Posted By BillHeise on March 17, 2009

I recently filled out one of those Facebook surveys that asks you to tell how many novels you have read. It began by announcing that the BBC has determined that most people have only read 6 of 100 “great books.” That’s a cynical thing to say; all of my friends who read far more than the BBC’s average. I myself have read 80.

This concerns me, because, whatever else my faults, I have always prided myself on being well-read.  I got a 98% on the GRE literature exam when I was applying to grad school, so I decided to examine why I got such a low score on the BBC’s list. (My pride is at stake, after all.)

First let me say that I am systematic reader. At various points in my life I have attempted to read every major work from every country in every period. This is impossible, of course, and I have not even come close; but it is the goal that I’ve pursued for more than 30 years. As a result, I had read every book on the BBC’s list written before the 20th century. So I turned my attention to the list written in the 20th century. What was wrong with me or the BBC that they did not cover the catalog of 20th century books that I had read?

The Great Books (Sort Of)

I assume—and here I could be wrong—that this list is compiled to measure a person’s engagement, not with any books, but with what we used to call the Great Books. Not all of Adler’s Great Books were well represented in the BBC’s list. Modern works like War and Peace were represented; ancient works like Aeschylus and Sophocles were absent. In fact, all drama was captured under two titles: The Complete Works of Shakespeare and Hamlet. The Middle Ages was entirely absent, as was epic tradition of Homer and Virgil. None of the great scientific that were included in the Great Books— works like Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy—made the list. Poetry is also absent from the list, except once again for Hamlet and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Religious works like Bunyan Pilgrim’s Progress do not make the BBC list, either.

This gave me a baseline to work with. The BBC was attempting to measure our knowledge of imaginative literature, and they had geared their list towards works that appeal to the contemporary reader.

To compile a list of Great Books was, I assume, much easier for the BBC than compiling a list of books from more recent decades. One of the reasons for this is that over time people continue to read some books (e.g. Great Expectations, Ulysses, and  War and Peace), while most books fall by the wayside, books like Mary in Candyland (Never heard of it? Neither have I.). Enough time has already passed for us to be able to make a judgment on what is enduring and what is fallible in the reading tastes of past ages. But for the 20th century, we need to establish some principles about what we think the books of the past are telling us about present books that we think (but do not yet know) will last  .

The End of An Empire

What the BBC has picked has as much to do with the passing of the British Empire as anything else; and this, in my opinion, is why I have not read so many of the BBC’s selections from the 20th century. The BBC’s list of bestsellers skews heavily to Victorian England. Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot—the staples of the Victorian novel—all are represented, but Byron—the destabilizing staple of the Romantic novel— is missing. In place of the turbulent Byron we get two works by Jane Austen, the woman who elevated the domestic novel to new heights.

Other works geared towards children are represented here as well: by Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Nothing wrong with those books; they are classics of (British) children’s literature.

When it comes to more recent literature, literature written in more recent decades, the BBC is on less sure ground. Hence they resort to guessing. Some of their guesses appear to be sure bets. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code appeared to be sure bets, since they are among the best-selling novels of all time. However, while I believe that Harry Potter is a timeless classic, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is the worst sort of drivel. 100 years hence, it will be forgotten, just like East Lynne (Haven’t heard of that one either? That one was a real bestseller.).

Drivel and Magic Realism

Great works of literature are not necessarily noted by the extent of their reach through the universe, but this seems to be exactly reason for inclusion of so many works on the BBC’s list. There is no Voltaire on the list—he had over-relied on reason, after all—but the former sportswriter Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet In Heaven is represented. I may be a snob, but I am sure that Albom’s book will be forgotten by subsequent generations, just as the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky, which was so popular in the works of Pirandello, Forster, and old T.S., has also faded over time.

The fact is that many of the works on the BBC’s list have a modernist ironic metaphysical view towards the universe. For instance, magical realism seems to be front and center in this list. I’ve never liked magical realism, and this is one of the reasons that I’ve missed reading so many works on the BBC’s list.

We get works like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children on the list. There’s nothing wrong with those books. I read, instead, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses when I was still in college.

It may be a matter of taste, but I have never liked the magical realist formula for a couple of reasons. First, I thought that it leveraged the knowledge of other cultures, such as Indian philosophy (to use but one example), but it did not engage the very real difficulties that true believers in such systems encounter.

This is a Western problem. Liberalism has always had the problem that it substitutes individual achievement for collective experience. It’s as though we are searching the world looking for confirmation that our liberal ideals—ideals that usually center on the autonomy of the individual from the constraints of traditional culture—have been held in cultures with stronger cultural traditions.

The weak point that emerges from magical realism—and from modern Western literature itself—is what happens when true believers in those cultures, such as the Iranians in the 1980s, take offense at Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses or the cartoons of Mohammed published in Jyllands-Posten. All the West can do is defend our superior principles against those cultures who do not deign to follow our shining example. This is an example of what was once known to the world-conquoring British aristocrat as a sense of noblesse oblige.

In my opinion, the West is not wrong, but it substitutes a weak belief system for a strong belief system. Real religion, and real believers in real religion, get attacked, while the more tame, more domesticated literature prevails. Literature at a distance, I call it. When it comes right down to it, we praise Salman Rushdie and excoriate the Iranian leaders who are so narrow-minded as to actually believe in their religion. Such an approach towards the literature of the West does not deal with the complexities that the Iranians are dealing with. Real religion, and real believers in real religion, get attacked, while the culture of the West is wanted as a the cure for the ills of the world, much like polio was cured by introducing a weakened form of the disease into the human host. [This also in my opinion is why the West was attacked in September 2001 by real believers in real religion.]

