demic Impressionist like the Spaniard joaqtiin Sorolla y Bastida? "Rings" asks too much of sotne artists, while others are presented at far less than their full strength in order to shoehorn them into the scheme. Ingres's gigantic Na- polemi Enthroned (1806), which hangs near Rubens's Arch ofFerdinund, is hope- less, an ice-cold surface with none of the painter's invitingly ambiguous un- dercurrents. Great art is not necessar- ily emotionally direct. I would have thought that Brown understood that; if so, he's not sharing the secret with visitors to the Olympics. "Rings" is aesthetic deniagoguery, and so far as [. Carter Brown is concerned Atlanta is only the beginning. In dis- cussing the show, Brown has said that he hopes to carry the concept to a "poten- tial audience that lies heyvnd Atlanta and the Olympic Ciames." He may have the wherewithal. As the chairman of Ova- tion, Inc., a new fine arts TV network, and a senior adviser and consuhing edi* tor at (^orbis, the corporation that Bill Gates has founded to create an interna- tional cornptiter image lihrary and pro- dtice art-related CD-ROMs, Brown can help shape the electronic universe whet e education and entertainment overlap. Apparently the stakes have become so high ihat art is practically beside the point. At the conclusion of "Rings," Matisse's Dance (llj is hanging on the wall and Mahler is coming throtigh the head- phones and Brown is intoning, "Inter- connectedness . . . rings . . . passion. It's what makes usall of ushuman." Wlien you're talking like this, paintings onlv get in the way. Dame (llj h an exhila- rating fusion of opulence and simplicity, btit Brown has gone Matisse one better: he's telling tis about life. The B oob y Trap BY HELEN VENDLER Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of t he Western World by David Denby (Simon and Schuster, 4 9 2 p p . , $ 3 0 ) I n an original solution to what he calls his "mid-life crisis," David Denhy, the movie critic of Xeiv imA magazine, decided in 1991, at the age of 48, to go back to Columbia and reread the Great Books that he had encountered thirty years before in the college's two famous cotirses, C.C., or (^ontemporarv C'ivili/a- tion, and Lit Hum. or Literature Hti- manities. From the beginning, Denby seems to have had the idea of writing a book about his experience. He wanted, he says, not only "to fnid out what actti- ally went on in classt ootns" in these days of the ctilture wars, but also "to add my words to the debate from the gronnd up." He was eager to write "an adventtue book ... and also a naive book, an ama- teur's bookin other words, a folly." Denby chose the right descriptions. His book is naive, amateurish and a folly. The author's "adventures" among masterpieces suggest that one is more impermeable at the age of 48 than at the age of 18. Try as he may to stiggest that he is growing and changing as he re- encoiinters the Great Books, his account suggests a man coming into the field with bis mind made up. Take, for in- stance, his prefatory remarks about his "crisis": I.ike many others, I was jaded yet still hungry; I was cast into the modern state of livin^-in-lhc-nicdia, a state of excitement needled wilh disgust. At the t'ud ui the ceii- liiry, the end (eveni) of the millennitmi, the media tineaten to take over altogether and push literaUire out of sii;hl, and my disgust was tinged with intense emotions I eonldn'l qnite pin downnostalgia, regiei, anger, even despair.... 1 sensed my identity had softened and merged into the atmo- sphere of representation My own mem- ories were lapsing ont into the log of media life, the tnilived lite as spectator. Since books, too, are instatices of "i epre- sentation," it's hard to see what good more representations (in printed form) might do for a man sick of spectator- ship. And the millennial threats are overplayed. Not everybody is as over- whelmed as Denby seems to be by "the modern state of living-in-the-media," and he isn't the fnst knell-ringer of books. Annvay, it is unlikely that an evo ltitionary mechanism so advantageotis as language is going to stop peribniiing its usual operations with words (from pvms to poems) any time soon. But lei us follow the jaded yet hungry, excited but disgusted narrator into the Columbia classrooms. Denby explains C^olumbia's famous requircd-of-all-sttidents courses: The ffeneral reader need know oniy [hat C'.(^. grew ont of (^olinnhia's War Issnes conrse offered during the First World War and was considered from the beginning a defense of Western civilization: and that Lit Ihnii (or Hnmanities A. as it was hii- lialh called) emerged in 1937 from a Gen- eral Honors conrse developed by teaciier and editor John Erskine over a period of \'ears, Denby grasps that at least one of these courses might be pectiliar. I don't know if the Columbia archives would bear him otit. btit he avers that from ilie heginiiing, Lit Hum was intended to enshiine the liteialmc of Christian Eur- ope in a ct>llege increasingly pi>piilated hy the children of Eastern or Southern Enri>- pean imniigranisthe imwashed hni not nnwashable Jews and Italians who needed to he assimilated inui the larger culture of the country. Against this assertion, I can only say that in 1937 there were rather few of the great luiwashed enrolled in Coltimbia College: and John Erskine, in putting together a fall semester of ancient Greek and Latin wiiters in his cotirse, was hardly etishrining (with the exception of Augtistine) the "literature of (Christian Europe." It might more trtily be said that he was enshrining Anglophilia, fhe second semester of lJt Hum incltided Dante and Goethe, but it also inehided Spinoza; and a fair number of the wi ii- ets on the list of 1937 who might be said by Denby to belong to "Christian Eur- ope" were also on another and more powerful list, Rome's Index of Forbid- den Books: Machiavelli, Rabelais, Rous- seati and Voltaire, among otliei's. By so conspicuously tailing