What fragments remain of the Western literary canon?  How many "great books" are complete mysteries to the vast majority of educated adults?

can-on -- n. [from Greek kanôn, rod, rule] a judgment by which something is measured; standard; criterion.

Botticelli, A Lady and Four Allegorical Figures

In recent months, The Center has often been contacted by browsers seeking a recommendation of some sort regarding classic literature: perhaps parents trying to build a home-school curriculum, perhaps college graduates nagged by a suspicion of having been cheated, perhaps mature adults desiring a book more challenging than a mystery novel or a celebrity biography.  We do not claim to have any special insight into the local requirements of home-school licensure--and most of the authors named below indeed very probably demand a wider experience of life to be understood than the typical adolescent possesses.  Our intent on this page of reviews, then, is to satisfy those in search of something both "classical" or "canonical" (if one may yet dare to use such words) and capable of giving profound enjoyment.  Homer or Dante will meet these criteria for some, of course (and would that they did so for many today!).  Their works not only tend to intimidate the casual reader, however, but also to be appear prominently on any proposed list of great books.

     Here we have striven, then, to suggest works which might well have escaped the contemporary reader's notice, though probably familiar to readers of the past--and which, also, a contemporary reader might find deeply rewarding with no more resources at his or her disposal than a lamp, an armchair, and a free hour.  Lis ce que voudras!

ARIOSTO, Orlando Furioso

    One is likely to excite incredulity by claiming that an author who preceded Shakespeare by a generation is underrated and awaited discovery... yet Ariosto's Orlando Furioso took me by surprise years ago, and to this day I have never personally encountered an academic who has read a significant portion of it, let alone completed the whole epic romance several times (as I have done enthusiastically).  Perhaps multiple readings are required before Ariosto's incomparable subtlety begins to grow perceptible.  Do not be lulled to sleep by the prior conditioning of heavily allegorical romances like Spenser's (who amply culled matter from the Furioso without ever suspecting the richness of his trove).  Ariosto's characters are "types" in a manner which anticipates the best of Shakespeare.  They do not symbolize gluttony or fidelity or allude to political factions at court: they are your neighbors, your family, your mates at work--the arrogant blowhard, the passive-aggressive Barbie doll, the likable but licentious frat rat, the "visionary" whose "idealism" is entirely self-serving.  Victorian novelists would have envied the author his knowledge of human nature if, by their day, this masterpiece had not been fatally mis-catalogued as The Faerie Queene's stiff-limbed forerunner.

    Orlando Furioso would be among the ten books I would take to a desert island (though, if I were never to see any people again, I suppose its hard lessons in the human race's foibles would be largely useless to me).  That Ariosto's exhaustive spectrum of character types poses and parades in medieval armor and finery might seem to the uninitiated to obscure his brilliance behind the creaky furniture of genre... yet I believe the effect to be quite the opposite.  Yes, magical lances, rings, and spells abound--but have they not always, and do they not today in the form of material advantages such as privileged birth and speed-of-light technology?  (The hippogryph is the spitting image of a jet aircraft, and Cimosco's blunderbuss evokes the contemporary host of questions surrounding weapons of mass destruction.)  The essential point to be grasped about Ariosto's wealth of enchantments is that none of them ever serves any purpose but to magnify the folly of its temporary possessor (just like the privileges of inherited money and the marvels of high-tech).  Maybe today, especially, if we were to keep reading rather than to put some charmed info-processing box in our ear, we might be uniquely well positioned to understand this wryly inspired poet.   JRH

CHEKHOV, Kashtanka, Steppe, and other novellas and short stories

    I used to teach "The Lady with the Pet Dog" routinely in a freshman class while working at a fairly hard-line Protestant college.  I don't recall any student's ever protesting that the story glorifies adultery (a favorite pastime of parents who caught their kids reading Ibsen).  This has to be a tribute to Chekhov's sensitive touch.  Few authors can present human flaws in finer detail without rendering their characters unsympathetic (or can probe sympathetic characters more deeply without shying away from their flaws).  This wondrous gift may be specially Russian, for some reason: Shchedrin leaves one weeping for the despicable Little Judas by the end of The Golovlyovs.  Yet Chekhov's stories, in contrast to those of his countrymen, are light and understated even when they grow into novellas.  The quasi-novel Steppe, which I have never seen in English and which frequently challenged my level of Russian, nevertheless revealed to me a secret of the author's made less accessible in translation, perhaps: his ability to view the world through the eyes of a being whose grasp of reality is very limited and somewhat fanciful--in this case, a boy just entering adolescence.  In other stories, like the somewhat shorter (but still novelesque) Kashtanka, a dog puzzles over the alterations in her life when adopted off the street by a compassionate loner--a circus-performer, it turns out.  The chapter where and unnamed presence (death) stalks into the bedroom one night and claims the group's wise old goose (recently trampled by a horse) is magnificently, even sublimely moody, demonstrating yet again that pedantic categories like "realism" hold little sway over creative genius.

