Could We Ever…Have New Literary Classics?

[Ricardo] We’re recording? Okay. Welcome to Could We Ever, part of the [mumbles]

[Danyelle] Welcome to Could We Ever, part of the UT Dallas CometCast network.

[Ricardo] Could we ever shines a light on our experts and ask them to tackle questions you never knew you needed answered.

[Danyelle] From science to art and more.

[voice 1] 124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter, Denver, were its only victims.

[Ricardo] That was a clip from the late Toni Morrison reading from a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Beloved.” While “Beloved” was highly acclaimed and made into a movie, do people actually consider it to be a classic piece of literature? Today we’re asking the question, could we ever have new literary classics?

[Danyelle] To further explore this topic we’re talking with Dr. Theresa Towner, Ashbel Smith Professor of Literary Studies in the School of Arts and Humanities at UT Dallas. We started off our conversation with Dr. Towner by asking her to explain how literary classics are defined.

[Dr. Towner] On the most basic level the literary classics are something that somebody makes you read. There are things that are common to educated people’s understanding of what important works of literature there have been. For example, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” if you go back to ancient Greece. And it’s not just that those works of literature are classics because we say they are; they’re classics because for generations now — for generations — other readers have been reading those things in their own contemporary moment and finding something relevant to it. So you would define the classics first of all as something that has a life over time. And we might get, eventually, to the question of whether there can be such thing as modern classics or contemporary classics and I’m sure we will get there. But for now it’s, it’s understanding the work that has produced other work. So people– These might be painful examples for some of our listeners, but the Oedipus stories — “Oedipus the King,” “Antigone,” the great Sophoclean plays, the great tragedies out of ancient Greece that we have still remaining to us, of which there are not many. Certainly some half-dozen plays by Shakespeare. Dante’s “Inferno,” if not necessarily the other two volumes of that, that trilogy but certainly his “Inferno,” because it’s always fun to find out who’s in hell and how they got there and maybe by how extension how we can avoid it. If you move up into the moderns you’re thinking about people like James Joyce, TS Eliot, Marcel Proust and writers who have in their turn absorbed the tradition and then contributed something original to it.

[Ricardo] Among classic literature, some books are considered to be essential. Those books are said to be part of the canon. Here’s Dr. Towner telling us a little bit more about it.

[Dr. Towner] If you’d asked that question 50 years ago the answer would have been very simple and in terms of the literary canon it would be mostly dead white men. When feminists came along in our second wave feminism in the 1970s, particularly in America, they started looking around saying, “Wait a minute. I’m not here. People who look like me are not here.” Alice Walker and Toni Morrison both said they started writing novels because they didn’t see themselves in any of the literature and Toni Morrison in any case, not Walker so much, but Toni Morrison has very clearly defined what it means to be a canonical writer who’s fully in command of the, of the Western literary tradition and then brings her own experiences as an African-American woman to that. And she talked many times over course of interviews in her life — people would ask her questions like, “When are you gonna write about white people?” And she would start to answer the question and one of my favorite examples she stopped herself and said, I don’t think you understand how profoundly racist that question is. Because you wouldn’t ask a white man when he was going to start writing about black women. And I’ve seen her set more than one interviewer back on their heels with that question. So who gets to define the tradition nowadays is almost in, almost in the hands the person who’s reading it. Certainly in the hands of the people who are writing to add to it. People like Morrison and then people like — if we extend the conversation you are writing fantasy novels, science fiction novels, young adult novels who are essentially absorbing the story of a young person going out and confronting the world and trying to make sense of that whole extraordinary and confusing and maddening process. So we’re not quite in the camp where each individual gets to define the tradition or define the classics but we are in a position where we can ask people, “What does this say to you?” So it’s both, it’s both an ongoing, time-bound notion of classics and also the sense that the classic — if it doesn’t speak to us in the present moment then it doesn’t deserve to be a part of the classical tradition. So it needs to be both timeless and time-bound in the sense that it evokes its own specific world repeatedly and for a variety of readers.

[Danyelle] Do you think anything that’s previously been considered a classic has the potential of losing its time-bound ability?

[Dr. Towner] Yes I do. And, and you do see, you do see quote/unquote classic works of literature go in and out of fashion. I’m thinking particularly here of the 19th century British novelists like Dickens, Thackeray, and the French people used to put more people into the classic tradition than they have been doing presently. And Dickens for example goes in and out of literary fashion but, but he still remains a classic. But we don’t read all of his novels as frequently as we do the ones that have remained most frequently, most often in the tradition. I’m thinking here of “Great Expectations.” It’s the story of an orphan who has an unknown benefactor and who yearns and loves a woman that he can never have because she has been perverted by the spinster lady who raised her. That’s a more contemporary feeling, kind of moment, almost emotional extortion that I think modern eyes and hearts respond. Whereas a story of, like “Oliver Twist,” orphans on this, on the streets of London — people look at this– It’s not contemporary, it doesn’t have a contemporary resonance.

