Is This the Line for Faulkner’s Latest?

by

Mark Bastable

The argument had grown more heated all the way through the entrées. Now I was going in for the kill.
 
“Look,” I said, sloshing out the last of the wine, some of which actually made it into my glass, “there is simply no question that by any objective standards, Dickens is a better writer than Dan Brown. That ought to be obvious even to a moron in a panic.” I wagged the admonitory finger. “It’s not elitist to say so. It’s not snobbish and it’s not a criticism of your choice of beach-read. I’m just saying…”
 
“…you’re just saying that hating every word of Little Dorrit would do me more good than enjoying The Da Vinci Code.”
 
I paused. I don’t like to be interrupted. It makes me cranky.
 
“Oh, go and boil your-hic-your head,” I told my mother. And having delivered that witty rejoinder, I slipped unconscious under the table just as the groom stood up to make his speech.
 
Later, thinking about it, I realised that the white-haired ancestor had made a point that demanded to be addressed. If it’s true—as I believe it is—that the work of Dickens offers more to the reader than that of Dan Brown, why do I encounter such resistance when I encourage people to toss The Lost Symbol and pick up The Old Curiosity Shop? Why am I so certain that if I give my brother Grisham’s latest as a birthday present, he’ll be delighted—but if I show up toting a gift-wrapped Gogol I shan’t be asked to stay for aperitifs?
 
In short, if the classics are so damn good, why aren’t people lining up outside bookshops to buy them?

In order to think about this at all, we need some idea of what we mean by ‘the classics’. It’s  a highly-inclusive term that covers work as diverse as Jude the Obscure and Candide. The Iliad and Ulysses. The Lord of the Rings and Lord of the Flies.

For the purposes of this discussion—and without attempting a definition of Great Literature—a classic is any book published more than fifty years ago that still sells enough to remain in print. Yes, all right, that applies to See Spot Run and Mein Kampf, but let’s not get picky.

If we’re going to consider why so many people seem not to like the classics, we should first acknowledge that even people who are seriously into classic literature don’t like all of it. Nobody could. You’d have to be suffering from some kind of multiple personality disorder. Or, in the case of people who love D.H. Lawrence, a miserable attitude and no sense of humour. The canon is just too diverse to be universally engaging.

And that would be true even if every single classic book was utterly wonderful. But—are you sitting down?—they’re not. Actually, in modern terms, a lot of the classics aren’t much good at all. Many of them are simply sacred objects.

This isn’t as provocative an assertion as it sounds. If you were a student of architecture, you might visit the public baths at Pompeii and be impressed by the style, the technology, the design techniques and so on; you'd learn a hell of a lot about how people lived in those days, and about the purpose that the building served in the society that constructed it. That wouldn't necessarily mean that you'd expect ever to design baths in that way today or that you'd be able to sell such a concept to a corporate investment fund.

Similarly, you don't read Moby Dick in the expectation that it will work like Silence of the Lambs. Melville’s fiction is simply not punchy in the way we prefer these days. By our standards it's heavily over-written and discursive to the point of unintelligibility. But it's an important relic that tells us about our literary past. If it were a building, it’d have a gift shop near the exit and an ice-cream concession out front.

And like any such revered building, Moby Dick is an attraction that school children should never be forced to visit, in case it puts them off old stuff for life.

Second, we should realise that we can never have the experience of a classic book that was had by someone who read it back then.

I once attended a lecture by Jonathan Miller (director, writer, doctor, critic, comedian, probably brain surgeon too) in which he suggested that although it might be fun to attend a performance of Shakespeare in the round, wearing Elizabethan dress, at a replica of the Globe Theatre, piping in the authentic smell of a fifteenth-century urban street and swigging goblets of mead, one shouldn't at any point imagine that what one was getting there was the authentic Hamlet experience just as the opening night audience got it. When those people got it, all the surrounding stuff was simply their life. They didn't even notice it. When you attend such an event today, you're aware of the artifice and you're making an effort to assimilate it.

