Long time readers of Dead End Follies know how bad I hate that word. It's been run into the ground by the literary community. "Ye gotta read yer classics, y'know?" is a phrase I have heard so many time, for so long, that it has lost all its meaning to me. Everything can be a "classic" if it sold well. I remember a delicious discussion I had in college where two people were bickering over the argument as whether or not, Ken Follet's Pillars Of The Earth should be considered a literary classic. The immediate reaction of any literary folk is to say "no way" because of the shameful, shameful sequel Follett published a few years ago. But is it that easy? Will The Pillars... be studied in high schools in 2050? Let's nail this word down, once and for all. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, classic means...
.serving as a standard of excellence : of recognized value
Surprisingly enough, I like that definition. It's short and clear enough. It's not without its problems though. Take "Of recognized value" for example. Value, as a currency term, is something that has been created. You can create value for things. If you take a pen and say "this is worth five bucks" and people believe you, your pen is worth five bucks. If I'm telling you that a writer is good, and you believe it, then the writer is suddenly very good. So when you say that something is "of recognized value" you mean that it's recognized that it's good. Recognized by who? What's the universal point that a novel has to make to have "recognized value".
And I'm not trying to tell you that the "art is not measurable, therefore Harlequin is as good as Fitzgerald, you can't judge my artistic sensibility. There is no empirical yardstick of measure for art" argument is valid. Because it's not. There are good writers and bad writers. Fiction is not the far west. But it's like intelligence, you know? There are different sorts of intelligence. Intellectual, emotional, psychological, memory, etc. Fiction is the same. If you don't enjoy Proust and enjoy Vonnegut, well it only means that you enjoy science-fiction classics more than modern classics who are tackling down philosophical questions about time. And I enjoy Vonnegut a lot better than Proust. You don't need to be a philosophy nerd to enjoy good literature. There is a great article on Cracked that illustrates my point.
Well, I'm realizing I don't have that much of a problem with the term "classic" as long and it's not thrown around to make somebody shut up "But it's a classic" doesn't work. "It's a classic thriller" or "It's a classic western" work. It means "they are the best of their category, the stories that people keep referring to when they refer to a type of literature. Is there some things as literature classics then? I don't think so. There are books that have been important in the development of literature as an art form (Don Quixote, Crime & Punishment, Ulysses, etc.) but but universal classics? No.