Note: “Classics” and “classic literature” in this post refers to classics of the Western literary canon. I have read a grand total of one classic of a non-Western canon so far and thus don’t feel qualified to speak on them.
Nearly every American high schooler is given a specific canon of “classic literature” to read, analyze, discuss, and write essays about. Though the particular books chosen in any given English Literature class varies, the list that they are picked from is finite. My mother was very into the idea of “classic literature” when I was a teenager and made me read a lot of the more recognizable titles. A sampling:
- The Great Gatsby (hated it)
- Nineteen Eighty-Four (hated it)
- Animal Farm (hated it but at least it was short)
- Les Misérables (took forever to get through, but liked it)
- To Kill a Mockingbird (it was okay)
- The Old Man and the Sea (hated it)
- Fahrenheit 451 (don’t remember it but it’s on my list of read books)
You will notice a theme of the books listed above: They’re all old.
The list above is only a sampling of ones that I personally read, but even on longer lists (and I’ve looked at many), this theme still holds true. The newest classic I read was To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960. Very few books on lists of classics are more recent than that – in all the lists I’ve looked at, I only recall seeing one book that was published less than 50 years ago.
You’ll notice another theme of the books in my list above: Most of them I did not like.
To be fair, I was a teenager, and when rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four as an adult I found that while I still didn’t like it, I was able to appreciate it. But from my very unscientific method of asking people I know what they thought of the classics they had to read in school, that seems to hold true for a lot of people. People may have liked one or two of the assigned classics, but for the most part, classic books aren’t something to be enjoyed, they’re Important Literature to be suffered through because they have Themes and Motifs and such.
Using the very rigorous method of “thinking at work because my earbuds died and the idea sounds pretty good,” I have developed a theory of why and how books become classics:
A book being considered “classic literature” does not necessarily depend on its entertainment value, enjoyment of the experience of reading, or literary prowess, but rather on being a book that had a new idea (conceptually or stylistically) or was the first to discuss a particular topic.
This would explain why in every list of classic books I’ve looked at (and I looked at six just while writing this post), there was only a single book published more recently than 1960. As time goes on, more and more books are published, and sooner or later almost every topic already has an older book that did it first.
This definition holds true for many of the books on my list at the beginning of this post, and for most classics on “top 100” lists. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World are the precursors to the entire dystopian genre. Frankenstein was the first science fiction. Dracula was the first popular vampire novel. The Bell Jar was one of the first (if not the first) to tackle mental health from a feminist angle.
However, this does not hold true for all classic books. Almost everything by Charles Dickens, writer of the well-known and much-adapted A Christmas Carol (one of the first books to romanticize Christmas traditions in fiction) is considered a classic. Even someone who has never heard of his book Martin Chuzzlewit will immediately categorize it as a “classic book” once they know Charles Dickens wrote it. And then there are classics like The Odyssey, which may or may not have been groundbreaking in their time but are classic for the virtue of being old with few or no existing contemporaries.
So I have added a few corollaries onto this theory of classics:
a. A book may be considered a classic if it is written by a “classic author,” i.e. an author who has at least one other work that is considered a classic under the primary theory.
b. A book may be considered a classic if it is so old that we have few or no contemporary works and so has historical significance regardless of other merit.
Now, I am in no way a literary scholar. I’m just a person who reads too many books (over 1,000 since I started keeping track in 2010) and has emphatically not enjoyed most of the classic literature of the Western canon. This is probably better described as a Hypothesis of Classic Books, and definitely needs more research into literary origins. Some of the books I’ve mentioned, like Dracula and A Christmas Carol, were not the first to have their ideas but the first to have their ideas and be a commercial success and reach a wide readership, while their actually original predecessors only reached small audiences and are generally obscure. Future variations of this hypothesis will need to take commercial success and readership numbers into account. But until I actually do that further research, my Theory of Classic Books will sit here in hypothesis form.
Bluejay Reads 