A READER WRITES:

In the face of all the cultural and political forces which dominate our lives and have brought so many negative consequences, I have to admit at times I wonder what the heck any of us can really do to change things. It seems that the traditionalist worldview that you advocate is simply never heard, and when proposed in even the mildest forms, is shouted down vehemently by our cultural controllers in the media, the entertainment industry, mainstream politics, and the universities.

What I keep coming back to is the idea of starting small, with whatever we have, and wherever we find ourselves. This year I have the opportunity to teach an introductory Literature and Composition course to freshmen at a nearby college. In the tradition of true liberal education, I would like to include some texts which might help my students to begin to question much of the received wisdom of our age, as your blog has helped me to do of late. (Needless to say, the content of most literature or composition courses in the modern academy is typically very much within the current anti-Western / anti-tradition paradigm). I don’t think I could get away with simply assigning any straightforward texts of conservative political thought or traditionalist societal commentary. Most students seem already hostile to such texts anyway. But literature can be a powerful way to reach hearts.

I have noticed that you have occasionally posted poems which echo some of your views. In that spirit, I am wondering if you or your readers might have any specific literary recommendations – novels, plays, short stories, or poems, perhaps – that I might include in my class, to help my students open their eyes to the truths of human existence, and begin an honest search for the Truth in their education and in their lives.

One other thing I should mention: I know there are many excellent choices from the “Great Books” tradition, which I have considered. I would like to include some of these, but I will need to choose carefully. There already is a separate Great Books course at my institution, and the students I have will be those who chose not to take that course. So rather than simply compiling a list of typical “Great Books,” I need to also find some perhaps “less obvious” choices for my class. It’s an interesting challenge; I almost feel that I need to find a more subtle “way in,” so to speak, by offering some readings which won’t make them immediately tune out, if at all possible.

Laura writes:

You sent this e-mail a while ago and every time I sat down to think about it, I found myself faced with many possibilities, but they seemed to be the wrong possibilities, all from the tried and true. You say you are not looking to stay strictly within the Great Books tradition and I guess that’s why I find it difficult to respond. It’s not that I don’t think that the Western canon should never change, but it seems that it should change imperceptibly.

It’s true that what you’re doing has larger significance. The sixties radicals were right: teaching literature is political. Great literature stands in direct opposition to the narrow ideals of radical individualism. Western individualism is the animating force behind our greatest  literature; without our conception of the individual as free, there would be no Anna Karenina or Huckleberry Finn. But Western literature also presupposes order. The individual battles against shared ideals and traditions and he is rarely totally at ease in rejecting them.

Given its preoccupation with both free will and the community, literature is dangerous and threatening to postmodern culture, to those who would like us to focus on one or two dimensions of existence, to deny the fullness and breadth of our desires. “Great books do influence societies for the better, and bad books do drag down the general level of personal and social conduct,” said Russell Kirk. He uses Edmund Burke’s phrase “moral imagination.” The ethical dimension of literature is connected to the sense of largeness and transcendence it conveys.

I would start an introductory literature course with the ancient Greek dramatists because they are so fundamental, because they give us the sense, to borrow Lionel Trilling’s words, “of being reached in our secret and primitive minds” and they are appealing to students easily turned off by the archaic. It’s important to convince students with little exposure to ancient works that people who lived in the distant past were very much like us and to correct the idea that we can be radically different because we are nothing like them. The language of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes and Euripides is easy to follow in translation and the subject matter is universal. The chorus in Aeschylus’Agamemnon voices the timeless questions of our secret, primitive selves:

This is how Calchas the seer
Unriddled the murder of the hare.
With a foregone, god-given victory
He opened the ear of Agamemnon
To the first whisper of a curse
And opened his heart to the fatal
Contradiction of heaven.

But then he soothed him with hope –
A hope of ultimate good.
What is good? Who is God? The mask
Of the great nameless.
Who can say anything about it?

