So what, or indeed who does have it in their gift  to confer classic status? I don’t think anyone genuinely has the answer - it’s certainly no one individual, so what most writers who deal with this subject end up saying is that each successive generation finds something relevant within the work’s meaning irrespective of its temporal setting; it’s a variation on the the “old universal truths”  we looked at in Big Theme #7 - Myth.

I think this is one of the least worst explanations we have, but it still reeks of contingency, a justification wheeled out in the absence of anything more satisfactory. It’s neat and plausible and works on a theoretical level, but I’m not convinced it’s the entire truth. After all, what this theory’s saying is that if the writer sticks to an exclusive diet of universal truths then nothing much can go wrong, and that coveted black spine will soon be his; it’s as if, once he’s worked out what a universal truth is, he’s away to the races. But writing a classic isn’t like assembling the ingredients of a recipe, and, as I’ll be demonstrating in the rest of this section, immortality’s more likely to be won in a casino than in the kitchen.

So let’s have a look at this hoary old question. To start with, we’ll examine works which haven’t  or won’t stand the test of time, or those which  went belly-up first time round and then re-surfaced when society’s tastes had caught up with them. Then we’ll flip the negative and look at the 24-carat classics of today.

How many times have you read one of those lazily-conceived phrases that shriek from book covers announcing, “ . . . an instant classic!” Aside from its potential as an oxymoron, what the reviewer actually means is that he thinks the book has exceptional qualities that set it above its peers. But neither he, nor anyone else can guarantee  whether it will actually become a classic, because, as any fule kno, tastes and times change, often quite quickly. And this is Scenario 1 (of 3) concerning the way meaning survives through the ages:

What’s rampantly fashionable today can be replaced in the public’s consciousness tomorrow, leaving the “instant classic” to begin its rapid journey to oblivion via the dump bin, the remainder shop and the pulping vat. One good instance of this is Henry MacKenzie’s novel ‘The Man of Feeling’, published in 1771. It’s perhaps the best English (actually Scottish) example of the Sentimental novel, a French import that proved all the rage in the late 18th century. It’s characterized by a lot of blubbering, which was, for a short time (certainly until ‘thirtysomething’ appeared on TV over two hundred years later) an index of a man’s sensitivity, or the degree to which he’s in touch with his feminine side; indeed, within the space of 115 pages, our sentimental hero, Harley, turns on the waterworks no fewer than 49 times. In the following example, he manages four cascades in one page, as he hears the sorry tale of a young girl in Bedlam;

Though this story was told in very plain language, it had particularly attracted Harley's notice; he had given it the tribute of some tears. The unfortunate young lady had till now seemed entranced in thought, with her eyes fixed on a little garnet ring she wore on her finger; she turned them now upon Harley. "My Billy is no more!" said she; "do you weep for my Billy? Blessings on your tears! I would weep too, but my brain is dry; and it burns, it burns, it burns!" -- She drew nearer to Harley. -- "Be comforted, young lady," said he, "your Billy is in heaven." -- "Is he, indeed? and shall we meet again? and shall that frightful man (pointing to the keeper) not be there? -- Alas! I am grown naughty of late; I have almost forgotten to think of heaven: yet I pray sometimes; when I can, I pray; and sometimes I sing; when I am saddest, I sing: -- You shall hear me -- hush!

"Light be the earth on Billy's breast,
And green the sod that wraps his grave."

There was a plaintive wildness in the air not to be withstood; and, except the keeper's, there was not an unmoistened eye around her.

"Do you weep again?" said she. "I would not have you weep: you are like my Billy; you are, believe me; just so he looked when he gave me this ring; poor Billy! 'twas the last time we ever met!--

"'Twas when the seas were roaring -- I love you for resembling my Billy; but I shall never love any man like him." -- She stretched out her hand to Harley; he pressed it between both of his, and bathed it with his tears. -- "Nay, that is BIlly's ring," said she, "you cannot have it indeed; but here is another, look here, which I plated to-day of some gold-thread from this bit of stuff; will you keep it for my sake? I am a strange girl; but my heart is harmless: my poor heart; it will burst some day; feel how it beats!" She pressed his hand to her bosom, then holding her head in the attitude of listening -- "Hark! one, two, three! be quiet, thou little trembler; my Billy is cold! -- but I had forgotten the ring." -- She put it on his finger. -- "Farewell! I must leave you now." -- She would have withdrawn her hand; Harley held it to his lips. -- "I dare not stay longer; my head throbs sadly: farewell!" ---- She walked with a hurried step to a little apartment at some distance. Harley stood fixed in astonishment and pity; his friend gave money to the keeper. -- Harley looked on his ring. -- He put a couple of guineas in the man's hand: "Be kind to that unfortunate" -- He burst into tears, and left them.

Us latterday cynics can only weep with laughter as we imagine the unfortunate girl’s cell awash with salt water, and pray for Harley’s death from dehydration. Suffice to say, there’s nothing wrong with accessing your feminine side, but this is a bit much. MacKenzie tugs on every heartstring he can until there’s practically a harp concerto going on in the background. I don’t know if Dickens read him, but it certainly seems he took an almighty big leaf out of MacKenzie’s book when he concocted some of his own syrupy scenes, which now also appear dreadfully dated, and are the features of his work routinely singled out by those who loathe him.

