Historicizing the Great Books, and Letting Them Historicize You

In which I try to get over my fear of looking dumb

I am trying, I am really trying, to write more casually in this newsletter the way so many of my friends and objects of distant admiration do. I do not mind in the least that their posts are sometimes long-winded, unedited, and conversational; I like that about them, that’s why I read them and not other things. They sound like the unguarded way I used to blog when I could still imagine no one was reading it, or the emails I exchange with smart friends. But I still find it much harder than it used to be to publish writing that reveals that I am, horror of horrors, unfamiliar with the literature. Ah, the great paradox of academia, where you ritually apologize for all the things you don’t know while expecting yourself to already know everything. You have to remember that people like Steven Pinker write dumb-ass books about the Enlightenment and mostly nobody cares.

So to try to force myself to get over it, I’m going to respond to a couple of fellow Substackers whose recent posts I enjoyed rather than bury those thoughts on the hard drive or send them private emails. I will save myself the trouble of setting them up for you at length—even though I am good at synthesizing and packaging other people’s arguments, that shit takes time, and the great part about the Internet is it’s right there for you to read for yourself.

First up:

Naomi Kanakia, “The Conflict Between the Great Books and Historicism”

Naomi is a novelist and critic I somehow only encountered recently, on Daniel Oppenheimer’s podcast, where she had a wide-ranging discussion about Brandon Taylor (one of the “it” gay novelists of the moment), identity and literature, wokeness in publishing, Great Books, etc. This post is an example of one of the things I enjoy about her Substack: the open, confessional way she talks about her own attempts to educate herself and her practice as a writer, showing the effort rather than hiding it.

The basic idea of this post—I guess I am simply incapable of foregoing introduction and setup—is that there are both pros and cons to treating the Great Books as history, “products of their times.” Most of the trends in the humanities the past few decades have been toward historicizing, contextualizing, relativizing the importance of individuals and individual works. As a French-theory student turned historian, I am completely a product of those times; my entire style of thinking is historical and contextual. Great Books defenders, who were once disciplinary conservatives and now are all too often also political conservatives, resist historicism precisely because of its relativizing powers; it drains the canon of its uniqueness and its quasi-religious aura of authority.

Naomi’s point is that hardline historicism requires a level of erudition that is nearly impossible for most readers, even for most scholars, and comes close to the suggestion that only the people a book was written for can really understand it. That is obviously wrong, as any young illiterate who has been bowled over by a Great Book can attest. At some level, it doesn’t matter that you know absolutely nothing about 19th century Russia when you read Dostoevsky, that his works have been pre-selected for you as important and translated from a language you cannot read. All of the accumulated authority that has gone into translating and introducing Dostoevsky, to producing accessible secondary literature, etc, is precisely so that you, the lay reader, can encounter something great, can achieve some degree of literacy, without the lifelong burden of true erudition. That’s a good thing, even if you will never read Dostoevsky like a 19th-century Russian, even if you “misread” him in your own personal way.

Despite being a historian and thus perhaps inevitably a historicist thinker—and despite basically agreeing with all the familiar critiques of the limits and political (mis)uses of the Great Books—I’ve always found the idea of the Great Books powerful and attractive. I don’t think it’s possible to have a culture, whatever that means, without a set of agreed-upon texts and references shared at the very least by elites and ideally also by as much of the masses as possible. (My social-democratic spin is that that creating a mass public with basic literacy in high(er) culture is highly desirable and completely achievable, and comes down to investment in material infrastructure.) That “canon” need not be rigid and circumscribed, and should of course be continually debated and remade. But as a foundation, a starting point, an ideal for lay readers, it has to be there. (One of the often overlooked things about the French theorists, idiotically accused of tearing down the foundations of everything, is that they were all erudite classicists who knew the Great Books inside and out; they were completely saturated in the canon and absolutely clear about the impossibility of tritely dismissing it.)

The power and value of the Great Books, to me, is not really in some claim that they are literally the “best of the best,” but the value of a body of knowledge that has been curated for you—something that seems all the more necessary as reading is inevitably crowded out by all other, more accessible and consumable forms of content. The idea that there are books you should have read, collected in college courses and on lists that are easy to find, can at its best serve as a challenge and inspiration. And it doesn’t matter if people who take up that challenge read them “badly” or in highly personal ways; at this point, though it’s a low bar, reading anything that doesn’t come from the immediate context and preoccupations of the endless present seems worth encouraging.

Finally, I liked Naomi’s point that informed reading—that is, often, historical and contextual reading—is not necessarily “better,” it is just, on a practical level, “less confusing and more fun.” I was amazed, when I started reading French literature as an adult with half a doctorate in French history, what a different experience it was. I knew what else was happening in France during the events of The Red and the Black, I knew the different positions on/for/against the Revolution and Napoleon, I even knew what the different units of currency were! It was so much more fun. When I finally read Balzac, I knew a least a little about the real literary factions and intellectual movements he was fictionalizing, and, thanks to my interest in Marxism and labor history, was thrilled by his minute descriptions of paper production and small-business operations. It was like all the nodes were lighting up at the same time, showing me the social theory in Balzac’s fiction and the literature in Marx’s social theory. It was amazing, but at the same time I feel for the lay reader who picks up Lost Illusions looking for a “Great Book” and has to wade through five hundred pages of publishing squabbles and paper factories. Hopefully they don’t skim too much and miss the cute little gay romance that no one talks about.

We never really know what’s going to move us, inspire us, how something written by people in an unfamiliar past world—where, I agree with Naomi, people were probably less different from us than we or historians imagine—can strike at the concerns of our life. I’m not sure Jane Austen made much of an impression on me in high school beyond being great page-turning stories. (I’ll have to think about that: English style? Reinforcing my Victorian mores? Perhaps!) But I know the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid were important because of how much further from my background knowledge they were. They enabled me sympathetically inhabit a world where my fundamentalist Christianity was not so much incorrect and inhibiting as it did not even exist, to see, at least dimly, that gods and religious practices were variable and products of their time. The Republic smacked my confused, anxious little teen self with frank, unabashed talk of homosexuality that came from thousands of years ago. (The Great Books also have within themselves a historicizing power, even or perhaps especially when read ahistorically: they can denaturalize all kinds of things, including bad things, about the present.) Maybe “bowled over” is too strong a term, but my barely-guided, uninformed reading of those books certainly planted the seeds that made me so much of what I am—above all, someone who looks for the meaning of life in books.