                          (Transl. Ted Hughes)

It would be fun to read one of the Platonic dialogues, The Symposium or Phaedo, in a literature course. Don’t know if you can get away with that. If I was an English teacher, I would love to include parts of the Book of Job and analyse it as a literary work, a spiritual epic unlike any other in the Western canon. Though students may have encountered it in Bible studies, it is worth studying for its literary craftsmanship and devices. The monologues of Job and the voice of God out of the whirlwind are immortal lines of poetry, as in chapter 29 on the remembrance of things past:

Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me;
When his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked in darkness.

Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, selections from Ovid and the Aeneid; excerpts from Dante; Paradise Lost; Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, poems by Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Marvell, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, Yeats – you know, all the greatest hits, but then nothing I could suggest would be original. The point of college literature courses seems to be to participate in this familiar conversation through the ages. I assume Shakespeare is already covered by other courses, but whatever happened to Charles Dickens? He seems to be very unpopular in literature departments today. The problem with Dickens is that he shows that hardship produces an efflorescence of personality. Out of the pit of misfortune comes Pip and Oliver and Sissy Jupe. They evoke our sympathies, but the enemy is the evil in man’s heart, not whole classes of people. He is the perfect antidote to the politically correct novel, with all its resemblances to Soviet social realism. Poor and rich are equally bad in Dickens, and equally good. 

The Egoist, written in 1877 by by George Meredith, is a very funny and entertaining book and one of my favorite novels. The lesser known short works of Robert Louis Stevenson, such as The Body-Snatchers or The Beach of Falesa; Washington Square by Henry James; New Grub Street by George Gissing; Winter’s Tales, Seven Gothic Tales and Anecdotes of Destiny by Karen Blixen, A Handful of Dust or The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, the short stories “Horsey”and “Big Blonde” by Dorothy Parker, The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: these are all more recent shorter prose works and novels I would love to be assigned in a class.  New Grub Street is often discussed as a book about the writer’s life, but it’s an interesting reflection on marriage and sex roles. But students need more than realism, they need fairy tales. Anthony Esolen, in his book Ironies of Faith, recommends  Tolkien’s short fairy tale “Leaf, by Niggle:”

Niggle is, as the name suggests, a niggler, “a very ordinary and rather silly little man” (Tolkien Reader, 102) Yet the first thing we hear about him places him in time – the faraway time of fairy tales, and the all-too-fleeting time that we adults know well. Here is the opening sentence: “There once was a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make.”

I remember reading The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, as a college freshman. I realized later I didn’t understand it at all. Kirk writes:

Were The Waste Land only the poetic lament of a man whose marriage had not fulfilled his hopes, and who had worked himself to the bone, it would remain interesting – but it could not have spoken as a conscience to a multitude of other consciences. A widespread decay of love is no accident; causes may be discerned, and remedies – however difficult  – may be suggested. In short Eliot has described in The Waste Land not merely his ephemeral state of mind; much more important, he has penetrated to causes of a common disorder in the soul of the twentieth century.

Disdaining the Romantic lyric poet’s exaltation of  the age, Eliot subordinated private emotion to the expression of general truths…

Can college students grasp the decay of love? I think they can. But it must be challenging to convey the subtleties of decay to students heavily exposed to what are basically pornographic or demonic images, to the subhuman, the stuff that’s on cable television every day.  Among more recent poets, Richard Wilbur, Ted Hughes, Anthony Hecht, Elizabeth Bishop, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost are a few I would recommend.

A literature teacher is a quasi-therapist. If he is lucky, he can wean a few of his students from images that make it difficult to imagine sweetness and light or any shadowing. It’s interesting that people so often argue that the study of literature is a luxury. Not only does it form our collective consciousness, our awareness of what is normal and abnormal, the habit of reading good literature provides students with an activity that it is relatively inexpensive and readily available in the years of adult work. The person who reads nothing at all may be “forever adrift,” said Kirk, unless he lives in a community that conveys meaning through oral traditions. Whatever you offer your students, you will help anchor them in words, pulling them away from the emptiness of image, unsettling and moving them through the lives of people who never were.  The great works of the imagination help us with real life. Here’s one last stirring quote from Kirk’s essay on literature, “The Moral Imagination”:

Until very recent years, men took it for granted that literature exists to form the normative consciousness – that is, to teach human beings their true nature, their dignity and their place in the scheme of things. Such was the endeavor of Sophocles and Aristophanes, of Thucydides and Tacitus, of Plato and Cicero, of Hesiod and Vergil, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Dryden and Pope.

