Why the classics are so important (pt. 1)
In recent years, I have noticed a complete shift in my reading habits away from the Modern Novel to The Classics. This is actually less a shift and more a return, after all, I grew up in a household filled with the classics.
My father devoted one of the largest rooms in the house to storing them. I remember the day he came to the house with our pick-up truck stacked high with cartons. We spent the entire weekend opening each, expecting toys, games, shoes or clothes only to find that they were all stuffed with Penguin classics. I was too young then to understand the value of so many books but at the same time I was thrilled. I had always felt a bit lonely as a child and books were a reliable and wonderful escape. I remember looking at the word “unabridged” and thinking that it meant “uncensored” in which case I was finally going to be allowed to read “grown-up” books, a very titillating idea to me at the time.
But most of those books were too far out of my reach both intellectually and linguistically. In fact, somewhat ironically, many of them still are. My parents were convinced that I was trying to rush my growth and read things beyond my age when I reached for Henry James, Dickens or Frost, and they were right. They would point me to Agatha Christie or some other lighter text and tell me to wait a few years. Late the next week, I would creep into the library, grab A Midsummer’s Night Dream and Anthony and Cleopatra, quickly scamper back down the stairs and hide them under my bed like they were so much contraband. I would feel a thrill late at night when I would light my bedside lamp and read them in secret, chuckling to myself whenever I reached the scene in Midsummer where bestiality becomes apparent. It was intoxicating, intellectual and sexual. Shakespeare was my pornography and like all adult content I consumed in those years, I was unable to understand most of it. In my dreams, I would have sex with girls who’s vaginas were blotted out by pitch blackness, whose anuses were sown shut and whose breasts were empty holes of space through which the rest of the room was visible. In my thoughts, Shakespeare was some kind of perverted writer who would curse with eagerness and fervour at every opportunity, and thrust sex in the reader’s face at will.
My growth as a reader was stifled when I was steeped in modern pop fiction. Later, my taste became more refined as I discovered how rich and vibrant the modern English novel is. Then five years ago, I found myself back in my father’s library, pillaging it for all it was worth so that I have essentially repossessed the entire collection. The books that I had sometimes scorned as an early teen were now the most precious items in the world. I take photos of my cartons and shelves so that I know exactly where everything is and in what condition. When I read them, each word carries the weight of the world’s gold. Each sentence is a string of priceless gems.
What led me back to the classics with such desperate abandon is in fact, the modern English novel. Fortunately, my selection of novels was restricted to the very best authors and every single one would reference the classics as casually as if they were required reading without which a clear understanding of the human condition is impossible. Initially, I would get frustrated at the obscure references made in passing that were so crucial to sharing the deep insights these author’s had.
Once the frustration dissipated, I grew curious and then powerfully intrigued, a condition so noxious that it had to be remedied hence my pillaging of my father’s library. I picked up Joseph Conrad’s Agent and Nostromo, then I found Rhys’ Wide Saragasso Sea, Tolstoy’s Karenina , Eliot’s Middlemarch and others. I found the writing refreshing, challenging and surprising. The styles of all these author’s were so markedly different that there was no way to confuse one with the other. Each had such a distinctive voice that I had the impression that these authors were separated by a great gulf perhaps ideological, maybe philosophical but definitely artistic.
The Victorian novel, as I read it more, began to appear less stuffy than I was lead to believe it was. The copious details and sometimes baroque structure contrast sharply with today’s popular novels which emphasise a trimmed down, austere, simplified approach to writing focused on narrative eschewing descriptive techniques. Pop fiction is very much like the modern western movie, which is not coincidental because they feed off each other. Western movies demand that a creator be single minded. They discuss one theme or topic and are built exclusively around it. Compared to older literature, they seem dumbed down and diluted as though the audience is too impatient, ignorant or inattentive to handle any more complexity or artistic sophistication. Realism goes out of the window and with it any significant insights into what it means to be human. In that regard, modern cinema is like pornography: events without real consequence or meaning.
The heft of the Victorian novel is symbolic of something more than what we currently have in literature. One might argue that such novels lacked the judicious editing that a modern novel might obtain but that argument diminishes what seems so clear to me: The classics came from a time when authors were uniformly ambitious, eager to use literature as a tool for exploration and investigation; as a lever with which to pry open the Pandora’s box of answers to life’s most difficult questions. When we read the classics, we get the keen impression that the novel was not merely a distraction or an escape, but a powerful alchemical tool in which the hopes and aspirations of entire generations were contained and transmuted. In the classic novel, we see a boldness, a scope and a hunger for a life of meaning and not just a life of entertainment. In the classics, we see a motivating urge not to escape from the world but to dive deeper into it.
The very best modern writers share these ambitions and it is obvious in their work. In fact, they attack the problems much more aggressively, like a man who, having been informed that he might have gold deposits on his land, proceeds to spend countless hours digging up his grounds so that, in the end, no clod of earth remains unturned. It’s no surprise that such authors show this kind of almost desperate bravado in their writing. They too, grew up on a healthy diet on the classics and they caught a glimpse, necessarily incomplete, of just how great The Novel can be and just how far it can take us. No man or woman can have that experience and not be terrified and irrevocably transformed by it.
