Reading the Classics

Things Fall Apart is another one that made a big impression on me

 

I picked up Fanny Hill (originally published 1749) and started reading it again, once more entirely swept away by the beauty and seductiveness of the language.

Here is the opening sentence:

Madam,
Sit down to give you an undeniable proof of my considering your desires as indispensible orders: ungracious then as the task may be, I shall recall to view those scandalous stages of my life, out of which emerg'd at length, to the enjoyment of every blessing in the power of love, health, and fortune bestow; whilst yet in the flower of youth, and not too late to employ the leisure afforded me by great ease and affluence, to cultivate and understanding naturally not a despicable one, and which had, even amidst the whirl of loose pleasures I had been tost in, exerted more observation on the characters and manners of the world, that what is common to those of my unhappy profession, who looking on all thought or reflexion as their capital enemy, keep it at as great a distance as they can, or destroy it without mercy.

 

I love that 18th century language!

 

I remember a grade 12 English teacher making an impassioned speech to her class about the subject and I felt she was speaking for me.

With a wave of her hand, she said, "Forget flowers, forget chocolates, forget all the trivial things—give me words—give me words!"

 

Well, God knows the Victorian writers had plenty of words, and some of them had no compunctions about sharing every syllable they could crowd into a sentence.

I'm with Homer. That passage makes me want to go read Hemingway, and while I'm reading, I'll take the flowers and chocolates the rest of y'all don't want.

 

Lol, I like flowers and chocolate well enough. Love chocolate actually. But the best stuff my husband ever gave me were the poems he wrote for me.

 

It wouldn't work if written today. It's no longer the 18th century. The language in Fanny Hill is an expression of a time and place long past. It belongs to that era but, in reading it now, brings it alive.

In no small part, the language transports me to a piece of human history beyond memory. It connects me to a sensibility that no longer exists but at the same time shows me how we are the same.

It connects me to a broader swath of humanity.

 

It was school curriculum to read the classics:
Elementary school:

• The Illiad
• To kill a mockingbird
• A wrinkle in time

Middle school:

• Huck finn
• Tom sawyer
• Treasure island
• Fahrenheit 451 (and other Bradbury stories)
• Flowers for Algernon (i loved this one)
• Of mice and men (i loved this one)

It wasnt until becoming an IB (international baccalaureate) student in HS that i realized the "classics" werent all written by white people (i had a professor in college call them "ODWG".... "Old Dead White Guys")
While the AP class read Dracula and Wuthering Heights and the Scarlet Letter (my husband was in the AP English class back in HS and though we went to the same school, our literature curriculum was VERY different)
My class read:

• The house of the spirits by Isabell Allende
• Things fall apart by chinua achebe
• A collection of short stories by Nadine Gordimer (though she is white, she is South African)
• Their eyes were watching god by hurston
• Beloved by morrison
• Love medicine by Louise Erdich

These books impacted me the most and kept me interested. When i went to college, i realized that only the IB students read books like these because my friends (who had gone to HS in different states) all had to read wuthering heights, shakespeare, dracula, etc, and hadnt even heard of Nadine Gordimer or even read Their Eyes Were Watching God.

 

English classic literature? Not Classics like Aeschylus or Horace. Ah, tristis sum.

Classic English literature is something I'm pretty familiar with - that drunken frat boy William Shakespeare, immirite?

I generally find that, writing style and vocabulary aside, most English classics isn't really that strange or difficult. Sure we don't live in the Victorian era anymore - but many books of Thackery or something like Jane Eyre are pretty relevant still if you look at them the right way. After, say, 50 years, the things we keep around is kept around because they're good and/or still worth something. But for every Lord of the Flies or Catcher in the Rye, there's thousands of books that were once popular that we simply don't care about anymore. Occasionally the universities will rediscover something, like The Beetle by Richard Marsh and try to say it's a new 'classic'. But I'm sorry, everything The Beetle does, frankly, Dracula does better.

Sometimes the academy is right though, like the effort to make John Clare a major Romantic poet (Romantic with a capital R, not lovey-dovy stuff) so there is that.

I think, too, a lot of these books and works are horribly taught. Like Shakespeare - anyone who thinks he's an elite writer simply doesn't know what they are talking about. He has a character who is just an excuse for a bum joke. His plays are like those dumb teen comedies that actually have really smart little moments, like Bill and Ted or something.

Well, ok, except for Hamlet I guess.

