We live in an unprecedented moment for booksmaxxing. I don’t know how I could otherwise make my way through authors like Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard — the latter of whom surely wrote not to be understood. With ChatGPT to help me sentence by sentence at times, Wikipedia, and the ungodly profusion of podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, and other internet rabbit holes, I feel that I could read almost anything.
Given everything we have at our fingertips, naturally we should be producing the most sophisticated readers in human history. Makes sense, then, that in this golden age, we’d be living through a massive wave of book bans, self-canceling authors pressured by mobs who haven’t even read their books, and outrage over fictional characters whose ignorance is the whole point.
Wait, what?
In an interesting turn of events, it appears that the first generations with unprecedented access to human knowledge don’t understand the most basic things about thought or art, like that a depiction of something is not the thing itself, nor is it an endorsement of it. A lot could be said about their ignorance; at the very least, we could say they don’t know how to approach a book with nuance.
Against this backdrop, Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books? or Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You), a call to arms for reading the great works of world literature, feels like a timely and welcome intervention.
Yet Kanakia’s defense of the Great Books isn’t quite what you’d expect. In the introduction, Kanakia lays her cards on the table, outlining exactly how she’s going to make her case. Rather than waxing rhapsodic with the lofty rhetoric of her academic forebears in the Great Books movement, she takes a characteristically methodical and thoughtful approach, where chapter by chapter she addresses the most common questions and objections from those she sees as her audience: left-leaning types.
Some questions are serious foundational questions like “What do you mean by ‘The Great Books’?” and “Where did your list of Great Books come from?” Other questions are distinctly of our cultural moment: “Aren’t the Great Books kinda problematic?”; “When we say, ‘The Great Books are worth reading,’ do other people hear, ‘White men are inherently superior’?”; and “Can’t reading the Great Books be psychologically damaging for marginalized people?” These latter questions might seem as intellectually uninformed to some people as “Can I catch HIV by hugging someone?” Nevertheless, Kanakia engages with them fully and in earnest.
As a subscriber to Kanakia’s Substack newsletter, Woman of Letters, I was already accustomed to her honest, forthright style and willingness to carefully consider other points of view. But I’m not going to lie: the idea of approaching these questions systematically one by one seemed kind of boring and made me think I already knew where the book was headed. And designing it around some of the most common questions about and objections to the Great Books (I was already pretty sold on the concept — English major, Classics minor, I read Arendt and Baudrillard “for fun”) seemed tiresome at best.
Indeed, as I began to read Kanakia’s book, it was like traveling back to college when a professor takes up another student’s obvious question in class, and you slouch in your seat, roll your eyes, think to yourself, “Here we go,” and resign yourself to mentally checking out. Except that, as Kanakia’s book proceeds, the professor takes up their question with such thoughtfulness, patience, and respect that you stop fantasizing about the hot junior next to you and start to pay attention. Before long, you realize you’re crying, so moved that you have to excuse yourself to the bathroom, where sniveling and red-faced and puffy, you give yourself a good, hard stare in the mirror. In that moment, you vow to become a better person — one more like your professor — and, inspired not just by their intellectual integrity but their humanistic empathy, you change your life forever.
Yeah, reading Kanakia’s book was a bit like that. With her dialogic structure, Kanakia models the very intellectual generosity that she argues is part of what makes the Great Books great. And while engaging deeply with these questions, she invokes Homer, Socrates, Kant, William James, Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot, James Baldwin, and many others, and brings free will, aesthetics, postmodernism, decolonization, cultural capital, and all your other favorite liberal arts suspects into the conversation.
Sound dry? It’s lively as hell, actually.
While Kanakia apologizes for her lack of academic pedigree (“Even now, I’m almost ashamed to be writing this book — who am I to write about the Great Books — I’m not a professor or a PhD!”), it’s probably one of her greatest strengths.
Unlike the tomes in the Great Books genre, which are written by and for academicians, Kanakia writes as an accomplished reader for the common reader, or the aspiring one. She wasn’t an English major. She grew up reading sci-fi, and despite her rare humanistic education at her Catholic high school, had very little interest in the Great Books until after college, when she took it upon herself to read the great writers so she could become a better writer of science fiction.
As she works through the questions in her book, Kanakia explores competing arguments from multiple angles, freely admitting her own doubts, uncertainties, and confusions. At one point she confesses, mid-thought: “I face a terrible, hopeless muddle, to the point where I am not even sure what I’m talking about anymore.” While most writers might try to conceal these moments, Kanakia follows them through. Such honesty only reinforces the book’s intellectual seriousness.
That’s not to say that Kanakia doesn’t have convictions. She reveals her 17 years of serious reading in her clear, finely weighed judgments and discriminating sense of taste. But she doesn’t just draw from what she’s read but from her own experiences, including her efforts to reconcile, as a trans person, the recent movement among the right in favor of teaching the Great Books. All of this adds up to something rarer and more compelling than a conventional defense of the canon: a consciousness. Kanakia offers not a dissertation, but, as in literature itself, an individual viewpoint.
