Defending the Classics

Featuring Homer, Link, and Victor Wembanyama

There is a deep rot in a culture that so celebrates remaking and selling of the past purely for consumption. Corporations can, at will, deny access to an original impactful work and sell you their new hip version at a tasty markup of course. In a world where knowledge and education are under attack, who decides what is and is not valuable? If it is okay to burn some books, at what point do the conflagrators stop? The canon, Greek for measuring stick, is the standard as far as great works of art go. You will find allusions and references to all the classics which make up that celebrated "Western Canon" in everything from newspaper comics to the other great classics contained within the canonical bucket. So why should we care about the words of those long dead white men, and the words of the still living white men who worship them? Why are the classics worth defending to begin with?

To begin, what even are the classics? Academically, "the classics" refers directly to the Classical Era of Greece and Rome. This definition has been in use since the Romans themselves; a Roman studying Homer in 450AD would have been as far from Homer as us from the Roman. The word has no temporal connotation, "classicus" merely used to refer to, as it sounds, class superiority. You wouldn't dare read "proletarius" writers as a leading patrician, you would be educated to the highest standard in Ovid, Homer, Virgil, and likely several who are lost to time. Eventually, the Odyssey stopped being described as Classicus, and became A Classicus, and the classic as a noun, as an honorary title was born.

Classic Rock did not exist in 1980. If you wanted to listen to older artists like the Beatles, Elvis, or 10cc, you would be on "The Oldies." Then, marketers realized that they could borrow from the legacy of of our collective civilization, and branded their music "classic" in order to make it sound more important than contemporary music. The bar for classic in this regard is that a song or group must be old enough to be marketable to 34-55 year old men. This is the smallest perversion of Classic our society has accepted, that AHA or Fleetwood Mac is magically more Classic than Smashing Pumpkins or The Beach Boys. This collision between the critic and the consumer, whereby commodifying the title of classic, robs it of its value. Appetite for Destruction is a classic rock album, and a classic rock album, and none but I knows which of those refers to its quality, and which of those refers to the intended demographic of people who would like to believe they are classic and not simply old.

Sports is rife with classics, and why shouldn’t it be? There is nothing more classical than our modern coliseums where gladiators fight and bleed for screaming masses vomiting in vomitoriums between halves. 2026 Western Conference Finals Game 1 between the San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder was classicus. You could tell halfway through the game. Here, among 7 foot giants and men with the speed of cheetahs, does the artist finally raise from his seat to describe the classic. Victor Wembanyama pulling up from 35 feet away for a game tying 3 point shot was accompanied by Bach's Cello Suite. The entire world stopped, not a single of the 20000 ornery fans even exhaled a single breath. And with a deafening swish, the San Antonio Spurs had forced overtime. Italo Calvino's "Why Read the Classics" is pertinent here. While he was referring to literature specifically, his 14 criteria can be applied to art and any experience we find meaningful. Sports create a microcosm of our society, of the stories we tell. The story of a group of young men, coming together to fell a corrupt, dominating tyrant is evocative and speaks to people. Calvino's 13th and 14th point ring true,
"13) A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.
14) A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation."
When that shot went up any concerns were background noise, and as I go through my day even a couple months later,it persists.

Yet, there remains an important question. Why will that game be immortalized while the season opener between the Thunder and the Houston Rockets be forgotten? Both feature the same narrative coexisting with a high skill game being played for 2 extra periods. Finally, we can tease the time of a piece out. Nothing exists in a vacuum and the context with which a piece is released is as important as the piece itself. That game 1 of the season had no impact on either team's season, the standings would not have changed if the result had flipped. The Wembanyama 3 decided the fate of the series, and the trajectory for both teams heading into the next year. I've chosen sports as a primary example because it immediately presents stakes and consequences in short time spans. That game can tell us everything about the 2 teams playing and the philosophy that built them, the league that they were built to compete against, and the players who toil protangonistically towards glory or defeat. Is there not equal value in Melville's philosophy, the ship and seas he describes, and that great whale Ahab obsesses towards?