Etnxipe "Christian Europe," Denby exhibits the nuiddled thinking ihat pervades his book. "Christianity" and "Europe" are far from simple concepLs, atid nobody, asked to cite some works from "the lit- eiatiue of Christian F.tnope." wotild be likely to mentioti Tom /ones or C.nndide. In fact. Lit Hum's spring list of 19H7 is lather peculiarly unrepresentative of Christianity: "Dante" lefers. t)f course, to the Inferno rather than the Paradiso; "Goethe" inchtdes oniy Part I of Faiist (no salvation there); the selection frotn 34 IHE Nr.W RtPLiBtir OCTOBER 7.1996 Moliere includes Tartuffe, in which reli- gious hypocrisy is satirized; Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagfuel is robustly anti- clerical and blasphemous; and the power politics a{' Henry IV. Parts I and II, hardly represent "(Christian Europe" as. say. The W/nln's Tale, with its resnrrective image, might represent it. Thomas Aquinas is conspictiousiy absent, along with other theological writers from Bonaventure to Rolle. Even Milton, in the form of the rctjuired Paradise Lost, hardly represents Etnopean (Christian orthodoxy. On the whole, if one enteied as one of the un- washed, one would be wholeheartedly converted, at the end of Lit Hum, to a form of washedness that was notably skeptical. I n 1961-62, when Denby first sat throtigh Lit Hum. not too nnich ill the second semester had changed. The cheerful Ihm Jones had been dropped, in those existentialist days, in favor of Cririie and Punishment, and Machiavelli had disap- peared. Bits of the New Testament had been added (no doubt because the stti- dents had become more .sectilarand more Jewish), as bits of the Hebrew Bible had been added in the first, "classi- cal." semester. Faust now included (per- haps for the same reason) Part 11. Shake- speare was much expanded: there was King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest. By 1991, however, when Denby re- turned to the classroom for his mid-life tttne-up, Rabelais, Cervantes. Spinoza, Swift. Voltaire, Dostoevsky and Part II of Fattsl had been scratched from the list in favor of Boccaccio, Descartes, Aus- ten and Woolf, Paradise Lost is listed as "optional." Shakespeare is reduced to King Lear and a play of the instructor's choice. Instead of Woolf, the instructor can substitute another text. It is clear that the subterranean discontents of stu- dents or professors. alt)ng with cultural change, caused the alterations. In the tirst "classical" semester, a feeble propi- tiatory nod to the female presence in the student body appeared in the inser- tion of the Homeric "Hymn to Demeter" and selections from Sappho. No doubt someone will write a re- vealing book on the history of these (hanges. But Denby is not much both- ered by them. One selection of "Great Books" will represent "the literature of C'hristian Europe" as well as another. Vet if such books have the impact that he claims for them, it should matter whether a student reads Aquinas or Spi- noza, Machiavelli or Boccaccio, Austen or Dostoevsky. Which picture of "Chris- tian Europe" should the college aim to purvey? As long as he is in the com- pany of a "Great Book," Denby seems not to care, though he sttirdily resists Kant and Dante, and feels him- self something of an enlightened mod- ern crtisader in so doing. More of that later. S o far I have neglected the second course, the one so curiously evolving from "War Issties." Known rather bi/arrely as "Contemporary (Civiliza- tion," it begins nevertheless with Thucy- dides and makes its sociopolitical way (in its present form) thiough Plato, Aris- totle, Cicero, the Bible, Augtistine (The City of God), Aquinas (politics and ethics). Christine dc Pisan, Machiavelli, Calvin, Descartes, Galileo, Hobbes and Locke, progresses, in the spring term. tu Rousseati, Httme. Kant, Madison, Smith, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Woll- stonecraft, Darwin, Nietzsche and Ereud, Then it closes with a flurry of choice: the instructor must select one book from a list containing Weber. Gramsci, Arendt. Lenin and Habermas, and one book from a list containing Beauvoir, MacKinnon, Rawls, Eanon, Malcolm X, West ((>)rnel), Eoticault and some Supreme Court decisions. (The particular decisions are un- specified, but I don't doubt that they broach issues of gender or race.) The first list of elective readings exists to sat- isfy' academic Marxists, on the faculty or among the students, and the second exists to satisfy feminists or black studies advocates. It is a sad falling-off from Machiavelli to MacKinnon, from Des- cartes to Malcolm X. The list for C.C. is idea-driven. What have writers had to say about the good or the just or the desirable society? With its twenty-six authors (plus parts of the Bible), the course is a onceover-lightly: many of the texts (the Repub lic, the Nico- machean Ethics, the Foundations of the Me- taphysics of Morals) are not your ordinary coverabie-in-a-week works. Indeed, my first emotion on beginning Denby's book was an incredulous sympathy for the teachers that have to frog-march freshmen or sophomores through these dense texts (or through dense selections from them). Denby quotes a now- departed instructor who thottght that there was too much too fast. Not Denby. He is sure that "the struggle to read seri- ously, the hundred hours or so of semi- nar discussion, would necessarily leave their mark on the student." But what mark, exactly? And is this the best way to spend those hundred hours? One could envisage a dilferent way to introduce stitdents to the European past, a way that would not be driven solely by the idea of a good society, but by several ideas of how to live both the public life and the private life. Sttidents might read the Symposium or the .Satyri- con or the Ars Amatoria. Dialogues on love and satires on social practice might be considered as instrtutixe as trea- tises on politics and ethics. Along with Machiavelli, one might read Pascal, so that not only government but also in- trospection might count as an index of "Western civilization." It's a sad re- dtiction of "Western thought" to con- fine it to thoughts on politics and eth- ics. The philosophical texts in C,C. are drawn almost entirely from political phi- losophy and ethics, scanting almost en- tirely the other branches of philosoph- ical thoughtaesthetics, metaphysics, epistemology; logic, the philosophy of science. Wittgenstein is conspicuously absent. D enby provides three read- ing lists (1937, 1961, 1991) fbi Lit Hum. but he does not offer any earlier lists of (C.