"What Is a Classic?

": International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question

Author(s): ANKHI MUKHERJEE
Source: PMLA , October 2010, Vol. 125, No. 4, Special Topic: Literary Criticism for the
Twenty-First century (October 2010), pp. 1026-1042
Published by: Modern Language Association

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 [ PMLA

"What Is a Classic?": International Literary

Criticism and the Classic Question

ANKHI MUKHERJEE

0 lord, have patience

Pardon these derelictions-
1 shall convince these romantic irritations

By my classical conventions.
- T. S. Eliot, "O lord, have patience"

MARK THE FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MAN BOOKER

Prize and the imminent announcement of the prize's 2008

short list,1 the Guardian asked a judge from every year to give
its readers glimpses into the "tears, tiffs and triumphs" that marked
the nomination of the winning novel. The resulting stories suggest
that the perils of literary judgment, as borne out by rosters of glori-
ous losers as well as by the historical fates of some of the winners,
could be put down largely to the fortuitous and subjective nature of
the process. This history of Booker judging, moreover, testifies to the
contingent nature of synchronie critical reception. In 1970 Rebecca
ANKHI MUKHERJEE is College University
West denounced Margaret Drabble for her novels of domestic life,
Fellow lecturer in the Faculty of English
remarking that "[a]nyone can do the washing-up," in the era when
Language and Literature, University of
Oxford, and fellow of Wadham College.
"brilliant old ladies," to quote the reminiscence of Antonia Fraser,
She is the author of Aesthetic HysteriaWest's fellow judge, could use the patriarchal line to seal the fate of "a
(Routledge, 2007) and a coeditor of Abrilliant young one" ("Tears" 2). Hermione Lee recalls how Salman
Companion to Literary Criticism and Psy-Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which has won the Booker of Bookers
choanalysis (Blackwell, 2011). Her cur-and the Best of the Booker and is "now a classic of world literature,"
rent book project, "'What Is a Classic?':
was "by no means an easy winner" in 1981 (3).2 Rushdie was an un-
Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of
known writer who scraped through by one nomination and would
the Canon," examines canon wars and
other contestations of literary value inhave lost if the chair, Malcolm Bradbury, had cast the overruling
twentieth- and twenty-first-century En-vote. By 1983, however, a battle for the Booker between Rushdie and
glish literature and literary criticism. J. M. Coetzee, likened to "a clash of continents," had developed, to the

1026 © 2OIO BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

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125-4 J Ankhi Mukherjee 1027

detriment of candidates with lesser symbolic their sophistication in taste - hence the popu-
clout (4). In 2000, according to Rose Tremain, larity of "educated" forms of recreation. The
Margaret Atwood won the prize for The Blind critical eye is a product of history reproduced
Assassin not for writing her best book but "for by education: cultural consumption presup-
all the times she'd nearly won it and had been poses, Bourdieu writes, "an act of cognition,
pipped at the post by a lesser writer" (21). a decoding operation, which implies the im-
Most of us in the business of literary plementation of a cognitive acquirement, a
criticism have little to do with the ersatz and cultural code" (3). Bourdieu terms as cultural
absurdity of deciding literary prizes like the capital the internalization of the cultural
Booker and with their tremendous, if dubi- code or the acquisition of a knowledge that
ous and short-term, impact on literary cul- equips the subject to decipher cultural rela-
tions. Prizes such as the Booker expose the
ture. "Even the most correct jury goes in for
horsetrading and gamesmanship, and what vested interests behind cultural recognition
emerges is a compromise," writes the novelist and exemplify, as James English observes, the
Hilary Mantel, a 1990 Booker panelist (5). A trenchant relation between the cultural and
number of judges even flag their Booker ser- the economic, or "cultural and political capi-
vice as the definitive event that marked their tal." These prizes are "our most effective in-
turn to nonfiction and narrative journalism. stitutional agents oí capital intraconversion"
But the criteria deployed in the determination substitutions and exchanges between differ-
of this yearly award speak to the supposedly ent complexes of capital (10). In his insightful
more serious and premeditated consider- study of the awards industry, The Economy of
ations that inform academic literary criticism. Prestige, English argues that despite the "stag-
No minds are changed by panel discussions, gering discontinuities" between the canon at
as the Booker judges note year after year, but any given time and the list of past prizewin-
there is the routine, familiar to literary crit- ners, "it is precisely by such embarrassingly
ics, "of anatomising one's taste and judgement social-commercial-cultural mechanisms . . .
and then communicating it to a group," as that the canon is formed, cultural capital is
Alex Clark, a 2008 judge, puts it (21). Booker allocated, 'greatness' is determined" (244).3
judging highlights the limits of literary criti- I will consider the role of literary criticism
cism: the triumph of creating a classic is not in two relatable, if less commercially com-
unmixed with the terror of choosing the promised, instantiations of literary capital
wrong book. Finally, it addresses the politics and determinations of literary greatness: the
of impersonality that marks the inception and twentieth-century lectures called "What Is
transmission of modern literary criticism. a Classic?" that T. S. Eliot and J. M. Coetzee
"But posterity will forget us," says the Booker gave forty-seven years apart. In each lecture,
judge John Sutherland, an English profes- the creative writer assumes the role of a critic,
sor, in the critical backlash against the 2005 self-consciously taking his place in the suc-
choice (John Banville for The Sea). "Barnes, cession of poet-critics - Johnson, Coleridge,
Ishiguro and - I believe - Banville they'll re- Shelley, and Arnold - and his questioning is
member" (21). historical as well as rhetorical. Both interro-
Pierre Bourdieu's well-known work on gate the idea of a classic as a work of endur-
consumption in Distinction exposed con-ing value and demonstrate, in singular ways,
sumers' desires to cultivate and demonstrate how literary criticism generates its classics.
a labor informing their consumption patterns Coetzee in his lecture, delivered in 1991, even
and to define their class position through it. claims that "the function of criticism is de-
Consumers select commodities that proclaim fined by the classic: criticism is that which is

