June 26, 2007
Literary Merit Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 PM EST Responding to a piece I wrote for this web site on Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Fred Schwarz blogged about what, if anything, it means to call someone a “writer of the first rank,” which is what I called Chabon. I had written that Chabon, Philip Roth, and perhaps Kingsley Amis were the only writers of the first rank to write novels of alternate history, and Fred Schwarz pointed out that The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s novel of alternate history, which I have praised on this web site, has just been reissued by the Library of America. Assuming the point at issue—that there is such a thing as a writer of the first rank—an edition by the Library of America is suggestive (it probably has a distinguished advisory board) but not necessarily decisive. The Library of America also publishes Harriet Beecher Stowe, an immensely influential writer—Lincoln called her “the little woman who started this great big war”—but I do not think influence, or emotional power, or moral clarity, are the same things as literary merit. For my money, Stowe is not in Fielding’s league as a literary artist. If there are ranks, I’d put Fielding in the first rank, and Stowe somewhere else. Fred Schwarz at one point states that literary ranking is “simply a matter of opinion.” Let us assume that is true, but granting the assumption, are all opinions of equal worth and weight? Put bluntly, does my opinion matter any more than Fred Schwarz’s? Not as a measure of literary value, if such a thing exists, but it may matter more in a practical sense. I am (with almost no relevant professional training, but that is another story) a tenured professor of literature, which means I get to assign old books to young people, which may help keep an author in print. So my actions matter to the fate of some books, a very little bit, even if my opinion doesn’t, or shouldn’t. However, if my opinion is wrong, and also shared by all the professors of literature in the United States, my feeling is that a great book will still be a great book, no matter what professors (and other critics) say. There was a time when the professors thought ill of Dickens. I believe they were fools to so think, but professors have some influence, and a dead author they despise may disappear from the stores and eventually from most of the libraries. I think some such authors then await rediscovery in a more enlightened age (which is what happened to Dickens, who was in any case dismissed only by the professors, never by the reading public, and was always in the stores and libraries—not all writers the professors despise are so fortunate). Many people in my profession think otherwise, consider my belief to the contrary mysticism or vulgar error, and think the question of literary merit an empty one, even an absurdity. It may amuse Fred Schwarz to know that his views of literary merit are to some degree more representative of what professors of literature nowadays allege than are my own. As it happens, my profession thought otherwise a few decades ago, and it may think otherwise again; I certainly hope so. One other factor: Fred Schwarz is a skillful writer and an effective polemicist, and he may thereby influence popular taste more than I do—I teach as few as 30 students a year, and never more than 150. That is not too much influence on popular taste, or on publishers’ decisions. When I publish anything, it is rarely on what is sometimes called canonical literature, the writing I had called literature of the first rank (I am by professional training a historian). Dickens rose in critical esteem in some part because a non-professor (Edmund Wilson) wrote an important essay praising his genius. Fred Schwarz at one point suggests that “the only way to say for sure that a writer is major (which is not the same as being good) is if his or her works are still available decades later. This uses what is effectively a popular vote, the only objective method, to decide, but restricts the franchise to literature lovers, the only people who buy books that are more than a few years old.” There is quite a lot to be said for this view, but I also think some very old books are in print only because they are old, and some very good old books drop out of print for a while because people in my profession stop forcing the young to read them. If, by some mischance, Dryden drops out of print (and fewer and fewer people seem to assign Dryden), I think Mcflecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel will still be works of genius. Fred Schwarz writes that “I just don’t like Ian McEwan. And people who don’t like Michael Chabon just don’t like Michael Chabon.” I have heard professors of literature say the same thing about Dryden. There is another possibility. People who cannot understand the greatness of Dryden may be wrong, sadly wrong, denying themselves wisdom and pleasure because they will not do the work to comprehend something initially inaccessible to them. I cannot prove that, and my view is currently an unfashionable one, but I hold it nonetheless, and not only about Dryden. When I was 15 or 16, I tried to read The Faerie Queene. I found it incomprehensible. Luckily, I tried again: in my late thirties, I heard a colleague lecture on it for a couple of weeks. My life was the richer for the experience.
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