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Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
On the Least Interesting Parts of Great Books: Melville and Homer
00:19:22
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A
Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being and we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at par podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale edu or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio. Welcome to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula and teacher led classrooms. Now your host, Scott Bertram.
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B
Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast hillsdale.edu or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website, k12 hillsdale.edu.
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C
We'Re joined by Jason Lund. He is upper School Humanities teacher and also senior Thesis Coordinator at Treasure Valley Classical Academy in Fruitland, Idaho. Jason, thanks so much for joining us.
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D
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
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C
Talking today about the least interesting parts of great books and two specific examples we'll get to about Melville and Homer. Perhaps not in that order. Let's start here though. What are some of the interpretive assumptions that a that a classical literature teacher ought to make about a great book?
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D
It's a great question. It seems to me that classical school Classical school teachers are in kind of an awkward position because on one hand we want to pursue the truth in a big way, but on the other hand we find ourselves in a position where it is more difficult to attain the precision that is possible for a mathematical and scientific counterparts. Nevertheless, though, it does seem like some readings are far better than others. And so part of what I want to think about is how can we get a little bit closer to what it is that the author wants to teach us. And so I think there's two ways to think about this, and I don't want to use any kind of jargony or literary theory type phrases. So I think we could in a way start as simply as saying, first of all, you have to read sympathetically. And what I mean by that is that I think you have to set aside, at least momentarily, your own view of what's good and bad and just and unjust in order to try to understand the characters in a novel as they understand themselves, try to ask the question, why did they do that? You know, maybe one way to think about it. Two examples. In Beowulf, the Danes are ruled by a king. And so we might say, like, I don't want to be ruled by a king, or, you know, something along those lines. But you would ask, like, well, why were they ruled by a king? And it seems like to them, they thought political authority should be derived from the human being most capable of giving protection under very harsh conditions. And so once you start to look at it that way, you can become much more sympathetic to these alternatives and to let the book kind of, like, disclose itself to you. Because I think in reading sympathetically, part of what I want to avoid is projecting my own modern opinions onto the text. And that way it can be a little bit more liberating that I'm actually trying to recover a potentially alien idea to understand it as it is, because I don't think you can refute anything without understanding it to begin with. So I think reading sympathetically is really important. And one thing I think that it maybe reveals to look at a second example is like, in the Scarlet Letter, we might say, like, I don't really want to be in a, you know, puritanical theocracy as far as, like, my political regime is concerned. But you can still see that there's a way in which the customs of the puritans are designed to solve certain types of problems. I wonder if that's a way that you could think about what customs are. It's the manifold ways in which people in different times and places try to address a sort of, like, underlying problem of, like, how best to unite a political community, how to, like, manage sexual mores, how to manage, you know, religious mores and things along those lines. So in some sense, then, like, love, justice and politics are present in all times and places. And so the problems are universal, but the ways that they're handled are better and worse. I think that's so ring sympathetically. That's maybe the first principle, in a way.
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C
We're saying, too, that we've got to have some trust in the author. Right. We have to trust the author is perhaps wiser than we are. It also has a plan, the plan for the whole of the novel.
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D
Yeah, I think it's a perfect way to put it. Yeah. So, like, when I turn to Melville, Hawthorne, Homer, et cetera, like, I always view them as vastly wiser than myself, that I have much more to learn from them than they would have to learn from me. And so I'm grateful to be able to learn from people that are better than me. And so one way to think about reading, too, is that we should read sympathetically on one hand, but carefully on the other. And so then we should probably look at books the way that Socrates looks at books in Plato's Phaedrus when he talks about, as you were just saying, where all the parts are ordered in such a way that the whole of the animal is kind of like all working together to do something. So one way to one term. I guess it's a little fancy, but just that I think that books are written with the greatest books. The books that are worth returning to and studying again and again are written with logographic necessity, where every part of the book is arranged such that if it's carefully attended to, the teaching of the thinker can be revealed, you know, slowly, over time. One other, maybe, metaphor for thinking about reading is to. This is something Vladimir Nabokov says in an essay on reading and writing, is that we can look at books as paintings, but in order to do that, we have to always be rereading the book. It's like that. When you see a painting, you can take it in all at once. Of course, you have to attend to the details, maybe ultimately, to understand it. But in a book, it's harder to see all of it at once. And the only way to get even close to achieving understanding a book like you would a painting where you can see the beginning, the middle, and the end all at once, you have to reread it a lot. So, and I don't think it's like an exaggeration to say that the greatest of the books really will yield new fruits and insights, you know, after reading them a dozen times, two dozen times, that I wonder if, of course, it's great to read new books. That's a wonderful thing to do. But I wonder if, like something very powerful and beautiful that we can do in our lives is to take a sort of handful of the greatest books and really just make them our guides and turn to them again and again.
