"Western civilization" vs. "World literature"

When I got into the Great Books (back in 2010) it went without saying that if you were going to create a canon, it should be an international one. You'd have Aristotle, but also Confucius. The Iliad and The Ramayana, Jane Austen and Lu Xun, Daniel Defoe and Lady Murasaki, etc.

The book that formed my understanding of the Great Books had only recently been expanded (in its fourth and final¹ edition) to include such international works, but from my perspective it would’ve been incomplete without them. And I'm happy this is the book I ran across, because I don't know if I ever would've read, say, Kokoro or Dream of the Red Chamber or The Pillow Book if they hadn't been included on that particular list of Great Books.

Nowadays I'm not certain that the ecumenical outlook is quite so popular. A lot of the heat with relation to the Great Books is coming these days from the Christian right, and they're extremely invested in keeping the canon Western. Jeremy Wayne Tate (whose recommended reading list is pretty racially diverse!) explicitly advocates for excluding non-Western books from his Classical Learning Test (and, by extension, from the curricula of Classical Christian Academies).²

"I think one of the downsides of the multicultural approach is that students get a lot of everything but not any real substance of anything. And I don’t think you can deeply appreciate any culture unless you have some culture to call your own."

As late as 1990, Mortimer Adler, a University of Chicago professor who was the face of the "Great Books" brand, proudly resisted calls to add diversity to his Great Books list. He specifically rejected W.E.B. Du Bois as a potential author that might merit inclusion, and he ventured to opine that blacks had “written no great books.”

And in 1993, when asked about multiculturalism by Studs Terkel, Mortimer Adler said:

I think the multicultural emphasis in the schools of New York, for example, or in Chicago, is wrong. Our culture is Eurocentric. No question about it. And I think the best parts of our country are transcultural. See, the only thing that is multicultural are matters of opinion, matters of taste. Cuisines are multicultural, habits of bowing, habits of dancing, habits of all those customs, but anything that is true, physical science, mathematics and technology were, were at the truth, they're transcultural.

This means that what I call the ecumenical idea, or the world literature idea—the notion that we might actually want and need to learn from other cultures—is actually very recent. In 1999, when the New Lifetime Reading Plan was released, it was obvious that it should include Eastern readings. But in 1989, this was by no means obvious, and it's unclear if it's obvious today or if it will be obvious in 2029.

I don't think the decline of ecumenicism is entirely conservatives' fault. Obviously conservatives will be suspicious of Eastern ideas. They're conservative, it's their job to be suspicious. It's the job of liberals to make the affirmative case that reading the Great Books of other cultures is important. And I don't think many liberals have really made that case. Because you make that case not just by arguing, with words, that Eastern books should be included in other peoples’ lists—you make it by demonstrating, in your own life and your scholarship, that Eastern books have had a deep influence on you, yourself, as a thinker and a writer. You do it by showing everyone you meet, everyone who reads your work, that Eastern books have life-giving potential, even when read by a Western academic.

This was one of the roots of my frustration with a very popular manual on how to run a writing workshop: Craft in the Real World (link is to my extremely excellent review). This is by a Korean-American writer, Matthew Salesses, who makes a lot of claims about how Eastern fiction is inscrutably different and alien, such that white people can't really read / understand it. And his solution isn't for people to, you know, read these books (which he obviously hasn't read himself!)—it's for white people to simply not attempt to analyze or criticize fiction by Asian people.

I think liberals have done a very good job making an affirmative case that non-white Westerners are worth reading: even at Classical Christian Academies, they read Martin Luther King, they read Langston Hughes, they read Toni Morrison. The Black American literary tradition is extremely strong, in a way that's almost beyond question at this point—are you genuinely going to argue that there’s a 20th-century American writer who excels Martin Luther King or Ralph Ellison? But the fact is, all those books are in the Western tradition. When we read Toni Morrison, we are reading a contemporary American literary novel. When we read Ralph Ellison, we are reading a novel in the modernist tradition. There is an Anglo-American conversation that these books slot into.

But the conservative argument against including Eastern literature is different from the argument against including books by Western non-white authors. In the latter case, the argument is that they’re just diversity picks and the quality isn’t there, whereas in the former case, the argument is that the quality might be there, but they’re simply not relevant to life in the West. In other words, Eastern books are part of a different conversation.

