The first step was to select not some Great Ideas but The Great Ideas. A list of seven hundred was whittled down to a hundred and two, extending from Angel to World and including Art, Beauty, Being, Democracy, Good and Evil, Justice, Logic, Man, Medicine, Prudence, Same and Other, Theology, and Wisdom.2 These were broken down into 2,987 “topics,” the top sergeants in this ideological army, the link between the company commanders (the hundred and two Great Ideas) and the privates (the 163,000 page references to the Great Books). Thus the references under “Art” are arranged under twelve topics, such as “3. Art as imitation,” “7a. Art as a source of pleasure or delight,” “8. Art and emotion: expression, purgation, sublimation.” With Dr. Adler as field marshal, coach, and supreme arbiter, the “scholars” (bright young graduate students who needed to pick up a little dough on the side and latched on to this latter-day W.P.A.) dissected the Great Ideas in the Great Books and, like mail clerks, distributed the fragments among the topical pigeonholes, the upshot being that, in theory, every passage on “Art as a source of pleasure or delight” in the Great Books from Homer to Freud ended up in “Art 7a.” Finally, Dr. Adler has prefaced the references under each Great Idea with a syntopical essay that summarizes the Great Conversation of the Great Writers about it and that reads like the Minutes of the Preceding Meeting as recorded by a remarkably matter-of-fact secretary.
The Syntopicon, writes Dr. Adler, is “a unified reference library in the realm of thought and opinion,” and he compares it to a dictionary or an encyclopedia. Words and facts, however, can be so ordered because they are definite, concrete, distinguishable entities, and because each one means more or less the same thing to everyone. Looking them up in the dictionary or encyclopedia is not a major problem. But an idea is a misty, vague object that takes on protean shapes, never the same for any two people. There is a strong family resemblance between the dictionaries of Dr. Johnson, Mr. Webster, and Messrs. Funk & Wagnalls, but every man makes his own Syntopicon, God forbid, and this one is Dr. Adler’s, not mine or yours. To him, of course, ideas seem to be as objective and distinct as marbles, which can be arranged in definite, logical patterns. He has the classifying mind, which is invaluable for writing a natural history or collecting stamps. Assuming that an index of ideas should be attempted at all, it should have been brief and simple, without pretensions to either completeness or logical structure—a mere convenience for the reader who wants to compare, say, Plato, Pascal, Dr. Johnson, and Freud on love. Instead, we have a fantastically elaborate index whose fatal defect is just what Dr. Adler thinks is its chief virtue: its systematic all-inclusiveness. (He apologizes because it is not inclusive enough: “It is certainly not claimed for the references under the 3,000 topics that they constitute a full collection of the relevant passages in the great books. But the effort to check errors of omission was diligent enough to permit the claim that the references under each topic constitute an adequate representation of what the great books say on that subject.”) This approach is wrong theoretically because the only one of the authors who wrote with Dr. Adler’s 2,987 topics in mind was Dr. Adler. And it is wrong practically because the reader’s mental compartmentation doesn’t correspond to Dr. Adler’s, either. Furthermore, one needs the patience of Job and the leisure of Sardanapalus to plough through the plethora of references. Those under Science, which take up twelve and a half pages, begin with four lines of references to Plato, which took me an hour to look up and read. Sometimes, as when one finds sixty-two references to one author (Aquinas) under one subdivision of one topic under one idea (God), one has the feeling of being caught in a Rube Goldberg contraption. Again, under Justice (“2. The precepts of justice: doing good, harming no one, rendering to each his own, treating equals equally”), one is referred to “Chaucer, 225a–232a, esp. 231b–232a,” which turns out to be the entire “Reeve’s Tale,” a bit of low comedy that one of the mail clerks threw into this pigeonhole apparently because Chaucer stuck on a five-line moral at the end (“esp. 231b–232a”). The one method of classification that would have been useful was not employed; there is no attempt to distinguish between major and minor references. An important discussion of Justice in Plato has no more weight than an aside by Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, although it is common practice to make such a distinction by using different type faces or by putting the major references first.
