I’ll admit that my timing on this is a little off. If you’re going to read something called ‘why read the classics’, the right moment is probably before you read through 100 of the things.
Nevertheless, better late than never. If you’re going to read more than just the contents of the Waterstones 3 for 2 table, it’s a question you need to ask yourself – what is it that makes a book a classic?
“The classics are those books you always hear people saying “I’m rereading…”, never “I’m reading…” ”
Italo Calvino is an Italian writer best-known for tricksy and recursive masterpieces like If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. It should perhaps be no surprise that his definitions of a classic are based almost entirely on the effect that the classic has on the reader, and has very little to say directly about the text itself.
“The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imaginations as unforgettable, and when they hide in memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.”
(Re)reading a classic, to Calvino, is a process of rediscovery. These are the books that permeate our world, whose ideas you can’t help having picked up – whether through reading, through other people repeating, or through having lived it in person. As Calvino says, “A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.” There is an excitement and an immediacy – something which the reader unthinkingly connects to and which makes the book itself seem desperately relevant.
But for all their familiarity, a classic is never as predictable as you have been lead to believe.
“Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected and innovative we find them when we actually read them.”
Calvino is pleasantly free from the braggadocio that often goes with being a European intellectual, and cheerily admits that it is impossible to have read your way through everything that is identified as a classic. You can comfortably fake at least a partial knowledge of many of the key parts of world literature, especially in the age of wikipedia. Yet – as I’ve learnt this past year – the more you rely on that second-hand knowledge, the greater the pleasure from encountering the real thing.
It’s not surprising to see a postmodernist like Calvino put his emphasis on what a classic means to a reader. For me, with my background in social and economic history, it does still feel a little incomplete. Some books that we now call classics have risen and fell sharply. Jane Austen, for example, may never have been obscure, but the reputation of her works has grown substantially in the past few decades; thirty years ago no one would have thought of putting her face on a banknote.* At mid-century Dickens looked destined for obscurity, while John Galsworthy seemed like an immortal cert.
To me, the fascinating thing about defining a classic is not what a book evokes, but why people subconsciously single some books out for a special status. It is influenced by quality and experience, but not wholly – there are plenty of wonderful old books that stand little chance of joining the pantheon. There’s also a strong element of herd behaviour: there is some knowledge that it is in a sense essential to share, or more accurately to be seen to share.
Any list of classics is that it is a living, growing thing.** It’s not only that new branches appear; equally some die and fall away. There can be many different reasons for that – the Sherlock Holmes stories are classics just as much as War and Peace, despite having almost nothing in common. Some books are classics for what they describe; some for what they explain and some for what they imagine for the first time. So what is it that binds them all together?
Calvino gets around this problem by building his definition around what you feel when reading – selecting classics by the principle of ‘I know it when I see it’. But what is it that makes you know it in the first place? The reader’s reaction doesn’t exist in a vacuum, any more than an idea of artistic beauty or psychological truth. I come back to the feeling that a classic is no more than a book people have agreed, for whatever reason, should be read.
So if you’re asking ‘why read the classics?’, the fact you’re using the word ‘classic’ may already have given you your answer.
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*And, much as I love Austen, I still think George Eliot would have been a better choice.
**Forty years ago, English faculties were convulsed with the debate about whether it was appropriate to talk about the ‘canon’ of great works – the books that counted as great literature. The idea, claimed the post-modernisers, was nonsense from top to bottom; there could never be a formal list in any sense. That might be true; but equally it would be a very brave English student who tried to get by without having read White Noise or The City of Glass or the works of John Cheever. In the end, all that disposing of the canon seems to have achieved is removing the sense of ‘at least I’ve got that covered’.
Man Versus Ideas 