The Two Bodies of Literature that Matter

Departments of literature be damned. There are two bodies of literature that matter in any individual's life: (1) Birthright Literature and (2) Acquired Tastes.

Birthright Literature is literature that bears an immediate and seemingly organic relationship to any given individual's native land and culture. This relationship is, in point of fact, an accident of birth; there is nothing about this literature that renders it intrinsically valuable or inevitable. It is the literature that one reads as a matter of course as a consequence of being born in a particular time and place. Its value and inevitability are functional: these qualities arise from the fact that such literature is absorbed by an individual's psyche like mother's milk and so it supplies the constitutional vocabulary and attitudinal thought-structure that serve as a standard of seriousness--a canon if you will--by which all future experiences with literature will be judged. In my own case, my Birthright Literature is American literature and the Bible.

Acquired Tastes are those literatures one finds oneself "instinctively" drawn to over the course of a reading life. I place the word instinctively in scare quotes because one's encounters with such literature are no less accidental than one's encounters with Birthright Literature. Nevertheless, one's readerly engagement seems to have a more arbitrary quality. This is a necessarily subjective assessment. For example, I need not have been drawn to modern French literature, Classical literature in Greek and Latin, 19th century Russian literature, or Arabic and Islamic literature over the course of my reading life--but I was and continue to be drawn to these Acquired Tastes. I am at a loss to explain why I have not found Chinese poetry more compelling--despite the fact that, whenever I have encountered it in translation, I have found myself invariably charmed. Likewise, the great Sanskrit classics (in translation) have the ability to move me, but they do not hold my attention for sustained periods of time. As the old saying goes, there is no accounting for taste.

By dividing literature into these two "bodies," I do not intend to create a center and periphery dichotomy--although I do not deny that such a dichotomy may present itself in the practices of an individual reader. Indeed, the human analytical tendency to divide (and conquer) is one that every reader should struggle to become conscious of and labor to ameliorate. The evolutionarily advantageous behaviors that social psychologists have identified as "in-group/out-group" extend to our reading habits. Caveat lector.