How to have good taste - by Henry Oliver

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How to Read Literature<br>How to have good taste<br>Taste is knowledge.

Henry Oliver<br>Jan 12, 2024

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The question of good taste is once again in vogue . Before Christmas, Dirt ran a series about ‘The Future of Writing’, in which Monika Woods wrote about the mediocrity of modern writing.<br>Subjectivity rules us all— the subjectivity of people who have bad taste.

Woods quotes Merve Emre that too many writers have nothing to say and no good way of saying it.<br>Tomiwa Owolade wrote in the Times this week about this philistine supremacy in modern culture , where so many adults are Harry Potter fans and read YA fiction. He quotes A.S. Byatt’s comment that adult fans of Harry Potter lack a sense of the mystery of life. Then says,<br>Yet confronting human nature, in all its wildness and variety, is crucial for any work of art. As Harold Bloom, the American literary critic and author of The Western Canon, once put it: “We read [the great works] to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.”

But good taste must have something to do with subjectivity. Good taste must be related to what we enjoy.<br>In a recent interview with Ezra Klein , Kyle Chayka, the New Yorker writer with a new book about the internet and taste coming out, defines taste like this:<br>taste is knowing who you are and knowing what you like, and then being able to look outside of yourself, see the world around you, and then pick out the one thing from around you that does resonate with you, that makes you feel like you are who you are or that you can incorporate into your mindset and worldview.

Chayka notes that taste is not about superficial consumption of whatever you happen enjoy, “but instead almost making it part of yourself.” Ezra Klein responded to this by saying,<br>I thought I could have good taste or bad taste, and I mostly thought I had bad taste… it’s relatively recent for me that I began to realize the first question is, what do I actually like and why?

The insight to take away from this (though it isn’t novel, and I’m surprised people need to hear it) is to follow your gut, find what speaks to you. A man must study that which he most affects, said Shakespeare. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, said Johnson. For autodidacts like Virginia Woolf, this was the only way to read. Her work is saturated with this principle.<br>Klein is reacting to the snobbery of good taste, which leads people to pretend to enjoy art for social reasons. Talking about good taste and bad taste often invokes such snobbery, as if bad people have bad taste. This isn’t true, of course. Reading Jilly Cooper or Colleen Hoover or Prince Harry doesn’t mean that you are bad. But no-one sensible can equate those books with the work of George Eliot. No-one who has read a lot of literature and, as Chayka says, made it part of themselves, would equate them.<br>The way we can relate personal taste and good taste is realising that taste is knowledge, as Chayka and Klein intimate but don’t say. Having good taste in wine means being able to identify what you are drinking, being able to distinguish various grapes and regions; similarly, having good taste in art means knowing what you are reading, watching, or hearing.<br>The better we know a piece of art, the more we can see it for it is, and not have our judgement clouded by our pre-existing feelings. The more we have read, the better we know where a new book fits. The more ignorant we are, the more likely it is that we will be dazzled by mediocrity. Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul, as Alexander Pope said.1 Good taste is accumulated through wide knowledge.<br>Believing that taste is a primarily personal question means believing that the canon is the canon because lots of people happen to prefer reading revenge tragedies and epic poems about Satan to reading anything else. It means believing that Chaucer is canonical because, much in the way some people prefer reading murder mysteries, many others prefer medieval stories told in iambic pentameter. Writers like Dante and Homer are not canonical because of a wide-spread personal taste for stories about the afterlife told in terza rima or because of a universal penchant for adventure stories with monsters told in hexameters. This is obviously false. The canon has been reapproved every generation because it is full of strange, unique, inventive, insightful work. It challenges us and shows us bigger things in life.<br>Klein gives the example of trying to appreciate classical music, and struggling to find a way in until he heard Steve Reich and Philip Glass and others. They spoke to him in a way other composers didn’t. But that was...