So what will happen to Brideshead? It will gradually assume the status of a period piece, very much of, and inseparable from, its time and setting.

There are, of course, many hundreds of other novels, plays & poems that fit into this category of partial transcendence, that make it into Division One but don’t quite have the staying power to get to the Premier League: ‘New Grub Street’ by George Gissing would be on my list, as would practically anything by HG Wells or GK Chesterton; virtually all of Dryden’s poetry; most Restoration comedy, perhaps with the exception of Congreve;and even Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’. Whole genres can date; Realism performs particularly badly when measured against the yardstick of eternity because it’s so time sensitive. Likewise a lot of sci-fi - nothing dates so quickly as the future.

This is, of course, a partial list, and adding to it can turn into quite a good parlour game. But I would stress that a work’s inclusion doesn’t mean it’s necesarily bad art, or that it will end up being totally forgotten. These are simply literary examples that have, in many cases wilfully, forfeited the dimension of timelessness by being too firmly rooted in their own period or a particular social milieu. A too-strict adherence to literary fashion; the desire to deliver a direct message to a particular audience; or putting faith in a seemingly ‘eternal’ quality that turns out to be merely transitory will all dilute the impact of a book’s meaning over time. So what future generations of students and critics will tend to focus on is the position of that work in social or literary history, and its meaning will be discussed in relation to these secondary contexts, not necessarily on its own terms. The circumstantial meaning of the work will start to be of greater significance than the textual meaning.

Unless your name happens to be Charles Dickens. There are always exceptions to any kind of literary rule you might care to formulate, and so far in this book Dickens seems to be the one who regularly frustrates my attempts to tie up the loose ends of a line of thought too conclusively.

He’s very much a writer of his time, yet one who somehow manages to persuade you that this doesn’t matter, or, in his best writing, makes you forget about it altogether. 

By anyone’s standards, it’s dead easy to carbon date his output; the subject matter, prose style, prolixity, authorial presence and voice - all scream mid-nineteenth century England at us. Particularly when he’s writing badly, which he’s perfectly capable of doing even in his best novels, these faults can become glaringly obvious to the point of being cringeworthy. Yet the sheer promiscuity of his imagination, what Franz Kafka called his “great, careless prodigality” somehow carries him through. And Kafka wasn’t alone in his admiration; Fyodor Dostoievsky was also a fan, particularly of ‘Bleak House’, and Sigmund Freud was sufficiently enamoured of ‘David Copperfield’ to name one of his most famous cases after David’s child bride Dora. Placing Dickens among this illustrious company has given critics considerable opportunity to remark on his relevance to those separated from him by time, geography and discipline, and to claim him as a proto-Modernist. Certainly in the case of Freud, Dickens’s imaginative anticipation of what would subsequently emerge from Freud’s clinical investigations into the human subconscious can offer fertile ground and provide plenty of material to support this thesis. It can be argued that Dickens was a pioneer not just in the energy and comprehensiveness with which he represented reality, but also the atypical nooks and corners his imagination was drawn to. So if you subscribe to this line of thought, a classic text is one that doesn’t just buck trends, it anticipates them. And this is:

Scenario 3:

Take Laurence Sterne’s ‘Tristram Shandy’ as another example. Published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1766, it tore up the rule book for novel writing, and freed the incipient art-form from the tyrannies of realism, chronology, linear narrative and, indeed, comprehensibility. The sensation it caused on its first appearance was largely prompted by this complete disregard for the sorts of rigid conventions and techniques that had solidified very early in the novel’s history.

Its early readers were equally amused and  appalled by what some would term experimentation, others whimsy: a cross appears when Dr. Slop crosses himself; a black page symbolizes the death of Yorick; squiggly graphs indicate the progress of the narrative line; blank pages are made to represent pages torn out and a very different kind of blank page is offered to the reader for the purpose of composing his own description of Widow Wadman's beauty. The novel continually draws attention to the craft of writing behind its composition; for instance, here’s a delightful little digression on the subject of . . . digressions:

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;--they are the life, the soul of reading;--take them out of this book for instance,--you might as well take the book along with them; [...] restore them to the writer;--he steps forth like a bridegroom,--bids All hail; brings in variety, and forbids appetite to fail.

All good knockabout stuff, which, however, failed to charm Doctor Johnson, who famously pronounced in one of his darker moods that it wasn’t “English”, and that “Nothing odd will do long. ‘Tristram Shandy’ did not last.”

