I think too much. It's easier and sweeter than doing real work. I set out, a couple of months ago, to write an essay on my favorite short story, The Grand Inquisitor. So far, I've only reread the first few pages of that fable. But I've spent days thinking about Russian literature, researching it on the internet, and compiling lists of 100 Greatest Novels. Most of all, I've been pondering the pros and cons of 100 Best Books lists, and how we try to comprehend a vast subject with categories and labels small enough to wrap our heads around.
I only read a few pages of The Grand Inquisitor, but I read 40 pages of Bing Search in a row. I entered "100 Novels Greatest Best", and set out to gather as many distinct lists as I could find. I stumbled across many diverting lists of interesting books I've never read - but these were not "100 Greatest Novels" of all kinds. The deepest lists were those covering some particular subset of literature: 100 Greatest Mystery Novels; 100 Top SF Books; or the best books written by women, Asians, or African-Americans, for example.
There are, of course, lists of Best Russian Novels. I found a few good ones, though they delve further into Russian literature than I can gauge against my own experience. By now The Grand Inquisitor was a speck in my rear-view mirror, and I was gathering all the worthwhile 100 Greatest Novel Lists I could find. My problem is, there are some large answers I'm terribly curious to know, but I'm not even clear what the precise questions are yet.
When I'm waxing theoretical, I subscribe to a principle I base on the game of Go: If you want a game worth thinking about, try to find the simplest set of rules which leads to the largest number of possible plays. I pored over many lists of novels. Here are the rules (not entirely set in stone yet) I came up with, to determine which lists I'd bookmark for future compilation and study.
A useful (for my project) list of 100 Greatest Novels:
1) Includes Novels from all times.
2) Includes Novels from many countries, voices and genres.
3) Includes at least 90 actual Novels.
These lists of 100 Greatest Novels will be feeding into many future essays I write, so I want to take some time here, to explain these ground rules, and my reasoning behind them. It's healthy for me, at this stage, to clarify my thinking so far. I hope some of you will question and challenge my premises. I'm enjoying this as a thought experiment. It will be far more interesting if it becomes an ongoing conversation, including more diverse views and original opinions. In the long run, we can get to a more robust system for talking about the Western Canon, and what are all the components of greatness in a Novel, if you'll add your own thoughts on the matter, and point out any discrepancies you spot in my theories and explanations.
So let's look at my areas to consider, and their boundaries, so far:
1) Includes Novels from all times.
The Novel is often seen as about 400 years old, and Don Quixote gets called the first proper novel. That is useful as a signpost. I'm sure most of the novels we discuss date from 1600 or later. I expect that 80% of the novels we talk about are post-1800 (not that earlier novels are unimportant, but there are far less of them).
Still, you could easily call Gargantua and Pantagruel and Tale of Genji novels. You can find most of what makes a book a novel in The Odyssey, or The Divine Comedy. What exactly is a novel? It's not like there's a standard novel stored in a glass case in Paris, to measure other books against. It's probably just as well not to mention that to French, though - they might get ideas. The best definition of a novel I've seen is, a piece of writing of a certain length that has something wrong with it.
To consider the whole subject of novels, I want only inclusive lists, that at least allow the possibility of all-time novels. Some of these ur-Novels may not meet a more precise definition of The Novel (should we come up with one), but we should at least consider all the contenders and pretenders to start with.
If you search the internet for lists of Best Novels, the two commonest kinds you'll find are lists of All-Time best novels, and best 20th Century novels. In practice, if I found a list of 100 Best Novels, but it contained nothing pre-1900, I discarded that list.
As Best Novel lists go, I find the 20th Century lists the second-most useful family, and the 21st Century lists the third-most useful. In some respects, the 21st Century lists are the most interesting of all. When you've looked at 20 lists of the All-Time best novels, you start finding 50-80% of each list very predictable. Once you listen awhile to the talk coming out of the Western Canon, you find that much of what seemed like the impressive booming of deep knowledge, begins pretty quickly to sound like an echo chamber.
The lists of Best 21st Century Novels are more interesting because they rely more on individuals' opinions, so they contain more idiosyncrasies. But these books have not withstood the challenge of decades of critical debate - they are less considered - so these lists contain more choices of bright, shiny things, that just happen to be hip or best-sellers. The echo-chamber of fleeting fashion is broader but shallower than the Canon.
2) Includes Novels from many countries, voices and genres.
This ground-rule seems necessary, essential - but, in practice, almost unattainable. You can put in a few countries, voices and genres. As soon as you do, you'll start noticing more that you're leaving out.
The 100 Greatest Novel lists that most impress me, the ones with vast knowledge and reading informing them, and with the most careful thought put into balancing their structure - well, I can recognize them by how many countries and genres their books come from, and by how all these diverse voices are balanced against the tested greatness of most of the novels we consider classics.
This ground-rule, right here, leads to half of the important conversation around the Western Canon, and the questions of excellence and inclusiveness. Once you get past Austen, Eliot, Wharton and Woolf, which other women can you fit into your list? Once you get past Ellison, Baldwin, Wright and Morrison, which African Americans? And who are you going to bump off the old list, to make room for them? How much will you value tradition, how much will you blend in the fresh and the new?
