The Space-Time Continuum of Canons

One More Thing... About Classics

Catherine M. Wood “Old Books”

Canons are rather subjective things. Since literature is an intensely subjective art form, there’s really no getting around that fact; how your imagination and experience meets the book in large part makes what the book means. Thus, different books will be considered classics by different people. Nevertheless, canons are “measurements” (κανῶν) and they try and offer a way to measure a book’s influence and significance.

When I came up with my Baker’s Dozen Canon I tried to come up with some objective criteria that would simply my subjective decisions a bit. Two factors came to the fore which not only clarified my decisions, but also made building other kinds of canons easier to do. These two factors made it a lot easier to measure books, because they’re the two main ways we measure everything else in our lives: space and time.

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Finding Your Space, or Determining Domain

First, we have to consider the space wherein we are considering books. We need to set the bounds of our domain within which we can collect our list of books. There are countless books in the world, and there are innumerable good books among them, so we need to narrow down our selection somehow.

In this case, I limited myself largely by geography. Specifically, I was interested in the most influential books for the West. Many of these books were clearly from Europe and America, but the Bible straddles a boundary between Western and Middle Eastern. While the Bible began as a Middle Eastern book, by the time the New Testament came around, it was primarily a Greek book. With the translation of the Old Testament Septuagint being paired with the Gospels and Letters, every word of the Bible could be read in the language of Homer, Plato, and the dramatists. There are other regions and languages for which I’d like to make other canons.

But domain doesn’t necessarily have to do with physical place. There are many “areas” of study or genres that could be considered distinct domains, and “literature” is only one of them. Peter Drucker’s Management is certainly a classic in the business world, but you probably wouldn’t find it on a list with the Bhagavad Gita or East of Eden. My Baker’s Dozen stayed pretty focused on fiction or literature (Plato was a notable example, but I feel his use of dialogue made the inclusion justified). But there other domains—like Orthodox theology, technology, time, and creativity—for which I have other lists which I should share.

Finally, you can make yourself the domain in question. I love learning about people’s “Personal Canon” or what their “desert island books” are: which books would you save from a burning house and which would you throw on a fire? Again, books are subjective things anyway, so you might as well embrace your personal taste and turn that bug into a feature.

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Time & Three Kinds of Classics

Now that we’ve set the bounds of our domain and know the area of our consideration, let’s move on to time. Some works may be considered timeless, but I personally like to define three kinds of classics according to their temporal relationship to me: True Classics, Modern Classics, and Contemporary Classics.

True Classics

If the author died before any of us were alive, he or she is eligible to be considered a True Classic. None of us played a round of roulette with Dostoevsky. None of us were guilted into attending Dante’s open mic night. While there are certainly different epochs we might consider—Ancient, Classical, or Medieval—one thing that ties together Sophocles and Cervantes is that their final words were written before any of us spoke our first.

Regardless how charismatic an artist might have been in life, or how good their publisher’s marketing department was at the time, their work must speak for itself after their death. Age alone doesn’t mean that a book is a classic: it might just be old. But there is something to be said for people reading your work without ever attending a book signing.

No one alive today has ever known a world without these books in it. By the time we, our parents, or our grandparents were born, the author’s works were already a part of our world. Since we see our parents as old and our grandparents as the oldest, everything else beyond that is practically ancient to us. Generally speaking, this means the author’s death was at least a hundred years ago.

Examples: Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, William Blake, Mary Shelley, Tolstoy & Mark Twain (†1910), Proust (†1922), Rilke can join this bunch in December 2026.

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Modern Classics

If a great author died while some of us were alive, they are eligible to be a Modern Classic. Before Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road, my grandfather was already cruising around town with my grandma. My parents were toddling around the house before Faulkner fell off his horse and before Hemingway shot himself. While those authors were gone before I was even born, I can personally remember—just a few years ago—living in the world where Cormac McCarthy might publish another novel.

Modern Classics are a mixed bag: some of us can remember our world before these authors, and some of us cannot. These authors have been household names for a couple generations, and may have even defined a generation. Many dealt with important issues which we still find ourselves within: world wars, civil rights, technology, philosophical movements, political revolutions, etc.

Being younger than a True Classic doesn’t mean a Modern Classic is less significant. While True Classics have some perennial relation to every age, the Modern Classics have a unique relation to the world we currently live in. Whether or not they will relevant to future generations is a different story, but they certainly do to ours.

Examples: Virginia Woolf, Lewis, Tolkien, Musil, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Orwell, Graham Greene, Nabokov, Agatha Christie, Yukio Mishima, Ayn Rand, Borges, etc.

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Contemporary Classics

If an author is writing great works but is still alive, they might be considered a Contemporary Classic. In this month alone, László Krasznahorkai received the Nobel Prize for Literature due to his book-length sentences, while Thomas Pynchon published a novel which people expect to be just as daring as his works from 50 years ago. Margaret Atwood’s red-and-white handmaid has be seen at countless political protests over the past decade, and Salman Rushdie was recently stabbed in the face for this things he’s written. How many millennials would even be reading books at all without J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter? While the future significance of all of these figures might be unclear, their present influence cannot be dismissed.

While some would argue that all artists are products of their time, there are some artists that are products of our time. We’re so close to these authors, it’s hard to tell if they’re actually good or just popular. Additionally, it’s not clear if their popularity is due to good marketing, passing controversy, or personal celebrity. Nevertheless, they are people we talk about today, and if you have to talk about them, they’re some kind of classic. No need to miss out on the classics of your day, because you’re too busy reading the classics of the past.

Examples: Kazuo Ishiguro, Anthony Doerr, Haruki Murakami, Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, Don DeLillo, Donna Tartt, William T. Vollman, Marilynn Robinson, Zadie Smith

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Where and When Is Your Canon?

Canons try to offer a list of “books you should read,” but each word in that phrase proves contestable. Determining which books you should read depend largely on who you are—and who you are also depends on the space and time in which you find yourself. Rather than broadly looking at “the best books ever,” I like to build canons according the same space and time in which we live our lives. My domain might be my geography, my profession, my languages, or my hobbies—and those might have nothing to do with the domains that concern you. Likewise, I enjoy comparing True Classics, Modern Classics, and Contemporary Classics across a given domain to see how our treatment of a topic or our concerns have shifted over time. Knowing what the limits of my domain or my timeline are makes it easier for me to swap them for others. After all, canons are measurements and what good is a ruler if you cannot move it?

So let’s move this ruler around and help me in the comments by sharing:

• Who are some classics you appreciate in a particular domain?

• Who are some of your favorite True Classics, Modern Classics, and Contemporary Classics?

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This “One More Thing…” post came out of my writing “The Baker’s Dozen Canon” which you can read here:

The Baker's Dozen Canon