The High Art of Low Authors
The Apotheosis of Homer by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1827, Louvre, Paris, France
The Christmas Potluck
The professor stereotype is not accurate. I can disprove it without looking beyond myself. I’ve never used the word “tenebrous.” I don’t drive a Volvo. I own five coats, none of them tweed. Scarfs are effete. Wool makes me itch. While English has the best dressed faculty, the disparity between our imagined mirror and our closet mirror dispels the popular rendering.
In spite of this, I managed to sniff out a fellow English instructor at a recent Christmas potluck. I was visiting an unaffiliated university in the company of an old colleague. While he circled the conference room stacking his plate, I found the open seat beside my fellow traveler. Discovering that we share disciplines, the conversation turned to what we’ve been reading. A star pupil of mine had nudged my return to Moby Dick, I said, and wouldn’t it be nice if our undergrads could read the great texts without coercion. As I raised a paper cup, I watched her face twist as though a disguise was peeling from my nose. “Melville?” she said. “He was a racist.”
What an anchor! A hole in the floor between us, a statement without an invitation. Without great effort from me—an empty chuckle, a vague concurrence, a flattering question to redirect—her effort to capsize the conversation would have succeeded. Yet by then our inner worlds were too known. Only empty pleasantries remained for us.
Those four words have stalked me for weeks, and doing a poor job of hiding. In that time, my response has macerated from a broad counter blast to something reconciliatory. Much abides in her quip about Melville, but at the heart lies one essential question for all literary-minded people: Can we read the high art of low authors?
The Merits of Censorship
Before judging the censorious instinct in English departments, it is essential to air the merits. The the line between moral and aesthetic judgements has never been apparent. At the fountainhead, Socrates would outlaw the arts on the ground that “all such poetry is likely to distort the thought of anyone who hears it, unless he has the knowledge of what it is really like, as a drug to counteract it.”¹ Euripides and Sophocles, our sainted tragedians whose works more often than not reinforced the conventions of ancient Athens, are also laid atop the coals. Even Homer must fuel the pyre, since “no one is to be honored or valued more than the truth.” For the moral health of society, unsheathe the black marker.
The Roman regimes, the medieval Church, Tutor England, Hayes Code America, communist China—the curation of narrative is a universal feature of society. May we never loose that pedantic instinct, for it is an implicit recognition of story’s primacy in the formation of identity and ethics. To paraphrase the Stoics, mimesis is dangerous; as the eyes and ears are the throat of the mind, to see and hear poison is to ingest it. Who could doubt that the unnoticed sufferings of the young today—an inelastic attention span, a desensitization to good and evil, the replacement of wit and parley with shock and bray—is rooted in the fact that our ethics follow our aesthetics?
Fruit of the Poisoned Tree
From both reformer and conservative perspectives, the Socratic solution for immoral literature is obvious. We risk emulating what we read, begetting evil from evil. The trouble lies at the heart of all narrative: conflict, and conflict is the result of one sin or many. Achilles’ thumos dishonors Hector by a disproportionate revenge. Macbeth’s swelling ambition murders his king. Rodion becomes a heroic criminal for burying an axe in Alyona the usurer. Mayella Ewell, the victim and villain of Maycomb, would rank deep in Dante’s depths for her false testimony. Florentino Ariza nurses a virility that would make Bacchus blink, and his feckless erotomania ultimately causes América Vicuña, his 14-year-old lover, to commit suicide. Our libraries are filled with such potent moral pollution that we forget they’re fiction. To paint man’s portrait with any accuracy is to give flesh tints to sin.
If men were angels then there would only be music. Without the principle inspiration of sinful man, prose, poetry, and drama would wither from want of subject. Yet no serious person today argues for censorship with such purity. Evil is essential to human beings, as it is essential in art.
The texts stand. Clearly an ignoble person can create something virtuous. Having established the value of these texts, should we reject works for their author’s private depravity?
An uncomfortable truth is that nearly all of the brand-name authors we read bear a black mark on their cheek—sometimes several. Poe was an addict.² JD Salinger was a recluse. According to his wife, Steinbeck was unfaithful and abusive.³ Ezra Pound held fascist sympathies. Hunter Thompson was a dope fiend. Show me the man and I will show you the crime.
The claim: Immoral authors should not be read, even if their works are virtuous. Blanket statements are too pervasive nowadays. Nuance should guide the prudent. First off, an awareness of our own depravity would slow the instinct to condemn.⁴ The judging eye rarely meets a mirror. Beyond that, the best foil to this critical instinct is to apply it. Lower the scythe so that only perfect leaves of grass are not touched and we are left with only that which dares not risk saying anything of depth or value.
All art is cut, spun, and scribbled by the wicked. Once we acknowledge that nobility can exist as aspirations for fallen people, all literature becomes viable. Just as we separate the American Founders from their bigotry, Dr. King from his infidelity, Luther from his antisemitism, etc., we can give ourselves permission to read the great fiction with nuance. But this view is not standard among stewards of literature.
The Case of Achebe
The most public case of an English professor lowering their helmet to sack an author is that of Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad. A fixture of post-colonial literature, Achebe wrote one of the most influential essays in literary scholarship: “An Image ofAfrica: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” His thesis, drawing upon the evidence of connotations, inferences, and gratuitous slurs, is that Heart of Darkness expresses “the desire— one might indeed say the need— in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe…the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.”⁵ The celebrated novella, he argues, is a reassuring imprint on white consciousness that Africa is a wasteland, a culturally-barren backwater of brutes and disease. His conclusion: “Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist.” Would my colleague at the potluck believe that she could quote Achebe?