“What the Corpus Juris does for the legal profession,” Dr. Adler has said, “the Syntopicon will do for everyone.” That is, as lawyers follow a single point of law through a series of cases, the reader can follow one topic through the Great Books. The Doctor is simply carrying on his mistaken analogy with the dictionary. The structure of law, although intricate, is a rigid framework within which concepts are so classified and defined that they mean exactly the same thing to everybody. Yet Dr. Adler actually suggests that the best way for the beginning reader, wholly unfamiliar with the Great Books, to get acquainted with them is to follow chosen topics through a series of works whose context he knows nothing about.
It is natural for Dr. Adler to compare his Syntopicon with the Corpus Juris, since he has been a teacher of the philosophy of law and a writer about it, and his mind is essentially a legalistic one. He aspires to be the great codifier and systematizer of Western culture, to write its Code Napoléon. The Syntopicon is merely the first step toward this goal. At his Institute for Philosophical Research, another group of scholars is working with him, using the Syntopicon, to produce “a dialectical summation of Western thought, a synthesis for the twentieth century.” The most celebrated attempt at such a summation was, of course, the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Adler’s guide and inspirer. Aquinas had certain advantages over his disciple; the culture he summarized was homogeneous, systematically articulated, and clearly outlined, because of the universal acceptance of the Roman Catholic faith as expressed in the Bible and by the Church Fathers. Dr. Adler cannot bring these qualities to and make them a part of twentieth-century thought, but he proceeds as if he could, and he has run up his own homemade substitutes for the sacred writings. Thus the true reason for his set of Great Books becomes apparent. Its aim is hieratic rather than practical—not to make the books accessible to the public (which they mostly already were) but to fix the canon of the Sacred Texts by printing them in a special edition. Simply issuing a list would have been enough if practicality were the only consideration, but a list can easily be revised, and it lacks the dramatic, totemistic force of a five-foot, hundred-pound array of books. The Syntopicon is partly a concordance to the Sacred Texts, partly the sort of commentary and interpretation of them the Church Fathers made for the Bible.
In its massiveness, its technological elaboration, its fetish of The Great, and its attempt to treat systematically and with scientific precision materials for which the method is inappropriate, Dr. Adler’s set of books is a typical expression of the religion of culture that appeals to the American academic mentality. And the claims its creators make are a typical expression of the American advertising psyche. The way to put over a two-million-dollar cultural project is, it seems, to make it appear as pompous as possible. At the Great Bookmanite banquet last spring, Dr. Hutchins said, “This is more than a set of books. It is a liberal education.… The fate of our country, and hence of the world, depends on the degree to which the American people achieve liberal education. [It is] a process…of placing in the hands of the American people the means of continuing and revitalizing Western civilization, for the sake of the West and for the sake of all mankind.” This is Madison Avenue cant—Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War, The Great Books Have Enlisted for the Duration. It is also poppycock. The problem is not placing these already available books in people’s hands (at five dollars a volume) but getting people to read them, and the hundred pounds of densely printed, poorly edited reading matter assembled by Drs. Adler and Hutchins is scarcely likely to do that.
