The Literary Classic and the Tragedy of Fiction

Abstract

Alongside questions concerning the canon and canonicity, considerable critical attention has been given of late to the nature of the “classic” text in literature.¹ The uneasy relationship between the classic text and the notion of canon, in secular or sacred literature, has very much to do, I contest, with the relationship on the broader scale between literature and religion. The great classic texts of literature — indeed of all the arts — betray by their very nature an anxiety, an unsteadiness, an accidental quality. It is precisely this which distinguishes them from the conventional, the everyday and the commonplace. They exist uneasily in time, yet they survive precisely because of this quality which is their genius, unrepeatable and revelatory. The huge blasphemy of any claim to “reproduce” the classic text and deny its unique quality is expressed by Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”: “The final term in a theological or metaphysical demonstration — the objective world, God, causality, the forms of the universe — is no less previous and common than my famed novel.”² As David Tracy has put it, the accident of the classic becomes its destiny, its very flaws contributing to the greater whole.