In the first sense of course the Classical is just whatever’s been around long enough to become an established model. Every culture has its Classics—whether music, art, architecture, poetic forms, we mean by this the works still serving as examples and patterns worthy of study. This is what you hear in the rhetoric of something like the Classical Education Movement (which has recently been receiving some peculiarly elevated attention). Though, in effect, the CEM mostly reproduces the same conservative Christian angle of the Canon Wars of the 1990s. Still, even here “Classical” does represent a recognizable body of works, however lamentable their use may be to some champions of progressive education.
Now, that strain of progressive lamentation you can follow back, over a century, to John Dewey and the first Progressive Education Movement. Maybe even the majority of Americans’ attitudes towards the Classical date back to that era and its practicably democratic response to a world of stuffy schoolhouses and rote memorization. You don’t need any current Educational Theory training to see that our ideals of teaching have generally been obsessed with rejecting something which seems too old. And the way this long Culture War has continually bled into classrooms reveals how sickly fascinated we are with children’s education as a battleground for ideology—we all know that both Right and Left fight nebulous wars at the State and Federal levels to ensure that children are never exposed to what each side considers politically incorrect. For many Americans, their concern with the concept of the Classical probably starts right there, with whether or not they consider it an impediment to progressivism, and whether or not that’s a good thing. (Here I’ll highly suggest diving into any of Freddie deBoer’s writing on current education issues: whatever else you think of the guy, his ed. analysis and reportage is always worth reading).
Of course, there are other ways the term “Classical” has entered the American vocabulary, which only further complicates attempts to define it. Even if your average American hasn’t heard of a Classical Education, you can be sure they have at least heard Classical Music, often treating it as a monolith. Never mind that there are Classical periods assigned in the study of many art-forms, or that musicologists tend to consider the Classical Era in Western music to be a fairly brief passage between the Baroque and the Romantic. For the convenience of contemporary listening and consumption, “Classical” can even be stretched to include all Western music from ca. 1000 to ca. 1900 A.D. Usually, though, it functions as a useful shorthand for an established tradition of written musical works, intended for religious ritual or, later, performance in the concert hall. These works are different from folk or popular traditions, mostly due to the reasons for their composition (you could speak similarly of Chinese Classical Music, or Arabic or Persian or Indian—all established modern traditions which are, nevertheless, probably more like each other than like Western Classical Music).
Of course, this doesn’t stop Western Classical Music from constantly drawing on folk and popular idioms. But there’s clearly something about the blanket-term version of the Classical which marks it off from other kinds, for better and for worse. The current idea is very much that Classical Music is elitist and therefore possibly evil, something even Classical musicians themselves are often taught now (though the fact that “elitist” has a negative spin to it at all is a fairly contemporary invention). And then of course there’s been a great deal of argument about whether Jazz ought to be considered part of Western Classical Music. There’s probably no harm in teaching it as such: it’s certainly as complex and deals in its own way with Western harmony. But at the same time, plenty of Jazz musicians aren’t quite comfortable with the idea of a decidedly black improvisatory form being lumped in with a mostly European tradition largely defined by being exhaustively notated and disseminated through strict training (which is, to be sure, one of Classical Music’s great strengths, just as one strength of Jazz is its ability to pass musician-to-musician without institutional intervention).
You could complicate this further with the fact that in European and American academies, the study of the Classical still means the culture and literature of Greece and Rome, or sometimes the Ancient Mediterranean more broadly. And you can complicate it even further with a discussion of the Neoclassical. In architecture, this generally means a period beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. America itself made its identification with this kind of Classicism explicit when it made its official buildings and monuments essentially Neoclassical. In English literature, Neoclassical is often another label for what scholars call the Long Eighteenth Century, while in more general European literature it usually denotes elegant authors who seem to set or follow the rules, like Alexander Pope and Racine. And of course, after Jakob Burckhardt, the Renaissance itself is perceived as essentially Neoclassical—as the original Neoclassicism. Meanwhile, back in the world of music, the term has actually come to mean a brief phase of the twentieth century, especially in certain compositions by Stravinsky. So both Classical and Neoclassical as terms remain somewhat nebulous and unfixed, meaning different things to the masses than they do to the academy, differing from art-form to art-form, often more perplexing than helpful.
