have Monet, what's the point of also in-cluding a vapid beach scene by an aca-demic Impressionist like the Spaniardjoaqtiin Sorolla y Bastida? "Rings" askstoo much of sotne artists, while othersare presented at far less than their fullstrength in order to shoehorn theminto the scheme. Ingres's gigantic Na-polemi Enthroned (1806), which hangsnear Rubens's Arch ofFerdinund, is hope-less, an ice-cold surface with none ofthe painter's invitingly ambiguous un-dercurrents. Great art is not necessar-ily emotionally direct. I would havethought that Brown understood that;if so, he's not sharing the secret withvisitors to the Olympics.

"Rings" is aesthetic deniagoguery, andso far as [. Carter Brown is concernedAtlanta is only the beginning. In dis-cussing the show, Brown has said that hehopes to carry the concept to a "poten-tial audience that lies heyvnd Atlanta and

the Olympic Ciames." He may have thewherewithal. 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 BillGates has founded to create an interna-tional cornptiter image lihrary and pro-dtice art-related CD-ROMs, Brown canhelp shape the electronic universe whet eeducation and entertainment overlap.Apparently the stakes have become sohigh ihat art is practically beside thepoint. At the conclusion of "Rings,"Matisse's Dance (llj is hanging on the walland Mahler is coming throtigh the head-phones and Brown is intoning, "Inter-connectedness ... rings ... passion. It'swhat makes us—all of us—human."Wlien you're talking like this, paintingsonlv 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 Booby TrapBY HELEN VENDLER

Great Books: My Adventures with Homer,Rousseau, Woolf, and Other IndestructibleWriters of the Western Worldby David Denby(Simon and Schuster, 492 pp., $30)

I n an original solution to whathe calls his "mid-life crisis,"David Denhy, the movie criticof Xeiv imA magazine, decided

in 1991, at the age of 48, to go back toColumbia and reread the Great Booksthat he had encountered thirty yearsbefore in the college's two famouscotirses, C.C., or (^ontemporarv C'ivili/a-tion, and Lit Hum. or Literature Hti-manities. From the beginning, Denbyseems to have had the idea of writing abook about his experience. He wanted,he says, not only "to fnid out what actti-ally went on in classt ootns" in these daysof the ctilture wars, but also "to add mywords to the debate from the gronndup." He was eager to write "an adventtuebook ... and also a naive book, an ama-teur's book—in other words, a folly."

Denby chose the right descriptions.His book is naive, amateurish and afolly. The author's "adventures" amongmasterpieces suggest that one is moreimpermeable at the age of 48 than at theage of 18. Try as he may to stiggest thathe is growing and changing as he re-

encoiinters the Great Books, his accountsuggests a man coming into the fieldwith bis mind made up. Take, for in-stance, his prefatory remarks about his"crisis":

I.ike many others, I was jaded yet stillhungry; I was cast into the modern state oflivin^-in-lhc-nicdia, a state of excitementneedled wilh disgust. At the t'ud ui the ceii-liiry, the end (eveni) of the millennitmi,the media tineaten to take over altogetherand push literaUire out of sii;hl, and mydisgust was tinged with intense emotions Ieonldn'l qnite pin down—nostalgia, regiei,anger, even despair.... 1 sensed my identityhad softened and merged into the atmo-sphere of representation My own mem-ories were lapsing ont into the log of medialife, the tnilived lite as spectator.

Since books, too, are instatices of "i epre-sentation," it's hard to see what goodmore representations (in printed form)might do for a man sick of spectator-ship. And the millennial threats areoverplayed. 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 ofbooks. Annvay, it is unlikely that an evoltitionary mechanism so advantageotisas language is going to stop peribniiingits usual operations with words (frompvms to poems) any time soon. But lei usfollow the jaded yet hungry, excited butdisgusted narrator into the Columbiaclassrooms.

Denby explains C^olumbia's famousrequircd-of-all-sttidents courses:

The ffeneral reader need know oniy [hatC'.( . grew ont of (^olinnhia's War Issnesconrse offered during the First World Warand was considered from the beginninga defense of Western civilization: and thatLit Ihnii (or Hnmanities A. as it was hii-lialh called) emerged in 1937 from a Gen-eral Honors conrse developed by teaciierand editor John Erskine over a period of\'ears,

Denby grasps that at least one of thesecourses might be pectiliar. I don't knowif the Columbia archives would bear himotit. btit he avers that

from ilie heginiiing, Lit Hum was intendedto enshiine the liteialmc of Christian Eur-ope in a ct>llege increasingly pi>piilated hythe children of Eastern or Southern Enri>-pean imniigranis—the imwashed hni notnnwashable Jews and Italians who neededto he assimilated inui the larger culture ofthe country.