[Ricardo] Why do you think classics are important when it comes to influencing people’s works?

[Dr. Towner] If a storyteller in any time tells his or her story well — in other words, creates a specific world that anybody can enter into, just as I said earlier, by the ability to read — if they can do that then they do something that, that makes it, again as Faulkner said, always move again with each new reader. Faulkner said that art’s attempt was to arrest motion, which is life, so that it– when a reader reads it, it moves again because it is life. So in that image of frozen motion or Keats’ great image of the Grecian urn, the, the Greek vase that alongside the edge of it at the outside of edge of it is a lover pursuing his would-be, his would-be lover and he can’t catch her. The moment on the urn is frozen when they’re, they are running, pursuing. He can’t catch her. Well on one hand that’s an image of frustration. Right? But on the other hand — in Keats’ view — that’s a great thing. Because you’re frozen at this perfect moment of your life where “forever wilt thou love and she be fair” is his line. She’s not gonna get old. You’re not gonna get tired. This moment of eternal pursuit, amorous pursuit, is frozen for anyone to recreate when they look at that urn again. And so I think that the works of literature that do that successfully can be produced at any time in the, in the, over the, the spectrum of the ages that we’ve been doing this, since Homer, and it has the potential to speak not just to our time but to the future. This is why I think the question of whether there would be new classics is an interesting one and I think that I could say with certainty the Harry Potter books have only been coming out since 1997 or 1998, and they’re already classic. And they keep making new generations of readers. And they do that because they take a world that we didn’t know anything about — Hogwarts and the wizarding world — and they hold it up against our own and they don’t posit it as a kind of utopia, but they say here is essentially a parallel universe that you can cross over to in any moment. And that’s what happens when you read at all. Period. You pick up a universe and you enter into it and not all readers will respond to all books in the same way. Not all readers will like all of the classics but the classics allow all readers to come into them. You don’t have to be an ancient Greek to understand Oedipus’s dilemma, for example.

[Danyelle] So can you see books like “Harry Potter” achieving the same thing that we see the Greek classics achieving? Because I know I’m a huge Harry Potter fan. I’ve heard people say, “But they’re kids books.” And it’s like, alright, I guess that’s true. It’s not the same as an epic poem, but can you see them being able to achieve these same markers that other classic works achieve?

[Dr. Towner] Absolutely, and particularly because of my interest in the “Oz,” “Narnia” and “Harry Potter” books I’ve thought about this a lot. And that criticism that, “Oh, it’s just a kid’s book.” I don’t think that’s fair. Anybody who writes for children — and CS Lewis chief among them — knows that the only way to turn them off is to write down to them. Okay. Anybody who can read can read the words in a Greek tragedy. Anybody can. It doesn’t matter how old you are when, when you do that. Anybody who can read the words to a “Harry Potter” novel can read the words to a “Harry Potter” novel. So it’s not a question of mechanical ability and it’s also not a question of theme because if you go into even the, the three quote-unquote children’s writers that I’ve mentioned so far, you don’t find them saying, “Oh, gee, don’t you have it great to be a kid?” “Just wait till you grow up, that will be the real world.” Whereas writers, all writers, know that whatever world you happen to inhabit at that moment is real It’s, it’s real! It is no less traumatic for you to almost get kidnapped by a goatman in Narnia than it is for you to, you know, fall down a rabbit hole or stub your toe. Those things are all– You don’t get the option of saying, “Oh, that’s just a kid’s book.” The reverse to that is bowing down to the classics just because people say you should. I think you should encounter whatever fictional, created literary world there is, look for its own terms and see what it says to you and understand that other people have been there, too. Reading — especially reading at a canonical body of literature — is one of the things that joins us not just as educated people, but as people. It’s one of the hallmarks of us being humans is that we look for ways in which we are like other people. Aristotle said that the greatest test of a poet was to be able to employ metaphors well because metaphors discern similarities between unlike things. So when you read and you enter that world and you find things that you have in common with Antigone or with Julius Caesar or with Madame Bovary, then you are finding likeness where previously you would thought you would only have difference. I can’t think of a better example of that than the wizarding world.

[Danyelle] I’m glad, because I love Harry Potter.

[Dr. Towner] Haha, me too.

