Poets or Pundits?

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells | Monday, August 31, 1998

'They should have sent a poet,' murmurs Jodie Foster's character near the end of the movie Contact, when confronted with the inexpressible glory of the cosmos.

My reaction was very similar when confronted with the pointless stodginess of the Modern Library's misguided attempt to rate, in descending order, the 100 Greatest Books Of The Twentieth Century: They should have sent a poet.

The Modern Library sent, instead, the inspiration behind Sesame Street (Christopher Cerf), a former President of Brown (Vartan Gregorian), a Kennedy propagandist (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.), a Roosevelt propagandist (Edmund Morris), a Southern propagandist (Shelby Foote), an indiscriminate polemicist (Maya Angelou), a professor of American Literature (A.S. Byatt), an art dealer (John Richardson), the man who once called William F. Buckley a crypto-Nazi (Gore Vidal), an eminent Yale historian (Daniel Boorstin), and William Styron, whose presence on the Board is the sole explanation for the inclusion of his Sophie's Choice, a nice piece of schlock but certainly not the 96th best book of the Twentieth Century.

What this grab-bag committee of intellectual prominents, quasi-prominents, and other sundry non-poets selected was the blandly safest list that could be imagined.

It seems, considering the 100, that the Board's members were occupied exclusively with the notion of creating a list that no one could contradict, the world's most standard, functioning, unadventurous list, the low-end Maytag of literary criticism.

What they missed, however, was the sense of occasion. There is a reason that the idea of listing the best 100 books of the previous 100 years right before the turn of the millennium seems more sensible than publishing a list of the 100 best from 1833-1933, or from 1865-1965. That reason is what this board failed to capture: the symbolic relevance of the moment.

Although the present universality of American suburban self-satisfaction seems unlikely to produce any cultural and social jostling akin to the fin-de-siecle debauchery that happened the last time we went through this great centennial Daylight Savings Time (1900 - forward; 2000 - back), the turn of the millennium still has some symbolic significance. The existent creative currents are supposed to kick in; we should have a driving contemporary theme that does more than look happily back on our latest accomplishments, fat intellectual boyars to our pots of gold.

The Modern Library's 100 Best Books, then, fails because it doesn't dare to address its subject with any subtlety, or attempt at theme.

It doesn't reward innovation, it subscribes strictly to pre-War (perhaps even pre-World War I) notions of what literature should be, and, most importantly, it doesn't provide any sense of what intellectual themes or emotions dominate the contemporary American zeitgeist.

The Board seems to have taken the instruction to rank the 100 best books at self-value. The list seems necessarily defensive.

A look back at a century's worth of literature should do more than merely look back. It should stress some dynamism, stress some theme, stress something, and therefore introduce some notion, any notion, of the present state and future of American literature. This list is too objective for its own good.

Many critics claim that this list was doomed from the start, that it is impossible to rank works of literature from most relevant to least relevant as if they were
public enemies, or post-graduate sociology programs, or strains of Ebola.

I disagree. This is not an impossible project, but to make it worthwhile it is necessary to go beyond the narrow dictates of the assignment.

If the Board had addressed the question with some thematic subjectivity, they could have infused American intellectual culture with some sense of itself and sense of its future at the close of the 20th century. They could have inspired discussion.

They didn't, of course, and this is the fault of whatever apparatchik at Random House (which runs the Modern Library imprint) selected the Board. These are members whose careers have been given to academic historical review. These are academics. These are historians. This is a committee,and, like all committees, is given to bland.

Instead,the Modern Library should have chosen someone with a thorough understanding of the drama of intellectual moment, someone who would infuse this project with a theme, who would have made the list a productive intellectual touchstone and conversation piece.

They should have sent a poet.

Poets or Pundits?

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