African-American Writers - A Canon, What is a Classic

 I admit to tardiness in posting about Henry Louis Gates Jr. on What Makes a “Classic” African American Text. In the prison Writing classes Russel Ochoki taught, he would ask what was a classic. Reading so much of classics seem like excavating a tomb; for me any novel needing footnotes no longer feels like a relevant work of art; there is also a taint of they are good for you, like cod liver oil. Yet, there are old books that still move - Raintree County, Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, Hamlet.

Professor Gates, I think, has as good as any explanation/definition of classic literature.

Thinking about the titles appropriate for inclusion in these series led me, inevitably, to think about what, for me, constitutes a “classic.” And thinking about this led me, in turn, to the wealth of reflections on what defines a work of literature or philosophy somehow speaking to the human condition beyond time and place, a work somehow endlessly compelling, generation upon generation, a work whose author we don’t have to look like to identify with, to feel at one with, as we find ourselves trans­ported through the magic of a textual time machine; a work that refracts the image of ourselves that we project onto it, regardless of our ethnicity, our gender, our time, our place.

This is what centuries of scholars and writers have meant when they use the word classic, and—despite all that we know about the complex intersubjectivity of the production of meaning in the wondrous exchange between a reader and a text—it remains true that classic texts, even in the most conventional, conservative sense of the word classic, do exist, and these books will continue to be read long after the generation the text reflects and defines, the generation of readers contemporary with the text’s author, is dead and gone. Classic texts speak from their authors’ graves, in their names, in their voices. As Italo Calvino once remarked, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

Faulkner put this idea in an interesting way: “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means, and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” That, I am certain, must be the desire of every writer. But what about the reader? What makes a book a classic to a reader? Here, perhaps, Hemingway said it best: “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are fin­ished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you, and afterward it belongs to you, the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.”

As for the canon he proposes, just follow the link above.

sch 3/29