Thanks to the publication by Le Monde of the essentials of literature in small format, Tiphaine Samoyault, professor of comparative general literature, essayist and serialist of the “World of Books”, returns to the notion of “classic”, its genesis and its scope, in the now international field of literature.
Certain works, capable of surviving over time, have become part of the world’s common heritage in the same way as monuments. Beyond their consecration, these texts have a strength, an infinite power of renewal, meaning that at any time and any place in the world, their reading can change the life of those who immerse themselves in them. We will call them universal or classic. I prefer to call them essential works.
To endow a book with the status of classic is to impose a relative value on it. Why relative? Because this value is subject to several logics which can evolve over time. A work is not established as a literary classic for its intrinsic values, but according to the way in which it is received. And its reception made it cross several thresholds of consecration: that of the literary institution of the time, of publishing, of school, of university research… In the 19th century, for the first time, a publisher, Hachette , launched a so-called “classics” collection. It is not a coincidence. This initiative was concomitant with the exaltation of the national novel. We then aspired to closely link language, literature and nation. It is therefore in a context of emergence, constitution and consolidation of nation-states that the notion of “literary classic” appears.
We encounter this phenomenon in other cultures. For example, the Qing dynasty in the 19th century established its “four extraordinary books” – By the Water, The Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, The Dream in the Red Pavilion – as pillars of classical literature Chinese. But we note in this company the same intention as in Europe to found the collective around literature. Through the bringing together of national and then global classics, the political will emerges to constitute a great story of common memory, the cement and foundation of nations. In this regard, it is particularly striking to note that in 1952, at the instigation of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago, fifty-four volumes were brought together under the title “The Great Books of the Western World”. Their master builder presents them as follows: “Here are the sources of our being. This is our heritage. This is the West. Here is its meaning for humanity. »
The first two series of this collection will be offered to Queen Elizabeth II as well as to President Truman, which symbolically confirms the takeover of power of the United States over the rest of the world. The notion of classic cannot therefore be separated from the policy of literature as it is carried out, in varying ways, by nation-states. Politicians can thus decide which book can be considered and used as classic at a particular time. Let us cite the example of Toni Morrison, the first African-American author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although unanimously considered North American classics, his works were recently removed from school curricula in Florida.
I do not believe in an ideal, decreed, imposed or canonized library. On the other hand, each reader can form their own with their childhood readings, their school readings, by making their own choices and thanks to the books that have transformed them. In the idea of any collection of essentials, it seems very important to me that the collective memory meets the personal memory of each person. There is a play between the two which offers the possibility of building small alternative communities within a larger one. Reading allows everyone to build a literary heritage that will connect with that of other readers. Also, for me, a library only becomes ideal when it meets the collective. Let’s think about the pleasure of talking to someone about a book that we have read together, even in a different language.
The collection of essentials proposed by Le Monde is not really representative of what we today call the “classics” of world literature. It mainly embraces Western literature, includes few works by women and its corpus does not bear witness to the opening that will take place throughout the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. But beyond this crucial question, this collection of essentials offers reading or rereading founding and very beautiful works. These texts were not written at this or that time; they have existed since the time of their first publication, that is to say, they continue to illuminate our times. They have a power of enchantment but also a power of alert which strikes, for example, each time we read again – or for the first time – Franz Kafka.
It has been said of the author of The Trial that he was a precursor, that his work anticipated the disasters of the 20th century. Everything essential in literature has this force of prefiguring the future which is precisely due to the actuality that each reading gives it. Thus, these classics are not works of the past, even less outdated works, but representations and scenarios of what could come.
For example, I read Les Misérables by Victor Hugo three times and each reading brought me something essential for the age at which I read it, in the stages of my learning. I first approached this book in an abridged version and a rewrite for children which made me want to read. Then as a teenager, in a complete version in three volumes, I made a political and social novel, coupled with a very beautiful love story. I understood the barricades, the shadows of Jean Valjean, the slang of the professions, the betrayals, the struggles always crowned with failure, the misery of women, the misery of those who steal to eat, and above all its symbols. Because behind the story of these particular characters, there was the whole world and that is perhaps what it is, the other side of the world and the other side of each person.