Occasionally you'll find in the 'canon', for lack of a better word, a book that just will always be there. Milton's Paradise Lost, a vast moral maze that either does justify the Christian God (as the poet says he does) or examines with the cruelty of the Christian God. You can't pick one interpretation or the other though, it really isn't that simple at all, and it is a huge, endlessly complex work that you just can't get to the bottom of. It's difficult to know quite what to think about works like that - they are really rare. Someone like Dickens you don't have to think too hard about, someone like Milton, or Spencer, or even (I'll say it) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, they can only really be admired.

 

Agreed. He wasn't really even a writer in the sense we use the term, he was a playwright. And he wrote popular material, not literary. It was palyed for the rabble at the Globe—potato-nosed peasants—not in some posh upper crust theatre where black suits and ties are required.

 

You're exactly right. His plays are plays, to be performed for people. With good actors it's amazing.

My parents aren't very literary, but I took them to a performance of Henry IV part 1 once, and even though they didn't understand literally everything that was said - they got what was basically going on and found the jokes funny. Shakespeare was mostly trying to keep the sales of beer and pies flowing in his theatre, and everyone from the educated to the work-a-day person could turn up and enjoy it and have a good time.

Getting school kids to just sit reading lines is sssooo boring - even if they are interested, and most off the time they just aren't. But when they see a live show, something silly like Midsummer Night's Dream can make life so much easier for everyone. I'm not a teacher anymore, but one of my happier memories of teaching is covering that play and having a class of teenagers giggling along with me. They really got into it after that.

 

Exactly!! When I was in my Shakespeare phase I would find movies or recorded plays so I could understand the emotions involved—you can't tell anything from a simple dialogue script with almost no stage directions. And all the phrases are so incomprehensible now, I also had to find a guide to what they mean.

For my money though, the thing that makes him connonical is his grasp of character, or should I say of human character. He understood it incredibly well, sort of an early psychologist, much like Nietzsche.

 

in washington DC, there is the Shakespeare Folger's Library. in Elementary school, my class took a trip there and we got to meet the actors and help set up the stage. we were broken up into groups to learn lines and help with the readings, then at the end, we watched the production we all had a hand in. it was Much Ado About Nothing. My first Shakespeare play. it was so fun!

 

I'd agree with that. Especially all the different ways you could understand a character like Falstaff or Coriolanus. Richard II is one of my favourites too.

 

Interesting. I made sure to buy the Folger's editions of the books, because they're set up with a page of the play on one side and on the opposing side are explanations of any difficult phrases or ideas that need some 'splaninin'.

 

@Lemex as far as English classics go, I’ve found Woolf’s The Waves to be a bit challenging to follow. It’s not as good as To The Lighthouse, which is a masterpiece imo, but it’s still well worth the time.

 

yep, those were the ones that i bought too

 

Even better than the Folger editions if you want to understand the Bard is No Fear Shakespeare @ SparkNotes

They give all kinds of help—summaries and explanations of each act, etc.

EDIT—well, apparently Sparknotes is no longer free, you just get to look at a few pages and then they want you to subscribe. In fact, maybe that was why I ended up getting the Folger editions? Don't remember now.

 

Yeah, I was speaking very broadly. Sometimes you do get the occasional book or writer where you will struggle. Like, I don't think James Joyce is terribly difficult once you understand what he's doing - even Ulysses isn't really that difficult. But then Finnigan's Wake ... I keep trying, I really do, but it's too much.

 

Agreed. I didn’t find Ulysses difficult. Finnegan’s Wake in impenetrable to me and I’ve never made it far into the book. I once saw a version with a page by page ‘translation’ opposite the text but that seems like too much work.

 

While we're talking about Shakespeare, I must add that one book that you cannot do without is Isaac Asimov's guide to Shakespeare. He explains all the arcane references that a cultured Renaissance Englishman might have caught but we can't. And when he discusses a history play, he tells you what actually happened and who it happened to, and why he made references according to the popular taste of the time (French=bad, English=good, for example). No library about Shakespeare should be without this volume.

 

And I define a classic as one that you can re-read and find new insights each time. I'm just re-reading the Godfather, and I'm realizing how important the voice of the narrator is to the effectiveness of the story... his quaint phrasing, as though English was not the language that he thought in. It was the voice of an older Italian man who might have been Don Corleone's counterpart. (I do agree that when Puzo and Coppola wrote the screenplay for the movie, they wisely ditched all the gynecological sub-plot and cut Johnny Fontaine's role to a minimum, and ditched other characters completely. It made for a classic movie, and it would have made a far better book if those deletions had been done on it.)