The conflict between the Great Books and historicism

Hello friends. Something about reading the Icelandic sagas was very inspiring and made me want to work on a fantasy novel, so I am trying to knock out a draft before one of my other projects comes back to me. In service of maintaining that inspiration I am going to only read Icelandic literature until the draft is done (the book is set in colonial India, because I am not stupid and actually want to sell it, but it has the je ne sais quoi of medieval Iceland).

One major criticism of the Great Books is that it’s a rather ahistorical method of reading. In its weak form, this criticism is that the focus on Great Books leads us to overvalue individual works and authors, because we impute the virtues of an age to a single person. Dicken is a marvelous, capacious, humane writer, but many of the things we like in him—his humor, his wit, his sprawling worlds—are features of a lot of other Victorian literature. We can say that in him these qualities are heightened, and he is the master of the three-volume novel, but can we really know that? And is it even true? I like Dickens quite a bit, but Thackeray seems to be good in rather the same way, and much of what’s good in both of them was present in English literature as early as Fielding, and, in truth, a lot of that common-sense diction and characterization—a feeling of rootedness in ordinary peoples’ sentimental lives—a feeling that is so missing from most French literature—is common to the broad range of English literature, from Chaucer onwards. Where did it come from? Who knows! It is in the air. And to see what English literature looks like without it, just contrast American literature, which always seems so serious in comparison (e.g. Faulkner versus Virginia Woolf, or Fitzgerald versus Waugh).

In the strong form, this critique asserts incommensurability—a certain kind of critic thinks a book can only be read well by its intended audience, and that the further you are from that time or place, the less and less you can get from it. This is another one of those assertions that ranges from trivial to ludicrous depending on the precise delta of the less and less that you assert. Nonetheless, in its strong form, this assertion makes lay reading useless, or even actively pernicious. Thus, the only valid form of reading, at least of a novel from another time and place, is to: a) read it in the original, and b) read it with as much historical and social context as possible.

Great Books proponents have always warred against this sort of historicism. As both a practical matter, few people since the end of the Renaissance have had the ability to read fluently in Ancient Greek or Latin. In the middle ages, writers who learned Latin both read and conversed in it. With the rise of the vernacular, this ceased to be true, and without that fluency, it became difficult to read high literary works in those languages. Today even most classics professors learn ancient languages to supplement facing-page translations—they read with a crib sheet in hand, so they can get a sense of the sound and shades of meaning of the original, but they don’t read fluently and easily, as an Ancient would have—it always entails labor.

For living languages, the situation is less dire—it is possible to learn to read, say Zola or Balzac de novo, as if you’d never encountered the text before. But in America, that proficiency is quite rare. Some might say that’s a function of our parochial education system, but I would say that we are a large nation: at three hundred and fifty million people, our population is half that of all of Europe. And only four American states border a country that doesn’t have English as an official language (California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas). To demand a strong historical sense in America is, functionally, to limit literacy either to works written in English or to demand that readers only have literary opinions that have been pre-vetted by experts (who themselves aren’t necessarily that literate, as we’ve seen with the classicists!)

Of course to read in translation only submerges the burden of interpretation, because the translator makes decisions for you! In this case, I suppose the purpose of historicism is to learn to efface the translator’s work and to see beneath their decisions and to try to get a sense of the original.

The proponent of the Great Books, on the other hand, takes the world as it is. These books exist as documents in English, rendered with great effort by brilliant translators. We do not know where their genius came from: what portion belongs to the author? What portion to the translator? And what portion to the prevailing culture and mores of the time?

But what does it matter? Because the aim of reading the Great Books is not evaluative: the judgment has been done for you. It doesn’t matter how the greatness was produced, what matters is that it exists.

On the plane of meaning—what did this text mean to the people who wrote it—we can have our own opinions. I text to think that human nature hasn’t changed as much as people would like to pretend it has. Freud did not claim that he was inventing the unconscious; he thought that he was discovering it. He thought that the great myths encoded psychic conflicts that were already occurring inside every person. Seen in another way, perhaps the unconscious is nothing more than the modern way of sublimating and internalizing the great myths! We do not believe in fate, but we still feel the power of Oedipus, so we need to create the unconscious as a way of giving the story its power—he feels a strong unconscious pull to sleep with his mother and kill his father, because of the mysterious hand of…the unconscious.