None of this helps combat the popular contention that “Classical” means the opposite of the popular instinct or liberal ideal. It means something too elite, too remote, too white, or European, or aristocratic. Which creates a multitude of ironies. When the American Right appropriates it (as with many of those Classical Education Movement types), it does so in opposition to a caricature of an effete, self-hating, revolutionary Left. So it ends up promising a kind of patriotic proletarianization of what was once prized for its elitism. Classical learning in America is cast as part of traditional Christendom, and as inheritor of the Republican ideals of Rome. Of course it presents its students with a history of the West which can’t really deal with its weirder side: gnosticism, hermeticism, Kabbala, the Romantics, psychoanalysis. Nor can it process the strict deism or outright atheism of so many Enlightenment writers (including many founding Americans). It’s funny to imagine conservative Christian “Classicists” trying to teach Emerson, Whitman, or Dickinson—could they really come to terms with the fact that the three greatest American writers were all fervent iconoclasts, mostly uninterested in conventional religion, and often in politics whatsoever?
I say this because I really do think those are the central writers who ought to be read by every American (and perhaps by any English speaker), without whom understanding oneself as an American is all but impossible. Yet one among many contemporary tragedies is the fact that the teaching of Classical (or, to say it in another old-fashioned way, “Canonical”) authors is now so associated with the theocratic busybodies of the modern Right. In order to be taught or understood at all in public schools or mainline universities, they have to be made to signify whatever the sexy preoccupation of the moment is. Emerson is made palatable because he advocated abolitionism and divorce from European culture; Whitman because he was resolutely pro-Union, and probably homosexual; Dickinson because her private unknowability can withstand any and all projections of feminism, queerness, and radicalism which the Academy can muster. All three are still taught largely because they represent a conscious break with the Old World and a (liberal, democratic, even Left-leaning) concern with the total New. Precisely because the concern with defining Classical or Canonical genius is so overwhelmingly Right-wing-coded, we usually only get a one-dimensional reading of the great works, almost solely in terms which fit the fixations of the moment.
If they encounter them at all (and given the constant dumbing-down of both high school and undergraduate curricula, who knows?), then students rarely get to encounter these writers on their own terms. If they did, they’d discover that the mainline of American literature very nearly begins in an essentially Gnostic and Orphic injunction to listen inwards to a largely spiritual self, not to be ultimately concerned with movements, opinions, politics, or even society at large. Like so many of the once-Canonical authors subject to our current political battles, they are in fact radically self-contained. This clearly disturbs us. You can rankle at the idea of being forced to read Freud, or Plato, or Montaigne, or any other Dead White Male who represents an oppressive Western Canon. The reality is that such Classics are often alarmingly apolitical, and aspire to some version of the universal.
In sectarian situations—like contemporary education—we’re not really supposed to believe in the universal. In some academic contexts, it’s treated as taboo to suggest that Western writers could ever be universal. (As though the rest of the world’s great traditions don’t also aspire towards the universal.) But when we think in these limiting terms we start to forget very simple things, things that both progressives and conservatives are alway skipping over. Like the fact that Christianity may not even be properly a Western religion; that Ethiopia and India had Christian communities before England did. That Buddhists made their way to Ancient Greece, and that Ancient Greeks made their way to India. That the greatest Christian writer was North African; that Aristotle was first preserved by Arabic philosophy and science, not European. Rather than see the West as an always-porous thing, which only requires a bit of simplification in order to function as a series of worthy models, we draw very hard lines according to whether or not we can make these works serve our own politics.
Still, I‘m going to try to get at some better definition of the Classical, as hard as that is. And there’s one especially well-suited to my purpose here. In his scholarly tour de force, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, the German philologist (what a lost art—philology!) E.R. Curtius proposed a very clean definition of the Classical, opposing it simply and perfectly to Mannerism. In his reading, these are not so much classifications as tendencies: cyclical moments in the unfolding of any art-form. An artistic “manner” evolves quickly out of any standardizing Classicism:
“...[it] wants to say things not normally but abnormally…prefers the artificial and affected to the natural…wants to surprise, to astonish, to dazzle. While there is only one way of saying things naturally, there are a thousand forms of unnaturalness.”