(;. since its "War Issues" incarna- tion, remarking only that C;.C. "has changed the natmr of its reading lists so radically that printing syllabi from sev- enty or fifty years ago would serve little purpose." There must be a story there. Denby does not seem to realize that a history of former radical change at Columbia supports precisely the argu- ment of those who would now once again alter "the canon." Perhaps the designers of C.C, inventing a course under the pressure of war. felt that one could interest students (or their teach- ers) only in political and ethical matters. and gave up on the other branches of philosophy; but the result of C.C. (as I ha\e seen it) is that most Columbia graduates think of "ideas" as a word referring to political or ethical concepts rather than to aesthetic or metaphysical ones. Political life, in such a course, is deemed "realer" than private life or aesthetic life. Ideas about society and the state are presented as more im- portant than ideas about what Yeats called "making [one's] soul." Even in Lit Hum, the supposedly literary course, the spring books chosen (except those by women authors) are ones heavy on "ideas" in the Columbia sense: the Con- fessions, Montaigne, King Lear, Paradise Lost, Descartes. Goethe. (Conrad's Heart of Darkness was Denby's instructor's choice in the "free" week, though other instrtictors chose Dostoevsky or Mann or Gide or Borges, for thematic or theoret- ical reasons that one can easily deduce.) Think what a different sense of Western civilization students would have if the lit- erature list offered the Metamorphoses, Troilus and Criseyde, Villon, Ariosto, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Boswell's John- son, Keats, Beckett. Nabokov. Wbat a OCTOBER 7, 1996 THE NEW REP I ; BI J C 35 send-up of solemn "ideas" as the foiui- dation of disctission of Western culttue such a course would be! And such a list would be no less representative of "the Western mind" than Lit Hum's current smorgasbord. D enby thinks that he is boldly taking part in the culture wars by defending the existence of cotn^ses such as C.C. aud Lit Hum. But since he never engages with (or even seems to notice) the principles behind Colum- bia's choice of books from the Western canon, he cannot really touch the cen- tral objections to such courses: that an agenda is present, httt it is not enunci- ated; that the books are said to be "great" but the criteria ibr "greatness" (beyond longevity alone) are assumed rather than held up for inspection and imperceptibly miuate from generation to generation. Instead Denby bittsters and bhmders from course to course, sampling the teaching of various in- str\ictors and giving (rather sparsely) instances of the disheartening student "discussions" of the texts. And, most of all, chummily judging the works he reads, as if they were the movies of the week up for review. Dante, for instance. Denby has a hard time with Dante. He begins by giving samples of pseudonymous sitident comments on Dante. "Wiiy is he so obsessed with these people? WTio is he to come up with these tortures?" says one. "There are mosques in hell. Dante is Turk-bashing," says another, offering "to put Dante him- self in the circle reserved for bigots and racists." And Denby feels pretty much the same way: Yes, |the Inferno] was fantasy and iTpreseii- tatioii, not rcat lift?, but I could not rid myself of ihc notion thai Dante had en- tered into complicity with torture. In some way, he believed in torttirc; he justiricd it. In life, ilie torturer's lust for control yields to moriality; the \ictim dies. Here the torim;nt goes on forever. A man wotild be tormented eternally for "barratry"for graft Imaginel A New York pol caught in a parking-ticket scam buiictl in excre- ment forever! In vain do the instrttctors attempt to form, in Denby as well as in the tuider- graduates, a more complicated attitttdc. "Everybody's a Christian, guys. It's not a sermon . . . it's a Christian poem writ- ten for a Christian atidience in a (Chris- tian framework," says Professor Shapiro. "You've got to try to tuiderstaud bclbre you judge," says Professor Tayler. They are right to warn against facile transposi- tions from one age to another, from a religious culture to a secttlar ctilttu e. Yet such arguments don't go to the heart ol the matter. In literature, one earns one's place by writing memorably, not by ex- pressing agreeable attittides that will wear as well in 1991 as in 1^00. or that can be forgiven by an "understanding" reader. A nd this brings up the ques- tion of teaching poetry in translation (Allen Man- delbaum's translation of Dante, in this case). The single string in Dante's bow, finally, is his use of the Italian language. His imagination is cel- ebrated too, but we wouldn't remember his imaginative acts unless they w'ere embodied in his alternately severe atid voltiptuous Italian. It is no wonder tmdeigradttates don't kindle to Dante, since he has been stripped of his fun- damental persuasive power, The poor students, and their poor middle-aged chronicler, are not really reading Dante. I do not expect them to master the Italian of fourteenth-century Flo- rence. Btit I do expect them to grasp that there is a difference and a loss, and that their judicial pronouncements whatever satisfaction they may pro- videhave no aesthetic