Mark Twain on John Milton's Paradise Lost:
"It's a classic... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
I feel like Twain is even more right today then he was when he said this. And I'm not trying to sound snobbish or elitist. I graduated with an Major in English and a minor in Creative Writing, (which means reading is pretty much my thing that I do a lot) and I don't want to read most of high-waisted drivel the English literary establishment has deemed "classic" either. Most classic literature before 1850 was either bumbling in structure, boring, or both. If it was deemed a classic post-1850, it was probably overly self important and needlessly difficult. Especially anything written between 1910 and 1970. I mean my God, why did nobody tell Joyce to rein it in a little bit? Seriously.
All this to say that I went into Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird--basically the classic of all classics--expecting it to be just as disappointing. But it wasn't. It was delightful. Scout Finch is maybe my favorite narrator of all time, primarily because of all the things that make her different from every other classic narrator of the period. She's simple. She's funny. She's unique. She doesn't hide behind overly complicated allegory or metaphysical, philosophical impositions.
I get a lot of shit for it, but my reading interests have always trended towards genre fiction because, despite the fact that these stories are about aliens or monsters or ghosts or dudes with swords and codpieces, genre fiction writers never forgot the most important of fiction: from Mary Shelley to George R.R. Martin, it's all about telling a great story. It's both the most simple and the most elegant thing any good novel can really hope to accomplish, but for some reason, literary fiction writers often sacrifice that commitment to storytelling in service of some loftier ideal or goal, be it experimentation with form, or psychological exploration, or an allegorical examination of some aspect of modern society. Literary novels started out telling great stories; shouldn't "classic" novels seek to carry on in that tradition, no matter the ulterior motives?
I'm not saying those goals aren't worthy. If that's what the author set out to do, who am I to say what's wrong with it? I've just got a problem with people calling them classics. Classic shouldn't mean too challenging in form or conceit for 99% of the literate world to comprehend. That's not what classic means in any other application of the term... when something is classic, that means no matter who's looking at it, that something can be instantly recognized as a timelessly apt representative of its contextual influences, a champion that can stand up for it's brethren and say, this is what we're all about, and that's never going to change.
A classic shouldn't be something we have to take a class on in order to understand. I'm reading William Faulkner's Sound and the Fury right now. Why should I need to study the sparknotes (which I did) just to figure out what this book is saying, and why it is supposedly a classic of southern literature? I'm southern--shouldn't I be able to figure that out on my own? Shouldn't the book speak to me, and not at me?
To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic because I don't need a Ph.D. to understand what makes this book great southern literature. No theoretical explanations necessary; it's just something you can feel from page one right through to the end. Harper Lee got it.
Makes you kinda sad she only wrote one, don't it? I mean, talk about raising the bar.
Thomas out.
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