Think about that: “there are a thousand forms of unnaturalness.” Rather than opposing the Classical with the Romantic, or the Ancient/Classical World with the Medieval/Gothic, Curtius briefly mapped out the process by which art-forms reach certain “periods of florescence,” that soon give way to decadent flourish and ornament for their own sakes. He explains further:
The standard classicist says what he has to say in a form naturally suited to the subject. To be sure he will “decorate” his discourse according to well-tried rhetorical tradition, that is, he will furnish it with ornatus. A danger of the system lies in the fact that, in manneristic epochs, the ornatus is piled on indiscriminately and meaninglessly.
Could it be any more alien to our contemporary sensibility to say that the “Classical” is what is “natural”? Yet that contention was somehow much more comfortable to past eras, and not just in the West. You can find the ethos everywhere. Really: until recently, most human ideals of art were based on strict study, imitation, or memorization of proven models. In following the rules handed down to you. Artifice was not a problem—it was the highest aim, best when most effortless. Such a sentiment is expressed in Pope’s infamous couplet: “Tis not enough no harshness gives offense/The sound must seem an echo to the sense.” To most artists throughout history, there was some natural way of doing things, as in poetry one aims to suit the sound to the sense. Though plenty of modern critics have mocked the extremes—or mannerisms—that this may lead to (Empson in his Seven Types of Ambiguity took the idea of “sound-meaning” in poetry especially to task), it may still be useful to us to conceive of the Classical in such a way.
One of the things which our vaguely populist antipathy to the idea of the Classical reveals (and making it a proxy for political conflict is only another form of an essential antipathy) is a distrust of the very idea that past art-forms should be treated as worthy of memorization or imitation. As I’ve written elsewhere, much of our anxiety about our own precipitous moment comes from our desperate needing to believe that nothing of interest happened before we got here. We can only admit the past into our own thoughts when they appear to reflect our present concerns back at us. But now that some intellectuals are perhaps just beginning to leave behind the idea of art as a political battleground, we have to do everything we can to stop seeing the Classical or Canonical as a choice between “Good for Our Politics” or “Bad for Our Politics.” If we could get a glimpse of past traditions and see them more as Curtius saw them—cycles between degrees of ornateness, complexity, artifice—perhaps we’d start to get over this antipathy, even a little bit.
It’s not doing us any favors to continually look at the past as only imposing on us a Burden of Form. To look at the Classical—whether in music, art, or literature—and see only calcification, or the spokesmen of dead languages perennially judging our wish for freedom and newness. After al, the Classical really is that which lasts. We come to it to be judged ourselves, far more than we could ever pretend to judge it. This isn’t any less true just because some opportunistic conservatives say it. We may become Mannerists, looking to confound and elaborate on the static models that bore us: we may also become Classicists, who elevate and praise what we think is correct. We may be sometimes one, sometimes the other. But we should always be aware that we are forever at risk of giving into the extremes of either.
The longer we ignore what past eras considered Canonical (whether Classical or Mannerist), the more resentful we become of their influence. And this resentment can only create more anxiety for us, anxiety which blocks us from making new Classics of our own. Did you read that NYT books list? I did and I still saw very little of real interest to me. Contemporary literature is something of an oxymoron. What lasts, what’s truly great, isn’t up to us in the end. Things last because each next wave of artists keeps studying them as examples, keeps requiring their influence. What is up to us—what we’re genuinely free to choose—is just what tradition(s) we want to be a part of. But we do have to choose.
Important reflections. I recently read some of Walter Pater's essays on literature (from the 1880s), and he suggests that the Classical and the Romantic are always reviving each other: the Classical adopts some twists and variations, and becomes the Romantic: the Romantic shaves off some unnecessary accretions, and reverts to the Classical. It's a cycle or a helix, not two parallel lines. Of course, as you also point out, who now reads classical literary theory? Everyone's too busy writing a memoir of very little interest to anyone else.