The Things That Matter: Why We Should Still Read Literary Heavyweights

by Carlo Laurena

 

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

                                                                                                                                    Marcel Proust

 

Macbeth, some chapters of a García Marquez novel, and the first two acts of The Cherry Orchard before I gave up on Chekhov – I lost my literary virginity in a threesome of “classics” in high school. For the past few semesters, as a European literature undergrad however, I have plodded (and will have to plod) through worse. Just thinking about the hours I’ve spent attempting to sympathize with indecisive flâneurs and fickle dilettantes for protagonists, and the shuddering and cringing at the most melodramatic schemes and cloying dialogue already make these three – a murder conspiracy, a magical tale of unrequited love, and a Russian comedy – a reprieve from the more opaque works of literature that even we majors struggle with. Sometimes, reading classics can be an arduous task, and the frustration can drive even a literature major like me to doubt my passion for literature, the purpose of all my studies and this path I’ve chosen – why are the classics such a big deal? Why do we have to read them?

 

Though at this point in time I’d be more than willing to read Macbeth again, to decipher Shakespeare’s linguistic gimmicks and luxuriate in his creativity for leisure, the high school student that I used to be, would not have read the play at all if it hadn’t been required in English. The same goes for Chekhov: I tried only because I was told to read him – a rite of passage for anyone seriously interested in drama. On the other hand, I sought catharsis from García Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera, thinking that it could sooth the pangs of an unrequited infatuation, a blizzard of hormones I once confused for idealistic concepts of love and destiny only to realize a quarter of the way in that unfortunately, I barely understood what was happening in the book, one that I took as an authoritative guide to dealing with a high school crush; one that I preferred to a Google search or a friend’s advice all because it was written by a Nobel Prize winner.

Many a night I’ve lingered in bookstores, made my way past the bestsellers, the self-help manuals and young adult fiction on display that greet me at the door, towards the shelves where the long rows of hefty tomes wait – a corner full of titles I’ve seen listed on university syllabi, fancy names of authors that ring a bell, and books that have been adapted into films. This was way before I decided to study literature itself, when most of the time all I did was marvel at them in a bookstore or a library, daydreaming about those voracious readers whom, by dint of the thickness or the author of the book they have clasped in their hands, I instantaneously imagine to be intellectuals, whose literary appetite and stamina I admire from afar. And it is because of this jealousy that I’ve found myself holding a book like Wuthering Heights in my hands, feeling both tantalized and pressured to devour it, only to stow it away after a few attempts to read its first parts. And sometimes, I’d give up and settle for a bestseller instead, foregoing these “classics” completely despite desiring to be someone who reads them.

 

It is with shame that I admit that I may not have thoroughly enjoyed my first time with the “classics”. And yet a few years after, here I am spending almost every waking moment leafing through one; whether or not it’s required for class doesn’t matter – I’ve learned to love the classics, binging on them as if their individual chapters were episodes of an addictive Netflix show. But before that, what I needed to do was to re-discover literature through new eyes, see these works from another vantage point. I used to compare myself to peers who read more widely than me, feeling as if I were a philistine whose existence was inchoate sans the important literature I hadn’t bothered to explore at the time. And I’m certain that others, also aspiring readers, struggle with the same predicament: we feel pressured to read the classics primarily because of their reputation, their historical importance; and the fact that at their core, they’re exciting and profound narratives which communicate personal truths, as much as universal ideas, is often overlooked.

 

When we speak of literature, we are first dazzled by its grandeur. We know of old, musty libraries with towering shelves full of them, and it’s easy to assume that the only reason why they’re still kept there (even if sometimes all they do is gather dust until the fateful day its pulled out by either a bookworm, a professor, or a desperate student who can’t find a pirated copy online) is that literature must automatically be a big deal. Think of how often a classic is claimed to be the reason for a country’s independence (Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere & El Filibusterismo), or how a book best represents a whole continent’s identity (García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude) – we think that what makes literature is not that its simply written word, rather that it’s written with aspirations to change society, to change a nation, to change the world. Although this is true and can certainly be said about most pieces of literature and their respective authors, when a whole corpus of texts, which year after year grows even more distant from us, texts from which we may be centuries, continents and oceans – worlds apart; when these stray even farther from the personal, are seen as a key that guarantees a revolution, unlocks the secrets of the universe, of our human existence, no wonder people are so intimidated by literature! We forget that these ‘classics’ once started out as personal stories too – even if the final product comes out heavily ornamented with extraordinary plots and characters, even if it eventually changes the world it was introduced into after a few decades or so, literature per se is primarily the result of significant personal changes – a celebration, an epiphany, an elegy, a desire expressed through, transmuted into fictional worlds and characters.

 

We demand so much from literature, for one, its transformative potential – how the practice of reading literary heavyweights will supposedly transform us intellectually and morally, and while this is, to some extent true, this can also be an exaggeration. We forget that these authors are people like us, that no matter how ambitious their works are, literature will always be a personal expression of growth and emotional maturity before anything else. As Nick Joaquin has commented about fellow Filipino writer Kerima Polotan, “private grief” is what makes literature. It is inevitable for a bona fide author to scatter, unconsciously or not, biographical tidbits in a fictional work. Literature results from a twofold process – it’s a re-writing of one’s understanding of reality (or even lack thereof), crushing the entire gamut of one’s life through a grinder – trophies, errors, skeletons in the closet – to undergo an extremely taxing process of criticism, re-understanding, and re-writing until they become actual literature. And the author’s self-immolation for his oeuvre cannot occur without the necessary emotional maturity, or at least, without resulting in it. The same goes for the reader: literature contributes to one’s personal growth, though it may not always be in a drastic way; before it goes and sets the world on fire.

