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Great Literature and the Democratic Culture: A Defense of Standards
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15882 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1989 |
8,597 Words |
| Author
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Milton Hindus
The fourteenth and most recent book written by Milton Hindus,
a professor emeritus at Brandeis University, is Essays:
Personal and Impersonal. His Crippled Giant, the first book
on Celine in English, has been described by scholars as a
classic and has been translated into French and Japanese. He
has been awarded the Walt Whitman Prize by the Poetry Society
of America. Articles and reviews by Dr. Hindus have appeared
in the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Le
Monde, and the Jerusalem Post. |
Since a man who insists upon the efficacy of definition as a means of resolving controversy is likely to be discounted as a pedant, I shall try to be politic and begin with an anecdote. Some years ago, in preparing a new edition of my first book, published thirty-six years before, I took occasion in a postscript to spell out my credo as a (retired) teacher of literature: "The literature we profess is neither pastime nor puzzle, self-indulgent pleasure or opportunity for intellectual display, though it is often treated as if it were one or another or some combination of these. It is probably nothing less than the world's most dangerous game." The sentiment seemed an appropriate one to introduce an account of my quest for the truth about a highly controversial French writer of the twentieth century, Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
But there was something more behind my statement. I had in mind something like Russian roulette, in which the player hopes to escape with his life, though his weapon is aimed at his own head. And I surely intended a covert allusion to a very well known short story by Richard Connell, "The Most Dangerous Game." It tells of a mad Russian aristocrat and big-game hunter who, having become bored with the sport of killing the most ferocious wild beasts, conceives of a plan of stocking his inaccessible island preserve with human game: shipwrecked sailors, whom he "rescues" and entertains before turning them out into the forest with a minimum of equipment for self-protection, which they are expected to use in staving off for three days the hunter (himself) and his small-caliber pistol. If they succeed in evading him for that limited time, they are promised their freedom. None succeeds until another famous big-game hunter accidentally turns up on his shore and is able to compensate ingeniously for his inadequate weaponry with stratagems that finally trap and dispose of his would-be murderer.
The unforgettable idea of the story is, of course, that it is intelligence that makes of man "the most dangerous game." And there is a pun intended as well--that the tracking and pursuit of a human quarry is the riskiest of all games. In speaking of literature as I did, I wished to be understood to say that the true writer may be both hunter and quarry: man in search of himself and his own nature. The true critic, who would fathom his deepest meaning, must bring no less courage than the writer himself to his task. That the writer of the story himself would allow for a legitimate literary analogy to be made is indicated in a passage in which the aristocrat is glimpsed relaxing from his macabre pursuit by reading a classic, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
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