The Great Tradition of English literature - and its discontents

Thanks to WS for sending me a pb copy of F R Leavis's The Great Tradition - opening the package was like a opening a grad-school time capsule, the weird 1970s cerise volume with the quaint typeface that sat on my shelf unconsulted for so long - maybe this was the very copy I'd ditched years ago. In any event, this volume, what I have read of it to date, is very much of its time and not of ours. Leavis sets out to in essence discriminate among novels, to determine which are the truly great novels, or novelists, in English literature. That in itself feels as quaint as the typeface and long outdated: Granted, all readers have tastes and preferences, and critics have standards for judgment and analysis, but the need to rank novels and novelists and set up a core of elite writers is far removed from the way we read today - in which all books are "texts" that can inform, move, and change us in various ways, some more profoundly and more meaningfully than others. FRL's standards for judgement and discrimination are no doubt unassailable: novels of consistent and clear for that express a view of the world and a dedication to humanity. Yes, these are high and valuable standards - but are clearly not the only ways by which to value a novel. The writers he reveres - Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad, and Lawrence - are all great by his measures and probably by any serious measure (and he discriminates among their novels as well, judiciously). But his narrow criteria exclude many great English writers: e.g., the only Dickens he greatly admires is the very atypical Hard Times, his praise of the 18th-century novelists is condescending, he's puzzled by the great one-offs like Emily Bronte, and he's very reluctant to include his contemporaries, such as Forster, FM Ford, Woolf - where are they? Aren't there other criteria for greatness?: access to consciousness of another's consciousness (Proust, Knausgaard), development of a character over time, a journey through time and space, beauty of language and form (Joyce, anyone?), news from another culture, to name just a few. Looking back today at his work from the 1940s, we have to realize that anyone writing about English lit today - much less about world literature - would have to recognize a far wider sphere of background and influence than anything FRL could have imagined as part of his canon: Indian, Caribbean, post-colonial (Rushdie, Naipaul, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali) class (Sillitoe, Trevor, Kelman et all if we make it British lit rather than English) - maybe not all these writers in and of themselves "great" but definitely part of a great and ever-widening tradition.