Against this assertion, I can only say thatin 1937 there were rather few of thegreat luiwashed enrolled in ColtimbiaCollege: and John Erskine, in puttingtogether a fall semester of ancient Greekand Latin wiiters in his cotirse, washardly etishrining (with the exception ofAugtistine) the "literature of (ChristianEurope." It might more trtily be saidthat he was enshrining Anglophilia, fhesecond semester of lJt Hum incltidedDante and Goethe, but it also inehidedSpinoza; and a fair number of the wi ii-ets on the list of 1937 who might be saidby Denby to belong to "Christian Eur-ope" were also on another and morepowerful 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 thenuiddled thinking ihat pervades hisbook. "Christianity" and "Europe" arefar from simple concepLs, atid nobody,asked to cite some works from "the lit-eiatiue of Christian F.tnope." wotild belikely to mentioti Tom /ones or C.nndide.In fact. Lit Hum's spring list of 19H7is lather peculiarly unrepresentative ofChristianity: "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'sGargantua and Pantagfuel is robustly anti-clerical and blasphemous; and the powerpolitics a{' Henry IV. Parts I and II, hardlyrepresent "(Christian Europe" as. say. TheW/nln's Tale, with its resnrrective image,might represent it. Thomas Aquinas isconspictiousiy absent, along with othertheological writers from Bonaventure toRolle. Even Milton, in the form of therctjuired Paradise Lost, hardly representsEtnopean (Christian orthodoxy. On thewhole, if one enteied as one of the un-washed, one would be wholeheartedlyconverted, at the end of Lit Hum, to aform of washedness that was notablyskeptical.

I n 1961-62, when Denby firstsat throtigh Lit Hum. not toonnich ill the second semesterhad changed. The cheerful

Ihm Jones had been dropped, in thoseexistentialist days, in favor of Cririie andPunishment, and Machiavelli had disap-peared. Bits of the New Testament hadbeen added (no doubt because the stti-dents had become more .sectilar—andmore Jewish), as bits of the HebrewBible 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 wasKing Lear, Antony and Cleopatra and TheTempest.

By 1991, however, when Denby re-turned to the classroom for his mid-lifetttne-up, Rabelais, Cervantes. Spinoza,Swift. Voltaire, Dostoevsky and Part IIof Fattsl had been scratched from thelist in favor of Boccaccio, Descartes, Aus-ten and Woolf, Paradise Lost is listed as"optional." Shakespeare is reduced toKing Lear and a play of the instructor'schoice. Instead of Woolf, the instructorcan substitute another text. It is clearthat the subterranean discontents of stu-dents or professors. alt)ng with culturalchange, caused the alterations. In thetirst "classical" semester, a feeble propi-tiatory nod to the female presence inthe 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 "GreatBooks" will represent "the literature ofC'hristian Europe" as well as another.Vet if such books have the impact thathe claims for them, it should matterwhether a student reads Aquinas or Spi-noza, Machiavelli or Boccaccio, Austenor Dostoevsky. Which picture of "Chris-tian Europe" should the college aimto purvey? As long as he is in the com-pany of a "Great Book," Denby seems

not to care, though he sttirdily resistsKant and Dante, and feels him-self something of an enlightened mod-ern crtisader in so doing. More of thatlater.

S o far I have neglected thesecond course, the one socuriously 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 (TheCity of God), Aquinas (politics andethics). Christine dc Pisan, Machiavelli,Calvin, Descartes, Galileo, Hobbes andLocke, progresses, in the spring term.tu Rousseati, Httme. Kant, Madison,Smith, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Woll-stonecraft, Darwin, Nietzsche andEreud, Then it closes with a flurry ofchoice: the instructor must select onebook from a list containing Weber.Gramsci, Arendt. Lenin and Habermas,and one book from a list containingBeauvoir, MacKinnon, Rawls, Eanon,Malcolm X, West ((>)rnel), Eoticaultand some Supreme Court decisions.(The particular decisions are un-specified, but I don't doubt that theybroach issues of gender or race.) Thefirst list of elective readings exists to sat-isfy' academic Marxists, on the faculty oramong the students, and the secondexists to satisfy feminists or black studiesadvocates. It is a sad falling-off fromMachiavelli to MacKinnon, from Des-cartes to Malcolm X.

The list for C.C. is idea-driven. Whathave writers had to say about the goodor the just or the desirable society? Withits twenty-six authors (plus parts of theBible), the course is a onceover-lightly:many of the texts (the Republic, the Nico-machean Ethics, the Foundations of the Me-taphysics of Morals) are not your ordinarycoverabie-in-a-week works. Indeed, myfirst emotion on beginning Denby'sbook was an incredulous sympathy forthe teachers that have to frog-marchfreshmen or sophomores through thesedense texts (or through dense selectionsfrom them). Denby quotes a now-departed instructor who thottght thatthere 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 leavetheir mark on the student." But whatmark, exactly? And is this the best wayto spend those hundred hours?