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1028 "What Is a Classic?": International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question [ P M L A

duty-bound to interrogate the classic" (19). ties, such an order is predicated on the occlu-
Coetzee had reread Eliot's famous lecture in sion of the nonliterary, non-European, and,
preparation for his own. The two essays, read arguably, political dimension of all literature.
together, seem to suggest that if the classical According to Said, there are two alternatives
criterion is of vital importance to literary crit- for the contemporary literary critic: unques-
icism, the classic in turn is constituted by the tioning reverence for the (affiliative) order of
criticism it receives down the ages. It is a pe- the humanities and for "the dominant cul-
culiar codependence: the classic is that which ture served by those humanities" (24) or the
survives critical questioning, and it in fact de- adoption of a "secular" mode of critical scru-
fines itself by that surviving. Eliot's and, later, tiny, which reacts against "orthodox habits of
Coetzee's investment in this question cannot the mind" and "organized dogma" (29). The
be reduced to nostalgia for or valorization of question What is a classic? is aligned with the
the set standards and idealized attitudes of second mode of doing criticism. This mode
canons. The critic's quest for the classic is in- symbolizes a constative and performative
deed romantic and oedipal, but if the classic epistemology, at once a long, ongoing "process
is a fantasized point of origin, it is also a new of abstraction" and a timely and contingent
departure and signals breathless new arrivals "reaction to immediate concerns."4 If Eliot
at debates that define and contest literary mo- addresses and nervously reinforces the idea
dernity and the literary present. of the classic as European and Eurocentric,
In "Secular Criticism," an essay that sets Coetzee draws out the unsaid implications in
out to define the function of criticism for our Eliot's lecture to elaborate on the afterlife of
times, Edward Said describes the critic as this question in trans- or international criti-
an "individual consciousness" that is not a cism. Both versions of "What Is a Classic?"
mere product of the dominant culture "but a use the object of inquiry to worry the place-
historical and social actor in it." Criticism is ment and affiliations of the literary critic. The
constituted by the "self-situating" of the critic,time of the classic, both lectures testify, is the
who assumes a "distance" from the collectivecomplex present of literary criticism, and its
(World 15). Western critical consciousness,place too is "here."
according to Said, has historically functioned Before launching into the Eliot and
through affiliation, "a kind of compensatory Coetzee interventions, we must mark the
order" or cultural system that eventually sup-distinction between classics and canons. The
plants the natural (or what Said calls the "fili-term classic is closely related to the idea of
ative") order: canonicity but is not entirely reducible to it.
The classic, like the canonical work, is a book
Thus if a filial relationship was held to- that is read long after it was written - and
gether by natural bonds and natural forms that demands rereading. The classic has the
of authority- involving obedience, fear, love,
"strangeness" that Harold Bloom identifies as
respect, and instinctual conflict- the new af-
the greatness of canonical works: "a mode of
filiative relationship changes these bonds into
originality that either cannot be assimilated,
what seem to be transpersonal forms- such
or that so assimilates us that we cease to see
as guild consciousness, consensus, collegial-
ity, professional respect, class, and the hege- it as strange." The classic, like the canoni-
mony of a dominant culture. (20) cal text, produces "startlement" rather than
recognition or a "fulfilment of expectation"
The affiliative order affirms and replicates fili-(3). The classic and the canonical work usher
ative processes, albeit through nonbiologicala polymorphous textuality that literary cul-
social and cultural structures. In the humani- tures value, and both involve criticism or

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125-4 J
interpretive traditions that contest the defi-
nition of literary value. But the classic is pri-
marily a singular act of literature, while the
canon, John Guillory states, is "an aristocracy
of texts" (175). Canonicity implies the forma-
tion of a corpus, the congealing of the "liter-
ary art of Memory" (Bloom 17), the making
up of a list of books requisite for a literary
education, and the formation of an exclusive
club, however painstakingly contested the
rules of inclusion (and exclusion) maybe. The
classic, however, is inseparable from the end-
less and unresolved contestations of the ques-
tion What is a classic? and belongs to what
Guillory calls "the conflictual prehistory of
canon-formation" (194). If the canon implies
continuity with the past or a perpetuation of
tradition, the classic is all that and something
else: the survival of the classic, according to
Frank Kermode, depends on its possession
"of a surplus of signifier" (Classic 140).
Eliot's and Coetzee's temporal perspec-
tive - a long look back - in "What Is a Clas-
sic?" has been revised by the drift of English
literary history. Cultural identity in the era
of cultural-economic globalization, as Said
suggests, should be conceived in terms of
space rather than time: "Spatiality becomes
. . . the characteristic of an aesthetic rather
than of political domination, as more and
more regions - from India to Africa to the
Caribbean- challenge the classical empires sic?" do not refer to the war but are neverthe-
and their cultures" (Culture 18). Are there any
perennial works or masterpieces in the new
geomorphic empire and in world literature,
which is not so much a canon of texts as it is
a mode of circulation? How does the unitary
ontology of the classic haunt the shadow con-
structs of postimperial selfhood? After elabo-
rating on Eliot's and Coetzee's investment in
the question of the classic, my essay specu-
lates whether this question is asked in some
form whenever "secular canon-formation"
occurs in the politics of publishing, teaching,
and translating core texts (Kermode, Clas-
sic 15). Criticism in the twenty-first century
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Ankhi Mukherjee 1029
continues to shore up the idea of transcendent
and foundational literary value against mo-
bile configurations of knowledge, technology,
and expertise. For Eliot the classic standard
was indissociable from dead languages. In
the new century, criticism invents itself and
its modern classics by waking the dead and
sustaining a dynamic and variable conversa-
tion with a monolingual literary tradition as
it becomes other.
"What Is a Classic?" is the title of a presi-
dential address delivered by Eliot before the
Virgil Society on 16 October 1944. The Blitz
had resumed early that year, and London that
summer had been introduced to flying bombs.
In June a bomb had fallen on the offices of
Faber and Faber, where Eliot was editor.
While business quickly resumed, Eliot was
left without the use of his flat at the office and
was forced to commute between London and
Surrey (where he lived) more frequently. He
stayed in London only on Tuesday nights and
fulfilled his fire-watching duties - camped
on a roof, the vertiginous poet scrutinized
the blacked-out city for evidence of fires af-
ter antiaircraft guns had done their job. Peter
Ackroyd's biography of Eliot details the be-
numbed existence the poet led in the last years
of the war, negotiating days one at a time with
no hope for the future (268). The lectures he
delivered around the time of "What Is a Clas-
less chastened and enervated by its reality.
The address begins in a retrospective
mode as Eliot casts a long look back: "It is only
by hindsight, and in historical perspective,
that a classic can be known as such" (10). El-
iot articulates his topic by means of a desiring
dialectic that pits the classic against the con-
tingent, the racial and national against the in-
ternational, the absolute against the errant. He
espouses a Utopian cultural homogeneity as a
precondition for the emergence of the classic.
A classic occurs when a civilization and a lan-
guage and literature are mature and there is
a community of taste and a common style. A
1030 "What Is a Classic?": International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question I P M L A