foimdation. Denby gestures pathetically at this tritth when Professor Shapiro asks an Italian-speaking student to read aloud, iti Italian, the opening lines of the Infeino. Denby absurdly says, quoting the first twelve lines, that "I wotild ask the reader to read the lines aloud, even if, like me, he doesn't speak a word of Ital- ian So strong was the sound of Dante's poetry that it made me feel I wasn't reading the poem at all." Poetry is thtis redttced to what Denby calls "metrics" and "sottnd"indispensable enough if you understand their function with respect to what is being said, btit hardly usefttl when they stand alone, as tmintelligiblc as Iroquois. It is no surprise that Virgil, in Robert Fitzgerald's translation, suffers much the same fate. Encoiuuering the Aeneid makes even Denby sympathize (rather ungrammatically) with "opponents of the canon": The Aeneid is the epitome of what oppo- ncnis of the canon hate: a self-empoweriug myth of origins, a celebration of empire No doubt about itthe poem asserts the ceiUraliiy of Rome in such a way thai ren- ders [sic] other people besides tbe Greek- Trojan-Roman line marginal dull Aeneas, in my mind, came to embody tbe ctillure of the West itself, marching grim- ly but purposefully into the ftituif. He brought his father and son, but he left his women behind. And the instructors cannot change Denby's mind. In vain does Shapiro argue that 'Virgil subverted the glo- rification of empire at every turn," and Tayler that this is a poem that em- phasizes loss. Denby concludes in a fashion that he visibly considers high- minded: No wonder p(.-(ple who had been read- ing tbe poem for years said they did not understand it. Virgil himself may not have tmdersiood it Tbat VirgiFs attittides were "wroug" should not boiber anyone. That his poem is hurt as art by those atti- ttides is something tu grieve over and deplore. W hy do I find the spectacle of AWc YorK's movie critic "grieving over" and "deploring" Virgil's dam- aged art so irresistibly comic? Why does his weighty judgment that Virgil himself "may not have understood" his own poem seem, to say the least, like some- thing out of Moliere? Denby seems not to understand that thejtidgment of a lit- erary work isajtidgment of the fitness of the st)le to the subject, manner to mat- ter, and that it cannot be made anachro- nistically nor (with any cotifidence) through translation. Nor does he itnder- stand that the artist's objective is to do something that hasn't been done be- fore, and to do it in an original achieve- ment of style. If he or she succeeds, that's it: the product is as unquarrelable- with as a lake or a mountain. It has become, through the admiration of stih- sequent writers, a part of the landscape of culture. It makes no sense to say, on the grotmds of morals, or taste, or women's rights, or whatever, that a literary mas- terwork shotild have been differently conceived or differentlv execttted. Of cotuse, one can argtte (as critics of "Great Books" courses sometimes do) tbat students should not be (breed to read morally "deplorable" or "elitist" books in a required course in college; that a college course, if it is to be re- quired, should plense contemporary moral taste. (That taste is defined, of cotirse, by the critics themselves.) This is where (loUtmbia's Lit Httni becomes muddled in its principles. It obviotisly selects literary works on the basis of their suitability for ethical or political argument, as though artists were valu- able for making arguments, for their theological or moral or political opin- ions. Coltunbia feels no qttalms abotit teaching literary works blithely in trans- lation and detached from the thought of their time. It uses such works (as the title "Contemporary Civilization" testi- fies) not to illuminate, say, the Middle Ages, but to take up, say, "war issues" in 1917. The highly content-oriented prin- ciple behind the choice of texts in both 36 THE NEW REPL Btjr OCTOBER 7, i996 courses directs students forcibly toward ethical judgment, unclouded by literary or imaginative considerations. Perhaps it does students no harm to conduct bull-sessions about colonialism in class; but should (.onrad be sacrificed to such an aim? D enby really goes to town on Conrad. He refuses nobly, he thinksthe view that Heart of Darkness endoi'ses the colonial ambitions of the British Empire. He asks whether "thou- sands of European and American read- ers may not have become nauseated by colonialism after reading Heart ofDark- n-ess}" He appears not to see the reality of his position, that the politically incor- rect does not differ essentially from the politically correct: both are moral posi- lions taken with respect to art. The politically correct think that the work is pro-colonial, and therefore has a bad (.ffect on the reader; Denby thinks that it is anti-colonial, and therefore has a good effect on the reader. He cannot see what the two views have in com- mon, and their common irrelevance. Treating fictions as moral pep-pHls or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and formal motives of a work of art. The representations in fiction are never driven by mimesis alone. Denbv contests Chinua Achebe's pro- test against Heart of DarknessAchebe maintains that "'Conrad's picture of the people of the Congo seems grossly inadequate.' ' Denby argues that "no art of consciousness can ever be abso- lutely complete," that "Conrad did not offer Henri oj Darkness as 'a picture of the people of the Congo' any more than Achebe's Things Fall Apart, set in A Nigerian village, purports to be a rounded picture of the British over- lords." And yet Denby allows that he has been "changed by the debate in class." that he has seen the relevance of a political readini^ of the novel. As a convert, he now attacks former critical methods (as he complacently under- stands them): "To maintain that this book is not embedded in the worldto treat it innocently, as earlier