How great literature can change your life

Wednesday

I’ve been reading This Thing We Call Literature, a collection of essays by Arthur Krystal, and his essay “What is Literature?” addresses an issue that some readers may have about this blog’s subtitle: “How Great Literature Can Change Your Life.” Given that the works I write about range from classic masterpieces to hard-boiled detective fiction and hero quest fantasy, so I really see these all as great literature?

If so, Krystal would not approve, disturbed as he is by what some now categorize as literature. In his essay he complains,

There’s a new definition of literature in town. It has been slouching toward us for some time now, but may have arrived officially in 2009 with the publication of Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s A New Literary History of America. Alongside essays on Twain, Fitzgerald, Frost, and Henry James, there are pieces about Jackson Pollock, Chuck Berry, the telephone, the Winchester rifle, and Linda Lovelace. Apparently, “literary means not only what is written but what is voiced, what is expressed in whatever form”—in which case, maps, sermons, comic strips, cartoons, speeches, photographs, movies, war memorials, and music all huddle beneath the literary umbrella.

Although I too see this as a bit extreme, I suspect that Krystal would call me out for not distinguishing between the truly great and and what Slovenians call “trivialna literatura.” Because I move freely over a wide range, however, I have a special contribution to make to the discussion. I’ll let you know my conclusions in a moment, but first let’s look at what Krystal has to say.

He acknowledges that the very term “literature” has been contested for quite some time. “For the greater part of its history,” he points out, “lit(t)terature, from the Latin littera (letter), referred to any writing, formed with letters and pertained to all written materials.” It wasn’t until the 18^th century that people began formulating hierarchical canons.

I believe some of this was due to the rapid expansion of a literate middle class. Wanting to know what they were supposed to read, people turned to professional critics like Samuel Johnson to guide them. The resulting canon, Krystal notes, went uncontested for almost 200 years, at which point it ran into

that mixed bag of politicized professors and theory-happy revisionists—feminists, ethnicists, Marxists, semioticians, deconstructionists, new historicists, and cultural materialists…Essentially, the postmodernists were against—well, essentialism.

The so-called canon wars had been joined. Traditionalists believed that “to mess with the canon was to mess with civilization itself.” Culture critics, on the other hand, thought that “literature with a capital L was nothing more than a bossy construct, and the canon, instead of being genuine and beneficial, was unreal and oppressive.”

Lost in the brawl, Krysal says, has been the distinction between “a list of Great Books and the idea that some books are far better than others.” Just because some of the traditional list makers have been narrow-minded and prejudiced “does not mean there are no great books.” As Krystal sees it, all serious writers aspire to literature with a capital L. If it’s not good or great, then it’s something other than literature:

Writers may be good or bad, but literature itself is always good, if not necessarily perfect. Bad literature is, in effect, a contradiction. One can have flawed literature, but not bad literature; one can have something “like literature” or even “literature on a humble but not ignoble level,” as Wilson characterized the Sherlock Holmes stories, but one can’t have dumb or mediocre literature.

I like what Krysal says next:

We want important writing (bearing in mind that not every successful poem or story need be utterly serious) to explore the human condition, and we want our writers to function, as Eliot said of the metaphysical poets, as “curious explorers of the soul.” Such exploration may be mediated by personal as well as historical forces, but the world will always reveal nature to be more obdurate than the institutions that seek to channel it. Indelible truths, as Auden might say, stare from every human face, and they are not at the whim of regime change. So while lesser writers may summon enthusiasm or indifference, great writers power their way into our consciousness almost against our will.

While I agree, I’m struck by the parenthetical qualifier he feels compelled to add. I think he worries about sounding like the utterly serious but humorless Matthew Arnold if he makes exploring the human condition the sine qua non of literature. After all, there are sublime works of nonsense, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Or what about Thomas Love Peacock’s mock-heroic gem “The War-Song Dinas Vawr”? But yes, the greatest works exhibit the power that he describes.

Now for what I’ve learned from my daily application of poetry, drama, and fiction to life. The greatest works have the most to say and I turn to them the most frequently. Sometimes works like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or Maltese Falcon spring loose ideas that tickle the mind, but my best essays have been those that drew on Odyssey, Oedipus, Beowulf, King Lear, Twelfth Night, Paradise Lost, Gulliver’s Travels, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Beloved and poets such as John Donne, George Herbert, William Wordsworth, and Emily Dickinson. When I’m in their grip, I see into the life of things more profoundly than I do with lesser literature.

That being said, one wants a bit of variety and there’s plenty to be learned from “literature on a humble but not ignoble level.” Krystal says one has to be a “real sourpuss” not to like Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and he’s a big fan of Leonard Elmore. But he says one must distinguish one kind of appreciation from another, and he picked up the distinction at an early age:

When I was growing up, no one told me that The Three Musketeers or the Sherlock Holmes stories were tales I should read; they were simply books that, once picked up, I had to finish. But when Stendhal and Dostoevsky and Gogol first fell into my hands, I became alerted to the fact that I was supposed to read, that reading was something I was good at. Although I didn’t know there was a canon, I knew that some authors were manifestly more intelligent, more thoughtful, more skilled than others. How could they not be?

I experienced something similar. Once I discovered real food, I was no longer willing to settle for junk food (although I will indulge myself with donut from time to time). Since this blog isn’t in the business of ranking works, I’ll keep my masthead since lesser works have their own role to play in illuminating the human condition. But I behave differently when putting together survey courses of must-read literature.