As a teacher, you are part of this great tradition. Good luck.

                                                      — Comments —

A. writes:

Here’s just a couple of suggestions off the top of my head:

1. Antigone, to teach the existence of the natural law in the early Greeks. 
2. Charles Peguy, to teach beautiful lyric poetry with whispers of God. 
3. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, to teach redemption. 
4. Song at the Scaffold, to teach grace of courage. It is also a modern play. Gertrude Von Le Fort. 
5. Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc. Hard to blame Catholics for his take on the Saint. 

 More if I can think of things we read in a Catholic book club for over twenty years.

Katy Carl writes:

If I’m not mistaken, the correspondent also, perhaps mainly, needs texts to teach that are from within the last 100 or even 50 years. How about Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a paean to lost goodnesses and a glimmer of the only way to get them back; or Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which in many ways inverts, subverts, and rebuts the anti-small town subgenre of the early twentieth century. Try John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany; try Ron Hansen’s short and excellent Mariette in Ecstasy. Investigate Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark, David Lodge, Piers Paul Read, Alice Thomas Ellis, Sara Maitland, Edwin O’Connor, Paul Horgan, Shusaku Endo, J.F. Powers. You’ll never get freshmen to sit still long enough for Michael O’Brien’s 700+-page Strangers and Sojourners, but why not include it in a list of further reading for those two or three who might be thus sparked? One of the major misconceptions we need to fight is that viable Judeo-Christian thought ended 150 years ago and that it has no inheritors today in literature.

One more suggestion: choose a theme. Pick out one or two common threads that run through the works you read, and show the young men and women how to follow them. Don’t show all your cards at once; try to draw them out instead. A couple may cotton on, become curious, start to pursue the line of thought.

Godspeed. Teaching frosh is a thankless job, but if you reach even one it’ll be much more than par for the course (no pun intended).

Rick Darby writes:

I like your list of literature for a college course and agree it is good to begin with the Greeks for a tragic, yet uplifting, sense of life.

It’s embarrassing to acknowledge how many of those on your list, including Bunyan, Spenser, Donne (other than a few of the most famous poems), Henry James, et al. I haven’t read. There’s only so much time, even for one who often prefers reading to life.

May I nominate a couple of alternatives? Tennyson, for nobility of mind and a historical consciousness, coupled with stylistic genius.

For Waugh I’d go with Brideshead Revisited, insightful about human character and deeply traditional. His earlier satirical novels are clever and fun to read, but by the time of Brideshead he’d put away childish things and aimed for something higher, and therefore truer.

Laura writes:

Thank you for the suggestions. I have read only excerpts from some of the authors I posted, including Bunyan and Spenser. I have to say in assembling this list, I was humbled. There are many things I would like to read and haven’t. Maybe I should go back to college.

Mike writes:

Henry James’ novel The Bostonians might be a good choice. The struggle between Ransom (Southern male) and Olive (Boston feminist) for Verena ‘s affections/loyalty would be interesting for male and female students on campus. Students on campus can relate to male and lesbian competition for cute girls. 

When I attended college 30 years go, there were times when I competed for young women’s affections with their feminist and lesbian friends.  

One cute little redhead would not let me pick her up from her volunteer job at the Womyn’s Center because of the lecturing and grief she would get from the arch feminists at the Center. I had to pick her up about a block away. Another young college girl broke down on our first date and told me about a lesbian seduction that had occured a few days before and left her confused. She was unable to see it as a seduction, but it was painfully obvous to me: “accidentally” getting caught in the rain, quick dash to the lesbian’s house, taking their clothes off so they could go in the dryer, a loaned bathrobe, bottle of wine, quiet lesbian music, etc. I decided I did not want to be a White Knight and did not pursue the relationship further.

Laura writes:

Yes, The Bostonians is a Thinking Housewife Book Club Selection. It should be mandatory college reading.

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