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Read any GREAT books lately?
The Sunday Oregonian FORUM October 11, 1987
By Sharon Schuman
List-makers took literature and left readers awash with
The Great White Male
Wouldn't it be nice if someone could edit out all the chaff of Eastern and Western thought and serve us up just the wheat?
This thought, a kind of intellectual consumerism, must surely have lurked somewhere in the minds of all those list-makers who over the years have been sifting and selecting the Great Books.
The most famous of these lists came from Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago. By 1957, it was being discussed throughout America in more than a thousand reading groups at the rate of two titles a month. At that speed, their Great Books list was long enough to last 14 years.
The first year's titles are impressive. They also tell us a lot about what was important to the list-makers -- our roots in the American founding and the Western world. So we see a heavy dose of the Greeks (though nobody as frivolous as Aristophanes, or as female as Sappho). We also see mainly political works ("Macbeth" rather than "A Midsummer Night's Dream").
Adler and Hutchins make no secret of their interest in educating the members of a democracy. And they make no apologies for stopping short of the 20th century (although in the fifth year, readers do get into Einstein).
The list is just as interesting for what it leaves out. No women, no Eastern texts, no authors of color. Of course, space is limited, but there is a pattern to the omissions. I read six years into the list and still did not find a single female (not even Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson). The only Marx was the "Communist Manifesto" (not "Das Kapital); the only Americans (besides the founders) were Thoreau, Twain, and Melville (not Hawthorne, Whitman, or Poe); and the Eastern world was a void. Instead of the Great Books, they could have called it the Great White Males.
If it is true that the dominant culture always tries to perpetuate itself in the education it selects, then we should not be surprised at these choices. But times have changed, and if we are still looking to consume the best in the way of books, we are at least in the mood for a change of diet. The question becomes: How do we choose?
E.D. Hirsch, author of the recently issued "Cultural Literacy," evades the issue nicely by supplying a 50-page list of words, concepts and titles he considers to be "the network of information that, all competent readers possess.", The beauty of his list (in terms of efficient consumption) is that we don't even have to read the books on it, since "the information essential to literacy is rarely detailed or precise."
According to Hirsch, who teaches English at the University of Virginia, we are a nation at risk not because our youngsters don't learn how to read, but because our educational system, in its passion for diversity, fails to give them a basic body of information that they can share with each other and use as a framework for learning. The clearest symptom of this problem has come with the revelation of details like this: "Two-thirds of ourl7-year-olds do not know that the Civil War occurred between 1850 and 1900."
Hirsch would remedy this situation by having teachers teach his list - which includes almost everything in the first year of Adler's. Like Adler's, it is interesting for what it includes and excludes. St. Francis is there, but not St. Augustine; Othello and Iago are listed, but not Desdemona; "Ode on a Grecian Urn," but not "Ode to a Nightingale"; Prokofiev, but not Copland; "Somethmg is rotten," but not "To be, or not to be"; the Environmental Protection Agency, but not the Equal Rights Amendment.
We could debate the implications of these choices. I think it's more interesting, though, that most of Hirsch's entries are not books, and that the books that do appear are not necessarily meant to be read. Literacy no longer seems to be a matter of reading books. I find this astonishing.
In this reactionary and apoplectic state of mind, I return to the original question: How can we choose a list of Great Books to read?
In 1915, the Department of Interior, through its Bureau of Education, came up with a list to be read by members of the National Rural Teachers' Reading Circle. Their idea was to help produce good teachers for the rural areas, where "nature and art are to be united in bringing the American farmer and his family all that is sweetest and sanest and strongest and best in human culture." At the same time many states were establishing their own "reading circles," which were really reading lists for school-age children. In Wisconsin, eighth-graders were to read Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, while senior high students read Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, Could our children handle these authors now? Could we?
Perhaps the best way to go about making a Great Books list for 1987 is to consider the purpose of the list. If we are talking about the 10 books to be stuck with on a desert island, we would probably want to cram in as much as possible, and even fudge a bit with books like "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" (more than 40 titles).
If we are talking about the books everyone ought to have read, this could turn out to be a very long list, and one that experts find it difficult to agree on. Recently I sat in on some discussions of a core list to be read by all undergraduates at the university where I teach. Beyond some fundamental agreements about Shakespeare and the Bible, there was no consensus to be achieved among the disciplinary specialists, and the project stalled.
If, to up the ante, we want to follow the advice of Allan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind" and talk about the books that the few best students at the best universities ought to read, this list might be easier to come by (Bloom has probably got one in his office at the University of Chicago). But it would not be much use to anyone besides Bloom's students, who are in the privileged position of having him to lead them through it.
What if, on the other hand, we have a very modest goal: 10 Great Books - a kind of starter list? Even this poses problems. Are we talking about books to be read with or without an instructor? This is an important question because not all works are immediately accessible to a general reader.
In fact, the major criticism of Adler's Great Books Program was that it involved inevitably superficial discussions led by amateurs - the blind leading the blind. Two hours for "King Lear"; next week we move on to Francis Bacon.
We are forced back to the question of purpose. If it is to instill in us all we need to know about the best that has been thought and said during the history of mankind, no list will ever be sufficient. Forget it.
But if it is to initiate people into a lifetime of exploring the inexhaustible riches of the past, such a list is possible. All we need is a limited number of titles that can be read without a teacher and that create an appetite for more.