One could envisage a dilferent wayto introduce stitdents to the Europeanpast, a way that would not be drivensolely by the idea of a good society, butby several ideas of how to live both thepublic life and the private life. Sttidents

might read the Symposium or the .Satyri-con or the Ars Amatoria. Dialogues onlove and satires on social practice mightbe considered as instrtutixe as trea-tises on politics and ethics. Along withMachiavelli, one might read Pascal, sothat not only government but also in-trospection might count as an indexof "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. aredrawn almost entirely from political phi-losophy and ethics, scanting almost en-tirely the other branches of philosoph-ical thought—aesthetics, metaphysics,epistemology; logic, the philosophy ofscience. Wittgenstein is conspicuouslyabsent.

D enby provides three read-ing lists (1937, 1961, 1991)fbi Lit Hum. but he doesnot offer any earlier lists

of (C.(;. since its "War Issues" incarna-tion, remarking only that C;.C. "haschanged the natmr of its reading lists soradically that printing syllabi from sev-enty or fifty years ago would serve littlepurpose." There must be a story there.Denby does not seem to realize that ahistory of former radical change atColumbia supports precisely the argu-ment of those who would now onceagain alter "the canon." Perhaps thedesigners of C.C, inventing a courseunder the pressure of war. felt that onecould interest students (or their teach-ers) only in political and ethical matters.and gave up on the other branches ofphilosophy; but the result of C.C. (as Iha\e seen it) is that most Columbiagraduates think of "ideas" as a wordreferring to political or ethical conceptsrather than to aesthetic or metaphysicalones.

Political life, in such a course, isdeemed "realer" than private life oraesthetic life. Ideas about society andthe state are presented as more im-portant than ideas about what Yeatscalled "making [one's] soul." Even inLit Hum, the supposedly literary course,the spring books chosen (except thoseby women authors) are ones heavy on"ideas" in the Columbia sense: the Con-fessions, Montaigne, King Lear, ParadiseLost, Descartes. Goethe. (Conrad's Heartof Darkness was Denby's instructor'schoice in the "free" week, though otherinstrtictors chose Dostoevsky or Mann orGide or Borges, for thematic or theoret-ical reasons that one can easily deduce.)Think what a different sense of Westerncivilization students would have if the lit-erature list offered the Metamorphoses,Troilus and Criseyde, Villon, Ariosto, AMidsummer Night's Dream, Boswell's John-son, Keats, Beckett. Nabokov. Wbat a

OCTOBER 7, 1996 THE NEW REPI ;BIJC 35

send-up of solemn "ideas" as the foiui-dation of disctission of Western culttuesuch a course would be! And such a listwould be no less representative of "theWestern mind" than Lit Hum's currentsmorgasbord.

D enby thinks that he isboldly taking part in theculture wars by defendingthe existence of cotn^ses

such as C.C. aud Lit Hum. But since henever engages with (or even seems tonotice) the principles behind Colum-bia's choice of books from the Westerncanon, he cannot really touch the cen-tral objections to such courses: that anagenda 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 assumedrather than held up for inspection andimperceptibly miuate from generationto generation. Instead Denby bittstersand 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 judgingthe works he reads, as if they were themovies of the week up for review. Dante,for instance. Denby has a hard time withDante. He begins by giving samples ofpseudonymous sitident comments onDante. "Wiiy is he so obsessed with thesepeople? WTio is he to come up withthese tortures?" says one. "There aremosques in hell. Dante is Turk-bashing,"says another, offering "to put Dante him-self in the circle reserved for bigots andracists." And Denby feels pretty muchthe same way:

Yes, |the Inferno] was fantasy and iTpreseii-tatioii, not rcat lift?, but I could not ridmyself of ihc notion thai Dante had en-tered into complicity with torture. In someway, he believed in torttirc; he justiricdit. In life, ilie torturer's lust for controlyields to moriality; the \ictim dies. Herethe torim;nt goes on forever. A man wotildbe tormented eternally for "barratry"—forgraft Imaginel A New York pol caughtin a parking-ticket scam buiictl in excre-ment forever!

In vain do the instrttctors attempt toform, in Denby as well as in the tuider-graduates, a more complicated attitttdc."Everybody's a Christian, guys. It's not asermon ... 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 bclbreyou judge," says Professor Tayler. Theyare right to warn against facile transposi-tions from one age to another, from areligious culture to a secttlar ctilttu e. Yetsuch arguments don't go to the heart ol

the matter. In literature, one earns one'splace by writing memorably, not by ex-pressing agreeable attittides that willwear as well in 1991 as in 1^00. or thatcan be forgiven by an "understanding"reader.

A nd this brings up the ques-tion of teaching poetryin translation (Allen Man-delbaum's translation of

Dante, in this case). The single string inDante's bow, finally, is his use of theItalian language. His imagination is cel-ebrated too, but we wouldn't rememberhis imaginative acts unless they w'ereembodied in his alternately severe atidvoltiptuous Italian. It is no wondertmdeigradttates don't kindle to Dante,since he has been stripped of his fun-damental persuasive power, The poorstudents, and their poor middle-agedchronicler, are not really readingDante. I do not expect them to masterthe Italian of fourteenth-century Flo-rence. Btit I do expect them to graspthat there is a difference and a loss, andthat their judicial pronouncements—whatever satisfaction they may pro-vide—have no aesthetic foimdation.