mature literature has a historical trajectory be- healthy and beautiful in itself. The classic
hind it, the history of "an ordered though un- has a style of its own and is new and inimi-
conscious progress of a language to realize its table, an invention that is not programmable
own potentialities within its own limitations" and must be recognized on its own terms.
(11). It is the work of a mature mind steeped in The style is new without neologism, new and
the history of its living language and magiste- ancient in equal measure, and effortlessly
rial in its critical sweep of the past, present, contemporaneous with all ages. The classic
and future. The maturity of the classic poet, renews itself continuously to pose as a per-
according to Eliot, accrues from a conscious- petual contemporary, "contemporain de tous
ness of history, the poet's own as well as that les âges": it is a living entity, open to endless
of at least one other hypercivilization. intervention in successive acts of reading and
Eliot reminds us that What is a classic? is interpretation ("Qu'est-ce" 42). The idea of a
not a new question, and I would like to dwell classic, in Sainte-Beuve's definition, is not re-
briefly on a notable historical precedent. Au- stricted to a single work or author but implies
gustin Sainte-Beuve, an Eliot-like creator of continuity and tradition and the transmission
literary value, confronted his age with the of tradition. Sainte-Beuve maintains that the
same query in his causerie of 24 October 1850: classic - and for him the works of Vergil are
"Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?" The word classic, the type of all classics-is both "an index of
Sainte-Beuve records, appears first in ancient civility" and the product of individual genius,
Rome as classici, a name applied to the citizens exemplifying health, sanity, and universal val-
of the first class, the only class that mattered. ues (Kermode, Classic 17). Ancient works are
The classic as a mode of classification thus classic not because they are old but because
originates in a gesture that equates social and they are vigorous, fresh, and fit.
literary rank. Sainte-Beuve's account of the Sainte-Beuve's essay is an excellent case
classic is at a remove from the antique ideal,
study of the difficulties attendant on asking,
What is a classic? Sainte-Beuve has elsewhere
but, as critics point out, it is telling that Sainte-
Beuve should begin in ancient Rome, wheremounted a poignant defense of the historical
the literary classic mirrors a privileged social situatedness and concomitant limitations of
class. As Christopher Prendergast comments: the critic. In his review of Flaubert's Sala-
manbôy Sainte-Beuve wonders what the critic
The implication seems to be that, howeveris to do in the face of insurmountable cultural
remote Roman antiquity, it still has a lesson
difference, as manifested in, say, "petty local
immensely germane to the present or to Sainte-hatreds between barbarians."
Beuve's construction of it: namely- that the
material and social conditions for the produc-
How can you expect me to take an interest in
tion of a "classic" rest on the division of labour
this lost war, buried in the defiles or sands of
and the specialization of function. (28)
Africa, in the rebellion of these more or less
indigenous Libyan tribes against their master
In this essay, as well as in the 1858 lecture
the Carthaginians, in these petty local hatreds
given at the École Normale Supérieure that between barbarians. What does it matter to
revises it ("De la tradition"), Sainte-Beuve of- me, this duel of Tunis and Carthage? Speak
fers several definitions of the classic that seek to me of the duel of Carthage and Rome, and
to broaden its spirit and scope: a true classic is at once I am all attention, I am involved.
an author who has enriched the human mind; (Prendergast 39)
the classic is an unequivocal moral truth com-
muted into a form that is not fixed but unfail-In "Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?" he neverthe-
ingly large and grand, fine and meaningful,less warns against the circumscribing of the

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125-4 J Ankhi Mukherjee 1031

canon by those who know only one language one way or another, done wrong, but that Vir-
and literature and proposes to rebuild the gil stand as a marker of absolute and unques-
Temple of Taste, a canon of Indo-European tionable literary value" (49).
classics and a veritable library of humanity. "There is no classic in English" (Eliot,
Sainte-Beuve extols Homer and, more un- "What" 25). English is a living language,
conventionally, European classics of the age various, vagrant, and with possibly the great-
of Louis XIV and the three unknown Hom- est capacity of changing and yet remaining
ers from the East: Valmiki and Vyasa of India itself. We may be glad, Eliot surmises, that
and Firdousi of Persia. Despite Sainte-Beuve'sEnglish has never achieved perfection in the
cultural limitations and the racist and classist
work of one classic poet, for that perfection
omissions from his pantheon of writers andmasks the homeostasis of death. "The clas-
texts, the Beuvian fantasy of the classic speakssic standard must come from the dead, from
to the dream of an international literary criti- the tomb," remarks Lamos (49). Acting as in
cism, of a universality that is both EuropeanFreud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle- an-
and transhistorical, and of the emergence of a other wartime text- the death instinct seems
global vernacular like English. to collude with the life instinct in propelling
Like Sainte-Beuve, Eliot identifies Vergil's living languages out of historical time. A
Aeneid as the originary classic of all Europe.language has to fulfill its literary potential-
According to Eliot, a classic mind maintainsprogressively die- to achieve the classic im-
an "unconscious" balance between tradition mortality of Latin and Greek. According to
and the originality of its contemporary mo- Eliot, the "classic criterion" should be of vital
ment. As heir to the undeveloped resources importance to a language or literature, dead
of a language, the poet is driven to outdo or alive. Without the application of the clas-
predecessors, but the revolt serves to radi- sical measure, we become provincial, with
calize and recode tradition, not discontinue distorted values, confounding the ephemeral
it. Vergil is a poet of the eternal metropolis, with time-honored monuments. Without the
the empire of empires, Rome. In the 1951 es- classic, we lose our sense of the past, and the
say "Virgil and the Christian World," Eliot world becomes the property solely of the liv-
praises Vergil for uniting the pagan and the ing, a property, to quote Eliot, "in which the
Christian and seems to want to emulate his dead hold no shares" (30). Europe, in spite
historical imagination. Vergil is not provin- of its mutilation and disfigurement, is to the
cial but Roman and European. He is a man of war-weary, middle-aged Eliot the old organ-
genius actuating the genius of his language. ism out of which a new world harmony must
The classic expresses "the maximum possible develop. The bloodstream of Europe must
of the whole range of feeling" of the people course through all variations of language
who speak its language (27). After Vergil, no and culture that can be grouped together as
great development was possible in the Latin European literature. The notion of the classic
language. While the great poet-Shakespeare is inseparable from notions of empire. Eliot's
or Milton, say- exhausts one literary form, universalist or imperialist classic derives from
the classic poet exhausts, according to Eliot, the belief that whatever happens in history,
the whole language of his or her time. For the empire remains unchanged. As Kermode
Eliot, Vergil is the classic criterion that rules states, "[T]he empire is the paradigm of the
over and outlives contesting literatures from classic: a perpetuity, a transcendent entity,
the periphery. As Colleen Lamos argues, it however remote its provinces, however ex-
probably "does not matter much to Eliot what traordinary its temporal vicissitudes" (Classic
Virgil did right that every other poet has, in 28). Latin is the universal language, the ideal