Like Ishmael, I'm beginning to find the limits in the rigid scientific description that accurately describes the classic as a work of "the highest order" as is so commonly parroted in the myriad articles and essays. T.S. Eliot, in a lecture he gave to the Virgil Society, gives his thoughts on the matter of the classics and came to the conclusion that there are no English classics. English, as a language and society, was not mature enough to produce a classic and that there was only 1 true classic: "The Aeneid." In his mind, Virgil had exhausted every possibility in the Latin language. Being the private poet of Augustus, he was the single most influential writer in the European tradition as his work lay at the foundation of that oft romanticized Roman Empire. Eliot's definition, like most of the problems I have with his work, is highly conservative and dismisses the work of the movements proceeding him despite his reverence for structure and archetypes. That said, we agree on the ruler we should use when measuring the classicality of a work. So far, I have only laid out 3 criteria which can be used to identify a classic:
1. Classic's are of anytime, not merely the work of yesterday, yesteryear, or yestercentury.
2. A Classic is a work of supreme quality that speaks to us days, years, and centuries later.
3. A Classic has a long-term impact on the culture around it, displacing the artists that follow in its wake.
Such a short list may seem arbitrary, or even lazy after the time spent painstakingly getting here. This set of rules for the classics is inclusive of all the standard texts and anything new you'd want to add. The Western Conference Finals, Moby Dick, and Appetite for Destruction all fit the bill. But a Harvard reading list of "the classics" is not going to include Wemby highlights and Mr. Brownstone. Ultimately, questions of what are the classics aren't about rigid definitions, but are questions of consensus. Moby Dick is the American Classic because we all agree it is, even if you think its a silly story about a guy who hates a whale.

It is easy to forget that for all but the most recent of human history there was no writing, and even more recent is the phenomenon of widespread literacy. We must give credit to our forebears for the survival of Homer, of Gilgamesh's tale to the modern age. These texts were preserved out of reverence and passion for the messages contained wherein. When one of the Ptolemys (a debate rages to this day about who specifically was responsible) erected the grand Library of Alexandria, it was as a symbol of wealth and power. The library was the arbiter of the premier texts, those classics I've defined previously. The first Head Librarian of the institution, Zenodotus of Ephesus, established what we would call the canonical texts for The Odyssey and Iliad, even being the first to split them into the familiar 24 books each. Here we see an institution dictating for the society at large what texts have and haven't value to the society. In matters of science and medicine, such as the work of Eratosthenes in sphering the world, the experts should be given the benefit of the doubt. However, who is to say that Zenodotus did not miss the greatest epic of all time, written in Egypt, while so diligently adding to and omitting from his precious Homeric Epics.

Canonization as term will never be able to escape the religious connotation that the early Greek Christians have given it. Originally, sainthood was bestowed locally among those followers who were persecuted by Roman or other authorities. These men were commonly martyrs in the image of Christ, dying for God and the good of good people. It wasn't until the middle ages that the Catholic Church, whose control of daily life is unthinkable today, began to centralize and formalize the process of Canonization. Essentially, a cult would form around a particularly devout man who was killed for his beliefs, and the Church would officially recognize that man as a "Servant of God," and thus would not excommunicate for idolatry, the original cult of personality. In many ways we have made saints of the media we consume, submitting it to the court of public opinion and academia, in order to not be idolatrous in our worship of whatever suits our fancies. See the way "fandom" as it were gathers around a piece and parades it for mass approval, lashing out at critics within and without and gesturing to the those same critics as some grand central authority.