Whether Joseph Conrad is a deeply prejudiced man or not is irrelevant for this essay. It is worth noting en passant that, according to the late Paul Cantor of UVA, Achebe privately claimed that his essay on Conrad was more for publicity than for scholarship.⁶ There is nothing wrong with Achebe making a living by being a firebrand. Nor is this paper concerned with the merits of critical theory, in which there is value. What matters is that Achebe opened a levee in 1977. What has rushed forth from that particular essay is a torrent of swill, a model of mediocrity that has dyed the Humanities’ in its wash.
Achebe’s mark on Heart of Darkness is inexpugnable. It is an anomalous case where the critic has eclipsed the artist. While it remains on many syllabi, Heart of Darkness is taught with an asterisk. If assigned, as it was in my general education, the objective is not dissection but appeal; class discussions are spent not on Conrad’s text but Achebe’s charges about Conrad’s text. All the stages of court proceeding—arraignment of the accused, discovery, incrimination, and finally the donning of the black cap—are present in the classroom and supplant the normal operations of literary study. The session becomes a trial by thirty junior judges hearing their first case of literary crime. Some of those students will graduate and reenact this procedure at Christmas potlucks.
The Problem of Simple Analysis
While an analysis of good-or-evil is accessible, we are doing our students positive injury by lowering standards. Consider what can be flogged from Conrad. The accurate rendering of human nature, the exposure of European colonialism in Africa, the warning of a social Darwinist zeitgeist, the foreshadowing of a boomerang genocide that will land in Europe, the alienation that comes with encountering evil, the brilliant treatment of light and dark that turns faceless descriptions into characters, the journey into liminality⁷ —all of these treasures in Heart of Darkness remain unexplored when the analysis begins and ends with the author’s soul. This is not to say that consideration of the author’s moral life, or even the critical eye, is irrelevant. Critical theory is a lens, but it should be kept as a lens and not, as Hamza Yusuf quips, a “cornel transplant.”⁸
The problem in following Achebe’s example is that condemnation is far from consolation. We must remember who we are serving. It’s insignificant for an experienced literary mind like Achebe, deep within the cloisters of academia, to chase a dubious, myopic, or esoteric theory. Their roots are established, and Achebe is no fool. He knows his Conrad better than anyone, in spite of the narrow ambit of that essay. But when the myopic, dubious, or esoteric enters the undergraduate classroom, it consumes precious minutes. We don’t have much time with our students, and their prior training has likely failed to justify the study of any subject—least of all English.
Our task as faculty is immense. Today’s young do not know they need the Humanities, so we must prove the need before providing for it. After that slow process of enlightenment, we must transition them from being newly born Dantes into being Virgils; we must not only teach particular texts, but we must convince them, by their own discovery, that the curative effects of reading literature are practical enough for adoption in their ordinary lives long after the semester’s end. It is a mountainous quest. Therefore, if their guide sinks weeks of instruction examining the author’s soul, then students aren’t accessing anything of substance and the generational chain of the Humanities is broken.
For Professors
For those in the profession, filtering our libraries—personal or public—is anathema. We must be good eaters, not just for ourselves but for our students who search for an example to emulate. English professors are not secular priests jobbed with curating a new Index Librorum Prohibitorum. We are midwives for a grand inheritance of consolation that is needed more than ever by those it was intended for. Why mourn the reading public when we cheapen our own wares? Let us excite our students’ suppressed hungry to explore by modeling nuanced thought and good stewardship.
As we watch the emerging generation, we trust that experience will reveal modern life as a Vanity Fair. Let us be ready when they come to us in hopes of an alternative mode of being in this dark age. We as stewards of English should prove that a timeless steady glow occupies the night, no matter how tenebrous.
Notes
¹ John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson, Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), X.595b.
² Marcelo Miranda C, “La historia médica de Edgar Alian Poe” [The medical history of Edgar Allan Poe], Revista medica de Chile, trans. by ChatGPT, vol. 135, (2007): 1216-20, doi:10.4067/s0034-98872007000900019;
³ Sian Cain, “John Steinbeck was a sadistic womaniser, says wife in memoir,” The Guardian, (September 7, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/07/john-steinbeck-a-sadistic-womaniser-says-wife-in-memoir.
⁴ John 8:7, New King James Version (NKJV), BibleGateway.com, accessed February 27, 2026, https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/John%208%3A7.
⁵ Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” The Massachusetts Review 57, no. 1 (2016): 14-27, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mar.2016.0003, 21.
⁶ Paul Cantor, interview by Bill Kristol, “Paul Cantor III,” Conversations with Bill Kristol, August 15, 2016, https://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/paul-cantor-iii-transcript/.
⁷ Marek Pacukiewicz and R. E. Pypłacz, “‘Over the Edge’: Liminal Aspects of Heart of Darkness,” Yearbook of Conrad Studies 9 (2014): 45–54, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44782445.
⁸ Hamza Yusuf, “What Conservatism Really Means - Roger Scruton in Conversation with Hamza Yusuf,” Renovatio: The Journal of Zaytuna College (June 5, 2018), 11:01-11:12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iawSzFZg-vw.