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1032 "What Is a Classic?": International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question I P M L A
to which European vernaculars should aspire
but that they can never attain. Their provin-
ciality is defensible so long as local languages
and literatures do not proliferate in isolation
but maintain their position as provinces in the
empire of the ideal classic - that is, Vergil.
It is easy to read "What Is a Classic?" as a
derivative essay in which Eliot defines Vergil
as the great pre-Christian precursor of Chris-
tianity's greatest poet, Dante, who fulfills the
tradition. But the grim historical context of
this dispatch makes us wonder if Eliot chose
the Aeneid not for its celebration of the age
of Augustus but for its prophetic testimony
of the possibility of fresh civil war. Vergil's
Rome is founded in blood, and Augustan pac-
ification is laced with terror that blood could
flow again. As Gareth Reeves points out,
Carthage, Troy, Tyre, and Rome stand inter-
changeably for an exploding city that, as Eliot
wrote in The Waste Land, "cracks and reforms
and bursts in the violet air" (31). "What is a
classic? It is not a new question," said Eliot in
his Virgil Society address (7). The real ques-
tion is why Eliot revisits this tired and curato-
rial attitude to reclaim the classic as a work of
foundational value. Was the effort war work,
as Ackroyd claims (268)?5 Did his difficult
present make the melancholy poet turn to a
philosophical meditation on history?
In T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Lyndall
Gordon sees "What Is a Classic?" as revealing
"Eliot's own concern with destiny" (383). Eliot
speaks to two peoples, English and American,
not only allies in war but heirs to a common
culture, embodied in his own person. A few
years before the address, Eliot had put to-
gether a selection of Rudyard Kipling's verse.
Kipling, Eliot said in his introduction, had
"a universal foreignness" and yet could see
more clearly because he was "alien." He had
"a sense of the antiquity of England, of the
number of generations and peoples who have
laboured the soil and been buried beneath it,
and of the contemporaneity of the past" (Gor-
don 383-84). Like Kipling and Joseph Con-
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rad, Eliot positioned himself in relation to
England as a powerful insider who was also
an outsider. As Rushdie once claimed, "[T]he
only people who see the whole picture ... are
the ones who step out of the frame" (43).
In a tribute to Eliot on 26 September
1986, on the occasion of the unveiling of El-
iot's blue plaque at 3 Kensington Court Gar-
dens,6 Ted Hughes made a distinction between
"great" and "truly great" poetry. Great poetry
is poetry of a "distinctive national character,"
while truly great poetry, like Eliot's, is "of this
new, unprecedented psychic simultaneity of
all cultures, this sudden, inner confederation
of all peoples, subjected as they are, under the
tyranny of modern history, to a single spiri-
tual calamity" (10). Coetzee, however, is less
forgiving of the "psychic simultaneity of all
cultures" in Eliot's Geist. In his lecture titled
"What Is a Classic?" given in Graz, Austria, in
1991, Coetzee says that what struck him when
he reread Eliot's famous lecture in preparation
for his present one was that "nowhere does El-
iot reflect on the fact of his own American-
ness, or at least his American origins, and
therefore on the somewhat odd angle at which
he comes, honouring a European poet to a
European audience" (2). As Coetzee points
out, Eliot's project involves not only invent-
ing a fully European identity for Vergil but
also claiming for England a problematic Eu-
ropean identity. Coetzee wonders "how and
why Eliot himself became English enough for
the issue to matter to him. . . . Why did Eliot
become' English at all?" (3). The motives, ac-
cording to Coetzee, were confused and com-
plex: Anglophilia, a strong identification with
the English middle class, a certain American
self-loathing. Arguably, the world wars were
instrumental in turning Eliot's avant guerre
cosmopolitanism into a paranoid and dis-
placed nationalism. Marjorie Perloff speaks of
Eliot's increasing alienation from the public
sphere and politics of Europe: "Indeed, after
The Waste Land, what we know as modernism
was to lose its Utopian edge and become much
 Ankhi Mukherjee 1033
125-4 J

darker, its face no longer turned to the 'new' "young colonials struggling to match their
in the same way" (41). His alienation also had inherited culture to their daily experience"
something to do with what Helen Vendler (7). Boyhood details a hilarious incident - the
terms "the dilemma of idiom" (64): Eliot and young John's pretending to be Roman Catho-
other American poets of his generation en- lic because he thinks it has something to do
countered a lack of a serviceable style as they with Rome - that plays on Eliot's insistence
came of age. "England is a 'Latin' country," on the nobility of Latinity. In a send-up of
Eliot had proclaimed in 1923 (Kermode, Clas- Eliot's early poetry of deracination, rootless-
sic 20). By 1944 Eliot was an Englishman, or a ness, and self-invention, the narrator of Youth,
"Roman Englishman" (Coetzee, "What" 3). John Coetzee, says, "[E]ach man is an island
According to Coetzee, Eliot uses the . . . [and] you don't need parents" (3). "There
story of Aeneas as a fable of exile followed is no dishonour in electing to follow Eliot,"
by "home-founding" to evoke the topogra- John speculates ("electing to follow" is telling,
phy of his own life history, appropriating the after the disavowal of genealogy and national
cultural weight of the epic to back himself. affiliation in both novels), and the antihero's
If Aeneas is recast as an Eliotic hero, Vergil mobility narrative negotiates Eliotic critical
is characterized as an Eliot-like "'learned
issues: Englishness, civilization versus barba-
rism (and philistinism), metropolitan urban-
author"' (5)7 Eliot is remaking and resituat-
ing his national identity here by inserting ity,
it Latinity, the grip of Europe on the colonial
in Western European and Catholic cosmo- imaginary. Halfway through his lecture, Coet-
zee tellingly embarks on "an autobiographical
politanism. Coetzee marvels at the way Eliot
fashions a new identity not on the basispath"
of (he says it is methodologically reckless
but will successfully dramatize the issue [9]).
"immigration, settlement, residence, domes-
tication, acculturation," as mere mortals Eliot
do, the provincial is indeed a pattern and
figure of the author, we learn. Just as Vergil
but by co-opting a convenient nationality and
spoke across the ages to Eliot, Coetzee, age fif-
then resituating it in a larger narrative of cos-
mopolitanism. He is, as Coetzee says, claim-
teen, had undergone the impact of the classic:
anof
ing "a line of descent less from the Eliots afternoon in the back garden in the sub-
New England and/or Somerset than from urbs of Cape Town, the music of Bach from
Virgil and Dante" (7). "Where Eliot went
the house next door, "after which everything
wrong," notes Coetzee, "was in failingchanged"
to (10). Does the classic choose and en-
foresee that the new order would be directed thrall us, or do we choose to be thus elected
from Washington, not London and certainly and reconfigured by a transcendent ideal?
not Rome" (6). Coetzee does not, however, Was that experience in the garden mystic or
outmode Eliot's notion of provincialism, material, Coetzee wonders?
which implies an eternal metropolis.
"What is a classic? It is not a new ques- [Was] I symbolically electing high European
culture, and command of the codes of that
tion," Eliot had said by way of introducing
culture, as a route that would take me out of
his topic. So what is Coetzee's investment in
my class position in white South African so-
this old question, and how does he answer
ciety and ultimately out of what I must have
it? It is impossible not to see a vexed affilia-
felt, in terms however obscure or mystified,
tion between Eliot and Coetzee, particularly as an historical dead end - a road that would
the fictionalized Coetzee of Boyhood and culminate (again symbolically) with me on
Youth. Coetzee's autobiographical protago- a platform in Europe addressing a cosmo-
nists match the description of Eliot and Ezra politan audience on Bach, T. S. Eliot and the
Pound he provides in "What Is a Classic?": question of the classic? (10-11)

