Classics in the Curriculum (Fall 1990)

James A. W. Heffernan

Some years ago, an arresting piece of conversation caught the ear of the late Robert Fitzgerald, distinguished translator of Homer, Sophocles, and Vergil, as he was walking one day through Harvard Yard. One young woman was talking to another, and he overheard her say this: "So I said to him, you know that scene in the Iliad where Achilles ties the dead body of Hector to his chariot and drags him through the dust three times around the walls of Troy? Well, that's what I'd like to do to you!"

At the risk of leaping to conclusions, I venture to infer from this scrap of overheard conversation that the classical tradition remains alive in America, or at the very least in Harvard yard, that some college students actually share a knowledge of Homer, and that women as well as men are still finding ways to use classical literature in their lives. Classical literature is of course the foundation of the Western literary canon, which for well over a decade has been steadily bombarded by attacks on its ideological rigidity, its patriarchal determination to celebrate the military and intellectual triumphs of white male Graeco-Roman heroes and to keep everyone else in their place. But the classical canon has so far stubbornly refused to disintegrate. Like the Parthenon, whose elegantly fluted columns have somehow survived over two thousand years of negligence and abuse--including an explosion of gunpowder stored within them in the late seventeenth century--classical literature retains its power to move, captivate, and inspire us.

To experience that power, we must of course be able to see beyond the caricatures that have lately been used to justify the demolition of the classical curriculum in many American universities--or more precisely the scrapping of requirement that it be studied. But if classical literature is to remain a vital force in university curricula, we must also recognize--with the help of new and challenging critical perspectives--that the classical tradition is far more heterogeneous and conflicted than either its defenders or its detractors commonly recognize.

Let us reconsider the case for the classics made some years ago by the late Allen Bloom. In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom argued that every American who wisher to be educated must study the classics, and in particular the Republic of Plato, because in the figure of Socrates Plato timelessly represents the sublimation of desire into the passionate quest of reason for the truth according to nature. For Bloom, Socrates' determined effort to lead the mind from the shadowy cave of religious myths and social convention into the sunlight of true being lead in turn to the Enlightenment, which makes the free exercise of reason politically possible for all citizen in a liberal democracy. Through the enlightenment, the American university inherits the Socratic spirit and must keep it alive by exercising and defending the freedom of the mind to contemplate intellectual alternatives, to resist the tyranny of majority opinion, and to seek knowledge for its own sake, rather than for its practical usefulness. The problem with American universities, according to Bloom, is that they have cut themselves off from the Socratic tradition. They have recklessly leaped or heedlessly slipped (not his metaphors, I should say) from the high ground of timeless Socratic inquiry into the dismal swamp of historicism, cultural relativism, personal creativity, and value creation: values arbitrarily posited or charismatically decreed rather than deliberately chosen. To find our way out of this swamp and back to the high philosophic ground on which we belong, Bloom argued, we must return to the study of Plato.

And at the same time, he insisted, as an antidote to the deterministic theories propagated by modern social science--theories that make the individual feel helplessly driven by impersonal forces--we must rediscover the models of heroic action put before us by the ancient poets and historians, by men such as Homer and Plutarch. When anyone or anything start to push us around, presumabaly the example of Achilles will show us how to strike back.

Bloom's argument for the study of the classics in American universities deserve to be carefully pondered by anyone who cares about higher education. But his way of defending the classical tradition has worked more to intensify than to overcome the resistance which that tradition has provoked in recent years. In holding up Socrates' quest for truth as a timeless example of rational inquiry, in sending us back to Homer and Plutarch for model of heroic action, Bloom assumes that the ancient Greek writers universally speak to and for all of us. He does not reckon with the feminist objection that Greek writers are men speaking to men in terms of male rationality and male aggression, that in western culture at least, Homer initiates a tradition of what Sandra Gilbert calla "literary paternity," a genealogy in which authority--the author's power to beget a text--passes from literary father to literary on. Women reader have trouble finding a place for themselves in this genealogy, and finding models in classic works. Where do they find them-

selves, for instance, in Homer' Odyssey? With Circe, the enchantress? With Penelope, the long-suffering wife and shroud-weaver? In the very first book of the Odyssey, when Penelope comes down the stairs from her room and tearfully asks Phemios to stop singing about the Greeks' bitter homecoming from Troy, Telemachus tells her that she must listen to it anyway and sends her back to her loom: "but the men must see to discussion," he says, "...and I most of all. For mine is the power in this household." Thus Telemachus begins to use the power that passes from father to son, and first proclaims his coming of age by silencing a woman.

