A Brief History of the Great Books Idea by Tim Lacy 2005

North American culture has embraced, rejected and, in recent times, re-embraced the idea of reading the “great books”. Allan Bloom’s “first volley in the culture wars” with the now infamous “Closing of the American Mind” published in 1987 was far from the beginning of the debate.
We can thank English Victorian poet and culture critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) for laying down the notions that eventually lead to the establishment of  liberal arts colleges and reading groups that read “canonical” texts that disseminate “universal principles” to the “common reader” in order to promote the “common good”. If this language sounds familiar and if a little background to the debates is welcome, then I recommend a thoughtful little essay by Tim Lacy called “A Brief History of the Great Books Idea”.
Lacy’s essay takes us on a chronological journey starting with the England of Matthew Arnold and ending with the New York educator and social critic Earl Shorris (1936-2012) and his ongoing Clemente Course which has national (and now international) chapters that brings great books to the disadvantaged, exposing them to the edifying impulses “inherent” in great poetry, logic, history and moral philosophy.
As part of his overview, Lacy quickly and efficiently lays out the academic hesitations and shifts in public opinion that have led to serious but sometimes absurd and naive debates over appropriate content. Unsurprisingly, ideas of political economy authored by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are mentioned more than once: Lacy tells us that in the early 1930s, Charles Walgreen, founder of the drugstore chain threatened the University of Chicago with funding cuts if “subversive works”, which were “forced” on his niece were not removed from the curriculum. Walgreen lost out to the idea of open inquiry and Das Kapital is still taught at the university today.
Also on the lighter side is Lacy’s description of Dr Charles Eliot’s colourful career. He tells us, for instance, that Eliot (1868-1909), president of Harvard and editor of a “five-foot shelf of books” which contains the classics of Western thought,  believed that the set could offer a full liberal arts education to any adult willing to read from them for ten minutes a day. 350,000 sets were sold to households from 1909, when they were first issued, to 1930. Today, the set is available to download for free.
Finally, and on a more serious note, Lacy describes how the term “plurality of excellences” has in recent times, been substituted for the older idea of “excellence”, a shift that has necessitated a reassessment of “greatness”. Where “excellence” used to be found in largely Western, European and Victorian thought, the category has in the past 30 or 40 years expanded to include Eastern and contemporary texts. But what happens, Lacy asks, if “no central standard of excellence is imposed to construct the list (of necessary reading)”?
The debate over the very existence of “permanent, universal values and the persistence of the dream of a common culture” is of course ongoing and deep, and while Lacy’s essay only hints at the fractious nature of the dialogue, it is up to the interested reader and both friends and foe of Allan Bloom to thrash it out.

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Strangers from Abroad by Daniel Maier-Katkin 2010

It is generally acknowledged that philosopher Martin Heidegger effected a kind of paradigm shift in thinking about the world and about thought itself when he asked us to put aside western philosophy’s foundational binaries idea/object or mind/matter and formulated anew, the meaning of being and thinking, this time viewing all that exists through the specificities of time and history. His work led to philosophical movements as varied as phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism and post-structuralism, and yet since 1940 and rather frequently in recent times, his work has made news not only in academic circles where one would expect his ideas to be critiqued but in the popular press because new evidence regularly surfaces tying him more and more firmly to his pro-Nazi past. The fact that he was, for a brief period, a Nazi party member, wrote about the menace he perceived inherent in Jewish rootlessness and cosmopolitanism, and still had an intense love affair with his star Jewish student, Hannah Arendt, continuing to see her until her death, multiplies the dimensions of the story considerably. Add the fact that Arendt, herself the object of public scorn, forgave him for his refusal to recant his anti-semitism adds yet another extraordinary and certainly perplexing element to the history of this relationship. Understandably, much has been written about these two international figures, including a book by Daniel Maier-Katkin called Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness, published in 2010. I recommend this book, particularly to those who enjoy psychological puzzles. And it can probably be agreed that the Arendt/Heidegger puzzle is amongst the more unusual of the recent past.

Stranger from Abroad lays out the controversies, introduces major and minor actors, theories, and provides quotes from many sources, including letters from the two protagonists but in the end it cannot resolve the Arendt/Heidegger enigma.

How deep was Heidegger’s anti-semitism? Did it go beyond personal opinion? Did it have philosophical ramifications? If the latter is the case (debates are ongoing), then what is one to do? Discard “Being and Time” and all those ideas that have been built upon Heidegger’s work?  And what of Arendt’s forgiveness of Heidegger? Was it willful blindness, naive adoration of a love object, or considered, rational thinking that kept her at Heidegger’s side?

Neither Maier-Katkin nor any other writer of recent times has been able to tell us.

