Literary Heresy, Cheerfully Committed

 

  

What “great literary influence” do you secretly think is overrated—but are afraid to say publicly?

 

Here’s my career-limiting confession.

 

I don’t think the most overrated literary influence is Shakespeare. Or Austen. Or Joyce.

 

I think it’s the idea of the canon itself.

 

Not because the canon is full of bad books. Far from it. But we treat it as though it descended from Sinai engraved on stone tablets rather than assembled, revised, argued over, marketed, anthologized, and taught by generations of critics, professors, publishers, and readers.

 

I came to that conclusion because of crime fiction.

 

People often lump Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler together because both wrote hard-boiled detective novels. That’s like saying Hemingway and Keats both wrote in English.

 

Hammett is to Hemingway as Chandler is to Keats.

 

Hammett strips language to the bone. Every sentence earns its keep. Chandler revels in metaphor, rhythm, and lyricism. One reports. The other performs.

 

Or, to borrow from journalism, Hammett is Jimmy Breslin while Chandler is Pete Hamill. Both wrote about the same world. One chased blunt force; the other chased music.

 

That, to me, is influence.

 

Hammett gave writers permission to be lean, unsentimental, and ruthlessly economical. Chandler gave them permission to be lyrical without sacrificing toughness. One proved detective fiction could achieve power through restraint. The other proved it could aspire to poetry. I mix both in my own writing.

 

Those influences matter to me far more than whether someone has a permanent reservation in an English department.

 

Which is why I admire plenty of canonical writers.

 

I just don’t worship them. Some leave me cold.

 

Moby-Dick? Half novel, half encyclopedia on whales.

 

Ulysses? I respect it more than I enjoy it.

 

Dostoevsky makes me want to open a vein.

 

If Tolstoy spends one more page describing a wheat field, I’m going to turn into that fellow inside the The Scream painting.

 

And yes, I once announced in a university classroom that Whitman was overrated—and something of a marketing genius. He self-published Leaves of Grass repeatedly, kept revising it, and famously “borrowed” Emerson’s private praise as promotional copy.

 

That’s not just poetry. That’s branding.

 

For the record, I do think Whitman is America’s great poet of death. Greatness and sainthood aren’t the same thing.

 

My professors were… less amused than I was.

 

That experience taught me something.

 

We often mistake fame for influence, influence for quality, and quality for whatever appears most often on a syllabus.

 

The bestseller lists of a century ago are mostly forgotten. Marketing fades. Fashion changes. Literary reputations rise and fall. Yet we’re remarkably confident that today’s canon represents objective truth rather than generations of critics, teachers, publishers, and institutions deciding what deserves to survive.

 

Education ought to teach us to argue with evidence. Too often it teaches us whom not to argue with because it is heretical to question indoctrination. Literature isn’t a religion.

 

It’s a conversation, and not a contest as to what deserves the capital L in literature.

 

Genre suffers in this false hierarchy. We still talk as though “literary” fiction occupies a higher plane than crime, mystery, fantasy, or science fiction.

 

I don’t buy it. Genre isn’t a lesser form. It’s simply a framework of rules. Violate them at your peril. The artistry lies in what the writer accomplishes within its rules.

 

Here’s another small heresy.

 

I genuinely enjoy Jane Austen, but I have ‘issues’ with Miss Austen. She largely erases the human cost of the Napoleonic Wars. Officers in Persuasion and Pride & Prejudice discuss prize money. Empire hums politely in the background without criticism. That’s a perfectly legitimate artistic choice, but it reminds us that every writer—even a canonical one—has blind spots.

 

Which brings me back to the question: What’s overrated?

 

The notion that the canon is beyond questioning.

 

The older I get, the less I am interested in inherited opinions and the more I am interested in discovering my own.

 

The book that changed your life at sixteen may disappoint you at fifty. The one you ignored for decades may suddenly become indispensable. Perhaps you weren’t ready to receive it. That’s not inconsistency or a flaw. That’s growth.

 

There are more books than any of us could read in ten lifetimes.

 

Read widely. Read recklessly. I say, read outside the syllabus or in the internet chatter.

 

The greatest instrument of literary rebellion has never been a banned book.

 

It’s a library card.