I am a somewhat reluctant convert to this camp--converted, in part, literally by Anna Karenina. But I'm still sympathetic to the opposing view, because people (including me) really struggle to articulate a clear theory what exactly distinguishes good and bad literature. As Henry has noted, a lot of the arguments people make about this are really quite bad!
If you set yourself up an authority on what is good and bad, then you better bring the goods! And if you can't, then prepare to be tossed out like the bum you may be reasonably supposed to be.
Yes some of the arguments are awful and what is really bad is that the people making them are sometimes oblivious to this! V glad to hear that about AK.
But I think sometimes the difficulty in articulating a 'clear theory on what distinguishes good and bad literature' can set too high of a standard that makes the average, non-literature PhD feel too fatalistic about developing a rudimentary sense of taste, which can then be improved.
It's one thing to assert that one is an authority on what is good and bad as a whole (which should require at least having a 'theory'!), but it's another to be an authority on why you /personally/ think one book is genuinely good over another, and to simply be ready to reason about it.
My guess is you can only develop a theory if you're willing to make these incremental judgments, i.e. treat it like 'data' that could help you develop a more sophisticated theory.
I think a lot is lost when a lack of confidence to articulate The Good (famously difficult problem of philosophy) is assumed to be proof of the non-existence of The Good at all, even if we don't yet know what the nature of it is.
I agree with all that! It's a mistake in science, too, to demand too detailed and too rigorous a theory too soon, or to demand a theory that is both detailed and universal. That's the kind of thing in you see in peer review when the reviewer despises a paper and is determined to kill it dead at any cost.
But in science, the handwavey bits of a theory are seen as... embarrassing? Like we should try to clean them up before the guests arrive. Or more optimistically, they opportunities for further research. Whereas the handwavey-ness of "taste", afaik, is not treated like an open problem for people to work on. It seems like the attitude is more like, either you believe taste is real or you reject it.
(People have that attitude in science too; but they aren't supposed to.)
I think it is useful to distinguish two different kinds of elitism in this context. One kind is aesthetic elitism - the view that some artistic works are simply superior to others. The other is social/intellectual elitism - the view that only a select group of people are capable of appreciating certain kinds of artistic works and having access to their value.
I think a lot of people who react badly to aesthetic elitism do so on the assumption that it entails social/intellectual elitism - that it is simply a form of snobbery, and involves looking down on the inferior masses who haven't the capacity or education to appreciate true greatness. And for some proponents of elitism that's true, and the people who react against it are responding to a real issue.
But it is perfectly possible to be an aesthetic elitist while being a social/intellectual anti-elitist: some works are better, but everyone can appreciate them and should be given access to them. Wagner was an aesthetic elitist but a social/intellectual anti-elitist. So was Matthew Arnold. So too, on my reading, is Henry Oliver.
I have always, always had immense suspicion for the dis-moi ce que tu manges, et je dirais ce que t'es school of media.
A. It reduces the brain and spirit to nothing but consumption
B. Even as an analogy it fails because it's weird to categorise foods as 'good' or 'bad'.
C. If you are an elitist about genre or type, you are giving up the far far greater privilege of being elitist about specific examples. If you're going to turn up your nose at Regency romance out of hand, for example, you're denying yourself the privilege of being a dick about the Bridgerton books versus Georgette Heyer.
I appreciate this thoughtful response, Henry, and for you directing some new readers my way! I'm still thinking about all of this and chewing on various responses. I like your way of putting it: that there are multiple kinds of good that literature can give us, and our ability to appreciate the whole art form depends on our ability to enjoy literature in multiple ways.
One sticking point that I'm still mulling over is difficulty. Most people struggle to read older literature and poetry because they can't understand it, and that lack of understanding makes them bored, and so they abandon it and assume that it is devoid of pleasure and that those who claim to enjoy it are really just trying to seem smart or sophisticated. This is one reason why I don't think it's enough for those who want to encourage others to read literature to act as if the pleasurability of, say, Shakespeare is self-evident. Shakespeare's hard work for most readers! And so we need narratives of enjoyment that offer a road to pleasure for readers who can't find it.
This also makes me think that one "good" that needs to be encouraged is the "good" of difficulty: of sitting with something that is not obviously pleasurable at first, but whose pleasure emerges only after a tribute of effort is paid. For many reasons, among them the forms of anesthetizing pleasure-media you discuss in the footnote, this is a sort of good that is urgently needed by many people right now, because it offers the ability to discipline the mind.
