by Joseph Carter Milholland
Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost
my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of
myself, and what remains is bestial.
– Cassio (Othello, Act 2, Scene 3)
So far, my focus in this series of essays (see part 1 here and part 2 here) has been how we write and talk about the literary canon. The canon is a rather abstract subject, but when we talk about how the canon has changed, we are wont to talk about something even more abstract: a writer’s reputation.
“Reputation” – read enough literary essays, and you’ll see that word appear again and again. “In recent years Kipling’s reputation has taken such a beating that it’s a wonder any sensible critic would want to go near him now,” a writer in the New Yorker explains. “A century after his birth, and more than half a century after his death, Wilde continues to enjoy a reputation that can hardly be justified by his mere literary achievement,” alleges another writer in the New Republic. “In the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate (not counting writers from other countries who became American citizens), Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure,” a third writer in Slate asserts.
Reading all this concern over reputation can be a bit dispiriting; the literary critic who records the minute changes in a writer’s reputation begins to look drearily like that of a day trader obsessing over the small variations in corporate shares (only, the literary critic makes a lot less money). What, after all, does reputation have to do with serious literary criticism? If a writer is good, why bother at all about their reputation?
There is no reliable, empirical way of measuring reputations; critics who write about reputation are merely relaying their impression of how much an author is valued by others. This doesn’t mean writing about a reputation is always a frivolous waste of time: a skillful critic can use a writer’s reputation as a vantage point from which to illuminate various aspects of their work. A good recent example of this is Leo Robson’s article in the New Left Review’s Sidecar about Milan Kundera, whose myriad obsessions and peculiarities are examined through the reactions they generated from Kundera’s readers. Robson even acknowledges how flimsy a concept reputation can be when he notes that Harold Bloom “asserted – on what basis he does not specify – that ‘young people no longer go off to the Czech capital with his novels in their backpacks.’” (For my part, I recently went to Prague with a novel by Bohumil Hrabal in my tote bag).
Some reputational changes are easy enough to track over the long term: Walter Scott’s has descended, Virginia Woolf’s has ascended. The article I quoted above that said Toni Morrison’s reputation “is by no means secure” was written in 2008; it is fair to say that in the past 15 years her critical reputation has become much more secure. But literary criticism is neither a very large-scale endeavor nor is it at all centralized, and some claims about reputational changes (like Bloom’s on Kundera) are suspect as to their veracity. The comment from the New Yorker that Kipling’s reputation has suffered “in recent years” is rather curious; already in 1941 Orwell was writing of Kipling that “during five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him.” Kipling, it seems, has had battalions of detractors for as long as his work has been around.
To return to the theme of this series of essays, how does reputation affect how the canon is made and read?
Some define the canon by pointing to one of the great books lists that academics craft now and again. But really, in the purest sense, the canon is simply all the books that are more than fifty years old that are still in print. Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been savaged by critics again and again throughout the decades, but you can find it in almost any bookshop, so it’s in the canon; meanwhile, a select few have said that George Borrow’s Lavengro is one of the finest books in English – but good luck locating a physical copy.
What comes into, goes out of, and remains in print is partially determined by sales, but reputation plays a role as well. When a book is resurrected, often it will be due to its reputation among certain literary connoisseurs. A good recent example is Kay Dick’s 1977 novel They: long out of print, it was praised by Lucy Scholes in a 2020 Paris Review column, only to be republished by McNally Editions in 2022 (with an afterword by Scholes herself).
In fact, one can tell a lot about a culture based on the old books it resurrects. As it happens, for about two and a half years now I have been writing a newsletter dedicated to reviews of books more than fifty years old that have been published in the past year. Some of these are re-issues or new translations of very well known books, but often they are new editions of books that have long been out of print, or translations of books by authors totally unfamiliar to the English-speaking world.