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C
Now, that approach, those assumptions might be difficult or unhelpful to maintain, or difficult to maintain or unhelpful when we get to the most difficult parts of a novel or the ones that appear on their face to be boring parts of great books. And you've got two test cases for us to speak of today. First, from Homer's Iliad, the catalog of ships. So set this up for us, please.
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D
Yeah, yeah. So it seems like there's these parts of the books that if Socrates is saying the books are like animals, it seems like some parts of the books are like these, like, bloated appendixes that are sort of just disgusting and need to be surgically removed and set aside and avoided, never assigned to read. And so, yeah, the catalog of ships and Homer, it takes place in book two of the Iliad. And more or less, you hear about all the kings of all the different Greek cities that have united to go across the sea to the Trojans to recover Helen, who was stolen from Menelaus by Paris. And so at first, this really does look horribly boring. It just looks like it's a list, you know, so now, you know, everybody who went or something like that. And so it's even the first time that I read the Iliad, it wasn't assigned to me. So this is only years later that I'd even read this passage, then found it boring. And then when teaching it, there's something kind of lovely about having to teach a book, because if you're reading a book as a student, you can, like, say, I understand this part and that part, but I'll let the teacher explain that other part. But as the teacher, there's this, you know, intense pressure to actually be able to say something about everything. And so I think then, if you look at the catalog of ships, I took some. Some guidance from the Greek historian Thucydides, who points us to the catalog of ships. He thinks it's a very revealing part of the text. So Thucydides thinks, or seems to imply that rather than the Greeks showing up to retrieve Helen, that's a kind of, you know, beautiful romantic quest in a way, really. They just want to take all the good things that the Trojans have because they're more powerful. And the Agamemnon and Menelaus have the most ships of all. So if you count up the ships, as far as I can tell, there's 1,186. And Agamemnon and Menelaus, these two brothers, have sway over approximately 220 of the ships, and that makes up for about a sixth of the ships. So if the other Greeks wanted to resist them, and it would take incredible coordination on their parts, you know, amongst, you know, maybe like a dozen of them or something, if you wanted to have overwhelming force against them. So Thucydides seems to think that that naval power is one of the Real reasons underlying the reason that Agamemnon is in charge of the venture. And that, Helen, is really just a kind of beautiful excuse to go to Troy, because it sounds much more worse to say, like, we're more powerful than them. You know, the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must, and we want their good things. It sounds a lot better to say, our beautiful princess has been stolen from us, our beautiful queen has been stolen, and on that basis, we have to do something about it. So that was like the first, like, whoa, kind of moment, you know, reading the catalog of ships. Maybe just one other kind of example from the catalog of ships is Nestor. He's the king of Pylos, but it says that he's ruling over several other cities. One of the cities is called Dorian, and there's this man named Tamarisk. Tamaris, it's said in the catalogue of ships, thought that he could out sing the Muses. And this is a big claim to make. And the Muses were not very happy about this claim. And so part of what they did is that they maim him, they remove his capacity to sing, and then eventually they make him sort of like, remove his memory altogether. And I think this is kind of interesting because maybe Nestor and Homer themselves learned a lesson from Tamris. Like Homer, at the beginning of this section, he. He is like, the Muses are going to tell us about this amount of human beings. Like, it's far too many human beings for human reason on its own to recover. And thus the Muses have to be invoked. So, too, Nestor, I think he's a character who strikes us as very boring and blustering, that he's always referring to ancestral things and sacred things. But there's a moment where there's like an armistice between the Greeks and the Trojans so they can recover the dead bodies. Like, Nestor kind of pushes for this, and so he's like, okay, it's very important that we do the sacred duty and recover the bodies. And he speaks for a long time, and then at the end of his speech, he says, and we should build a wall. So in other words, I guess, like, it seems like Nestor really wants to attend to the things that Tamarisk failed to attend to in, you know, hubriscally saying he doesn't need the Muses. Nevertheless, Nestor never loses sight of necessity. And I wasn't really clued into Nestor being that clever of a character until I saw this thing in the. In the catalog of ships.
