Christopher J. Scalia has written a book that takes a valiant stand against the self-obsessed screen-culture spirit of our times. It’s called 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read). Scalia, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a former English professor, and he has a deep and abiding love for literature as well as an evangelical streak that compels him to spread the joy. “Why read fiction?” he asks, and replies, “Simple: great fiction is a source of beauty, and beauty is good.”
This sentiment stands sharply in contrast to the milieu in which Scalia’s book appears. For years now, it seems that every day has brought a new story about how young people find it hard to read at book length, so thoroughly steeped are they in other media, especially short-form video content on their phones. While some enter the rejoinder that old people have been complaining about the declining literacy of youth for generations, this observation doesn’t clear the hurdle of the possibility that the literacy of youth actually has been declining for generations, with TikTok the impetus for the latest fall-off.
The arrival of AI in 2023 has made matters worse. Now you can get a summary of any book you want out of ChatGPT or Grok (though there is substantial risk AI will tell you something that isn’t true). Beauty aside, whatever utility that once came from reading a book—say, the ability to write an assigned paper—is capable of fulfillment by more efficient means. Nowadays, one can also bypass the summary and prompt AI to write the whole paper.
Under such circumstances, what is the utility function of reading? This is the first problem Scalia is up against. The second, which paradoxically points toward a solution to the first, is our gaping political polarization. With regard to literature, the leftward extreme has little to no use for works from the past, the authors of which suffer from the fundamental deficiency of bad character in the view of their modern readers—actually, their modern nonreaders—who feel themselves to be undeniably superior in sense and sensibility. At best, the malignant dead offer passages that can be pressed into service in support of one’s position in current controversies—a use of literature that is hardly novel, though rarely admirable.
A recent example is an article in the New York Times that recasts Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as an extended hidden polemic against slavery. I’d say the urge to read Mansfield Park as an abolitionist tract begins with the recognition that Austen’s genius is undeniable—and therefore deserving of a context, however stretched, in which it can resonate with today’s bien-pensant opinion. Although this reading, if true, would reduce Mansfield Park to a middlebrow problem novel—which it isn’t—the bright side here is that a new reader looking for a self-affirming anti-slavery allegory might make the pleasant discovery of something different and better.
The ransacking of the past in search of good material has at least the virtue of proceeding from a core hypothesis that literature has intentional meaning accessible to careful readers. The denial of this proposition is an even worse practice of the literary left. I have a higher degree of tolerance for critical theory than most in my political demographic—but not to the point at which authorial intention and meaning get dismissed as inaccessible and irrelevant as reader confronts text. Yet that view began its takeover of mainstream academia more than two generations ago, starting with Roland Barthes’s 1967 proclamation of “The Death of the Author.”
Within a decade, deconstruction and other fashions of theory had become so dominant that two UK novelists and professors, David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury, could put forth a years-long tag-team procession of campus novels hilariously lampooning the phenomenon and its practitioners. Theory fully flowered as an object of satire with John L’Heureux’s 1996 The Handmaid of Desire, in which an ambitious professor at a school resembling Stanford (where L’Heureux taught) plots to replace the English Department with the “Department of Discourse and Theory”—even as he keeps locked in a desk drawer a copy of Austen’s Emma, to which he secretly repairs in times of stress.
The combination of screen culture, runaway presentism, and the triumph of theory over author gives Scalia the opportunity he has seized: making the case that conservatives should devote some of their time and intellectual energy to conserving the literary tradition of the novel. Ruling out already well-known candidates such as the Austen novels, 1984 and Bonfire of the Vanities, Scalia has picked 13 entries for his list, offering for each a summary interpretive essay, including relevant biographical details, and consideration of how the work resonates with conservative sensibility. He spells out the elements of the conservative disposition he sees reflected in his selections as follows:
They include the preference for gradual social and political change over sudden innovation and revolution; the recognition of the imperfectability of mankind and the consequent dangers—and inevitable doom—of utopian projects; an inclination toward time-tested traditions over abstract theory and untested innovation; a respect for religious belief, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition; and an emphasis on the institutions of civil society, especially the family.
It’s off to the books, then, with chapters starting with Samuel Johnson’s 1759 Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, and proceeding chronologically to Christopher Beha’s 2020 The Index of Self-Destructive Acts. And here’s where a certain competitive streak, as well as a certain modesty, must kick in.
