'A Living Culture Is a Swarm of Moments'

Much on my mind of late has been that victim of literary taxonomy, the “minor” writer. We glibly sentence writers to one of two categories, “major” and “minor,” a sort of Manichean system of classification that leaves little room for the most welcome writer of all – a good one we enjoy reading. For the purposes of defining our terms, who is an unambiguously major writer? To cite the obvious: Shakespeare, Dante, Tolstoy. Of course, there are plenty of fashion-conscious readers, critics and academics out there who would deny such a status to our trio, while boosting some piddling but au courant mediocrity. Now the tougher decision: who is a minor writer, if we assume that “minor” is not a dismissively qualitative term? Guy Davenport in a 1995 interview comes to our assistance: 

“Minor writers may have charm, a polished finish, and a kind of eccentric attraction. Thomas Love Peacock, Colette, Simenon, Michael Gilbert -- fine fellows and impeccable stylists, but when compared to Tolstoy, Cervantes, Balzac, or Proust, minor. I would place Poe and Borges among the minors, splendid as they are. They are narrow. A Martian could not learn about human nature from either of them.”

 

That final sentence is an interesting fine-tuning of our understanding of “major” writers, if it is not to be simple snobbery. According to Davenport, part of their job is to define what it means to be human. I wouldn’t argue too much with that and would suggest that no writer is minor while we are pleasurably engaged with his work, enjoying it, admiring it, learning from it, sharing it with other readers. Every serious reader would agree that Swift and Chekhov are “major” writers. We are obligated to read them if we wish to be fully literate, conversant with the culture we have inherited. To intentionally not read them is to be ungrateful, a betrayal of what is most important in our tradition.

 

Let me propose a question and not offer a tentative solution. I’ll leave that to you. What are we to make of two excellent writers active during my lifetime whose birthdays we observe today – Janet Lewis (b. 1899) and V.S. Naipaul (b. 1932)? Your answer will say something about what you have and have not read, what you value most in literature, and your definitions of “major” and “minor.”

 

Clive James has a poem titled “To Leonie Kramer, Chancellor of Sydney University: A Report on My Discipline, on the Eve of My Receiving an Honorary Degree, 1999.” James is defining what he does as a literary journalist, a major minor writer, a writerly jack-of-all-trades, not a narrowly defined academic – the usual recipient of an honorary degree. Here are stanzas ten and eleven:

 

“The only problem is, no other kind

Of writer except great’s thought worth attention.

This attitude, in matters of the mind,

To my mind robs us of a whole dimension.

Intelligence just isn’t that refined:

It’s less a distillate than a suspension,

An absinthe we’d knock back in half a minute

Without the cloud of particles within it.

 

“Just so, a living culture is a swarm

Of moments that provide its tang and tingle:

Unless it’s fuelled by every minor form

From dirty joke to advertising jingle

It ends up like Dame Edna’s husband, Norm,

Stiff as a post. I think John Douglas Pringle

Was first to spot our language, at its core,

Owed its élan to how a wharfie swore.”

 

In 1728, Bishop White Kennet reports of Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): “I have heard that nothing could make him laugh, but going down to the Bridge-foot in Oxford and hearing the Barge-men scold and storm and swear at one another, at which he would set his Hands to his Sides, and laugh most profusely.”