Rethinking the Notion of "Greatness" in Literature
Paragraph 1
There is a widespread conviction among literary scholars that there is no such thing as a great book. Better put, […] there is no basis upon which one can make generalisable judgments about the greatness of a book. The claim extends to works of art in general. At first sight, this may sound odd – what are museums for, if not to single out and display works that command special attention? But the challenge to the idea of ‘greatness’ – the challenge to assigning hierarchical value to cultural expressions – isn’t as preposterous as it might first appear. If, for example, one points to the aesthetic qualities of a work, one must reckon with the fact that aesthetic quality is notoriously difficult to pin down, and that attempts going back to antiquity have failed to give us an objective standard by which to judge. Moreover, aesthetic judgments can easily boil down to individual preferences, which, though perhaps finely attuned to prevailing social norms, are actually the result of particular kinds of education. In other words, it’s hard to extricate aesthetic value from cultural – and aristocratic – prejudice.
Paragraph 2
One might also justify the judgment of greatness in a book or work of art by pointing to its influence on a tradition of thought or to its impact on how we have come to see the world. In that case, a theoretically sophisticated sceptic might argue that such value judgments point not to anything intrinsic in the work, but to a historically contingent configuration of social power, which, the conscientious critic might add, is inextricable from forms of oppression, exclusion and domination present in our contemporary world. In this critical reading, the elite forms of cultural power embodied in values of ‘greatness’ are undergirded by the exploitation and dehumanisation of ‘the other’.
Paragraph 3
These anti-foundational critiques of ‘greatness’ carry the high-voltage implication that any hierarchy of artistic value is probably complicit in moral corruption. Up-and-coming scholars who endorse the particular value of certain works, especially canonical ones, do so at their own career-ending peril. In contemporary literary scholarship, it’s better to stick to critique – all the more so when it comes to old books. But without minimising the insights of critical theory, we can contain its paralysing force by eschewing any effort to define a great book – or a classic – with reference to some defining essence, whether aesthetic, ideological or historical. We can simply survey the bodies of texts that have come down to us in our few thousand years of written records and note that certain works, and not others, have demonstrated a capacity to illuminate the lives of many different kinds of people in many different historical circumstances. These works somehow transcended the conditions of their own creation – they spoke within their time, but also beyond it. I don’t need to understand much – or anything, really – about the political struggles of 14th-century Florence, ubiquitous as they are in Dante’s Divine Comedy, to have that work inspire deeper reflection of my own humanity, beginning with its invocation of an individual reaching a crisis point in the life journey we all travel.
