Different Classics
Though it was late for a lot of places, school has just started back up. Fall was in the air, the libraries and cafes were keeping regular hours again, and school was starting with promise of a new year and relief from the heat the summer. I was issued a stack of new paperback course books-some of them are free under some circumstances-and I headed to the first class in which I'm a writing intern.
The address of the day: the anger of Achilles. The rage at the wounded honor Homer starts his poem is also an initiation rite in college: this is so often the first humanities lecture many students have. It's a fall ritual all its own. I remember mine. It comes when you first start college, and usually repeats in a few courses; it's a touchstone. From there, it's on to the book of Genesis, through Plato and so on.
Quite often, Homer comes at the beginning of the college experience. Generations of professors and administrators have decided that humanities lessons on justice or rhetoric or cosmology best start out at the moment and within the tradition Homer represents. Why should this be? What gives the classics not just their staying power, but their right of priority in higher education? What is it about modern conceptions of the ancient eastern Mediterranean that makes them the building bases of what higher education is supposed to represent? And could a different reading encounter provide this?
The reason to ask isn't a concern about Sophocles and Plato staying relevant, but asking if there can be a broader way of thinking about fundamentals of college education that can be "classical" in a different sense. To say that humanities learning has tended to privilege the European, the male, and the ancient- what Western empires said was the beginning and end of higher learning in recent centuries- is to understate things. However, more than only addressing ways that power and age have shaped the humanities, thinking about what priorities are and why can be helpful for people on any part in the breadth of that field.
Two qualities of the classics stand out: their foundational quality and the way they can portray strange familiarities to Western readers.
The classics have a sense of foundation to commend them: everything from the Italian renaissance to the fake classicism of Washington, DC needs a ready key of interpretation, and so an educated American needs the classics. As true as this is, imagine a different sense of what could be a foundation and how. Why shouldn't every first-year seminar begin with the relationship that the Mecca has to Islamic thought? We could start with the way that al-Shāfiʿī refers to the qibla and the importance of the pilgrimage to Ibn al-ʿArabī.
Some Islamic traditions build on themselves neatly the way the Roman empire turned into the Latin West, producing the same kind of key to understanding a great depth of historical experience. This is of course also true for other putative "diversified classics": the Bhagavad Gita, the epic of Sundiata, the Analects. There are long-experienced life ways that take these fundamental elements and build on themselves to the present moment.
However, it is also the remove from the present moment- placing readers in a context with some common features but a very different moral life- that is part of the importance of the classics. In this, postcolonial literature can be classic. From curriculum-regulars like Chinua Achebe to Cheikh Hamidou Kane and Tayeb Saleh, readers can encounter two of the types of familiar alienation we demand from the classics in that these authors focus on societies very different from ours reconfiguring into ones we know if we have not seen it from the same perspective.
It seems to me part of the point of assigning the opening of the Iliad is to right away send young adults into a world with disturbingly alien values, or one where familiar value-vocabularies have disturbingly alien expression. Part of the pedagogical point in presenting the strangely familiar, in either the classics or in postcolonial literature, involves finding and negotiation terms, of observing different connections and disjunctures of ideas. A literature that disentangles the civilizing mission can serves this purpose of the classics in very different ways than the unfamiliar frames of Homer as met for the first time.
However, I'm not suggesting that looking at these alternatives accounts for the importance of classics in college. In large part, the way the curriculum imparts the classics is to reinforce the idea that Western universities' curation of the past has enduring relevance to the present. Those universities have very successfully sold their prestige and interpretative privileges worldwide, if only a quirky added feature to the promises of future earnings for their alums.
This is not to suggest that classicists today or before deserve special critique for undeserved privilege. If anything, the barriers to more inclusive kinds of humanities owe more to orientalism and the provincialization of area studies than the designs of scholars who work with mostly Western sources. I mean to say the naming of particular sources and experiences as classic and their importance for initiating critical reading or other core college topics speaks to significant priorities in higher education. But those are not priorities that can only be served one way.