One or two cautions, though: There are several wrong ways to read these books, and if you insist on reading them in these ways, you can turn the very best of books into propaganda, soap-opera or self-portrait:
- The mirror approach: browsing through the ancients for ratification of our own ideas. An excellent example of this is the recent 'The Classic Touch: Lessons in Leadership from Homer to Hemingway." A typical chapter title, which perhaps speaks for itself, is, "Pericles: Father of Corporate Culture." In this book, the world of business management seeks ratification for its practices by turning to the Great Books of the past.
The trouble with this approach is that it lets us read with blinders on, filtering out the foreign in favor of the familiar. For example, the authors (John K. Clemens and Douglas F. Mayor) quote the funeral oration of Pericles, in which he describes the Athenian way of life: "When our work is over, we are in a position to enjoy all kinds of recreation for our spirits." In the authors' minds, this philosophy translates to "work hard, play hard," which does not quite do justice to the drama, debate, religious festivals and games that, for the Greeks, constituted recreation.
The mirror approach looks for our own image in the classics and is equally distorting whether that image is corporate, self-aware, alienated, liberated or sincere.
- Correcting the classics: reading the classics to prove how much more enlightened we are than they were. Some feminist criticism falls into this category. We look, for example, at Milton's Eve and observe that this is a sexist portrait. We go on to explain how this sexism undermines Milton's whole conception of paradise.
The trouble with this approach is that it is dismissive. It encourages us to read a book just long enough to judge it and move on.
- The cheerleader approach: reading as homage. This displaces judgment with enthusiasm. It inhibits rather than nurtures thought, and it prevents the reader from actively engaging in a mental conversation with the text.
Let me illustrate these three approaches with a short speech from "Antigone." Here the heroine, who has just defied the king's edict and buried her brother, justifies her act:
Your edict, King, was strong,
But all your strength is weakness itself against
The immortal unrecorded laws of God.
If we follow the mirror approach, we might see Antigone as an individualist, standing up to the power of the state, or as one of the devout, who knows how to put religion before politics. If we wish to correct the classics, we might observe that a more enlightened Antigone would know better than to turn to a God for guidance. Shouldn't she have learned from the absurdity of her brothers' fratricide that no God was watching? If, on the other hand, we can content ourselves with doing homage, we might observe that this is a great speech from a great play with a great heroine.
So how should the speech be read? In the context of the rest of the play. The play will teach us that, to Sophocles, religion and politics overlap and that both require the corpse to be buried. Since the king fails to realize this until things have gone too far, he gets into deep and irreversible trouble. But part of his problem is Antigone, who lacks the will and tact to break the news in a way that can be accepted.
So you see, the point is simple. You just read.
The list reflects my own ideas about what's important and what makes for a good read. "Antigone" is a great piece of war literature, without having one battle in it, and if you avoid misreading it as a Thoreauvian quest for personal freedom and fulfillment, it will make you see like-a Greek.
This will come in handy when you read the "Apology" and "Crito" which ask you to judge for yourself whether or not Socrates deserved to die - whether or not his death was democracy's darkest moment. "Othello" presents a portrait of evil that forces us to rethink the whole concept of friendship. If you saw Dennis Arndt's Iago in Ashland a few years ago, you know what I mean.
Swift, Austen and Dickens all create worlds that we are privileged to enter, however temporarily. Tocqueville brings us back to America - not just the America of the 1830s - but our own America, prophetically and sometimes disturbingly forseen.
Dostoevsky, once called "the Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum," is one of a kind. His Underground Man is an unforgettable portrait of modern consciousness. "The Death of Ivan Ilych" is not as depressing as it sounds.
The surprise of the list is Zora Neal Hurston. Cynics will accuse me of killing three birds with one stone, since she is female, black and American. You will have to judge for yourself.
This is just a starter list. It will not do much to satisfy our consumer's appetite for the best product, because beyond this best is more best. These books lead to others along a path that branches out over the Earth.
But this is the secret. To read the classics, all we need to do is let them teach us how to see the world as they present it. If we really pay attention to Pericles, or Plato or Shakespeare, they constitute "recreations of the spirit" that entertain us, yes, but also free us from the narrowness of our time and place.
To the extent that they are successful - to the extent that they are more than mere names on a list - they are perhaps subversive to Hirsch's goal of cultural literacy, the mastery of "American literature culture" rather than a "transcendent world culture."
Yet we must risk this subversion, for we, no less than the farmers of 1915, have a need for the sweetest, sanest, strongest and best.
The Great Books
The titles in the first year of Mortimer Adler's Great Books Program:
- Declaration of Independence
- Apology; Crito - Plato
- Antigone - Sophocles
- Politics, Bk. I - Aristotle
- Lycurgus & Numa - Plutarch
- The Gospel according to St. Matthew
- Discourses, selections - Epictetus
- The Prince - Machiavelli
- Macbeth - Shakespeare
- Areopagitica - Milton
- The Wealth of Nations, selections - Adam Smith
- The Federalist, Nos. 1, 10, 15, 51;
- Democracy in America, selections - De Tocqueville
- The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels
- On Civil Disobedience; Walden, selection - Thoreau
- The Death of Ivan Ilych - Tolstoy
The author's list
The titles of what might be called a starter list of Great Books:
- Antigone - Sophocles
- Apology, Crito - Plato
- Othello - William Shakespeare
- Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
- Democracy in America - Alexis De Tocqueville
- Notes from Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Death of Ivan Ilych - Leo Tolstoy
- Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neal Hurston
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