Understanding Civilization as Narrative

E. Christian Kopff A

healthy person's life forms an Aristotelian narrative with beginning, middle, and end, with roots and goals, with motivations and accomplishments. The life may, and probably will, include success and failure, tragedy and comedy, high emotion and bathos. A coherent narrative trend, however, will unite all these variegated strains. A person who cannot explain how his actions of today relate to his deeds of yesterday is in trouble; he will not be able to understand the connection between the alien self he inhabited once and how it became the being he is now. Furthermore, each individual life is part of larger wholes: family, profession, nation, civilization. The healthy individual must be able to recount the narrative of those larger wholes or collapse into the anomie which Durkheim described and so much of modern literature portrays. The Great Books provide a means of introducing young people to the narrative that their own lives will continue and to the story of the civilization they inhabit. Today's world is concerned with the development and protection of the individual. How did Western man develop from Homer's heroic warrior to the strong democratic leader described by Aeschylus or Thucydides, to the autonomous individual exemplified by Socrates? It is a story that every educated voter, that all our leaders must know. In Homer the ordinary person scarcely enters the picture. The ugly, sneering Thersites steps forward to be beaten and mocked, while his opinion, an eminently sensible one, is ignored. All eyes focus on the hero, Achilles or Odysseus. By the time of the fifth-century Athenian democracy the individual's vote counts, but center stage is still occupied by the great man, Themistocles or Pericles, Cimon or Nicias. Only in Aristophanic comedy is there the hint that the average farmer or craftsman might be a hero, too. With Plato's Socrates we see the consummation of this development. Socrates is as ugly and socially unimportant as Thersites, but, by cultivation of his soul, he matters as an individual. That important stage in human development has often been ignored and sometimes been overemphasized, but no one can understand why our society lays such importance on the individual without knowing the story that lies behind it. Of course, there are many narratives that can be followed in the Great Books. One can track a similar pattern, tracing the growing significance of the "ordinary" person from Homer's Helen and Penelope through Sappho on to Aeschylus' Clytemnestra and Athena and even to Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Praxagora. I do not deny that a contemporary history book can retell these narratives from our perspective and in our words and idioms. Only reading the Great Books, however, gives us the actors themselves, speaking their own lines in their own way. E. Christian Kopff is associate professor of classics, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, and a N.A.S. Fellow.

18

Academic Questions / Spring 1989

We argue about so many issues in today's world: abortion, feminism, justice. Frequently those debates end in a cul de sac because we are arguing from different premises and even out of different traditions. There are only a few works of literature or philosophy that confront other traditions in a way that allows a real discussion to take place. Reading those books is essential if we are to find our way out of the current morass of disagreement. Plato, for instance, is able to make his enemies, the Sophists, who are the ideologues of the triumphant fifth-century Athenian democracy, part of his solution to the dilemmas that urban and democratic society posed to the Homeric vision of mankind. Starting with Plautus and Terence, we can also follow the Romans' first attempts at assimilating the accomplishments of the Greeks all the way to the Aeneid, Virgil's great epic, and Augustine's masterful reinterpretation of three cultures, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, The City of God. Some people teach the Aeneid as a rewriting, a modernization of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The Aeneid, however, contains figures borrowed from Apollonius of Rhodes' Hellenistic Argonautica, such as Dido, and from the archaic Greek cyclic epics, such as Camilla. Virgil is responding not only to Homer but to the entire Greek epic tradition, which he puts into a new and significant context. Virgil's imitation of Homer involves assimilation and challenge, both artistic and moral. That is one reason why he is worth reading in translation. He teaches us by example how one culture can respond positively to another, gaining strength and wisdom without losing distinctiveness. In Augustine's greatest works, the Confessions and The City of God, he builds on Virgil's accomplishments and adds the insights of the Hebrew prophets and of Jesus and Paul to the vision of Greece and the civilization of Rome. When students are cut off from these stories, they are like the antiheroes of modern novels, trapped in a world they cannot understand, doomed to play parts in a drama whose basic themes are a mystery to them. Taking seriously the people we disagree with and making them partners in the way we answer the important questions of life can be learned only by watching someone who has succeeded in doing so. Such figures are few. There are so many goals for education and so many demands made of it that we must be chary of promising too much from any one part of the curriculum. Reading the Great Books can help a reader at age twenty, forty, or sixty, to understand where he came from and so where he is. Because the Great Books represent a tradition, reading them shows a student that different ages and languages and cultures can creatively respond to the past, that originality does not necessarily mean the rejection of what is different or distant, but rather its humane assimilation. Obstacles to Teaching the Great Books The Great Books are difficult to read and difficult to teach. Students have little experience reading books that stretch them, that demand much of them. They should not expect Homer's Iliad, for instance, to be easier than Faulkner's

