One thing many fans of science fiction do that never fails to bug me is react to critical assaults on their beloved books with hot declarations that critics are never right, that academics pick awful books to make themselves look good, that anybody who professes to admire any book that aspires to more than potboiler status is just faking out of self-aggrandizement. Sure, the guy who dumped on Terry Pratchett and claimed that he never reads anything but great novels is a bit of an ass…but responding, as someone just did on my page, that “at least half of all classic novels” only achieved their status because they were incomprehensible — I repeat, AT LEAST HALF, she claimed — betrays thinking just as blindered and harmful.
Are there overpraised classics? Sure. Are there bad classics, that retain their reputations centuries after the fact because nobody ever pointed out their awfulness loudly enough? Sure. But a blind rejection of the classics, because they’re classics, out of imagined fealty to whatever comfort fiction you read in the present day, amounts to the claim that all of man’s achievements pall next to the magnificence of the paperback original with the spaceship on the cover. How grateful we should be, to be born at this blessed moment, defined by this one book about the battle in the asteroid belt!
Nonsense. The occasional unreadable doorstop notwithstanding, the occasional tome notorious for impenetrability notwithstanding, the classics became classics because they dynamited the territory ahead of them, because they spoke to great questions about humanity, because they were powerful, and — hear me — because they were preposterously entertaining. DON QUIXOTE didn’t achieve its status because soime critic wanted to make himself look good. ROBINSON CRUSOE didn’t; PRIDE AND PREJUDICE didn’t; THE THREE MUSKETEERS didn’t; A TALE OF TWO CITIES didn’t; any number of books that the reader of today might initially find impenetrable because they now come off as florid narratives over social interactions now confusing to us didn’t. Even SILAS MARNER, frequently cited on snarky lists of most boring classics, is at heart just a sentimental tale about an embittered old man much improved by the introduction of an orphan. It’s a Hallmark movie. These books became classics because they were rip-roaringly fun, because any effort expended on them rewarded those dedicated enough to make the attempt with mental and emotional profit, not just equal payback.
This would all be self-evident, and yet so many defensive readers of the contemporary respond to any assaults that bring up the classics with arguments that approach “all classics suck!” The premise that the classics are just the result of a conspiracy meant to fool us that has gone on for centuries is a ridiculously self-aggrandizing one, wielded by the deeply threatened, who will go to any lengths to flatter their own choice of casual reading. It is self-deluded and it is, in a word, desperate, the cry of those proud of knowing nothing.