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"We must call the classics before a court of shipwrecked men"

The following talk is adapted from a lecture given in honor of Jerry Clack at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States on October 8, 2010.

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Have you ever had this experience?  You read something and forget about it.  Then years later, in my case decades later, an image or phrase from the work comes vividly to mind. You go back and try to find it in the work but you can’t.

That’s what happened to me with Jose Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, intellectual, anti-fascist activist, whose Revolt of the Masses I read as a student, and whose injunction “we must call the classics before a court of shipwrecked men” stuck in my mind as the situation of the classics, the humanities and indeed liberal education has become more difficult.  It feels as if we had been hauled before some kangaroos court, asked to justify ourselves in the crassest possible terms–or else.

Could Ortega y Gasset provide us with any help or advice? I read through Revolt of the Masses again looking for the quotation with no success. I Googled it in various ways, but still no luck. 

In my frustration I began to think of places in literature in which a shipwrecked person gets ahold of a text.   To be sure, this doesn’t happen often. Even in fiction, when the ship goes down you run for the life boat not the ship’s library.  Still, I invite you to join me in a voyage of our own to visit these shipwrecked people and the books they had with them.

Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe, of course, comes immediately to mind. Crusoe was lucky. When he washed up on a fictional counterpart of the Caribbean island of Tobago, the ship did not entirely break up and wash away. He was able to salvage many things from it, including some tobacco and not one but 

three very good bibles …; some Portuguese books also and among them two or three popish prayer–books, and several other books all of which I carefully secured [ in a sea chest]. (60)

Only the Bibles, however, won his serious attention, and that only after a terrible illness.   In his affliction he looked to the tobacco to relieve his misery: 

... in this chest I found a cure both for soul and body. I opened the chest and found what I looked for, viz., the tobacco; and as the few books I had saved lay there too, I took out one of the Bibles, which … to this time, I had not found leisure, or so much as inclination, to look into. (88)

Now he makes up for that neglect: after finding that rum infused with the tobacco was a most potent medicine, he turns to the Bible        

…and began to read, but my head was too much disturbed by the tobacco to bear reading, at least at that time; only, having opened the book casually , the first words that occurred to me were these: “Call on me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.’ The words were very apt to my case. (88)

At first Crusoe cannot believe this promise of deliverance, but in time the text from Psalm 50, 15, quoted in the King James Version, becomes almost a mantra, guiding and slowly but profoundly  changing  his life on the island.  A week after finding the Bibles—and the rum with tobacco cure-all—he starts reading the good book diligently.    

July 4. In the morning I took the Bible: and beginning at the New Testament, I began seriously to read it; and imposed upon myself to read a little every morning and every night…. (90)

Soon

I was earnestly begging of God to give me repentance, when it happened providentially, that very same day, that, reading the scripture, I came to these words, "He is exalter a Prince and a Saviour; to give repentance and to give remission." (90)

In this case Crusoe paraphrases the King James version of Acts 5.15, “Him hath God exalted with his right hand [to be] a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins.” Or was one of the three Bibles an earlier translation such as Coverdale’s of 1535 or the even earlier ones by Tyndale and Wyclif? 

Crusoe begins over time to be thankful for what providence has given him,    

I was here removed from all the wickedness of the world; I had neither the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, nor the pride of life. I had nothing to covet, for I had all that I was now capable of enjoying. (120)

In short, in his tropical Eden he experienced a contentment in his earlier life.

Professor Laura Rosenthal of the University of Maryland called my attention to a female Robinson Crusoe in a work  produced in 1792 by Charles Dibdin called "Hannah Hewitt; or, The Female Robinson Crusoe" from 1792.  In her solitude Ms. Hewitt spends much of her time reading books on science that she found onboard the ship. Professor Rosenthal tells me that a copy of the work can be found in the Huntington Library.