100 Greatest Novels lists are the best and the worst place to start, in order to comprehend literature. It might be wonderful to include all the Great Books, but they smell so dusty. What modern reader wants more pages of Thomas Aquinas than of Shakespeare? Okay, it would be wonderful to have three whole shelves of the Western Canon (in its traditional version, or the one currently undergoing revision). Suppose you had all those books: how many of them would you read completely, in the next decade? And we here are Readers & Book Lovers, we read a lot more than most people.
If the conversation is three wide shelves of the Western Cannon, we can be sure that less than 0.1% of Americans will be paying much attention. If it's boiled down to a 100 Greatest list, at least people who regularly read books will click on the link, and peruse the list. In practice, most of the people who look at the list won't even read 10 more great books than they would have, I think. But they may read a few - and at least they'll think about books, and wonder what makes some of them greater than others. So a list of 100 Greatest Novels is a starting point for a healthy conversation, it is at least a door any reader can open.
The Neanderthal Classic Novel lists are stuffed full of books by white men, who came from Britain or the US, and died some time ago. The Great Books series is just a Neanderthal with a PhD. If you want a more evolved list, you need to include more women, minorities, and authors from other countries and continents.
But you can do all that, and still end up with a far from inclusive list, a list that represents Serious Literature, instead of all excellent writing. Serious Literature is, approximately, the kind of subjects and styles of writing that get taught every year in high schools and colleges across the land. Which means that most mystery, thriller, western, romance, SF and fantasy novels don't get a look-in.
The Western Canon, undergraduate syllabi, and 100 Greatest Novel lists are different-sized nets, but they're all fishing for the same thing: what is the largest, best and most diverse catch you can fit in the attention span of your target reading public?
If you are aiming for the most diverse and interesting selection of books, you'll consider all those genres I mentioned, and any others you can think of (though you'll come to a boundary eventually: do you consider Graphic Novels? How about porn?). Serious Literature (and the critics and academics who guard it) looks down its nose at most of the genres I mentioned above (mystery, thriller, western, romance, SF and fantasy), it considers them lowbrow.
The traditional solution is a kind of tokenism. You could say the genre is cherry-picked, for its most literary and broadly appealing exemplars. They're allowed to move out of their ghetto, and be considered as Literature. So professors who never read SF themselves are happy to assign Frankenstein, 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and Slaughterhouse 5.
3) Includes at least 90 actual Novels.
This seems an odd rule, when we're discussing lists of 100 Novels. But I encountered many lists of 100 Best Books, which were almost entirely Novels, with two plays, Leaves of Grass, and some short story collections thrown in. Perhaps a few works of non-fiction.
It's interesting, how easily we absorb boundaries of discourse, without questioning them. Just as it's easy to look at Great Books, without noticing that you're quietly excluding everything that lacks that musty smell of Literature, it's also easy to reduce great writing to Novels, and great writers to their biggest and smoothest Novel. We measure by what's easiest to grasp, and hold in the mind. Then we don't have to wrestle with slippery qualities, and we can hold a dry and orderly array of objects in our mental gaze.
It's the same with Rock Music. We measure bands by their Classic Albums. They are the easiest products and artifacts to hold, and much easier to compare to their peers than hundreds of variable live shows or the fleeting explosions of pop that fit into singles.
I've fallen into the same bias pro-Novels. I prefer Novels to all other forms of writing, 90% of my reading has been Novels, and I know much, much more about them than all other forms put together. I'll try to alter course, going forward. For critical purposes, the Novel gives you a lot to sink your teeth into, a great mass of criteria and qualities to compare with other Novels.
If a Best Books list was 90%+ Novels, I figured it was near-enough comparable to the 100 Novel lists I was bookmarking; if there were less than 90 Novels, I left the list out of my database.
As I was compiling these 1000 Best Novel lists, and thinking about Great Russian Novels, I naturally looked through my 12 lists to see which Russian Novels made it onto the 100 Best lists.
I found the same tokenism I spoke of with SF Novels, and it got me thinking about this whole project of cramming a representative sample of all the best voices and kinds of literature into a list of only 100 Novels. If you're trying to include all the flavors of writing I've mentioned, you're not going to have many slots free for Russian Novels. Unless you've studied Russian Literature in depth, you'll probably settle for a few of the best-known and esteemed Russian Novels, and then move on to the trickier choices.
In 12 lists of the All-Time Best 100 Novels (including about 1150 slots for Novels), 53 of the picks were Russian. Of these 53, 31 slots were taken by the same 4 Novels - again and again and again. You know those 4 Novels well, at least by name. They were written by just two men - yes, great novelists both. Still, this completely blows my mind.
Here are the top 4 Russian Novels, by ubiquity: Anna K. was on 10 of the lists; C & P on 8; W & P on 7; Bros. K. on 6. I don't dispute the many excellences in these four books. But do they really represent 60% of the greatness in Russian Novels?
Lolita was also on 7 lists. But Lolita is a novel about the USA, by a man who then considered himself an American. Only two other Russian Novels got three whole slots each: The Idiot, and The Master and Margarita. Well, the ubiquitous favorites could have been much worse: those are six truly excellent Russian Novels.