Denby gestures pathetically at thistritth when Professor Shapiro asks anItalian-speaking student to read aloud,iti Italian, the opening lines of theInfeino. Denby absurdly says, quoting thefirst twelve lines, that "I wotild ask thereader to read the lines aloud, even if,like me, he doesn't speak a word of Ital-ian So strong was the sound ofDante's poetry that it made me feelI wasn't reading the poem at all." Poetryis thtis redttced to what Denby calls"metrics" and "sottnd"—indispensableenough if you understand their functionwith respect to what is being said, btithardly usefttl when they stand alone, astmintelligiblc as Iroquois.

It is no surprise that Virgil, in RobertFitzgerald's translation, suffers muchthe same fate. Encoiuuering the Aeneidmakes even Denby sympathize (ratherungrammatically) with "opponents ofthe canon":

The Aeneid is the epitome of what oppo-ncnis of the canon hate: a self-empoweriugmyth of origins, a celebration of empireNo doubt about it—the poem asserts theceiUraliiy of Rome in such a way thai ren-ders [sic] other people besides tbe Greek-Trojan-Roman line marginal— dullAeneas, in my mind, came to embody tbectillure of the West itself, marching grim-ly but purposefully into the ftituif. Hebrought his father and son, but he left hiswomen behind.

And the instructors cannot changeDenby's mind. In vain does Shapiroargue that 'Virgil subverted the glo-

rification of empire at every turn," andTayler that this is a poem that em-phasizes loss. Denby concludes in afashion that he visibly considers high-minded:

No wonder p(.-(»ple who had been read-ing tbe poem for years said they did notunderstand it. Virgil himself may not havetmdersiood it Tbat VirgiFs attittideswere "wroug" should not boiber anyone.That his poem is hurt as art by those atti-ttides is something tu grieve over anddeplore.

W hy do I find the spectacleof AWc YorK's movie critic"grieving over" and"deploring" Virgil's dam-

aged art so irresistibly comic? Why doeshis weighty judgment that Virgil himself"may not have understood" his ownpoem seem, to say the least, like some-thing out of Moliere? Denby seems notto understand that thejtidgment of a lit-erary work isajtidgment of the fitness ofthe 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 dosomething 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 hasbecome, through the admiration of stih-sequent writers, a part of the landscapeof culture.

It makes no sense to say, on thegrotmds of morals, or taste, or women'srights, or whatever, that a literary mas-terwork shotild have been differentlyconceived or differentlv execttted. Ofcotuse, one can argtte (as critics of"Great Books" courses sometimes do)tbat students should not be (breed toread morally "deplorable" or "elitist"books in a required course in college;that a college course, if it is to be re-quired, should plense contemporarymoral taste. (That taste is defined, ofcotirse, by the critics themselves.) This iswhere (loUtmbia's Lit Httni becomesmuddled in its principles. It obviotislyselects literary works on the basis oftheir suitability for ethical or politicalargument, as though artists were valu-able for making arguments, for theirtheological or moral or political opin-ions. Coltunbia feels no qttalms abotitteaching literary works blithely in trans-lation and detached from the thoughtof their time. It uses such works (as thetitle "Contemporary Civilization" testi-fies) not to illuminate, say, the MiddleAges, but to take up, say, "war issues" in1917. 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 towardethical judgment, unclouded by literaryor imaginative considerations. Perhapsit does students no harm to conductbull-sessions about colonialism in class;but should (.onrad be sacrificed to suchan aim?

D enby really goes to townon Conrad. He refuses—nobly, he thinks—the viewthat Heart of Darkness

endoi'ses the colonial ambitions of theBritish Empire. He asks whether "thou-sands of European and American read-ers may not have become nauseated bycolonialism after reading Heart ofDark-n-ess}" He appears not to see the realityof his position, that the politically incor-rect does not differ essentially from thepolitically correct: both are moral posi-lions taken with respect to art. Thepolitically correct think that the work ispro-colonial, and therefore has a bad(.•ffect on the reader; Denby thinks thatit is anti-colonial, and therefore has agood effect on the reader. He cannotsee what the two views have in com-mon, and their common irrelevance.Treating fictions as moral pep-pHls ormoral emetics is repugnant to anyonewho realizes the complex psychologicaland formal motives of a work of art.The representations in fiction are neverdriven by mimesis alone.

