12 BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
By Melvyn Bragg
Over the years there have been a lot of little (and
not-so-little) lists of Very Important Books that Everyone Really Ought to Read. Melvyn Bragg's 12 Books
that Changed the World is different from most of these, and different in
significant ways. First and foremost, his dozen selections are not all
"books" (and he admits to "elasticating the strict meaning of the
word 'book'") that he actually expects anyone will read. In
addition to the complexity of its ideas, Newton's Principia Mathematica
was written in Latin. Magna Carta, which stretches the elastic definition of
book to its limit, is a text Bragg can't even bring himself to quote from. The Rule
Book of Association Football is a reference guide. Arkwright's three-page
patent specification for a spinning machine is . . . well, just what it is.
If most of these books are not now, if they ever were, books to be read (even Shakespeare was meant
to be performed), then just what are they? What they have in common, in Bragg's
estimation, is "that they changed the world to that in which we now
live":
these British voices began, all of them, with the quiet strokes of a
quill or a pen and were formed in seclusion to be sent out into the world, where
a fuse was lit. There then followed a conceptual chain reaction, sometimes of
awesome proportions, which changed the way all of lead and experience our lives.
Yes, these voices are all British. That is one of Bragg's self-imposed
limitations. As for the forming in seclusion, we may have our doubts. Did
Shakespeare write in seclusion? We don't know. But we do know The Rule Book
of Association Football wasn't. As befits a popular overview of the subject
(this book is actually the companion to a television series), Bragg throws in a
fair bit of stuff like this because, I suspect, it sounds good.
Then there is the lighting of the fuse. Bragg sees these books as standing at
the beginning of a "conceptual chain reaction," the intellectual
sparks that started the fire.
Only that's not really true either. While including much that is undeniably
the contribution of individual genius, there is more here that the world shaped
than shaped the world. One suspects that 12 Representative
Monuments in the History of Ideas just wouldn't have been as catchy a
title.
Indeed, in some cases there is no individual author, much less individual
genius behind the words. Magna Carta and the football rule book were both
committee work. The spinning machine patent was something more prepared than
written. But more than this, the ideas themselves - and remember these twelve
books have been selected more for the ideas they contain than the expression of
those ideas - were not spontaneously generated "in seclusion", out of
nothing. They were all in the air, ideas whose time had come. Came the time,
came the book. William Wilberforce was a great champion of abolition, but he was
hardly its inventor. Nor did Darwin discover evolution, Newton the calculus,
Wollstonecraft feminism, or Smith market capitalism. The books these people
wrote did help to light the fuse of change, but that fuse had already been set
in most cases, and eventually it was going to be lit by someone.
This isn't too disparage these books as seminal, or at least representative,
works. But it does help to make clear a distinction between the importance of
ideas and the importance of their expression. Of the twelve books discussed here
only two, I believe, have any continuing importance as books. The others
have either been surpassed in terms of their knowledge or fully absorbed into
the culture's intellectual bloodstream to the extent that their origin is of
little interest to anyone. As I began by pointing out, no one (outside of a
university class) could be expected to read any of these texts today. With the
exceptions, already noted, of the King James Bible and Shakespeare.
The reason these two books are still read today is that they don't stand for
a set of propositions or ideas that, once understood, makes their expression
irrelevant. This isn't to say that Bragg was wrong to substitute old textbooks
on electricity for classic works of literature. By his own criteria his choices
were correct. And, in any event, if you want a list of Very Important Novels
there are already plenty of guides on hand, like the dismally-titled 1001 Books You Must Read Before You
Die (a book published at the same time as Bragg's, and limited exclusively
to fiction). What I do object to about Bragg's list is the way he throws
everything into the same pot, a tactic which does damage to any reasonable
concept of artistic, or expressive, genius. In defending the inclusion of
scientists and inventors he takes the view that their work is every bit as
creative and original as that of any artist. Fair enough. But their genius is
not the same. The language of mathematics, of "proofs" is different
than that of art. But Bragg is forced to argue against such a common-sense
observation:
Are "proofs" below the salt? It smacks a little of
intellectual snobbery. It smacks even more of a mistaken understanding of an act
of creativity. Cézanne could have explained his intentions and methods in
discovering Mont St-Victoire during the course of his making seventy paintings
of it. Shakespeare could have given reasons for the order and selection of words
he used, the juxtaposition of phrases. To explain how you arrive at your
conclusions is not a bar to being called a genius: if anything it is cause for
additional admiration.
So much for inspiration. So much for the unconscious. So much for the sense
for the sense so many artists have testified to of a force working through
them. A work of artistic genius, on this reading, is as much an intellectual
machine as the calculus. Of course this is nonsense. There are different
languages at work, and different methods of employing them. Even Bragg's
examples are doubtful. Could Cézanne or Shakespeare really have explained or
given reasons for their work? And would such explanations have been worth
anything? Poe's analysis of how he scientifically constructed his poems, or
Eisenstein's after-the-fact explanation of the theory of montage, are only
interesting fictions. No one believes either artist had any such things in mind
during the act of creation. An artist has been defined as someone who doesn't
know what he or she is doing. If they did, they'd be a craftsman, which is
something different. That's not snobbery, but an acknowledgement that there's a
difference between writing a poem or making a painting and trying to come up
with an explanation for how the world works, or establishing the rules for
soccer.
This is, of course, a coffee-table book that isn't interested in arguing
points like these. Even as a television companion it seems a little glib and
superficial. Most of the critical analysis is borrowed. Stock images of
merry-go-rounds ("Newton's Laws of Motion revealed that to any action there
is always an opposite and equal motion") and the Manhattan skyline at night
("To light Manhattan at night power stations still use the same principles
employed by Faraday's first electric generator in 1831") are a waste of
colour plates. The text never comes to life with the same intellectual verve and
strength of insight that you get from masters of the companion genre (a genealogy we
might date back to Kenneth Clark, leading up to names like Simon Schama and
Robert Hughes).
12 Books that Changed the World does provide an easy introduction to
the history of some important ideas, but it is also an unnecessary book, about a
number of books that are themselves no longer essential.
Notes:
Review first published online May 31, 2006.
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