In Lodge’s 1976 novel Changing Places, which kicked off the duet with Bradbury, a young British professor of English, on exchange at a university resembling Berkeley, introduces his American colleagues to a party game from home. It’s called “Humiliation.” Players take turns naming a work they haven’t read, and they get one point for each player in the group who has read it. So to win, the humiliation one inflicts is upon oneself. In the Changing Places installment of the game, one assistant professor, seized by competitive spirit, blurts out “Hamlet!” No one believes him, but he swears an oath that he’s telling the truth, eventually storming out of the room over colleagues doubting his veracity. So, yes, a member of the English faculty who hasn’t read Hamlet. For his department colleagues, this is a bit much. He unexpectedly flunks his tenure review three days later and is driven into exile.
Scalia’s list immediately causes one to do a conservative literacy tally in line with “Humiliation.” To play this version, just give yourself a minus-one for each unread novel from the two above on Scalia’s list and the 11 following: Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Walter Scott’s Waverley, Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, Zora Neale Thurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, Muriel Sparks’s The Girls of Slender Means, V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, P.D. James’s The Children of Men, and Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River.
I won’t tell you my score. But I will admit that I hadn’t read Johnson’s Rasselas or Beha’s Index before I agreed to review Scalia’s book. To check his work, I then did read them. It turns out that he’s a reliable and entertaining guide.
“Johnson wrote Rasselas over the course of a week in 1759 quite simply because he needed the money,” Scalia notes. And indeed, it reads like something written in a week by someone who needed the money—provided the someone in question was the towering literary figure of the eponymous Age of Johnson. In it, a young Abyssinian prince and his sister break out of their elegant captivity in the “Happy Valley” in the company of an older and wiser man, Imlac, who has traveled the world. He guides Rasselas in the search for his “choice of life.”
Rasselas is at times very funny. For example, Imlac tells the travelers about the time he once spent with one of the greatest astronomers in the world. The astronomer’s studies of the movement of celestial bodies have forced him to the conclusion that through his influence on them, he has the power to control the weather—though he has concluded it best not to do so. Seeking inner peace, the troubled astronomer solemnly transfers his unique power to Imlac. At the conclusion of Imlac’s tale, his auditors are amused to varying degrees by the madness of the astronomer. Imlac upbraids them: “Few can attain this man’s knowledge and few practice his virtues, but all may suffer his calamity. Of the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason.”
Scalia notes that the travelers’ journey becomes a stage for Johnson’s depiction of his ceaseless “belief in a universal human nature.” In the end, the journey is one toward an understanding of human potential and its perils, not a preparation for a culminating “choice of life.”
Of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, Scalia notes that “Beha bristles when reviewers and interviewers compare him to Tom Wolfe.” But the family resemblance to Bonfire is unmistakable: money and influence in upper-crust New York City, ambition, selfishness, bad choices leading to the inexorable pressing in of fearsome consequences.
Though Wolfe’s powers of observation are keener, Beha has more psychological depth and wider intellectual range. That includes an exceptionally well-rendered character, Margo, a sometimes-aspiring poet whose interior monologues brim with unattributed passages from Wordsworth. She has set herself to the slow-moving task of seducing the novel’s married protagonist, Sam, for whom the affair is a close-run thing: “He was trying to do something impossible. He wanted to become someone else, but to do it while staying himself. He wanted to be the person who slept with Margo Doyle while remaining the person who was faithful to Lucy. It contradicted the foundational laws of Boolean logic.” Sam is a data journalist.
Scalia rightly calls Index “a novel about endings,” which he relates to George F. Will’s contention that the “foundational conservative insight” is that “nothing lasts.”
One could raise principled objections to Scalia’s project in its entirety. The appeal of great or even good literature is universal and should not be contingent on its consanguinity with the political preferences of today’s readers. We should read novels for their beauty and insight, not in search of affirmation of our pre-existing convictions. The problem is that while everybody used to think that, it’s now a view that many reject. Its remaining supporters are almost by definition culturally conservative.
Scalia didn’t pick this fight with progressive presentism, or with the threat screen culture poses to art. The fight began with an assault on the beauty and insight of the great “content creators” and “influencers” of the past. It’s ongoing, and Scalia is right to join it.