For a long time, I thought of literary success as a giant lottery. Thousands of people write books, publish them, and try to find an audience. Only a tiny fraction break through. The metaphor that came to mind was the sperm cell: millions set out, only one reaches the egg, and the rest disappear without a trace.
Literature can look much the same. A hundred writers may publish a hundred perfectly respectable books, yet perhaps only one gets a second edition, an important review, wider distribution, or the attention of influential critics. Then come the universities, the schools, the translations, the reprints. Eventually, that writer becomes “important.”
The others simply vanish.
But there is a problem with this explanation.
Who decides which sperm cells get the chance to survive?
Heidegger and the Machinery of Culture
This is where Martin Heidegger’s reflections on art and culture introduce a variable that was missing from my original metaphor.
A work does not remain alive simply because someone wrote it. It has to be preserved, interpreted, republished, taught, discussed, and passed on. It has to enter a cultural world that keeps it visible.
And that world is not neutral.
This does not necessarily mean that a handful of powerful people sit around a table and decide which books will become immortal. The reality is both less dramatic and more powerful than that.
Every age builds its cultural hierarchy through publishers, critics, newspapers, universities, schools, prizes, libraries, foundations, markets, and public institutions. Each makes countless decisions about what deserves attention and what does not.
Taken together, those decisions help create what we call the literary canon.
Power Doesn't Have to Censor You
The most interesting part is that power does not have to ban a work in order to marginalize it.
Sometimes it only has to leave it unsupported.
A book that is never reprinted becomes harder to find. A writer who is never reviewed becomes harder to discover. An author who is never studied at universities becomes harder to turn into an object of serious scholarship. A work that never makes it into the classroom is much less likely to be passed down to the next generation.
The reverse is equally true.
Once a book enters the school curriculum, millions of people may encounter it simply because an institution has placed it in front of them.
At that point something remarkable happens:
fame begins to look natural, even though it has been built through a long chain of decisions.
Publishers Decide What Gets a Shot
Before the classroom comes the publisher.
Every year, an enormous number of manuscripts are written. But publishing space is limited. Editors have to decide what gets published, how much money to put behind it, how many copies to print, how aggressively to market it, where to distribute it, and whether to keep investing in the author.
Talent is only one factor.
The genre matters. The market matters. The timing matters. The expected audience matters. An author's connections and public profile may matter. So does the possibility of turning a book into a media event.
A manuscript sitting in a drawer cannot compete with a book backed by a national distribution network.
Not necessarily because it is worse.
Simply because it never got the same shot.
The Market Doesn't Just Discover Taste. It Shapes It.
This also complicates the familiar idea that the market merely discovers what people already want.
The market can help create what people eventually learn to want.
If a publisher spends heavily promoting an author, gets the book into bookstores, newspapers, podcasts, television programs, literary festivals, and social media, that author gains a level of visibility that an equally talented writer without that machinery is unlikely to achieve.
Then the sales figures arrive.
“The public chose the book.”
Perhaps.
But the public chose it after someone had made sure the public knew it existed.
That distinction matters.
Universities Confer Legitimacy
Then there is academia.
Universities do not simply study whatever happens to exist. They also help determine what is worth studying.
An author becomes the subject of dissertations, conferences, academic papers, courses, and scholarly debates. Specialists emerge. Those specialists produce more scholarship. The bibliography grows.
And a self-reinforcing cycle begins:
A work is considered important. It is studied. More scholarship is produced about it. Its academic importance grows. It is taught. It enters textbooks. It becomes part of the canon.
Recognition creates more recognition.
That does not necessarily mean manipulation. It is an institutional process.
But the consequence is real: once an author is inside the canon, that author has far more opportunities to remain there than a writer who never got inside in the first place.
Schools Turn the Canon Into Collective Memory
School is where the process becomes especially powerful.
A writer taught to millions of students is no longer simply an author. That writer becomes part of collective memory.
Entire generations encounter the same names, the same poems, the same novels, the same historical narratives. The next generation then inherits them already labeled as “important.”
At that point, the original cultural choice can become almost invisible.
A student learns that Dante is a great writer.
