Review: Naomi Kanakia, What’s So Great About the Great Books?

or, the water's fine

I felt very cool and connected when I received an advance copy of Naomi Kanakia’s forthcoming book What’s So Great About the Great Books? a few weeks ago. I’ve been a fan of Kanakia’s newsletter, Woman of Letters, for a while, and this book is essentially a gigantic Woman of Letters post. So if you like that, you’ll like this. It’s written in her now instantly-recognizable voice; she approaches Literature in her matter-of-fact left-brain sort of way; there’s a refreshing and striking lack of pretense about the whole thing.¹

I have grumped before about the tendency of some academic humanists to smugly dismiss those who object to academic shibboleths. If someone says, for example, that critical theory is gobbledegook, or that modern painting is all worthless trash, or that contemporary poetry is pointless, I find that humanists sometimes mock and deride them rather than express their disagreement in a way that might make sense to them. Instead, I’ve suggested, humanists should engage with objections to the ideas they hold dear.

Kanakia’s new book does a version of this, although it’s important to note that this is a book about approaching the Great Books as a pastime and is emphatically not about institutional education, college curricula, syllabi, etc. Her central argument is that the Great Books, the sort of thing compiled in the Great Books of the Western World set, are good and that reading them is a worthwhile way to spend one’s free time. What’s So Great is structured as a series of responses to objections to (and questions about) this thesis. The Great Books are good, she says, because they are unusually rigorous and honest, which means that they tend to portray genuine moral difficulties and ambiguities. Thinking about these moral difficulties helps readers develop the capacity to make fine moral distinctions and to inhabit gray areas. This isn’t to say that they make readers more moral as actors, only that reading them helps readers develop a capacity for more sensitive moral perceptions, for a deeper understanding of the moral complexity of the world.

So why would anyone not want to read these books? Primarily, in Kanakia’s view, because the books are associated with conservative or far-right thought. Many of the Great Books have what Kanakia calls “bad politics.”² To some potential readers, the Great Books seem to express support for such bad politics; also, those who are most publicly invested in the Great Books (e.g. the faculty at Hillsdale College, Bronze Age Pervert) are often invested in political and moral ideas that Kanakia regards with a distaste that ranges from annoyance to real repugnance. Given that the Great Books often say or imply bad things (defenses of slavery, racist ideas, and so on), and given that their cultural reputation is aligned with right-wing ideas, why should a left-leaning person bother to read them? Why not read books that are just as beautiful, as Kanakia puts it at one point, but have better politics?

Kanakia addresses these questions patiently and thoroughly. She does not make all of the points that I might make, but I think her answers to these questions are humane and well reasoned. She makes a strong case for the Great Books without recourse to nostalgia, human nature, ethnic chauvinism, wispy aestheticism, or the other gauzy bloviations which, as Kanakia points out, have tended to characterize defenses of liberal education and the Great Books. There is nothing of the obscurantist or the charlatan about her. If you, like me, are a fan of a good wispy bloviation every now and again, you may find Kanakia’s approach stark and rationalistic. She doesn’t really talk about beauty all that much, and she largely omits discussion of language, metaphor, structure, and intertextuality. Similarly absent are some of the great experiences you can have during the act of reading: humor, emotional catharsis, wonder, recognition, solace, or the fun of a genuine cognitive challenge, as well as familiar arguments about the inherent value of knowledge or recourse to traditional ideals like being cultured or well-read. She also is not exactly a fan of close reading, a practice that I have found to be both pleasurable and personally formative, because she sees it as forbidding. But it’s exactly this stripping-away of pretense, the presentation of an unadorned argument more or less free of rhetorical flourishes, that might be most persuasive to readers who are not already convinced that they should read the Great Books. A description of why a Great Book made someone weep, or think about their father differently, or whatever, might be emotionally compelling to some readers, but it might seem purple and florid to other readers. It’s the second group to which this book is addressed.