Thank you, this is very stimulating and has left me with many questions.
How do we recognise good literature? Would love to hear your definition. Perhaps a future post?
Surely, those who appreciate Racine and those who appreciate nurse romances are evaluating work on different criteria. Is 100 degrees celsius better than 100 lbs? How can we say one set of criteria is better than the other, without arbitrarily asserting that our preference is superior? Temperature is better than weight?
“It is your problem if you take it personally when someone tells you that what you like is trash if it actually isn’t very good.” Try this alternative: “It is your problem if you take it personally when someone tells you that the person you love is ugly if they actually aren’t very attractive.” Do you not accept that many people see their choices (partners, clothes, books, films, etc) as self-defining?
Also, could you publish a list of The Canon? I’ve never managed to locate it ;-)
I *am* arguing for subjectivity. In fact you make my point by mentioning canons in the plural. If it wasn't a subjective exercise, there would only be the one definitive version, surely?
But nothing I wrote implied an assumption that "what people like" is the primary or only criteria of assessment. I suggested that people have different sets of criteria by which they judge books: how gripping is the plot, for example, or some definition of "well-written" and *that* - the choice of criteria - is down to personal preference.
I just read your piece on taste and I am none the wiser. Is this your definition of canonical work of literature: "...strange, unique, inventive, insightful work. It challenges us and shows us bigger things in life."?
This is a great article. My only pushback is that so often genre—a commercial category—becomes a pre-identified ghetto for fiction. You noted that with Tolkien, but he’s not alone in being a “genre” writer whose work is unfairly ignored due to its mode. Certainly a majority of romance or fantasy or detective fiction is inferior to Shakespeare, but that’s true of “realist” fiction also. Too often critics allow these commercial categories—a superficial, market-driven phenomenon—to define quality.
Placing “without any binding constraints of canonical standards” in italics seems to warrant the possibility of approaching the problem without constraints. The idea of a ‘standard’ means to make requirements. Whatever meets the standard will be sheaved together as the volume of work the acolyte is expected to swear by. As the volume is bound together so are the acolytes to the trade (not withstanding the bumptiousness of the lodge meetings.)
As a long-time Science Fiction fan, I think the scholars and critics have done themselves injury by being too closed-minded, and now we’re in the backlash. As you say, we must account for Tolkien, but Tolkien is just the tip of the iceberg. But I’m with you, and I want us to correct for this over-correction.
This essay makes good points about distinguishing between books and readers but solves its problem by collapsing the distinction between taste (one's personal belief as to what books are better and which are worse) and objective value. Elitism is not "the belief that some books are better than other books and that it is better to read those books" but the universalization of one's taste -- the belief that one has exclusive access to the correct valuation of books. This does not mean that one must abandon aesthetic judgment, but it is foolish to behave as though there is a canonical consensus that one simply correctly recognizes or, either out of political bad faith or ignorance, does not.
Standards, and maintaining them, come with authority. Maybe culturally, or institutionally, the authority of english departments/professors/teachers is so little that students expect a 4 year long book club, and not, well, being taught.
Funnily enough, on Anna, I just finished a reread (Maude translation) and the political and economic discussions came into more clarity for me this round. I couldn’t help but realize that my appreciation for those discussions came from my university education in Russian history, and I wondered how effectively, say a teacher or professor could discuss those topics which were pertinent to Tolstoy and Russian society at the time, with students to further their understanding. I read a goodreads review of someone complaining about the “unnecessary” discussions in Anna but they only feel unnecessary if you don’t understand the context. I had amazing english teachers and independently I was naturally an intellectually curious child, but there are students who are not so lucky. The importance or significance of the canon and the context of specific works is quite literally poorly understood so naturally that undermines the enforcement of any kind of standard.
I am a somewhat reluctant convert to this camp--converted, in part, literally by Anna Karenina. But I'm still sympathetic to the opposing view, because people (including me) really struggle to articulate a clear theory what exactly distinguishes good and bad literature. As Henry has noted, a lot of the arguments people make about this are really quite bad!
If you set yourself up an authority on what is good and bad, then you better bring the goods! And if you can't, then prepare to be tossed out like the bum you may be reasonably supposed to be.