[Ricardo] I will fess up I’m not that much of a reader. As a non-reader how can I, or like, any non-reader, get into reading the classics? Or like where do you even start really?

[Dr. Towner] Well, you could take a shortcut and you could ask somebody like me or like any of my colleagues who teach in the historical or the literary canon what you should read. And I get, I do get that question passing from people who, let’s say they’re in engineering and computer science, and they’ve lost the habit of reading or they think that maybe they ought to read something. Where should they start? And so somebody like me could give you advice based on what your interests were. If you just wanted to know what the classics were you could find that. You can find that. There’s a hundred best books lists everywhere on the internet. Poke around until you find a title that looks interesting. If you pick up the book, you start to read it — if it’s not interesting, put it down. Pick up another one. That’s a great thing about books is that so far we’ve got a lot of them. [all laugh] There’s something out there that you’re, that you’re gonna like. I always tell students it doesn’t matter to me what they read; it matters to me that they read. And I think just in that exercise alone is value. It, it– “Popular Mechanics,” you know. Read “Sci-fi Today.” Read Pinterest. Just have your mind engage with somebody else’s. That’s what reading really is. And then again there’s the other metaphorical way of thinking. It’s reading. It’s just interpreting our environment every day. Whether you know it or not, you read. You go out and you see what’s the traffic like, what’s the weather like, what am I gonna do about that, how do I respond to that, how do I relate to this, how does this affect me. And that’s what reading is. It’s interpretation.

[Danyelle] So why do you think that some people, like Ricardo, don’t enjoy reading the classics? What do you think turns people off about the classics?

[Dr. Towner] I am — this is not gonna endear me to a certain profession — but it’s almost always English teachers, particularly in high school, whose job it is really to get students through high school and then in many cases get them into college and have them pass certain standardized tests. I’m not talking now about the value of any of that, I’m just saying that when I talk to somebody who is a non-reader and they, they get past the point of total fear that appears on their face when they’re just sure I’m gonna get out my red pen and start grading their speech, that’s the first response, is “Oh, oh no! I didn’t ever do very good in English,” is what they say. But when I talk to them, it’s almost always that somebody tried to force-feed them literature in the guise of being educated or knowing something they should know. It almost always goes back to a systemic problem — in other words, you know, an institutional one, not necessarily dislike of, of reading.

[Danyelle] Do you think that there is something on the other side that coin that draws people to the classics even if they have a mean English teacher in high school? Which I didn’t. My English teacher in high school was amazing.

[Dr. Towner] I know. Mine was too.

[Danyelle] But do you think that there’s something inherent for people who are thirsty for reading the classics and read them even when it’s not required reading for school? Like you. You probably read a lot of classics you weren’t required to read.

[Dr. Towner] Right. Yeah. Guilty.

[Danyelle, laughing] I didn’t mean that to sound so, so mean.

[Dr. Towner] I would say to follow your tastes. I don’t know if I’m answering the question that you asked me, but I think that even, even among the classics your tastes are gonna be different. There are quote unquote classics that I don’t like to read. I might know about them and if I had to I could probably teach them, but I don’t particularly like, for example, reading a nineteenth-century British novel novelist named Anthony Trollope. I just don’t care for his work. As hard as it is to believe there are people who don’t read Faulkner. Unbelievable! Or who don’t like him. Actually have a graduate student this semester in Faulkner who took the undergraduate class for me as well, she said that when she told her friends that she was thinking about studying Faulkner — reading, doing a course on Faulkner — they said, “Why would you do that to yourself?!” And I mean he wrote 19 novels and over a hundred short stories and I’ve read it all. I mean I keep, keep doing it to myself.

[laughter]

There’s a payoff. There’s an intellectual and a deep emotional payoff in understanding something that you didn’t understand before. I think people like to learn. I think everybody likes to learn new things. Sometimes we don’t like what we end up learning. But I think, I think people like it. And surely when you’re in college that’s why you’re there. Right? To learn stuff you didn’t know before.

[Danyelle] You talked about Harry Potter and some of the other children’s type of series and fantasy series being modern classics and you’ve mentioned some of the African-American female authors that could be modern classics. Why do you think it’s important that we continue to expand our notion of what the classics are to include the aforementioned pieces and even other pieces?