This is not to say that Kanakia leaves no room for the mystery of beauty. She’s just very clear about the fact that she can’t really argue for such mystery rationally, and she doesn’t really attempt to wax poetic about it. When she challenges herself to explain why In Search of Lost Time is superior to Gone Girl, she writes: “Proust is indeed the superior author. To find out why, you simply need to read and appreciate him, because what you learn from reading him is something you need to read him to learn! If it could be conveyed without reading the book, there’d be no need to read the book. The answer is distinctly unsatisfying, but true.” Which seems about right to me! Rather than sniffing at one who might dare to compare Proust and Gillian Flynn, or regarding this sort of challenge to Proust as the inarticulate gruntings of an uncultured barbarian, she addresses it as clearly as she can, admitting the limits of her argument, and in general refraining from trying to bully or shame her reader into agreement. Anyone who wants flourishing communities of people reading capital-L Literature should want more of this kind of argumentation.

Kanakia sustains this substantive engagement with skeptics throughout. She is admirably evenhanded, an advocate but not a zealot: she shows that reading the Great Books is a good idea, but that it isn’t necessary to live a good life; she makes the case that reading Great Books is better than reading other books or learning cognitive skills in other ways. I hope her argument works, and I think it will, at least on those readers who pick up this volume. (I am already persuaded of Kanakia’s thesis, so I am not the best judge of whether her argument genuinely persuades.)

There are some questions I am left with. Chief among them is the question of whether Kanakia spends the bulk of her energy addressing the right doubts about the Great Books. Are people really not reading the Great Books because they see them as having bad politics?³ I have seen this objection to the Great Books online, and I have detected the underlying ethos in some of the scholarly literature that I have encountered. But I do not believe that I have ever personally met someone who genuinely believes that reading the Great Books will corrupt or harm them, and I think most reasonable and curious people see the value in understanding the ideas and worldview of people with whom they disagree, even on fundamental questions. The idea that reading the wrong sort of book can ruin your life has a long and distinguished history; it was rampant in the novel panics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and eventually peaked with the ravings of Anthony Comstock, the censor and famed prude who blamed the lurid murder stories that he read in the yellow press on the lurid murder stories that he read in cheap novels. But I don’t think many people imagine that reading Shakespeare will actually make them racist or will actually be traumatic. If I had to guess, their actual objection is closer to something like: “Reading the Great Books is the sort of thing right-wingers do. Hence, by reading these books, I will signal to others that I am a right-winger even though I am not, which would make me unattractive in my social circles.” (Or perhaps it is an obfuscation: a way that some people moralize their avoidance of something that is difficult or which they do not want to admit they simply have no interest in.) In declining to look upon the objections she voices suspiciously, Kanakia deals with them more generously than perhaps I would—but, then again, that’s the reason I’m praising the book—that it meets objections directly instead of looking upon them with a baleful eye.

Much more common than this political objection, in my experience, is the idea that reading Plato or Shakespeare is boring and difficult, has no payoff, and that only annoying, pedantic nerds, rather than right-wingers, would ever do it. To be fair, Kanakia does address the objection that the Great Books are too “difficult,” even if she does not spend as much time on it as on the political/moral questions, and in the very form and tone of the book, she counters the objection that the Great Books are only for pretentious people.⁴ It was refreshing to read a book in favor of the intellectual life that does not read as an ego-trip for the author, or barely-concealed contempt for the genre-fiction-reading rabble, or a bunch of vague, highfalutin rhetoric expounding gauzy ideals. Reading this book, one gets a real sense of welcome. I, for one, think the literary world could use a bit more of that.

1. See also Alexander Sorondo’s review here. I didn’t see any other ones, but I’m not on this website very frequently, so if/when I see more reviews, I will add them here.

2. Kanakia specifically identifies “bad politics” most frequently with racist or anti-trans political views; unlike most literary critics who identify themselves as on the left, she does not seem to have knives out for capitalism.

3. You might raise another objection: Kanakia’s argument is pretty much exclusively for people who agree with her on what constitutes “bad politics.” In other words, this is a book for liberals and lefties, not those on the right. One gets the sense that Kanakia does not think that conservatives need any encouragement to read the Great Books: she already sees these books as heavily conservative-coded. But although Kanakia’s arguments are clearly directed toward readers on the left, I think her arguments hold quite as much force for readers of all political persuasions. Why should conservatives read the work of critics of private property like Tolstoy, or those who thumb their nose at tradition like Emerson, or socialists like Zola, or decadents like Wilde, or, or, or…

4. She articulates one payoff for reading, although it does seem to me that some people probably already see themselves as able to make fine moral distinctions, and these readers might not be so motivated to read the Great Books based on this argument.