In adulthood, the third reading was again that of the enlargement of the novel, of the enlargement of the prose, becoming both broader and freer, since to enlarge is to enlarge and set free, not necessarily in the same movement. The novel extended to welcoming into it my past, that of my readings and that of my experiences. It also extended to showcasing the accuracy and topicality of his language taken in a passion as lively as it was hospitable.
These texts can touch different times and different places in the world and change the lives of their readers. Because the work of fiction is capable of offering direct or metaphorical moral knowledge about human experience, capable of acting as a revealer, provoking the projection of the reader into very different and distant destinies. Concerning the possible effects and extrapolations that literature provides, Laure Murat evokes, for example, in her book Proust, roman famille (Robert Laffont, 256 pages, 20 euros) how, based on microscopic adventures of Parisian high society, her text can be read in Japan, Russia or Argentina, all social categories combined.
It is an experience that remains unique each time for each person and is infinitely reproducible. It is also a dynamic in which a phenomenon of recognition intervenes, a universalization which is based on a difference. There is therefore, from a singular experience, a possibility of reaching everyone. The novel and the theater, by promoting identification, bring into play this relationship between individual and collective to the highest degree. It is because he is particular that a character can speak to everyone.
Not only does it differ according to each country, but also from one era to another. The idea of literature in the modern sense is very recent and essentially Western. During Antiquity, legal texts, political texts, a whole set of speeches and essays, philosophy were placed in the field of letters, etc. A progressive separation of fields took place which placed literature on the margins of other disciplines.
On the other hand, in all cultures and at all times, we note the importance of memory stories, the founders of communities. The story is an anthropological invariant. We do not know a culture without narrative. Also the idea of literature, whatever name we give it, exists everywhere. Its weight and importance vary in society. In the 19th century, when the notion of the classic was promoted, literature was given capital importance as the founder of the community. Today this imprint is less strong. But in some countries, you can still bring half a city to a poetry reading, bringing together all social backgrounds. I witnessed this in Haiti. These variations are therefore not only spatial and cultural, but also temporal.
The enormous success of Millenium, the detective trilogy by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson, is a social phenomenon and illustrates the mirror effect provided by narratives in which the reader recognizes himself. Massive thrillers play on immediate memory, the effect of recognition and identification but do not necessarily carry the reader into a permanent renewal of the effect of surprise. These works function like series, comforting forms which accompany everyday life and which can be very inventive and creative today. But I don’t think these successes are against or to the detriment of the classics. You can passionately follow a television series and enjoy a cinema masterpiece. These two forms are neither competing nor incompatible.
The rise of nationalism is also closely dependent on the formation of national literatures. Johann von Goethe’s intention, when he created the concept of world literature, was to amplify dialogues between different national literatures, for which Western countries and in particular Germany would have a leading role. In his mind, the idea of world literature did not tend towards an equalization of all literary expressions but towards their hierarchy. Nowadays, if the weight of globalization weighs more than ever on literature, dependent on the symbolic and economic weight of different nations, the values seem to have been reversed: the symbolic dimension has diminished, while the economic dimension has is reinforced, hence the weight of English in the world canon. Whatever the case, we can still dream that world literature – to constitute itself of particular stories – resists the homogenization of globalization. Capable of innumerable phenomena of differentiation, it represents minorities more widely than any other discourse, even if it is not the only one to be interested in it.
Following the Second World War, this generous project, linked to the very aspirations of UNESCO, embodied the desire for a cultural rebalancing between peoples. So after two successive so-called “world” wars, it was interesting to found the world heritage of literature on peace. It was also an alternative to the predominance of one culture over another, an initiative to make known little-known and distant realities – like the 13th-century Persian mystic poet Djalal ad-Din Rumi – or closer ones, like writers and poets later awarded the Nobel Prize such as the Icelandic Halldor Laxness, the Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu or the Japanese Yasunari Kawabata…
This “library of libraries”, encompassing all world traditions with a view to openness, enlargement and pluralization, is obviously not limited to the “Western World”. On the contrary, UNESCO’s program of representative works has brought together a large number of the essentials of world literature, doubling its action with a program of translations into often undervalued languages - from Hungarian to Indonesian – to offer a mirror of the diversity of literary creations throughout the world, that of languages, their use and their sharing intended for the greatest number. That’s the whole idea of a collection of essentials: opening doors and inviting the reader to follow their own path.