval book prices fluctuate wildly, there seems to be a consensus that buying a book in late medieval England would have been a considerable investment, comparable to buying a car today.' I just found this a fascinating insight into the act of reading pre printing press. Sorry - a bit off topic.
Nice piece, liked reading it. One reason I trust your pieces is because I see you asking questions on Substack like "We still like X, yeah?" Or "What's the consensus on Poe?" and don't use these to decide your opinion but rather to listen to 'the people' and stay in touch with them, rather than pronouncing judgment from a high throne. I've found that I trust the taste of people whose process is transparent, and it's worked so far.
Also, I grew up with the Mahabharata as one of the basis texts of my moral education - not the original, but abridged versions of it, anecdotes, ideas from it, etc. so that it's always been around like background noise - while I was also familiar with Western culture. So it's interesting to see how the Mahabharata comes across as something fundamentally alien in some sense to a reader not familiar with it.