But even if you think the text meant something different for the people who wrote it, so what? We are us, we are not them. We care about what it means to us instead!

Ultimately, what underlies the Great Books is their undeniable power to affect contemporary human beings. These are books that only exist because they have been reaffirmed continuously.

So…I am not the biggest believer that you need historical context to read these books.

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On the other hand, as I have gotten older, I’ve learned to take my time when entering a new region, a new language, and a new tradition. When I was 25, reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy for the first time, I knew absolutely nothing about the political and social climate of 19th century Russia. If I was reading those books today, I would absolutely read at least one history of the time and one overview of the literature of that time and place.

Honestly, having more context just makes the books less confusing and more fun. Like…in Russian novels, there’s a lot of to-do about the difference between the Petersburg and Moscow nobilities. A lot is encoded in the trek from one place to the other (Anna meets Vronsky in Moscow, for instance, then returns to her husband in Petersburg). If I knew more about the time, I would know exactly what is entailed by the difference between these two worlds.

There is also a divide in Russian society, it seems, between those whose incomes derive from government service and those whose incomes derive from their estates. This divide seems common to most imperial systems (we see the same thing in Tang China and the 10th-century Byzantine Empire, for instance), but how exactly does it work in Russia? I don’t totally know, and perhaps I never will!

Oh, and then there’s geography! I just googled St. Petersburg and learned it is significantly north of Moscow! Whoops! I had just never bothered before to find out where it was on the map.

These are mistakes I would never make anymore, because now when I encounter a place-name in a text, I look to see where it is! I make notes in a little journal of important places, and I develop mnemonics to figure out what is where!

For this reason I am now fairly conversant with both the economic system and geography of medieval Iceland. I’ve been making notes about the lineages of the saga heroes, which is how, when I come across, say, a pirate named Ospak, I am like…is this the same Ospak who feuds with Odd Osveigson in a different saga? And I realize no, this is Ospak Ketilsson and that one was Ospak Glumsson, and Ospak Glumsson is actually the nephew of Grettir the Strong. And later in the text, I realize that Ospak Ketilsson is the grandfather of Ospak Glumsson, which makes sense, because there is a tendency in Viking families to name kids after their grandfathers, so Ospak’s son Glum named his own son after his dad! It also explains why, in the other saga, Thorarin the Wise was so reluctant to let his daughter Svala marry Ospak Glumsson—you wouldn’t want your daughter marrying the child of some pirates either!

I also understand, for instance, that the cavalier attitude Icelanders seem to have to their sheep (they just let them wander around in the highlands, sometimes for entire seasons at a time) is because there are no natural predators in Iceland, and the fjords are so small that you know all your neighbors, and it’s hard to get away with sheep-theft (a theft of sheep is at the heart of the feud between Ospak and Odd Osveigson, but that’s another story).

Is all this context necessary for enjoying the sagas? Well…no. But it sure makes reading them a whole lot more fun!

I’m not particularly interested in purity tests: who is getting the most from this book? Who is reading it the way it is supposed to be read? There is no cut-off below which your reading doesn’t count as real reading. We are not professors, we don’t need to publish on this stuff and make our bones as the top Icelandic Saga scholars in the world!

But I think one of the nice things about the Great Books is that there is a lot of secondary literature available. You can find books about these books. You can find a precis of these times, and resources to educate you. You can even learn to read them in the original (Old Norse is not particularly difficult, as languages go, at least judging by its similarity to Anglo Saxon, though given that most icelandic literature is in relatively unadorned prose, I’m not sure how productive reading the original would be). These are books that reward a deeper engagement, and what’s more, you know going into them that they are worth studying in more detail. The moment I started reading sagas, I knew that I was going to be reading a lot of these, and I knew that I would want more context, so I started making notes and I read a textbook or two.

I can’t say that I wish I had made the time for that when I first started reading the Great Books. It’s hard for a twenty-five year old to think in those terms (“I am going to spend the next six months reading just this”). I recently read the autobiography of Edward Gibbon, the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and one of the most impressive things he recounts is how he repaired his initial defects (as a result of the poor quality of education at Oxford) in his Latin. He was sent to live in Lausanne by his father (to get him out of the way after he converted to Catholicism while at college), and he engaged himself in translating passages of Cicero from Latin into French, and then back again, over and over, and comparing his translations to the original. That is a level of conscious practice that I think few twenty year olds could undertake—I certainly could not have! And he could only do that because he knew Latin and French were important!

