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1996 David Denby, Great Books

One of the great literary and cultural arguments for the last generation has been whether or not there is a Western Literary Canon. And if there is, is this a good thing? Isn’t it the case that those who say what the great books are, have the advantage of dictating literary and cultural values? Classics are attributed an authority that can be used as a way of silencing, marginalising, even rubbishing the voices that don’t fit the favoured elites and empowered cultural norms. After all why should George Eliot’s Middlemarch represent the great novelist’s literary benchmark, and Bridget Jones be dismissed as chick lit? Or why should Homer’s Odyssey be given canoncial status and placed on a different literary level from Lord of the Rings, arguably the greatest quest fantasy of the 20th century? And is Jane Austen the epitome of literary craft and human observation or at best a more or less boring, perhaps an occasionally amusing writer, who pales alongside today’s more emotionally outspoken and psychologically informed writers like Margaret Attwood, Anne Tyler or Penelope Lively?

I bought David Denby’s, Great Books, to commemorate my ordination in 1996, and to indulge my passion and interest in the influence of reading, and the role of books as great literature on the culture of the individual mind and of any given society. David Denby was in 1996 Film Critic for the New York Magazine (still is I think). In 1961 as a student he took the ‘Great Books’ course at Columbia University but didn’t take it all that seriously. So 30 years later he went back to take the course again, as an experienced, mature, hardened social and media critic, and to do so in a class, interacting with the students and ‘instructors’. The book is the account of that year – and it is wonderful reading, at times annoyingly clever, but mostly honest and wise. He describes lying on the sofa reading and trying to ‘get’ Kant, feeling the heart-rending tragedies of Sophocles, amazed at the subtly cynical but politically effective power plays of Machiavelli, bemused by Hegel, won over by Jane Austen, going with the flow (of consciousness) that is Virginia Woolf’s take on human experience….and so on throughout the whole academic year.

Denby summarises and criticises, respects but isn’t intimidated by this exploration of great literature; arguing with mostly everyone, just as often humbly listening to students half his age who are an entire culture removed from Denby’s generation, sometimes he is arrogantly declaring what this or that means, must mean, might mean – but through it all trying to hear what these great books say about what it means to be human, to live a human life, yes to LIVE a human life. I would have to say for myself I learned more about human existence and reflection in this book than in a dozen theology monographs. This is a modern encountering the post-modern in the classroom thirty years on.

Denby is passionate about what he writes here – this year back at Columbia clearly deepened the irrigation channels in his own spirit. Here is his own description of the ennui that drove him back to school, the creeping boredom that comes from being saturated by media images, the mind being deprived of reflective substance, the emotions depleted from overstimulation and moral muscle atrophied through lack of sufficient exercise:

By the early nineties I was beginning to be sick at heart, sick not of movies or movie criticism but of living my life inside…the society of the spectacle – that immense system of representation and simulacra, the thick atmosphere of information and imagery and attitudes that forms the mental condition and habits of almost any adult living in a media society. A member of the media, I was also tired of the media; I was more than uneasy in that vale of shadows, that frenetic but gloomy half-life filled with names, places, chatter, acts, cars racing, gunshots, expertstalking, daytime couples accusing one another of infidelity, the sheer busyness of it all, the constant movement, the incredible activity and utter boredom, the low hum of needs being satisfied.

That last italicised phrase is the clue to the book. Denby went looking for substance, not to have needs satisfied, but to understand the nature of human longing that gives rise to needs, to encounter the tragic and the comic, the romance and the quest, the philosophical search for enlightenment and the poet’s quest for meaning. And he went looking for all this in the great books of the Western Canon.

Here is Denby again

I know longer knew what I knew. I felt that what I had read or understood was slipping away. I possessed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs. The foundations of the building were turning to sand while I sat in the upper balconies looking out at the sea. Feeling the wiggle, I knew I was in trouble. I sensed my identity had softened and merged into the atmosphere of representation, and I couldn’t quite see where it ended and I began. My own memories were lapsing out into the fog of media life, the unlived life as spectator.

As a Christian, a preacher, a pastor, and as a human being first of all, I found this book to be quietly but persistently an argument for recovering the power of literature to shape and enrich, to inform and nourish, to deepen and in the end to humanise, human life. I’ve read this book three times and expect to enjoy it again.

And it is ridiculously cheap on Amazon – which tends to suggest not everyone thinks it’s as wonderful as I do. Don’t care! Or as Catherine Tate might say, (and with due acknowledgement of the source!), in language unlikely to establish itself in the Western Canon, ‘Not bovvered’!

I hadn’t really intended to let a few reflections on previously bought books grow into a series – but I now find it personally intriguing trying to trace some of my footprints through books bought years ago because they were significant at the time – and now might not be, or might still be. Apologies for what is therefore becoming self-indulgence!

1994 Joel Green (ed) Jesus of Nazareth Lord and Christ.

This is the sixtieth birthday collection of essays in honour of Howard Marshall. Thirty essays, and only one by a woman – Ruth Edwards, herself a careful, unassuming but deeply learned New Testament scholar, and dedicated Episcopal priest. But there are some important essays here – some of them heavy going. Such essays date quite quickly, and some of them have already been overtaken by scholarship, sometimes by the essay writer’s own developing thought. But most of Howard’s main areas of biblical interest (which are remarkably wide) are represented. I value the book for reasons of personal friendship, and because I think Howard Marshall’s contribution to New Testament scholarship and to Evangelical credibility in the academy, is in the same tradition, and on the same scale, as his mentor F. F. Bruce.

1995 S. M. Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Elie Wiesel: You are My Witnesses.

My view of the world, of faith, and of how faith and tragedy combine in the deep moments of personal and moral life, is long indebted to these two Jewish thinkers. Heschel (is that not a wonderful face on the book cover?) was a remarkable thinker, whose work on the prophets and the pathos of God represents some of the most profound theology and humane reflection I have ever read. It deeply influenced Moltmann. Elie Wiesel (pictured below) is a holocaust survivor whose writing is dedicated to ensuring that the world never forgets the story of mechanised evil and genocidal hatred that befell central Europe. Wiesel’s two volume autobiorgaphy, All Rivers Run to the Sea, and The Sea is Never Full, I read while on holiday in Yorkshire – they are a remarkable account of a human life lived in the shadow of great evil, and refusing to allow his humanity to be eclipsed by the memories of such moral horror.

Friedman’s book examines the life values of these two Jewish thinkers, one a devout philosopher, the other an agnostic novelist, both of them men whose writing glows with morally generated power. Reading this I was conscious of two people, whose life experience and intellectual legacies require those of us who are Christians to read them humbly, and thank God for their capacity to construe and construct a worldview lacking in that embittered hostility that inevitably ignites enmity. They represent the ethical genius of Judaism. They are the obvious riposte to those who say religion per se is inevitably the source of violence, hatred and enmity. As a book to commemorate my ordination to Christian ministry, it compelled searching reflection then, as now, on the relationship between God’s ancient people, and the Church of Jesus Christ, within the family of faith that traces its genealogy to Abraham. Shalom.