`Literature Is Simply Good Writing'

Over breakfast on Sunday, my 8-year-old asked what a coelacanth was. I told him about the discovery 70 years ago of a fish assumed to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period. Shortly after my lecture I exchanged e-mails with David Myers, proprietor of The Commonplace Blog, on the relative merits of Zbigniew Herbert’s translators. Then I read David’s post for Sunday, “Literature: the very idea,” and realized Samuel Johnson’s common reader (albeit an academic subspecies), once believed extinct, is the coelacanth of the digital age. We survive and thrive, solitary creatures, in the happy depths of our libraries.

A common reader possesses, along with formidable bookishness, an uncommon gift for common sense. David briefly and elegantly reviews Western civilization’s understanding of what constitutes literature, and concludes:

“Literature is just the writing that arouses the impulse to preserve it and pass it on. (I call that the `canonical impulse.’ Canons are inseparable from literature. To call something literature is to start a canon.)”

The canonical impulse, I think, begins in pleasure (others might call it love). I read something and enjoy it. My enjoyment may be purely aesthetic -- pleasure, say, in the music of a poem by Hopkins. It may be moral – an essay by Johnson that exposes or clarifies a worldly dilemma. It may be intellectual, as in one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets. Or it may be all of these things, or some combination of them. A week or 10 years later, I read the text again. It may give the same degree of pleasure, or less, or more, or a different sort of pleasure, or none at all. If my response is among the first four, I probably will, sooner or later, read it again, and perhaps again until it’s memorized (in the case of a short lyric) or at least becomes deeply familiar – second nature, as they say. The work and the reader intermingle and grow together – if the work is inexhaustible and worthy of preservation. Then it will survive – a rare quality, for most writing, even that which is justly or unjustly celebrated, is soon forgotten. In a poem addressed to his friend and fellow-poet, “To Ryszard Krynicki – a Letter” (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter) Zbigniew Herbert writes:

“Not much will remain Ryszard really not much
of the poetry of our this insane century certainly Rilke Eliot
a few other distinguished shamans who knew the secret
of conjuring a form with words that resists the action of time without which
no phrase is worth remembering and speech is like sand”

In a letter to Benjamin Bailey, on Aug. 14, 1819, Keats writes: “Shakspeare [sic] and the paradise [sic] Lost every day become greater wonders to me.” Every uncommon common reader understands this. In the spirit of David’s “the writing that arouses the impulse to preserve it and pass it on,” let me pass on what Johnson wrote in his “Life of Gray”:

“In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.”

Here is David’s conclusion:

“Literature is simply good writing—where `good’ has, by definition, no fixed definition.”