By Steven Assarian, Business and Career Librarian
Recently, I was watching The Who Was? Show, a live-action sketch comedy show about historical figures. This particular episode was a doubleheader with King Tut and Shakespeare.
The actress playing Shakespeare had a song where she sings about all the different words and phrases that Shakespeare wrote first. Words like alligator, eyeball, and downstairs were first recorded in Shakespeare’s plays (in Romeo and Juliet, Henry VI Part 1, and Hamlet, respectively.) It’s an impressively long list.
I keyed in on this because, somewhere in my brain, I had it in mind that Shakespeare invented those words. Of course, if you think about this for five seconds, that doesn’t make any sense. But it felt natural that Shakespeare would be the inventor of so many English words; he is, after all, The Bard. Not just any bard, The Bard.
This assumption I made is why you should read The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea by Helen Lewis.
Not because I think you made this same mental mistake, mind you, but because the reason that mistake was in my head was the Genius Myth, which Lewis describes so well in this book. And that myth drives so many of our ideas about how greatness is made.
The Genius Myth is the idea that a genius is a kind of person, someone who is so smart their intelligence is almost a superpower: They can see patterns where no one can, write truths no one can write, and make art that seems wholly new and original, seemingly birthed out of nothing.
Lewis outlines her ideas by taking us through all the genius hits—da Vinci, Tolstoy, and Edison, for instance—and breaks down how ahistoric our ideas of genius are. We constantly flatten people in order to create stories about geniuses. And that’s what genius really is: a story.
The Genius Myth builds on your previous knowledge of historical figures to support her thesis. This makes the book very readable and entertaining while getting you to question a load-bearing idea in our culture.
I was unaware, though, of the scientific studies that try to identify geniuses, especially related to IQ testing. It is satisfying to see how little IQ comes into play when studying geniuses, and how attempts to make “genius” clubs and groups fail in spectacular and hilarious ways.
On some level, I think we all know that genius isn’t singular—that a single person working alone is not going to give us a breakthrough in anything. Scientific articles have tons of authors; big engineering innovations are created by huge teams. Even early scientists and engineers, who developed breakthroughs going after low-hanging fruit, did so in communities of scholars.
But we still want that narrative, that guy (it’s usually a guy) to be able to cut through all the morass and find clarity, find something that will make our lives better and more interesting.
I think we want geniuses because genius feels magical. When you see something that moves you—like a piece of art, technology, or engineering—it’s very easy to take that awe, and try to attribute that to a lone hero.
I remember reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell years ago, a book that I was completely lost in. I remember it ending, and just being in awe of the piece of art that I had just experienced. That feeling is incredible. It’s satisfying to think that there are people in the world that are a cut above, who can do things we can only dream about, and that we can interact with those dreams in our own lives. That there is a lone human being behind that thing.
But even a novel, with a single author, has many people who make the experience of the novel: editors, typesetters, designers, manufacturers, booksellers, even librarians. It's a collective effort.
We also want to imagine that if you have a good enough idea, enough talent, enough grit, that it doesn’t matter what’s happening outside of the few square centimeters behind your eyes. If you have the right stuff, you will be recognized, lauded, and gain fame that echoes through history.
It’s easy enough to poke holes in this idea. There are brilliant scientists who toil anonymously; skilled artists who never gain fame or recognition; thinkers whose ideas were a bit too early or too late; even those who work unceasingly for the sake of genius. These are all people Lewis describes in the book. I especially enjoyed her chapter on Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia, the copyist of War and Peace, whom I’d never read about.
Overall, this book is a great counterweight to the idea of the genius. It does an excellent job of describing, instead of the genius myth, how acts of genius actually happen, rather than what makes a good story.
That’s why you should read this book.
Anyway, I’m off to go read The Tempest.
Hope it’s as good as I remember.
