Most of us can remember a time when we were bored -- perhaps a rainy day -- and when we complained about being bored, our mothers all answered our complaint with the same question: "Why don't you pass the time by reading a good book?" Well, what the heck is a "good" book? That's not such an easy question to answer. Ever since the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans lovers of literature have been trying to define the qualities of good literature. As a result, for more than 2,000 years writers have offered volumes full of wildly varied and often conflicting definitions and criteria concerning the nature of so-called "good" literature. In this essay, I may over-simplify the principal positions that critics have taken down through the years, but that is after all the point of the essay -- to give my readers a simple "map" of what informed writers and serious readers believe about what makes a "good" book.

To begin with, critics have always tended to describe good literature in one or the other of two very different ways. Either a critic is saying that a specific work is good because it is useful in some way or he is saying that the work is good because it is entertaining in some way. The Romans, for example, called the two halves of that division utile (that is, useful) and dulce (that is, sweet, pleasant, or entertaining).

Usefulness as a Literary Criterion

Critics have pointed out many ways in which literary works can be useful, but let us simplify the picture a bit by limiting ourselves to just three points on the scale of usefulness. We will start with the simplest meaning of utile and progress upward to the most sophisticated meaning:

1. At the simplest and most obvious level, a literary work (or drama or film) is useful if it presents factually accurate material. The recent movie Pearl Harbor, for example, was praised by some critics for its factual accuracy about the Battle of Britain, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Doolittle's raid on Japan. On the other hand, a work might be blamed if it gets factual matters wrong. The Will Smith version of Wild, Wild West, for example, has been criticised for depicting President Grant as the dignitary who drove the golden spike at the ceremony celebrating the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad when in fact the spike was driven by Governor Leland Stanford of California.

2. At a somewhat higher or more complex level, literary works are considered useful if they promote the values, philosophies, or doctrines of which the critic approves. If, for example, a critic believes already in the doctrine of the Rapture, that critic is already prepared to approve of the novel series known as "The Left Behind Novels." If, to cite another well-known controversial case, a critic is opposed on religious grounds to magic and witchcraft a la Harry Potter, then that critic is going to condemn the Harry Potter films and books. Thus it is that conservatives praise conservative books, skeptics praise works that question basic religious beliefs, and so forth. Generally speaking, however, works which embody the characteristic beliefs and philosophies of a whole period of history or a whole civilization are usually praised for that very reason. That's part of the reason why critics praise such works as Homer's epics, Beowulf, and Paradise Lost. Those works embody the values of the cultures in which they were produced.

3. Perhaps the highest and most complex kind of usefulness derives from the fact that literature is a form of vicarious experience. In other words, literature that is well-made can be a kind of substitute for first-hand experience. Through the high quality literary work a reader can be led to sympathize or even empathize with characters and experiences far different from anything the reader experiences in real life. So it is that works which enlarge our understanding of the human situation by putting us in the shoes of people different from ourselves -- so it is that such works are of value in much the same way as real life experience is valuable; and those writers like Chaucer or Shakespeare, who over and over depict the experiences of life in effective ways, are prized because they add to our experience of life.

There are also various levels of entertainment value which critics and commentators recognize. Let's list the three characteristic points along the scale of entertainment value:

1. At the lowest or least complex level, readers have always enjoyed escaping into imaginary worlds of suspense, romance, adventure, and great riches. Put more bluntly, readers always like stories with plots that depend mainly on sex, violence, and money. The typical James Bond plot, for example, has the hero making love to nearly every female in the story as he is surrounded by explosions and the wholesale violence of a cross-country car, boat, or plane chase while saving the leaders of the world from having to spend a few jillion dollars to keep some master villain from achieving world domination. Consider, for another example, how Gone With the Wind, one of the most popular plots in all of American fiction and movies, is the story of the romantic adventures of Scarlet O'Hara and Rhett Butler set during the violence of the Civil War and recording how the great fortunes of the old Southern plantation owners were wiped out by that war.

2. A somewhat more complex kind of entertainment is what is sometimes called psycho-physical entertainment. By that term we mean the kind of enjoyment we get from reading stories that cause us to react in physical ways to psychological stimuli. When we read a story that makes us laugh out loud or which makes us nervous and jumpy or which causes other sorts of physcial reactions such as weeping, anger, and so forth -- that's when we are experiencing psycho-physical enjoyment. When a story like Jaws makes us afraid to go into the water or when we actually weep over the sorrows of thwarted lovers, we almost always credit the author of the stimulating story with great skill. Stephen King's books or Poe's short stories like "The Cask of Amontillado" have often been praised for possessing the ability to make our bodies react to what is really only words on paper.

3. Perhaps the most sophisticated and complex form of literary enjoyment is what might be best called aesthetic appreciation. The more we learn about such literary techniques as irony, symbolism, point-of-view, dialogue, and the myriad of other literary devices, the more we come to enjoy works because they are well-made and skillfully executed. The student, for example, who fully understands Poe's use of point-of-view to reveal the deranged character of a narrator such as Montresor in "The Cask of Amontillado" -- the student who understands how that literary device works in the story will certainly have a much higher level of enjoyment than the student who fails to perceive Poe's skill at handling literary devices.

The foregoing summary can help you to understand why some works are great popular successes but are not considered truly great literature or drama or film. To achieve a great popular success like Gone With The Wind the creator tries to emphasize the simplest levels of usefulness and entertainment: the sultry passion of Scarlet for Rhett, the loss and the rebuilding of an immense fortune, the excitement of the burning of Atlanta, and the more or less accurate re-telling of the events of the Civil War. A movie like the Leonardo DiCaprio Titanic, for another example, carefully combines the elements of sex, violence, and money with the historically factual account of the sinking of that famous ship.

Great literature does more than popular literature. Great literature is useful as well as entertaining on a variety of levels, especially on the most complex levels. Of course, that makes us work harder when we encounter masterpieces like Hamlet or Paradise Lost, but it also means that those works will be of interest to us even after many re-readings. We might initially prefer to see a movie like Titanic over seeing a play like Hamlet, but twenty or thirty years from now we will still be seeing new life in the old Shakespeare play while the odds favor the popular movie having been almost completely forgotten.

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