[Dr. Towner] Well I think it’s important because people don’t– they’re not, they’re not stagnant. As, as a people, as a culture we change. As individuals we change — better, worse, but we do change. We are not even physiologically the same people that we were an hour ago. We’re different. And recognizing difference is only following common sense. Right? I am always struck by people — very well-meaning people — who say that when they look at another person they don’t really see color or they don’t really see a sex or they don’t really see– Well if you got, if you can see– I mean if your eyes work, you do see that. And saying that you don’t — again, this is Toni Morrison turn of phrase — is to, is to pretend to overlook a difference that you’ve already discredited. It’s like when I look at you I don’t see an Hispanic or I don’t see a Black or I don’t see a woman. Then what you’re saying is, “I see somebody who’s as good as I am. I don’t see this thing that makes you less. I see the same as me.” So it’s, it’s falsely, it’s falsely egalitarian. And so just looking around at who inhabits the world and making the literary world open to everyone means that each individual reader and writer has the chance to take that inherited world and remake it in their image. And to see what we have in common, as well as what our difference brings to the party. Reading about the same kind of experience all the time is what people I think used to think the classics were.

[Danyelle] Earlier you mentioned that a lot of the classics traditionally have been written by white men who were generally middle to upper-class. How important do you think it is for middle to upper-class white men to read stories written by people who are not like them and for even people who aren’t upper-middle-class white men to read stories about people who are not like them? Because I understand the white man’s struggle from all of the classics that I’ve read. But I had to read “Beloved” when I was in high school and that slapped me in the face! Because it was, it was a whole different perspective on a whole different era of America I had never read about in such gritty detail. How important do you think the classics are at, I guess, changing our perspective of everything?

[Dr. Towner] Well, I think they’re vital. It’s important to know that your way isn’t the only way. And so I think it’s interesting that you invoke “Beloved” because the roots of “Beloved” — it has historical roots in Toni Morrison’s career as an editor. When she was at Random House she was editing a book of African-American source materials called “The Black Book.” And she came across a newspaper clipping from the Civil War era that described a woman named Margaret Garner killing or attempting to kill her children rather than see them taken back into slavery. That was the nugget that became the story of “Beloved,” which as you know is the story about a woman who tries to kill all of her children, only succeeds in killing the one. But that book also has roots — very deep, deep roots — in Greek tragedy. And that’s the sense, is what do you do when your historical reality is so awful and nobody has ever tried to confront it before? What do you do when all of a sudden it’s your personal problem?

[Danyelle]So I know that you are very interested in African-American literature. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into that professionally?

[Dr. Towner] Yes. I had finished my PhD work at the University of Virginia and I was unknowingly embarking on an extended four-year period of unemployment. So one day I was sitting around my house in my unemployed state I decided to read one of the novels that was on my doctoral exam reading lists for the novel that I had in fact not read for the exam because I ran out of time.

[Danyelle] It happens to the best of us.

[Dr. Towner] That novel was Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” And I started reading it in the morning in my pajamas and I finished reading it that afternoon in my pajamas. I could not move; I was absolutely transfixed. And it’s the story of a man –protagonist named Milkman Dean — the running joke is that you can’t, you can’t make him feel too bad because he’s already dead — and his experience growing up in Detroit in the 1970s. And I was just fascinated by how she told this story and I kept thinking this is so Faulknerian. I mean I just read, just written a dissertation on Faulkner and it was, I was very interested in race and how race operates in Faulkner’s novels. When I read that novel, I read, I went on an African-American literature reading binge. I read for months and I started reviewing books on the topic for, for scholarly publications. And then I went back to reading Faulkner. I was gonna revise my dissertation into what turned out to be my first book, and because I had been reading through that lens of African-American literature and culture — because I had been reading through those lenses, I should say — when I went back to read Faulkner’s later novels they were transformed for me. I saw things happening there that I had not, I had frankly just not seen before. I’d been reading through the lens of professional Faulkner criticism and through the classical literary lenses but this other way of reading, another way of representing experience showed me that — in his later novels in particular — what Faulkner was really interested in are the ways that individuals try to sort each other into groups and then label those groups by way of making them easier to deal with.

[Danyelle] And how do you think having a secondary teaching specialty in African-American literature has changed the projection of your career from how was before when you were focused solely on Faulkner?

[Dr. Towner] Well I don’t want to create the impression I’m not still focused mainly on Faulkner, because I am.

[Danyelle] You’re right, I’m sorry. He’s your first love.

[Dr. Towner] He’s my first love and he’s my ongoing twentieth-century love because of a great big digital Yoknapatawpha – a digital Faulkner project that I’m ongoing involved with.

[Ricardo, aside] Dr. Towner is the associate director of a project called Digital Yoknapatawpha. Yoknapatawpha is a mythical county in Mississippi where William Faulkner set many of his stories. The project breaks down characters, places and events of Faulkner’s books into a searchable database.

