PART 1
THE QUESTION OF THE CLASSIC
1
âWhat Is a Classic?â
International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question
O lord, have patience
Pardon these derelictionsâ
I shall convince these romantic irritations
By my classical conventions.
T. S. Eliot
To mark the fortieth anniversary of the Man Booker Prize and the imminent announcement of the 2008 shortlist, the Guardian asked a judge from every year to give its readers glimpses into the âtears, tiffs and triumphsâ that marked the nomination of the winning novel.1 The resulting stories suggest that the perils of literary judgment, as borne out by rosters of glorious losers as well as by the historical fates of some of the winning tickets, could be put down largely to the fortuitous and subjective nature of the process. This short history of Booker judging, moreover, testifies to the contingent nature of synchronic critical reception. In 1970 Dame Rebecca West denounced Margaret Drabble for her novels of domestic life, remarking that âanyone can do the washing-up,â in an era when âbrilliant old ladies,â to quote Antonia Fraser, could use the patriarchal line to seal the fate of âa brilliant young oneâ (âTears, Tiffs, and Triumphs,â 2). Hermione Lee recalls how Salman Rushdieâs Midnightâs Children, which has won the Booker of Bookers and the Best of all Bookers, and is ânow a classic of world literature,â was âby no means an easy winnerâ in 1981 (âTears, Tiffs, and Triumphs,â 3). Rushdie was an unknown writer who scraped through by one extra nomination and would have lost if the chair, Malcolm Bradbury, had the overruling vote. By 1983, however, the Rushdie-Coetzee battle for the Booker was likened to âa clash of continentsâ (Fay Weldon, in âTears, Tiffs, and Triumphs,â 4), to the detriment of candidates with lesser symbolic clout. In 2000, according to Rose Tremain, Margaret Atwood won the prize for The Blind Assassin not for writing her best book but âfor all the times sheâd nearly won it and had been pipped at the post by a lesser writerâ (âTears, Tiffs, and Triumphs,â 21).
Most of us in the business of literary criticism have little to do with the ersatz and absurdity of deciding literary prizes like the Booker, and their tremendous, if dubious and short-term, impact on literary culture. âEven the most correct jury goes in for horsetrading and gamesmanship, and what emerges is a compromise,â writes the novelist Hilary Mantel, a 1990 Booker panelist (âTears, Tiffs, and Triumphs,â 5)2. A number of judges even flag their Booker service as the definitive event that marked their turn to nonfiction and narrative journalism. But the criteria deployed in the determination of this yearly award speak to the supposedly more serious and premeditated considerations that inform academic literary criticism. No minds are changed by panel discussions, as the Booker judges note year after year, but there is the routine, familiar to literary critics, âof anatomising oneâs taste and judgement and then communicating it to a group,â as Alex Clark, 2008 judge, puts it (âTears, Tiffs, and Triumphs,â 21). Booker judging highlights the limits of literary criticism; the triumph of creating a classic that is not unmixed with the fear of choosing the wrong book. Finally, it addresses the politics of impersonality that marks the inception and transmission of modern literary criticism. âBut posterity will forget us,â says English professor and Booker judge John Sutherland in the critical backlash against the 2005 choice (John Banville for The Sea). âBarnes, Ishiguro andâI believeâBanville theyâll rememberâ (21).
Pierre Bourdieuâs well-known work on consumption studies in Distinction (1986) has long exposed consumersâ desires to cultivate and demonstrate a particular kind of labor informing their consumption patterns and to define their class position through it. Consumers select commodities that proclaim their sophistication in tasteâhence the popularity of âeducatedâ forms of recreation. The critical âeyeâ is a product of history reproduced by education: cultural consumption presupposes, Bourdieu writes, âan act of cognition, a decoding operation, which implies the implementation of a cognitive acquirement, a cultural codeâ (3). Bourdieu terms as cultural capital the internalization of the cultural code or the acquisition of a knowledge that equips the subject to decipher cultural relations. Prizes such as the Booker expose the vested interests behind cultural recognition, and exemplify, as James English observes, the trenchant relationship between the cultural and the economic, or âcultural and political capital.â They are, to quote English, âour most effective institutional agents of capital intraconversion,â substitutions and exchanges between different complexes of capital (Economy of Prestige, 10). In his insightful study of the awards industry, The Economy of Prestige, English argues that despite the âstaggering discontinuitiesâ between the canon at any given time and the list of past prizewinners, âit is precisely by such embarrassingly social-commercial-cultural mechanisms . . . that the canon is formed, cultural capital is allocated, âgreatnessâ is determinedâ (245).3 I will consider the role of literary criticism in two relatable, if less commercially compromised, instantiations of literary capital and determinations of literary greatness: the twentieth-century lectures called âWhat Is a Classic?â that T. S. Eliot and J. M. Coetzee gave, forty-seven years apart. In each lecture the creative writer assumes the role of a critic, self-consciously taking his place in the direct succession of poet-criticsâJohnson, Coleridge, Shelley, and Arnoldâand his questioning is historical as well as rhetorical. Both interrogate the idea of a classic as a work of enduring value, and demonstrate, in singular ways, how literary criticism generates its classics. In his lecture, given in 1991, Coetzee even claims that âthe function of criticism is defined by the classic: criticism is that which is duty-bound to interrogate the classicâ (âWhat Is a Classic?â 19). Coetzee had reread Eliotâs famous lecture in preparation for his. The two essays, read together, seem to suggest that if the classical criterion is of vital importance to literary criticism, the classic in turn is constituted by the criticism it receives down the ages. It is a peculiar codependence: the classic is that which survives critical questioning, and it in fact defines itself by that surviving. Eliotâs and, later, Coetzeeâs investment in this question cannot be reduced to nostalgia for or valorization of the set standards and idealized attitudes of canons. The criticâs quest for the classic is indeed Romantic and Oedipal, but if the classic is a fantasized point of origin it is also a new departure and signals breathless new arrivals at debates that define and contest literary modernity and the literary present.