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1034 "What Is a Classic?": International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question I P M L A
"Every writer who desires to be read . . . has
to seek admittance to the canon- or, more
precisely, a canon," says Derek Attridge of
the processes of canonization operative on
Coetzee's novels; "unless we are read, we are
nothing" (74). Coetzee s fashioning of his liter-
ary and cultural genealogy in the classic mold
is inseparable from the writerly desire to be
recognized and judged favorably by the clas-
sic's exacting standards. And his ambivalent
attitude toward the legacy of the classic re-
flects his misgivings about the transmission of
knowledge in the humanities: the acquisition
of disinterest and autonomy by subscribing to
transcendent values comes with an inescapable
sense that to be educated is to be victimized.
According to Coetzee, the classic, escaping
ideological determination, is historically con-
stituted by the criticism it receives down the
ages. What is a classic? is thus an unanswer-
able question. The classic is that which sur-
vives skeptical questioning - in fact it defines
itself by surviving. Coetzee evokes the "great
poet of the classic of our times, the Pole Zbig-
niew Herbert" to set in motion the antagonism
between the classic and the barbarian: "not so
much an opposition as a confrontation." It is
not the possession of some essential quality
that enables the classic to survive barbarism.
Rather, "what survives the worst of barbarism,
surviving because generations of people can-
not afford to let go of it and therefore hold on
to it at all costs- that is the classic," Coetzee
asserts, echoing Herbert. The classic is also
radically new: impossible to predict and diffi-
cult to welcome. Coetzee shows a strong affin-
ity with Eliot in the way he brings his topic to
a close. According to Eliot, the classical crite-
rion is of vital importance to literary criticism.
Coetzee takes this idea to its logical limit:
The function of criticism is defined by the
classic: criticism is that which is duty-bound
to interrogate the classic. Thus the fear that
the classic will not survive the de-centring
acts of criticism may be turned on its head:
rather than being the foe of the classic, criti-
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cism, and indeed criticism of the most scep-
tical kind, may be what the classic uses to
define itself and ensure its survival. (19)
As in Sainte-Beuve's "Qu'est-ce qu'un clas-
sique?" the classic and the critical appraisal of it
have a "function," an ostensible aspect of which
is to attest to the viability of and embolden the
very tradition of close critical "testing":
The criterion of testing and survival is not
just a minimal, pragmatic, Horatian standard
(Horace says, in effect, that if a work is still
around a hundred years after it was written, it
must be a classic). It is a criterion that expresses
a certain confidence in the tradition of testing,
and a confidence that professionals will not
devote labour and attention, generation after
generation, to sustaining pieces of music whose
life-functions have terminated. (18)
According to Sainte-Beuve, the function of
the classic as well as of critical investment in
the question of the classic is to act as a dike
("une digue") in the face of rising barbarism
and anarchy.8 The term function, when ap-
plied to the work of literary criticism, has the
Arnoldian resonance of "preserving and de-
fending something seen as under threat" and
is applicable equally to Sainte-Beuve's, Eliot's,
and Coetzee's task of interpreting and evalu-
ating the classic (Prendergast 46). The discus-
sion of the function of criticism is a telltale
moment in the Coetzee essay. The author-
critic is justifying the high seriousness of his
present endeavor; he is also activating the idea
of the classic for the contemporary writer.
What is a classic? is another way of asking
What is borne across? or Who reads me? or,
in a more Beuvian mode of address to the
higher mortals, What would they say of us?
The subsistence of the classical criterion, com-
bined with the absence of a definitive classic
in English, must also fuel the modern writer's
hope, to quote Coetzee's predecessor, "that I
. . . may be able to write something which will
be worth preserving" (Eliot, "What" 25).
125-4 j Ankhi Mukherjee 1035

As Coetzee points out in his lecture, Eliot signals entrenched cultural privilege and
does not mention his wartime circumstances overreach. In the context of increasingly glo-
except in passing, to let his auditors know thatbalized structures of labor, trade, environ-
"accidents of the present time" made it diffi- ment, warfare, and knowledge, however, the
cult for him to access research materials for question of the classic is no longer bound to
the lecture (8). It could be argued that Eliot pa- class imperatives, "cognitive acquirement,"
renthesizes the raging war so as not to let theor the power-knowledge nexus of a colonial
timely critical consideration of the Europeancanon. The literary canon itself has become
classic be overwhelmed by one of the greatest a site of unresolved struggles, perceived no
crises in European history and possibly be-longer as a mainstay of transhistorical values
cause the reality of the event would be greaterbut as an "abstraction from history," an insti-
than any act of aesthetic containment. It couldtutional means of exposing people to "ideo-
be argued that Coetzee's engagement with this logical overdeterminations" (Altieri, Canons
question too takes the distant impress of the24). In the twenty-first century, the idea of the
conflictual social reality. The apartheid regimeclassic also has to measure up against float-
fell apart in 1990, a year before Coetzee's lec- ing populations; transnational politics within
ture. His back garden, like Eliot's war-ravaged national borders; mobile configurations and
London, is represented as timeless, spaceless,diffusions of knowledge, technology, and
and universal. Coetzee's reexamination of expertise; and global English. We are, as Ar-
metropolitan versus provincial or classic ver- jun Appadurai states, functioning in a world
sus barbarian in this lecture could be said to "characterized by objects in motion":
refer obliquely to the relation between South
African cultural production and international These objects include ideas and ideologies, peo-
ple and goods, images and messages, technolo-
aesthetic paradigms and to the 1990s South
gies and techniques. This is a world of flows
African cultural debates about finding a new
It is also, of course, a world of structures, orga-
settlement between domestic and international
nizations, and other stable social forms. But the
discourses. Coetzee's evocation of the function
apparent stabilities that we see are, under close
of criticism brings up the ghosts of Eliot and examination, usually our devices for handling
Arnold and a duty to eschew the antinomian objects characterized by motion. (5)
"inner voice" that urges "doing as one likes"
and attune oneself instead to the higher au- Does the classic criterion speak to the plan-
thority embodied in the literary canon (Eliot,etary system of literature rising out of th
"Function" 27). This turn away from the "new" movements of capital, commodities, services
to what Eliot valorized as the "present mo- and discourses, or does it constrain such
ment of the past" could be read as Coetzee's flows? And if the classic ideal could be reno-
increasing alienation from the South African vated for a postcolonial, global world, would
public sphere ("Tradition" 22), its institutional it inevitably replicate global capital and what
and academic politics, notably the debates Ian Baucom calls the "globalizing imaginary"
and disputations on the shaping of a national by synchronizing and homogenizing histori-
culture. Finally, the quest for the classic and cal difference or differentiation and creating
the need to be accommodated in the classical a centralized (not constellated) literary stud-
category are symptoms of "a kind of upward ies (168)? In What Is World Literature? David
race-mobility" (Spivak, "Burden" 276) that is Damrosch presents "world literature" not as a
Coetzee's burden as much as it is Eliot's. canon of texts but as a dynamic field, a mode
What is a classic? is easily mistaken for of circulation and reading whereby books
a snobbish and conservative question that exist in literary systems beyond their cultures