Now, I want to be clear here. I’m not defending the Iranian government. But I’m saying that the BBC is lording Rushdie’s fantasies about Islamic culture over the difficulties of dealing with Islamic culture as it is. It seems to me that the problems of Islamic culture are intractable, while the problems of fiction are more easy to deal with. This is why, I suppose, that the BBC did not pick Satanic Verses: they were afraid of the backlash from real religious people.

The stance of magical realists like Rushdie seems to me to be like the ironic distance of Rousseau’s Emile, who learns by not learning. Instead of engaging his stale old books, he listens to his more immediate soul. This is much like what I think I would encounter if I picked up a book by Mitch Albom, who wrote his first bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie, about his evenings with an old college professor who is dying of cancer. He’s not a professor himself; he’s living through another. Sometimes—and in my opinion most of the time—not learning does not lead to knowledge; sometimes not learning simply makes us stupid.

Anyway, this is why I never picked up another magical realism book. I used to own a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, I could never get through it. And this in turn explains why I never picked up Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind. The Washington Post review, posted on Amazon.com, says “if you love One Hundred Years of Solitude…” you’ll love The Shadow of the Wind. That was enough for me.

The BBC’s Temporal Metaphor

The temporal metaphor has a long history in literature whether it is through Faust (Marlowe’s or Goethe’s) or Shelley, who travels to the underworld in Prometheus Unbound. These characters managed to subordinate the rest of the universe to their individual mind. It’s only in fiction that we can break the bounds of our human condition to ascend to the condition of a god. The rest of us are stuck in the real world.

I prefer works that deal with a more reasonable assessment of the human condition. This does not mean that I believe, with Tom Wolfe (the author of another unjustly overlooked work, The Bonfire of the Vanities) that the way out of the postmodern dilemma is to return to the past: the realistic works of Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot. I don’t think that a return to realism is necessarily answer. The early science fiction classic , like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is much more to my liking, for Mary Shelley puts limits on the her husband’s bold grasp after god-like power.

But Mary Shelley is absent from the BBC’s list. My reservations about the temporal metaphor explain why I never picked up two other essential novels of the BBC’s list: Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife.

The BBC’s Spatial Metaphor

The BBC also uses a spatial metaphor. I suppose this is appropriate for a culture that once ruled an area so vast that the sun never set upon it. Works like Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, Seth’s A Suitable Boy, and Mistry’s A Fine Balance give a picture of the world of Japan and India to round out the South American world of Marquez and the Middle East of Rushdie.

At the same time, things don’t appear to be going as well at home. Bill Bryson’s Notes From A Small Island, it seems to me, represents the passing of postwar culture from Britain to America. Bryson’s commentary on England shows the cultural self-centeredness of the BBC. At the same time, the inclusion of Iain Banks The Wasp Factory shows the English—or rather the Scottish—at their worst. This is something like the Sex Pistols screaming “No future” at the end of “God Save the Queen.”  There may be no future for individuals or culture. Individuals die, like Sid Vicious; and cultures die, as well. That does not mean that all culture has died. And it seems to me to be the reason that the BBC has reached out from its rotting interior towards the edges of the world (India, China, Middle East, South America, but not, it seems, to America).

The Failure of Romantic Nerve

The BBC is quite hesitant to allow the full force of Romantic fantasy to grip them. They step back into magic realism, culture at a distance. They, like the Victorians who get so much representation on the list, are content with the failure of the first push of Romantic period: the French Revolution had failed, and the views of full-blown agitators like Thomas Paine and Lord Byron were supplanted with the views of Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, thinkers who were able to pull down the veil between views strongly held views of Teufelsdröckh and the general public, who was thought incapable of holding them without disintegrating into warring social factions. The Romantic ideals were maintained, but were domesticated into an acceptable form.

We live in a postmodern world, a world ruled by the skepticism of Jacques Derrida. The sort of hard-core questioning of the foundations of our very knowledge that takes place in the works of Anthony Burgess , Kurt Vonnegut, , Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo is largely absent; only Joseph Heller, an early and once-dangerous-but-now-safe author, is represented on the BBC’s list.

The fact of the matter is that the cultural slide of Britain will not be impeded by the BBC’s failure to knowledge the world outside of its borders. America has been ascendant since the end of the second world war, but many of its greatest novelists are not represented: Dos Passos and Faulkner should be on the list before Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. There are no books by Black Americans, and this means that one of the most unforgettable novels of this or any time—Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—has been left of the list.

Final Word

The choices made by the BBC only makes sense if we look at the BBC’s list as an Anglocentric list which is as much concerned with the displacement of the once great culture of England as it is with creating a comprehensive list of the greatest works ever written. As an American, I object. The list was written by people more concerned with the domestication of thought than thought in its full-blown form. As a radical thinker, I object.

I am not advocating going backwards in any way. The ascendancy of America over Britain on the world stage will not halt the slide of Romantic culture, which was flawed from the very beginning. Memory, it has been said, is 20/20. But memory is not what we need if we are to move forward into our future. Moving forward means making our way as the blind man in the dark to the possibilities that lay before us. This is less comfortable than the easier way laid out by the BBC of having the failed policies of the past guide us towards future failures.

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