“Excuse us, Sir,” the physicist and philosopher then respectfully inquired: “We can’t help wondering what in the world those folks asked that even You couldn’t answer.” To which God sighed and replied, “They asked me, When will our kids ever get their shit together?”
END OF JOKE (which anyhow I suspect applies less to graduates of this institution than to those of many others) and beginning of the Tragic View of Liberal Education. For me to natter on here about the importance of “Great Books” curricula like St. John’s would obviously be preaching to the choir — but I’ll do at least a paragraph-sworth of that anyhow, for reasons to be set forth presently. Having been born, raised, and schooled in the state of Maryland, and having subsequently lived and worked there for more of my life than not, I became acquainted early on with the program at your original campus in Annapolis. If I ended up matriculating at Johns Hopkins instead, that was because from high school I had gone up to Juilliard’s summer program to test against reality my then ambition to be a professional jazz drummer and orchestrator; I aced my courses but failed my reality-test with flying colors, came home to think what to do next, and found I had won a state scholarship to Hopkins that I’d more or less forgotten I’d applied for. So with a shrug of the shoulders I went there, faute de mieux—a most happy faute, as I came to realize later. In my undergraduate and graduate-school years there half a century ago, the St. John’s curriculum was spoken of and its pros and cons debated, or anyhow discussed now and then, in class and out; we compared and contrasted it with our own quite admirable two-year lecture courses in Literary Classics and Classics in the History of Thought — mandatory in those bygone days for all Hopkins Arts & Sciences undergrads.
What were those pros? What were the cons, as we saw them from the perspective of Baltimore back at mid-century?1
The pros, as I’ve said already, go without saying in this venue — or would so go except that 1) some of them are even more evident now than they were 50 years ago, and 2) saying over and over what goes without saying (at least vis-à-vis the craft of fiction-writing) was for decades my pedagogical specialty. So what’s to be said (once more, with feeling) for a curriculum devoted to the study of a more-or-less-agreed-upon roster of “the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s famous formulation — or at least as representatively much of that Best as the ever-evolving consensus of a good college faculty believes can be fruitfully addressed between undergraduate matriculation and the baccalaureate?
Welclass="underline" What’s to be said for it, needless to say, is that it not only edifies and instructs — any old good curriculum does that — but permits discourse within a shared frame of reference richer and more stable than this season’s pop music, films, and TV shows, which a colleague of mine used to lament were the only points of cultural reference that he could assume to be shared by his undergraduate students: not Homer and Sophocles and the Bible, not Virgil and Dante and Shakespeare, but The Sopranos and Friends and Britney Spears and N’Sync, all of which in just a few years will seem as quaintly dated and otherwise limited as Leave It to Beaver and Boy George and Tiny Tim (I don’t mean Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim). It is this urge for a richer shared frame of reference that has prompted those “One City, One Book” programs that you may have heard about, in Seattle, Chicago, Buffalo, Rochester, and elsewhere: the urging by city officials that every adolescent and adult in town read, say, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, their reading to be accompanied by discussions and other events in the city’s libraries, bookstores, and community centers as a low-cost way to nurture civic pride and community spirit while propagandizing benignly against racism (in the case of the two novels just cited) and offering teenagers a healthy alternative to television and video games. Who could possibly object?
No show of hands necessary: One may fidget at the choice of Harper Lee and Ernest Gaines (serious and competent writers both) instead of, say, Flannery O’Connor and Ralph Ellison, finer literary artists with no less moral passion in the matter of racism. And one fidgets at the idea of any single book — instead of, say, Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf of 418 Harvard Classics, or the 88 distinguished names (who can resist saying “88 key names”?) on the St. John’s College Reading List last time I looked — as a shared frame of reference for dialogue on racism or anything else, including the topic of Shared Frames of Reference. But one has to start somewhere, no? It’s just a question of where — and in raising that question we find ourselves confronting possible reservations about Great Books curricula, which doubtless also go without saying in this venue, especially on this happy occasion, so let’s review a couple of them anyhow:
NEVER MIND, FOR starters, the half-serious objection of my undergraduate mentor at Johns Hopkins, the late aesthetician and historian of ideas George Boas, who liked to tell us that the problem with the Annapolis curriculum was that it left out not only all the bad books — which, like bad art, may be indispensable to defining and appreciating the good — but also all the arguably great books that happen to disagree with the ones in the canon. We can dispense with these teasing objections because (in the first instance) mediocre-to-bad books and art are sufficiently inescapable that we needn’t include them in our curriculum, although it’s certainly useful to point them out from time to time and to argue with them. As for the second instance, any respectable clutch of Great Books will contain sufficient contradiction or at least disagreement on, e.g., the nature of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty to escape the curricular sins of pasteurization and homogenization. The real problem, it goes without saying (and this is what Professor Boas was good-humoredly pointing out to us sophomores), is that there are so many great or at least important books that no four-year undergraduate survey — much less his own two-year survey — can be more than a radically selective, though not arbitrary, sampling. And this, mind you, was the 1940s and ’50s, before multiculturalism and political correctness hit the fan. Dr. Eliot’s aforementioned shelf (which I myself read, or at least thumbed right through in numerical sequence, while working as a night-shift timekeeper in Baltimore’s Chevrolet assembly plant one undergraduate summer) had come to look quaint indeed by the century’s latter decades: all those Protestant sermons, instead of the Mahabharata and Gargantua and Pantagruel! Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I Promessi Sposi instead of Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji and James Joyce’s Ulysses! For all its merits, by the 1960s it was as obviously dated a cultural artifact as its most judiciously updated and multiculturally sophisticated present-day counterpart would doubtless be seen to be half a century from now.