Denbv contests Chinua Achebe's pro-test against Heart of Darkness—Achebemaintains that "'Conrad's picture ofthe people of the Congo seems grosslyinadequate.' ' Denby argues that "noart of consciousness can ever be abso-lutely complete," that "Conrad did notoffer Henri oj Darkness as 'a picture ofthe people of the Congo' any morethan Achebe's Things Fall Apart, set inA Nigerian village, purports to be arounded picture of the British over-lords." And yet Denby allows that hehas been "changed by the debate inclass." that he has seen the relevance ofa political readini^ of the novel. As aconvert, he now attacks former criticalmethods (as he complacently under-stands them): "To maintain that thisbook is not embedded in the world—totreat it innocently, as earlier academiccritics did, as a garden of symbols, or asa quest for the (irail or the Father, orwhatnot—is itself to diminish Conrad'sachievement." God knows what Denbyhas been reading, since he cites nonames for these "earlier academic crit-ics." But the mediocrity of criticism hasnot ceased just because one has sub-stirnted political readings for Freud-ian readings or archetypal readings.Denby's faith in "embeddedncss" is noless partial and inicomprehending thansomeone 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 overthe erotic or aesthetic or epistemologi-cal; and such an emphasis is a standinginvitation to correctness or incorrect-ness, since it steers discussion, willy-nilly,toward currently agitated political andmoral questions. In itself, this agenda ofinstruction, though it would not be mychoice of a "Great Books" cotuse, can-not be said to cause actual harm. Bothof these coiuses have proved enlighten-ing and broadening to many genera-tions of Columbia students. But some-thing has changed for the worse, Isuspect. Were Coltunbia's stndenis inthe past—or their instructois—likelyto make anachronistic and patronizingjudgments on Virgil or Dante or Con-rad, stemming from concerns of thepresent? 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 holdthemselves contentedly superior to the"Turk-bashing" Dante.

I would hate to have my own teachingrepresented by notes taken by someonelike Denby, so I haven't quoted much

from his account of his instructors. Butthis is what he represents Professor Sha-piro (whom Denhy calls "the (^oach") assaying at the beginning of the Conradclass:

I doiTi wain to say that this is a workthat teaclirs desperaiJon ... or that the evilis something we can't deal with. In someways, the world we live in is not as dark as(^lonrad's; in some ways darker. This isnni a one-way slide to the apocaHpse thatwe are witne.s.sing. We o\iiselves have theabihty now to recogni/e and even to fixand change our .society even as literaturereflects, embodies, and serves as an agentof change.

Now. this sermon-mode (complete withits hortatory "we") is tnuch more grandthan Denby's earlier account of how theCoach began the Conrad class:

"Who here comes from a savage race?" thet: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, butit was a good answer. Then he was offagain. "Are you natural?" he roared al awoman sitting quietly near him at the endof the table. "What are the constraints foryou? What are llie rivets? Why are >'ou heregetting civilized, readhig Lit Hum?"

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hi Denby's rendition, Shapiro doesn'tsound any too civilized himself withhis shouting and roaring. (The wordsmay hv the voltible Denby's attempt toyd77. up the threateningly dull prospectof retailinff what goes on in a collegecourse.) But whether Shapiro is doinghis piilpii-act or his iniimidation-act,none of what he is reported to havesaid has anything to do with bringingsttidcnts 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, howConrad turned what might have beena conventional travelogue into an im-aginatively powerful fiction, and whatdiscourses he had to mobilize (or toinvent) to do so. Seeing the Colum-bia course use Dante and Conrad asmoral examples is rather like seeingsomeone using a piece of embroideryfor a dishrag with no acknowledg-ment of the difference between hand-woven silk and a kitchen towel. It is truethat some of the instructors struggleagainst the morally judgmental tide(Professors Tayler and Van Zuylen, forinstance, the one emphasizing archi-

Liberal ArtsAfter redding More's Utopia again.

That year there were two of us.Long-distance firsts. At swimming, zweiterKlasse on the liquid shelfRibboned by the glassy dazeThe Wannsee made from sun uponA rose, retiring shoulderblade.We sat in the abandoned libraryAt a table one foot thickWith nothing on the ancient floor.Someone read to others out ofEarshot homilies that hadNo past, or nodded to no writtenWorld, intentionally presentTense, and good, and temporaryAlthotigh the future drove like bellsIn afternoon admonishmentsFrom atitumn's discontented suite.The days himg low. The woodwork waited.Sunlight seemed life's fu'st attackOf exaltation, or politics.Perhaps, embraced those indecisionsOut of which we carved our coming selves.There in that sophisticatedChaos with our unsuspectingLips upon the wave, our eyes on books.Our hands relentless, inefficient.Artificial as philosophy.All sciences explosive in the veinWherein you looked at me. and dove.The mountains stood along in ail their shade.

MARY KINZIE

tectonics, the other "the resurrectionof life through art"), but it's hard towork against the emphasis of the selec-tion, which has been designed to pro-voke students into socio-politico-moralposition-taking.

