There are varying levels of regret that come with not doing your homework.

Level one is the brief pang of irritation when you realize that you will be too busy this week to make up the reading or lecture you missed yesterday.

Level two is the acute panic and then furious, unsubstantiated creativity when a question about that reading comes up on the midterm several weeks later (and you write a verbose and incredible–i.e. not credible–essay in response).

Level three is the wistful recollection, two weeks after the semester ends, of how much more insight and academic joy you could have had if you’d done your readings before discussion section.

Level four is when you are on your deathbed and realize that you have lived an unhappy and unfulfilling life because you threw away a chance to truly appreciate literature and the human spirit in spring of junior year.

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Coetzee’s Question

This past semester we were assigned some readings in my English class on the question of “What is a literary classic?” Because I am in level three-going-on-four of academic regret right now, and because I just read the new J.M. Coetzee book, I revisited–er, visited–his essay on the topic.

Bach’s music is not just the incarnation of certain musical ideas, but the incarnation of higher-order ideas of exposition, complication and resolution, that are more general than music. Bach thinks in music. Music thinks itself in Bach.
["What is a Classic?" by J.M. Coetzee]

So far so good. Gushing about Bach is not surprising; this is pretty much rule number one of being a Smart Person. But then Coetzee poses a strange and very penetrating question.

Is there some non-vacuous sense in which I can say that the spirit of Bach was speaking to me across the ages, across the seas, putting before me an ideal of form; or was what was really going on at that moment that I was symbolically electing high European culture…as a route that would take me out of my class position in white South African society…?

In other words, why do we actually like Bach, or Tolstoy, or the work of any of those dead white guys? Is it because we’re told that they are great? Because they’re dead and white, and their creations have been around a long time? Because–this is the usual assumption–their art contains some space-and-time-transcending quality of ineffable truth? Is enjoyment of a classic a matter of the universal, or of the personal? In Coetzee’s words, we seem to be faced with a choice between the classic as a “disinterested and impersonal aesthetic experience” or the classic as a “naked expression of material interest.”

The Classic as Historical

This reminds me of the conversations I sometimes have with a certain friend about music:

Me: I like / dislike band X because…<long pretentious list of music theory concepts, paraphrasings of CD liner notes, Pitchfork reviews, etc.>

Friend: Bullshit! I dislike / like (note the inversion) band X because they sound bad / good. You haven’t demonstrated anything about the value of the band’s music, only your ability to regurgitate liner notes and ramble about your own subjective musical values.*

*Very loosely paraphrased to maximize rhetorical effect.

The discussion then descends into the meaning of “good”-sounding music, the existence of universal aesthetic values, our respective qualifications as music critics, ad hominem attacks, etc. But my friend’s point, or–as I speak for myself–the point I’ve learned from my friend, is worth repeating: “Your standards for music aren’t objective, silly! When you evaluate a song or a band, it’s your culture talking, your person, your past, and your need for validation.”

Full disclosure: the conversation above was about Beirut and Animal Collective, hardly subject to the same values as is Bach. (Or are they?–but that’s a topic for a different post)

So do I like Bach because I am a middle-class Asian immigrant trying to be a European aristocrat? Of course not, I’d like to answer. It’s because I’m smart and well-educated. The beauty of this music–yes, Objective Beauty, universal, self-contained, lives in a locked box in the 5th dimension–just WAITS for smart and well-educated people like me to come by, unlock the box with my intellect, and enjoy it!

In reality, it’s a confusing question to answer if you’re trying to keep your own ego out of it. Coetzee himself admits that the question he posed above is “of a kind which one would be deluded to think one could answer about oneself.” Turns out both Coetzee and I are deluded enough to at least try, and I agree with his conclusion from the bottom of my deluded heart: the “classic” quality in art is independent of material interests, because it is by definition the quality of having withstood the test of time and historical vicissitude. This point is made perfectly by the essay’s example of Bach’s music, which went almost completely out of favor near the end of his life and was not revived for decades. Even after Mendelssohn dusted off the St. Matthew Passion for a historic Berlin performance, it took many more years before Bach was appreciated as art, rather than as cheap German nationalism. More generally, it’s no coincidence that a lot of what we consider to be “classic” today was at one point in history ignored by public taste.

Is classic art good art?

There is only one problem with the historical definition of the classic. Even though it sidesteps the problem of ambiguity–History, given enough time, always makes up its mind–it doesn’t really explain, on a personal level, why I or anyone would enjoy listening to Bach. In fact, the whole debate about what is a classic seems pretty useless and unconnected to our everyday ideas of what is “good” music or literature. It’d be pretty hard to claim that rock band X’s new album is “good” because it has stood the test of time. I probably can’t even claim that it’s good because most people like it; if people change their minds years from now, I’d be in the ridiculous position of trying to explain how the music somehow became better or worse while sitting unused on a bookshelf.

Don’t tell her I said this, but my friend was right. There is something fundamentally personal in all matters of taste that cannot be captured in a laundry list of a work’s objective qualities. I can talk about the instrumentation, lyrics, even the social context of a song, but it is impossible to say that these things, in themselves, lead to greatness or failure. Theory–musical, literary, or social–offers the temptation of objectivity in the sense that it is a convention shared by all inheritors of a common cultural tradition. But using this objectivity to evaluate art can only generate false conclusions. Theory describes art in order to understand it; it can’t prescribe what art should or should not be.

By the same token, it’s not trivial at all to say that good art is simply what pleases me (or my friend). Good art is simple if I am simple. It is complex if my parents and my peers taught me to value the complex. On the other hand, I am free to persuade my peers so that they also value complexity and enjoy complex art. The process might seem subjective since we all have different opinions. It is actually a lot less subjective since our opinions on the most important things tend to converge over time. After all, Westerners are all to some degree brought up in a shared environment, and participate in a mutual dialogue over art. Perpetuating this dialogue and digging deep for those collective opinions is an important cultural task we call criticism.

The classic, then, is just good art which has captured enough individual approval that we rename the source of that approval to something else–History. To do this, it has to articulate the most common shared cultural attitudes in a society, in a way performing the greatest good for the greatest number. This is why we often claim the quality of “universality” in classic works. Actually, we don’t relate to a work of art because it is classic; it is classic because we–and everyone else before us–can relate to the work. When I read of Odysseus’ journey back to Penelope, I might smile each time Homer’s story seems to capture my sentiments and fantasies. But then, in a way I didn’t realize beforehand, this is the exact reason I picked up the book in the first place.