What Good Is Great Literature?

On Thursday, the Swedish Academy will award the Nobel Prize in Literature, the pre-eminent — perhaps only — global arbiter of literary greatness.What distinguishes the Nobel isn’t that it singles out the best new poems, novels, essays and plays — that kind of reader service is the job of the National Book Awards, the Booker, the Pulitzer and the dozens of other worthy prizes that crowd the calendar.The academy does not celebrate great books; it consecrates great writers, compiling not a canon but a pantheon, not a reading list but a roster of immortals.It’s easy enough to second-guess the choices, to count the past winners who have fallen into obscurity (no disrespect to Salvatore Quasimodo) and list the non-winners who have stuck around for posterity (Vladimir Nabokov was totally robbed).

Questioning the wisdom of the Nobel Committee is a cherished paraliterary ritual, along with guilt-buying the works of an author you’ve never heard of.(I swear I’ll get to Jon Fosse, as soon as I’m done with Herta Müller and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.) Mostly, though, the busy and distracted reading public is content to take the learned Swedes at their word, to balance skepticism and bewilderment — wait, who? — with a measure of relief.

We can rest assured that, for one more year, an important cultural principle has been upheld.But what purpose does the principle serve? What good is greatness?The concept has an old-fashioned, even retrograde ring.A generation ago, in the early 1990s, the literary canon was attacked for its narrowness, a critique of the syllabus — too European, too male, too familiar — that was often extended to the writers who inhabited it.

The suspicion of dead white men and their living would-be counterparts has intensified since then, partly thanks to the upheavals of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.Every great artist is a potential art monster; every canonization is a cancellation waiting to happen.Furthermore, the notion that a ...