Literary Vexation
What makes a literary work great?
This vexing question was once again raised in an article published by Vanity Fair when Donna Tartt’s third novel, The Gold Finch, was published in 2013. As someone who once was an editor for an old publishing house in Tokyo, reading this article brought back my distaste of the ‘literary world’, the self-insulating society populated by the pathologically self-conscious personalities plagued with particularly irritating dualistic human trait, that is, the simultaneous manifestation of the primitive self-assuredness and the aggressive insecurity.
(To be fair, the presence of this peculiar flaw is not particular to the world of letters; politics, business, you name it, every human activity is touched by this infectious frailty.)
To be clear, I have not read the work by the author in question. My interest in the American was picked only when I came across an article by BBC about the enduring appeal of her first book, The Secret History, and I am now slowly readying myself to acquaint with her work. Hence, in this musing, Tartt’s work is not the subject of my inquiry; it is rather aimed to confront the criteria of great literature which is seemingly dominant amongst the high-judges of the literary taste.
According to critics, there is a distinction between lofty literary work of fiction and mere ‘good read’, that is, a class of barely acceptable vanity projects that populates the vast majority of bestseller lists and the shelves of surviving bookshops as well as the sprawling digital marketplace. A question would be, then: How exactly do they make such a distinction?
It appears that these critics advance two distinct charges against the contemporary trivialities: 1) The story is unrealistic/implausible/unconvincing; and, 2) The prose does not meet the standard of literary fiction. Let us examine what these critics mean by these statements.
Firstly, a serious novel needs to be ‘truthful’, or ‘authentic’. This is all very well, yet it is not altogether clear what they mean by this grand statement. Lorin Stein of Paris Review states that serious literature is about ‘real life’. In further addition to his profound grievances against the popular literature, he forcefully declares that there is no need of a ‘stage management’ from an author. What one can gather from all other comments by various reviewers who panned The Gold Finch featured in the article in question, it appears that they find the strict observation of ‘realism’ in a certain empirical sense of the word a necessary quality of serious literature. Hence, according to the London Review of Books, Tartt’s latest effort is a ‘children’s book for adults’, a sharp dig at the wild success of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series as well as that of The Gold Finch. Therefore, a serious author must faithfully appreciate what is possible within the constraint of empirical, psychological, technological limits of which we can be aware and comprehend at the present moment.
Interestingly, if one appreciates this doctrine, one must exclude quite a few literary canons from the celebrated echelon of literary greatness. In fact, such a criterion would deem most of my favourite authors as the degenerates.
Take Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I wonder what Mr Wood might think of the story that begins with the protagonist finding himself transformed into a vermin. If we literally apply literary realism of the sort advocated by these critics, then the entire work of Kafka must be relegated to the lowly category of non-serious books, since his work is full of absurdities such as talking animals and an imaginary torture machine.
Obviously, fantastical entities such as ghosts must be excluded from serious literature. I now realise that Nikolai Gogol, the great Ukrainian author who inspired the likes of Dostoevsky, cannot be taken seriously. After all, The Overcoat, not unlike Hamlet, features a ghost who haunts the street of St Petersburg. And The Nose… well, we will do better not to mention it.
What about the demons, you may ask? I am terribly sorry to inform you that no self-respecting person can utter such a word. Neither Goethe nor Marlowe should be included in a syllabus. The same fate awaits Dostoevsky: surely Ivan Karamazov cannot be speaking with the devil, can he?
We have indulged ourselves far too long with lunacies, and it is high time for cleaning the house of literary greatness. For example, Witold Gombrowicz must be considered a ridiculously demented fantasy writer of no merit whatsoever: Ferdydurke begins with the protagonist slapping the face of his Doppelgänger, being diminished to his 14-year-old self, and being escorted back to school accompanied by his school-teacher uncle (Besides, the name of the book is not even a proper word. The Pole, therefore, cannot be considered serious). Would Mr Stein spare Bruno Schulz? Unlikely. He would not stand by when the protagonist’s father begins scurrying about as a lobster, which, incidentally, is one of my favourite life-forms.