And I think that’s a reasonable argument. The New Lifetime Reading Plan treats the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek/Latin/European-vernacular tradition with a lot more completeness than it treats the other five major post-Bronze Age language traditions (Sanskrit, Chinese, Persian, Mayan and Arabic). When it comes to the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek/Latin/European-vernacular tradition (which I guess you could call “Western civilization”),³ you're given enough authors that you can trace a certain line of descent. It'd be fairly simple for any person with a knowledge of English literature to come up with thirty authors that form some kind of literary tradition, and these authors are more or less represented by the New Lifetime Reading Plan or by any course of reading you could name.

But when a course of reading includes books from outside this tradition, they're usually not presented with the same level of coherence. The Mayan tradition is almost always absent. The Japanese tradition is typically represented by 11th-century Heian-era literature, and then, aside from Basho, almost no Japanese authors from the next 900 are presented as being "Great" and inescapably worthy of attention. The Persian tradition, if it's mentioned, is represented by a single work, The Shah-Nameh. The Indian tradition is represented mostly by The Mahabharata and The Ramayana and the plays of Kalidasa.

What I'm saying is the criteria of selectivity breaks down. If you're American, you read Edith Wharton because she's a great writer, but also because she had a formative influence on American letters (she joined French and English fiction styles in the particular combination that still predominates in American fiction today). There is a mix, in other words, of influence and literary quality.

With non-Western books, the quality is there, but what can we say of the influence? In many cases that influence has been nil. The Mahābhārata and The Rāmāyaṇa haven't had nearly the influence on Western literature that, say, the Tang Dynasty poets had (through Ezra Pound, they fed into the creation of imagism and, thus, helped determine the direction of all modern English-language poetry). The Shāhnāmeh has had even less influence—its been a hundred years since the last unabridged translation in English!

Most liberal professors would endorse the world literature concept, but if you look at their own reading, it’s usually very limited to the Western tradition. Like, it’s very obvious when you read Nietzsche or Herman Hesse or Ezra Pound that they’re very influenced by the East, and it’s equally obvious when you read, say, Samuel Delany, that he is not. In Samuel Delany you will see many references to Barthes and Plato and Auden, not a lot of references to Tu Fu and Confucius and Kalidasa. And that is fine!⁴ But I think Delany is like most literary critics and literature professors—he hasn’t really read Eastern literature. And when a professor like, say, Matthew Salesses pushes the world literature concept, it comes off as virtue signaling. It's a way of saying, see, we aren't parochial. We conceptually acknowledge that other cultures were also good at writing and such.

And yes I think it’s fine to have the intuition that Eastern literature is equal to Western lit, but unless that intuition is backed up by some actual reading, it’s simply not going to hold up against any determined opposition. If we’re just assuming that the literature is worthwhile and good, then why should anyone take our assumption seriously? The fact is, either something is worth our time or it’s not. If even literature professors and writers of high-brow fiction don’t find Genji to be worth their time, then doesn’t it leave a sour taste if they advocate for its quality? Something can be good without us having to insist on its goodness; conversely, if we insist something is good but don’t read it ourselves, then is it really good?

At least the conservative view is honest. They know the Western tradition, and they know it’s good and worth reading. They just don’t know the Eastern traditions, and why should they recommend people read something that they themselves don’t know?

I'm very sympathetic to the view that it's simply a better use of one's time to stick to our own tradition. I know that when it's come to Japanese literature, in particular, I've been frustrated by how much I don't know about the history of Japan and the cultural context in which these books were written. I could fill in the gaps, obviously, and that's work I've done my best to do for Chinese literature, but, again, there's a limit to what a person can do!

It's very easy to tell someone to read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but when I read the book I lacked a basic understanding of Chinese geography. I didn't understand the first thing about the differences between the Yellow and Yangtze basins or about the differences between Northern and Southern China.

I mean, sheesh, there's a lot I didn't understand about the geography of Greece and Anatolia until very recently! I didn't understand, for instance, that Athens and Sparta are actually quite close to each other geographically, but that Sparta dominated the Greek mainland, while Athens relied on its island and Anatolian empire to maintain dominance (kinda like how, in the Civil War, Richmond and Washington, D.C. are actually quite close to each other, but the war was still fought over a vast geographical expanse).

