Great Books

My Adventures with Homer,
Rousseau, Woolf, and
Other Indestructible Writers
of the Western World

By David Denby
Simon & Schuster, $30

ISBN 0684809753

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Review by Michael Sims

At the age of 48, three decades after he surveyed the canon of Western literature in Columbia University's core curriculum classes, David Denby returned to his alma mater -- and to the very same classes. He longed, he admits in Great Books, to submit himself to something greater than his career. "In a largely utilitarian, philistine, and media-dazed society, college was one of the few earnest places." Denby proposed to reread those works he had studied in his youth, to read those that had since been added to the list, and to write a book about the experience. "Obviously," he confesses, "it wasn't just learning that excited me but the idea of reading the big books, the promise of enlargement, the adventure of strangeness."

Denby is no ivory tower academic. He opens his discussion of Homer, for example, with an aside about Casablanca. A frequent contributor to the New Yorker, he is also the film critic for New York magazine. Never pompous, armed with contagious enthusiasm and a fine way with a sentence, Denby takes a topic that might have been deathly dull and makes it a great adventure. We follow him as he wades -- reluctantly, at first -- into the Iliad, and as he rediscovers the enduring beauty of the few surviving scraps of Sappho's work. He reads Nietzsche and Jane Austen, Rousseau's rebuttal to Hobbes, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Beauvoir and Wollstonecraft on women's rights.

But Denby does more than read. He talks with students and professors. He attends the annual "Take Back the Night" march, during which women recount their stories of rape. He lives a normal metropolitan life, surrounded by the threat of violence. And through all these experiences, Denby makes it clear that the themes of the "great books" are not abstract or merely aesthetic. They are the profoundly important issues of everyday life -- freedom, responsibility, morality.

The questions, from students and professors and Denby himself, multiply: Are the Greek classics really the root of Western democracy? What about Plato's Republic? Isn't it a blueprint for totalitarianism? Is the core curriculum an aesthetic or a political heritage? In the course of all this, Denby articulates the aspect of the arts that disturbs Jesse Helms and Newt Gingrich: "A great work of art is likely to be challenging and even subversive of almost anyone's peace."

Along the way, Denby addresses the most basic question of all: What is an education and what purpose does it serve? A Columbia professor named Edward Tayler, from whom Denby had taken a class 30 years before, answered that: "You create a self, you donŐt inherit it."

Michael Sims's almanac of natural history, Darwin's Orchestra, will be published in October by Henry Holt.

©1996, ProMotion, inc.

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