To come, then, to the other course,the more overtly philosophical (Contem-porary Civilization. Does it lend itselfbetter to the emphasis on "ideas" onwhich the two courses are predicated?Does Dcnby learn anything as he givesthe course a second try? He has a lot oftrouble with these texts and has to strug-gle not to fall asleep: there's less humaninterest here. But human interest getsdragged in anyway. Hegelian dialecticmakes one student suggest that "theHolocatist was the Fortunate Fall. Itdrove the fbiuiding of Israel." The in-structor rushes in to say that "you canmake the Hegelian argument that theHolocaust can be read dialectically....But this is not a justification for theHolocatist." And Denby is off andrunning:

His clarification only introduced greatercontention. Several stiidcnLs voiced thoir

dismay, and I snarledto myself that I lackedthe ingenuit\' to readthe Holocatisi dialec-tically as the neces-sary spur to Israel'screation \Miat didHegel mean by free-dom an^-ivay?... manyof us would be loathto nominate Prussia in1815, with its censor-ship, iis lack of repre-sentative bodies, asour ideal of freedom.Indeed, if Prtissia wasHegel's ideal, he maywell have approved,despite his dismi.ssal ofthe morality of theEast, the paternalisticand authoritarian Sin-gapore.

Poor Hegel. Didhe ask to have theHolocaust and—God save the mark—Singapore broughtinto the discussion?The relentless bring-ing of everythingpast into everythingpresent so falsifiesthe contribution tothought made bysuccessive philoso-phical systems thatstudents can hard-ly be made to real-ize the explanatoryand cognitive value

of such systems.Denby likes to bring everything back

to himself. If he read.s Hegel on humanbeings constructing each other as per-sons by mtitual lecognition, the passageis attached to Denby's being mugged inthe subway. And it is converted, to boot,into High Noon:

I had not looked the two young men in theeyes, 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'sfiction, ibe men who met at high noonhiid no past; they met, so to speak, asequals. The two men who faced me wereprobably descendants of actual slaves, andwhile one can't forget that, the factdoesn't, in itself, change ihe nattire of theencounter. The difference between us wasone of class. If the two young men hadheld up a black man in a suit on his way towork, the dynamics of tbe situation wouldhave been tbe same,

I'd say the "difference between" Denbyand the muggers was first and fore-most one of criminality. To say it wasone of class is to stigmatize all blacks inpcjverty, most of whom do tiot end upas muggers.

w hen Denby can't natural-ize a philosophical doc-trine with such a hu-man interest vignette,

he becomes fretfully cross, Thoughhis instructor energetically expoundsKant's interest in epistemology and ina moral a priori, such things leaveDenby cold. They don't have enoughto do with real life: "Was it possible?Was it sane? To derive an ethics purelyfrom reason and will; to compose aguide to action elaborated without thepressures that every human actor feels,a rumhie of indigestion, a mood?" .\ndwasn't Kant's experience a\vfully narrow-compared with, hey, Denby's? "Manuel[a student] obviously had a point aboutparochialism. A lifelong bachelor, Kanthad never gone farther than five miles

from the small city of KonigsbergWasn't there something provincial, lim-ited, repressed, perhaps privileged inhis conception of the moral life?... Iagreed with the students."

As for thinking, with Kant, that anact committed fiom inclination cannotproperly be called an act of genuinemoral worth, that morality resides inthe fulfillment of duty—why, Denby canscarcely contain his scorn: "The passagehas 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 REPUBLIC OCTOBER 7. i996

human beings is happiness consonantwiih right conduci. Duty is a dfbi; itis 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, orl);iiitc, <»r any otlier thinker or wriitrwho has the misfortune to fall into hisbands, has to offer. He seems to thinkibat 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'snot going to be buffaloed into any grov-elling submission. No, sir: "Extendingpiety to classics that one didn't respondlo was an academic vice, and I bad loa\()id it. I \vould read for enjoyment andinsu LKtion, and when bored. I wouldsay so." And when be [bougbt that Ivinlwas a great noble tjooby, lie would saytbat, loo.

And he wouki be t;tii\ too. He wouldnot lei himself off tbe moral hook. Didbe [ie;u those muggers righi? And whaiabout liis mother? Voti didn t ibink he'tll('a\'e her out, did voii? "Unlike Regati.iiul (ioncril," he vvriics in bis eliapler onKi)n^ Lear. "1 did my parent no gccatbarm—1 took caie of ber in the slightly(listaiu but steady way that wai'y only sonstake I are ol tiiotliers—l)ut I was often ina rage," And wbat do you know, hebecomes a veritable Kantian booby, fullofwretclieebiess and willed proprieiy. asbe does his duly: "No tnatter. 1 toldmyself al the lime. The thing required ingrown-up sons was dut\. VVhai you feltwas beside the polni. You bad ol lifra-(ions. and you hafl to fulfill tliein." Arewe to believe that Denby has undergonea Kiintian conversion? And il so, wby wasthere no sign of it forty pa^es earlier, noteven a repentant parentbesis?