The Tempest

In composing Robinsoin Crusoe (published in 1719) Daniel Defoe surely knew another story about a shipwrecked man with a book—indeed with a whole library.  A drama, probably produced in 1611 (the same year as the publication of the King James version of the Bible) tells the story of a of a Duke of Milan, who was rather too keen on the liberal arts, as he admits in the play, saying that his interest in the liberal arts was

Without a parallel; those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies” (1.2.72 –77)

His neglect of statecraft results in a coup d’etat, and he and his young daughter, Miranda, are put out to sea on 

A rotten carcass of a butt, not rigg’d,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast – the very rats
Instinctively have quit it…. (1.2.146-148)

The kindly Gonzalo, however,  

… of his gentleness
Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prized above my dukedom (1.2.165-168)

Among those books was one about an art, not usually numbered among the liberal arts, an art, which as Caliban says 

… is of such power,
It would control my dam’s god Setebos
And make a vassal of him (1.2.372-374)

It allows Prospero, the shipwrecked duke to conjure up the tempest that gives its name to the play, and to bring into his clutches the wicked conspirators who drove him from Milan.  But his magical treatise has also provided Prospero with the power to turn what could be a tragedy of revenge into the happy ending or forgiveness and reconciliation:

… I’ll to my book,
For yet, ere suppertime must I perform
Much business appertaining (3.1.94-96)

His library no doubt helped sustain him during his years on the island, but that magical book empowers him, and transforms his life and those of all who were  shipwrecked upon this wondrous isle.

Before we return to our quest for the elusive quotation from Ortega y Gasset, let us visit one more shipwrecked man. 

Dante

You will recollect that his mid life crisis was a metaphorical shipwreck, as he says early in the Inferno:    

And as one who, with laboring breath,
Has escaped from the deep to the shore,
Turns and looks back at the
perilous waters,
So my mind, still in flight,
Turned back to look once more upon the pass
No mortal being ever left alive (Canto 1.22-27; trans. Robert and Jean Hollander)

And it's there, of course, that he finds not a text, but an author, who has long been a stylistic model for him (line 87), but now becomes a spiritual and moral guide, someone who can show him the way around the perils that confront him.    

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Let’s pause here. Perhaps some of you will add to my little collection of literature in which shipwrecked people retain a text, or tell me that somewhere in the TV series Lost or in some section of Tom Hanks’ Castaway or elsewhere in pop culture another shipwrecked soul manages to salvage a book. But these three examples--Robinson Crusoe, the Tempest, the Inferno, seem to me of special significance.  In every case the text the shipwrecked person encounters sustains, enriches, transforms and accords deliverance. 

This should not surprise the classicist who remembers the legend that legend that some of the Athenians captured in Sicily were allowed to leave their imprisonment in Syracuse  because they could sing  lyrics from Euripides’ tragedies.

Is this what Ortega y Gasset had in mind—that classics when called before the court of the shipwrecked, have to show that they have these powers to sustain, transform and deliver? In any event, the three texts we have been looking at set the bar that other texts have to clear. And they point to an approach that we, as advocates speaking before the jury of shipwrecked men on behalf of the Greek and Roman classics, may be wise to adopt.  The case may require a clear demonstration that our classics too can help sustain, enrich, transform and deliver.

This may seem a daunting task, especially at times when it seems that no one is listening, no one rally cares. But, remember, in Defoe, Shakespeare and Dante, the shipwrecked men are not the enemies of the texts they find. They recognize that they need those texts, they hang on to them as if they were a lifejacket in a winter gale.

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Ortega y Gasset: I finally found the quotation from Ortega y Gasset, or more precisely Facebook found it for me.  In despair I posted a cry for help on my site and within twenty minutes Adrienne Mayor, author of The Poison King, had given me the reference I needed.   It turned out the quotation was not from Revolt of the Masses, the only book of his that I owned, but  from a remarkable  essay on Goethe that Ortega Y Gasset wrote in 1932,  had published in Berlin, in the face of the Nazis.  It was a time when it seemed the values and inherited assumptions of European culture were being sucked into the abyss, when all was shipwreck.  