Yes some of the arguments are awful and what is really bad is that the people making them are sometimes oblivious to this! V glad to hear that about AK.
Yes, I struggle with this tension too.
But I think sometimes the difficulty in articulating a 'clear theory on what distinguishes good and bad literature' can set too high of a standard that makes the average, non-literature PhD feel too fatalistic about developing a rudimentary sense of taste, which can then be improved.
It's one thing to assert that one is an authority on what is good and bad as a whole (which should require at least having a 'theory'!), but it's another to be an authority on why you /personally/ think one book is genuinely good over another, and to simply be ready to reason about it.
My guess is you can only develop a theory if you're willing to make these incremental judgments, i.e. treat it like 'data' that could help you develop a more sophisticated theory.
I think a lot is lost when a lack of confidence to articulate The Good (famously difficult problem of philosophy) is assumed to be proof of the non-existence of The Good at all, even if we don't yet know what the nature of it is.
I agree with all that! It's a mistake in science, too, to demand too detailed and too rigorous a theory too soon, or to demand a theory that is both detailed and universal. That's the kind of thing in you see in peer review when the reviewer despises a paper and is determined to kill it dead at any cost.
But in science, the handwavey bits of a theory are seen as... embarrassing? Like we should try to clean them up before the guests arrive. Or more optimistically, they opportunities for further research. Whereas the handwavey-ness of "taste", afaik, is not treated like an open problem for people to work on. It seems like the attitude is more like, either you believe taste is real or you reject it.
(People have that attitude in science too; but they aren't supposed to.)
Great point.
A great defense for standards. I've always enjoyed Charles Taylor's phrase that moral relativists "collapse the horizons of significance"
I think it is useful to distinguish two different kinds of elitism in this context. One kind is aesthetic elitism - the view that some artistic works are simply superior to others. The other is social/intellectual elitism - the view that only a select group of people are capable of appreciating certain kinds of artistic works and having access to their value.
I think a lot of people who react badly to aesthetic elitism do so on the assumption that it entails social/intellectual elitism - that it is simply a form of snobbery, and involves looking down on the inferior masses who haven't the capacity or education to appreciate true greatness. And for some proponents of elitism that's true, and the people who react against it are responding to a real issue.
But it is perfectly possible to be an aesthetic elitist while being a social/intellectual anti-elitist: some works are better, but everyone can appreciate them and should be given access to them. Wagner was an aesthetic elitist but a social/intellectual anti-elitist. So was Matthew Arnold. So too, on my reading, is Henry Oliver.
Yes I am v much a social anti elitist
I have always, always had immense suspicion for the dis-moi ce que tu manges, et je dirais ce que t'es school of media.
A. It reduces the brain and spirit to nothing but consumption
B. Even as an analogy it fails because it's weird to categorise foods as 'good' or 'bad'.
C. If you are an elitist about genre or type, you are giving up the far far greater privilege of being elitist about specific examples. If you're going to turn up your nose at Regency romance out of hand, for example, you're denying yourself the privilege of being a dick about the Bridgerton books versus Georgette Heyer.
Are all the poetic elites still in a rile because Charles Bukowski made it into the Huntington Library &
they did not 🥸
Happy you’re reading Isaac! He has been killing it lately.
I’m a fan!
I appreciate this thoughtful response, Henry, and for you directing some new readers my way! I'm still thinking about all of this and chewing on various responses. I like your way of putting it: that there are multiple kinds of good that literature can give us, and our ability to appreciate the whole art form depends on our ability to enjoy literature in multiple ways.
One sticking point that I'm still mulling over is difficulty. Most people struggle to read older literature and poetry because they can't understand it, and that lack of understanding makes them bored, and so they abandon it and assume that it is devoid of pleasure and that those who claim to enjoy it are really just trying to seem smart or sophisticated. This is one reason why I don't think it's enough for those who want to encourage others to read literature to act as if the pleasurability of, say, Shakespeare is self-evident. Shakespeare's hard work for most readers! And so we need narratives of enjoyment that offer a road to pleasure for readers who can't find it.
This also makes me think that one "good" that needs to be encouraged is the "good" of difficulty: of sitting with something that is not obviously pleasurable at first, but whose pleasure emerges only after a tribute of effort is paid. For many reasons, among them the forms of anesthetizing pleasure-media you discuss in the footnote, this is a sort of good that is urgently needed by many people right now, because it offers the ability to discipline the mind.