So what are publishers of old books interested in right now? Here are four of the most prominent trends that I have observed:
- Minor European Languages – Books translated from French, German, Italian, and Russian have always dominated the catalogs of classic literature. But now, many of the old books appearing in English for the first time are translations from the smaller European languages, such as Romanian, Hungarian, Finnish, and Danish. And soon the Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature will be releasing translations of the most important Ukrainian writers of the 20th century, such as Maik Yohansen, Valerian Pidmohylny, and Lesya Ukrainka. Even though Portuguese is not a minor European language (it’s the world’s fifth largest language by number of native speakers), this trend may, strangely enough, explain why Brazil’s major writers, before now comparatively overlooked compared to the major Spanish American writers, are also being published in great numbers: multiple new books from Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, and Mário de Andrade have all appeared lately.
- Middle Eastern Literature, Especially Turkish and Persian – Many great books written in both the Turkish and Persian languages have long been out of reach, despite their acclaim and historical importance. This is starting to change, fortunately: we’ve seen some new translations of the great Persian poets of the Middle Ages, such as Rumi and Nizami Ganjavi, as well as some 20th century authors such as Forugh Farrokhzad and Sadeq Hedayat. The Turkish literature that is appearing now is largely from the second half of the 20th century, featuring writers such as Oguz Atay, Ferit Edgü, Sevgi Soysal, and Leylâ Erbil.
- Women Writers of the 20th Century – Tove Ditlevsen, who I mentioned in my last column, is just one of many 20th century female writers who are being acknowledged or re-acknowledged as a significant author due to new editions of their work appearing. As well as Ditlevsen and the above-mentioned Farrokhzad, Lispector, and Kay Dick, we have also seen the recent introduction or re-introduction of Magda Szabo, Rosemary Tonks, Ann Quin, Nelly Sachs, Nancy Hale, and Margaret Kennedy, among several others. It would be reductive to say these writers all channel the “female experience,” but many of them write very cuttingly about gender.
- Philosophically Engaged Literature – Gratifyingly, I have found that it has not been the case that writers are being translated from foreign countries for purely representational reasons: that is, not because they provide local color from a particular part of the world, or because they highlight some particular social issue. Instead, many translated writers come from a tradition preoccupied with the vita contemplativa – that is, literature that seeks transcendent values outside of the instability of “ordinary” life. I am over-generalizing here; what I mean is that many of the writers I encounter in my newsletter seem to share the concerns about knowledge and meaning that appear in Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Bernhard. Even writers who do not clearly fit into this tradition nevertheless value the life of the mind over the events of the material world: Ditlevsen lived through the Nazi Occupation of Denmark, but in her autobiography the historical events are only a dimmed background over which she pursues her poetic impulses and judges the character of individuals.
The East Asian languages seem not to have fared as well recently in terms of translations – there have been some fine translations, but little that stands out as particularly revelatory from the past few years (though there’s been an increased and ongoing interest in Uyghur literature recently).
Most fortunately of all, we have seen totally unexpected works that fall outside any of our preconceived categories, such as People from Bloomington, a book of short stories by the Indonesian author Budi Darma based on his time in Bloomington, Indiana, along with Discourses of the Elders, a translation of the Latin transcripts of Aztec philosophy compiled by a 16th century Spanish priest. Deep Vellum’s release of Leylâ Erbil’s A Strange Woman would seem to fall into the categories I pointed out above – it is a philosophically-engaged novel by a Turkish woman – but it seems an insult to reduce it to any of those things – it is hardly even a novel.
What can we conclude from this? All four of the trends I highlighted point to an interest in marginal literature as I defined it in my last column. While an individual book that falls under any of those four categories is not necessarily marginal, that these are the works of literature that are being added to the canon excites me. It is an opportunity to reassess and re-interpret literary history, to absorb different stories, and different ways of telling stories, about our literary past. Doing so honestly, while preserving and cultivating the standards of the greatest literature, will be difficult; it will take a more than usual perspicacity from writers, publishers, translators, and readers, especially in this age of digital distractions. But I think it can be done. Let us not waste the opportunity.