The Making of a “Classic”

Agatha Christie

“Is there a reason a video game can’t be considered a classic?” I remember a student asking in English 102. “Why can’t a video game be ‘literature’?” Our class that semester was dedicated to researching and writing about the meaning of education, especially higher education, and what it means to be an educated person. The student was an English major, but uncomfortable with the canon that the discipline considered “classic.”

I recalled this student this week, when publisher HarperCollins announced that Agatha Christie would be the latest popular dead writer to have their work rewritten to exclude inflammatory language. Christie, whose work hasn’t gone out of print in a century and whose novels have been more widely translated than Shakespeare, used a number of late-Empire attitudes in her writing. Her protagonists often disliked “foreigners” and used vulgar racist language.

My student got a discussion rolling over what works were considered “classics” in high school English classes. Why, for instance, is The Great Gatsby considered classic literary art, but The Maltese Falcon still lumped with “genre” fiction? Why Shakespeare, but not Neil Simon? We never reached a satisfactory conclusion in class, but I repeated the question to other sections, and eventually, I think we reached a provisional definition of literature.

A work becomes a “classic,” we tentatively decided, when it says something about the time when it was written, and also about the time we read it. In other words, classic literature isn’t transcendentally timeless; it belongs to the time when it was written. This sometimes means outdated attitudes, such as Atticus Finch’s White Savior mentality. But even outdated content says something about us, now, reading and interpreting the text.

(Incidentally, by this definition, a video game narrative could potentially become a classic. The game itself couldn’t, however, because the technology necessary to read it becomes outmoded and illegible to future generations. Thus popular video game adaptations, like the current TV series The Last of Us, might potentially outlive the games that spawned them.)

Roald Dahl

That returns us to the current mania to rewrite classic literature. Sure, sometimes that’s necessary. The widespread outrage over rewriting began with Roald Dahl’s novels, which often contained jarring racism. In Dahl’s 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa-Loompas were explicitly described as African pygmies working without pay. First-generation readers considered this so offensive that Dahl himself rewrote that aspect for the 1973 rerelease.

But there’s a difference between an author acknowledging public taste (and his own egregious cock-up) and correcting it, and uncredited outsiders imposing another era’s views on that author. One author being heavily rewritten is Ian Fleming, who created James Bond. In Fleming’s telling, Bond was racist, frequently anti-American, and had little patience with anybody not British. Far from the cinematic hero depicted by MGM, Bond was a lousy human being.

Yet I’d contend that’s the point. Like John le Carré or Frederick Forsythe, Fleming wrote about the kind of bottom-feeder who generally worked in international intelligence. Anybody who reads the history of international affairs knows that the Cold Warriors working for spy agencies like MI6 or the CIA were often little better than the miscreants they hunted. These novels usually featured what one critic called “the pretty bad standing against the truly awful.”

When ghostwriters shave Bond’s chauvinism, nationalism, and bigotry away, they lose something of the Cold War milieu that produced him. James Bond emerged from an atmosphere of realpolitik that found his skills useful. But Britain also sent him overseas because it wanted to put men like him as far from the homeland as possible. James Bond is, simultaneously, a British national asset, and a liability to a global superpower’s self-image.

Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, and Roald Dahl wrote during the British Empire’s final crumbling years. Britain’s economy, culture, and self-image were in a state of flux, one that arguably paid off in the ignominy of Thatcherism. Their racist ideas reflected at least a portion of Britain at the time, watching burnished imperial splendor wither, exposing the moral rot that had always laid underneath. Arguably, they handled the change badly.

Except I believe that’s the discussion readers need to have when reading these works. Poirot and Miss Marple upheld the law, which included parroting top-level White supremacy and late colonialism. James Bond defended a homeland that was embarrassed by him. Charlie Bucket inherited an economy based on enslaved labor. These works are “classics,” not in spite of, but because of these traits, and the questions they ask us, the readers.