Does classical literature say anything more to women than Telemachus says to Penelope at this moment? Does it belong in a curriculum designed for the education of both sexes? To answer this question fairly, we need to recognize that classical literature--poetry, drama, history, philosophy--encompasses far more than either Bloom's defense of it or the feminist critique of it would suggest. Bloom's version of classicism recalls the way in which Winckelmann and hie fellow critic in eighteenth century Germany thought about the classical era: as a period privileged in its procession of a timeless, ideal, Apollonian beauty which modern man must strive to regain. Bloom writes at length about the influence of Nietzsche on American thought, but he would like to return--he would like all of us to return--to a classicism undisturbed by Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, which revealed the core of Dionysiac passion and violence lurking behind the serenely rational image of Apollo. To follow Nietzsche rather than Bloom is to see that classical literature offers us not just timeless models of rational inquiry and heroic action but also searching explorations of human beings at their most contingent, their most destructive, their most irrational. Neither Bloom's nor Gilbert's version of classicism accounts for a work like Euripides' Medea, which fully engages our sympathy for a woman murderously enraged by the arrogance of a husband who wants to cast her aside in the name of what is reasonable and practically expedient.

There in no model of male heroism here, no shining example of rational inquiry, no monumental display of phallocentric authority and literary paternity; there is instead the passionate expression of a woman's desire to make a man feel the force of her defiance. Indeed, even in mainstream work of the classical tradition, feminist-minded classical scholars are now discovering moments at which the supremacy of male values is profoundly challenged. In the sixth book of the Aeneid, when the hero goes to the underworld and meet the shade of Dido, he is suddenly made to realize that by abandoning this woman he has driven her to suicide. I swear, he says (in Fitzgerald's translation), "I left your land against my will, my queen./ The gods' commands drove me to do their will.

And I could not believe that I would hurt you...So terribly by going." The eponymous hero of the Aeneid is at his weakest here, disclaiming responsibility for what he has done and amazed by its consequences. At this moment--for this moment--his divinely ordained mission to found what would become the Roman empire becomes an inhuman, irrelevant abstraction; like the feeble word of Aeneas, it is utterly overpowered by the eloquence of Dido's granitically silent response.

Classical literature is worth reading now, in our time, because it remains alive and open to revisionary re-readings, because it gives us not so much timeless truths and timeless models as enduringly recognizable representations of human need, human suffering, human conflict. It makes room for the experience of women as well as of men, and we should not forget that the greatest of early Greek lyric poets was a woman named Sappho, who greatly influenced Catullus and Ovid and who is now at long last part of the first-year core curriculum in at least one major American university.

There remains the question of whether all students at any college or university should be required to read a core curriculum of classics, and whether such a curriculum meets the needs of minority students. The concept of a core curriculum--the notion that any set of texts should be required of all students--runs directly counter to the reigning academic catchword of our time, which is diversity. Perhaps in time this word will replace "university," which seems more and more an irrelevant misnomer. In any case, diversity at Dartmouth College, where I teach, means--among other things--that Dartmouth students have in common precisely one text: the college catalogue. No other text is required of all students; in this academic community, no other text provides common intellectual ground on which all students can meet.

I believe that such a ground might be found if we were first of all willing to recognize the vitality and diversity of the classical tradition itself, and secondly willing to recognize what has achieved classic status in our own time--the classics of feminist literature such as Simone de Beauvoir' Second Sex, the classic of black literature such as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the classics of Latin American literature such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. In short, I believe it is possible to construct core curriculum that connects the old classics with the new ones, with their way of representing the experience of women and minority groups. The classical tradition is not a closed corporation for the elite. What keeps it alive is precisely the fact that it can say--in the words of Terence--"Humani nil a me alienum puto." Nothing essentially human stand outside it.