A little over a year ago, I read James Joyce's Ulysses for the very first time. Joyce's novel is considered one of the best books ever written, and the Modern Library named it the greatest work-of-fiction of the 20th Century. I am working on getting through said Modern Library list as part of my book club, and so I knew this would eventually become a mountain I'd have to conquer. As I was going, though, I was finding that I wasn't entirely understanding everything happening. Joyce's novel is a take on Homer's Odyssey, which I've read (even though it's been a number of years since I tackled it), but it also relates back to a number of allusions to Irish politics and social taboos of the time, and it's a hard read. The novel is regularly listed on "Banned Books" lists for school libraries, but my take after reading Joyce's magnum opus is if you're smart enough to understand which parts of Ulysses are dirty, you're old enough to read the book. It was a challenge, and enough to make me think that Finnegans Wake (generally considered to be the most intellectually steep of Joyce's works) will be a good way to end this project rather than tackling it in the near future (for the curious about my current Modern Library progress, I just finished up Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, which I loved, and will be reading Iris Murdoch's Under the Net next; I'm going out of order but I'm at 36 books at this point).
I read the book not just because it's part of a project, but also because I firmly believe that classic novels should be read. There has been a lot of discussion in the past couple of decades about the value of the canon, not least of which because the most ardent defender of the Western Canon, Yale Professor Harold Bloom, was generally known to be a jackass in his personal life. But I think foundational literature and cinema is important, enough so that I devoted one of my final posts before my hiatus to it. You can debate what qualifies as a classic, but Ulysses is one of those texts that needs to be on the list regardless of how you define the parameters. And even if it's tough to comprehend sometimes, to quote one of my friends who I texted about halfway through knowing that I might not make it, "just keep reading, because it'll be worth it...even if you don't understand all of it." He was right-Ulysses was magnificent, the kind of book you could read 50 times and experience something new in its 700-pages every time.
But something has happened in the classics debate that I think is really disturbing: the debate over what constitutes essential reading has laid a path for people just to find it acceptable to not read at all. This was discussed in-depth online in the wake of Christopher Nolan's decision to make his next film an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey (which, of course, is what Ulysses is based on...see the method to my madness there?). So many people, particularly younger people, had no concept of what The Odyssey was, and they were receiving public shaming from posters who were stunned they knew so little about one of the building blocks of literature. This received a backlash, with those who initially didn't know about The Odyssey proclaiming anything from "that isn't taught in my country" (which is a lie if you had a European or North American education, which most of these posters did-even if it's not taught directly you're going to get allusions to Homer's work in at least one class if you're paying attention), and that it was "too difficult" for them to understand. This led to more reveals of people using AI to understand it, dumbing down the story to simpler language (not just Homer, but everything from Dickens to Shakespeare) to the tried-and-true method of "there are no universal classics" so this isn't "essential" reading.
I'm not going to champion Harold Bloom, who is a blowhard even if I've got one of his books directly behind me right now, but I am going to say this: The Odyssey is a classic of literature. Bloom's approach, and much of 20th Century studies of creative fiction, oftentimes precluded women, persons of color, and authors who were not from the United States, Canada, or Europe from "the canon." That's just a fact. But it's also foolish to backtrack so badly in trying to correct that to pretend that something like The Odyssey shouldn't be considered a classic-most of literature is in Homer's shadow...most of art is in Homer's shadow. It's influential in a way only The Bible & Dante's The Divine Comedy can manage to trump in cultural conversation. If you haven't read it, you can own up to it (even more so than movies, everyone has a classic book they've never gotten around to-my copies of Moby Dick and Ivanhoe have done nothing but collect dust since I bought them), but to pretend it's not important or that you can call yourself educated without having at least a cursory understanding of its story is, well, laughable.
Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey are unique in most cultural conversations because, of course, no one is exactly sure if anything their reading in terms of plot and certainly in terms of verse is actually linked with Homer's original story. Very little is known about his life (and what is is based on people like Herodotus, who lived centuries after Homer), and his poems were carried forward through oral tradition before being published, first in Greek in the 15th Century. So if you're reading it in English, you are reading a translation. Same with The Bible and The Divine Comedy.
But other figures that got brought into this conversation online, like Charles Dickens, were written in a very readable language for people who speak English. People like Dickens have long been translated into baser editions of their books; when I was in 4th and 5th grade, I read the "Great Illustrated Classics" installments of A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations as a way to learn more about these stories. But those editions, I cannot stress enough, are for children. They are not intended to be read by adults as definitive editions of these works. Dickens is an accessible writer-he is not Joyce or even Dante...he is writing for the masses. I read A Christmas Carol recently for the holiday season, and was struck by how similar it is to the many movie adaptations of it...it shouldn't be hard to read his novels. If you are struggling with that and you're out of high school...it might not be that these books are "super challenging" for most people. It's more likely that you are just not a practiced or strong reader.
These debates spark up constantly in the past few years, which is terrifying coupled with the rise in fascist rhetoric from right-leaning parties in the United States and Europe. Anti-intellectualism is a key component of most rises of fascist regimes through history, one of the reasons that book burning became so synonymous with the Nazis. But even taking politics out of it, the rise of AI to "do your thinking for you" and skipping the thinking for you, particularly for students who need to have the practice of academic rigor to, well, learn anything (you can only get by with not doing the reading for so long before you've actually not done anything), is also terrifying. ChatGPT is opening the door to a world of people who aren't smart enough to understand books that have been taught to people much younger than them for over a century. Reading is meant to be enjoyable and pleasurable-that's why it's a leisure activity. But as I've said before on here, if you don't occasionally challenge yourself with what you're reading or watching on TV or watching at the movies or seeing on a stage...when are you? Critical thinking is a skill, and if you don't use it (or let someone else, or some thing, do it for you) you'll lose that skill.