academic critics did, as a garden of symbols, or as a quest for the (irail or the Father, or whatnotis itself to diminish Conrad's achievement." God knows what Denby has been reading, since he cites no names for these "earlier academic crit- ics." But the mediocrity of criticism has not ceased just because one has sub- stirnted political readings for Freud- ian readings or archetypal readings. Denby's faith in "embeddedncss" is no less partial and inicomprehending than someone else's faith in mythological or psychoanalytic subtexts. I do not want to blame Denby alone for this. He is imbibing Colttmbia's ten- dency with literary texts, which is to fas- ten on the political and the moral over the erotic or aesthetic or epistemologi- cal; and such an emphasis is a standing invitation to correctness or incorrect- ness, since it steers discussion, willy-nilly, toward currently agitated political and moral questions. In itself, this agenda of instruction, though it would not be my choice of a "Great Books" cotuse, can- not be said to cause actual harm. Both of these coiuses have proved enlighten- ing and broadening to many genera- tions of Columbia students. But some- thing has changed for the worse, I suspect. Were Coltunbia's stndenis in the pastor their instructoislikely to make anachronistic and patronizing judgments on Virgil or Dante or Con- rad, stemming from concerns of the present? I suspect that former genera- tions were invited to immerse them- selves in the mentality of the past with- out the presence of this sort of hividi- otis judgment. But now they can all hold themselves contentedly superior to the "Turk-bashing" Dante. I would hate to have my own teaching represented by notes taken by someone like Denby, so I haven't quoted much from his account of his instructors. But this is what he represents Professor Sha- piro (whom Denhy calls "the (^oach") as saying at the beginning of the Conrad class: I doiTi wain to say that this is a work that teaclirs desperaiJon ... or that the evil is something we can't deal with. In some ways, the world we live in is not as dark as (^lonrad's; in some ways darker. This is nni a one-way slide to the apocaHpse that we are witne.s.sing. We o\iiselves have the abihty now to recogni/e and even to fix and change our .society even as literature reflects, embodies, and serves as an agent of change. Now. this sermon-mode (complete with its hortatory "we") is tnuch more grand than Denby's earlier account of how the Coach began the Conrad class: "Who here comes from a savage race?" the t:oach shouted at his students. "We all come from Africa," said the one ."Virican-Arnerican in the class Shapiro smiled. It was not, I thought, exactly tbc answer he was looking for, but it was a good answer. Then he was off again. "Are you natural?" he roared al a woman sitting quietly near him at the end of the table. "What are the constraints for you? What are llie rivets? Why are >'ou here getting civilized, readhig Lit Hum?" B e prepared for life's little contingencies, with... Gentleman's Pocket Knife (GPK) 3 (Yes, three!) for only ''B ut read this ad for an even b etter deal! 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(The words may hv the voltible Denby's attempt to yd77. up the threateningly dull prospect of retailinff what goes on in a college course.) But whether Shapiro is doing his piilpii-act or his iniimidation-act, none of what he is reported to have said has anything to do with bringing sttidcnts to understand the two funda- mental gesuircs of literature, what Ste- vens called "the poetry of the idea" and "the poetry of the words"that is, how Conrad turned what might have been a conventional travelogue into an im- aginatively powerful fiction, and what discourses he had to mobilize (or to invent) to do so. Seeing the Colum- bia course use Dante and Conrad as moral examples is rather like seeing someone using a piece of embroidery for a dishrag with no acknowledg- ment of the difference between hand- woven silk and a kitchen towel. It is true that some of the instructors struggle against the morally judgmental tide (Professors Tayler and Van Zuylen, for instance, the one emphasizing archi- Lib eral Arts After redding More's Utopia again. That year there were two of us. Long-distance firsts. At swimming, zweiter Klasse on the liquid shelf Ribboned by the glassy daze The Wannsee made from sun upon A rose, retiring shoulderblade. We sat in the abandoned library At a table one foot thick With nothing on the ancient floor. Someone read to others out of Earshot homilies that had No past, or nodded to no written World, intentionally present Tense, and good, and temporary Althotigh the future drove like bells In afternoon admonishments From atitumn's discontented suite. The days himg low. The woodwork waited. Sunlight seemed life's fu'st attack Of exaltation, or politics. Perhaps, embraced those indecisions Out of which we carved our coming selves. There in that sophisticated Chaos with our unsuspecting Lips upon the wave, our eyes on books. Our hands relentless, inefficient. Artificial as philosophy. All sciences explosive in the vein Wherein you looked at me. and dove. The mountains stood along in ail their shade. MARY KINZIE tectonics, the other "the resurrection of life through art"), but it's hard to work against the emphasis of the selec- tion, which has been designed to pro- voke students into socio-politico-moral position-taking. To come, then, to the other course, the more overtly philosophical (Contem- porary Civilization. Does it lend itself better to the emphasis on "ideas" on which the two courses are predicated? Does Dcnby learn anything as he gives the course a second try? He has a lot of trouble with these texts and has to strug- gle not to fall asleep: there's less human interest here. But human interest gets dragged in anyway. Hegelian dialectic makes one student suggest that "the Holocatist was the Fortunate Fall. It