I don't mean to insinuate that this is merely a recent phenomenon, what could one call Zenodotus except a massive fan of Homer, his associated researchers moving with the same zeal as those declaring the sainthood of John Paul II. Indeed, we have built Idols of Homer, of Blake, of Melville, and the so-called "western canon" arbitrated from the ivory tower of academia. Harold Bloom, from the window of said tower, was disgusted at the ways the works of the past could be reinterpreted and reexamined in the modern age. For him, art was only valuable in a measurable, aesthetic sense and it has nothing greater to say about the author, and the time they lived in, or what the reader can even take from it. In a baffling and contradictory foreword where he claims the canon is "being destroyed" by "The School of Resentment," he also asserts that there is an objective standard of strangeness which defines those canonical works. I find it then laughable to discount every work which does not comport with some dying 20th century conservative worldview. In what way is Harold Bloom qualified to discount the Langston Hughes' and Toni Morrisons of the world, and reduce them to a mere product of "a Chaotic Age" which will usher in, what I assume he spent his last days praying for, the new Theocratic Age.

So what then, say I, who began this essay with the assertion that the canon was "under attack," that the very root of our culture is being dug from underneath our feet? Adaptation and reinterpretation are both good and necessary as a work ages, but to remake and cast away the original, is what our media environment has made the order of the day. We have ceded control of the canon, of those works who can be appreciated in anytime, and whose impact reverberates through our collective souls, to business interests. In film, this is manifest in the nostalgia remake and excessive franchising that drives those billion dollar studios. In literature, its apparent in the commodification of reading itself. While I find labeling anyone's interests "performative," there is something deeply unsettling about the notion of someone saying they've read 100 books when they've actually read 100 AI-generated summaries of books. Alas, these are not my main arenas, the battle I've taken is in that youngest of all media, the Video Game.

The technical aspects that underpin video games make it uniquely challenging if one wants to experience all of the greatest works inherent to it. You cannot simply pick up a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 and open it up and start playing. The relationship between technology and capital is inseparable as in the early years of the medium, games were made by and for the hardware manufacturers. The poster child for this is, of course, Nintendo who to this day police IP like its a low-income neighborhood. No, if you want to play Super Mario Bros. 3, you must buy a Nintendo Entertainment System, and the cartridge, and 2 controllers, and you'll need a CRT TV with the correct input ports. That’s how it was intended to be played, with art and mechanics specifically designed for that specific space and time. If ever there was a medium that would allow for the remake, surely video games are it? Yet, if we were to remake Super Mario Bros. 3 today, it would be a completely different product. It may look or play better, but a new Super Mario Bros. 3 would, in the age of Search Engine Optimization and trendchasing influencers, completely bully the old game out of discussion. It would reduce it to an artifact, not a piece of art, but like Gutenberg's first press a step towards our better-now-than-then world.

Already, several games I consider unimpeachable as art both then and today have received the remake treatment, and the sentiment seems to be that it is okay to erase our past to sell nostalgia back to us at full price. If your favorite game is the new Resident Evil 4, I'm happy for you and I'm glad you enjoyed it, but you did not play Resident Evil 4. You played a remake, a completely different game that changes every single aspect of the original to sand it into a shape that modern audiences can consume at the trough. All of this is exasperated by the fact that I lied about the connection between technology and games. You don't need all of that to play Super Mario Bros. 3, you can play it on a Nintendo console with the online subscription. You can play it on literally any other device as long as you (legally*) upload your copy to anything with a processor. The same is true of any game that has come out in the last 10 years. Sony dropped backwards compatibility on their consoles after PS3 and has been selling "remakes" of The Last of Us for full price on every single console since.

The justification for a game being remade is simply that it was on the last set of consoles, and enough people will buy it again on this set of consoles. Despite being able to play Resident Evil 4 on every single console ever made including Zeebo for 10 bucks, it had to be resold to gormless masses for full price and was consumed as such. Silent Hill 2, Ratchet & Clank, Dead Space, Every 2D Final Fantasy and also VII (which Squeenix has found it can charge full price for 3 times), Genesis Sonic, PS2 Grand Theft Auto, even my beloved NIER, and that is just off the top of my head. In every case the original has been superseded for a version that, without fail, perverts the original and erases it in exchange for the capital to continue that very perversion. All of those games, I would argue, would be classics, would have some argument for a true canonization and appreciation not just for those of us in our cults hiding from the ball-and-gun Romans, but for all of the medium to appreciate. To measure them as they were and as they are; as art pieces and not as if they were congruent to the shift from DOS to Windows.