In just the same way, it's not possible to read, say, Frankenstein or The Grapes of Wrath or Uncle Tom's Cabin as it would have been read back then, because you bring to those novels ideas about science and poverty and race that were not at the time part of the common attitudinal vocabulary. You have thought things and you believe stuff and you know truths that most readers would not have thought or believed or known on the day those books were published.

Why does that matter? Well—those books are classics because of the effect they had on the readership. Their status is a consequence of their cultural impact and of the societal changes of which they were a part. Having been assimilated into the culture, they can never have the same ideological impact on you.

To observe this phenomenon in action, check out the dismissive and scornful one-star reviews of The Catcher in the Rye on Amazon. Many modern readers can’t understand why the self-regarding ramblings of a privileged adolescent boy should be of interest to them. That’s understandable. We’re surrounded by media that incessantly transmit the ramblings of privileged adolescent boys—on MTV, in the magazines, on pumped-up reality-shows and in sun-bleached soaps. Those disgruntled Amazon reviewers just cannot imagine a world in which Holden Caulfield’s voice might form the basis of an extraordinary and ground-breaking book.

I’ve heard it said that The Catcher in the Rye wouldn't get published today. That’s probably true. But it wouldn't be necessary today. Some classics are classics because of what they did when they did it.

Third, one has to get away from the idea that liking something and it being good are the same thing. It's entirely possible to know—intellectually, historically, analytically—that Jane Austen was a talented, influential and important writer, but at the same time to profess that you find her work irrelevant, smug and irritating.

That seems a pretty obvious distinction, right? But the biggest single obstacle to conducting a discussion about the value of the classics is that so many people insist that what they like is good and what they don’t like is bad. No one will admit to liking crap or to disliking quality stuff.

The temptation is to justify the subjective by denying the objective. For instance, I fly the flag for the irreparably-flawed talent of Terry Southern. Cornered and drunk, I might even suggest that he’s a better writer than, say, Tolkien, whose work I despise. But such a provocatively eccentric contention is completely counterproductive. It will never convince a Hobbit-head to emigrate from the Shires, and it’s quite likely to turn him against Southern out of offended contempt for me.

However, I’m not saying that one shouldn’t read Tolkien. The thing about the classics is that they have enough going for them—vision, style, invention, philosophical position, universal insight, whatever—that they’re worth reading for those qualities alone.

Incidentally, I’d be willing to bet the life of someone of whom I’m only moderately fond that the people who say they don’t like classic literature far outnumber the people who’ve read any. To take a specific instance, I don’t like Solzhenitsyn, whom I’ve never even sampled. Don’t have to read that stuff, man—just know I won’t like it. And I concede that that’s pathetic and lazy of me.

Be honest. How many of the great writers you say you don’t like have you actually read?

All the arguments I’ve presented so far have been mitigations of the possibility that we might not have as much fun reading the classics as we would reading Jackie Collins. I appear to be saying, “It’s not supposed to be enjoyable. That’s not the point of reading good literature.”

But it is enjoyable. It’s fantastically enjoyable—and there are lot of people out there enjoying it. We can be sure of that because, however respected the classics, publishers only print them because they sell. And those sales are not all down to students handing over their gift certificates for syllabus fiction. There are hundreds of classics in print and no more than several dozen feature in scholastic courses in any one academic year. If the books still command valuable shelf-space at the store, then someone’s buying them for pleasure.

Which raises the question, where the hell are these people? Have you ever seen a guy on a Greyhound reading Madame Bovary? When’s the last time you followed a woman out of Gap saying, “Excuse me—you dropped your Mill on the Floss”? Or is it that they're guiltily hiding their pocket Dostoevski inside a cover torn from Valley of the Dolls? I think that Amazon should be using this as sales pitch: With a Kindle, no one at Starbucks need know you like Henry James.

Perhaps not every single book in the Penguin Classics corner of your local bookshop is going to gladden the heart and put a spring in the step, but a high proportion of them will. In fact, I’d say that the more classics you read, the higher the proportion of them you’ll enjoy. There’s a reason for that—you get better at it. The more you do it the better you get; the better you get the more you enjoy it; the more you enjoy it the more you do it. It’s like cooking.

