firing the canon

In David Lodge’s comic novel Changing Places, a group of academics play a confessional dinner party game called “Humiliation”(on the topic of that, please someone from the States bring me Cards Against Humanity). The objective is to own up to a major gap in one’s cultural experience and the contest culminates when a young literature scholar triumphantly declares that he has never read Hamlet (gasp!). He wins the game but subsequently loses his job (that would have never happened nowadays).

My first impression of surveys of people’s “favorite books” is that the nation is invited to participate in a massive, inverted version of Lodge’s apocryphal game. It’s impossible to know how honest people are: I mean, how many of us are prepared to admit that we’d rather (imaginatively) hang out with Harry in Hogwarts than with Dedalus in Dublin (or with Lisbeth in Stockholm - *raises hand)? J.K. Rowling’s series makes the top 100 in its entirety but so too does Joyce’s modernist masterpiece (nothing yet about the Millenium trilogy, but I can wait).

Lists like the 100 best books of all time have, of course, become a very familiar part of the way in which we construct our sense of shared identity. The fact that new “best ever” lists are generated annually suggests a kind of instinctive restlessness coupled with a desire to remake the personal and public self. These polls represent a risk-free playing out of the “anxiety of choice” that seems to be part of our radically unstable age. The impermanence of the so-called “timeless classics” is arguably further evidence of a lack of social coherence: a couple of years ago, Titanic and OK Computer seemed dead certs to transcend their times. Today Radiohead are those hipster dudes nobody really, thoroughly liked, and Titanic a huge moneymaker. Granted, with a cool soundtrack. But would they really want to be blessed (or cursed) with the dubious label “classic”?

Conferring permanent significance to a work of art is a problematic act. George Steiner has argued that “post-modern culture” is an oxymoronic term: culture, he maintains, is necessarily hierarchical whereas the “postmodern condition” wishes away al boundaries, divisions and pecking orders. The cultural anxiety implicit in this position is, in my view, misplaced. Culture is transient and so too are the purposes that it serves. We should be prepared to critique our heritage, in all of its literary, artistic, political and religious manifestations.

That’s why I agree with these people’s choice lists, when they are being honest. The results might upset some academic specialists, but the point is that this is not an undergraduate reading list, nor was it meant to be. I mean most of us have a sneaky suspicion that what we like to read might not be what we “should” be reading. How else would we explain the presence of a Dan Brown or Paulo Coelho novel within these lists?

No matter how instable cultural canons are, we do have to make choices and I’m happy that there is a difference between the books we nominate as personal favorites and those that we believe will make us better people by reading. This contradiction is very difficult to wrestle our way free from without imposing an impossibly restrictive and highly fictional form of ethics on our reading habits. 

Lists and rankings might be inadequate gestures towards making a fragmented culture cohere. We don’t worship or even watch television together anymore but we do like to remember together. The pursuit of collective memory need not be a seductive-destructive, honeyed nostalgia, but part of a creative quest to discern what and why we like what we like.