The New Index: Montaigne
We are going to launch the New Year by taking nominations for the New Index of classic books to ban. To be eligible the book and writer must be either included in some Great Books series or, at least, be a staple of the postmodern curriculum, e.g., The Diary of Ann Frank or The Handmaid's Tale or The Awakening.
I am going to concentrate on the subversive books adored by self-described conservatives like William Bennet, though I won't take the time to eliminate of his favorite picks, "The published works of Socrates."
We could start with the essays of Michel de Montaigne. It's not that Montaigne was a poor writer--on the contrary, he often writes like a latter-day Plutarch--or entirely foolish--in fact he can be quite wise. In fact, people of mature mind and properly formed character could read him without danger. But for young men and women of any time, he would be a bad influence, and for the poor ignorant creatures who attend high school, college, and get Ph.D's in English, he is toxic.
Of the many reasons to reject Montaigne, let me select just a few. First, he is sex-obsessed and talks about adultery and masturbation as normal. He is also a staunch enemy of Christianity. Part of his hostility may have been fueled by the religious wars that had broken out in France and his admiration for the cynical King Henri IV, but he may have owed some of his resentment to his Jewish mother. Whatever his motives, he is poisonous, not because he openly attacks Christianity--that would have been risky for him and less dangerous to readers who would mount a defense. No, he is never direct, but always sly and underhanded.
Perhaps his most destructive influence has been on European self-hatrad.The first shot fired in the multi-culturalist campaign to disown the West was the “Essay on the Cannibals,” in which Michel de Montaigne [1533-92] slyly undermined the monarchy, the church, and France itself by comparing them with the Latin American savages who are physically superior to Europeans and inferior in no respect except duplicity and violence.
Montaigne begins his tale with a transparent fiction—an uneducated visitor who had spent 10 years in Brazil and observed the natives up close. Europeans call them barbarians, but, he insists, “I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.”
This sentence becomes a self-evident truth in for the multi-culturalists, but it is nonsense. Logically speaking, either there is barbarism or there is not. Montaigne seems to be first suggesting that barbarism is in the eye of the beholder, a position he does not even try to defend because it would subject him to ridicule, but he goes on to praise the good qualities of this savage race that live a natural life as if they lived in Golden Age that 16th century Europeans were incapable of appreciating:
“These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity. The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours: but ‘tis in such purity, that I am sometimes troubled we were not sooner acquainted with these people."
Montaigne anticipates the ignorance of latter-day proponents of multi-culturalism—Martin Bernal, for example, in his fictional counter history Out of Africa. Like Bernal, who knows nothing of the languages and cultures of the ancient world, Montaigne had absolutely no idea of what he was talking about. In the essay he makes the ridiculous pretense of knowing something about Brazilian natives, whom he probably had never seen up close. Montaigne’s imaginary cannibals do not seek wealth or status, and their language is “sweet, with a pleasing sound, whose endings are reminiscent of Greek in its endings.” A preposterous claim on two counts: First, because he could not have heard much if any of Indian languages, and second, because he was a lazy student, whose indulgent father never forced him to learn Greek. In making this broad and unsubstantiated claims, Montaigne establishes a pattern followed by multi-culturalists ever since: For them, ignorance really is bliss.
These last four paragraphs were drawn from a lecture. To avoid wearying my readers, I'll let them suffice.
All of Hemingway after In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926).
Finnegans Wake would be my test case because I imagine I could find liars from both sides to testify under oath that they have been reading at it or in it for years and although none could make heads or tails of it, one thinks it should be required reading for all incoming college freshman and the other totally banned because it was the final work of a certifiably sick and demented soul.
Thank you, Mr. Reavis! Ages ago when working at a university I mentioned in one of the rare discussions of literature that I found all of Joyce unreadable. Folks reacted as if I recommended poisoning the drinking fountains at the local kindergarten. At first I thought it was purely my ignorance but soon realized that none of these people had read him and if they had, they would not understand it any more than they would grasp the minutes of a municipal meeting in Uzbekistan.
