Zombie Classics
Sep. 9th, 2009 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloWhen I was a kid there were a lot of fusty old 19th century novels that were still being sold to us as classics. I don't mean Middlemarch. I mean Ivanhoe and Westward Ho!- books that built the Empire. They had warrior heroes, they were stuffed with racial pride and they weren't very good. When the Empire fell apart they went out of print. We didn't need- or esteem- their teachings any more. Tony Blair once- revealingly- named Ivanhoe as his favourite book. It was a choice that no-one who loves books- and has actually read Ivanhoe- could possibly have made.
Westward Ho! is about the colonisation of America and the defeat of the Armada. Its hero- a blond sea-dog called Amyas Leigh- is chivalrous, pious and chaste. It is, I'm told, full of historical inaccuracy. Charles Kingsley, its author, was an exemplar of that weird mode of being known as "muscular Christianity" and an admirable public intellectual of the sort who if he were alive today would never be off the telly. His best known book is The Water Babies.
Books like Westward Ho! don't exactly die. No-one reads them for pleasure any more- or even- as I did- out of a sense of duty- but their one-time popularity has made a mark in the collective unconscious that is never going to be erased- and they continue to enjoy a cultural half-life. They are known to the compilers of crossword puzzles and pub quizzes- and historians of their era are bound to take them into account. They have become zombie classics. You want to take the temperature of mid-Victorian England? Westward Ho! will give you as accurate a reading as Bleak House- and without the distracting flourishes of genius.
Good news then for Dan Brown: his work will never die. He may not have the respect of posterity (actually, who knows?) but there'll always be someone who'll need to read him for the light his enormous sales undoubtedly cast on the taste and obsessions of our time.
Westward Ho! is about the colonisation of America and the defeat of the Armada. Its hero- a blond sea-dog called Amyas Leigh- is chivalrous, pious and chaste. It is, I'm told, full of historical inaccuracy. Charles Kingsley, its author, was an exemplar of that weird mode of being known as "muscular Christianity" and an admirable public intellectual of the sort who if he were alive today would never be off the telly. His best known book is The Water Babies.
Books like Westward Ho! don't exactly die. No-one reads them for pleasure any more- or even- as I did- out of a sense of duty- but their one-time popularity has made a mark in the collective unconscious that is never going to be erased- and they continue to enjoy a cultural half-life. They are known to the compilers of crossword puzzles and pub quizzes- and historians of their era are bound to take them into account. They have become zombie classics. You want to take the temperature of mid-Victorian England? Westward Ho! will give you as accurate a reading as Bleak House- and without the distracting flourishes of genius.
Good news then for Dan Brown: his work will never die. He may not have the respect of posterity (actually, who knows?) but there'll always be someone who'll need to read him for the light his enormous sales undoubtedly cast on the taste and obsessions of our time.
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-09 01:58 pm (UTC)It's interesting you bring up novels being touted as Classics that are no longer relevant. I was just talking about that recently with someone else, in regards to the recent news that American schools are "trying out" a new technique to get kids to read -- they're having the kids choose the books they want to read. I'm trying to find an objective opinion about this. On one hand, kids will elevate to whatever level they're allowed or encouraged to, and we shouldn't fear [for] them. Kids can and will read whatever you give them and even though many Classics are outdated, they still have cultural relevance. On the other hand, maybe having kids engaged and choosing their own reading material, no matter how trite, is a good gateway to get them to read more and better, and then maybe they can choose Classics for themselves (both good and bad). Or, maybe the Classics we give kids to read needs to change and be updated. I haven't decided how I feel.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-09 07:42 pm (UTC)It's tricky. Teach a book badly and you can turn kids off it for life. I think Shakespeare is ruined for a lot of people because of how they first encountered him in school. I suspect there isn't a policy that can be guaranteed to work in every situation.