drove the fbiuiding of Israel." The in- structor rushes in to say that "you can make the Hegelian argument that the Holocaust can be read dialectically.... But this is not a justification for the Holocatist." And Denby is off and running: His clarification only introduced greater contention. Several stiidcnLs voiced thoir dismay, and I snarled to myself that I lacked the ingenuit\' to read the Holocatisi dialec- tically as the neces- sary spur to Israel's creation \Miat did Hegel mean by free- dom an^-ivay?... many of us would be loath to nominate Prussia in 1815, with its censor- ship, iis lack of repre- sentative bodies, as our ideal of freedom. Indeed, if Prtissia was Hegel's ideal, he may well have approved, despite his dismi.ssal of the morality of the East, the paternalistic and authoritarian Sin- gapore. Poor Hegel. Did he ask to have the Holocaust and God save the mark Singapore brought into the discussion? The relentless bring- ing of everything past into everything present so falsifies the contribution to thought made by successive philoso- phical systems that students can hard- ly be made to real- ize the explanatory and cognitive value of such systems. Denby likes to bring everything back to himself. If he read.s Hegel on human beings constructing each other as per- sons by mtitual lecognition, the passage is attached to Denby's being mugged in the subway. And it is converted, to boot, into High Noon: I had not looked the two young men in the eyes, liierally refusing ihem "recoginlion." The reason, as I said earlier, was botli (on- lenipt and fear: You do not eyeball some- one holfling a gtm on yoti In Hegel's fiction, ibe men who met at high noon hiid no past; they met, so to speak, as equals. The two men who faced me were probably descendants of actual slaves, and while one can't forget that, the fact doesn't, in itself, change ihe nattire of the encounter. The difference between us was one of class. If the two young men had held up a black man in a suit on his way to work, the dynamics of tbe situation would have been tbe same, I'd say the "difference between" Denby and the muggers was first and fore- most one of criminality. To say it was one of class is to stigmatize all blacks in pcjverty, most of whom do tiot end up as muggers. w hen Denby can't natural- ize a philosophical doc- trine with such a hu- man interest vignette, he becomes fretfully cross, Though his instructor energetically expounds Kant's interest in epistemology and in a moral a priori, such things leave Denby cold. They don't have enough to do with real life: "Was it possible? Was it sane? To derive an ethics purely from reason and will; to compose a guide to action elaborated without the pressures that every human actor feels, a rumhie of indigestion, a mood?" .\nd wasn't Kant's experience a\vfully narrow- compared with, hey, Denby's? "Manuel [a student] obviously had a point about parochialism. A lifelong bachelor, Kant had never gone farther than five miles from the small city of Konigsberg Wasn't there something provincial, lim- ited, repressed, perhaps privileged in his conception of the moral life?... I agreed with the students." As for thinking, with Kant, that an act committed fiom inclination cannot properly be called an act of genuine moral worth, that morality resides in the fulfillment of dutywhy, Denby can scarcely contain his scorn: "The passage has its loony and comical side, an excru- ciating pathos. It's almost as if, for Kant, enjoymetit and spontaneity taitited vir- tue, and wretchedness and willed pro- priety sanctified it. Great noble boobyl" But "wretchedness and willed propriety" are not at issue in Kant. Kant's aim for 38 NEW REP UBLI C OCTOBER 7. i996 human beings is happiness consonant wiih right conduci. Duty is a dfbi; it is iioi 11 "proprieiy," like (he riglii fuck. The booby here is not KiUit. Anri Dciiliy is a patroni/ing boob\. loo. "iudirioiisiy" assessing wbat Kani, or l);iiitc, <r any otlier thinker or wriitr who has the misfortune to fall into his bands, has to offer. He seems to think ibat lie is by this means asserting him- self as an adult. Kids may bave lo swal- low il wbolc: li(.'ll. lie swallouvtl it wbok' tlic lltst time around: but this lime he's not going to be buffaloed into any grov- elling submission. No, sir: "Extending piety to classics that one didn't respond lo was an academic vice, and I bad lo a\()id it. I \vould read for enjoyment and insu LKtion, and when bored. I would say so." And when be [bougbt that Ivinl was a great noble tjooby, lie would say tbat, loo. And he wouki be t;tii\ too. He would not lei himself off tbe moral hook. Did be [ie;u those muggers righi? And whai about liis mother? Voti didn t ibink he'tl l('a\'e her out, did voii? "Unlike Regati .iiul (ioncril," he vvriics in bis eliapler on Ki)n^ Lear. "1 did my parent no gccat barm1 took caie of ber in the slightly (listaiu but steady way that wai'y only sons take I are ol tiiotliersl)ut I was often in a rage," And wbat do you know, he becomes a veritable Kantian booby, full ofwretclieebiess and willed proprieiy. as be does his duly: "No tnatter. 1 told myself al the lime. The thing required in grown-up sons was dut\. VVhai you felt was beside the polni. You bad ol^lifra- (ions. and you hafl to fulfill tliein." Are we to believe that Denby has undergone a Kiintian conversion? And il so, wby was there no sign of it forty pa^es earlier, not even a repentant parentbesis? W ell, tbis book will give no aid or comfort to anyone on either side of tbe cul- ture wars. How does one (lefeiirl courses in the "Great B<oks," if they produce in their students (and no doubt in some instructors) mindless attacks on serious writers ol'ibe past? .