<< Potter, Harry | Front Page | Do Literary Texts Count as Strong Evidence about the Human Mind? >>
Sunday, December 13, 2009
What Good Can Masterpieces Do?
In reading around for a paper I’m writing on Franco Moretti, I ran across an article (sorry, subscription wall) by Jonathan Arac with the title “What Good Can Literary History Do?” It presents a number of questions about the place and purpose of literary history, but the following struck me squarely if only, I suppose, because I haven’t thought much about it recently, and haven’t really been missing the concept at the center of its query:
Whether literary history is conceived as a reference archive or as a narrative, there remains the question of what elements of a literary field, such as works, authors, modes, and genres, are to be archived or narrativized. What role does a notion such as masterpiece play? Scholars have elaborated rich structures of significance to motivate their research into works from the past that no present reader would otherwise willingly attend to, but without some such notion as masterpiece, how can a student aspire to read distant, difficult work? What alternative categories of importance, or value, can we propose? I do not think the old, positivistic category of “representative selections” any longer wins much assent.
(Arac, “What Good Can Literary History Do?” American Literary History 20.1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 3)
I, for one, do not find “representative selections” a very useful term, but Arac’s question allows me a moment to reflect on the degree to which I still find something like “representative selection” or “masterpiece” to be a “motivat[ing]” influence in the selection of the texts I analyze, or the degree to which I believe that it might cause “a student [to] aspire to read distant, difficult work.”
My initial reaction is mostly skeptical on the first count, but my skepticism is somewhat more qualified on the second count. I don’t teach yet, so I can’t speak to that perspective, but as an undergraduate I remember choosing literature classes more by period than by the individual selections, although I can remember course catalog entries clearly trying to play the “masterpiece” angle in advertising for a course on Tolstoy, or on Mann, or on Ulysses. I don’t know how effective these appeals were, or if they were necessary.
I would be interested in other people’s experiences—both as teachers and as students. To what degree is the idea of “masterpiece” used as a motivator toward venturing into “distant, difficult work,” and to what degree is it effective? And then, the other question Arac asks, “What alternative categories of importance, or value, can we propose?” And, finally, do we (pragmatically) need any?
Comments
I’d contend that the notion of a masterpiece does have a place in literary history and literary criticism, but a very limited one. For one thing, it’s only meaningful when applied to a single author. A literary masterpiece is the greatest work of an author, one whose peak he/she would never attain again. (This jibes, for instance, with the definition of a masterpiece in the OED.) Masterpiece, then, would take only a possessive article. You can’t really talk about “a masterpiece,” only “his/her/(perhaps) their masterpiece.”
This means that “masterpiece” is relative to period, genre, language… There is no minimal bar to entry, no (or at least few) canonical implications. Although it is the case that some authors don’t have a single particularly high point, and others appear to have more than one.
For students, it becomes most relevant in a single-author course. Is Ulysses Joyce’s masterpiece? Or does the Wake go further in its experimentation, is Portrait more controlled, more engaged with the world? The key is to get students to articulate their aesthetic judgments in critical terms. Then, you gradually do away with the aesthetic judgments, at least sheer ones. Here I’m guided by my quasi-Wittgensteinian belief that our aesthetic judgments in general are valuable less for their content than what they ask others to call to their attention.
As a phenamenalogical category, it certainly exists; I was reminded of that, this semester, teaching One Hundred Years of Solitude. Which is the only way the category really makes sense to me: as a way of talking about how we experience works of literature, the idea of “greatness” tells us something important both about how we commonly react to such texts, in ways that tell us somethig interesting about ourselves (and thuis a kind of taste not reducible to the Bourdieuvian definition). Why One Hundred Years of Solitude struck so many of my students in the way it did is something I want to teach the book again to better understand, but I certainly felt it myself, and that was the only way that teaching it was productive, so maybe this: a masterpiece is the kind of book you can share your incoherant enthusiasm for? Defining a masterpiece in terms that require an authoritative reading is one way of killing that sense of communal experience (my students and I would agree on the book’s status as masterepiece, but often—at the level of first experience—little else).