Recently Nintendo announced the upcoming remake of Ocarina of Time, a game I consider The Classic of the Medium, and Miyamoto its Shakespeare or Ovid. When talking to people who are excited for the game, I am struck by the reason for the remake simply being "Its old." Have we already forgotten our definitions from earlier? All the classics are old, for they have had the time for a pedestal to be built underneath them and for their worship to become habitual. When playing it for the first time a few years ago, I was struck at how modern it felt, the lock-on combat system aped in every so called "souls-like," the impressive way the game accounts for your choices as you zip between times and spaces. Never has there been a more potent metaphor for the terror of growing up than when you exit the Temple of Time for the first time, the world and people now being enemies, competition and that Campbellian mono-myth played to perfection as you save the princess, slay the villain, and return to Kokiri. There is nary a moment of downtime, the world is full of rich characters, secrets, side quests and is the prototype for all the open-worlds we see before us today.

Calling it a Prototype is disingenuous though; It builds off the foundations of both the previous Zelda and Mario game. Mario 64 was Miyamoto's team learning how to program on the new and exciting hardware, and the structure of Ocarina very much follows a template set forth in A Link to the Past on SNES. It was downright revolutionary, Hyrule Field is a technical marvel, the scale is simply unheard of for any game of the time. All of this accompanied by Koji Kondo's beautiful soundtrack using every technology of the time to provide what are still today, some of the most memorable tracks in the history of the art. There are parts where the experience falters slightly, the water temple is a drag with its menu shenanigans, but the game is unassailable in its deftness for the craft. What could you possibly improve about Ocarina of Time, what could you do that would echo the impact it had then and now?

This question has been answered once already by Nintendo, who remade the game once already in 2011. I lied about lying earlier in regards to hardware not mattering, there are several consoles in which emulation is incredibly difficult if not impossible, and the N64 is the poster child. It is so challenging it was easier for fans to examine the source code and port it PC directly rather than emulating it. This was the approach Nintendo Grezzo took for Ocarina 3D and it kept almost the entire game intact while updating the visuals for people who cant look at a 32x32 texture and understand what they're looking at. While I like the original visuals, the new version runs at a crisp 30 fps which makes a world of difference, especially in areas where the original chugged along. The menu changes improve 1 aspect of the water temple. Yet still we are not treated to only improvements. The new Sheikah stones are an eyesore, the water temple signage detracts from the mystery and puzzle, and the audio is worse in many regards, especially the music. I ask again what can you possibly do to improve Ocarina and to echo its impact? Nothing, as the remake is forgotten and another is churned out by the corporate machine.

This is not entirely on the corporations, the consumer is as much to blame for demanding a remake when, just like Super Mario Bros. 3 and Resident Evil 4, the original is playable on modern hardware. Surely at some point, there will be an end to the culture of eating all the gruel shoveled onto our plates by trillion dollar conglomerates, right? Our failure to uphold a canon is why its so easy for those classics, those game evangelized by the cult of fandom, to be yanked from the past and sanded to fit modern sensibilities. Could you imagine Moby Dick remade with the intent of being a modern Young Adult Novel? Then to eradicate every copy of Melville's original under the guise of Intellectual Property, in order to sell you a worse version of that celebrated story. There would be an outrage, it would be international news. That is the status quo in the gaming industry, an erasure of the past, all its triumphs and tribulations, to elevate shareholder value. It speaks of both an incredible hubris, that the designers of today are more qualified than those of the past to create great works, and an incredible inferiority complex, that those designers work will never live up to that imagined classical past. That the only thing our society can do, is regurgitate the past and that there isn’t a present or future worth living.