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C
Yeah. Is there also something here with themes of the Themes of glory and themes of heroism, that when we see this list, this catalog of ships, that we understand that to be named like that is to be remembered. I mean, hundreds of years, this is still around these people, these ships, right?
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D
Yeah. It seems one of the principal concerns of the Homeric Greeks was to win kleos, which is to say undying fame, so that your name will ring in the minds of human beings forever after, for as long as human beings are around. And. And it seems like the catalog of ships serves that purpose in a big way. And one of the Latin teachers here at the Classical Conference informed me that there's kind of a famous old Latin translation of the Iliad that cuts out many parts of the Iliad. So it's a sort of like abridged Latin translation of the Greek. However, one of the things that's kept word for word is the catalog of ships. So in other words, maybe that ancient translator understood precisely what you're pointing to. That's what this was for, and that was very important.
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C
Talking with Jason Lund, he's upper school humanities teacher and also senior thesis coordinator at Treasure Valley Classical Academy, about the least interesting parts of some of the great books. Our second example here is actually a part that I talked about with one of our great Hillsdale English professors, Dr. Kelly Scott Franklin, some months ago, the extracts portion of Moby Dick from Herman Melville. So set that up for us, please.
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D
Yeah. So at the beginning of Moby Dick, there's a set of 80 whale extracts, in other words, quotations about whales. And they're very short. They tend to be two lines. Some of them are as long as, I think, 14 or 15 lines. And they're from all types of different sources. And when I picked up the book, I mean, quite honestly the first time, I really did think, like, I just want to read the book. I want to hear what the story is. But then, like, kind of what we talked about earlier, I just thought, like, well, Melville, he's probably wiser than I am, and he placed these here. So it's my duty, if I want to understand his thought, to understand him as he understands himself, to take seriously whatever it is that he's doing, because it is very puzzling. And there's not many books that do anything like this, actually none that are known to me. But when I started looking at them, there's several themes that emerge. The first five extracts are all biblical quotations. And so originally or initially, you're looking at them from the whales, that is from the perspective of the Bible, then you Sort of look at whales from the perspective of like, sort of more primitive or like, I guess, lower technologically advanced, you know, people in a way, who are very afraid of the whales. And so then they strike fear into the hearts of men. And there's a kind of development where you sort of see whales viewed as economic opportunities, to put it crassly, in a way. They almost start to look like floating gas stations, you know, from which you can extract wealth and resources. You also see them examined, like, historically. You see statements from statesmen like Jefferson and Burke. So you look at whales from, like a political standpoint, like, whose whale is this? Which nation gets access to this part of the sea? Who can rightfully claim to have the whale? They become opportunities to win honor. And you sort of start to see, as the extracts move on. Oh, and of course, like, scientifically in a big way, there's a lot of extracts like that, but that from a bird's eye view, you sort of see whales. You sort of see a picture of all of human history contained within 80 paragraphs. Couldn't believe that you could accomplish something so incredible with just quotations, in a way. And maybe to add something to that, the first quotation is from the book of Genesis. The final quotation, number 80, is just said to be a whale song, but it more or less says, you know, might makes right in the sea, referring to whales. And that struck me as maybe like, in a way, two different fundamental ways that you could see the cosmos itself structured. On one hand, there could be a loving creator to which we owe, you know, obedience, who's wise and good. That's one possibility. That's the possibility that I hope is true. But on the other hand, there could just be naked force that rules everything, and there's nothing else besides that. And so then just the extracts themselves sort of like, open up this question of the existence of God or non existence of God. And this kind of like, reflects the way that Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, kind of, like, proceeds in his questioning because he sort of looks at the. At the world from four different standpoints. Early in the book, in chapter one, he talks about having a New Testament perspective. Later he talks about when he's up on the masthead, a kind of Platonist or philosophical perspective. Then after he almost dies in, like, a sort of least likely case of, you know, danger, he kind of adopts a desperado perspective, a kind of nihilistic perspective where the universe is kind of playing a big joke on you, and he ends up settling at the end of the book on something like fate. So at any rate, then the kind of cosmological investigation present within the extracts is also carried out in the book. And you sort of see almost all of the books from the extracts get mentioned throughout all of Moby Dick. So it really sets you up to understand the book as a whole in a big way, if you're willing to carefully attend to it.