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1036 "What Is a Classic?": International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question I P M L A
of origin.9 The corpus that constitutes world
literature at any given time is variable. The
ways in which the works of world literature are
read are also (ideally) variable. A given work
may enter into world literature and fall out
again, depending on the "complex dynamics
of cultural change and contestation" (6). "The
history of the world is the slaughterhouse of
the world, reads a famous Hegelian aphorism;
and of literature," says Franco Moretti. "The
majority of books disappear forever," Moretti
adds, citing the canon of nineteenth-century
British novels, whose two hundred titles ac-
count for about half of one percent of all nov-
els published in Britain during the century
(207). Similarly, very few books secure a quick
and permanent place in what Damrosch terms
the "limited company of perennial World
Masterpieces" (6). Damrosch 's definition of
a masterpiece makes it nothing other than a
modern classic. There is a superficial differ-
ence between the two in that while the classic
is a work of lasting value, identified primarily
with Greek and Roman art and often closely
associated with imperial hierarchies, the mas-
terpiece can be an ancient or modern work
and need not have any foundational cultural
force. The greatness of the masterpiece, how-
ever, seems to lie in its perpetuation and re-
definition of a cultural standard of excellence,
in its high difficulty level, and in its participa-
tion in a classic ideal, as it were: "In this liter-
ary analog of a liberal democracy the (often
middle-class) masterworks could engage in
'a great conversation' with their aristocratic
forebears, a conversation in which their cul-
ture and class of origin mattered less than the
great ideas they expressed anew" (15). Dam-
rosch discredits the culture of "presentism"
that entails opportunistic, erratic, and often
unhistorical appropriations of the past for a
perpetual present (17). The canons of the ear-
lier periods, suggests Damrosch, should be
reexamined and opened up rather than aban-
doned, and a masterpiece is a work in which
the past is thus reconfigured and put to use.
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Damrosch 's views on literary master-
works are relatable to Kermode's suggestion
in the concluding pages of The Classic that the
"imperial classic" has given way to "a modern
version of the classic," which is plural, secular,
and "a permanent locus of change" (139-40).
Kermode seems to present the modern ver-
sion of the classic as both plenitude and lack.
The classic ideal is a "surplus of signifier"
(140), exceeding the claims of an interpreter
or a generation of interpreters: the plenitude
of the modern classic allows it to be adapted
to the specific demands of different cultures.
And the classic is a teeming lack, which in-
vites readers to make and remake meaning.
Kermode briefly pauses to consider "classic
characteristics"- "'a fine awareness of human
relations,' and a certain maturity" (133) - but
his analysis glosses over the constitutive
depth and magnitude of a classic work, which
invites and organizes successive readings. It
is as if the classic can only be determined ret-
roactively and across a hermeneutic gap, the
survival of the classic being the greatest proof
of its ontic status. Kermode is content to
shore the classic as a complex indeterminacy
that has allowed us "our necessary plurali-
ties" (121), and this stance in turn reduces the
classic to a temporary and replaceable touch-
stone for modern literature and criticism. In
this schema, the values of the "originary cul-
ture" are routinely outmaneuvered by those
of the "receiving culture" (Damrosch 126).
Surely classics are important for "the qual-
ity of the questions they ask and the concerns
they exhibit, rather than for the thematic an-
swers they propose," as Charles Altieri argues
in his critique of Kermode ("Hermeneutics"
89). Damrosch 's concept of the masterpiece
reinvents the classic more effectively for a
postteleological age. It augments Kermode's
sequential narrative (the classic as "an essence
available to us under our dispositions, in the
aspect of time" [141]) with dynamic networks
of dialogue and exchange with the past that
reflect human diversity, new forms and maps
 Ankhi Mukherjee 1037
125-4 J

of belonging, and what Coetzee, in Diary of habit ... an incessant recoding of diversified
a Bad Year, calls "the continuity of the hu- fields of value" (Spivak, Outside 61). What is
man story" (189). Coetzee's shorthand for a classic? is a question that has no single or
the classic in this experimental novel, a set unified answer. It is self-confirmatory and ef-
of "strong" (and "soft") opinions evocative of fective to some extent, of course, but it is also
Vladimir Nabokov, is "the perduring" (190). posed as an incomplete and unfulfilled quest
What is a classic? is a question of outliv- and "a yearning for conceptually" (Said,
ing and "postness" or of living in an age that World 52). As the Eliot and Coetzee lectures
seems to come after the end of history. As my demonstrate, the question of the classic dra-
readings of Eliot and Coetzee show, the rela- matizes the conflict between personality and
tion to classic is in a sense equally "post" or impersonality implicit in twentieth-century
postcolonial for both Eliot (American and conceptualizations of the critical function: it
also English in relation to Vergil and Dante) gives poignant form to the latecomer's desire
and Coetzee. In their roles as literary critics, to be a precursor, to bring new literary value
both seem to subscribe (in varying degrees) into performance, to articulate "those voices
to the fantasy that literary culture is instru- dominated, displaced, or silenced by the textu-
mental and produces beliefs and ideas that ality of texts" (53), while also affording escape
unify or order culture. And the outsider, like to poetics and artifice, impersonality, and the
Coetzee, reading at college in the 1950s the force field of a transnational literary space.
modern classics by Eliot and Pound, is more "For every major poet a cloud of minor
interested in constructing tradition, since his poets, like gnats buzzing around a lion,"
own relation to it has to be constructed, not notes the poetaster of Coetzee's Youth (20).
assumed. As Pascale Casanova observes: The classic question is inevitably tied in with
anxiety around major and minor statuses in a
The irremediable and violent discontinuity be-disciplinary context, since they are also con-
tween the metropolitan literary world and itstestations between the majority and minori-
suburban outskirts is perceptible only to writ-
ties. Though the deconstructive impulse is to
ers on the periphery, who, having to struggle in
"decenter the desire for the canon," Spivak is
very tangible ways in order simply to find "the
right to sound a cautionary note:
gateway to the present" (as Octavio Paz puts
it), and then to gain admission to its central
[A] full undoing of the canon- apocrypha op-
precincts, are more clearsighted than others
position, like the undoing of any opposition,
about the nature and the form of the literary
is impossible
balance of power. (World Republic 43)
are ourselves moved by a desire for alternat
canon formations, we work with varieties
The question of the classic is closely related and variations upon the old standards. He
to the "worlding" of an international liter- the critic's obligation seems to be a scrup
ary criticism for the twenty-first century. For lous declaration of "interest."
writers and critics emerging from the sub- ("Scattered Speculations" 110)
urban outskirts of the metropolitan literary
world (as repeated attacks on the elitism ofIf the question What is a classic? is histori-
Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spi- cally implicated in what Spivak often calls
vak show, however, it is impossible to fix thethe "epistemic violence" of colonial ca-
location and provenance of "the most deserv- nonical norm, its deconstructive logic of
ing marginal"), the case is one not simply of evaluation provides the terms for counter-
accessing the culture of imperialism but of questioning and eventually reterritorializing
the "persistent critique of what one must in- the idea of the canon: "What subject- effects

