Okay, but why?

Last week, another top 50 list came out. It’s not that I don’t like lists. I always get a kick of them (especially the ones on Cracked.com). What I don’t like is that a lot of the list creators don’t include their reasons for why something is important, or the best, or the greatest, or whatever adjective they’re using. And because they don’t say why, I always get the urge to immediately start arguing with the author. In the case of Robert McCrum’s list, “English Literature’s 50 Key Moments from Marlowe to J.K. Rowling,” I immediately want to ask why Geoffrey Chaucer isn’t at the top of the list. I like Christopher Marlowe a lot, but Chaucer was the first writer to use vernacular English after the Norman invasion in 1066. And why pick Shakespeare’s sonnets instead of the plays for a key moment?

See what I mean?

When I don’t see an explanation, I start to question why this ranks higher than that. Of course, I know that a lot of it is subjective. But at least one could include a veneer of objectivity. The list that most gets my goat in this regard is the Modern Library’s “100 Best Books.” It might just be because the first book on their list is James Joyce’s Ulysses. I really, really don’t like Joyce. Apart from Dubliners, I’m pretty sure he was just messing with people to see how much critics would squirm to try and convince others that they understood Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. Why are the chosen books the best?

I was once asked what the English canon was. They didn’t want a definition; they understood the word. What they wanted was a list. I couldn’t find a definitive one no matter how hard I looked, and I have very strong Google-fu. When I started to make my own mental list, and started to question why something was or wasn’t a part of the canon, all I could think of for a reason was that critics* considered it to be canon.I suspect this is where my skepticism of lists comes from: wondering as an undergraduate in the English program just why we had to read Frankenstein instead of Dracula.

* Similar to “They” from “Well, they say…” I couldn’t say who these critics actually are.