The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [31]
But what does it mean to read the classics or to study them? Dwight Macdonald’s review of the Hutchins-Adler Great Books series—a review that must have been real fun for him to write—takes note of the deliberate absence of a “scholarly apparatus” accompanying a set of books that span the disciplines of literature, philosophy, history, and science, and range from ancient Greece and medieval England to Freud and (inadequately selected works of) Marx. “The Advisory Board,” Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote, “recommended that no scholarly apparatus be included in the set. No ‘introductions’ giving the editors’ views of the authors should appear. The books should speak for themselves, and the reader should decide for himself. Great books contain their own aids to reading; that is one reason why they are great. Since we hold that these works are intelligible to the ordinary man, we see no reason to interpose ourselves or anybody else between the author and the reader.”4
Macdonald found this particularly vexing in the case of the six volumes of scientific writing, which posed a problem “so urgent that almost no expository apparatus would suffice. A scientific work differs from a literary, historical, or philosophical work,” in his view, “partly because it is written in a language comprehensible only to the specialist (equations, diagrams, and so on) and partly because its importance is not in itself but in its place in the development of science.” Thus, while Milton “does not supersede Homer,” and the historian Edward Gibbon “represents no advance over Thucydides,” scientific writing is “often revised, edited, or even superseded by the work of later scientists.”5 To underscore this point, Macdonald offered some quotations from Hippocrates that were meant to show how out of date he was as a scientist—for instance, “In women, blood collected in the breasts indicates madness.” But as this example makes clear, such observations are very much of interest today in the history of science and medicine, and as well in the fields of women’s and gender studies. It has become a critical truism that the works of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche are taught more often in literature courses than in the original disciplines (science, economics, philosophy, or philology) in which those writers began their work. This does not make them failures but, rather, successes—“crossover” successes. Hippocrates, likewise, has found new readers, new contexts, and new relevancies, even if physicians do not consult him on the treatment of ulcers and broken bones. These writers have become literary and historical. That does not mean they are useless but that they have found, or made, new uses. The literary is not the category of last resort (or of lost causes) but the category of textual richness and multiplicity of meanings.
Let’s return, though, to the purist claim made by Hutchins and Adler—that the omission of a scholarly or expository apparatus was a plus, morally, ethically, and literarily, for their Great Books series, removing a barrier between reader and writer. Dwight Macdonald quite sensibly suggests that “surely, without distracting the reader from the text,” a scholarly apparatus could have given the essential information about the historical and cultural context in which each work appeared and have translated terms and concepts whose meaning has changed with time.6 The word apparatus is an unlovely word, conjuring up as it does a kind of mechanical contraption or scaffolding. In fact, apparatus comes from the same root as prepare, and means a way of getting ready. A scholarly apparatus, however, sounds particularly menacing and constraining, like a harness (or a HAZMAT suit).
This idea, that scholarship and criticism somehow got in the way of and impeded the direct interaction between reader and work, is an artifact of the times—the late forties and early to mid-fifties. It is related to the romance of the Great Books as part of a theory of general education, a theory that