A lot of times I hear people rant about how awful books (usually ones that we have to read at school, but also super popular books like Harry Potter and Twilight and whatnot get thrown in the mix) are, and how much they hate them and don’t see how anyone can stand to read them. And what gets me is when people start talking about how “bad writing” all of these classics are, because it makes me think that if the authors were really as horrible as people make them out to me, they never would’ve become “classics”. Now, I realize that the whole “classic” thing is a whole ‘nother discussion, but it makes me wonder: what makes a good book? Can you objectively say that a book is good or bad, or is it entirely objective?
I want to know what you think. For the sake of clarification, here are my questions:
1. What do you call a “good” book?
2. Is “goodness” in books entirely subjective, or can it be objective?
3. If you answered the latter to the previous question, what are the objective standards by which one can call a book good?
1. Distinguishing a “good” book from a “bad” book is mostly a matter of taste. Some good books I’ve read could have been bad if I’d read them on different days (and vice versa), so I won’t try to answer what makes a book good. I can, however, try to answer what I think makes a book great. At the most essential level, great books seek to offer answers to the questions that humans have always been asking. Some do this by simply deepening the mystery, but the appeal to mystery is something of an answer in itself. The best books try to say something about Man and God, the distance between us, our place in this time and on this earth, our future, our past, and the sickness that infects us all from birth.
Thousands of novels are published every year, most of them forgotten immediately. Of those that aren’t forgotten immediately, most are forgotten later. Some remain, though and achieve that measure of timelessness because they continue to speak to audiences long after they should have died and been put at the bottom of a cardboard box to be sold for $0.25 at a garage sale. The reason we still read John Milton is because he still has things to teach us. One of the many reasons we still read Shakespeare is because he tapped into those universal problems of the human spirit. His audience might not have recognized it, but on some level, he was popular then for the same reason he is popular now.
Great books are great because they do not die.
2. There is certainly an aspect of books (like all art) that is deeply subjective from person to person. For some reason, I loved Slaughterhouse-Five. A friend of mine thought it was rubbish. So it goes.
Everybody will experience a piece of art in a different way. And people experience different pieces of art different ways at different times. I listened to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” last Saturday and it just about broke my heart in two. It doesn’t always do that. The first time I heard it, I thought it was kind of sappy.
So yeah, there is an aspect of “goodness” in art that is subjective. Most of it is subjective, maybe. Books become classics (which is different from being great) because a large number of people had similar subjective reactions to them.
Still, I can’t help but believe there is at least some aspect of objectivity in the arts, and even in our value judgments of them.
3. Several ways:
- There is the objective judgment of what kind of impact a piece of art has. If you say “1922″ to anybody even remotely interested in literary history, they will automatically think two things: “The Waste Land” and Ulysses. While you could argue that these works were simply the explosion after a long buildup of pressure (beginning with Whitman or Blake or even Milton), it is almost impossible to overstate the importance these works had on the literature of the 20th century. Virtually everything since has fallen beneath the shadow of Joyce and Eliot. Few people (assuming they have any clue what they are talking about) would deny this. So, objectively, you can say, “The Waste Land” is a “great” work of art because, in stature, it is great.
This measure works most times, but it isn’t true every time. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was monumental, but most readers today recognize that it isn’t really good literature. But, for the most part, I think you can judge works like Ulysses to be a great book objectively in the same way that you can objectively judge Katrina to be a terrible hurricane.
- There is a way to measure good writing against poor writing. And I mean “writing” as a craft. It isn’t quantifiable, but I believe most people can tell the two apart. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that a person who believed F. Scott Fitzgerald was a bad writer of prose was wrong.
I would call this kind of measure “soft objectivity” or something like that. We can’t say objectively whether Marlon Brando or Daniel-Day Lewis is the better actor, but we can know objectively that Marlon Brando is a better actor than I am. Nobody can say what exactly separates a good writer from a bad writer, or where the line is, but some writers are just good. Shakespeare is a great writer. I’m as sure of that as I am of anything. I don’t know whether he’s better than Milton, but I do know that both of them are great.
- Books have objective meaning (which doesn’t answer the question yet, but give me a minute). That might be a controversial claim, but I can’t see how it’s not true. Nobody can know the complete meaning of any one piece of art, but the meaning does exist. And it may have many meanings. Ambiguity might be a part of its meaning, but it is there. Even the author might not hold the key, but it does not change the fact that something inspired him to write what he did. Something caused Flannery O’Connor to name the protagonist in Wise Blood Hazell Motes and not Jim Straw. Why? There is a reason, even if it is just that the author needed a catchy name. Nothing is really accidental in art. To give a more obvious example, nobody in their right mind would say that 1984 is a pro-fascist work, because it is objectively not.