In âSecular Criticism,â an essay that sets out to define the function of criticism for our times, Edward Said describes the critic as an âindividual consciousnessâ that is not a mere product of the dominant culture, âbut a historical and social actor in itâ (World, 15). Criticism is constituted by the âself-situatingâ of the critic, who assumes a distance from the collective (15). Western critical consciousness, according to Said, has historically functioned through affiliation, âa kind of compensatory order,â or a cultural system, that eventually supplants the authority of the natural (or what Said calls the âfiliativeâ) order:
Thus if a filial relationship was held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authorityâinvolving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflictâthe new affiliative relationship changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal formsâsuch as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the hegemony of a dominant culture. (20)
The affiliative order affirms and replicates filiative processes, albeit through nonbiological social and cultural structures. In the humanities, such an order is predicated on the occlusion of the nonliterary and the non-European, and arguably the political dimension of all literature. According to Said, there are two alternatives for the contemporary literary critic: unquestioning reverence for the (affiliative) order of the humanities and âthe dominant culture served by those humanitiesâ (24); or the adoption of a âsecularâ mode of critical scrutiny, which is oppositional toward âorthodox habits of the mindâ and âorganized dogmaâ (29). The thrust of the question âWhat is a classic?â is aligned to this, the second mode of doing criticism. It symbolizes a constative and performative epistemology, at once a long, ongoing âprocess of abstractionâ and a timely and contingent âreaction to immediate concerns.â4 If Eliot addresses and nervously reinforces the idea of the classic as European and Eurocentric, Coetzee draws out the unspoken implications in Eliotâs lecture to elaborate on the afterlife of this question in trans- or international criticism. Both versions of âWhat Is a Classic?â use the object of inquiry to worry the emplacement and affiliations of the literary critic. The time of the classic, both lectures testify, is the complex present of literary criticism, and its place, too, is âhere.â
Before launching into the Eliot and Coetzee interventions, it is necessary to mark the distinction between classics and canons. The term classic is closely related to the idea of canonicity but is not entirely reducible to it. The classic, like the canonical work, is a book that is read long after it was writtenâand that demands rereading. The classic shares with the canon the âstrangenessâ that Harold Bloom identifies as the greatness of canonical works: âa mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strangeâ (Western Canon, 3). The classic, like the canonical text, produces âstartlementâ rather than recognition or a âfulfilment of expectationâ (3). The classic and the canonical work usher a polymorphous textuality that literary cultures value, and both involve the dimension of criticism, or interpretive traditions that contest the definition of literary value. But the classic is primarily a singular act of literature, while the canon, Guillory states, is âan aristocracy of textsâ (âIdeology,â 175). Canonicity implies a formation of a corpus, the congealing of the âliterary art of Memory,â as Harold Bloom terms it (Western Canon, 17), the making up of a list of books requisite for a literary education, and the formation of an exclusive club, however painstakingly contested the rules of inclusion (and exclusion) may be. The classic, however, is inseparable from the endless and unresolved contestations of the question âWhat is a classic?â and belongs to what Guillory calls âthe conflictual prehistory of canon-formationâ (âIdeology,â 194). If the canon implies continuity with the past or a perpetuation of tradition, the classic is all that and something else: the survival of the classic, Kermode states, depends upon its possession âof a surplus of signifierâ (Classic, 140).
