Theodora Elucubrare

A while ago, I picked up John Reed's All the World's a Grave from Barnes and Noble. Because I was at school, my mind and body slowly decaying in the amniotic fluid that was the air of my room, a barren womb, I haven't started it until now. The premise seemed fascinating, and was indeed one that I had abandoned attempting myself - to compose a new play from lines plucked from the corpus of Shakespeare.

While I haven't started reading the play yet, I've read his afterward, in which he rails against the idea of "Classics" and "greatness." "To condemn one classic to oblivion...," he says, "would not precipitate the downfall of literature." This is true, as it is true that no one man's death precipitates the downfall of the world. But to quote a classic that would surely be condemned by Mr. Reed, "Each man's death diminisheth me." If, as he claims, there are many modern books that languish unknown, there are as many written two hundred years ago that are just as entertaining and just as unknown. Take "The Manuscript found at Saragossa," by Jan Potocki, a ridiculous, thrilling romp full of gypsies, Moorish fortunes, demons, astrology, love affairs, mystery, and almost anything else you can think of. Certainly it's not a Great Book - but it furnished me with a few highly entertaining train-rides.

Which brings me to another point. Certainly some books are "better" than others - There is no comparison between Madame Bovary and my little Manon Lescaut, in terms of richness of language, depth of characterization, and theme - but that doesn't invalidate the fun of Manon Lescaut. I read. I read for enjoyment, for entertainment, to find out about past lives, because I enjoy the quaintness of 18th century style. After reading all of Le vicomte de Bragalonne, I do not attempt to make it into a vast intellectual adventure, except perhaps that I didn't read it in my native language*. But I would certainly be miserable if it were consigned to Mr. Reed's fires.

I don't search for obscurity. I read for many reasons: because they had it in the dollar section of Strand, because it looked interesting, because there's an opera based on it. Nonetheless, I've read things that are obscure and things that are classics, and things that are modern. I've enjoyed some and not others, and if I have enjoyed the moderns least, it is only because each century has its own style, and I prefer the leisurely, byzantine sentences of previous ones** to the clipped, simplistic style of today.

All of which is to say, it's not the classics themselves that should be burned, but the listed thereof, and the attitude that one should force him or herself to read through them if it makes them truly miserable. The Bluest Eye, one of Mr. Reed's suggestions for "new classics" made me miserable***; I thought it badly written: Ms. Morrison indulges herself in language entirely inappropriate for the narrator; the message is forced and obvious; the characters are flat; and many episodes seem to be included only for sensationalism. People still like it, and I'm sure anything I could hold up will be disliked by many. There are books that hold up to analysis and those that don't; the former category can be enjoyed as well. And - most importantly - every century has books that fit into both categories.****

So, Mr. Reed, I invite you to put your contempt for "old books" into your pipe and smoke it.

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*Most of my examples are French. I have no idea why.
**As you may be able to tell.
***Yeah, we all know I hate Morrison.
****There is also a place for mediocrity, if only as a yardstick for brilliance, but that's another post.