    Anything of Chekhov's that you can find in translation is well worth the reading--but wander off the beaten path.  His least known works (perhaps neglected because they are not ready grist for the realist mill) are often his most delightful.   JRH

KIPLING, Kim and various short stories

     Kipling's unpardonable sin in literary history was twofold.  First, he was popular.  Every academic knows that the rank and file consists of easily manipulated idiots.  Anything that this crowd likes--especially during the perigee of British imperialism and the stifling rise of the middle class under Queen Victoria--must be rancid pabulum.  Second... well, it was the age of imperialism, and Kipling wrote a poem exhorting his countrymen to assume the "white man's burden".  How's that for sophisticated literary analysis purged of idiocy?

     Steve Kogan recently wrote a piece for Praesidium (9.2) which makes a far better case for Kim than I can do here.  Suffice it to say that, as well as knowing how to spin a ripping yarn, Kipling displays genuine and deep spirituality.  I would add of his prose generally that is has none of that copious overflow which undergrads associate with Victorians because of a persistent and merciless exposure to Dickens.  An aspiring writer could do worse than to immerse him- or herself in Kipling in order to study proper and effective use of the English language.

     As for the "racism", it was a foible common to the times, and Kipling should be given credit (but will not be any time soon) for translating his Western "superiority" into an obligation to serve rather than a license to kill.  (One wonders, by the way, how exactly "reparations" are to be understood if not as a burden which the white man must lift because darker-skinned citizens cannot heft it without help.)  If Kipling were really a bigot, why would stories like "Without Benefit of Clergy" present with exquisite and anguishing sympathy love affairs between the English colonizers and the Indian colonized?  The sentiment in this short piece is as overpowering without spilling into the sentimental as anything of its kind that I have ever read.  Some (perhaps much) of the power comes from the implicit understanding throughout the story that the star-crossed couple's plight is commonplace.

     Do not forget the Just So Stories or Puck of Pook's Hill, either, although they were intended for younger readers.  The Victorians puzzled over Homer, too, as a possible children's author, since they could not interpret his naive belief in the supernatural as anything other than adolescent (more of that insufferable condescension).  Yet these years were perhaps the beginning, in the wake of an exhausted romanticism, of our cult of childhood as more honest and spiritual than adulthood.  Now we're back to the boy Kim.   PTS

STEVENSON, The Master of Ballantrae

     As I wrote of Kipling above, Stevenson is best known for his children's books--and Treasure Island and Kidnapped are most certainly classics whether one takes the audience's age into consideration or not.  Also like Kipling, Stevenson modeled a fluid, expressive, pleasing style which avoided his period's tendency to verbosity.  Yet his true masterpiece is neither fit for a child's understanding nor (due to the narrative's Scots dialect) suitable for any but experienced readers.  The tale pits a virtuous but lackluster young Highlander, who has legally inherited his father's fortune, against a lawless more infinitely more flamboyant and romantic brother.  Though the virtuous man struggles far beyond his formal obligations to accommodate the demands of the renegade, the hatred that evolves between the two is at last insurmountable.  The sad tale ends at last in the snows of North America, where the tamer brother surprisingly mines his loathing for the superior force necessary to slay his brother.  Deprived of an adversarial relationship which he has allowed to define his existence, he does not long survive the fallen wild man.