* * *
1. It is certainly much sounder than the selection offered by it
s long-established and still active competitor, Dr. Eliot’s celebrated Five-Foot Shelf, the Harvard Classics. Half the authors on Dr. Adler’s shelf (which also measures, by chance or ineluctable destiny, five feet) appear on Dr. Eliot’s, but only eight are represented by the same works; the rest appear in extracts or in shorter works, for if Dr. Adler overdoes the complete text, Dr. Eliot goes to the opposite extreme. Among the Great Books authors whose work doesn’t appear in the Classics at all (if one ignores a few snippets) are Aristotle, Thucydides, Aquinas, Rabelais, Spinoza, Gibbon, Hegel, Marx, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, and Freud. On the other hand, since Dr. Eliot went in for variety above all, he did include, though often in unsatisfactory snippets, many writers omitted by Dr. Adler. No less than ten of his fifty volumes are anthologies, and while this is overdoing it, surely the Great Books would have been enriched by a few, such as one of English poetry and one of political writing since the French Revolution. Some of Dr. Eliot’s choices are as eccentric as some of Dr. Adler’s (though Eliot produced nothing as fantastic as the six volumes of scientific treatises): Robert Burns gets a whole volume, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi another, and Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast a third. But in some ways the Classics are a better buy. For one thing, they cost only half as much. And for another, there is an amateurish, crotchety, comfortable atmosphere about them that is more inviting than the ponderous professionalism of the Great Books. Moreover, while Dr. Eliot is overfond of the brief sample, the chief practical use of such collections may well be as a grab bag of miscellaneous specimens, some of which may catch the reader’s fancy and lead him to further explorations on his own. When I was a boy, I enjoyed browsing in the family set of the Classics, but browsing in the Great Books would be like browsing in Macy’s book department.
2. Inevitably, the choice was more than a little arbitrary: to the naked eye, such rejected ideas as Fact, Faith, Sex, Thought, Value, and Woman seem as “great” as some of those included. However, the Doctor has appended to his Syntopicon those sixteen hundred small ideas, running from A Priori to Zoology via such way stations as Gluttony (see Sin), Elasticity, Distinctness, Circumcision (see God), and Daydreaming (see Desire). This Inventory relates each of these small ideas to the Great Ideas (or Great Idea) under which references pertinent to the small ideas can be found, and all one needs to find one’s way around in the Syntopicon is some sort of idea, Great or small (plus, naturally, plenty of time and determination).
EDMUND WILSON
FROM
NOVEMBER 15, 1958 (ON DOCTOR ZHIVAGO BY BORIS PASTERNAK)
N DEALING WITH Doctor Zhivago, the novel by Boris Pasternak, the reviewer—not to end on a dampening note—proposes to reverse the usual procedure and discuss the translation first. This translation was made in England by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (though the poems which compose the last chapter are translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney); the copyright page of the American edition (Pantheon) shows that it was revised over here; and a lack of coordination between these several hands may be part of the explanation of the unsatisfactoriness of this English version. But, comparing it with the Russian text—which has been announced for December publication by the University of Michigan Press—one has the impression that a project which, if properly carried out, might well have taken many months has been put through in too much of a hurry and without the translators’ having beforehand sufficiently studied the book.
All this is not said, however, to discourage you from reading the novel, which is one of the very great books of our time. Tolstoy and Turgenev first made their impression in translations that were sometimes far less competent than that of Harari and Hayward. The good thing that can be said for this version is that it reads well, it does not sound translated. And it is the triumph, in any case, of the literary genius of the Russians, master storytellers, master moralists, that they have been able to leave their language and a good deal of their style behind, to submit to be stripped of so much, and yet hold the world spellbound.
· · ·
Doctor Zhivago has no doubt been much read—like other books that promise to throw some light on the lives of our opposite numbers in the Soviet Union—out of simple curiosity. But it is not really a book about Russia in the sense that the newspaper accounts of it might lead the reader to expect; it is a book about human life, and its main theme is death and resurrection.
Dr. Zhivago is the hero of the story, and though Zhivago is a real Russian name—there was a nineteenth-century painter called Zhivago—it is obvious that Pasternak wants to suggest zhivoy, “alive, living” (to one form of which it almost corresponds), as well as zhizn’, “life,” and zhit’, “to live.” These words are constantly used by Zhivago in his arguments against the deadness of political abstractions and the tyranny of government control. One is reminded, in reading Zhivago, of Yeats’s constant insistence on the importance in literature of “the crooked way of life” as distinguished from “inorganic, logical straightness.” One may not at first notice this dominant theme, though it is first announced on page 9 (of the translation) and repeated on page 67. One is likely to be so much surprised at finding a book from the Soviet Union which pays no deference to the official ideology, which has been written completely outside it on assumptions that have nothing in common with Marxism, that one does not at first quite know where one is. Then one realizes that where one is with Pasternak is exactly where one is oneself, at home in the great literary tradition of bold thinking and original art.