I suppose I am set to be exiled to the literary wasteland with Gregor Sama and Victor Frankenstein. Let us not to bring out Daniil Kharms or Thomas Bernhard now. They would do well being obscured from the unforgiving eyes of the judges of the higher taste.
Secondly, the writing must be of the highest quality to be judged as serious literature. On the face of it, it is hard to argue against it. Yet, this is also a statement that cannot be clarified in any meaningful way. Amongst the canon of great literature, the styles with which each author distinguishes her/him/themselves is quite diverse. Whilst it is a popular practice preaching to ‘write like Hemingway’, such a simplistic schema would not lead us anywhere. That is not to say that there is no such thing as literary quality in writing. However, as in any aesthetic judgment, one must accept the fact that aesthetic quality is something that can be only ‘shown’; it is not something that can be captured by linguistic means.
The common practice of literary evaluation of any given text rests on the assumption that aesthetic judgment is about determining the innate, static quality of a given object of discernment. Yet, to the chagrin of the proponents of this doctrine, this supposedly innate quality has proven itself quite elusive. As Wittgenstein noted, any concepts that can be thought clearly can be said clearly. In reverse, if we are unable to clearly articulate a concept, we cannot ‘think’ such a subject at all in a proper sense of the word. This means one thing: both the theoretical assumption of the criticism and its general practice must be deemed nonsensical.
Furthermore, we must consider the dynamic and mutable aspect of aesthetic judgment. As David Bowie noted in Moonage Daydream, the identical object of aesthetic judgment does not always inspire the identical response in the observer. In short, art does not speak to us in the same way, all the time. Once we begin to account for this transient aspect of aesthetic judgment, the common practice of peering over in search of any literary flaws in the way Francine Prose does to The Gold Finch seems utterly pointless. To be sure, every draft needs editing. Yet, as the remarkable diversity of styles in the canonical works of literature demonstrates, there is no simple scheme or algorithm to determine the quality of writing. In the end, clinical demonstration of technique is not enough to make a work ‘great’, and/or ‘important’.
And thus, we are left with no clear answer to the question: What makes a literary work ‘great’?
This state of affairs begs another question: Why bother?
Not all of us will, and perhaps should, trouble ourselves with the question of literary seriousness. After all, literature has been considered a form of entertainment since when humankind had acquired the means to share stories. However, if you care and love literature, you cannot help but study it and try to determine how good a given story may be and why it is compelling or not. Our constitution is such that we wish to deepen our understanding of whatever we find enticing. This is what engaging with life looks like for the creatures like us. However, when we engage with a subject, we must do so disinterestedly with a clear understanding of the limit of our engagement, the nature of the limitation, and why our engagement matters.
When we critique a work, we must do so fairly and diligently. Yet, if we do so in the hopes or illusion of having a clear understanding of some innate quality of writing that is quintessential to ‘great’ literary work, then we are terribly mistaken: we have no access to such innate quality. Notwithstanding the commonplace perception, thus, it is not the role of critics in secluded studies to deliver the final verdict on a given literary work. The purpose of critical discernment of literary work is not to sort a given literary work into one existing category or another. Critical appreciation of literature is a worthwhile practice because, thanks to the extensive reading and studying requirement of literature, critiques may be adequately trained to discover something for which they may be compelled to advocate. Critics are not the ones who safeguard the world of letters as supreme judges of taste; they are here to respond when they believe that they have made an encounter with an auteur.
Thus, critics’ instinct to shy away from the bestsellers is not necessarily wrong. However, the restrictions they seem to impose upon literature are. Hence, it turned out, that age-old question about the innate and necessary quality of ‘great’ literature is not only unanswerable, but also meritless. A literary critic is not a sorting hat, and should not pretend to be one. Yet, they may still prove valuable because, due to their privileged access to the contemporary writing, they may have better chances of discovering another important voice. If we are fortunate, the discovered work may have captured the otherwise obscure Zeitgeist. It may even transcend the epoch wherein it was written. When this happens, we must recognise it as it is, regardless how fantastical its chosen form of transfiguration may appear to be.