And for a while it didn’t. Once the initial popularity wore off, its reputation remained semi-dormant until it was re-discovered by a new generation of readers for whom the narrative dislocations were a very early precursor of Modernism. (1) By the 20th century, Sterne’s reputation had been completely re-appraised and resurrected; everyone, from surrealists to post-modernists were claiming ‘Tristram Shandy’ as their own, almost two hundred years after its first publication.(2) Sterne’s revolutionary vision of the novel has naturally attracted a whole forest of criticism, most of which appears to state, at great length and in some of the most tortuous jargon I’ve ever come across, that the novel focuses not so much on narrative, as about writing a narrative, which really strikes a chord with  academics who’d much rather jaw about theory than read a text. So I’ve saved you the trouble of perusing guff like this, which is a genuine quote from a recent academic paper:

The novel is an incipient phenomenology the ultimate aim of which is an ontological analysis of the meaning of Tristram's being.

What I think he’s saying is that ‘Tristram Shandy’ is an autobiography which tells the story in an idiosyncratic way. But I can’t be sure. I thought you might also like a narratological analysis of the meta-narrative, which, according to one critic, goes something like this:

E (C (Ca, A, Aa)- C (A, B)- C (A, B)- C (B, Cd)- Cs- C (Cs, A, B)- D (Dd)- B- B). The plot(s) could be reductively summarized: E (C-C-C-C-Cs-C-D-B-B), factoring out the level of narration. From these notations, we should be able to see that the overall shape of the novel is fairly simple.

Ahem.

So your meaning can get a welcome injection of authority and relevance when society’s tastes and literary sophistication finally catch up with you. In Sterne’s case, this was one of the longest, slowest processes in literary history, but we got there in the end - ‘Tristram Shandy’ is now published in Penguin Classics, and, given the level of attention it currently receives, isn’t likely to go out of print any time soon. Something odd did last, Dr J.

So that’s three examples of how meaning’s stock can fluctuate over time. But we’re still not that much nearer solving the riddle of what keeps readers consistently revisiting the same text over successive generations to the point where its meaning is self-sustaining and immune to any amount of mud or wrong-headed interpretations being hurled at it. To answer this, we’ll have to address the fraught issue of . . . the Western Literary Canon.

I remarked a few pages ago that the conferment of classic status is more about luck than judgment. If you’re a writer, you can’t will your book to be a classic - it’s a process that happens despite you. Of course, creating a work of unimpeachable quality can’t hurt, but acknowledgement of this artistic excellence is down to the caprice of the Great and the Good within the literary industry, and those Recreational Readers with whom your meaning strikes a sustained chord.

We all create our own individual literary canons, whether they’re in our heads or on our shelves; they’re the titles we’ve read that have meaning for us, and as such they’re going to be a highly personal, maybe even idiosyncratic selection. While we will inevitably share titles with other readers, no two lists will be identical. They’re like a spiritual fingerprint, a record of what we’ve read and what we’ve reacted to. And books don’t just furnish a room, as Anthony Powell once noted; they furnish your mind. And you can tell a lot about a mind by its choice of furnishings.

But if you’re the editor of Penguin Classics, or an examiner setting a syllabus, or even a Radio 4 commissioning editor, you have to move beyond what pushed your particular buttons and try and establish what’s worth including on the list of the best literature can offer. Your prejudices should be sacrificed to the interests of objectivity. Because what you’re doing is influencing what people will read, or continue to read, no matter how inconsequential the occasion for your list; in many ways, it’s an awesome responsibility. If there was such a contraption as a ‘Meaning-Ometer’, you could stick it in a book and measure its score against a graduated scale. But because there’s no benchmark for what meaning is, let alone how you calibrate it, you’re going to have to rely on a combination of historical precedent and your own instinct for what’s best. And then pray, because you’ll get slagged off whatever judgment you make, or however disinterested and benign you consider your editorial intentions. (3)

Footnotes:

1 . Oddly, the book’s popularity never waned in Germany. Goethe loved it; and, believe it or not, the young Karl Marx wrote a novel directly imitating it.

2. FR Leavis , flying in the face on contemporary opinion, still hated it, describing the novel as “irresponsible (and nasty) trifling.” Which in my book makes it even better.