The phrase "narratives of enjoyment" and the idea that difficult goods can "discipline the mind" aside, we are in agreement
Thank you, this is very stimulating and has left me with many questions.
How do we recognise good literature? Would love to hear your definition. Perhaps a future post?
Surely, those who appreciate Racine and those who appreciate nurse romances are evaluating work on different criteria. Is 100 degrees celsius better than 100 lbs? How can we say one set of criteria is better than the other, without arbitrarily asserting that our preference is superior? Temperature is better than weight?
“It is your problem if you take it personally when someone tells you that what you like is trash if it actually isn’t very good.” Try this alternative: “It is your problem if you take it personally when someone tells you that the person you love is ugly if they actually aren’t very attractive.” Do you not accept that many people see their choices (partners, clothes, books, films, etc) as self-defining?
Also, could you publish a list of The Canon? I’ve never managed to locate it ;-)
I have published one list of the canon, there are several others including Bloom’s
Yes people see their choices as self defining but you are making my point — *they* see it like that, which I am not obliged to agree with!
I wrote about taste once which had some work on “recognising good literature”
You subjectivity argument assumes that “what people like” is the primary or only criteria of assessment
I *am* arguing for subjectivity. In fact you make my point by mentioning canons in the plural. If it wasn't a subjective exercise, there would only be the one definitive version, surely?
But nothing I wrote implied an assumption that "what people like" is the primary or only criteria of assessment. I suggested that people have different sets of criteria by which they judge books: how gripping is the plot, for example, or some definition of "well-written" and *that* - the choice of criteria - is down to personal preference.
I just read your piece on taste and I am none the wiser. Is this your definition of canonical work of literature: "...strange, unique, inventive, insightful work. It challenges us and shows us bigger things in life."?
This is a great article. My only pushback is that so often genre—a commercial category—becomes a pre-identified ghetto for fiction. You noted that with Tolkien, but he’s not alone in being a “genre” writer whose work is unfairly ignored due to its mode. Certainly a majority of romance or fantasy or detective fiction is inferior to Shakespeare, but that’s true of “realist” fiction also. Too often critics allow these commercial categories—a superficial, market-driven phenomenon—to define quality.
Placing “without any binding constraints of canonical standards” in italics seems to warrant the possibility of approaching the problem without constraints. The idea of a ‘standard’ means to make requirements. Whatever meets the standard will be sheaved together as the volume of work the acolyte is expected to swear by. As the volume is bound together so are the acolytes to the trade (not withstanding the bumptiousness of the lodge meetings.)
As a long-time Science Fiction fan, I think the scholars and critics have done themselves injury by being too closed-minded, and now we’re in the backlash. As you say, we must account for Tolkien, but Tolkien is just the tip of the iceberg. But I’m with you, and I want us to correct for this over-correction.
This essay makes good points about distinguishing between books and readers but solves its problem by collapsing the distinction between taste (one's personal belief as to what books are better and which are worse) and objective value. Elitism is not "the belief that some books are better than other books and that it is better to read those books" but the universalization of one's taste -- the belief that one has exclusive access to the correct valuation of books. This does not mean that one must abandon aesthetic judgment, but it is foolish to behave as though there is a canonical consensus that one simply correctly recognizes or, either out of political bad faith or ignorance, does not.
Standards, and maintaining them, come with authority. Maybe culturally, or institutionally, the authority of english departments/professors/teachers is so little that students expect a 4 year long book club, and not, well, being taught.
Funnily enough, on Anna, I just finished a reread (Maude translation) and the political and economic discussions came into more clarity for me this round. I couldn’t help but realize that my appreciation for those discussions came from my university education in Russian history, and I wondered how effectively, say a teacher or professor could discuss those topics which were pertinent to Tolstoy and Russian society at the time, with students to further their understanding. I read a goodreads review of someone complaining about the “unnecessary” discussions in Anna but they only feel unnecessary if you don’t understand the context. I had amazing english teachers and independently I was naturally an intellectually curious child, but there are students who are not so lucky. The importance or significance of the canon and the context of specific works is quite literally poorly understood so naturally that undermines the enforcement of any kind of standard.