- [16:30]
C
Yes, it gives us great perspective that the whale is universal. All times, all literature, all genres of human thought can center around the whale. And it gives us perspective as to what we will read later on in that novel.
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D
Right? Yeah. And it sort of shows that, like, the whale just on its own, you wouldn't think of a whale as a portal into all of the fundamental questions. But the whale is. And I think that's a way that you can think about the great books in general, which is why there's a temptation to want to read all of them, you know, to make a big list and check them all off. But it seems to me that every great book and the one that maybe speaks to you the most is probably going to be a portal into all of the fundamental questions.
- [17:12]
C
We started by talking about these interpretive assumptions that a teacher ought to make. If you are just a reader of one of these great books and you get to a portion and you're starting to question, you say, ah, this is boring. Why would I want to read this? Are there specific questions that we should ask ourselves when we get to these portions?
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D
Yeah, I think just asking the question, why did the author put this here? And I know that's like such a kind of basic question, but I think maybe we don't always ask that. We sort of think like, why isn't the action picking up? Or something like that. And I also think those. The sections of books that are like this are the reason why you can't just get, like, an AI summary, you know, or something like that, of the books that I wonder if Melville intends on occasion to induce intentionally frustration within the reader because the, you know, the other character, Ahab, really wants to get to the bottom of reality. He wants to kill this whale, to sort of, like, attack the capriciousness and injustice of the world, that maybe if he can kill this whale, he can, you know, set the world aright, at least for himself. But there's a way in which maybe Melville, excuse me, Ahab, wants to force the world into, like, his own image in some sense, whereas maybe Ishmael is more open to letting the world reveal itself. As it is. And I think that kind of, like, frustration is also a frustration that can just teach us about reading in general, just to, like, let the book reveal itself. And also, I think there's no shame in admitting that you don't understand a part of a book. Like sometimes. Like, I'm reading the Brothers Karamazov right now, and I've never read it before. I'm going to teach it next year, so I have to like, you know, really prepare it over the summer. And my thinking is I'm going to do a really fast read of it, like as fast as possible. So then I have like the beginning, the middle and the end in view and then start it over and approach it much more slowly after that. And so I think, I think it's okay just to bypass a part. And if the book, you think that there's something there that you don't quite have hold of, just returning to it and seeing if, like, that second read makes things more clear.
- [19:06]
C
Jason Lund is upper School Humanities teacher and senior thesis coordinator at Treasure Valley Classical Academy in Fruitland, Idaho. Talking today, making it interesting the least interesting parts of great books, Melville and Homer specifically. Jason, thanks so much for joining us here on the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast.
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D
It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much.
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B
I'm Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook search for Hillsdale College K12 classical education. You also can follow us on Instagram hillsdalek12. That's hillsdalek12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network Network More at Podcast Hillsdale Edu or wherever you get your audio.