-\iid why attack them, since substituting aiiothei" socio-political set ot books more modern, more representative of maiginalized groups, more critical of "Western Culture"only pcrpettiates the old bad babit of ignoring the differ- ence between a sermon and a novel, an idea and a painling? Otie can answer wearily ibat echu ation has to start some- wbefc. and it hardly matieis wbei'e: Amciican students entering nni\ersity ba\c read pratiicalh noibing, so any- thing will help Ui afhanre ibem to a next level of consciousness. And this is not (lone in a single term, or by a single course, or even bv courses alone. II' tbe student graduating from college has a mote nuanccd set o( ititellecitial re- sponses than at) etjually intflligeni stu- dent ol the same aj^e who has not been to college, tlicit all tbe cotnersatiuns and tbr coiuses and the extra-curricular activities bave had a cumulatively desir- able effect. In that hope, most teachers teach. As fbi- iiKJtals themselves, tlicy ai e not ac(|iiire(l in college courses. Ttiey are acquired in eliildlio<d aiui tauglit by example, (bourses iti "moral reasoning" (as Harvard calls its set oJ Clore (iourses on philosophical, mostly ethical, con- cepts) may sharpen one's sense of the rationality and the logie propei" lo in- formed moral discussion, but tbey don'l make one a better spouse oi" father or liieud or citizen. To think that moral betleiinent can be the result of a re- quired course in wliich stndents hasb over lightweight argtmients on complex books (one per week, more or less): to confitse moral instritciion (or miUtial moral hectoring) on fashionable con- temporai'y issues with (be ]:)ursuit of learning or tbe uuderstanfliug of litera- Une; to throw a week of DatUe in trans- lation at students wlio bave not ilie faintest notion of the Middle Ages or Cihrislian doctrineall this is not to extend "Western civilization," but to travesty it. A nd our bero? He con- cludes that "the courses in the Western classics force us to ask all those questions about self and societ\' we no longer address without embarrass- mentthe questions our media-traiuet! habits of irony bave nicked us oul of askitig." Odd. Swift's "habits of irony" never tricked him oul of asking such questions. Nor Montaigne's. Nor tler- vantes's. Of course, tbey lived and thought before we were, every last one of us, media-trained. But the impor- tant point is that ironyand self-irony above allis the ilrst requisite of the educated tnind. And Denby, on tbe evi- denee of his book, has iifH yet acquired it. In bis conclusion, with a tei'tain mag- niloquence, he distributes points to "tbe lelt" and "tbe right": T<i ihe left, I would say iluil reading ihc canon in ilie 199O's is unlikely lo turn any- niR- into a chauvinisi oi' an inipfiiali.si tVujili- WIK> deny [he power of iiti.stlictic cxpcriciKC or ttic possibility of" disintcr- (.stt'd jiidgiiifnt may welt have cynirat oi- tarcfiisi reasons for doin^ so. And to the righi, 1 would say thai liow- I'viT insirut live ihc grt'iu works niif^lii be in buiifting ihi' moral chariKter of the iiaiion's citi/cns. the books were more likelv, ill the inilial brush, to inenn some- idiosyncratic and pcisonal I agree witli William tifiniclt ;ind other tra- ditionalisis to tliis C'Xteni: Men and women cdnialed in the Wcsietn tiadition will have ilie bc'si possible shot at ihe dauiitinjr iask of u'inveniiiig morality and comiiniiuty in a republic now badly uiiieied by fear and niisti usi. As Denby's rhetoiic in this passage rises to its climax. I could onl\- tbitik in amazement about tbe new iTiillenai Ian importance of college readiug lists: Lit Hutu and C.C. now have to do what Mil- loti thought only the Incarnation could ck)repair tbe lall of otir flisl parents. As Oenby giavely proclaims tbe tejjublic to be "bacih' tattered," we are to tbitik tbat his so\eieij^tt judi^metit has been upheld by tbe Cireat Books that be has stitdietl so deeply: "They offer tbe most direet representatioti of the possibilities o( eivil existence and the disaster oC its dissoltuion." Isn' t it stratige tbat some- one could write this way aftei reading Montaigne? AtKl tbf mid-life crisis? Since tbe argu- ments and the opinions exptTssed are too coarse and too slipshod to be taken PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION SOFTWARE Examine Evary Eleetton 1789-1992 On Your PC Dliplay lOOOi of Color M>p> and Chana Coven All Stale and National ReaulD Uietl By Major Univenilies and Collegss Free Update Afisr 19B6 Hoction Explore IB96 Elsctoral Strategy $29.95 To Order Call 1-608-845-2332 or Entail Your RM|uat to ELEC50FT0EXECPC. COM ELECTORAI. SOFTWARE, Box 830371. Mafliion Wi 53593.0271 PERCUSSION JAZZ PROJECT 1 PRE-RELEASE ALBUM AVAILABLE Intelligent music, no cacophony, no plagiarism, no generic solos. no cliches, no musical babble. Call (310) 271-4770 Dibliorind The Internet's largest inventory of old, used and rare books. Search titles of hundreds of antiquarian booksellers with a single (free) query http://www.bibllofind.com OCTOBER 7, 1996 Tilt-: Ni:W Ri-.fl Bl.JC 39 seriously, one can perhaps read Dtnby's book Hs the autobiography of a tired man wanting a break from the movies. The account is framed as a conversion narrative. He was weak but now he is strong. Here is a part of Denby's perora- tion on the personal dimension of his adventures: I was exposing myself to sti er than my life, stronger ihau my life but also exposing my /(/('aiirl ihe books called biirk ihings tlial I had iorgoUcn or been afraid |<> face, and so I knew thai I had sinned in ibc way Atigiisiiin" said we all sinned and thai I had nol always served my mad and needy molbei' well in her final years I was discovering an edge, talking more and more in class, even com- peting with ihf teachers In truth, by the end. ! had grown stronger. Not em- powered in ihe .social w,\y ihat critics of the canon meant, bul personally strong- er . . . . I had recovered a good part of myseii.... 