Great Books and the Abyss [by David Lehman]

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.

Comments

[Caroline Seebohm]

Brilliant. But depressing. How do we climb out of the abyss?
Caroline Seebohm

[Sidney Ghoti]

Great column. Would you read my manuscript of poems and consider giving me a reading, blurbing my next chapobook, or recommending me for a Guggenheim?

[Terence Winch]

Lucid, brilliant, and right on target.

[Joseph Gerver]

You might be missing the point about the N-word in Huckleberry Finn. Everyone in that book who uses the N-word is evil, or, like Huck, has been totally indoctrinated into an evil system of values that they have almost no chance of escaping. Mark Twain knew what he was doing. And he understood that this book could only be written by a white man, because racism is a disease of white people (including Twain himself when he was growing up). Huck feels guilty about helping Jim escape. His conscience tells him to turn Jim in. He is certain that if he helps Jim to escape, he will go to Hell. But in the end, his heart overrules his conscience and he does the right thing anyway, still convinced that he will go to Hell. Of course he uses the N-word. That's just one more part of the total corruption of white society that Mark Twain is portraying.

[Keith]

I am quite positive that the word, "N-word" does not appear anywhere in Huckleberry Finn. At the risk of being censored, here, the word used is "nigger". It is absolutely ridiculous that we cannot use this word when talking about it. Using it as a label which hurts someone is awful and wrong. But looking at the word from an etymological and literary viewpoint should be totally acceptable. Fear of words should not control us and neither should the use of a word. We need to understand the difference between abuse and discussion.

[Bruce Kawin]

This is a wonderful article, and it's all true.

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Terence -- and you, Bruce. Keith, I am in total agreement with what you say. Many people feel as we do. If only they would raise their voices instead of yielding to the fear of being shamed by the mob.

[Marc Cohen]

Just finished reading Finley’s "The World of Odysseus"; this a terrific and timely essay. -- Marc Cohen

[Bill O'Brien]

David, thank you so much for raising your hand and adding to the counter-current against the received wisdom of this ominous aspect of progressivism. It is of course not limited to literature-course reading lists. It is only through continually laying out the counter-arguments -- dare I say common sense-- that this newest fashionable orthodoxy might someday run its course. I applaud your bravery.

[David Lehman]

Thank you, M.C.
And thanks very much, Bill, for your spirited comment. I am very glad we agree. Superlative debater that you are, I'd love to see a brief by you on the subject! It is amazing that the views I am articulating here require "bravery." We need people to speak out despite fear of being shamed by the Woke mob.
It ain't easy if only because some publishers and publications are woke to the point of insomnia.

[David Lehman]

From a professor of film I learn that <<< One of my buddies, who happens to be a moderate conservative on many issues (in contrast to my still-stalwart Marxist (non-Stalinist) perspective, was teaching SINGIN' IN THE RAIN. One student raised the issue - and took it to the dean! - that Gene Kelly kissed Debbie Reynolds without asking permission! My friend hung up his chalk immediately thereafter. Unfortunately, only a few of us laugh at the absurdity of such "P.C." accusations. And it's not really a laughing matter when one's reputation and livelihood are at stake. >>>>

[Irene]

It's not only the arts; it's medicine, too. "Chest-feeding?"
Or, as I saw on the subway this morning, "One out of four people with uteruses will have an abortion."
Something wrong with "breast" and "women"?

[Angela Ball]

David, what a brilliant and unnerving connection you make between deconstructionism and the plight we find ourselves in, a world where MOBY DICK is (according to a course description) "A novel of the whaling industry." Periphery becoming the center--and the center becoming the abyss. Thank you for this disturbing and incisive essay.