It is a truth universally acknowledged that literary critics are the most annoying people in the world. They’re elitist, or undignified. They’re divisive. They’re snobs. Their profession is, in fact, dead, and has been for decades. And upon realizing that they are irrelevant, they take themselves way too seriously.
Overseeing the development of a literary culture, which is part of a critic’s job, is a process of fits and starts. Critics play a role in determining which books published today should be branded “instant classics,” which authors are best described as “little-known” and which books published in past decades or centuries merit re-examination. Beginning in the early 20th century, reissues complicated those categories. Older books like “The Dud Avocado” and “Stoner” — and even “Moby-Dick” and “The Great Gatsby” — became more famous upon reprinting than they had been when originally published.
The canon itself is in a constant, ongoing process of being shaped by book lovers who are often in disagreement not only about what qualifies as literature but also about the purpose of reading literature. But this is a feature, not a bug: The journey of discovering literature — for critics and also for everyday readers — is made of detours. A reissue, more often than not published after the author is deceased, rebalances the purpose of literature away from writer intent and more toward reader intent. Reissues are about readers recovering what is worthy about another world. As one early 2000s reissue of a perhaps forgotten 1953 classic had it, “the past is a foreign country.”
Early last year, the small magazine n+1 reiterated a longstanding policy: No dead people. Reading work from dead authors may be inevitable, but as literary critics tasked with creating and shaping the conversation, writing about dead people was considered unacceptable — because it was unfair to expect that contemporary writers, already struggling to secure attention for their work, compete with their predecessors. We need, n+1 argued, to “redirect the public’s attention to the under-read work of the living.”
The magazine has amended this policy over the years, but it was not alone in the general idea that many dead authors are often overhyped. Every so often a new list of overrated classics presents itself, identifying authors who have had “more than enough time in the sun,” crowdsourcing titles that deserve to be demoted, giving readers “permission” to not read them. This, too, is how the canon is made and remade.
Such is also the case with underrated classics. “Enough with the ‘forgotten’ writers,” a writer in The Week implored in 2017: It’s a tired excuse to talk about an author or subject we like, and it shouldn’t be necessary. Sometimes the critic rebels against the publisher and its publicist. Last summer, a review of Susan Taubes’s novel “Lament for Julia” criticized the way editors decide (seemingly capriciously) which authors deserve to be republished: by humoring the critic’s tendency to pontificate on an arbitrary subject with “indirect self-presentation,” to “hoist his reputation by raising another’s.”
It’s true that the literary world — perhaps egged on by editors, publishers and critics alike — also frequently talks about reviving “unjustly neglected” voices from the depths of history, trying to ensure they are “rescued from oblivion.” And it’s true that sometimes we have ridiculous ideas of who has been forgotten or overlooked. Has John O’Hara been unjustly forgotten three years after a flurry of reissue-related press? Are Alice Munro, James Salter and Langston Hughes really “notoriously underrated”?
The urgent need to slot historical works of literature into some sort of forced contemporary relevance, whether by insisting on their prophetic nature or wiping them from the collective memory in order to rescue them, seems to miss the idea that reissues may have inherent value because they have aged, or even simply because they are enjoyable. Perhaps Ms. Taubes has something different or more to offer without being reduced to an early example of autofiction. Perhaps a Marguerite Duras novel of rural French poverty and exhaustion does not need to be introduced and contextualized within a story of being a tired mother in a white-collar home in the United States. Perhaps Elsa Morante deserves better than to be remembered in the shadow of Elena Ferrante.
Critics and readers tend to be insufferable nostalgics. In a letter he sent from exile in 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli described his evening routine: After coming home from the “vulgarity” and “trifles” of daily life, he donned “garments regal and courtly” to commune with the dead. Reading those before him, he was “not frightened by death,” and instead gave himself “over to them,” his literary forebears.
I am fond of this folly, of this excessive ego combined with excessive sentimentality. But seeking counsel from the dead is to take comfort not only in how relatable or similar to us they were, but also in how different they were, how differently they experienced poverty or sexuality or sexual politics or wartime. There is a deranged, eerie magic, a breathless mania, to the women of Ms. Taubes’s and Ms. Duras’s and Ms. Morante’s fiction that speaks for itself — and is magnetic not because it’s familiar but because it isn’t familiar in the slightest.
We don’t rescue and recirculate authors in order to do right by them, but because their work is a piece of history. We need to understand literature in its own right and as an expression of its own time and context, even if that context is horrifying or alien or uninviting or problematic. Perhaps there will always be something unscientific about how we decide whom to bring back into the conversation, but who cares?
The constant negotiation with history is itself the most critical aspect of a constantly developing canon. And so the questions never cease: Why rescue dead white men instead of marginalized writers? Why edit problematic dead authors? Why force dead writers to keep publishing books from beyond the grave? What do we do with writers who don’t want to be read?
To even be asking these questions is a kind of communing with the past, and critics must do that. But to live a rich reading life, all readers, not just critics, should resist the imperative to treat reissues as particularly pertinent to our current moment, and instead view them as objects through which to experience a different moment. We should welcome the critic’s sentimentality and enthusiasm, her insistence on talking about books and authors she fears no one cares about — because we should resist the impulse to justify every moment of time we spend, and more importantly because to only consume art that was created in our lifetimes is a terrifying thought.
Reading well — and writing good criticism — brings a sense of wonder to history, and despite the egotism or sentimentality that may sometimes inspire reissues, what they uniquely do is compel an experience of and negotiation with the past that will always be important.
Apoorva Tadepalli (@storyshaped) is a critic based in Queens. She has written for publications including The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Point, Bookforum and The Nation.
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