The uses of pedantry

Here’s a bizarre video from a literature YouTuber whose work I usually like. The thesis (as near as I can tell): through some murky combination of commercialism and progressivist malice, what we’ve been sold as “classics” is undermining both the real classics—the foundational literature of the Greeks and Romans—and Western Civilization. The title is literally conspiratorial: “‘The Classics’ Are a Plot to Destroy Western Culture.”

There are a lot of problems with the video, not least its confused potted history of classics publishers; its ad hominem attacks (generally on people who deserve it, like André Gide, but still irrelevant to the subject); a few unexplained asides that aroused some uncomfortable suspicions (why go out of your way to point out that the oldest current member of the Académie Française is related to the Rothschild family?); its presentist and whiggish assumptions about what the ancients thought their literature was for; its apparent lack of understanding of translation work; its strange attack on Penguin Classics for starting its eighty-year run with the Odyssey; its even stranger and contradictory arguments (at the midpoint) that classics publishers have erred in making ancient literature accessible and (at the end) that what they should have been doing is making literature accessible; and its pervasive attitude of suspicion bordering on paranoia.

But the biggest problem, which bothered me through the entire first half of the video, is its insistence on an extremely narrow meaning of the word “classics.” The clearest definition provided in the video is still vague in application: “the body of work that serves as a foundation of Western civilization, the archive of a people, the blood of a culture.” Functionally, judging by the examples used throughout, this means only Greek and Roman literature.

Certainly anything new is pointedly declared “not a classic.” 19th-century novels? Austen and the Brontës? Not classics. 20th-century novels? Get real. Even CS Lewis’s essay “On the Reading of Old Books” is singled out for talking merely of “old books” instead of sticking to our YouTuber’s preferred understanding of classics.

I’d recommend caution when preparing to cross swords with CS Lewis over any literary topic. You’re unlikely to win.

I spent the first half of the video thinking this was a needlessly pedantic argument, insisting on a needlessly pedantic definition of classics and going on at needlessly pedantic length. But then I realized that the problem—well, the main problem—with the video and its argument is not that it’s pedantic, but that it isn’t pedantic enough.

To be pedantic, then: classics and the classics are two separate things. A classic according to any dictionary is a preeminent, respected, and therefore influential example of its kind, whatever it is: a classic sci-fi novel, a classic Scots ballad, a classic ghost story. This is clearly what publishers like Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics have in mind, which is why they distinguish themselves as Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics. The classics—with a definite article and perhaps even a capital C—or classical literature is Greek and Roman literature, literature in the classical languages, Greek and Latin. That’s everything from Homer and Hesiod to Bede and the Byzantines.

Our YouTuber could have avoided a lot of annoyance and effort simply by observing this obvious distinction. Not every classic is one of the classics.

Being pedantic can have its uses, but drink deep, or taste not. A classic insight.