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1038 "What Is a Classic?": International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question P M L A

were systematically effaced and trained to ef-

between an open, global and generous vision
face themselves so that a canonic norm mightof universal literature, and a national view,
emerge?" (110).10 My argument is that the and it takes him two steps to come down, or
question of the classic, especially when posed
back, from the universe to the West, and from
with "a scrupulous declaration of 'interest,'"
the West to his own village" (1195).11 The tra-
ditional discourse on the classic follows the
provides metropolitan twenty-first-century lit-
erary criticism with a viable, sustainable, andlogic traced by Jacques Derrida in his essay
ethical means of judging literary works and"Onto-theology of National-Humanism":
demarcating the literary field. "Either there
the experience of the European modern who
were aesthetic values, or there are only the
claims to be universal against the backdrop
overdeterminations of race, class, and gender,"
of imperialism and the rise of nationalisms.
says Bloom unequivocally of secular canonTo borrow from Derrida's description of Jo-
formation (487). Needless to say, the over-hann Gottlieb Fichte's Discourse to the Ger-
determinations of race, class, and gender are
man Nation, the discourse of the classic in
real, and they persist, but they should not lead
the Sainte-Beuve or Eliot mode tends to es-
to dubious negotiations between aesthetic stan-sentialize national literary value "to the point
dards and social engineering. Neither should
of making it an entity bearing the universal
texts be read and canonized for the politics of
and the philosophical as such" (11). A nation's
blame they embody. It is equally absurd, how-
fantasy of self-identification always assumes
ever, to deny the cultural embeddedness of aes-
philosophical form, Derrida observes:
thetic standards, as Bloom tends to do. While
it is impossible to dissociate literary meaning This philosophy, as structure of nationality
and value from the socioeconomic and insti-
. . . can show up as spontaneous philosophy,
tutional factors that determine them- or from an implicit philosophy but one that is very
the history of Western hegemony, for that constitutive of a non empirical relationship
matter- I would argue that the question of the with the world and a sort of potentially uni-
classic signals the kind of agonistic discussion versal discourse "embodied," "represented,"
and debate that enables the literary-critical "localised" (all problematic words) by a par-
field to produce its own criteria for cultural ticular nation. (10)
distinction. It marks what Wai Chee Dimock
calls the "nonstandard space and time" of the Derrrida has spoken elsew
collective life of literature (4), a unique and ir- way Europe claims to stand fo

regular geography and chronology with con- ("Geopsychoanalysis").12 Coet

tinued relevance for national, diasporic, and out Eliot's Americanness and
international usages of English. "convenient nationality," sharp
The limits of international literary criti- hegemonic logic and to some
cism should not evoke territorial borders. Yet harder for readers to conflate

the two lectures by Eliot and Coetzee testify with that of the traditional
to the unstable relation between the classic classic. Yet Eliot's lecture on the classic shows

as preeminently European or national and that the national (or national-as-universal)

the classic as universal, global, trans- or in-protocols of the classic are by no means stable,
ternational. As Antoine Compagnon pointsthriving as they do on iterability and cultural
out - and his observations are based on performance. The desultory binary evoked in
Eliot's and Coetzee's essays - the global and
the qualitative differences between Sainte-
Beuve's 1850 essay and its reprisal in thethe local or national - might even turn out to
1858
lecture - Sainte-Beuve himself is "divided be a productive one in the way twenty-first-

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125-4 J Ankhi Mukherjee 1039

century literary criticism interprets acts of lit- The literary world system, in this appraisal,
erature. The classics of South Asian English, is the final asylum for nonwinning and non-
for example, work neither universalistically hegemonic writers if they are to win freedom,
nor as reified particularity, as the enduring recognition, and consecration. Literature from
appeal of Rushdie's Midnight's Children has "subordinated regions" - nations with diverse
shown. Postcolonial literature in English populations and polyglot cultures, multi-
has undergone cultural globalization in its lingual literary traditions, and the tangled
inexorable move toward Western markets cultural legacies of different forms of domina-
and readerships, but it is also a heterotopic
tion - are doomed therefore to be negatively
site, a mash-up of continuities, discontinui-
determined as literature written against a
ties, repetitions, and displacement. The self-
putative Western center in the reactive reg-
determination and future of that literature isters of assimilation, translation, rebellion,
cannot any longer be meaningfully related to and revolution. The metropolitan literary
a hyperreal cultural Europe that stands as "an establishment, Casanova seems to suggest, is
entelechy of universal reason" (Chakrabarty the singular object cause of any activity in pe-
3), as Casanova ends up doing by way of de- ripheral literary cultures, as well as the final
lineating global literary space. If hierarchy, address in their inexorable movement from
inequality, and the uneven distribution of nationality to universality. And that establish-
goods and values have marked the staggered ment seems to have banished critics from the
ascendancy of (postcolonial) global literature, republic and is consequently not self-divided
Casanova reads the strategies of reversal along or self-questioning in any way, just as national
old colonial lines. In the widely acclaimed The literatures seem devoid of literary-critical
World Republic of Letters, she groups the spec- agon. As Joe Cleary observes in his review of
ificities of emergent literatures under headings Casanovas book, "The World Republic of Let-
such as "Small Literatures," "The Assimi- ters attaches no importance to the discipline as
lated," "The Rebels," "The Tragedy of Trans- a serious arbitrating variable in its own right."
lated Men," and "The Revolutionaries." V. S. While Casanova mentions individual critics,
Naipaul's complex extrapolations of English her world system is powered by writers and
ethnicity and his melancholic Englishness the publishing (and award) industry, and one
are read as "assimilation," "the lowest level of
of the book's key oversights is ignoring "the
literary revolt, the obligatory itinerary of ev- relative strengths or the different dispositions
ery apprentice writer from an impoverished of nationalized literary critical establishments
region having no literary resources of its own" or university systems" (Cleary 213).
(207). Casanova falls back on the certitudes of
International criticism is not simply
the center-periphery model of literary-critical locatable in areas of underdevelopment or
history, failing new epistemologies of com- uneven development surrounding what Casa-
parison and connection:
nova identifies as "central precincts." As Terry
Eagleton points out, English literature in the
[T]o speak of the centred literary forms and
twentieth century has been largely written by
genres simply as a colonial inheritance im-
Americans, the Irish, Poles, and Indians (9),
posed on writers within subordinated regions
is to overlook the fact that literature itself, as a and a similar case for foreignness could be
common value of the entire space, is also an in- made for literary criticism and theory ema-
strument, which, if re-appropriated, can enable nating from the Western academy. The post-
writers- and especially those with the fewest colonial and global world has witnessed the
resources- to attain a type of freedom, recog- return of what Spivak calls "demographic,
nition and existence within it. ("Literature" 9) rather than territorial, frontiers that predate