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Obviously I come down squarely on the world literature side of the equation. But…I actually read world literature. Genji is a beautiful novel—both violent and graceful, depicting a world that’s fading away and declining even as we read the book. To me, we read world literature for the same reason we read books from Elizabethan times. We read them precisely because they’re so alien, in terms of their structure, social mores, use of language, stylistic devices, etc. They’re alien, and yet they’re recognizably human, recognizably by people just like us. It’s the same as how when I pick up a contemporary novel, I always hope I’ll read something genuinely new, genuinely shocking. When I pick up, say, a classic Korean novel, like The Nine-Cloud Dream (about a Buddhist monk who’s sentenced to live out an entire life as an all-conquering hero, just so he can learn that possessing riches and having sex with hot girls isn’t really that great), I know I’m going to read something utterly unlike anything I’ve read before.

Honestly, I don’t think ‘influence’ is all it’s cracked up to be! Some of my favorite Great Books have been amongst the least influential. I love Anglo-Saxon literature, even though most of it was lost for centuries and was only gradually rediscovered in the 1800’s. I love the “The Pearl” and Gilgamesh, even though both were unknown until about 150 years ago. The less influential something is, the stranger and more impactful it tends to be. I love reading something that is recognizably a classic, recognizably important, recognizably of high literary quality, but just not very well-known. What’s more fun than that?

But I think instinctive calls for multiculturalism and more inclusion are a bit misguided. The fact is, you can’t force someone to like what they don’t like, or read what they don’t want to read. Mortimer Adler just didn't like anything non-Western. For him to include Eastern books in his collection would’ve been humbug and a mere buckling to pressure. But that doesn’t mean the books he did like weren’t good! Similarly, a professor can’t really teach what they don’t know. I had a friend who worked at a writing center that asked professors to include non-Western forms of storytelling in their lesson plan. How? My friend was an adjunct, getting paid $3,000. She simply didn’t know anything about non-Western storytelling. Where was she supposed to learn—moreover, most students want to learn how to write Western stories! In my opinion, there’s really no shame in only knowing and teaching things from your own culture. It’s nice to know about other cultures, but I agree with the conservatives that it’s not as necessary as knowing about your own.

As in most things, I tend to feel more sympathy for the conservative who instinctively feels non-Western books aren’t worth his time than I do for the liberal who foists upon other people a political principle that they don’t adhere to in their own life. But, you know what? There are a lot of people who’ve gained quite a bit in the last few hundred years from contact with the East: we’re talking Nietzsche, we’re talking Hesse, we’re talking Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence and Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac. Judge the tree by its fruits—you’re not gonna find a lot of people out there who are like, oh yeah I read a bunch of Chinese classics and they were shit! Instead, you’re gonna find two kinds of people: folks who thought they were rewarding; and folks who’ve never bothered to read them.

Further Reading

If you've an interest in the Great Books definitely check out The New Lifetime Reading Plan. I've read a lot of these kinds of books, and they tend to vary a lot along three different axes: a) difficulty; b) achievability; and c) diversity. The Great Books list on my substack page is the one I retyped by hand fifteen years ago from the pages of their book

Many Great Books lists are way too difficult. Mortimer Adler's list is particularly bad here. Kant and Hegel are not really suitable for the general reader. They're just too hard to understand! Some lists are also much too long—a lifetime isn't long enough to finish Harold Bloom's list, for instance. At over 1,000 books, it's simply not achievable. And a surprising number of these lists don't really include non-Western books. I leave aside entirely, of course, the lists that only include novels or only include 20th- and 21st-century books, like the Modern Library list or the recent NYT list. Such a list is unworthy of comment.

The Fadiman / Major list is not only readable, achievable, and relatively diverse, it's also snappy, easy to read, and free of grandiloquent posturing. I went back recently to look at the introduction, to see if they have any particular reason why somebody should embark on a lifetime reading plan. They don’t worry about it. They don’t give it a thought. Their only concern is for explaining how and why they selected these particular books. They assume that there is interest in reading the Great Books, and that all their readers want to know is which books are truly worth reading. Compared to some of the overblown rhetoric I’ve read from other authors on the subject, I found their laid-back intro to be extremely refreshing. I’ve purchased (and lost) at least three copies over the year, and I’m certain I’ll buy a few more in the years to come.

Addenda

I.