But books are like clothes – there are some we keep, but most we outgrow. The ones our ancestors have kept for us, the ones that still fit us and are stylish enough to be worn today, taught in schools, these are your ‘classics’ – the ones that stood the test of time, the ones we haven’t outgrown and probably won’t anytime soon.

 

Literary critic Alain de Botton once said that “a great writer picks up on the things that matter”. Great writing therefore must reflect the things that matter to us the most. What the classics should offer is not specific information about the era and the atmosphere when they were created (though they may offer helpful insights regarding these); instead the classics must contain things that will matter for a long time – the things that mattered then which still matter to us now and will matter in the future.

 

The “things that matter” may be monumental events, sure – for example, Tolstoy’s War and Peace deals with Napoleon’s campaign in Russia and its effect on Russian society. But it may be surprising that all it takes could sometimes just be, say, the aroma of a cookie being dipped in tea. When the narrator of Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust dips a madeleine, a scallop-shaped French pastry into his tea, he is transported to his family’s estate where he had spent most of his childhood. This event, in fact one of the most famed ones in literature, would precipitate an act of reminiscing that spans hundreds of pages, recollecting things in the past that may be as negligible as flowers along a walk or a catchy strain from a sonata’s melody. It’s no shock that most readers would struggle with the classic, criticized to be terribly boring, discombobulating and convoluted, a complete waste of time (according to some reviews on Goodreads). While other authors focus on revolutions and heroic duels, “things that matter” much more than say, a silly recollection of smelling the asparagus in someone’s urine after dinner, Proust decides that what matters for him are these humble memories – a good-night kiss from his mother or the resemblance between a housemaid and a painted visage – propping them center-stage in a three-thousand page tome divided into seven volumes, À la recherche du temps perdu, a literary pilgrimage that a lot of readers have actually undertaken. That’s because only Proust to date has captured in writing the importance of remembering, the fluidity of the active mind as it struggles with a past that finds its way into the present, a past that cannot be entirely retrieved however. The magnum opus has decided for us that these little moments that evoke a bittersweet nostalgia should matter to us as much as the more dramatic events in our lives – and that’s all it took for the work to be hailed as a classic.

 

The “things that matter” in literature are nevertheless so much more than relatable coincidences between our lives and those of the authors we read. The surface most times appears to be a mirror of reality, but literature – the things that matter do not compose a mirror that shatters too easily. And this endurance is what distinguishes literature from most best-selling self-help or young adult books, most of which will be forgotten in a couple of years. Literature survives because it results from its creators confronting their own reality and shattering it voluntarily, delving into the truths behind the “things that matter” and risking discovering that these truths may be irreconcilable with reality (as with Proust in his painstaking exploration of memories); if this is the case, the author fashions a new one out of the shards of his former reality, though it may have been a more comfortable one, then the author matures, acquiesces to his or her new reality until the day he or she needs to break it once more. And readers who commit to such orchestrated chaos will page by page acclimate to this harrowing artistic process of re-writing reality, until they themselves eventually participate in it, not necessarily by becoming producers of literature – but by slowly achieving personal growth as they become the author of their own realities and lives.

 

There remains so much debate and theorizing on the definitive purpose of literature, but for me, the most convincing reason to read the “classics” is not their inherent importance, not their reputation – whether they were once on the Index or their authors were put behind bars, but because they simply contain the things that matter to us – even if these were expressed through iconoclastic content and extraordinary plots and characters, what lie in store for us are wholehearted testimonies of personal growth, bits and pieces of humanity that eventually coalesce into lens through which we can evaluate our own selves, through which we can learn and grow.

 

Now Reader, the next time you find yourself in a bookstore, I advise you to look beyond the best-sellers and spend more time in the deeper end where the classics await you, as I once used to do. But take it one step further than me – look up their synopses until you find one that hooks you enough to pick it up and shell out some hundreds of pesos for it. Then commit to a chapter every day, build up your literary stamina by reading more widely or by taking a literature class or joining a book club – not because you’re obliged to, but because you just want to find out about the things that truly matter, and to find them through a hell of a story at that! I encourage you to read all you want, but also remember that life is short, so when you’re ready:

 

Start with the ones that matter.

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Carlo’s suggestions for first-timers who are interested in classics:

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis is a novella about a salesman who wakes up transformed into an insect. A staple of modern fiction, Kafka’s work is a brilliant introduction to understanding existence and how modernity has adversely transformed how we exist. 

 

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
A forerunner of the Latin American Boom, Juan Rulfo’s fantastic writing in Pedro Páramo would influence his successors, one of which is Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, to create literature that would put Latin America back on the cultural map. 

 

Kamouraska by Anne Hébert
Anne Hébert, one of Canada’s most esteemed authors, disturbed a conservative Catholic Quebec with Kamouraska, a novel full of angst whose treatment of unsettling themes such as murder and domestic abuse is nonetheless delicate and sublime, making it a pinnacle of the experimental French novel. 

 

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
One of the most revered works of Anglo-American literature, The Great Gatsby teleports us to the decadence of the Jazz Age all the while a heart-wrenching tale of unrequited love unfolds in the foreground. 

 

This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
The first of a tetralogy called The Buru Quartet, Pramoedya’s This Earth of Mankind, a novel that betrays traces of José Rizal, is an exemplar of nationalist literature as it recounts the trials and tribulations of a Javanese concubine and her half-Dutch children. Pramoedya, before obtaining permission to write a more detailed story in prison, relayed the quartet’s story orally to his fellow inmates. Albeit being banned in Indonesia after its publication, the book was eventually considered to be one of the most important works of Southeast Asian literature – a testament to is endurance.