BOOK OF THE DAY: ALAN O'RIORDANreviews A Great Idea at the Timeby Alex Beam Public Affairs Books 245pp, $24.95
IT IS no longer controversial to say that the best words were more often than not placed in the best order by a white, male hand. But despite the self-evident value of canonical works, defences of them have been deemed necessary, often by writers convinced a multicultural, feminist, post-structuralist tide was about to sweep away all value judgments about literature, leaving only “texts” and theories. Well, fads in the academy have come and gone, but the classics remain.
Such defences came in part because the "great books" were often done no favours by their adherents. And from the ranks of these well-intentioned pedagogues Alex Beam draws an entertaining odd couple: Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins. In Beam's account, Adler is an insecure workaholic; a man who could write in a love letter "I love you with the passions attendant thereto". Hutchins, Don Quixote to Adler's Sancho Panza, is the tall, chisel-jawed patrician Wasp to whom everything came easily. Together, this pair, having devised a great-books course at the University of Chicago, became the driving forces behind a preposterous 1950s fetishisation of the very concept of the canon: the Great Books of the Western World, a series of 443 works by 74 dead white males bound in 54 encyclopedia volumes. Banal and absurd, the Great Books is an exercise in systematic eccentricity summed up by Adler's Syntopicon, his index of the Great Ideas (there are 102), subdivided into 2,987 topics under which come 163,000 references. The idea was that the assiduous reader could trace a single idea through the Great Books– that the contexts would be a mystery to the same reader seems not to have dawned on Adler.
But then, the reader could not expect much help from a series that included alongside the likely suspects (Homer, Dante, Shakespeare) superseded works by Ptolemy, Kepler and Copernicus, as well as utterly impenetrable works by Thomas Aquinas. Quite what the general reader was supposed to glean from science of purely archaeological significance or such questions as “Whether by Virtue of Its Subtlety a Glorified Body Will No Longer Need to Be in a Place Equal to Itself?” is perhaps a moot point: the Great Books were utterly unreadable anyway, in dense double columns of tiny print and without notation.
There were books worth reading by the dozen, it's true: Plato's Apology, Boswell's Life of Johnson, The Canterbury Tales, Gulliver's Travels, Mill's On Libertyand so on; but presentation is all. Curious readers these days have Penguin and Oxford Classics to rely on, with their fresh translations and explicatory material. Also, rather than letting the "books speak for themselves" as Hutchins claimed they did, today's reader is more likely to spend his time more profitably in the company of an expert guide to, say, the modern legacy of the scholastic method, rather than labour with the monks in their tortuous dialectics.
Though shoddy, puritanical and patronising, the Great Bookswere by no means a commercial failure thanks to wily door-to-door salesman and the intellectual insecurity of newly prosperous American families. Alex Beam is a breezy guide through this postwar US middlebrow moment, and his skills as a journalist are to the fore in chapters reporting on vestigial Great Books reading groups and St John's College in Annapolis, with its Great Books curriculum.
Beam's attempts to extrapolate the fate of the great books from that of the Great Booksare less convincing, but that is a topic well-rehearsed elsewhere. His tale of the rise and fall of a single project is more than enough for one good, if not great, book.
Alan O’Riordan is a freelance journalist