A Word's Worth

Supermarket shoppers perusing the publication rack must have felt a dose of Weltschmerz as they waited for their frozen peas to be scanned. “Is God Dead?” read the Apr. 8, 1966, cover of Time Magazine, rendering the question in red typeface on a stark black background. The Nietzschean challenge emerged in the context of an immense cultural despair. Faced with a world so complex, so seemingly contradictory, a vocal group of American theologians—described in the magazine’s lead story—was seeking to radically re-envision a Christianity without a divine being.

The ’60s are over (as are the days when Time dared run such provocative covers). Replace “God” with “genius,” though, and the impertinent question remains just as pertinent. Last Thursday, Harvard’s Center for European Studies hosted a talk titled “On Genius and Geniuses in the Eighteenth Century.” At ease at the head of the Cabot Room’s oval table, a tan, tweed-clad Florida State professor delved into the religious and cultural roots of Enlightenment conceptions of “genius.” But throughout the presentation, the unspoken question hovered: Does the idea of genius still exist today?

The answer, at least in the traditional sense, is a troubling “no.” It’s true that “genius” has become a catch-all term of praise for everything from violin playing to political strategy. Yet modern understanding of the word is best explicated by rapper and self-proclaimed genius Kanye West, as good a barometer of the cultural zeitgeist as any: “If you read books—which I don’t, none at all—about how to become a billionaire, they always say, ‘You learn more from your mistakes.’ So if you learn from your mistakes, then I’m a fucking genius.” In response to a Rolling Stone interviewer’s request for a definition of genius, West added that “if you have a series of genius moments, then you can be considered a genius.”

Learning from mistakes, attempting to repeat one’s successes: Those sound more like accessible middle-class values than like the innate inspiration or providential favor once attributed to exceptional persons. Indeed, as much as Americans treasure the idea of genius—“Baby Genius” and “Baby Einstein” CD lines offer ambitious mothers-to-be the chance to transform their prenatals into intellectuals—we shy away from the suggestion of any hidden Mozarts in our midst.

The hesitancy makes sense. For a handful of chosen ones to walk among us with a greater potential to create things of worth doesn’t mesh terribly well with our country’s democratic values, after all. New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell tapped into just this everyman conception of genius in last year’s bestselling pop science book, “Outliers.” Reaching the top levels of a chosen field, he explained, simply requires a combination of hard work and luck—with a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice, anyone can be a winner.

But while this feel-good democratization is politically correct, it fails in practice. Populist American optimism tends to cut the legs out from beneath potent terms like “genius”; the harsh truth is that not everyone is capable of producing works of incredible beauty or sublimity. In the Coen brothers’ 1991 movie “Barton Fink,” a studio boss dresses down his star scripter: “You think you’re the only writer who can give me that Barton Fink feeling? I got 20 writers under contract that I can ask for a Fink-type thing from.” Yes, but there’s only one Barton Fink.

Still, that doesn’t mean we should return to the days of divine right. There’s a way to conserve the idea of genius without succumbing to elitism. Rather than maintain the illusion that with due diligence anyone can be a superstar, we should argue that any of us could be the one harboring that hidden genius potential. Who knows who might be considered a genius retrospectively? Probably not the grind with the flashcards.

At any rate, as writers over the centuries have realized, “genius” is ultimately a great consolation in itself. Just as the notion of a religious god continues to haunt much secular Western literature and art, the idea of genius—no matter how bankrupt—continues to make itself felt in the modern creative process. It reassures us that not everyone is destined to be merely a bit player, a secondary source, a “Fink-type.” Julia Kristeva put it best: genius is a “therapeutic invention that prevents us from dying from equality in a world without a hereafter.” So criticize the concept of genius, debate its meaning—but let’s not write its obituary.


Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.