What makes a classic? As an answer – or to avoid the rather puzzling question – you might name some: Anna Karenina, Nineteen Eighty-Four, David Copperfield. And then move on to more straightforward literary topics: what’s your favourite Shakespeare play? What do you think of Salman Rushdie’s new book?
But let’s return to the matter of the classic for a moment. Mark Twain puts it pithily: a classic is ‘a book which people praise and don’t read.’ It’s a painfully ironic comment considering the enduring appeal of his own Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The classic might prettily adorn your coffee table, impressing guests who – what a coincidence! – also adore that book! Needless to say, neither of you have ventured past the first page. The other day, I even found myself recommending Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to a friend; please don’t ask me for the plot – I don’t have a clue. (That said, my recommendation stands as I’ve heard great things).
Perhaps that is a sign of a true classic: a book which you can confidently discuss but never need to read. Or you might discuss it without knowing you are referring to a book at all. No judgment here; we do it all the time. The classic’s language infiltrates culture without our noticing it, and to such an extent that its birthplace within the text becomes forgotten. Who knew that the eyes of Big Brother oversaw the story of Nineteen Eight-Four before enjoying a renaissance on British television two decades ago? Or that the widely used expression ‘Jazz Age’ was first coined in F. S. Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age? The classic, if you will, exists hidden in plain sight.
Or it could exist hidden altogether. The idea struck me when looking at the cover of John William’s Stoner. On it features a review from the Sunday Times: ‘The greatest novel you’ve never read.’ One could add ‘you’ve never heard of’, for it really does go unnoticed (it’s a mystery to me, as the book is fantastic). Regardless, the Sunday Times seems to insinuate that the classic need not be well-known to earn its stripes. How else, then, might it claim the coveted title? Must it tick certain boxes, like one might expect of a genre?
Upon some research, it seems that adhering to certain features might in fact increase your chances of releasing the next classic. Wikipedia refers me to the more erudite words of T. S. Eliot, who emphasises the trait of ‘comprehensiveness’: ‘The classic must, within its formal limitations, express the maximum possible of the whole range of feeling which represents the character of the people who speak that language.’ No wonder, then, that we so often associate this label with the great Victorian stories - Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Oliver Twist, The Mill on the Floss to name but a few. Helpfully, these novels focus at most on two characters allowing this ‘range of feeling’ to be fully and convincingly developed.
The publishing house Pan Macmillan identifies the classic as a work which ‘very often portrays a particular time and place in an intensely evocative way.’ Dickens’ London is a first-class example. It might also be the first of its kind; Walter Scott’s Waverley, for instance, initiated the genre of historical fiction in 1814. Most crucially, the classic sets a precedent, especially in terms of character. It introduces an archetype – take Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse – who invites constant reinterpretation. In the case of Emma, we’ve seen the novel revived onscreen in 1996, 2009, and 2020. It’s even been placed in the nineties American high school context in the fabulous Clueless (1995). The modern retelling isn’t jarring; rather, it works beautifully as a comforting rom-com, with the headstrong Cher facing the same dilemmas as Emma. Clueless’s rendition of the novel shows us how uncannily human emotions stay fixed over the centuries. Cher might live in an overstimulating world of shopping and jeeps, but fundamentally, she owes all her emotional complexity to Austen.
If it doesn’t meet all these criteria, perhaps all a contending book needs is to collect a hefty amount of dust. Even better if it’s a two-hundred-year-old leather-bound edition. Time, it seems, helps to cement the brilliance of otherwise neglected texts. Moby-Dick, now a staple of literature curricula, was snubbed by readers upon its publication in 1851; it was only in the 1920s that critical scholarship properly acknowledged this baffling work. And for good reason: its encyclopaedic knowledge of literary history and all things whaling (both the hunting practice and the scientific field) is spellbinding. And all the while, Melville toys with the reader, dissimulating himself only partially behind his narrator.
But time is an unreliable judge of greatness. Take The Great Gatsby, for instance. I am not suggesting it had been better left in the archives, but there are other novels – now eclipsed by Daisy Buchanan’s dazzling smile – which are more telling of Fitzgerald’s genius. Tender is the Night, especially, shows a more mature writer seriously exploring character through psychoanalysis rather than the too obvious symbolism of Gatsby. But the passing years have worked in Gatsby’s favour. With the two Hollywood films featuring some of the industry’s greats, the world has repeatedly marvelled at the glitz and glamour of interwar New York. Gatsby, you could even argue, has become the poster child of the American 1920s.
What a blessing, you might say. But I would argue the label of ‘classic’ is more of a curse. The classic scares and makes one dread interminable hours spent poring over mile-long sentences. In the case of Proust, you wouldn’t be wrong (trust me, I tried). I couldn’t tell you about Anna Karenina or Nineteen Eighty-Four – I haven’t read them. But they might be sitting patiently on my bookshelf for a couple more years to come.