But while Kanakia’s book avoids the abstraction and well-meaning yet ivory-tower loftiness of other Great Books proponents, it’s not without transcendence. Kanakia grants that the books won’t necessarily change your life and that some people may have better ways to spend their time (she offers up the example of her wife, an HIV research scientist looking for a cure). Yet her most compelling argument, which might also be the least fashionable, lies in defense of aesthetics.
Aesthetics are under attack in late capitalist digital America. Part of the reason is that, thanks to the democratization of aesthetic production and distribution through tools like Canva, as well as the very nature of the simulacral digital world, genuine aesthetic experiences have been replaced by brand signaling and instant interpretation. While we’ve had the democratization of the elements of aesthetics, we have yet to democratize deep thought.
As Kanakia reveals with the help of Great Books authors, it is nuance itself that characterizes aesthetics. While the manipulation of aesthetic elements is part of its practice, so is moral complexity.
Kanakia introduces Marxist critical theorist Terry Eagleton’s “ideology of the aesthetic,” which she defines as “the idea that our aesthetic sense gives us higher truths than human reason can.” It’s a seductive argument for aesthetic ideologues — and it’s been my own. Yet even though Kanakia admits that it’s at the core of her own position, she acknowledges its “fuzziness” and occult qualities. She proceeds, however, to ground the concept in a way that made me realize just how fuzzy my own notion of this has been.
An aesthetic sense isn’t some mystic faculty but the ability to make, as Kanakia writes, “finer distinctions in morality.” It’s through this lens that she explores books like Anna Karenina and Middlemarch. Why are some aesthetic works great while others fail? Why do we return to certain books while others disappear just as soon as we finish them? Kanakia suggests an answer:
[T]he Great Books tend to share one quality. They have a lot of integrity. They tend to be unflinchingly honest about whatever their subject happens to be. And this means that even when they come down on one side of a question, they usually make a fair case for the opposite side.
And here we come to the T-word. While she may not be capitalizing it, she’s most assuredly talking about Truth with a capital T. Not only that, Kanakia invokes yet another T-word — Taste, which it turns out isn’t just the inability to enjoy a Netflix original movie:
The Great Books are, more than anything, marked by their tremendous rigor, their drive to hold their own ideas up to scrutiny. And in that rigor, that paring away of what’s easy and facile, they bring us closer to the world-in-itself — the true, objective world that we can never know through reason alone. And it’s my contention that this rigor and honesty and care is synonymous with taste.
In our household, we don’t censor movies by violence and adult themes but by what I call “quality.” While I never explicitly explained this notion, by the time my kids were seven they seemed to grasp it intuitively as I shared with them what made the cut and what didn’t. Under our dictatorship of taste, my daughter recently got into replaying Terminator 2 and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off while I was reading Kanakia’s book. We knew these were unquestionable inclusions on the “Quality” list, but I finally had the vocabulary to articulate why. Formal considerations aside (there’s also something to be said for the other capital word, Beauty, and Kanakia takes that up as well), they give a fair shake to opposing viewpoints. In Terminator 2, how can all machines be evil when the Good Terminator is able to form a stronger connection with John than any human has? Is it really worth all of Sarah Connor’s sacrifices for humanity’s future savior when she won’t even accept the french fries he saved for her? As for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, while Ferris seems to be saying that life should be enjoyed, in the case of Ferris’ BFF Cameron, it appears that sometimes it’s about confronting painful and scary realities. True freedom doesn’t mean playing hooky from life, but if you focus on making a good little boy or girl out of everyone, like Rooney or Ferris’ sister, Jeanie, you risk missing the very thing that gives Cameron the courage to claim that freedom for himself.
For all her efforts to pin it down, Kanakia understands that a conversation about taste only goes so far; a work of true taste can never be reduced to explanation (sorry, book review reader). As Kanakia writes as she compares reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time:
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, and yet it is true.
It’s in Kanakia’s own pursuit of moral truth through nuance that her strength as a writer lies. She doesn’t use the showy language or inflammatory élan of other popular internet writers, but then, do we really need more of that anyway? There’s a strong aesthetic sense behind her clean, clear prose.
As for the rest of What’s So Great About the Great Books?, I’ll let the book do the talking for me. As Kanakia suggests when she argues in favor of reading Proust, there are some things you can’t do justice to in summary — even in a long-winded review. A testament to its own greatness, the same is true of her book.
Who knows? Perhaps one day sensitivity readers, self-canceling authors, outrage mobs, and ideas like the belief that you can catch someone’s “evil” by reading their work will seem as quaint as the old fears about hugging someone with HIV. At least for now, Kanakia gives us reason to believe that the tradition of nuance, generosity, and integrity passed down through the Great Books may help get us there.
Jesse Relkin is a fiction writer and critic. She publishes The Dreaded Word, a Substack on literature and culture.
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Im also a subscriber to her Substack. Naomi wrote an article about the New Yorker that is the greatest thing Ive ever read on the internet. She is a gem.
Can't wait to get my copy. Thanks for the review!