Any twenty-year-old starting right now on the Great Books should, I hope, know enough to slow down. You aren’t going to reread these books that many times (I think the major rereads I’ve done were Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, War and Peace, and Proust’s novel), so your first time through these books may very well be the one that lasts your entire life! It’s good to savor them, to learn as much as you can.

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On a similar note, about three years ago, when I started writing criticism seriously, I began building up a stockpile of reference books. For me, the most useful books were one-volume surveys of the literature of small nations. For instance, I have a two-volume anthology, edited by Donald Keene, of Japanese Literature from its earliest beginnings to the 21st century. The book lets me dip in and sea, oh, so this is what Japan was doing in, say, the 12th or 18th century (you know, the between times). Because a lot gets left out of the Great Books! Sometimes I read further, as I did recently when I read some novels by Ignacio Silone (I kept wondering, what were the early 20th and 19th century Italian fiction writers besides Manzoni and Nieto). Sometimes I just read a passage and keep it in mind for the future!

Another set of books I refer to frequently are volumes on the popular novel in America. I have one incredible one by James Hart called The Popular Book, which details the most popular books in America from colonial times until about 1950 (they’re not the books you’re thinking of! Besides, of course, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben Hur). And I have a similar one, by Michael Korda, former CEO of Simon and Schuster, that gives bestseller lists from 1900 to 1999. Another book I look at frequently!

I think the purpose of reference books is they’re a window into what you don’t know you didn’t know. It’s not until you open a book like this, for instance, that you realize, wow, overtly Christian fiction has gone through periods of massive popularity in America—a popularity that’s had virtually no impact upon our literary memory. And it’s the same with reading histories and surveys and podcasts with regard to the Great Books—since so much of our attention now is managed by apps, which attempt to steer us into the safe and predictable—the Great Books are, paradoxically, a way of showing us something that us relatively unmediated, unmanaged. These books come to our attention through processes much older and wiser than those that bring contemporary books to us.

And it only makes sense to open that aperture wider, to use the Great Books as tools to allow other sorts of odd and unmediated information to flow into us.

To what end? Who knows! The question, I’ve come to realize, is not: “What use is this?” but “Is this more fruitful than whatever else I would be doing with my time?” Everything in society is designed to get you to focus on the immediate and the temporal and frivolous, so any time you spend reading about medieval Iceland is almost by definition going to be rescued from the abyss.

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Good Posts I’ve Read Recently:

• miri
  : “I’ve been thinking about how much cultural critique I’ve read recently reads like a scene report. It’s hinged to the news cycle, voided of politics, inflected with pointless insider gossip.” ALSO Laissez Faire Femininity

• BDM
  : The Political Art Conversation Is A Flat Circle

• Darrell Owens
  on San Francisco’s forty years of discourse about the “homeless problem”. My position on San Francisco is that it is, quite frankly, a paradise. One of the country’s most beautiful and walkable cities, with wonderful shops, restaurants, culture, people. Which is why it’s so strange that the city has become a byword for urban catastrophe. We should all wish for such catastrophes! Similarly, it’s astonishing to me how worked up the world is about homelessness in SF when the numbers aren’t much worse than they’ve been historically. Darrell Owens shows that people have been getting worked up in this way, and in exactly these terms, for forty years! Sheesh, can this city just go and build some SROs or something?

• Blake Smith, “The Pride Flag (vs the Church Gays)”. Blake seems to be writing here about the feeling that gayness has been colonized by straight people, has been used by them as a signifier or brand. I like his writing, but it just seems like a rather empty critique to me. At its core, this complaint is just identity politics, and it is subject to the same critic we level at identity politics, which is…to the extent that your identity can be taken away, you never really possessed it in the first place. For instance, when I meet Westerners who are into Hinduism, I don’t get mad, because who cares? I know they can never be Hindu or understand the religion in the way that I can, but what’s the point of telling them? Let them get what they can from it.