     Clearly, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the eventual progeny of this novel.  Yet I consider Master the greater work because it is not playfully allegorical but bravely realistic.  In the same way, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, while celebrated for pioneering something like science-fiction, avoids through macabre extravagance the grim truth that no two people can hate one another like brothers.  Stevenson makes a mature, deeply disturbing, and above all direct commentary in this book about man's fallen nature.  Those who cannot bear the message's weight should stick with their fantasies.   PTS

UNAMUNO, Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho

    In my experience, The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho is unique, in the word's true sense.  I have never read anything like it.  Unamuno appears to be playfully serious in insisting that Cervantes did not understand his own characters fully--that he is at times, indeed, a blunt hack, and that the ultimate truth about The Knight of the Sorrowful Figure is not to be found in this hack's surviving account, but rather in the spiritual intuitions of sympathetic readers like Unamuno himself.  If this is irony, however, it constantly verges on a thrilling--and winning--innocence.  I'm not so very sure that authors do NOT sometimes create characters of greater profundity than they themselves possess.  Apparently, the official academic line on Unamuno's stunning book is that the ambitious but at last disastrous career of Don Quixote allegorizes Spain's Golden Age... yet the Ivory Tower has missed the point by steering clear (with an inerrant errancy typical of its method) of faith and the soul.  To Unamuno,  Don Quixote's struggle is infinitely more proximate to that of the idealist committed to a higher reality and forced to seek ascent to it through this world's squalor.  The parallels he draws between Cervantes' "mad fool" and spiritual luminaries like Ignatius Loyola and Teresa of Avila must outnumber all mention of Cortez and Pizarro by a factor of twenty.  And the parallels, at least to my mind, are most apt: I was immediately persuaded, despite a nagging sense of the maneuver's slight-of-hand, that Cervantes really didn't "get it" in the matter of his hero's heart of hearts.

    Taken to full extension, Unamuno argues defiantly that Don Quixote represents CHRIST, or at least his lingering imago.  Do not attempt to reach a verdict about such a seeming stretch without hearing out the author's case--the pleading of which he knows full well to be Quixotic: I.e., a little crazy and also magnificently right.  I will never be able to read the original Quixote again in quite the same way; and, in the final analysis, perhaps Unamuno has created a metalegomenon to his nation's greatest classic which will forever more prove inseparable from it.  Perhaps Cervantes himself could not appreciate his grand old man as the suffering knight of faith in the seventeenth century; but perhaps we who have witnessed the steady ridicule of faith by the sordid self-interest of "objectivity" since those years will never be able to see Sr. Quijana as anything else--or will always feel that we have missed some vital part of him until we spot the Cross framed by his gaunt shoulders.   JRH

XENOPHON, The Anabasis

     Long used to introduce beginning students of ancient Greek to Attic prose, the Anabasis has probably always been somewhat underrated as a great read.  Classics students are supposed to view it as a means to reach the "important stuff", while the general reader ends up never seeing it mentioned beside the works of Herodotus, Thucidydes, Plutarch, Livy, and the other preeminent classical historians.  Yes, Julius Caesar used it as a paradigm for the propagandistic--and highly successful--accounts of his own military campaigns; but to praise the work on this basis is again to treat it instrumentally.  It deserves better.

    Possibly, the story is too enjoyable for "serious scholars" to take seriously.  The exiled Athenian Xenophon, having embarked upon a mercenary expedition with 10,000 Spartans to place the dynamic young Cyrus upon the Persian throne, begins his account of the adventure just a little before it turns sour.  Cyrus is tragically slain in battle, and the Greeks are faced with having to fight their way back home through hundreds of miles of unknown and hostile terrain.  To evade the Persians, they take to the hills--and this, in turn, brings them into contact with many rugged mountaineer tribes who practice very strange customs and are quite unbigoted in their willingness to attack all outsiders of any origin.  The troops quarrel, there is a thorough shake-up of leadership, and Xenophon finds himself catapulted into one of the highest (and most risky) positions.  Eventually, aided by a genius for diplomacy and much common sense, he leads the survivors back to the sea ("Thalassa!  Thalassa!" cry famously the first soldiers to crest the last ridge before the Hellespont).  Things in Thrace are far from friendly once a crossing is negotiated, but our man finally makes it back in one piece--with what a tale to tell!

     The work is not without considerable historical and cultural value--but I love it most, frankly, because it reads so like a modern adventure novel (as which it has about the same proportions and rhythm).  Those who like to extrapolate to the contemporary scene will even find cautionary lessons about trying to fight wars in the Middle East... but I leave that to them.  (After all, Alexander read the book as a heavy hint about how easy the Persian Empire would be to knock off!).   PTS