W ell, tbis book will give noaid or comfort to anyoneon either side of tbe cul-ture wars. How does one

(lefeiirl courses in the "Great B<»oks," ifthey produce in their students (and nodoubt in some instructors) mindlessattacks on serious writers ol'ibe past? .-\iidwhy attack them, since substitutingaiiothei" socio-political set ot books—more modern, more representative ofmaiginalized groups, more critical of"Western Culture"—only pcrpettiatesthe old bad babit of ignoring the differ-ence between a sermon and a novel, anidea and a painling? Otie can answerwearily ibat echu ation has to start some-wbefc. and it hardly matieis wbei'e:Amciican students entering nni\ersityba\c read pratiicalh noibing, so any-thing will help Ui afhanre ibem to a nextlevel of consciousness. And this is not(lone in a single term, or by a singlecourse, or even bv courses alone. II' tbe

student graduating from college has amote nuanccd set o( ititellecitial re-sponses than at) etjually intflligeni stu-dent ol the same aj e who has not been tocollege, tlicit all tbe cotnersatiuns andtbr coiuses and the extra-curricularactivities bave had a cumulatively desir-able effect. In that hope, most teachersteach.

As fbi- iiKJtals themselves, tlicy ai e notac(|iiire(l in college courses. Ttiey areacquired in eliildlio<»d aiui tauglit byexample, (bourses iti "moral reasoning"(as Harvard calls its set oJ Clore (iourseson philosophical, mostly ethical, con-cepts) may sharpen one's sense of therationality and the logie propei" lo in-formed moral discussion, but tbey don'lmake one a better spouse oi" father orliieud or citizen. To think that moralbetleiinent can be the result of a re-quired course in wliich stndents hasbover lightweight argtmients on complexbooks (one per week, more or less): toconfitse moral instritciion (or miUtialmoral hectoring) on fashionable con-temporai'y issues with (be ]:)ursuit oflearning or tbe uuderstanfliug of litera-Une; to throw a week of DatUe in trans-lation at students wlio bave not iliefaintest notion of the Middle Ages orCihrislian doctrine—all this is not toextend "Western civilization," but totravesty it.

A nd our bero? He con-cludes that "the coursesin the Western classicsforce us to ask all those

questions about self and societ\' weno longer address without embarrass-ment—the questions our media-traiuet!habits of irony bave nicked us oul ofaskitig." Odd. Swift's "habits of irony"never tricked him oul of asking suchquestions. Nor Montaigne's. Nor tler-vantes's. Of course, tbey lived andthought before we were, every last oneof us, media-trained. But the impor-tant point is that irony—and self-ironyabove all—is the ilrst requisite of theeducated tnind. And Denby, on tbe evi-denee of his book, has iifH yet acquiredit.

In bis conclusion, with a tei'tain mag-niloquence, he distributes points to "tbelelt" and "tbe right":

T<i ihe left, I would say iluil reading ihccanon in ilie 199O's is unlikely lo turn any-niR- into a chauvinisi oi' an inipfiiali.sitVujili- WIK> deny [he power of iiti.stlicticcxpcriciKC 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 bein buiifting ihi' moral chariKter of theiiaiion's citi/cns. the books were morelikelv, ill the inilial brush, to inenn some-

idiosyncratic and pcisonal Iagree witli William tifiniclt ;ind other tra-ditionalisis to tliis C'Xteni: Men and womencdnialed in the Wcsietn tiadition will haveilie bc'si possible shot at ihe dauiitinjr iaskof u'inveniiiig morality and comiiniiuty ina republic now badly uiiieied by fear andniisti usi.

As Denby's rhetoiic in this passagerises to its climax. I could onl\- tbitik inamazement about tbe new iTiillenai Ianimportance of college readiug lists: LitHutu and C.C. now have to do what Mil-loti thought only the Incarnation couldck)—repair tbe lall of otir flisl parents.As Oenby giavely proclaims tbe tejjublicto be "bacih' tattered," we are to tbitiktbat his so\eieij^tt judi^metit has beenupheld by tbe Cireat Books that be hasstitdietl so deeply: "They offer tbe mostdireet representatioti of the possibilitieso( eivil existence and the disaster oC itsdissoltuion." Isn't it stratige tbat some-one could write this way aftei readingMontaigne?

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seriously, one can perhaps read Dtnby'sbook Hs the autobiography of a tiredman wanting a break from the movies.The account is framed as a conversionnarrative. He was weak but now he isstrong. Here is a part of Denby's perora-tion on the personal dimension of hisadventures:

I was exposing myself to stier than my life, stronger ihau my life—but also exposing my /(/('—aiirl ihe bookscalled biirk ihings tlial I had iorgoUcn orbeen afraid |<> face, and so I knew thai Ihad sinned in ibc way Atigiisiiin" said weall sinned and thai I had nol always servedmy mad and needy molbei' well in herfinal years I was discovering an edge,talking more and more in class, even com-peting with ihf teachers In truth, bythe end. ! had grown stronger. Not em-powered in ihe .social w,\y ihat critics ofthe canon meant, bul personally strong-er. . . . I had recovered a good part of

myseii.... 1 did not iecl desolate ai theend of ihe year.

