A Christian Guide to the Classics (eBook)

CHAPTER 2

What Is a Classic?

The first thing to say is that the concept of a classic is not limited to literature (although that is the subject of this book). Most objects and events in our lives have examples that rise to the status of being a classic. “Give the gift of a timeless classic,” says an advertisement for a watch. “It’s a classic,” a wife tells her husband as they look at suits in a clothing store. In some American towns, residents can saunter downtown one evening per week during the summer to see displays of classic cars. One of the ESPN television channels is called ESPN Classic; it specializes in reruns of past sports events or profiles of athletes from the past. It is obvious, then, that when an English professor tells a prospective student and her parents that “we still teach the classics,” the professor is tapping into something universal and not only literary.

The classics are a paradox. On the one hand, they are the best of the best and belong to a very elite circle of the very greatest works. They raise the bar high in terms of what they demand from us. On the other hand, many of them are familiar to us because they have traditionally been central in our educational experience. Some classics that we have not yet read are familiar to us by simple cultural osmosis. For example, even if we have not read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we probably know that Hamlet is a brooding loner who toys with a skull in a churchyard and utters a famous soliloquy that begins, “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” Most people know about Hester’s scarlet letter even before they read Hawthorne’s great story about it.

A second preliminary observation is that the universal concept classic should not be confused with the adjective classical. Classical literature and art were produced by the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. The classical school movement derives its inspiration and content from Greco-Roman civilization and is not necessarily built around classics from all eras. (It is also the case, though, that people who value classical education in this specialized sense tend to embrace the classics generally, even when they are not ancient in origin.)

A third thing to note at the outset is that in popular culture today, words such as classic and epic are tossed around as honorific terms with little specific meaning—like the all-purpose adjective awesome. When people do this, the word classic is assumed to carry automatic positive associations and is little more than a way to express enthusiasm for the work or event in question. Often publishers resort to the quick fix of pinning the label classic on a book that they wish to promote. It was an editor who once changed a book title from Reading Literature with C. S. Lewis (the accurate title) to Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis (a title that the marketing department thought would carry more popular appeal). As the author of multiple guides to the classics, I am of course gratified by this vote of confidence for the classics, but it is important that we validate the label with some genuine content.

There are many famous essays and books that address the question of what makes a classic. T. S. Eliot wrote an essay “What Is a Classic?” and his statement on historical longevity is often quoted: “It is only by hindsight, and in historical perspective, that a classic can be known as such.”

Toward a Definition of the Term Classic

Every academic discipline, as well as such cultural pursuits as sports and cooking, has its classics. That is useful to keep in mind as we consider the concept of a literary classic. It helps to think of a literary classic in light of classics in other spheres because the literary definitions that I am about to quote can illuminate the concepts of a sports classic or a classic family photograph as well.

The format that I have chosen for this chapter is to quote some touchstone definitions of a literary classic and then unpack what these complementary definitions tell us. Here are the definitions:

The classics are so great that they often remain a permanent part of us even if we read them only once in school. A literary critic has written that “the classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory” (Italo Calvino, “Why Read the Classics?”).

• “We speak of a book as a classic when it has gained a place for itself in our culture, and has consequently become a part of our educational experience. But the term conveys further meanings implying precision of style [and] formality of structure” (Harry Levin, Introduction to The Scarlet Letter and Other Tales of the Puritans).
• “There are many reasons why certain works of literature are classics, and most of them are purely literary reasons. But there’s another reason too: a great work of literature is also a place in which the whole cultural history of the nation that produced it comes into focus” (Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination).
• A classic “modifies our very being and makes us feel . . . we are not the same men and women we were when we began it” (Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief).
• A classic “lays its images permanently on the mind [and] is entirely irreplaceable in the sense that no other book whatever comes anywhere near reminding you of it or being even a momentary substitute for it” (C. S. Lewis, review of Taliessin through Logres).
• The classics “deal with the archetypes of human experience, with characters at once concrete and universal, and with events and relationships that are invariant in the lives of all men. . . . The perils of the soul and its achievements are constant. From his earliest literary efforts man does not seem to have advanced in his comprehension of them, and may well have declined” (Kenneth Rexroth, Introduction to Classics Revisited).
• “Among the best of a class; of the highest quality in a group. . . . A literary classic, then, ranks with the best of its kind that have been produced” (The Harper Handbook to Literature).
• “A piece of literature which by common consent has achieved a recognized position in literary history for its superior qualities; also an author of like standing. Thus Paradise Lost is a classic in English literature” (Thrall and Hibbard’s Handbook to Literature).
• A classic “is doubly permanent: for it remains significant, or it acquires a new significance, after the age for which it was written and the conditions under which it was written, have passed away; and yet it keeps, undefaced by handling, the original noble imprint of the mind that first minted it” (Arthur Quiller-Couch, “On the Use of Masterpieces,” in On the Art of Reading).
• “The classics are books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through” (Italo Calvino, “Why Read the Classics?” in The Uses of Literature).

Until recently, certain agreed-upon classics formed the core of the literature curriculum at both high school and college levels. This aggregate of works was known as the “canon”—the definitive list of works that any educated person knew. With the collapse of the old culture, the canon has become so eroded that it is hard to come up with a list of masterworks for a series like Crossway’s Christian Guides to the Classics (authored by Leland Ryken). Many leading English departments no longer have a list of required courses that all English majors must take, or works that students are expected to know.

The first thing to note about these definitions is how little overlap there is. This should alert us to the fact that we are dealing with a many-faceted phenomenon. We can regard the differences among the definitions as reflecting what each of the authors regards as the primary or most obvious trait of a classic. Probably none of the people who formulated the definitions would disagree with the other definitions.

As the definitions show, the concept of a classic combines an objective, verifiable aspect and a subjective element that is personal to the experience or perception of an individual. One of the objective criteria is endurance. A classic has stood the test of time and yet is still current. It is both timeless and timely. Unlike a classic car, which sometimes immediately strikes us as dated when we see it, a literary classic is only superficially dated. It actually lives on. People who sneer at the classics and their authors as being “dead” miss the point: the classics are like Abel, who “though he died . . . still speaks” (Heb. 11:4).

In 1987, E. D. Hirsch Jr. published a bestselling book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. In it he made the case for the benefits to society of educating every child and citizen in a shared body of essential information. Cultural literacy of this type is broader than just the literary classics, but the literary classics are an important part of the cultural literacy that Hirsch and his supporters envision....