In the summer of 1981, the novelist Italo Calvino published an article on the great books in the Roman weekly news magazine L’Espresso. “Why Read the Classics?” is classic Calvino: playful, charming, erudite, skeptical, humane. It consists of fourteen “suggested definitions” of a classic that deliberately contradict each other. Per definition one, the classics are books you are always rereading, even if you are discovering them for the first time, per definition five; or they are books you have yet to read because you are still waiting for the opportune conditions to enjoy them, per definition two. Classics are pre-selected for us by the group: “they come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture” (definition seven), they generate “a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse” (definition eight), and are often known through “hearsay” before they are known by experience (definition nine). But they are also chosen by the individual reader for personal reasons: “‘your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent” (definition eleven). Ancient or modern, a classic is a book that “relegates the noise of the present to a background hum,” (definition thirteen) and at the same time one that “persists as background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway” (definition fourteen). The implication being: a classic is impossible to define. Rather, it is a designation relative to an individual reader’s position in a particular culture at a particular moment in history. In his scholium to definition fourteen, Calvino gives a reason for this. The proliferation of books in “all modern literatures and cultures” has led to “the dissolution of the library,” such as the one inherited by Giacomo Leopardi, the reclusive nineteenth-century poet and philosopher who was one of the last people who could plausibly confuse his thorough education in European literature, philosophy, history, and science with the totality of knowledge. The “eclecticism” characteristic of late twentieth-century culture is the result of its inescapable awareness of the contemporary, on the one hand, and the global, on the other. Just as the books of the past and the present are indispensable to understanding each other, Calvino told the readers of L’Espresso, the classics of his language and culture, such as Leopardi’s Canti, “are indispensable to us Italians in order to compare them with foreign classics, and foreign classics are equally indispensable so that we can measure them against Italian classics.” That we will “never be able to draw up a catalogue of classic works to suit our own times” was not a cause for worry, in his view. He proposed that each of us replace the catalogue or list model of the great books with “our own ideal library” consisting of works that have been meaningful to us and those that have been meaningful to others, making sure to leave “a section of empty spaces for surprises and chance discoveries” as we accumulate new experiences over the course of a lifelong relationship with the written word. The following winter, a rather less cheerful assessment of this state of affairs appeared in the pages of National Review. In “Our Listless Universities,” Allan Bloom diagnosed “an easygoing American nihilism” among students at the country’s top schools. Already “socialized” as historicists and cultural relativists, incoming freshmen viewed “the comprehensive truth about man” as at best “opinion,” at worst “prejudice,” and in any case “unavailable” to knowledge — and nothing about their four years at the university was likely to disabuse them of this “dogma.” Encouraged by their professors, according to Bloom, students in the humanities were unwilling to acknowledge that “one culture is superior to another,” that the “old books” of the Western canon were any “better than any others” being produced in the present, let alone ones that might “contain the truth.” As a result, classics such as the Bible and Plutarch — to use his examples — no longer made up the “furniture” of the “souls” who were bypassing the liberal arts altogether for degrees in the hard sciences, where at least the aspiration to truth-finding was integral to the program of study, and the professional schools, where at least there were material rewards to be had upon graduation. In the name of an “equality of values,” Bloom concluded, students had lost the ability to discriminate in their moral and aesthetic judgments; in the name of “openness,” they had become closed-minded. The only remedy — a sustained encounter with the great books — was the one that was being foreclosed by the usual suspects: structuralists, deconstructionists, Marxist humanists, and those professors who would introduce course requirements in non-Western civilizations and cultures. Although he shared Matthew Arnold’s view that culture is “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” Bloom’s denunciation of relativism is less Arnoldian in spirit than Calvino’s endorsement of it. The apocalyptic tone of Bloom’s invective causes him to make absurd claims, some of which, like his animus towards rock music, are comically square, while others, such as his claim that among his students “it is almost respectable to think and even do the deeds of Oedipus,” cross the line into hysteria. The special contempt he reserves for feminists — whose demands for equality in the workplace, the domicile, and the culture he holds responsible for the destruction of everything from the family to eroticism to literature — is downright sinister. On the last point, Bloom has this to say: “In the absence (temporary, of course) of a literature produced by feminism to rival the literature of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, and Stendhal, students are without literary inspiration.” It is neither here nor there, but off the top of my head I can think of dozens of female writers who are more deserving of our attention today than Racine, starting with his contemporary Madame de La Fayette. Where the canonical status of Stendhal (and, by extension, the force of that parenthetical) are concerned, I would
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