Eliotâs and Coetzeeâs temporal perspectiveâa long look backâin âWhat Is a Classic?â has been revised by the drift of English literary history. Cultural identity in the era of cultural-economic globalization, as Said suggests, should be conceived in terms of space rather than time: âSpatiality becomes . . . the characteristic of an aesthetic rather than of political domination, as more and more regionsâfrom India to Africa to the Caribbeanâchallenge the classical empires and their culturesâ (Culture and Imperialism, 18). Are there any perennial works or masterpieces in the new geomorphic empire and in world literature, which is not so much a canon of texts as it is a mode of circulation? How does the unitary ontology of the classic haunt the shadow constructs of postimperial selfhood? After elaborating on Eliotâs and Coetzeeâs investment in the question, I speculate on whether the question of the classic is asked, in some form, whenever âsecular canon-formationâ (Kermode, Classic, 15) occurs in the politics of publishing, teaching, and translating core texts. Criticism in the twenty-first century continues to shore up the idea of transcendent and foundational literary value against mobile configurations of knowledge, technology, and expertise. For Eliot, the classic standard was indissociable from dead languages. In the new century, criticism invents itself and its modern classics by waking the dead, and sustaining a dynamic and variable conversation with a monolingual literary tradition as it becomes other.
âWhat Is a Classic?â is the title of a presidential address delivered by T. S. Eliot before the Virgil Society on October 16, 1944. The Blitz had resumed early that year, and London that summer had been introduced to âflying bombs.â In June a bomb had fallen on the offices of Faber and Faber, where Eliot was editor. While business quickly resumed, Eliot was left without the use of his flat at the office and forced to commute between London and Surrey (where he lived) more frequently. He stayed in London only on Tuesday nights and fulfilled his fire-watching dutiesâcamped on a roof, the vertiginous poet scrutinized the blacked-out city for evidence of fires after antiaircraft guns had done their job. Peter Ackroydâs biography details the benumbed existence that Eliot led in the last years of the war, negotiating days one at a time with no hope for the future (Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, 268). The lectures he delivered around the time of âWhat Is a Classic?â do not reference the war directly, but are nevertheless chastened and enervated by its reality. The connection of âWhat Is a Classic?â to war work is speculative, of course: it is impossible to know if Eliot would have bothered to write this essay had the Virgil Society not held him to a presidential address, and whether this critical essay represented anything more than a tertiary thought in the masterâs late period. Hugh Kenner, reviewing Frank Kermodeâs revival of the piece in The Classic (1975), is convinced that âthe British tradition of the ceremonial has been obligating these individual talents, and it has taken all Mr. Kermodeâs skill with the panel-lights and rheostats of documented learning to disguise this hollow factâ (âFootsteps of the Masterâ).
Eliotâs address, with a rhetorical question as its title, begins in a retrospective mode: âIt is only by hindsight, and in historical perspective, that a classic can be known as suchâ (What Is a Classic? 10). Eliot articulates his topic by means of a desiring dialectic that pits the classic against the contingent, the racial and national against the international, the absolute against the errant. He espouses a utopian cultural homogeneity as a precondition for the emergence of the classic. A classic occurs when a civilization and a language and literature are mature and there is a community of taste and common style. A mature literature has a historical trajectory behind it, the history of âan ordered though unconscious progress of a language to realize its own potentialities within its own limitationsâ (11). It is the work of a âmatureâ mind steeped in the history of its living language and magisterial in its critical sweep of the past, present, and future. The maturity of the classic poet, according to Eliot, accrues from a consciousness of history, the poetâs own as well as that of at least one other hypercivilization.
Eliot reminds us that the question âWhat is a classic?â is not new. I would like to look briefly at a notable historical precedent. Augustin Sainte-Beuve, an Eliot-like creator of literary value, confronted his age with the same query in the causerie of 24 October 1850: âQuâest-ce quâun classique?â5 The word classic, Sainte-Beuve records, appears first in ancient Rome as classici, a name applied to the citizens of the first class, the only class that mattered. The classic as a mode of classification thus originates in a gesture that equates social and literary rank. Sainte-Beuveâs account of the classic is at a remove from the antique ideal, but, as critics point out, it is telling that Sainte-Beuve should begin in ancient Rome, where the literary classic mirrors a privileged social class. As Christopher Prendergast comments: âThe implication seems to be that, however remote Roman antiquity, it still has a lesson immensely germane to the present or to Sainte-Beuveâs construction of it: namelyâthat the material and social conditions for the production of a âclassicâ rest on the division of labour and the specialization of functionâ (28). In this essay, as well as the 1858 lecture that revises it, Sainte-Beuve offers several definitions of the classic that seek to broaden its spirit and scope: a true classic is an author who has enriched the human mind; the classic is an unequivocal moral truth commuted in a form that is not fixed but unfailingly large and grand, fine and meaningful, healthy and beautiful in itself. The classic has a style of its own, and is new and inimitable, an invention that is not programmable and must be recognized on its own terms. The style is new without neologism, new and ancient in equal measure, and effortlessly contemporaneous with all ages. The classic renews itself continuously to pose as a perpetual contemporary, âcontemporain de tousles âgesâ: it is a living entity, open to endless intervention in successive acts of reading and interpretation. The idea o...