Hello Pook.
“[1.] Classics survive not because stuffy old professors deem them so, but because the works touch on universal themes of Humanity which make them immortal for they are speak to every generation. What is interesting to note is the classic works have been around centuries if not more, and the 'feminist literature', etc. are still stuck in the current generation. [2.] A good way to tell if something is art is if it survives the test of time. [3.] 'Feminist literature' and all could be read, but not at the expense of the true classics. [4.] (Why are these true classics dispensed with? Because they are now deemed politically incorrect.)”
I can see several errors in here, so I’ve numbered them; I’ll go through them in order:
This is not entirely true; take, for instance, Chinua Achebe’s Things Falls Apart, a million copy bestseller, which is set in colonial times, about an African tribe and the threat from the white men who were just arriving. To me, this is a classic piece of literature, which explores “universal themes”, but most people would never have heard of it were it not for the fact that the novel is perfect for studying (namely, colonialism, postcolonial perspective of). James Joyce’s Ulysses is a book designed for studying (ditto Finnegans Wake).
Firstly, what is art? Secondly, many would argue that, say, Don DeLillo’s Underworld is a great work of art; it was published in 1997.
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, I suspect, will be read in centuries’ time, a true classic of ‘feminist literature’. Maragaret Atwood – I hope, I pray! – will not.
Which true classics? Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ostensibly has many racist aspects to it, as does Rudyard Kipling’s oeuvre, and Saul Bellow is very unpopular among the feminist crowd, but all their literature survives in tact. What does this tell you?
You say that more people should read the classics; here, I must quote everyone’s favourite writer, Salman Rushdie (writing in 2000):
literature, good literature, has always been a minority interest. Its cultural importance does not derive from its success in some sort of ratings war, but from its success in telling us things about ourselves that we hear from no other quarter. And that minority – the minority that is prepared to read and buy good books – has in truth never been larger than it is now.” (‘In Defence of the Novel, Yet Again’)
He says good literature is a minority interest; you say that speeches of Cicero were taught to children of 12 years old. But who thinks all those kids cared about what they were being taught. Of Cicero’s speeches Montaigne has this to say:
I want arguments which drive home their first attack right into the strongest point of doubt: Cicero’s hover about the pot and languish. They are all right for the classroom, the pulpit or the Bar where we are free to doze off and find ourselves a quarter of an hour later still with time to pick up the thread of the argument. (‘On Books’)
Perhaps this is why they were taught to 12-year olds; if they missed the finer details, it wouldn’t matter. And so what if they were taught these speeches? I know for a fact that secondary school kids in Germany are taught Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech. As for The Odyssey and The Iliad (which you consistently misspell), these epics were orated; it’s not as if Plato Jnr. sat down with a few thousand wax tablets and read them! And, to be honest, the Robert Fagles translations of Homer’s epics are very easy to read, not that much harder than Harry Potter in fact. Besides, I don’t seriously expect kids to appreciate good literature at such a young age; after all, good literature is about life (Patrick Kavanagh said, “it takes a lot of living to make a poem”; why not modify this to say that it takes a lot to appreciate a poem?), about the ‘human condition’. Kids know nothing, or very little, of the human condition. If a kid wanted to discuss with me the nature of irony in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, I’d be quite worried. No, life must be experienced first, then literature comes into play. First a man must fall in love, be rejected by someone he loves, meet or know of evil people, etc. before he can appreciate the emotional depth of a novel like Anna Karenina or a play like Anthony and Cleopatra or Waiting for Godot. The first three Harry Potter books may not say a lot about life, but they get kids reading, learning words, broadening their vocabularies, and learning how to spell (shame you didn’t have Harry when you were a kid), and that’s all that a kids’ book can seriously hope to achieve (the millions of copies sold is presumably a bonus). A kid who has read the classics is like a person in restaurant who knows the menu off by heart but hasn’t tasted any of the food.
“No one takes Romance books seriously” you say, perhaps forgetting, that Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient won the Booker prize, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind won the Purlitzer and Boris Pasternak, who wrote Doctor Zhivago, won the Nobel Prize. And what of Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, etc?
“As I've gotten older, I've realized most sci-fi is incredibly bad” – And yet, so much of it is great: Dune, Star Maker, H.G. Wells’ classics, The Hitchhiker’s Guide…, I am Legend, We, etc. Sci-fi is the most recent major development (and probably the last) we are likely to see in literature; it will take a few decades for people to truly acknowledge its impact. Most of the great writers of the last 50 years – William Burroughs, Doris Lessing, Anthony Burgess, J.G. Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut – have dabbled in sci-fi; what does that tell you? You say that sci-fi started in the 30’s, but you are wrong: it started in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels, swiftly moved on to Frankenstein, merrily made its way to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and never looked back. The rich crop of novelists who have written in this genre is staggering: Olaf Stapledon, Michael Moorcock, Frank Herbert, Ray Bradbury, Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke, Richard Matheson, Joe Haldeman, etc.
“The audience for Sci-Fi have always complained that they are not taken seriously in literature (which isn't true, there is Farehiet 451, 1984, Brave New World)”. Brave New World, is, by its author’s concession, “a book about the future”; sorry to be anal, but I think there is a difference between proper sci-fi and Huxley’s masterpiece. His is prophetic, sci-fi is about the present. To build on one of your own points: “The point is that these 'golden works' are not passing the test of time and are becoming more ridiculous.” Taken as prophetic works, yes, they are dated, but this isn’t what sci-fi, real sci-fi, was about; it was about projecting the problems of the present into a different realm (mostly forward, into the future), to abstract them, so that problems could be viewed differently, at a distance. So Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is the Vietnam war by another name. The way the soldiers age much slower than people on Earth because they are in space reflects the distortion of time for Vietnam vets. Michael Herr writes:
When you’re out there, fighting, it feels like time stands still; no progress. And, you know, back home folks are getting on with their lives, getting older, and when you get back, to start from where you left off, you find that people have moved on, changed.
The suitably of this space setting becomes clear. And, of course, sci-fi goes on to this day; Iain M. Banks and William Gibson, for example.
Harry Potter
So now I finally, arbitrarily, return to Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling and Stephen King are not literature (or high art) but nobody said they were. Compare Stephen King with Richard Matheson or Robert Bloch, not Shakespeare and Homer! King’s reign of terror, I am sure, will come to an end within a century or so, but I don’t think anyone believes otherwise.
Harry Potter
And you knock children’s writers like they’re idiots; I hope Roald Dahl, Mark Twain, A.A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll and Enid Blyton would all feel suitably humbled by your opinion were they alive today. James Joyce never wrote a kids’ book and probably never could, and, frankly, thank Christ he didn’t!
To finish, here are a few quotes you may find funny/useful:
“Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, pratcise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Pat Robertson, US Politician, 1992
“The uses of knowledge will always be as shifting and crooked as humans are themselves.” John Gray, Straw Dogs
“When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing.” Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
