I find myself compelled to return to the topic of great books as a result of reading Middlemarch with one of my reading groups. To recap: I have argued that 1) our judgments of books changes over time and is context sensitive (cultural standards and sensibilities change); 2) that institutional inertia and imprimatur mean that a canon gets established and remains stable over long periods for “elite” or institutionally embedded opinion; revolutions in taste happen suddenly after long resistance to the revolution (akin to the idea of a “tipping point” or Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a “paradigm shift”); and 3) it hardly makes sense to rank order a set consisting of all novels since there is such variety within the set (what could it mean to compare Moby Dick to one of the Jeeves novels?) and that what is deemed “best” in any context is relative to the purposes that drive the judgment or choice. Wodehouse is better than Melville on some occasions and for certain purposes. In short, variety (diversity) reigns—both in the objects being judged and in the purposes that would underline any specific act of judgment.
Then I started reading Middlemarch and wondered if I simply was wrong. That there are some achievements of human agents that simply make one shake one’s head in wonder: how could a human being be capable of that? The breadth of vision in Middlemarch, the ability to imagine a whole world with an astounding cast of characters, startles—and humbles. It seems a feat only one person in a million could pull off. It is, in short, a masterpiece. And masterpieces are all too rare.
Now it is possible to say Wodehouse also wrote masterpieces—given his aims and the genre in which he was working. And it is certainly reasonable to prefer reading Wodehouse to Middlemarch on many occasions. We get to one sticky issue here, the one best represented by Matthew Arnold insisting that Chaucer was not top drawer because his work lacked “high seriousness.” One prejudice in the “great books” canon-making is some notion (vague enough) of profundity. This is why tragedy has always been ranked above comedy, why King Lear is generally deemed greater than Twelfth Night despite each being of high quality in its chosen genre.
I don’t have anything that strikes me as worth saying about this profundity issue. I only think it should be acknowledged as a standard of judgment—and that it should be acknowledged that it is only one among many standards. And I don’t think it should be a standard that trumps all the others. Let’s discuss King Lear’s greatness in a way that specifies the standards by which we deem it great—and not indulge in meaningless comparisons to Twelfth Night, a play whose greatness is best understood in relation to other standards.
But—and here’s the rub, the reason for this blog post—I still find myself wanting to talk about the greatness of these Shakespeare plays. Just sticking to Shakespeare, comparing apples to apples, I am going to say Twelfth Night is better than Two Gentlemen of Verona; and that King Lear is better than Coriolanus. There are cases where the things to be compared are within the same domain—and one can be judged better than the other. In the realm of realistic novels that aspire to a totalizing view of a certain social scene, Middlemarch is better than Sybil. Of course, one is called upon to provide the reasons that undergird these judgments.
All of this brings me to Novak Djokovic—and the core doubt that drives this post (and this re-vision of my two earlier posts on “great books”). What is astounding about Djokovic is the gap between him and most of the incredibly talented men’s tennis players in the world. The twentieth best tennis player in world has almost no chance of beating Djokovic (especially in a five set match). There are, in fact, only (at absolute most) ten players in the world who could beat him—and even in that case he would win the match against them well over half the time.
My point is the extreme pyramid of talent. That the gap between the tenth best player in the world and the absolutely best player is so wide defies explanation and belief. It seems much more plausible to expect that the top rung of talent would be occupied by at least a group. There are, after all, many aspiring tennis players and novelists who have put in the hours (Malcolm Gladwell’s famous “ten thousand hours”), yet do not reach the pinnacle. Why is extreme talent, extreme achievement, so rare? I have no answer here. Talent is a mystery, what Shakespeare would have called “fortune”–unearned, simply implanted in the person. Of course, it is possible to waste one’s talents, just as it is crucial to nurture and hone one’s talents. But it is nonsense to think Djokovic’s supremacy is the product of his working harder and being more monomonaically dedicated to being the best tennis player in the world than his competitors. There are plenty of people just as dedicated to that goal as he is. They just lack his talent.
Could it be, then, that the term “great book” makes sense if used to designate those instances of extreme achievement, those cases where we encounter a work of human hands that awes us because it is so far beyond what most humans, even ones dedicated and talented in that specific field of endeavor, ever manage to accomplish?
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