Which all ties into the point above about what books say. Again, great books aim to explore great questions. I will run into problems when you say, “well, what are the so-called ‘great’ questions?” I think the best answer is that these questions are the ones that humanity has always tried to answer. If you look at the literary canon, there is remarkable continuity across time and place in terms of theme. Homer explores many of the same questions that Kurt Vonnegut does. So I would ask, do they tap into that timeless urge to know or don’t they?
- Humans know good storytelling from bad storytelling. (I guarantee you that there is not a single great novel out there in which the hero has no admirable qualities.)
And of course, there is a great deal of subjectivity in art. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But if I didn’t believe there was something real and concrete in art – a part that said something universal about the spirit – then I’d be wasting my time.
Great post, and I’m excited to read what others have to say.
I like what you say about “soft objectivity”. I’m assuming that you got that from somewhere else, so I won’t commend your genius for making it up (if I’m wrong, by all means, be commended), but I think that term describes well how we can call works of art “great” or “bad”.
I think often times when people lament how “horrible” a book is, what they are really trying to say is how much they dislike it, for whatever reason. So the lines between objective and subjective goodness get blurred by language. But I think that part of the problem is not so much that people use misleading language, but more that they have become so accustomed to judging everything based off its ability to divert them, that they have almost no capacity for appreciate art for its own sake. I know a very few people who can read a book and say “I hated every plot turn in that story, and I hated everything the author had to say, and I hated the style that he/she wrote it in…but I have to give it to him/her–that was a good book, and I enjoyed reading it”.
I think people nowadays come a books the way they come at music–they want to read things to their taste, with the message they want to hear. There’s little to now interest in joining the “Great Conversation” (as some call it) of Western thought through the ages. People aren’t interested in asking the questions that have always been asked, if they are, they aren’t willing to hear an answer they don’t like. And so all we want is to be entertained.
In the words of Switchfoot, “I don’t know what love is, and I don’t know who I am; I don’t wanna read the book–I’ll watch the movie”.
Haha, hopefully someone else bites on this. I think it’s a quite interesting discussion.
As far as I know, I made that term up, but I just needed a place holder that conveyed what I wanted to say in less than three words.
I know a very few people who can read a book and say “I hated every plot turn in that story, and I hated everything the author had to say, and I hated the style that he/she wrote it in…but I have to give it to him/her–that was a good book, and I enjoyed reading it”.
Haha, I don’t care how I come off, The Bell Jar was a bad book.
Well serious props on the term then. I like it.
Oh, and I don’t blame you about The Bell Jar;. Books by total psychopaths are excluded from any list of “great books”.
Haha, hopefully someone else bites on this.
Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I check this site more often than the people who run it.
Here’s my 2 cents.
It’s hard for me to put into words what makes a book good in my mind, because I’m more likely to remember the scene in a book that the words describing the scene.
I can tell you that when Ransom came out of the cave finally in the end of Perelandra, there was a vibrantly blue pond and the grass was perfect and cut short and there were low branches that he laid under for he-doesn’t-even-remember how long. I can tell you that Frodo and Sam looked out through the waterfalls when they met Faramir for the first time in that place I can’t remember the name of when Faramir captured Gollum, and that the water was sparkling and beautiful and the sun glinted off of it in a surreal way.
But, in neither of those situations can I tell you what the writer actually wrote. I assume it was amazing writing, since it painted such vivid pictures in my head and has stayed in my head so long (and since it was Lewis and Tolkien but that’s beside the point). My point is, a good book stays with you. It may be because of the scenes it put into your head, the plot, the new ideas presented, the characters and their decisions and personalities, the descriptive writing. It could have none of those things, it could have all of those things, but if you continually mull it over or find yourself coming back to it, then it is a good book. I’m willing to make that a blanket statement.
I’m also willing to say that in a general sense, the “goodness” of a book is entirely subjective to the general public. Most people could not care less if a book uses literary devices well, they only care if it piques their interest and stays with them.
I think we run the risk of falling into the “art for art’s sake” trap if we decide that a book’s “goodness” is based on the skill with which it is written. I think there’s more to it than technical skill.
And I’m not saying this against what had been said already, btw.
Thoughts?