On Great Books
I read two very
interesting takes on “great” books. The first one was by Deirdre Nansen
McCloskey who talks about a book that “sits on every college reading list”: Max
Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism. The book’s stance
is that the religious ideas of Protestants in general (and Calvinists in
particular) is what led to the rise of the capitalistic spirit (and system). McCloskey
writes:
“But
that a book is "great" does not mean it is correct, or is to be taken
as good history or good economics or good theology. Marx's Das
Kapital is indubitably a great
book, one of the very greatest of the 19th century, as I say to annoyed friends
of libertarian or conservative bent. But then I say to my left-wing friends,
annoying them too, that Marx was wrong on almost every point of economics,
history, and politics.”
“Great” does not
mean “correct”: that’s a very interesting point!
The other article
was by Umberto Eco who had this to say in his review of Pierre Bayard's book,
How to
Talk About Books You Haven't Read:
“He declares without shame that he has
never read James Joyce’s Ulysses, but that he can talk about it by alluding to
the fact that it’s a retelling of the Odyssey, which he also admits never
having read in its entirety… Knowing a book’s relationship to other books often
means you know more about it than you do on actually reading it. ... An
intriguing aspect of this book, which is less paradoxical than it might seem,
is that we also forget a very large percentage of the books we have actually
read, and indeed we build a sort of virtual picture of them that consists not
so much of what they say but what they have conjured up in our mind.”
An oft-referenced
or oft-quoted book often makes us feel that we know the book! And we confuse
our takeaway from a book with what the book actually said.
And on that last
point, I loved Rob Beschizza’s remark:
“And now we do this with the news, too.”
A pretty good subject issue for a blog and it is succinctly presented.
ReplyDeleteI was surprised and happy when I read the quote from McCloskey, “But that a book is "great" does not mean it is correct, or is to be taken as good history or good economics or good theology. Marx's Das Kapital is indubitably a great book, one of the very greatest of the 19th century, as I say to annoyed friends of libertarian or conservative bent. But then I say to my left-wing friends, annoying them too, that Marx was wrong on almost every point of economics, history, and politics.”
I was surprised and happy because, in my own way, this is the attitude I have got into, over a period. [Communicating such ideas to others generally landed up into endless arguments and go entirely tangential. :-( ]
What the blogger says towards the end, "And we confuse our takeaway from a book with what the book actually said" has great depth, because this is the eternal dilemma of communication itself! Let me share some of my views about communication here, taking off from the blog's highlight on "what books may want to communicate and what their influence could be".
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We all can sense this truth: Let's say A Has a crystal clear idea, which we will call as X. A conveys that to B. What has B got, is a billion dollar question! Strange, eh? What B got is most likely this:- some part of X which is the intrinsic idea + some part of Y, which we will define as B's inability to understand the X conceptually + some part of Z, which we will define as B's paradigm. Who would deny that we are all bound rigidly by our preferences and dislikes about everything almost! The degree will vary, no do doubt, but the basic truth of it stays.
Looking farther, with such widespread limitations in "transplanting" ideas from one mind to another, the success story of mankind in communication is stupendous! :-) Who can doubt that the ability of human mind to address issues (including the problem of communication) is marvelous. That "human evolution has communication as its foundation" seems plausible.
Well then, the building has many flaws, but the foundation appears pretty strong! :-)