Ebadur Rahman in LA Review of Books:
THE GUARDIAN’S “100 Best Novels of All Time” list is best approached not as a verdict but as evidence, an involuntary cultural confession revealing the mechanisms by which one particular literary culture decides what counts as literature. Lists of this kind are not cartographies of anything real. They are maps of a culture’s readiness to recognize, and the distance between recognition and judgment, though almost never acknowledged, is precisely where literary history whooshes and purrs.
Raymond Williams’s description of the canon as a “selective tradition,” offered in his Marxism and Literature (1977), remains indispensable to any honest engagement with exercises of this kind. Williams understood that canons do not simply preserve excellence; they preserve the forms of excellence that institutions already know how to teach, translate, and consecrate. But the selective tradition never feels like selection. It feels like inheritance: the apparently natural accumulation of worth over time, the slow geological settling of greatness. This is precisely its authority, and precisely its danger. Every canon believes itself to have transcended the misjudgments of its predecessors, and this conviction is among the oldest and most persistent of aesthetic errors.
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