But the historical question is not whether Dante deserves to be read. It is:
How did Dante come to occupy this particular place in our cultural memory, and how has that position been reinforced and reinterpreted over the centuries?
The same question can be asked about Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, Manzoni, and countless others.
Their literary value was not necessarily invented by institutions. But their position in the cultural hierarchy is also the product of a long history of selection, interpretation, preservation, and transmission.
This Is Where Gramsci Comes Back In
This is where Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony becomes useful.
A ruling class does not have to dictate every idea directly. It can help create an environment in which certain values, assumptions, and ways of seeing the world become dominant.
Applied to literature, this does not mean that “the powerful write the books we are told to read.”
It means something more subtle.
The institutions through which a society produces and transmits culture do not exist outside that society's structures of power.
Publishing, academia, education, journalism, the market, and cultural institutions are all embedded in history.
And every historical period therefore tends to elevate certain works while leaving others in the shadows.
The Most Powerful Part of the Canon Is That It Looks Natural
Perhaps the greatest power of a canon is that, once established, it stops looking like something that was constructed.
A student walks into a classroom and encounters Dante, Petrarch, Manzoni, and Leopardi. The student does not ask who decided these were the authors worth studying. They are simply presented as “the greats.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with having a canon. A society needs a cultural inheritance. We cannot reinvent the entire library every morning.
But there is a legitimate question hiding underneath it:
How many writers disappeared because they never gained access to the institutions capable of preserving and transmitting their work?
And how many survived not only because of their talent, but because they happened to benefit from historical circumstances that allowed their work to be preserved?
That question does not destroy the canon.
It puts the canon back into history.
Famous Yesterday, Forgotten Today
History is full of reminders that fame is temporary.
Tommaso Grossi was a major literary celebrity in nineteenth-century Italy. Today he is far less familiar to the general public than Manzoni. Giovanni Prati was a widely known poet in his own time; today he is primarily read by specialists.
Outside Italy, Marie Corelli was one of the bestselling authors of the Victorian era. Today, her name is largely absent from popular literary culture.
And then there is the opposite phenomenon.
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville did not immediately acquire the canonical status it enjoys today. Melville's reputation declined dramatically during his lifetime, and his major literary rehabilitation came later.
So the present is not necessarily capable of telling us what the future will remember.
Fame is a snapshot.
The canon is a sediment.
Memory is a selection process that can continue for centuries.
The Real Lottery Begins After Fame
This forces me to revise my original sperm-cell metaphor.
I once imagined that the great lottery was the one that took a writer from obscurity to fame.
Perhaps that is only the first lottery.
The real selection begins afterward.
A writer must first be published, then read, then reprinted, then reviewed, then studied, then taught, and eventually rediscovered and reinterpreted by later generations.
At every stage, writers fall away.
And in the end, only a tiny number remain.
They are not necessarily just the best. They are the ones that managed to survive a long chain of historical selections.
Talent may be necessary.
But talent alone is not enough.
Someone has to open the door. Someone has to invest. Someone has to promote. Someone has to teach. Someone has to preserve. Someone has to rediscover.
So Who Gets to Decide What We Remember?
This does not mean that every great writer has a powerful puppeteer pulling the strings. That would be an easy explanation—and often an impossible one to prove.
The reality is more unsettling precisely because it does not require a conspiracy.
Those who control the mechanisms of cultural transmission possess a measure of power over what a society will remember.
Publishers decide what gets a place in the market. Critics help determine what deserves attention. The market determines what can be financially sustained. Universities determine what receives scholarship. Schools determine what millions of young people encounter. Institutions preserve some works and neglect others. Later generations decide what deserves to be rediscovered.
What we call “culture” is therefore not only the spontaneous accumulation of humanity's greatest achievements.
It is also the result of an enormous, largely invisible process of selection.
And that changes the problem for the writer.
The challenge is not simply to get published.
It is to survive cultural selection.
Being published means entering the present.
Being famous means belonging to your own time.
Being remembered means surviving the market, institutions, intellectual fashions, political interests, changing tastes—and ultimately, death.
Perhaps that is the hardest form of literary success of all:
not winning the lottery of your own age, but surviving the lottery of the ages that come after you.
