ABSTRACT
There can never have been a time when the question seemed more urgent. Classics are, roughly, works of art that survive; more exactly, those that belong to a shadowy, indefinite canon which is, for everybody concerned with survival from the lowly pastorate to the inspired theocrat—that is, from the working schoolmaster to the legislating critic—the best analogue we have to the less mutable canon of the church. The urgent question is, how does survival work? What are the chances of its continuing to do so after our own time? There are now a dozen ways of saying that the day of the classic is past. For Walter Benjamin, classics are beautiful unjust objects, each representing usurpations and exploitations impossible to justify in a world moving inevitably towards socialism and fully equipped with the means of mechanical reproduction. We must be content to lose the aura of the unique object because at the same time we lose its stains; and we have instead the new things, clean and capable of equitable distribution. For Marshall McLuhan, classics belong to a cultural epoch which is being technologically phased out. For the counter-culture they are simply a part of the past which they have abolished, or aspects of a gigantic confidence trick against human liberty which has now been exposed. Our ways of talking about them are equally obsolete; the old terms of praise are now terms of insult, as Mr. Robbe-Grillet remarks, imagining the stock commendations of nineteenth-century novels applied to his own. Our notions of form are not only inapposite but demonstrably wrong. Shock, discontinuity, silence, emptiness, succeed rondure, harmony, plenitude, order. And so on. There are many ways of characterizing a situation which one need only hint at, since everybody knows about it and some people express it with marked exaggeration. There remains, though, a perfectly reasonable doubt about the fate of the classics after our day.
