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THE CLASSICS
There's been a bit of talk lately in reaction to a number of YA authors publicly trashing the classic works of literature that have been traditionally given to schoolchildren to read and learn from.
There's been a bit of talk lately in reaction to a number of YA authors publicly trashing the classic works of literature that have been traditionally given to schoolchildren to read and learn from.
It's most difficult to defend "classic literature" because you find yourself having to define it to people who hate it, and then having to address the value of every piece of classic writing from "The Iliad" to "The Merchant of Venice" to "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest."
The best you can do is try to explain why certain books are still read centuries after they were written, and why others aren't. Generally, this explanation involves the universality of human experience, and how that experience is described in the text.
The stories we write today are the same stories we wrote thousands of years ago; we just change the characters and settings through each era of history. That's fine; once the theme grabs you, it's how the story is presented that keeps you stuck to the page.
We've all been Tom Joad in one form or another, and we've all been Bob Crachit and Blanche Dubois and Huckleberry Finn and Proust's Narrator. I'm sure some of us have felt like Ophelia, or wanted to go Cain on an Abel sibling.
When you read these enduring works, you connect yourself to a shared experience of humanity that stretches back to the beginning of language. When we read these works together, we realize how similar we are to each other.
That similarity creates brotherhood, even across cultures and eras. It's hard to hate someone who loves the same things you do, and it's easier to understand someone who's had the same experiences that you have.
What authors do when they impugn the classics is try to pull up these shared, vicarious experiences by the root, and replace them with their own artless, dreadful imitations of literature. Nobody who professes to hate the classics is worth reading in any format.
There is no more political subculture in publishing than Young Adult (YA) writers, and they're all woke progressives (with like 3 exceptions). What drives wokeness is hate, born of a combination of personal evil, mental illness, and weak intellect.
When you're woke, you have to lash out at a world that won't do what you demand it to, and when you're a woke YA author, you lash out at books that you know you'll never match in longevity or quality.
So you tear them down. You call "Huckleberry Finn" racist, even though Huck maintained his loyalty to, ah, Jim through the threat of eternal damnation. You tear down anything that you or anyone else had to read in high school/college.
"THE CLASSICS SUCK," you cry, because it hurts to acknowledge that some old white men (and women) have accurately described universal human experiences without being disabled trans WOC. Your self-image requires people who don't think/look like you to be despised, not honored.
Every writer wants to be universally read and admired. The overwhelming majority of us won't get anywhere near that. But we write anyway. The best of us use the classics as a foundation; we learn from them and emulate them in our own way.
The worst of us attempt to impugn the the classics out of jealousy or self-hate or simple ignorance of the themes within. The classics will survive, no problem. Their detractors won't even make the bargain bin.
