What Makes a Classic?

A discussion on bookstores, literature studies, and the literary canon

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Welcome to A Narrative of their Own, where I discuss the work of 20th century women writers and their relevance to contemporary culture.

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When I studied for my undergraduate degree in English, the final piece of work for one of my modules asked us to revise the criteria for the Nobel Prize for Literature, explaining our rationale behind it, and then to choose the best novel of the twentieth century from a shortlist of four novels: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig, Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah, and The Ghost Road by Pat Barker.

The assignment also instructed us to use theoretical and critical debates as encountered within our studies, analysing two of the above novels: one which we selected as the winner and one other.  

I really loved this assignment!  But it turned out to be harder than I’d realised.  

Often, when I read the short- and long-listed nominations for writing awards, I find myself wondering what the specific qualities the book has that has caused the judging panel to nominate it.  

Similarly, I sometimes wonder what makes a book worthy of the title ‘Classic’, or the perhaps more often used ‘Modern Classics’ on the shelves of our bookshops.  

On the course, we had looked at authors such as Daphne du Maurier, for example, and I had researched and written in depth on her novel Rebecca.  This, we were told, had only relatively recently begun to be considered a ‘classic’, and much debate was had around the inclusion of authors such as du Maurier as ‘popular’ novelists, meaning they were often disregarded as being worthy candidates for the canon.  

It seemed that to be considered a classic, the gatekeepers were suggesting, an author’s work should not be considered ‘popular’ by the masses.  

Photo by Danika Perkinson on Unsplash

I’ve often wondered whether some of this is down to the longevity of a novel and its author, who are often deceased when their books become known as ‘Classics’, or whether it was a matter of snobbery; a case of keeping out certain groups of writers.

Which authors and books do you think of when you hear the term ‘Classic’?

For me, it’s authors like Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontë’s, Henry James and George Eliot, amongst many others.  Most of the books I studied on undergraduate literature modules would be considered classics, many of which were written by dead white men (there was a distinct lack of female authors on my undergraduate course, and less still in my school education.)  Thankfully, by the time I studied for my Masters, more books by people of colour, women, and writers from the LGBTQ+ community were being studied and recognised for their classic status.

Alan Bennett, the English playwright and author, stated that for him, a classic constituted: “a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have read themselves.”  This explanation would explain how, in my recent post on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, I received a few comments from readers expressing their surprise that they hadn’t read this classic book.  

In the subsequent thread that followed, many of the books generally thought of as classics reared their heads.  I myself confessed recently to my own surprise (and a little shame) as a scholar of (women’s) literature that I have never read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  I can only say, in my defence, that I am afraid of ‘horror’ type stories, and I think that has put me off for so long.  But I must remedy this!

In this vein, I love Mark Twain’s take on the idea of the classic book.  When recounting an academic’s opinions on Milton’s Paradise Lost, he was quoted as stating that the work met the Professor's definition of a classic as "something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read".  Touche, Twain.

This is of course not the whole truth.  Some of the literature I encountered as a student has stuck with me still (in a positive way) and indeed it has led me to writing here every week on great women writers (some of whom would now be considered classic authors, some who still would not). 

I count Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier as some of my favourite novels of all time.  But I also encountered others in my own time, such as The Bell Jar and the whole of Plath’s poetry, as well as the works of Jane Austen. 

(I wish I could say this was me reading my copy of Wuthering Heights, but alas, I am not this cool) Photo by Loren Cutler on Unsplash

Within the assignment mentioned at the beginning of this essay, we were fairly tightly bound in that we had to choose from the shortlist given to us.  Unsurprisingly, as the only female novelist listed, I chose Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, a novel which forms part of her Regeneration Trilogy. 

In her novel, Barker tells the story of Billy Prior, an injured soldier returning from the front during WWI and William Rivers, an anthropologist and psychoanalyst, whose early work on Post Traumatic Stress is examined as he treats soldiers at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh.  As with much of Barker’s work, her protagonist Billy Prior is working class.  He appears alongside poet Siegfried Sassoon who features as another patient of Rivers, though is not as prominent as in the earlier books in the trilogy.  She cleverly blends real-life with fiction within her novel. 

Interestingly, Barker’s book, which won the Booker Prize, and which is often excruciatingly visceral, also explores Prior’s increasingly risky sexual adventures before he eventually returns to the front.

The ‘runner up’ to the Prize, I put forward, should be Kiss of the Spider Woman, an intertextual story written by the Argentinian writer Manuel Puig.  It details daily conversations between two cellmates in an Argentine prison, Molina and Valentin, and the intimate bond that forms between them.  The innovative, modernist structure of the novel contains mainly dialogue without a traditional narrative voice, and a ‘-’ to indicate the change of speaker rather than any indication of who is speaking.  Some of the narrative is written in a stream-of-consciousness style, with interjections of government official documentation as a form of metafiction.  The conversations between Molina and Valentin are often of films that Molina has seen, which act as a form of escape from their environment.  

The new criteria I suggested for the Prize was that the novel should offer “a fresh, innovative perspective; which contributes a new way of examining the past or contemporary society in a meaningful way; a text which re-invents its genre,” and “not necessarily dealing with universal contexts but allows for marginal voices to be heard; a text which focuses on the individual experience but which delivers a message and requires the reader to engage in an ‘active’ reading.”

