Is there anyone alive and writing today that anyone, seriously, ranks among the pan-century greats?
I think it takes time to realise anyway, they're old or dead by the time it's clear how great they are (or were).
There's no point naming them, but of the three ~contemporary authors I thought of, two are dead and one I came to realise only really had the one hit I was aware of.
It takes a while for people to be canonized, but hell yes. I'm 40 and by no means a championship reader, but here's a small set of folks alive or recently departed that will be part of the canon:
- Kurt Vonnegut
- Hunter S. Thompson
- Margaret Atwood
- J. D. Salinger
- Salmon Rushdie
- Neal Stephenson
- Colson Whitehead
But unless you think there's something special about today's literature, you have to wittle that down further, or over time there's just too many even for a 'championship reader'!
For sake of argument say that's an ordered list of your favourites. Why would you read Whitehead when you could instead read Vonnegut of yesteryear, last century, before that, etc.?
How do you pick something recent to read? A bestsellers 2021 list? Why cast aside something that eas an even better seller, just because it wasn't released this year?
There's just too much available, I don't think I could ever read something new, because I'll never (especially not at my rate, but nobody could) catch up with everything before it, about which more is known and had more time to digest and review etc.
Not really. That list spans 75-ish years of English literature. There are only about 400 years of (modern-enough-to-be-read-by-non-specialist) English literature. If your statement were true, we'd have to assume that there's only space for about 40 authors in the English canon. Even at my non-championship status, I'd guess I've read fiction by 150-ish authors. I'd expect people whose lives are focused on literature are an order of magnitude beyond that.
For me personally, it's usually random chance or personal recommendations that get me to read something from a new author. (I also mostly read things at least a couple decades old.) But a lot of authors basically reach the "canon" in their own lifetimes, at which point it's not a giant roll of the dice to read their recent books. Even when it is though, I mostly read for my own amusement. I'm not expecting any reward other than additional rolled eyes from friends at the bar. ;-)
- "These authors are already dead/or will be, and their books are already decades old, but they are very good according to me, even classic status worthy".
In that sense, it's an answer to TFA's question: "why read classic books" if we consider it as not just asking "why read classic==canonized books?" but "why read class==old books?"
And the answer is "because old books can be great, and contemporary books that are great will at some point be 'classics' themselves".
There can be no honest absolute ranking of subjective artistic works. It's NY Review of Each Other's Books to lull oneself into ranking apples with oranges.
This is all well and good, really -- I love 'the classics' to whatever extent that's an agreed upon list (Harold Bloom's the Western Canon (1994), probably its most explicit recent defense, had a list of essential books that was highly controversial and admittedly personal). But I'm concerned that not enough people here have heard the counter-arguments.
The problem is that time is not an unbiased filter, and all the processes of history that anoint and preserve Great Books are not purely a result of their innate or universal value. It's the same argument that's been made for the last 30-40 years about historical archives: what gets saved and how inherently excludes other stories, perspectives, and lives that we're now trying to recover. Often those exclusions are made along lines of power--race, class, gender, etc.
"The Classics" is an idea with its own history that scholars can trace, where the key players are rarely literary critics or sales numbers but institutions (churches, schools, etc.) aligned with powerful interests. Of course it's more complicated, and you'd ideally want to trace each work or groups of texts individually to see how they were 'canonized' and what that meant--but what's important to question is why many of us take this notion of 'the classics' for granted, and whether we might just be stooges of old historical prejudices (that are not, of course, gone). Understandably any effort at 'canonization' makes people nervous, because we'd immediately want to know who's making the decisions.
None of which is reason not to read things considered classic--Tolstoy and Thucydides and Shakespeare are some of my favorite shit-- but to treat the concept with skepticism, appreciate new work that challenges it, and consider each work on its own, rather than as part of some grand corpus handed down from above. It's an attitude that arouses a lot of contempt (Bloom called critics the 'School of Resentment' intent on subjugating all aesthetics to Marxist politcs), but it's really I think just a standard liberal challenge to established authority. In some sense it's a broader playing out of the Reformation rejection of Catholicism's stranglehold on biblical reading and interpretation, except what we're dealing with is the secular equivalent (Great Books). Inevitably there's a radical segment which will call for abandoning these books altogether as vehicles for oppression and nothing more. And every time there's a threat to established church order, including the Reformation, authorities have cried 'antinomianism' (no laws, faith justifies all)--true in a few cases, but misrepresenting the movement as a whole and disqualifying its legitimate criticisms.
Anyway, contemporary writers and publishers are becoming aware of these issues and some have tried to resurrect the lost narratives excluded or unrecognized by 'the Classics,' documenting facets of the human experience that rarely earned entry. Since more people can read and think freely now than ever could during the formation of the Canon, and a lot of these people would not have had a seat at the table if they were alive then, the skepticism of 'Classics' and embrace of modern writers speaking directly to them, makes total sense. The "rich white men" point is a bit overplayed, and often misapplied, but in general it pretty succinctly nails the problem.
tl;dr: there are absolutely great books considered classics but 'the classics' itself is a historical construct that's often been wielded by the powerful for their own ends; lots of folks feel no obligation to it and prefer instead to find modern writers creating new ways forward.
Valid points, but lest one thinks the canon is just some sort of unanimous, homogeneous cohort of writers, one shouldn't forget that this particular western canon is built itself as a conversation between authors, often contradicting each other, over the span of centuries.
Its value is in the breadth of that conversation and the fact that new authors, whether trying to inscribe their works inside the canon, or trying to break away from it, can hardly escape being positioned relative to it (partly the point of Bloom's "anxiety of influence").
There can however certainly be competing canons, and canons that are more single-minded, and should be recognized as such.
One good thing about the age we live in is that it is easier than ever for readers to discover those “lost narratives” that didn’t find their way into the Canon. The Internet Archive, for example, hosts scans of millions of older books that can be read online and downloaded for free. Among the genres I’ve explored to my own benefit and enjoyment over the past decade have been travel narratives [1], the humor and sports writing of Pierce Egan (1772–1849) [2], and 19th-century novels [3].
The novels, I thought, have been a particularly unfortunate victim of the filter of the “classics.” In the 19th century, they played a role similar to that of television dramas in the streaming era: immersive, commercial, produced in large numbers, intended primarily as entertainment, and ranging in quality from junk to great art. Most have been completely forgotten, but many are still worth reading.
Posts that whiff of “sjw” tend to get downvoted or at least end up controversial, regardless of the quality of the post. The canon is continuously reevaluated and that is a good thing. But it fits the narrative of “woke academics ruining stuff I like.”
> It's an attitude that arouses a lot of contempt (Bloom called critics the 'School of Resentment' intent on subjugating all aesthetics to Marxist politcs), but it's really I think just a standard liberal challenge to established authority.
This might well be a distinction without a difference. Even liberal challenge to established authority can be outwardly indistinguishable from mere ressentiment, at least if one does not take care to look into the specifics - and in interesting cases, these specifics will obviously involve facets other than "Is X challenging some established authority?"
Is there anyone alive and writing today that anyone, seriously, ranks among the pan-century greats?
I think it takes time to realise anyway, they're old or dead by the time it's clear how great they are (or were).
There's no point naming them, but of the three ~contemporary authors I thought of, two are dead and one I came to realise only really had the one hit I was aware of.