A Reconsideration
Once, while in Oxford and over a surprisingly unharried lunch, I was speaking to a literature student and attempting—somewhat vainly, I can only imagine—to display my familiarity with the vast oeuvre of English literary masterpieces. Although I considered myself moderately well read, having played a rather intense game of catch-up on classics’ reading lists after a childhood spent primarily on the back of a horse, I’ve still read a only handful of Shakespeare’s plays, a few works by Jane Austen, and have yet to finish a Dickens novel longer than The Christmas Carol. Nonetheless, when my recent acquaintance asked me to guess what is largely considered the “Greatest British Novel,” I boldly ventured a guess.
“Ulysses,” I proposed. I’d never read James Joyce’s epic novel, but in my history student estimation, length is often accompanied by preeminence. So why not? (Because he’s Irish, my brain should have chided me at the time. Ah, well. Live and learn.)
“Guess again.”
I’d never been a fan of guessing games to begin with, and scoring a point wrong certainly didn’t help the matter. Still, I racked my brain and offered another: “Jane Eyre.”
Wrong again. We’d reached the point where I was asking for hints.
“Something by Shakespeare, Dickens, or Austen?” I asked, effectively making fifty-eight guesses all at once. Still no luck. At this point I capitulated. “What is it?”
“Middlemarch,” she said.
“Middlemarch,” I repeated, though with a note of skepticism in my voice that made it obvious I’d never read the book.
Yes, Middlemarch. This was not simply an opinion reserved to the echelons of Oxford academe, but, I would later learn, was also the conclusion of a broad poll of international literary critics conducted by the BBC in 2015. I should not have been so surprised. While my acquaintance waxed poetic about the richness of George Eliot’s literary technique, the nuanced complexity of her emotional depictions, the transcendent quality of her deeply personal narrative, I listened with as much rapt attention as a history student hard-pressed by deadlines can muster. Then, lunch finished, we parted ways.
I have since purchased a copy of Middlemarch—second hand for two dollars at a used-book shop, spattered with the underlines and commentaries of a previous owner—which has done a five-star job collecting dust on my bookshelf ever since. Subtext: I have yet to read it. It seems I suffer from that tendency to approach classics as best described by Mark Twain: “A classic is something everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
The assumption behind this is nearly too obvious to be stated: classics are challenging to read and therefore impossible to enjoy. In short, they’re boring. The perceived difficulty of classic literature underscores the aversion many of us have to delving into those hefty tomes. My own experience with War and Peace was far more war than peace, and a battle I retreated from halfway through. The idea that classic books are drier than Mississippi during prohibition is one to which I can often relate. Yet, accompanying it is a perception which is subtly more nefarious, less often articulated yet no less significant as a result. I speak of the presumed snobbery of classical literature.
To a certain extent, such a designation rings with a chime of truth. Literacy having been a privilege reserved to the elite (mostly men) throughout the greater part of history, the luxury of reading, let alone reading without practical purpose—for (gasp!) pleasure—is one few could previously afford. In our century, wherein Western civilization boasts unprecedented literacy, reading has become commonplace, with a proliferation of books so overwhelming that the concept of a modern classic rapidly begins to lose its meaning.
Those books which have survived from periods preceding our own, having been deemed by the democracy of mankind to possess sufficient transcendent meaning so as to be worth sharing and preserving, now make up the collectanea we deem “the classics.” Their deputation to classrooms, lecture halls, and esoteric doctoral degrees has only augmented the view of classical literature as elitist. Classic literature, one begins to think, is what is studied by bespectacled students at Oxford and Cambridge (which it is), rather than what is read for pleasure but the average layperson (which it ought to be).
This perception, however, remains fundamentally mistaken. Quite to the contrary, classic literature is not nearly so elitist as one might imagine, but is intrinsically and irrevocably democratic, representing the collective taste of generations of readers—those dead as much as those living. As G.K. Chesterton so thoughtfully defends legend, we may also defend classic literature: on the basis of tradition. As he writes, “Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be waking about.” And therein lies the democratic richness of literary tradition, in which the oligarchic elitism of any single generation is subverted in favour of the shared democracy of humanity across space and time. Those books which remain are those which have survived the discriminating taste of the collective. Revolution may subvert the tyranny of a single man, but tradition overthrows all tyrants at once.
Further undercutting the notion of literary elitism is the now sweeping accessibility of classic literature. Thousands of years worth of literature has now entered the literal and literary public domain. Where once a work may have been reserved to a choice audience—to the initiates, to the educated, to the wealthy—an irreversible emancipation has taken hold, spurring a timeless dialogue between the author and his or her audience—an audience not of the elite, but of common people of every age, race, gender, and class. This conversation is indiscriminate. Whoever chooses to read a classic work becomes a part of it, for the author, regardless of intent, has produced a volume which has expanded beyond its own pages, creating a timeless and universal experience: a shared dialogue between readers who speak a hundred different languages and live at a hundred different times.
Even so, the argument that is often levelled against classic literature is that it remains, even now, a genre dominated by the works of “dead white men.” What their being dead has to do with it I cannot fathom, and it seems a rather strange cruelty to deride someone for their misfortune of not being alive (Would it be better if they were living white men, I always wonder?). Their whiteness, on the other hand, is taken to underscore a lack of diversity in the canon. Though there is truth in this criticism, I might offer the reminder that as classical literature has historically been understood as Western classical literature, it would only stand to reason that the bulk of it, at least into the 19th century, would in fact be written by Europeans and those of such ancestry. That most of these European writers were also men is simply an unfortunate historical reality, given that as late as the Middle Ages it is estimated that as few as 1% of all women were literate (and only about 10% of men, we should acknowledge). Women’s inclusion in the canon of classical literature has, unsurprisingly, accompanied growing literacy rates and the advance of suffrage. It is worth reminding ourselves that George Eliot, author of Britain’s greatest novel, was known to her friends as Mary Ann Evans.
Progress aside, to scorn classic literature on the basis of it being dead, white, and male is as historically naïve as it is unhelpful. To then arbitrarily extend such a judgement to the entire canon of classics is ironically elitist itself. An aristocrat deems everyone else inferior on the basis of class. A reviler of the classics does so on the basis of race and gender. Both are guilty of generalizations on the basis of peripheral categorizations, and both lack historical perspective.
History has the final say. Today, as the definition of a classic has broadened, we have seen increased heterogeneity in the continually growing canon, as well as the inclusion of non-Western works from centuries past, which have long boasted preeminence outside of the Western world, from the Mahābhārata to Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. The canon, it would first appear, has followed much the same progressive trajectory as liberal society. Yet, quite the opposite may be argued—classic literature has not followed liberal society; it has helped forge it. Many ideas now perceived as dated or backwards were stepping-stones towards a more liberal and emancipated society. Even antediluvian values were once contemporary. Our society, such as it is, serves as the best measure of the progress made by those preceding it—progress often first framed by the works of each society’s thinkers.
There remains a further danger in deeming classic literature as elitist, and this is of course the danger that by doing so it will become precisely that. If abandoned by the democratic readership and reserved only to the echelons of academia, it will by necessity become increasingly oligarchic—even aristocratic. That the classics are not elitist is not an inevitability. It is a tenuous reality, contingent upon the enjoyment of the classics by the democracy of common readers. In this sense, the classics are like all truly democratic institutions: if they are not guarded, they will transform, and we may find that the transformation is precisely what we feared all along.