Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Ahhh, the classics. So what makes a classic, anyway? Is it longevity? Quality of writing? Depth of subject matter? What is it? Why is Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises a classic? I’ve read it. I can say with conviction that it shouldn’t be. It kept me interested – but just barely. In that particular novel, he had a way of droning on for paragraphs about mundane and incidental information.
For instance, in one passage, he tells us how he woke up, ate, got dressed, and left his hotel room. This goes on for pages. It doesn’t further the story, move the plot, what little of it there is, or give us insight to any of the characters. So why did we need to know it?
It seems that when a writer’s work attains the level of ‘Classic,’ questioning his prose somehow becomes taboo, off limits, failing to be sufficiently reverent of his position in the literary world. Luckily I’m not educated enough to show adequate respect for such artists, so I can shoot from the hip…with both barrels! Being white trash does have its advantages.
Please understand, I’m not trying to be iconoclastic or fashionably critical here; after all, there are those that deserve the title of classic, and more so: To Kill a Mockingbird, Dracula, Frankenstein, and to a lesser degree, The Scarlet Letter, and many more I’m sure. But it seems also there are many that do not. Now I don’t mean to pick on Hemmingway, he is just one with whom I am familiar.
Let’s take Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Here is a book that one would think would be the ultimate in adventure–the high seas, survival upon the open ocean, man against beast. IT’S A GIANT WHITE WHALE FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE! I mean, how much more material to work with could one hope for in a novel for shear suspense and excitement? However, if you’ve read it, you know that there is very little of said excitement and suspense. And yet it garners the unquestioned prestigious and hallowed title of ‘Classic.’
Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady is another one. It’s not horrible, or even bad. It’s just a bit vanilla, banal. If you decide to tackle that one, make sure you play a lot of loud heavy metal music while you read it. It’s as if the whole thing is laced with Novocain. There is a certain, almost romantic, tension between the characters Ralph and Isabel, I’ll give him that. But it’s so infrequent and subtle that the reader almost has to eisegetically capture it. It’s there, but you have to want it to get it. And his, A Turn of the Screw, a supposed horror classic, doesn’t even approach the actually scary and unsettling creepiness of its 1961 film adaptation, The Innocents. In the film version, Jack Clayton was able to do what Henry James failed at–that is, bring a chill to the spine.
So why then, are all of these novels given the a priori grandeur of ‘Classic’ in the artistic arena of the written word?
I’ve been told that Hemmingway introduced a style that moved away from the usual traditional story telling voice – more journalistic than pedantic. Ok, fine. He gave us something we hadn’t seen before. But does that automatically give him a free pass when it comes to gripping the reader with powerful prose? Apparently so. That’s not to say that he hasn’t written anything riveting. As a matter of fact, his short story, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, was wonderful. It shows that he can, when he wants to, lasso the reader’s attention and hold it with a more than capable dexterity. However, I have found that Macomber is the only story of his, that I have read so far, that can boast of such accomplishment.
Herman Melville on the other hand is just absolutely atrocious. The writing is at times, adolescent. And what really irritated me was that you don’t get to the great white whale until the last few pages of the book–and it’s a long book! Here again, the contemporary Peter Benchley did with his novel Jaws what Melville couldn’t. Benchley’s story was compelling, exciting, and upon occasion, thrilling. Melville’s was laborious, tedious, and I would go so far as to say even trite in many places. Yes, yes, I know, I can hear it now, “What about all the underlying metaphors and sub-linear tangential, exo-transitory solipsistic blah, blah, blah, etc, etc…” I’m old fashioned I guess. I want a story to move me, jolt me, make my flesh tingle, not give me a new outlook on cosmic inter-planetary ethereal divinity. I mean you can do that whole, make-me-question-my-existential-views-on-Star-Trek-episode-29 thing, but please, thrill me in the process. Call me crazy, but I want to be entertained when I read.
So as far as The Classics go…eh. Some yeah, some not so yeah.
So, give me a good Clint Eastwood Classic where somebody gets offed and I’m happy!
Ah yes…the Classics.
Keck
