When education and consumerism merge, students get what they want, and one thing they appartently want is all A’s – as striking students at the New School in New York City demanded in November. They also want an igloo of protection from the weather of reality. But the very virtue of great books is not that they protect and reassure us, but that they disturb us and make us confront those elements of actuality that are hardest to endure. Literature is not comfort food, even if there do exist good books that one can consume with the ardor of a teenager eyeing a box of chocolates.
A faculty committee formed to devise a safe, harmless great books course would realize pretty quickly that, with the possible exception of Jane Austen, almost every item on the list is vulnerable to objection. The Iliad glorifies war. The Odyssey perpetrates a double standard in which Odysseus is allowed the pleasures of Calypso while Penelope must resist the attention of her suitors. Genesis propounds creationism. Dogmatic Dante audaciously puts Mohammad in a low circle of the Inferno. Infidelity is good for a belly laugh in Chaucer. Rabelais is ribald. King Lear demonizes daughters. Swift’s Gulliver puts out a fire in Lilliput by urinating in it. The Oedipus cycle of Sophocles and the Oresteia of Aeschylus confront readers with parricide and matricide, respectively, which may trigger a mental upheaval if Freud was on to something. Freud’s work is itself verboten because he is out of intellectual fashion. Alexander Pope’s satirical masterpiece “The Rape of the Lock” has to go on the grounds that the very conceit of the poem trivializes rape.
In each case the protesters miss both the forest and the trees by focusing on a single fallen leaf. This is deliberate. The formula, derived from the acolytes of the arch-deacon of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, is to focus on the periphery, not the center, of the object of criticism. But the secret of The Odyssey is not that the hero favored by the gods belongs to the ruling class. The secret of The Inferno is not that it helped its author get back at his enemies. The point of Anna Karenina is not that her husband is a symbol of Russian Imperialism.
Hamlet engages us not because the prince’s treatment of Ophelia is caddish but because the prince raises the most pressing questions facing all of us. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” Ernest Hemingway said. Yet you’ll not find the book on required reading lists, despite the appeal it has always made to young minds in formation. One complaint: the use of racist lingo, accurately reflective of the time of composition. More recent protests center on the notion that the author, a white man, dared to write about slavery, as if that were a province reserved only for slaves and their descendants. Consider the harm this kind of thinking does to our idea of imaginative liberty. Now that you’ve heard the score of Porgy and Bess, would you really want to travel back in time and discourage the Gershwins from giving voice to denizens of Catfish Row?
The censoring of bawdy works is a little like airbrushing the cigarette out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s hand in a postage stamp. It puts the past sous rature (“under erasure”), as deconstructionists put it. The erasure robs the past of its pastness, its right to exist on its own terms, whether we approve of them or not, even if they strike some of us as either a dangerous precedent or a premonition.
Having twice mentioned deconstruction as a culprit that has bought us to, if not to the edge of the abyss, the unfortunate state of affairs that exists in our universities and colleges, I feel I should add a third example. Easy to do, because a basic tactic is to divide the world into binary oppositions, pick one out, and then flip the power status in the pairing. Thus, traditionally the teacher rather than the student was “privileged.” Now, however, the student holds the face cards. A complaint from an enraged college kid, bogus or real, could cost the instructor his or her job. Teachers used to give grades. Now they are expected to give all A’s, while students get to evaluate their instructors with anonymity and without risk. A topsy-turvy world: the world of deconstruction.
In the 1960s at Columbia, the desire of students to confront the modern literature most likely to prove upsetting was intense. It led Lionel Trilling to devise such a course and then to reflect on the experience in a fascinating essay. Trilling writes that he had given his students a taste of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Nietzsche, Conrad, Thomas Mann and William Blake. “I have asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serous study, saying: ‘Interesting, am I not? And exciting if you consider how deep I am and what dead beasts lie at my bottom.” Trilling could question the maturity of students who moved “through the terrors and mysteries of modern literature like so many Parsifals, asking no questions at the behest of wonder and fear.” But the Columbia professor had no doubt that the teaching of modern literature — including that which may be said to bear an adversarial relationship to the prevailing culture — was worth doing well and with a full consciousness of what the enterprise entailed.
In 1965, Trilling observed tartly that the “progressive educational prescription to ‘think for yourself’ . . . means to think in the progressive pieties rather than the conservative pieties (if any of the latter do still exist).” He could see that in the postwar era liberalism had for all intents and purposes emerged triumphant in the clash of ideas in the academy. The author of The Liberal Imagination might be expected to applaud the development, but Trilling valued the dialectic of ideas, where thesis meets worthy antithesis, and he foresaw danger in the hegemony of an ideology.
Of one thing there is little doubt. Reading the great books — whether Plato or Machiavelli, Ovid or Milton, Montaigne or Lady Murasaki, Augustine or Emily Dickinson , Aristiphanes or Swift — will continue to trigger an intense response and may even lead us to the terrors and mysteries of the Abyss.
— For eleven years, David Lehman taught a course uncompromisingly called “Great Poems” at New York University.
Copyright © 2023 by David Lehman. All rights reserved.
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