What good is the New York Times?

The philistine supremacy strikes again

I don’t know what to call this piece written by the Times’ “critic at large”, but it certainly isn’t criticism. It’s the fashionable expression of a mood, a higher clickbait.

The premise is that as the Nobel Prize is about to be announced—the “global arbiter of literary greatness”—we need to recognise that greatness and popularity are not, and cannot, be the same.

Greatness is not the same as popularity. It may even be the opposite of popularity. Great books are by definition not the books you read for pleasure.

This would come as a surprise to the masses of people who read (and still read) the great nineteenth century novels for pleasure. It would be a surprise to those people who turned Shakespeare into a bestseller, too.

Millions of people have read Kazuo Ishiguro for pleasure, a recent Nobel Laureate, and that is true of many other modern laureates like J.M Coetzee, Seamus Heaney, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro. That is only to mention some of the English language winners.

After making the premise of his piece about the Nobel, A.O. Scott shifts into a colloquial definition of great books, by citing the 1990s reaction against the idea of a literary canon (without citing Bloom’s The Western Canon which was a bestseller). After passing by “art monsters” and cancellations for bad writers, he calls the whole process of the Nobel “quaint”, “absurd”, “aloof”, “unworldly”, and “anachronistic”. (Can something that currently exists even be anachronistic? Don’t worry about that, this is fashionable polemic, not criticism.) The fact that he claims both that the Nobel inducts a new writers into a pantheon and is also an aloof anachronism doesn’t ever bother the assuredness of his arguments.

And so the wedge has been driven in to turn away from the concept of great books and towards the concept of popularity.

The great books are the ones you’re supposed to feel bad about not having read.

This is the sort of thing people say in chit-chat, not what we need to go the New York Times for. Come on! This is how we define Montaigne and Plato? If a major critic at a major newspaper thinks that these are adequate ways to define quality in the humanities, then what on earth does he think is the point of his job? Ah, yes, to make lists.

Critics make lists; newspapers conduct polls; algorithms and social platforms serve up carefully curated consumer advice.

Nobody invests any of these with too much authority. If you don’t like what’s on my list, you can make your own. How we evaluate the things we enjoy thus feels data-driven, democratic and subjective in the ways that institutions like the Nobel don’t.

Lists are good. But that is not what a critic is. The abnegation of taste at our cultural institutions is precisely the problem. If critics think their job is to make lists and become a substitute for an algorithm then of course no-one takes them seriously!

The critic’s job to be knowledgeable, to understand how a work of art is, to be able to place it and compare it, to be able to say how it functions, to bring to light some of its qualities that readers (or watchers, or listeners) can find their way through the swell of production to the shore of pleasure. A critic turns opinion into knowledge (Johnson). They show us how a work of art is what it is (Sontag).

In doing this, the critic will inevitably make judgements. There has been, for several generations now, a reaction against judgement, against the critic as ordainer of the best and the worst, the good and the ugly. It is a lower form of criticism not just because it is arrogant and absurd for a critic to think they are capable of making such pronouncements, but because it too often precludes the real work of explication, explanation, understanding, and sympathy.

That doesn’t mean critics cannot or should not judge. It’s unavoidable, and necessary to honesty. But judgement without knowledge is petulance. And so judgement is largely avoided (apart from a few badly reasoned hit pieces) and we end up with pieces like this, where a major critic can write, quite seriously, that popularity is more significant than greatness:

In our more cynical, more quantified time, money and celebrity are part of the substance of greatness. We prefer the indisputable, measurable achievements of pop stars and athletes to more nebulous judgments of cultural importance. Surely no one can argue — though I guess people will — that Simone Biles or Serena Williams is overrated, or that Taylor Swift doesn’t dominate the landscape.

Who is the “we” here? Surely our times are no more cynical or quantified than the nineteenth century, which spent a huge amount of cultural energy worrying about the heartless, calculating new philosophy of utilitarianism that dominated so much of intellectual life?

The essence of our culture is not cynicism but rather fragmentation. The mode of production of art has changed and so, therefore, has the nature of fame.

There has always been artists who dominate the landscape. Novelists like Scott and Dickens were popular and great, selling in huge numbers and dominating the imaginations of people across the century. But there were many others who sold in great numbers who are no longer read.

Names like William Henry Ainsworth mean nothing anymore but certainly were part of the writers who “dominated the landscape” back then. In 1894, for example, George Du Maurier’s Trilby sold 80,000 copies in three months. Ever read it?

Sometimes greatness is the same as popularity. Sometimes popularity means nothing in the long run. It simply doesn’t make sense to quote Emerson and the remembered names of his century and compare that to the popular culture of our time.

They had popular culture too, and it has all gone to dust. Try reviving vaudeville, music hall, and the like. Who cares now about the great Hollywood actors of the silent era?

All A.O. Scott is really saying is that winning a Nobel Prize isn’t a guarantee of greatness and feels out of step with the times. A more obvious cultural statement is it hard to conceive. But this has been spun out into a long thesis that tells Times readers that “the confusing swirl of emotions aroused annually by the literature Nobel” means greatness is a thing of the past.

At a time when reading is in decline and the value of literature is everywhere ignored or overlooked, instead of promoting this easy philistinism, we might hope that the Times would offer us something more like actual criticism. That is, the work of knowing about art, rather than opining about the culture surrounding art, and helping it, in Merve Emre’s words, “pass gracefully from my hand to another’s, from the present into the future.”

Whoever wins the Nobel, we would all be better served by more actual criticism than any more of these platitudes that what is popular has taken over from what is great.