[Dr. Towner] When you’re a literary critic you can kind of fall into a professional rut, you know, and reading African-American lit and theory opened me up to all kinds of possibilities. And then some years back now I had the idea that I would teach a class on Oz. So I pitched it to my dean who basically said “Why not?” I had all these arguments. I had all these arguments for why Oz was a great topic for a college class because it was interdisciplinary and there was a lot, a lot of literary output and there were films and there was history and there– And I didn’t have to say any of that. He just said “Why not?” And so that sort of “why not” way of reading the world is, you know, why not?

[Ricardo] We asked Dr. Towner to go a bit deeper on the topic of diversity and literature.

[Dr. Towner] I think that the value of diversity — people talk a lot about diversity, there’s a lot of lip service paid to diversity right now in the culture and in the academy and a lot of times when people who are doing the talking are not doing the walking, if you know what I’m saying. They’re not, they’re not doing it. So the virtue of reading those things is to find out, again, like I touched on before, what we have in common and where we’re different. Different is not better just because it’s different. Diverse is not better just because it’s diverse. But you have to admit that there is diversity, you have to admit that there is difference and in, just in that acknowledgement I think is the basis for better and more thorough understanding. Now it also brings with it the possibility for better and more complicated misunderstandings but that’s where we have to recommit to communication and not necessarily finding common ground for its own good but acknowledging the value of representing whatever human experience it is, in my case on the page and in the classroom.

[Danyelle] And what work is being done to expand the canon and make it more diverse and inclusive?

[Dr. Towner] That’s an interesting question also. It’s being done first of all at the publication level.

Publishing houses are getting much more interested in first of all looking for and cultivating the expression of different opinions, backgrounds, points of view. The one thing I am a little bit worried about is, among publishers the trend in places like Barnes & Noble to separate out gender studies from African-American literature from what they call whatever the literature is where they put all the, all the novels. I’m a little worried that in the attempt to market to these to various audiences the, the real contributions in this case the literary contributions, might be obscured by the search for the dollar. But that’s another, that’s another podcast topic. So a little concerned about that but I think in general they’re there. The different voices are there and to the degree to which they speak successfully to readers now and in future they either will or won’t have a long shelf life. The test of the classic is its appeal over time.

[Danyelle] How long is over time? Cause like you’re saying, you consider Harry Potter a classic but it’s only been out like twenty-some-odd years.

[Dr. Towner] But when you think about it that’s at least three generations worth of people.

[Danyelle] Mm-hmm.

[Dr. Towner] I remember when I first started teaching Harry Potter with the third novel had just come out and a young lady — she was a freshman at the time — came up to me and she said “You know, I’m really glad that we’re gonna read this Harry Potter book because I was in the airport this weekend and some 30-year-old man was reading this book and I thought, what can I possibly have in common with a 30-year old man.” I thought, ah! Am I a hundred?! She was essentially telling me that that she thought Harry Potter was just for her generation but, you know, when my father was still, was still among the living I bought him every one of those Harry Potter novels and he took them to work every day I read them on his lunch break. And he was much older than 30 years old when he did that. So that’s one way to measure over time, too. You know, when I teach Harry Potter now there’s always at least one person in the class who has not read any Harry Potter. They’re the type that says, “Oh, I’ll resist this because it’s popular. It must not be very good.” Sometimes those are the biggest fans in the end. So appeal over time, appeal over generations, with the possibility of rediscovering things that are lost.

[Ricardo] So Professor Towner, could we ever have new literary classics?

[Dr. Towner] Absolutely.

[Danyelle, dramatic vocal sound effect]

[Ricardo] “Literary” is one of those words–

[Danyelle] It’s a word you never say.

[Ricardo] — that a Hispanic man just cannot say right.

[Danyelle laughing] You said it so beautifully.

[Dr. Towner] You did.

[Danyelle] You said it very beautifully.

[Ricardo] Thank you guys.

[Danyelle] And then do you have like a final thing you want to leave our readers with?

[Dr. Towner] What do you mean, life advice, or?

[Danyelle] Like advice or whatever. Just whatever. Like one last little nug.

[Dr. Towner] Read!

[Danyelle] We’d like to thank Dr. Towner for joining us on this episode the podcast. Check out the School of Arts and Humanities on social media, which we will link in the show notes.

[Ricardo] The UT Dallas CometCast is a podcast network brought to you by the UTD Office of Communications.

[Danyelle]
A special thanks to senior lecturer Roxanne Minnish for our music. Be sure to follow the university on social media and check out Could We Ever and our other shows at utdallas.edu/cometcast. So listen out for us next time.