Pasternak is as much an example of the intellectual man of the world as Pushkin or Turgenev or Tolstoy, yet he is saturated with Russian life and language in a way that makes most Soviet writing look like diagrams drawn up in offices. His father was a painter, his mother a musician; he studied philosophy in Germany, and he evidently, like Zhivago, before the first war, lived a good deal in Eastern Europe. At the time of the Revolution, he was twenty-seven—that is, his mind was already formed. That this mind should have continued to function for forty years in the Soviet Union, judging the events in Russia and continuing to think in terms of the whole sweep of human history, is likely to seem as astonishing as that the mammoths preserved in Siberian ice should still have their flesh intact. We find that we are reading a contemporary and peer of Faulkner, Malraux, and Auden, and we are so eager to see how such a mind will deal with the Bolshevik seizure of power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Civil Wars, the Soviet state after Lenin’s death, the purges, and the war against Germany that we may not notice at first that his interest in these matters is, in a sense, incidental. For though he touches on all these events and though his comment on them is breathtakingly explicit, and as enlightening as it is unexpected, there is developed throughout the novel, consistently and step by step, a point of view that is universal, that does not cater to Soviet officialdom or even to Russian patriotism and from which war and revolution are seen as striking local occurrences that have made Russia loom larger to the rest of the world as well as to the Russians themselves but that must be taken in a wider perspective as the transient phenomena they are. It will be well, then, before coming to the story itself, to try to give some account of Pasternak’s general view as it is gradually built up for the reader in conversations between Zhivago and the other characters.
It ought to be explained at the outset that Pasternak—though a Jew or part Jewish—has evidently been brought up in the Greek Orthodox Church; that the ritual and the doctrine of the Church represent for him the fundamental moral realities. Yet his religious position is peculiar. It is as if his Jewish authority had somehow made it possible for him to reinvent Christianity—which, to this non-religious reviewer, is made here to seem a good deal more impressive than in the works of the literary converts: a force of regeneration that has given Pasternak the faith to survive and the moral courage to write this book. Since it is usually Zhivago or his uncle, whose line of thought the nephew is supposed to be following, who develops this point of view, I shall not, I think, be misrepresenting
it if I summarize it by putting together the utterances of several characters at different ages and in various circumstances.
It is possible, then, we are told at the beginning, “to be an atheist, not to know whether God exists or why there should be one,” and yet to believe that Jesus has brought to man the supreme revelation. By displacing the moral emphasis from the society, from the nation, from the people in the sense of the populus Romanus to the individual soul, to “the idea of the free personality and the idea of life as a sacrifice,” he for the first time rescued man from the rest of nature and inaugurated a society that was truly human. It has been the great mistake of the Jews—it is a Jewish character who makes this point—not to recognize this revelation, which has been their own chief gift to humanity. The doctrine of the salvation of the individual disregards, supersedes nationalities, yet the Jews, with all their social idealism, have remained professional nationalists and have paid for this with unnecessary suffering.
But Jesus also brought immortality. One must be “faithful to immortality, which is another word for life, a somewhat intensified word.” The resurrection of all humanity in another world is unthinkable and ridiculous. We should be animals still craving our animal life, and our removal from the continuum of the universe would leave it and God without meaning. But life, which pervades the universe, does incessantly renew itself in its innumerable different forms. Our birth is a resurrection, and we shall rise again in our children as well as in our work. (The translators make Zhivago say to his love when they part for the last time, “Farewell…until we meet in the next world,” but this is not in the text and would be contrary to Zhivago’s cosmology. What Pasternak makes him say is that he will never see her again “in life”; he merely bids her “farewell in this world,” which does not imply meeting in Heaven.)
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