Great Books:
My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World
By David Denby
Simon and Schuster, 492 pages, $30
At first glance, the project that resulted in David Denby’s “Great Books” looks like a pretty good, and pretty simple, idea: Take a couple of courses in literature and philosophy at 48 that you took at 18, both to check out how the courses have changed and to discover who you are 30 years on. Then write a nice thick book about it. The whole thing seems a little bit experiment-like, almost scientific, or at least systematic. But the most interesting thing about “Great Books” is how the wealth of Denby’s nine months at Columbia, taking Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization (courses required of freshmen and sophomores), simply refuses to be contained between the covers of even a nice thick book. “Great Books” evokes the true feel of a significant educational experience through its very failure to detail and master more than a small portion of that experience. Education is overwhelming. The very thing that is most compelling about it is the very thing that is least communicable to the world off-campus.
But Denby makes a game effort, and “Great Books,” though not a great book, has a wonderful way of making the reader want to follow the author into the educational labyrinth, especially the labyrinth of ideas and images that make up the humanities.
Denby begins his year at Columbia as something of an everyman, Upper-West-Side-of-Manhattan variety. He is happily married, the father of two sons, prosperous and successful. Every week he tries to make something respectable out of the new movies that are coming out of Hollywood (for the most part) by reviewing them intelligently for New York magazine. Readers of Premiere will know that Denby is also fond of pondering the charms of cinematic classics; he’s about the closest pop culture comes to an actual intellectual–smart and hip, knowledgable, stylish and reliable. He is not, however, immune to feelings of middle-age anomie. His telling symptom is that he begins paying attention to the culture wars as if they matter. His wife (always, in “Great Books,” a figure of practical wisdom) urges him to put up or shut up. And so he buys the books, attends the classes, takes the notes, listens to the students and the teachers.
It quickly becomes clear that the thickest book is not going to accommodate every entry on his syllabuses, but he devotes a chapter or a part of one to 31 separate works, beginning with “The Iliad” and ending with “To the Lighthouse.” He interlards these with several more-general essays that consider some of the issues, cultural and personal, that come up through the school year. One nice touch is Denby’s depiction of the natural scene around Columbia, such as it is. Fall gives way to winter, winter to spring and then very early summer. For many students and teachers, I think, these seasonal changes compose the context of every syllabus, and the ups and downs in the classroom are very much tied to the weather–Denby nicely evokes this.
In his essays on authors and books, Denby recalls the Virginia Woolf of the “Common Reader” series. He makes it clear that he is not an academic, but rather (and, perhaps better, in his own view) a serious reader bringing a fair intelligence and education to bear upon books that are susceptible to amateur understanding. He does not intend to do what academics do–elucidate how the books work, what their historical context is, or how they define meaning–but rather to find ways to bring the books into his own experience (which, of course, is the first goal of these courses for their intended audience of freshman and sophomore students). He fares pretty well for a man who makes his living from the media.
He is especially good on authors he didn’t know before or didn’t expect to like, and who really give him joy. Of Boccaccio, he says, “I kept thinking he was not some `ribald’ early version of Fellini but dry and sparkling, closer in spirit to Mozart and Fred Astaire. . . . He shared with (them) the happiness of making art. . . .” He appreciates Boccaccio’s celebration of sexuality, especially female sexuality, and calls all his friends. If only they read Boccaccio, they might themselves be liberated from our own “dreary time of sexual violence and disease.”
Although grumpy in general toward feminists and canon-busters, Denby is exuberant in his rediscovery of Woolf: “What an event! Movie reviewer discovers Virginia Woolf at the age of forty-eight! I fell in love with what everyone else had fallen in love with, the way Woolf fed the entire ordeal and ecstasy of consciousness through the simplest of domestic moments.” He almost thanks the feminists for rediscovering her, but not without chiding them; now that he is a Woolf lover, he makes her his partisan against canon-bashers, accusing them of “confusing their own career agendas with literary history. . . .”
Many of Denby’s discussions of these books, and many points that he makes along the way, are entertaining and enlightening. Denby is a fluent writer and a smart guy, but his arguments about the culture wars (in favor of culture, great books, sticking with tradition, against introduction into the canon of “second- or third-level books”) are repetitive and undeveloped. It turns out that he feels the same at the end of the year about the canonical works he has read as he did at the beginning of the year before he read them (or reread them): They’re great books (pleasurable, enlightening) and they ought to be read. While he devotes a small chapter to the views of the other side (as expressed in a talk by Catharine Stimpson that he attends), he is predisposed against them because he is swept up in his own educational experience.
Only in ruminating over the real culture war–the war between media culture (of which Denby is a representative and a beneficiary) and the high culture–does he strike his best sparks of insight. My favorite : “For there is only one `hegemonic discourse’ in the lives of American undergraduates, and that is the mass media. Most high schools can’t begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, or dead.” The project of the leftward-leaning professoriat, to empower non-white, non-male students against the white-male literary and cultural tradition, is absurd, because few students are educated in any tradition at all–they are all creatures of TV, the movies, video games, pop music, etc. How true. And certainly Denby’s exhilarating and overwhelming educational experience did replicate that of many of his fellow students–they met up with their syllabuses and were galvanized into thought. That is what the canon is good for.
But Denby also lived through a canon-challenging experience without even realizing it, for if, as he suggests, the real canon is the media, then what happens to him as he rethinks his own implication in the power structure is what has happened in many parts of American academia. He returns over and over in “Great Books” to what it means to be a movie critic and, for example, a father: “. . . as a movie critic I was in the worst moral position to take a stand against moviegoing and television. (When I argue with the boys, forcing them to reduce their TV habit, they are gracious enough not to harp on this all-too-obvious point.)” Having promoted and lived off the media for his entire adult life, he now turns against it in no uncertain terms, lamenting what a succession of video-game fads has done to his children and everyone else’s: “Nothing lasts! The restlessness produced by each station of this Via Dolorosa annihilates the child’s devotion, and he passes on.” In the end, he returns to movie reviewing, as practicality demands, but the reader is left with the impression that he can’t do it with quite the conviction that he once did, that he is still in moral flux about where he stands in relation to the destruction he identifies all around him. In other words, he cuts himself a little deal that forwards his career agenda. Well, yes, the ontogeny of Denby’s educational experience recapitulates the phylogeny of the past generation in academia. He might therefore be a little more sympathetic to it.
All that aside, the great challenge for the author of a work such as “Great Books” is finding a voice that the reader can tolerate for 400 or 500 pages. I have to say that there are many essayists I am happy to flee from when our allotted time is up. David Denby is not one of them. He sustains a variety of tone, subject matter and approach that keeps “Great Books” alluring and readable throughout. The greatest compliment I can give is that, at the end of each of his discussions of the great books, I was torn between getting out a copy of the book he had just discussed and reading it and going on with Denby. In every case, I went on with Denby.