The reasons I gave for elevating Barker’s novel as a worthy winner of the Prize under my new criteria were mainly around its preoccupation with class, gender, war, and culture; allowing for marginal voices and experiences to be heard, as well as offering a fresh perspective on the First World War.  

For Puig’s runner up status, I cited his utilisation of an intertextual relationship with the medium of film, juxtaposed alongside its examination of a more serious underlying social theme of 1970s South American politics.  I quoted Puig who stated that he chose to write in this way to reject established, more traditional forms of writing, drawing instead on the popular and cliched to transform them into profound explorations of postcolonial society.

I asserted, therefore, that both texts allowed for marginal voices to be heard; concerned individual experience as well as encompassing more universal themes; and both involved the reader in an active reading, challenging their assumptions of history and individuals.  I also acknowledged that the whole subject of judgement for a literary prize could never be totally unbiased, any judge bringing with them their own cultural, social, or gendered biases.  

All which brings me back to this idea around ‘What makes a classic’ and who gets to decide? 

Photo by Dorin Seremet on Unsplash

Two of the most borrowed authors in UK libraries are James Patterson and Agatha Christie, both also bestsellers for many years, and many readers’ favourite authors.  However, I think you would struggle to find either of these writers within the classics section in bookshops or on library stacks.  So perhaps much of this comes from a snobbery around genre fiction- such as crime and thriller- and the books chosen for university and college English studies courses.   I believe Christie, however, has begun to be studied on some literature courses, and perhaps the key to this is her status as an author who has stood the test of time, even long after her death. 

I often think that many of the novels I read during my own studies were chosen because of their relevance to the social and cultural structures around the time of their writing.  Examining pieces of literature through a feminist- or Marxist criticism lens, for example, allowed for students to examine thoughts and ideas around women’s roles and the class system.  

In an old Guardian article I came across, Sian Cain, a former bookshop worker, claims that her experience of working in bookshops has shown a difference in how they chose to display books considered as classics.  In one bookshop, they chose to shelve anything written prior to 1960 under the moniker of ‘Classic Fiction’, whilst anything later under ‘Modern Fiction’.  However, as she pointed out, some authors spread over both eras.  To make matters worse, Cain points out, some publishers release titles as ‘Modern Classics’, a title which caused some flutters when Penguin decided to issue English musician and Smith’s front man Morrissey’s first novel as a Penguin Classic, stating their reasoning that it was ‘a classic in the making’.  Anyone who has read the novel can make their own choice on that.    

To make issues for booksellers and book buyers more tricky, there is often the category of ‘Literary Fiction’, which can cause confusion and may come down to the opinions of the person stacking the shelves.  Cain suggests that some of this however plays to the thoughts of the customers, who sometimes see their reading choices as being more admirable if they come from the classics section.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

This led me to contact a fellow Substack writer, Rosalynn Tyo, who writes the brilliant All By Our Shelves, a newsletter which began life discussing non-traditional families in fiction, and has recently moved towards essays based on her role working in her local used bookstore.  (I always find myself dreaming of working in one of these bookstores after reading Rosalynn’s posts!)

This is what she had to say on her local bookstore’s system of dealing with so-called classic literature: 

“One of the first things I learned, when I started working at the used bookstore, is to check in at least two places for any given novel.  Our fiction is subdivided into sections, and there are guidelines for choosing the section when shelving a book, but sometimes, there truly isn’t room in the most ideal location, and so we must go with the second-best.  Sometimes we have multiple copies of a title that is hard to categorize, and so it ends up being shelved in more than one location.  It’s a little messy and idiosyncratic, but I feel like that’s part of the charm.  

Apart from the genres (sci-fi, mystery, etc) we do have three main sections for fiction - by far the largest is what we call General (alphabetical by author). Then there’s Classics, and Contemporary Literature.  To be honest I’m not sure that last section has a label, but the staff shorthand for it is “Literary” and it’s located right below the Classics, so there’s a kind of visual connection as well as a philosophical one.  It’s where we put the award-winners and nominees, the major book club picks, the ones with moody cover art and blurbs containing words like “lyrical” or “exquisite” or (ick) “masterful.”  We don’t have a hard-and-fast publication date for Classics, but to get in this smallish section, a book must be several decades old and likely to appear on a class syllabus.”  Rosalynn Tyo, All By Our Shelves.  

I thought this was really interesting.  It backs up the theory by many of the sources I researched that a work of classic literature tends to be something studied on a class syllabus, therefore remaining in our minds and hearts (for good or bad) years later.  It also indicates the idea that Sian Cain discussed around books that are several decades old, although without a specific instruction such as ‘before 1960’ as in the example given earlier.  I particularly liked Rosalyn’s comments around the ‘moody cover art’ and the addition of words such as ‘lyrical’ on book blurbs!  I think we all know those books…

At the end of Cain’s article, she wonders what books might make it into the literary canon and emerge as future classics.  

Will more genre fiction writers or graphic novelists get their moment, perhaps?  Will Morrissey’s first novel become the ‘classic in the making’ as predicted by Penguin?  Or will younger writers reflecting the current cultural zeitgeist become the studied texts of future literature graduates? 

Only time will tell.

Thank you for reading my ramble on classics and the literary canon this week!  If you enjoy essays around literature, feminism, and contemporary issues, please hit the subscribe button above.  And please check out Rosalynn’s brilliant newsletter, too!