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1040 "What Is a Classic?": International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question P M L A

Amiri Baraka, and Alice Walker, demanded and secured

and are larger than capitalism" and of "para-
the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Toni Morrison's Beloved. The
state collectivities," which make unsustain-
intervention, according to English, was in the form of a
able national anchorings and the traditional
petition to the New York Times Book Review that stated
differentiations and bindings of political
pointedly that James Baldwin (who had recently died)
space (Death 14). I urge a way of thinking
"never received the honor of these keystones to the canon
of American literature: the National Book Award and the
about the relation of Eliot and Coetzee, two
Pulitzer Prize: never." The statement went on to link Bald-
very different outsider writers, to mainstream
win to Morrison, who, despite her formidable international
British literature- not how we think of them
reputation, "has yet to receive the keystone honors of the
(American and South African or institutional-
National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize" (238). The
Morrison
metropolitan cultural arbiter and postcolo- Pulitzer scandal raises uncomfortable questions
about racist occlusion as well as about egregious forms of
nial critic) but how they position and imagine
affirmative action. Beloved is undoubtedly a literary classic,
themselves, which is often as out of place,
and English himself points out that "Morrison and Beloved
emergent, or coming after and as needing make
to singularly bad targets for the decline-of-standards
rewrite perduring pasts, real and invented.polemic"
In deployed by Reagan conservatives in the wake of
the controversy (240). I refer to this case to point out the
the end, the question and concept of the clas-
relevance of this putative bid for canonicity to the cultural
sic is perhaps always that of the outsider.
contestations key to my topic. Do worthy winners bring
their value and "future, if not present," canonicity to the
prize, as English argues (241), or do value and canonicity
issue from prizes and cultural arbiters (and critics)?
4. 1 am referring here to the terms Jonathan Kram-
Notes nick uses to describe the formation of the English liter-
ary canon in eighteenth-century England. The historical
I wish to thank Derek Attridge and Robert J. C. Youngcircumstances
for Kramnick describes as crucial to canon
their formative comments on the first draft of this essay.
formation- the transformation of the reading public
I am grateful to Regenia Gagnier for encouraging me to
and print capitalism- are also particularly relevant to
submit work related to my current book project, "What
the contingent staging of the classic question (1088).
Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the
5. As Ackroyd observes, the wartime lectures- "What
Canon," for this special topic.
Is a Classic?," "The Social Function of Poetry," "The Music
1. When the Booker Prize was established, in 1968,
of Poetry," and "The Classics and the Man of Letters"- re-
it was touted as an English-language Prix Goncourt, an
iterate the themes of "common language," or the "chang-
award that would encourage the wider reading of the
ing language of common intercourse," and "common
"very best in fiction" across the United Kingdom and the
style." The dereliction of war had fostered a sense of na-
Commonwealth ("Fortieth Anniversary"). Celebrated
tional identity, which manifested itself in Eliot's work as
winners include V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Salman
a unity of the "letters of the past" and a formal, if exceed-
Rushdie, William Golding, A. S. Byatt, J. M. Coetzee,
ingly fragile, order called European literature (270-71).
Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri, Ian McEwan, and Margaret
Atwood. 6. London's blue plaques mark buildings in which his-
torical luminaries lived and worked. Founded in 1866, the
2. Midnight's Children was judged the best-ever win-
ner of the Booker Prize for the first time in 1993, receiv-program of the blue plaques is believed to be the oldest of
its kind in the world and has been run successively by the
ing the Booker of Bookers, a special prize commemorating
the Booker Prize's twenty-fifth anniversary. The Best of Royal Society of Arts, the London County Council, the
the Booker, which in 2008 marked the prize's fortieth an- Greater London Council, and, since 1986, English Heri-
tage. The plaque scheme has steadily raised awareness
niversary, was also awarded to Rushdie. The short list for
the 2008 award, chosen by the biographer Victoria Glen-about London's historical buildings and, in some cases,
has saved them from demolition. It has been instrumen-
dinning, the broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, and John
Mullan, professor of English at the University of London,tal in inspiring conservation movements such as the So-
ciety for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (founded in
was put to public voting. The list included the Australian
Peter Carey, the South Africans Coetzee and Gordimer,1877) and the National Trust (founded in 1895).
and the Indian-born Rushdie. Of the six short-listed nov- 7. There is a long critical tradition of comparing El-
els, five deal with colonial or postcolonial experience. iot to Vergil. In 1944 W. F. Jackson Knight identified El-
3. English details an instance of alleged prize fixing iot's poetry as Vergilian. While reviewing On Poetry and
when a group of forty-eight influential African AmericanPoets in 1958, Kermode detected in Eliot the Vergilian
writers, including Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara,qualities of gravity, labor, pietas, and a sense of destiny.

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 12 5-4 Ankhi Mukherjee 1041

He elaborated on world'
the topic
also connotes in . The
all that virgin territory . . where psy- Classic. D
and Elizabeth Porges
choanalysis,Watson have
to put it bluntly, has never set foot" (65). written inf
says on Eliot's treatment of Vergil. According
T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet, Vergil informs E
about politics, society, and religion, not just
and yokes Eliot's
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