Anyway, ‘The Man of Feeling’ surfed the lachrymal tide - and then plummeted into obscurity, not exactly helped by Mackenzie denouncing his own creation 15 years later in a magazine article, in which he characterized readers of the sentimental novel as being "the young and the indolent, to whom the exercise of the imagination is delightful, and the labour of thought is irksome". Hypocritical bugger. It no doubt awaits rediscovery as cult literature, or a classic of kitsch.

A more up-to date example (and a bit of a soft target but what the heck) might be the phenomenon of chick-lit, which is basically all the bastard offspring of the superb ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’; in fact, by the time you read this, the genre may already be six feet under. In an ‘Observer’ article the other day, former Tory spin doctor Amanda Platell (who clearly knows a bandwagon when she sees one) amusingly stated the obvious when she noted a lack of meaningful action in these books: “Some of us,” she wrote, “have grown out of the stage where love is a pair of size 10 Earl jeans, contentment is a full-body St Tropez tan and heartbreak some bloke who doesn't call . . . where tragedy is a sick nanny and failure is a lacklustre dinner party?”

 Well bully for you, Amanda. But most likely she’s right. Although you just somehow know no-one’s going to be reading this stuff in 200 years’ time, a lack of objective literary standards means it’s difficult to be certain.

Chick lit may have struck a brief chord with a largely metropolitan set of young semi-affluent career women (which, let’s face it, is a reasonably small niche, despite their ubiquity in the media), but the composition of society, and therefore its tastes, moves on.

But it’s not just tastes that move on; so, naturally, do society’s mores and values. So although the book may be viewed as a work of quality that has enduring features, its meaning is undermined over time as the ethos that provides its setting gradually loses its relevance. This is Scenario 2, and we’ll take ‘Brideshead Revisited’ as our example.

Throughout Evelyn Waugh’s distinguished novel, several members of the aristocratic Marchmain family inform the narrator, Charles Ryder, that not being a Catholic, he couldn’t possibly understand their thoughts and behaviour. And, I suspect, that as traditional forms of organized religion gradually fade from the cultural radar, fewer readers will be able to empathize with characters possessed by  almost pathologically high levels of guilt and a neurotic tendency to interpret everything they do, no matter how insignificant,  through the long lens of a redemptive eternity. And why Sebastian Flyte, the absent centre of the novel, should be viewed as a glorious, even “holy” drunk because he embodies these qualities, rather than just a common or garden drunk who’s a sucker for the more sentimental trappings of religion.

Even at this middle remove (the novel was first published in 1945), it’s getting less easy to see the artistic justification for the sustained atmosphere of metaphysical remorse that ultimately has the effect of ‘flattening’ the novel, and dampening its emotional impact, although we know from Waugh’s many biographies that he considered ‘Brideshead’ his ‘magnum opus’ and wanted to use it to dramatize what he considered was the most significant and taxing spiritual issue of his day (“the operation of divine grace” in a secular age, as he termed it).

Now, although the issues of flesh and spirit, earth and heaven and sin and redemption haven’t gone away, they’re expressed through a number of different cultural channels, and Catholicism doesn’t enjoy the central role in these debates it once did.

In short, I feel society as a whole will lose the knowledge  (and sympathy) it needs to understand the ‘glue’ of the book. And that may be the signal for the entire exquisitely-crafted structure of its meaning to collapse, or at least lose much of its resonance. Like the gothic chapel at Brideshead, it’ll become a glorious anachronism.

Now compare that now with another novel set in a country house in the early to mid-20th century, ‘The Remains of the Day’ by Kazuo Ishiguro, published in 1989. Potentially, it could suffer from the same flaws as ‘Brideshead’ - only it doesn’t.

The central character is Stevens, a model English butler who believes that he has served humanity by devoting his life to the service of a "great" man, Lord Darlington. It’s 1956; Darlington has died, and the Hall has been let to an American businessman. As Stevens begins a rare and solitary motor trip to the west country, traveling farther and farther from the context of familiar surroundings, he also embarks on a revelatory journey through his own memory. What he discovers there causes him to question not only Lord Darlington's greatness, but also the meaning of his own insular life shut up in the Hall. For Darlington, like many of his class, was a Nazi sympathizer in the run-up to World War Two, and by serving this flawed, rather than evil man so assiduously, it gradually dawns on Stevens that he’s passed up the opportunity to have a life of his own, so tantalisingly symbolized by his unconsummated love for Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper.

The critics of Greek antiquity would have loved the book - every aspect of its meaning arises from the plot, unlike Waugh’s theme of Catholicism, which, as time goes by and its aura diminishes, increasing resembles an unfamiliar guest at a party who you can’t quite place. Meaning isn’t parachuted in  from outside as a “given” quantity we’re asked to accept; it develops, quite naturally, out of an initially commonplace story of thwarted love which is gradually lent a greater poignancy as the historical perspective surrounding it unfolds. Stevens’s story is always at the centre, and his flaws are of his own making, rather than inherited from an outside agency. And this is what I feel will make the book’s meaning survive longer than Brideshead’s - the ascendancy of character over theme.