This virtuous loop of nourishing involvement would never be established by gulping down Dan Brown’s stuff, which is the literary equivalent of a Happy Meal. And not the one with the little cup of healthy apple segments either.

Whenever the suggestion is made that a person might like to consider reading some good literature, the person says, “Look—sometimes I just want mindless entertainment. I don’t always want to have to work at it.”

My mother wrote cookery books, and she reckoned that people buy cookery books in order to absolve themselves of the guilt of not cooking. They say to themselves, “Of course, I could make boeuf bourguignon if I wanted to—it’s right there in the book—but tonight I’m sending out for pizza.”

The ‘mindless entertainment’ riposte works in much the same way. “Of course, I could be reading Tristam Shandy, but tonight I’m going to kick back with Clive Cussler.” And that's okay.  I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t from time to time scarf down junk. I’m asking why we so rarely get around to chewing on anything else.

While I’m making it plain what it is I’m not saying, let’s get a few other potential misapprehensions out of the way, before the wires that lead to this page are reduced to filaments of ash by red-hot gouts of twisted e-flame.

For a start, I’m not saying that all mass market fiction is crap. I am saying that Dan Brown’s mass market fiction is crap. And if you have any sense, you’re saying that too, even if you like it.

Also, I’m not saying that no one’s writing any good stuff today, because they clearly are, and some of that stuff will be regarded as classic in the future if it’s not already.

So it follows that I’m not saying that all the old stuff is good and all the new stuff isn’t. Don’t start with the ‘dead white guy’ schtick. Both you and I know that that’s a different argument entirely.

Oh, and when I say ‘you’, I don’t necessarily mean you, the person reading this now. Obviously you maintain a perfectly balanced intake that ranges from Harold Robbins to Beowulf, and you’re a credit to your library card. No—I’m talking to, and about, the thirty-five-year-old management consultant sitting next to you on the train reading Twilight.

My mother—yes, her again—often says, “There’s no such thing as junk food, dear—only junk diet.” Recognising the pragmatic good sense of that observation, I intend to launch a campaign today. I want you to be part of it and also to recruit the management consultant on the train.

Here’s the plan.

Every time you splash out on a mass market novel that you know, deep in your heart, is crammed with pulp cholesterol and cultural MSG, go to the checkout via the Literature section and pick up a healthy, delicious, nutritious classic that you’ve always wondered about. Buy them both, and enjoy them consecutively. Balance the junk with some good stuff. You’ll be surprised how a change of diet can not only alter your tastes but also make you feel totally great.

And spread the word. When your teen nephew’s birthday-list stipulates the novel of the movie of the Nintendo game of the on-line strip Uberfist II: Visigoth Bloodlust, couple it with an obviously perfect literary companion. Off the cuff, I’d suggest PG Wodehouse’s What-Ho, Jeeves. I too was wearing black eyeliner and a skull earring when I first read that masterpiece, and I’m confident that two pages in, the kid’ll be hooked.

So pledge to the cause. Buy one, get one good. Together, we can change the entire profile of book buying. It’ll broaden our perceptions, rack up our cultural intelligence and give immense enjoyment to everyone involved.

On top of which, you really don’t want to cross my mother. 
 

Mark Bastable has published two novels in the UK (Icebox and Mischief—Hodder, 1999 and 2001 respectively) and was also a columnist for both Gentleman’s Quarterly and Esquire. His short stories have appeared in various print and online magazines. Mark has made periodic appearances as a news-reviewer on BBC Radio London, amongst others. He also appeared on the literary panels at the Backspace Writers’ Conference in New York in 2007 and 2008. His third novel is currently undergoing final revision, and the one after that is percolating through the synapses. You can learn more about Mark and read some of his stories at his website. Married to a Jersey girl, Mark is adept at being interestingly British for Americans. Contact Mark.