Two Defenses of the Canon, One Living and One Immortal
In this installment of his weekly readings, the novelist and critic behind Grand Hotel Abyss takes up two books about the Western literary canon: Naomi Kanakia's forthcoming What's So Great About the Great Books? and Toni Morrison's posthumous Language as Liberation. What holds them together is a shared refusal to approach the canon as supplicants. Both writers claim the tradition as their own, not by dismantling it, but by insisting they belong inside it on equal terms.
Kanakia's Case for Serious Reading
Kanakia's book, due in May from Princeton University Press, makes what the reviewer calls "a classic liberal defense of everyone's right to think through the complications of individual human existence as worked through by some of history's most articulate thinkers." She came to the Great Books late, after college, putting herself through Mortimer Adler's midcentury curriculum because she thought it necessary preparation for becoming a writer. What she discovered was that the literary establishment considered such broad reading eccentric, even suspect.
"The average MFA-holding novelist, she points out, probably hasn't read any Balzac, let alone Kant or Cicero."
The review emphasizes that Kanakia is not issuing a culture-war jeremiad. She concedes that nobody needs to read the Great Books, that religion and pop culture may serve moral deliberation and aesthetic fulfillment just as well. Her argument is narrower and more personal: these works expose readers to "the rigorously developed and expressed worldviews of extremely intelligent individuals, themselves the products of usually distant or alien cultures."
"We read these books because of the things in them that seem like bad politics. Which is to say, the moral and ideological content of the Great Books cannot be easily categorized; as with Socrates -- who could be read either as a Sophist or a philosopher -- many Great Books seem to support both sides of a position."
One might push back slightly on this framing. The idea that ambiguity is the distinctive virtue of canonical literature risks becoming its own orthodoxy, a way of domesticating difficult texts by praising them for never quite meaning anything in particular. Sometimes the Great Books are not ambiguous at all. Sometimes they are brutally clear, and that clarity is what makes them dangerous.
The Democratizing Origins of the Great Books
The review surfaces an important historical point from Kanakia's book that undercuts the common charge of elitism. The Great Books movement was not an aristocratic imposition but a middle-class aspiration, driven by immigrants' children seeking cultural footing in America.
"Mortimer Adler was the son of an unsuccessful furniture-store salesman. And people who bought into the Great Books programs were cut from a similar mold. They were largely middle-class, in the technical professions, and cut off from mainstream society."
This is a genuinely useful corrective. The sneering at Great Books programs that one encounters in English departments often comes from people who have themselves benefited from the tradition those programs made accessible. Still, one could note that democratizing origins do not immunize an institution from later becoming exclusionary. The history of universities themselves proves as much.
Morrison's Authority
The essay's treatment of Morrison begins with a scene from the 2019 documentary The Pieces I Am, in which Morrison demanded equal pay from her white male boss at Random House. Her words become the essay's controlling metaphor.
"I am head of household, just like you. You may think I'm colored or a woman, but I am head of household. Just. Like. You."
The reviewer's argument about Morrison's genius is precise and compelling. She did not petition the canon for admission. She wrote as though the entire Western tradition had been building toward her work, so that reading Beloved retroactively transforms one's experience of The Scarlet Letter or Moby-Dick. The strategy, borrowed in part from Joyce through Ellison, was to begin with the local and marginalized and render it in the elevated register of the monuments.
Where Morrison sustained this project across half a century, Joyce ended in the "dead end of vanguardist incommunicability" with Finnegans Wake, and Ellison fell into "the dead end of abashed silence before its magnitude." Morrison alone, in this telling, pulled off the trick at Shakespearean scale.
Language as Liberation: Diminishing Returns
The review is considerably less enthusiastic about Morrison's posthumous book. Language as Liberation collects lecture notes and teaching materials for her Princeton course on race in American literature, but much of it covers ground already staked out in Playing in the Dark and "Unspeakable Things Unspoken."
"Morrison obviously quarried her teaching for her criticism and vice versa, as many of us who both write and teach often do."
The reviewer doubts Morrison herself would have published the book in this form, noting that "an academic version with a proper scholarly apparatus that allows us to examine the full scope of her teaching documents and their context would almost certainly have been preferable to this incomplete-feeling collection." This is a fair concern with posthumous publications generally. The desire to honor a writer's legacy can conflict with the editorial standards that writer would have applied.
The highlights the reviewer singles out are genuinely interesting: a reading of Flannery O'Connor, an extensive analysis of Absalom, Absalom!, and a "surprisingly moving" concluding interpretation of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King. Morrison reads Bellow's fantastical Africa not as simple appropriation but as a journey whose humanity "does not finally redound to the credit of that fantasy's object."
"Saul Bellow makes no secret of the self-reflexive properties of his mission. Indeed he is refreshingly forthright. His representative American becomes free, healthy, and capable of love by his imaginative appropriation of the original Africanist Presence -- from which and in which he can discover not only what it means to be raceless, but what it means to be human."
The Footnotes as Second Essay
A distinctive feature of this piece is that its footnotes constitute nearly a second essay. The digressions range from the history of white suburban counterculture to the relative merits of Harold Bloom versus Allan Bloom, from the Germanomania of Substack intellectuals to a defense of lowercase racial designations. These asides are where the reviewer's personality emerges most fully, by turns self-deprecating and combative, erudite and gossipy.
"I somehow got it in my head at the end of December that it would be reasonable to cover The Magic Mountain, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, the Aeneid, and the entire Divine Comedy in 15 weeks. This is not reasonable."
The sprawl is part of the point. The essay enacts the very kind of reading life it describes: omnivorous, digressive, governed by passionate curiosity rather than professional obligation. Whether this makes for tighter criticism is debatable, but it certainly makes for more honest criticism.
Bottom Line
This is a dense, discursive, and often brilliant double review that uses two books about the canon to advance its own argument about literary authority. The core insight -- that Morrison and Kanakia both refuse the posture of the outsider requesting admission, instead claiming the tradition as birthright -- is genuinely illuminating. The treatment of Morrison's critical method, reading white authors from the inside out to discover what need drives their engagement with blackness, is the essay's strongest contribution. Readers who care about what it means to inherit a literary tradition not originally addressed to them will find this piece rewarding, if occasionally self-indulgent in its tangents.