Candide, or just about anything written by Voltaire, or Rousseau. Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Robert, no need to ban Finnegan’s Wake since no one but a tiny number of eccentrics would even try to read it. When I was a college student, people told me that to appreciate even “Ulysses” one had to know Greek and Latin, French and Italian. Well, my Greek is certainly better than Joyce’s and I probably would beat him in Italian and come close in French, but I still cannot abide Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist, much less FW. The Dubliners was OK but just. Uncle Tom was regarded as junk by reasonably intelligent people, so no need, but Voltaire and Rousseau absolutely. As for EH, I certainly agree with Ray’s judgment, but no one takes any of that stuff seriously except perhaps the incredibly awful For Whom the Bell Tolls.
On a not unrelated matter, isn’t it interesting that most early novels had straightforward titles drawn from the names of characters, such as Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, Tom Jones, Waverley, David Copperfield, Henry Esmond, Phineas Finn, or place names like Barchester Towers, or occasionally a stated them like “Can You Forgive Her?” or Memoirs etc of a “Justified Sinner.” Vanity Fair was clever but still transparent, but when did the allusive title become dominant. Examples? The Sun Also Rises, For whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and Into the Trees, Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, Winter of Our Discontent, Grapes of Wrath….. It seems to me to betray one of the fundamental weaknesses in modern literature, not just fiction, since poems, which typically went by the first line of a simple description, such as Ode to a Nightingale now often have groovy titles, like Leroi Jones’ Preface to a 20 Volume Suicide Note, though I do like “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Interior Decorator.”
I nominate Ayn Rand.
Somewhere in my youth, I enjoyed reading The Fountainhead (1943), the stubborn and awkward Howard Roark, and the underlying defense of individualism over collectivism seemed appealing. Years later, while converting to Catholicism, I tossed her objectivist philosophy, and even in revisiting Fountainhead realized how bad her writing is.
The nearly 1,200-page Atlas Shrugged (1957) is usually the culprit first responsible for luring folks into libertarianism. I’m guilty of selling my copy to Half Price Books, where it probably became someone else’s problem. In charity, I should’ve binned it.
I hesitate to condemn what I haven’t read, but Rand’s other works likely contain more of the same drivel.
I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin based on a recommendation of Prof Clyde Wilson!
Actually, Dr. Wilson had recommended the book Liberty Line, which book remarked on the social significance that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had in its time. “Uncle Tom” being a phrase of some significance in our own time, I decided to read the book.
I am glad that I did. As far as I can tell it is in fact cartoonish junk, yet the character Uncle Tom might represent the ideal Christian. Those who would use “Uncle Tom” pejoratively only betray their own racial hatred.
I read about half of UTC just to see what it was like, but I long ago lost my taste for comic books–though I did read a lot of Italian comics, when I was beginning to learn the language. I first ran into objectivists in the 1970s and while they were all rude and stupid, they could be amusing, if you have a cruel streak. Like Brett Olson, I did read the Fountainhead and saw the pretty awful movie. Sure, Rand had a point about collectivism, but it had been made many times before by brighter thinkers and better writers. Her former friend Murray Rothbard used to insist that she had ripped off both Rose Wilder Lane and Isobel Patterson. My first impression she was trying to be Nietzsche after a lobotomy that cut out not only half his intelligence but also his erudition. While the celebration of the artist triumphing over collectivism has an appeal, Howard Roark is not an artist, only a guy who designs ugly buildings and destroys what might have been useful work because he failed to realized, way back in college, that architects are not poets or painters: They are like movie directors who have to collaborate with dozens of people. Some people think she had Frank Lloyd Wright in mind. For his sake, I hope so. We visited his dream home in Spring Green. Lovely location–he must have had an eye for landscape–but that was it. Lovely SW Wisconsin rolling hills and this this pile that looks like a factory or schoolhouse. The amazing thing was the shoddy construction. None of the joints or corners were tight and as they pulled apart, rain entered and then rot. I thought immediately of all those canvases of Expressionist painters rotting in the basements of museums, because Pollock and company did not know how to prepare a canvas. The good news is that most 20th art and architecture is decaying at about the same rate I am.
Oh, and by the way, if you hated The Fountainhead, you should try Atlas Shrugged! It’s longer, more pretentious, and worse written.