If we believe him, then the books andthe teachers and the classrooms workedtheir therapeutic magic even without hisunderstanding how they did it. But Iwould bet that the result would havebeen the same with four entirely dif-ferent sets oI absorbing books. Therewould have beeu the same feeling ofintellecttial refrcshuient, of having spentexciting time with interesting minds, ofhaving been talked to (or roared at) bycommitted and intelligent teachers. Andthai 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 ThfBreaking of Style {Harvard UniversityPress).

Modernism to MadnessBY JAROSLAW ANDERS

Insatiabilityby Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicztranslated by Louis Iribarne(Northwestern University Press, 534 pp., $40)

A t the beginning olthis mad,surreal Bildtmgsroman,fust pitblished in 1927 inPoland, a young Polish gen-

tleman named Clenezip Kapen, a sensi-tive high-school graduate aud the sonof a brewer in the Carpathian region,looks into the starlit sky and is seizedby a sense of cosmic melancholy: "Eter-nity was as nothing compared to themonstrous infinitude of time within in-finite space and the lieavenly bodiesinhabiting it. Wiiat to make of the ihing?It was beyond imagining and yet im-pressed itself on the mind with absoluteontological necessity...." As his aloof,tyrannical father lies dying, Cienezipsenses "something painlully sweet inthis sensation of loneliness," and hesets otit on a Iren/ied, sexnal and philo-sophical qtiest ol self discovery. He rtuisaway from his lather's bedside andengages in a series of heated debates onart, love, being, science, theosophy andreligion with an a.s.sortment of charactersinclndiiig a composer of cacophonousmusic, an avant-garde writer, a professorof symbolic logic and an expropriatedaristocrat ttirued neo-Catliolic philoso-

pher. He is brielly sedticed by the com-poser, btit he ends the night in tbe armsol' the mysteriotis and alluring PrincessIrina, who is mtich advanced in years.

The erotic aud the philosophical free-ly intermingle in the novel, and endlessinlellecttializing seems the favorite formof 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 abstractelimination 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'smany pages we see him himiiliated andrejected by Irina, joining a militaryschool, reconciled witli Irina, worship-ing another fiendish sadistic womanand mtirdering her gay chaperone, tak-ing part in an aborted coup and finallymarrying an angelic beatity, whom he,strangle.s ou their wedding night.

In the meantime, the whole worldis imploding aroimd Genezip and hiscompanitins. Western Europe is ruledby an array of "soft" communist or fas-cist regimes that manage lo keep theirpopulations complacent and materiallysatiated throngh superior labor organi-zation, though the word is out that"the white man had ceased to believe inthe myth of iiilinite progress and nowsaw the wall of obstruction in himselfand not in nattire." There is a hyper-reactionary "WTiite" revohuion going onin Russia, while from the Far East a "liv-ing wall" of Chinese is approaching withihe intention of interbreeding with theF.tiropeans and starling a uew era in thehistory of humanity.

In the middle, as always, lie.s Poland.govertied by Cieneral Rotzmolochowic/,its enigmatic dictator, and a shadowySyndicate for National Salvation. Con-stantly allying itseH and fighting with ailits neighbors, the country is "absoltite-ly unswerving in its heroic defense ofthe 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-iudticedNew Age religion of Murti Bing thatpreaches the Mystery of Panexistence,Maximal Oneness and Duo-Unity. Atthe decisive historical moment the gen-eral, moved by a stidden htnnanitarianimpulse, surreuders his invincible armyto the C'hinese aud is respectfully be-headed by the enemy. At the end of thestory Genezip. "by now a consummatelunatic, a mild automaton," is forced tomarry a beautiful Chinese princess andbecome a faithful servant of his newmasters.

T his bizarre book is set in afantastic present, and itmight as well be ihe 19yOsin the costumes of the

iiUerwar Poland. An innocent readercould be perstiaded thai he is reading awordy, overdone, sometimes delightfulparody of a generic Central EuropeanNovel, dense with murky eroticism,abstract cerebrations and an almost com-forting premonition of the impendingend of history. Even the character oi'Koizmolochowicz. a stable boy turnedMaximum Leader and "the most unpre-dictable demon from among the intrepidsouls still loamiug abotu on the vanish-ing horizon of individualism," might beread as a portrait of Marshall Jozef Pil-sudski, Poland's iuterwar leader, and amore contemporary version of the Polishman of providence Lech Walesa. Hisgenius, it seem.s, consists mainly of thefact that he has absolutely tu) clue aboiUauythiug thai happens arotmd him. andso his erratic decisions befuddle his alliesand enemies alike.

40 THE NEW R E P U B U C OCTOBER 7,1996