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| The College Magazine - Winter 2006 | |||
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 How many Johnnies have read—or even heard of The History of Henry Esmond? Thackeray’s novel, the story of Henry and his love for Beatrix, was on the list of books that Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan assembled for the New Program, first published in The Bulletin of St. John’s College. It was the Bulletin that in 1937 set out the specifics of the Program for prospective students and the rest of the world, and here, the college’s criteria for choosing a classic was defined. The first two involve magnitude: “A great book must have been read by the largest number of persons”; for clarity, works by Plato and the Bible are mentioned in this regard. The work also must offer the possibility of many different interpretations. It must “raise the persistent unanswerable questions about the great themes in European thought.” And the final two criteria: it must be “a work of fine art” and a “masterpiece of the liberal arts.” These criteria have guided choices for the college’s reading list for nearly 70 years. A self-study conducted by Annapolis faculty for reaccredidation two years ago acknowledged that, “although there is broad agreement about our reading list, certain authors, texts, and text selections regularly come up for discussion. The Senior Seminar list, which contains the most recently written books, is always the most controversial. Even here, however, upon annual review of the Program by the Instruction Committee, there is far more stability than change, and our concerns amount to small waves in a largely tranquil sea.” Changes—major and minor—to the list come slowly and with careful deliberation. This is not done to preserve a canon, but rather, a continuum, as the self-study report states: “Year after year, for at least two hours on Monday and Thursday nights, students and tutors discuss the same books in the same way with the sense that here, in the thinking, speaking, and listening that go on in the Seminar, the College is most alive and most itself.” A number of books read for seminar have dropped off that first list included in the Bulletin, including Goethe’s Faust, Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Corneille’s Le Cid. Moby-Dick—which many faculty and alumni would consider a perfect match with that 1937 definition of a great book—has been out of the list for some time. It hasn’t been read in seminar in Annapolis for 31 years and has made sporadic appearances on the Santa Fe seminar list. In recent years Flannery O’Conner and William Faulkner have joined the senior seminar list at the urging of some tutors and over the objections of others. Considering suggestions and objections from tutors and students is the work of the Instruction Committee, comprising 12 tutors (six from each campus), the deans of both campuses, and the two presidents as ex-officio members. The IC is responsible for the program of instruction, and with it, has the power to add or remove a book from the reading list. Changes are made by consensus, not by majority rule, and also are governed by transferability. Annapolis tutor Anita Kronsberg (A79) says the committee considers factors such as “whether a book has the kind of weight and substance” worthy of study and discussion, and whether it connects in interesting ways to other books on the reading list. Each year, the committee reviews reports submitted by the tutors who served as the recorders for their seminars. These reports help the committee decide if a certain reading is working well in seminar, and along with specific requests, factor in decisions to change the list. When a book comes off the reading list, it’s usually to make room for another. There are sacrifices and sometimes compromises, because in the harsh light of reality, “we can’t read all great books,” Kronsberg says. The nature of the college’s Program (roughly chronological) means that fewer changes will be made when Ancient Greek and medieval works are concerned. A few years ago, the committee made an earnest attempt to find room for The Sound and the Fury, “but we couldn’t put it any-where in the seminar where the students could read it,” she says. “It’s a very beautiful book, some of Faulkner’s finest writing,” Kronsberg says, almost wistfully. “The approach he takes is not like anything else we read.” Don Quixote is one of a handful of very long novels Johnnies are asked to read in the Program, most timed for summer or winter breaks to allow time to read and ponder before seminar meets. But discussion is still condensed to two meetings on books like War and Peace and Middlemarch.It’s not entirely satisfying, but that’s another reality of the Program: “We acknowledge that St. John’s is a place where some books get a first reading,” says Kronsberg. Whether it’s a long novel, a complex poem, or a passage from Kant, returning to the work provides a fuller view. Santa Fe tutor Frank Pagano says the IC on his campus usually concentrates on two years of the Program at a time: freshman and junior years, or sophomore and senior. When the committee makes changes to the list, it’s often in the interest of choosing books that “work well in seminar.” “We want books to be great,” says Pagano, a tutor of 22 years. “That’s easy to experience, but hard to nail down.” To illustrate his point, Pagano points to difficulties in reading Supreme Court decisions for seminar. While important, they don’t quite work as Program books, in his opinion. “Inevitably they require historical background—that’s a sign that something isn’t great,” he says. In Santa Fe about five years ago, the IC decided to add Maimonides (Guide for the Perplexed) to the sophomore reading list. “It’s a great book in itself. But the second reason it works in seminar is that you have two traditions that the Bible represents, and we had no theology that was Jewish.” Maimonides also speaks to other Program authors, says Pagano: “He’s picked up on in junior year by Spinoza, especially.” Although changes to the reading list have not been monumental ones, the Instruction Committee could vote by consensus to remove Plato’s Republic—highly unlikely, but by the rules governing the committee, not impossible. “The thought is we could change anything,” Pagano notes. However, substantial changes to philosophy are pretty rare. “They’re all part of a tradition, and it’s very hard to take one out and put one in,” he says. “If you’re going to do Hegel and not do Kant, you’re not going to be able to see who Hegel is responding to.” Pagano would like to see Johnnies read Absalom, Absalom—“a book that encapsulates the American tradition