What determines literary excellence?

I think all the enduringly excellent books began, in fact, as immediately excellent, whether they were noticed at the time or not. Their special quality is to outlast the moment and carry immediacy, impact, meaning, undiminished or even increasing with time, to ages and people entirely different from those the novelist wrote for.

Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare

Enduringly excellent literature versus immediately excellent literature is a distinction many of us have made, but Ursula K. Le Guin gives us vocabulary for that distinction. Some books are immediately excellent but, for whatever reason, never become enduringly excellent, meaning they are not recognized as excellent by the generations that follow the generation in which the books were written.

Some books are not regarded at the time of their publication as being immediately excellent, yet in years to come are hailed as enduringly excellent. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick provides a fine example, one mentioned by Le Guin. The novel got little attention during the author's lifetime, both readers and critics of his day preferring his shorter, more adventurous stories. Only much later was Moby-Dick recognized as a work of genius. The point Le Guin makes is that books like Moby-Dick were immediately excellent whether they were recognized as such or not.

Of course, one could also argue that some books are enduringly excellent whether they are recognized as such or not. Yet in the end, greatness requires someone to recognize that greatness.

To be either immediately excellent or enduringly excellent a book generally needs certain things to happen:

1. It must be read. Not necessarily widely read. It need never become a best-seller. But someone with the power to influence opinion and focus attention on that book must read it. 

2. It must be talked about and written about. Literary critics and scholars carry much weight. When they say a work of literature is great, others may believe them. Even obscure, long-forgotten books can gain a second life if someone writes a notable biography of the author, for example, or writes an article about the book for an important literary journal.

3. It must be taught by literature professors. This may be the most significant of all because when a novel is taught in a college classroom, students are likely to regard it as a significant work of literature whether they actually liked reading the book or not.

I can recall taking a class in contemporary literature in the 1960s. The professor assigned such novels as The Man with the Golden Arm, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Ginger Man, Catch-22 and A Fine Madness. We students made the assumption that these books were at least immediately excellent and had the potential to become enduringly excellent. Have any of them reached that potential  after the passage of more than a half century? Catch-22, perhaps. It depends greatly on whether there are any professors still teaching these books. Because they were all written by white men, perhaps not.

4. It must actually be excellent. Excellence, like beauty, tends to lie in the eye of the beholder, but Le Guin attempts to give excellence a narrower definition. She speaks of excellence in terms of "an art that embodies the moment." It speaks to those beholders about their lives and their times. Those books that embody the moment of today are immediately excellent. Those that embody the moment of tomorrow and of endless tomorrows have a chance to become enduringly excellent.