What Makes a Work of Fiction a Classic?

As readers know, I tend to use the weekly “Bookends” feature of the Sunday New York Times book review section as fodder for this blog. The way the feature works is as follows: the editor poses a question and then two of various regular participants attempt to answer it, sometimes with opposing views, but often with just different slants.

This Sunday (Oct. 18, 2015), the question (slightly different online than in the print edition) was: “When we declare something a ‘classic’ we emphasize timelessness. But shouldn’t art speak to something current?”

Why is this a bad question? Because it implies that to be a “classic,” the contents of a novel have be transcendental in nature as opposed to pertaining to a specific moment or period in time. This is nonsense. The vast majority of books considered to be classics originally did in fact speak to something current and became “timeless” because of the manner in which they did it.

No wonder the two respondents, Adam Kirsch and James Parker, struggled to answer in a manner that shed any useful light on the question.

Parker attempted to answer the query literally: whether one should try to write something transcendental in nature as a means of achieving lasting fame. “If you shoot for timelessness in your writing, consciously orient yourself to the upper realm, the shinning truths and the inexhaustible symbols etc., you will – by a kind of law – produce drivel,” he said. On the other hand, he continued, a novel about three plumbers in Milwaukee in 1987 could become “a singing blueprint of human significance.”

Kirsch, in contrast, dodged the question and answered a somewhat different one: are there certain devices a writer can use, such as writing in Latin or evoking similes believed to be universal, to successfully produce a classic – a book for all ages? Not any more (if that was ever really the case), he concluded.

“The mutability of our outer lives – the way manners, morals and technology now change radically from decade to decade – means that writers today must trust even more in the unity of our inner lives. … Each human being contains the potential for all human experience,” Kirsch said. In other words, there is no useful distinction between current and timeless when it comes to the internal contents of a book.

Timelessness, as in how "classics" are characterized, comes about after a work is published, and, paradoxically, may not be forever.  Books identified by the usual gate keepers as “classics” from time to time do fall out of the pantheon.

A more interesting question for a writer may be: to what extent is it advisable to avoid references to specific things or places that may not exist for long, especially if they are important to the story? Does one risk having a tale become quickly dated, and perhaps thus irrelevant, by including too much in the way of verisimilitude?

I was faced with that question in writing “Manhattan Morning,” a novella structured around a person’s mental associations that arise from sights and sounds. The sights and sounds had to be very specific – in this case, stimuli encountered on a walk through a certain portion of Manhattan on a certain day – and as a result, my protagonist visits several real places during the walk. Some are still there, but others – how and where one buys tickets for busses to NY airports, for instance – have since disappeared.

Does that make “Manhattan Morning,” recently selected through a curatorial process as a self-published book suitable for U.S. public libraries, less compelling than was the case when it was written? I don’t think so, but I could be wrong. Perhaps someday, readers will want to follow Dan Morrison’s path through Manhattan the way readers now try to follow Leopold Bloom through Dublin. Seems unlikely, but …

(Readers who want to see what that original bus ticket office looked like can take the “Manhattan Morning” photographic walking tour on my website – www.fowlermartin.info.)