Classic Literature... What's a Classic?

Last year I tried to read On the Road by Jack Kerouac, the beat poet. I made this decision after:
a) reading Gabrielle Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude and being absolutely blown away by it, and
b) reading the Penguin Great Books of the Twentieth Century List on the first page of this special edition text.

I read about 30 or 40 pages of On the Road and gave up. That far in the book, it was about a narrator/college kid who writes and lives with his aunt. He meets and becomes obsessed with a character named Dean. I appreciated the richness of the language -- at times, it reads like vintage Kerouac poetry -- but I kept waiting for a plot. And the characters... well, they were a bunch of beatniks who all got along. No conflict.

I just took the book out of the library again. I'm going to give it another chance.

There are other books on that list which I've read and, clearly, I'd consider them classics. I've found them, powerfully moving and incredibly well written.

Hm, there's my definition of a classic, I guess...

Titles in the Penguin list that I've read and love are:

Heart of Darkness
Lord of the Flies
The Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist
The Metamorphosis
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
etc.
Actually, I've loved pretty much every book I've read on the list except for On the Road (so far).

And then there is Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory (which is not on the list, although his novel, The Heart of the Matter is). The jury in my head is still out on that one. I get it intellectually and I found it moving intellectually, if that makes sense. I get the whole martyr-as-a-real-man-who-sins thing, but, I just wasn't all that moved emotionally.

There was one part which was kind of moving in an almost comical pathetic sort of way. There's a scene where the main character, the priest, manages to buy some wine -- an act which is dangerous, illegal and even treasonous. He buys it so that he can deliver communion at masses illegally as he travels the country. After the government official sells him the wine, he, and other officials, proceed to drink the entire bottle with a series of "salud's!". The priest leaves weeping and broken. It reminds me of a Stephen Leacock short story, "The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones", a story in which a pastor visits some parishioners and is too polite to take his leave. His hosts are too polite to ask him to leave, so he stays for tea, dinner; he stays the night, he stays a week, a month. Eventually, he dies a delirious death in his hosts' home.

Maybe it's more a of a comment on me than a judgement of classic literature. I found The Power and the Glory well written in a lean, prosaic kind of way, but existential and not all that emotionally moving. And so far, On the Road isn't doing much for me with the exception of the fairly regular beautiful prose like "... the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn..."

Maybe you need to be a bit of a beatnik/hippie to really get On the Road? Maybe you need to be a bit of an existentialist to get a book like The Power and the Glory (although, ironically, of that novel, most people would say it's very Roman Catholic)?

Maybe I'm just too narrow in what I consider classic literature...

Please feel free to comment and set me straight.