1 did not iecl desolate ai the end of ihe year. If we believe him, then the books and the teachers and the classrooms worked their therapeutic magic even without his understanding how they did it. But I would bet that the result would have been the same with four entirely dif- ferent sets oI absorbing books. There would have beeu the same feeling of intellecttial refrcshuient, of having spent exciting time with interesting minds, of having been talked to (or roared at) by committed and intelligent teachers. And thai makes the whole question of the "(ireat Books" moot, doesn't it? HF.I.EN VF.NDi.i'.R is Porter University Pro- fessor at Harvard. She has recently pub- lished The Given and the Made and Thf B reaking of Style {Harvard University Press). Modernism to Madness B Y JAROSLAW ANDERS Insatiability by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz translated by Louis Iribarne (Northwestern U niversity Press, 53 4 p p . , $ 4 0 ) A t the beginning olthis mad, surreal Bildtmgsroman, fust pitblished in 1927 in Poland, a young Polish gen- tleman named Clenezip Kapen, a sensi- tive high-school graduate aud the son of a brewer in the Carpathian region, looks into the starlit sky and is seized by a sense of cosmic melancholy: "Eter- nity was as nothing compared to the monstrous infinitude of time within in- finite space and the lieavenly bodies inhabiting it. Wiiat to make of the ihing? It was beyond imagining and yet im- pressed itself on the mind with absolute ontological necessity...." As his aloof, tyrannical father lies dying, Cienezip senses "something painlully sweet in this sensation of loneliness," and he sets otit on a Iren/ied, sexnal and philo- sophical qtiest ol self discovery. He rtuis away from his lather's bedside and engages in a series of heated debates on art, love, being, science, theosophy and religion with an a.s.sortment of characters inclndiiig a composer of cacophonous music, an avant-garde writer, a professor of symbolic logic and an expropriated aristocrat ttirued neo-Catliolic philoso- pher. He is brielly sedticed by the com- poser, btit he ends the night in tbe arms ol' the mysteriotis and alluring Princess Irina, who is mtich advanced in years. The erotic aud the philosophical free- ly intermingle in the novel, and endless inlellecttializing seems the favorite form of foreplay ior most of the book's char- acters. In Irina's bed, Genezip mnses: "The pri>perty of arbitrariness is imme- diately posited for every animate crea- ttue: il is an elementary fad of exis- tence; under certain circumstances re- sistance engenders a feeling of limita- tion and relative necessity, whereas ab- solute necessity, because of the abstract elimination that occurs at the periph- ery of Partictilar Being or of living crea- tures in general, is necessarily a fiction." Young Zip, as he is also called, is grow- ing up fast. In the cotirse of the book's many pages we see him himiiliated and rejected by Irina, joining a military school, reconciled witli Irina, worship- ing another fiendish sadistic woman and mtirdering her gay chaperone, tak- ing part in an aborted coup and finally marrying an angelic beatity, whom he ,strangle.s ou their wedding night. In the meantime, the whole world is imploding aroimd Genezip and his companitins. Western Europe is ruled by an array of "soft" communist or fas- cist regimes that manage lo keep their populations complacent and materially satiated throngh superior labor organi- zation, though the word is out that "the white man had ceased to believe in the myth of iiilinite progress and now saw the wall of obstruction in himself and not in nattire." There is a hyper- reactionary "WTiite" revohuion going on in Russia, while from the Far East a "liv- ing wall" of Chinese is approaching with ihe intention of interbreeding with the F.tiropeans and starling a uew era in the history of humanity. In the middle, as always, lie.s Poland. govertied by Cieneral Rotzmolochowic/, its enigmatic dictator, and a shadowy Syndicate for National Salvation. Con- stantly allying itseH and fighting with ail its neighbors, the country is "absoltite- ly unswerving in its heroic defense of the idea of the nation" and determined "to be a bastion, a role which in her tor- por she gladly assumed." /Mas, the coun- try's elites fall prey to a drtig-iudticed New Age religion of Murti Bing that preaches the Mystery of Panexistence, Maximal Oneness and Duo-Unity. At the decisive historical moment the gen- eral, moved by a stidden htnnanitarian impulse, surreuders his invincible army to the C'hinese aud is respectfully be- headed by the enemy. At the end of the story Genezip. "by now a consummate lunatic, a mild automaton," is forced to marry a beautiful Chinese princess and become a faithful servant of his new masters. T his bizarre book is set in a fantastic present, and it might as well be ihe 19yOs in the costumes of the iiUerwar Poland. An innocent reader could be perstiaded thai he is reading a wordy, overdone, sometimes delightful parody of a generic Central European Novel, dense with murky eroticism, abstract cerebrations and an almost com- forting premonition of the impending end of history. Even the character oi' Koizmolochowicz. a stable boy turned Maximum Leader and "the most unpre- dictable demon from among the intrepid souls still loamiug abotu on the vanish- ing horizon of individualism," might be read as a portrait of Marshall Jozef Pil- sudski, Poland's iuterwar leader, and a more contemporary version of the Polish man of providence Lech Walesa. His genius, it seem.s, consists mainly of the fact that he has absolutely tu) clue aboiU auythiug thai happens arotmd him. and so his erratic decisions befuddle his allies and enemies alike. 40 THE NEW REP UBUC OCTOBER 7,1996
John Keats - The Man Behind The Lyrics: Life, letters, and literary remains: Complete Letters and Two Extensive Biographies of one of the most beloved English Romantic poets
Sonnets (Complete Edition): 63 Sonnets from one of the most beloved English Romantic poets, influenced by John Milton and Edmund Spenser, and one of the greatest lyric poets in English Literature, alongside William Shakespeare