October 28, 2006
Lawrence W.Levine II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:30 PM EST I read with interest Josh Zeitz’s remarks on the historian Lawrence Levine, who died this week. When Levine published Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, I reviewed the book in The Nation. On balance, I liked the book very much, but one thing about it bothered me. Josh reminds me of what was troubling about it when he writes that in a subsequent book Levine “argued convincingly that the so-called ‘canon’ is no canon at all, and that much of what today’s academic conservatives claim as indispensable reading material for college students—Shakespeare, for instance—was considered intellectual drivel by nineteenth-century scholars and university presidents.” In Highbrow/Lowbrow, Levine was oddly squeamish about acknowledging that Shakespeare was in fact better than most of the other books miners, slaves, and cowpokes spent their time with. What does it mean to say that “the so-called ‘canon’ is no canon at all”? It may mean acknowledging that the body of things we think everyone should know, and the body of books we think everyone should read, changes over time. That is simple truth (although it does not mean that we cannot make judgments about the wisdom of given changes). It may also mean that there are no books everyone should read, and that there are no compelling grounds for passionately admiring some books more than others. In my memory, Levine mostly argued for the first position and sometimes slid into the second. When he did, I think he became foolish and destructive. Josh concludes with the assertion that “by implication, he [Levine] argued that the inclusion of new texts, by authors from different racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds, and of new methodologies or analytical tools, does not water down the canon but rather contributes to its ongoing development.” The problem is, this is not necessarily true. When I taught contemporary civilization at Columbia, a required course in what would once have been called great books, which I did for five years, something became painfully clear: A lot of modern academics hated the very idea that any books, and especially books written by people then despised as “dead while males,” were genuinely great. It also became clear that to teach one book on a given syllabus sometimes means not to teach another. And some critical methodologies and analytical tools do water down the canon, or at least impoverish the use we can make of it, when those methods and tools make us look at irrelevant things, or think foolish things. To pick only a single example from, alas, an embarrassment of riches, a method that insists that “great books” are only judged great when they corroborate existing forms of unjust power can very easily make people stupid about books, and has.
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