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Raphaël et la Fornarina XI, from La Série 347 by Pablo Picasso (1968)

In the span of 12 days in 1968, when he was 87 years old, Pablo Picasso made a series of 25 etchings that depict erotic episodes involving Raphael and his mistress Margherita Loti, known as La Fornarina (The Baker’s Daughter). Because it is Picasso and Picasso was a committed, promiscuous and successful borrower of style and subject matter originating from multiple places and historical moments, a small investigation, even a cursory one of these two dozen etchings yields names and references as varied as Michelangelo, the Vatican, Jean Auguste Ingres and psychoanalysis.

This little study is built upon the story of Raphael and his appetites, which is entertaining in and of itself but the story also offers a convenient way to mention some of the foundational ideas about sex, art, and inspiration held by Picasso.

First, we can say that Picasso’s statement “sex and art are the same thing” suggests ideas of sexual energy, sublimation, creativity, paraphilia, all terms familiar to us as post-Freudian subjects. In fact, it can be argued that when Picasso draws Raphael painting a portrait of his mistress while simultaneously making love to her (Raphael has paintbrush and easel in hand while he penetrates Margherita), Picasso is making art in order to sublimate sexual energy. In short, the artist, the exceptional man, can have it both ways: the paintbrush and the phallus can both satisfy and be satisfied.

And what of sex as compulsion? In several of the etchings we see Pope Julius II, sometimes sitting on a throne, sometimes on a chamber pot (his behind in full view), sometimes hiding behind a curtain, watching, and sometimes in full view of the lovers in action. Picasso’s message is clear: while the office of the Pope is meant to confer respect to the man who represents divine power on earth, this pope is a voyeur who permits the forbidden (sexual gratification — his and his employee Raphael’s — against the codes of Catholic orthodoxy), making him and his office mere objects of fun.

The other figure that lurks in these sketches, often hiding underneath the bed, is Michelangelo. The story (from Giorgio Vasari) goes that Raphael, curious, needing inspiration, viewed the work in progress in the Sistine Chapel without permission and proceeded to copy the style. Michelangelo never forgave him for stealing, uttering “Everything he knew he learned from me.”. Three hundred years later, Jean Auguste Ingres borrows from Raphael, painting “Raphael and The Fornarina”, using his own mistress Madeleine Capelle and justifying his borrowing by asking, “Is there anyone among the great ones who has not imitated? Nothing is made with nothing.”. A century and a half later, the Ingres painting provides Picasso inspiration: he too, sketches the lovers, claiming “good artists copy, great artists steal”. Perhaps Picasso is saying that a good artist merely transports theme and image from one canvas to another, one age to another, but a great artist transforms previous art so that it suggests a new and different understanding of life.

In these 25 sketches Picasso plays with ideas of patrimony, ego and method and besides challenging us, he makes us laugh a little.

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The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir (1954)

Despite the overwhelming consensus amongst its readers (from its initial publication in 1954 to present times) that “The Mandarins” by Simone de Beauvoir is a “classic” novel, mixed assessments of its literary value persist. Divergent views are inevitable, in part, because “The Mandarins” overlays political opinion, historical detail and philosophical debate on to the fictional form. For many readers, including myself, too much is being asked of the novel: the large political and sociological problematics that occupy so much of this book undermine the storyline and the psychological rendering of character, making the novel, at times, tedious. Some reviewers find “The Mandarins” to be a soapbox for political ideas or an apologetic for Stalinism and not at all a genuine work of fiction that seeks to understand how people experience a complex world. Critic Norman Podhoretz writes in 1956 that the novel is essentially just a critique of American capitalism. Unfair! The book is more nuanced than that: many of the characters in the novel struggle with the problem of divided loyalties. They ask if one can maintain one’s allegiance to an ideology that has been thoroughly compromised, and at what cost. I prefer critic Anna Banti’s contention that “The Mandarins” is really “an essay that is novelized”, where characters struggle with complex issues.

As simply a novel, a work of the imagination, free of polemical intent, some readers still find it wanting.  On Good Reads, I read comments like, “It is a big, baggy thing in need of an editor and a plot arc” and “the novel is full of flat characters whose voices are scarcely distinguishable, awkward dialogue and insipidly clunky internal monologue”. I, too, admit to finding the characterization sometimes tedious: too much time is spent watching Paula lose herself to mental illness, Nadine to adolescent angst, and Anne to self-doubt. However, the novel offers us a chance to see how people in post-war France and to some extent America (Anne spends time with her American lover Lewis in the United States) were beginning to react to changing social and sexual mores.
I would suggest that while “The Mandarins” is too long (700 pages) and repetitive, lacks a plotline and is short of suspense (although a murder takes place in the penultimate chapter but is oddly immediately forgotten), the work remains important. German reviewer Francois Bondy speaks for many of us when he writes that this book is really a “roman a clef” and should be read as a complement to de Beauvoir’s memoirs, a record of an important cultural movement rather than purely as a work of fiction.

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