The article originally appeared in Die neue Rundschau in 1932. Translated as “In Search of Goethe from Within,” it appeared in the Partisan Review in December 1949, and was reprinted in a collection of his essays published as The Dehumanization of Art (Garden City: Doubleday-Anchor, 1956: 126-160, trans. W. Trask). 

Ortega also spoke on Goethe in a keynote address at the Aspen Institute on July 12, 1949. The speech, “Concerning a Bicentennial Goethe,” is printed in Goethe and the Modern Age, ed. A. Bergstrasser (Chicago, 1949: 349 – 362). See John T. Graham, The Social Thought of Ortega y Gasset, 441.

The passage surprised me. Ortega adores the idea of shipwreck. His work is full of shipwreck imagery and here he identifies not with the unfairly apprehended classic by some vicious survivalists but with the shipwrecked men themselves:

Life is, in itself and forever, shipwreck. To be shipwrecked is not to drown. The poor human being, feeling himself sinking into the abyss, moves his arms to keep afloat. This movement of the arms is culture—a swimming stroke (126).

The passage calls to mind Walt Whitman:    

Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start of the frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well train’d, intuitive, used to depend on themselves and not on a few coteries of writers. (Democratic Vistas ed. Floyd Stovall, 1964, Vol. II, p. 424 f.)

A little later he explains what he means:

Consciousness of shipwreck, being the truth of life, constitutes salvation. Hence I no longer believe in any ideas except the idea of shipwrecked men. We must call the classics before a court of shipwrecked men to answer certain peremptory questions with reference to real life. (127)

There it is—the quotation at its source and in context. For shipwrecked men it is not enough to have and hold on to a text; they want to interrogate it. 

If Ortega is right, the case that has to be made to this jury is not that the classics are part of a grand cultural tradition that we should all revere and defer to.  Far from it.

There is but one way left to save a classic: to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation–that is to lay aside his classicism, to bring him closer to us (160).

Instead of deference, dialogue. 

But what are the “peremptory questions” that Oretga says must be put to the classics?  In context, that is, in the setting of his  discussion of Goethe, it is clear they are not How do I get a good grade, or make a buck, or get a job or a raise, or tenure—but how do I live authentically, that is with values that are my own, not inherited  or imposed  from outside. Hence his title, “In Search of Goethe from Within.”

Ortega sees, moreover, a close nexus between authenticity and ‘vocation’ by which he means 

… the subject’s fidelity to this unique destiny of his.… The matter of the greatest interest is not the man’s struggle with the world, with his external destiny, but his struggle with his vocation.… Does he subscribe to it basically, or … does he fill his existence with substitutes for what would have been his authentic life? (133)

That is, to be sure, modern existentialist phraseology, but at its core it is not so far from the way Robinson Crusoe approached his text, hammering his goat skin covered head against the Bible every day, or what Prospero somehow came to in his years of isolation on that mysterious island, what Dante, I venture, was hoping for from Vergil. In each case the transforming power of literature is tied to the discovery of an authentic way of living a life.

Approached in this way the issue for the Greek and Roman classics when they come before the court of the shipwrecked whether they can help when tradition gives way and inherited orthodoxies lose their grip? Can they help us and our contemporaries when, escaping the abyss, we wash up on a strange, uncivilized shore? That is the case that has to be made; those are the questions that have to be answered.  

In a subsequent posting on this website I plan to address the most pressing underlying question, which in my view is not whether classical texts can have such transformative power—surely they can—but how, that is, under what circumstances that can happen. Those circumstances seem to me to point to changes in how we teach the classics, and that in turn leads to an inquiry into what thoughtful people in the Roman world did with their classics. All this anon, but the basic point is clear at the outset the transforming power of classical texts does not just happen. It is not the automatic result of reading a text, analyzing it, or admiring its excellences. It takes more than that, and that is what which I plan to be exploring in the near future.    

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