n+1 Loads the Canon

By Nicholas Desai | Saturday, December 8, 2007

“As so often,” wrote Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, “better acquaintance with a writer (Pope in this case) means a lowering of the opinion a cursory reading gave. But I shall never hate him as much as I hate Dryden; I think ‘one dryden’ ought to be a sort of unit of hate for a writer—only D. achieves 1.00, elsewhere the figure is less than one, eg—

Johnson . 5 dryden
Keats .4 “
Milton .9 “
Jonson .85 “
Shelley .85 “
Chaucer .9 “ (i.e. ‘tends to’ 1 dryd.)”

If it weren’t for the conspiracy to make sure the world never gets too interesting, I’m sure this unit would appear in most standard encyclopedias of weights and measures. Amis recalled how at Oxford he had taken out a copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queen that had also been read by Larkin: “At the foot of the last page of the text he had written in pencil in his unmistakable, beautiful, spacious hand: ‘First I thought Troilus and Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know that The Faerie Queen is the dullest thing out. Blast it.’” Set that to music, and you’ve got an anthem.

These quotations sprang to mind as I considered the canon, after being in a way prompted by a pamphlet called “What I Should Have Known” by the staff of the magazine n+1. I wondered what it meant that I had spewed Rockstar Energy Drink all over my computer monitor when I first read about the dryden. Did this make me, along with Amis, a philistine?

Hold that thought, and consider n+1. The most annoying part of the pamphlet and really the entire n+1 enterprise is the constant mulling over what it means to be an intellectual, the writer’s life, all the knick-knacks cluttering up the ivory tower. It’s the sort of blather that, if writing were any other occupation, would be consigned to the trade magazines. Yet they do try to engage the basic, nagging questions, an activity so spurned nowadays that they get points just for trying. So, in answering the question of what to read in college, they produced this pamphlet, which is really just a transcript of two shindigs that alarmingly resemble the dreaded panel discussions. (Why they didn’t write it down or, hell, just dictate it and edit it later is beyond the scope of this article.) What initially drew my attention to the thing, though, was that it was conceived in opposition to a pamphlet that Keith Gessen, one of n+1’s editors, had found outside of his freshman dorm room in 1993. It was by Jeffrey Hart, guiding light of this publication, and Gessen was for a time enthralled.

In his book Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe, which expanded the themes he had set forth in the 1993 pamphlet, Hart tells a story of Western civilization as an interaction between Athens and Jerusalem, to use Tertullian’s metonymy, or Reason and Revelation. Unlike, say, the canon-fetishist Harold Bloom, Hart was not pedantically obsessed with rank or ‘strength,’ and instead his chapters consisted of readings of various interesting works. My favorite chapter had to be the one on The Great Gatsby, in which Hart shows that Gatsby is portrayed as a magician, a Faustian striver against boundaries, who wants to turn back time itself. This is the canon at its best: helping along the understanding of certain works through the analysis of works from another time. The canon is not exclusive invitation list, but a tool that makes it easier to navigate the mass of verbiage piling up.

If you were approached and told that, taking the long view, your life is probably not as consequential as that of the president, you would have be pretty skilled at lying to yourself to disagree. Yet only someone given to hysterics would derive from this that any life but the most consequential is worthwhile or valuable. The analogy is not exact, but a similar thing is at work with books. Saying that the Iliad is more important than an Agatha Christie mystery could possibly lead to disagreement on terms, such as “important,” but most would agree, if only for the reason that Homer’s survived millennia whereas Christie hasn’t yet had the opportunity to endure. But her books are fun, well written, and many people, not stupid ones either, would admit they derive more pleasure from her than from Homer.

It surprised me that despite the gorilla dust Gessen kicked up at the outset, the n+1 vision is finally not so different from Hart’s in that both believe some books are more important to read than others. Though lacking Hart’s compelling narrative, they still manage to get across some advice worth taking. The best part of the n+1 pamphlet was the small section where the contributors provide top-ten lists: what they wished they’d read in college. Mercifully free of all fretting over the writer’s life, here the whole point comes into sharp relief. The familiars are there (Dostoevsky, Shakespeare) but also the less exalted (Henry Green). It reminds me of why these lists are valuable in the first place: they reduce time wasted. A book is a huge investment of time, and most books are terrible. Unlike an awful movie, which you can allow to wash over you, a book demands that you think at some level about the language, to exert your mind towards where it’s leading you. If a book, even a classic, does to you what Dryden did to Amis, then blast it.

n+1 Loads the Canon

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