A friend told me to push my novel more in my posts. I wrote a literary novel! The Default World came out May 28th from Feminist Press. It’s a relatively traditional literary novel (i.e. very different from the fictions I post on Substack) about a trans woman, a self-described ‘adventurer’ who tries to manipulate a friend into marrying her so she can get his health benefits. I think it’s a lot of fun! The response, esp on Substack, has been great. Most recently there was this review from Phil Christman:

The ending…finds a way for Jhanvi, still an asshole in recovery, to make herself useful both to the household and to the larger community around her. It’s an alchemy of character and situation that ends up humanizing everybody a little more. That’s what we’d want in our communities and our households and our institutions — to find ways that everybody’s worst instincts are a bit neutralized while their best are brought to the forefront. It’s also something we’d like to see in more of our novels, frankly. Plot is so weak in a lot of contemporary fiction; this book’s plot actually does something. That’s really hard to pull off.

II.

I’ve been wondering if there’s any interest in me putting together some crib sheets to various literatures. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the stuff I wish I’d known before reading, say, The Tale of Genji, and I think that I could write a three or four thousand word post that would provide a decent guidebook to getting started with Japanese literature. It’d include both literary and social context. For instance, in Heian-era Japan, the social mores amongst the literary class were quite strange, by modern standards: men and women lived apart, women owned their own houses (paid for by their fathers), men and women were bound by ritual obligations that controlled their physical movements (on many days you couldn't leave the house, or could only go in certain directions), women were forbidden from seeing men aside from their husbands and relations, and husbands could have multiple wives and weren't necessarily required to visit or financially support all their wives, so many women were de facto divorced from / abandoned by their husbands. This is basic social knowledge that would've really enlivened the several weeks I spent reading The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, and various Heian-era diaries. Anyway, this would be a feature for paid subscribers, so let me know if you think that’d be interesting.

III.

I also wrote a locked post over the weekend for paid subscribers: it’s about my experience posting fiction on Substack.

Publishing short fiction on Substack is doable, but not easy

1. I saw ‘final’ because the original writer and editor, Clifton Fadiman, has passed. In the fourth edition they brought on a friend of Fadiman, John Major, and I believe Major was responsible for adding most of the non-Western classics, although I don’t have the book in front of me to check. Nonetheless it was done in consultation with Fadiman and I don’t think the latter objected. One of the dirty secrets of Great Books lists is that they’re usually constructed by committee, and no one author has really read all the books on the list. This was certainly true for the Hutchins / Adler Great Books of the Western World, where there was substantial disagreement over what should be on the list, and the final list was a compromise. In this case it seems clear that Fadiman had acceded to the overall vibe shift towards world literature, while his peer, Adler, had not. Adler definitely could’ve brought on co-authors, like Fadiman did, to add Eastern books. Even better, he could’ve sat down and taken a few years and read some Confucius and been like, okay, including this makes sense. But for whatever reason, he didn’t. Which is fine—both the circus and the monkeys belong to him, and it was his right to train them however he wanted! But because he didn’t I’m talking mostly about Fadiman’s list here and not Adler’s, and I think Fadiman’s is the better and more durable one.

2. Incidentally, Tate’s inclusion of Martin Luther King Jr. in the author bank was what inspired my recent post about Gandhi. The moment I saw that name, I immediately realized, oh yes…King is obviously a literary figure on par with, say, Hemingway or Faulkner. And that made me wonder what other political figures and polemicists also merited consideration for their literary talents (the usual answers are Winston Churchill and Disraeli. I’ve never read Churchill’s book-length work, but Disraeli’s books struck me as distinctly second-rate—entertaining, but nowhere near on par with Letter From Birmingham Jail or My Experiments In Truth.)

3. One thing you learn from World Literature is that Arabic literature and civilization were so heavily influenced by the Ancient Greeks that the entire term “Western civilization” starts to feel like a misnomer. In some ways the whole idea of the Dark Ages is just a misnomer caused by the artificial separation of Christian and Islamic realms. If you look at, say, Syria, Greek learning was not interrupted by the Dark Ages! It continued onwards (almost) seamlessly, until, via Islamic Spain, it was retransmitted (usually through Jewish intermediaries) into Christian realms, like France and Britain, where it’d never really taken root in the first place! Despite fissures caused by religious conflict, the Mediterranean world has really always, since the beginning of recorded history, been one world. This stands in stark contrast, to say, India, China, and Persia, which usually seem quite separate from the Mediterranean world.

4. I should note that I’ve never seen Delany make an explicit call for world literature—he’s an autodidact and not much concerned with university Reading lists or lists of any sort. Just naming him as an example of an extremely well-read left-of-center critic who I like and respect, but who doesn’t engage much with the East.