better, as well as the Southern problem.” He’d choose Faulkner over Moby-Dick, which he finds interesting, but not as compelling. “I delivered a speech on Moby-Dick in high school,” he adds as a side-note, “and that speech was a bit of a bomb.” Moby-Dick first appeared on the college reading list for seniors in 1952-53. It was read for many years in the 1950s and made brief reappearances in Annapolis and Santa Fe, most recently in 2003. It lives on in preceptorials, yet some tutors think it’s a shame not all students read the work because it is the type of work—like so many books that remain on the Program—that needs to be discussed to be understood. How did Melville’s novel first get the boot? The prevailing legend in Annapolis is that too many students were writing essays on the book. With only a list of prize-winning essays available to check, the memory of veteran tutors was consulted. “Oh, it’s absolutely not apocryphal,” says Eva Brann (HA89). “I distinctly remember one year there were at least 10 essays written on the book.” Tutor Malcolm Wyatt (HA03), who joined the college in 1958, recalls that too many bad essays were being written about Moby-Dick. “The temptation of allegory was too much for students—the white whale, why is he white, the peg leg—it was a way to grind out a senior essay without much serious thought,” he says. In Santa Fe, the book was last read in senior seminar in the spring of 2003, but it wasn’t a success in the eyes of tutor Howard Fisher. That may be because it was read while seniors were writing their senior essay. (In Annapolis, seminar is suspended with all other classes for the writing period, while Santa Fe students meet for seminar for part of the time.) “As wonderful as the book is, the seminars were not a success,” Fisher says. “I had been in a senior seminar or two in Annapolis where we read it as part of the Program, and it seemed to me that we had as good a discussion as any other book. It is episodic, and that makes it difficult to sustain a unified conversation, but I wouldn’t say it’s impossible.” Most years, on one campus or the other, Moby-Dick is offered in preceptorial, and it’s a popular offering. Annapolis tutor Jonathan Tuck tried to lead a precept on the novel a few times, only to find other tutors got there first. “In some ways, having frequent preceptorials honors Moby-Dick more, because it gets the reading it needs,” Tuck offers. Santa Fe Tutor Claudia Honeywell loved the preceptorial she led on the book. “Oh, would that it could be on the Program,” she says. “At the time I chose it for precept, I was really interested in it. I felt like it was my discovery—‘I’ve found this great book, let’s read it together.’ ” For Honeywell, Moby-Dick more than meets the college’s criteria for a great book: “It’s endlessly fascinating. You’re never done reading it, and there’s no way to be done reading it. Even as you’re formulating the line of interpretation, you’re left in an uncomfortable place—just as Ishmael is. The book has no apparent resolutions.” It was “a bummer” that the novel came off the reading list, Honeywell says, because “we don’t have it as an element of our common discourse. It’s a book that can really accompany us through the moral uncertainty of life. There’s the famous passage where Ahab talks about how human life is lived, that men hide behind a pasteboard mask if they’re there at all. I think about that now and then, I see situations that trigger memories of it.” As one of their rewards for finishing the novel, Annapolis tutor Nathan Dugan invited his students a few years ago to a party, complete with clam chowder. Dugan had read it for the first time just a year before and was eager to read Moby-Dick with students. The preceptorial was productive, but it took hard work to make such a vast book the subject of coherent discussions, he notes. “The good thing is that you can go through very slowly and spend a lot more time on the parts,” he says. “The difficult thing is that you can’t require everyone to read 1,000 pages before you start. But with the right of questions, a glimpse of the whole can come out.” What the novel would add to the program as a whole is a portrait of human beings as seekers and interpreters of symbols and meaning, Dugan adds, something that relates well to Platonic dialogues Johnnies read as freshmen. “In the end it’s telling us something about why we need to be self-aware,” he says. Dugan sees no compelling reason Melville’s tale must be on the reading list. And yet, he allows, “life would be more full” if he could teach Moby-Dick and Joyce’s Ulysses. Having taught two preceptorials on the book, Annapolis tutor David Townsend acknowledges the impracticality of Moby-Dick as a seminar reading. Yet in his view, the novel is “one of the dozen great novels ever written.” The book confronts themes of man and nature, hierarchy and obedience, freedom and equality. “It addresses the struggle to build a community and how essential that is,” he says. “It points out that you don’t have an individual self outside of the community. It’s eclectic and diverse in the cultures that it depicts. And it’s also contemporary in that it’s one of the first books to address a global economy and the psychological and moral effects of commerce.” In addition to the length, one problematic issue in Melville’s tale is an absence of women, something that can’t be said about Middlemarch. Townsend would not want to see Eliot’s novel sacrificed for another fictional work. “It’s a very rich and coherent story, more manageable in two seminar discussions” than Moby-Dick. St. John’s is not trying to establish a canon, even if it seems that way to outsiders, says Townsend. And yet the college gets letters and e-mails from those who look to “the great books college” to decide what “great” books they should read. A few years ago, a group of Canadian doctors asked for the reading list. Most recently, an Iowa man wrote to ask for a copy of the list; he planned to ask his local library to post it for patrons. “Because we don’t have time to read everything, it often seems that if someone’s not on our reading list, it’s because we’ve found that the work is not as important,” says Townsend. That’s not the case, he adds. “These books at this moment in time are the ones that work well in conversation for our community.” Honeywell expresses a similar sentiment. “There are so many friends out there, and we can only invite so many to the party, yet you still think about your friends. We form our own relationships with books, and they are like friends.” To find out what Johnnies are reading today, visit the St. John’s Web site: |
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Copyright © 2006 St. John’s College