Kopff

19

The Sound and the Fury. For readers who are used to being treated with contempt by writers who do not challenge them, reading the Great Books will always seem hard work. The Sound and the Fury is a challenge to both reader and teacher because it begins with a narrative delivered by a mentally retarded person, who seems to be mixing up the chronology of events and even the sex of the characters. We have to read on in the book's other narratives before the first section becomes at all clear and meaningful. Is the challenge this technique presents to the reader so different from that of Aeschylus' great tragic trilogy, the Oresteia? Order comes out of chaos in the course of those three plays, and clarity out of obscurity, but only with time. In the first play, Agamemnon, the choral lyrics tell the story of past events, while the dialogue and speeches render the emotions and passions. Essential background, such as the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father, is sung in the lyrics, while the messenger speech, usually an exposition of events, concentrates on the leaping journey of fire from Troy to Argos as the series of beacons warn Clytemnestra of the fall of Troy and her husband's return. In the last play, this technique is reversed to the more normal and natural format for drama. The key action is a trial scene that takes place in front of us, and the lyrics express moral sentiments and high passion. The reader's effort is rewarded in both the ancient and modern works, but effort and challenge await us and no reader should expect otherwise. The Great Books should be a challenge for the teacher as well as for the student. Unfortunately, Great Books and humanities courses have too often become refugee camps for the least highly trained and talented of our teachers. To take only the most obvious example, the great majority, in fact, nearly all teachers of Great Books cannot read the assigned books in their original language. Fewer still find anything wrong with this situation. Translations, even the best, are crutches. They help us to introduce the worlds of Homer and Sappho and Aristophanes, of Virgil and Augustine, of Dante and the Beowulf-poet, to students who otherwise might never know of them. But we must not delude ourselves or our students into thinking that they replace the original. No class in the Great Books can dwell on the linguistic intricacies of the original texts. Every such course, however, should pause at some point to bring home to the student some sense of what only direct contact with the original text can reveal. Let me take an example from my teacher Richard Lattimore's translation of Sappho's great prayer to Aphrodite. In this poem, Sappho is in love and prays to make her beloved fall in love with her in return. She recalls the last time she prayed to Aphrodite; the goddess appeared to her and (now I quote Lattimore): asked me what afflictionwas on me, why I called thus upon you, what beyond all else I would have befall my tortured heart: "Whom then wouldyou have Persuasion force to serve desire in your heart?"

20

Academic Questions / Spring 1989

Lattimore thus makes these lines a straightforward statement of passion, but in the original Greek, as Sir Denys Page has pointed out, Aphrodite's statements to Sappho repeat a word that means "again" or "this time" three times, a term Lattimore omits: "She asked me what was wrong with me this time and why I was calling on her again . . . . W h o m this time am I to persuade to enlist as your lover?" The passion that causes Sappho to call on the goddess of love is not her first amour and Aphrodite's statements near the end of the poem make it plain that it wilt not be her last. There is more than one way to read and interpret this poem. It may be an artless outpouring of a young girl's heart, or it may be a witty and distanced portrait of emotion. Only the teacher who has access to the original Greek will be able to present the class with these options and so stretch the student's appreciation of the possible range of lyric verse. Most Great Books and humanities courses in America are taught by people who have no access to the original texts. I once sat in on a committee that oversaw the funding of courses in humanities to be taught by college teachers to high school teachers. One proposal involved a course in Plato's Republic and the referees had objected that the teacher knew no Greek. The course was defended by the two most distinguished scholars on the committee, indeed two of the most distinguished scholars in the humanities. One said that knowledge of the original language was probably important for poetry, but not for prose. The other said that Allan Bloom's version of The Republic rendered knowledge of the Greek superfluous. I mean no disrespect for Prof. Bloom when I say that translations are tools. In the hands of a knowledgeable teacher the reefs of a poor translation can be avoided. In the hands of an ignoramus, even a good translation becomes an instrument of destruction and desecration. Some will say that if we apply my standards it will be impossible to find teachers for Great Books courses. After all, Greek for Homer and Plato, Latin for Virgil, Hebrew for Genesis, Italian for Dante?! I can only answer in the words of John Henry Newman ("The Tamworth Reading Room"): "I cannot help that; I never said I could. I am not a politician; I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy, and resisting a pretence." The humanities will never recover the status they deserve until they are taught according to the highest standards. I do not believe that knowledge of the original languages of the books we teach is enough to make a successful teacher of the Great Books, but I do think that it is a sine qua non for good teaching. And, by the by, the self-respect of the humanities teacher who sets out to fulfill this minimal qualification will also increase. Hints o n H o w to T e a c h the Great Books

Try to find some part or aspect of the reading that relates to the daily life of your students. If it is the year of the Olympic Games, add Pindar, who wrote epinician or victory odes for aristocratic athletes, to your reading list and

Kopff

21

compare our response to athletic accomplishment with the Greeks'. I cannot say how pleased I was to have a student come up to me during the games in Seoul and say, "All during the last part of your lecture, when you were talking about the fragility of glory and the closeness of light and darkness in Pindar's world, I kept thinking about Ben Johnson." I was pleased because I had been thinking about him, too. Then the student asked, "What would Pindar have written about that race?" I was even more pleased because I had not thought of that. Remember not to downplay the strangeness, the alien character of the great works you are teaching. Of course, you will lose your students if you do not present, explicitly and implicidy, the closeness of the past to our time. You will fail to make your students grow if they do not see and feel that the past is also different and yet legitimate. The poet Solon helped found the Athenian democracy in the sixth century B.C. and left us poems about his political and ethical struggles. He writes about the problem of injustice in this world in ways that are very close to what young people feel today. Yet he is satisfied if Zeus, allowing an evildoer to escape without punishment, chastises his family instead. Students must learn to understand how a man can be wise and good and still not accept our notions of right and wrong. To emphasize sameness without difference is to pander to your audience. Presenting differences without the touch of proximity is to reduce the past and its literature to Ripley's Believe It or Not. To combine these two elements in a way that interests your students and stretches them is the challenge of teaching the Great Books.