An Incomplete Education Read online

  An Incomplete Education

  Judy Jones

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The authors would like to thank the following, all of whom contributed their energies, insights, and expertise (even if only three of them know the meaning of the word “deadline”) to the sections that bear their names:

  Owen Edwards, Helen Epstein, Karen Houppert, Douglas Jones, David Martin, Stephen Nunns, Jon Pareles, Karen Pennar, Henry Popkin, Michael Sorkin, Judith Stone, James Trefil, Ronald Varney, Barbara Waxenberg, Alan Webber, and Mark Zussman.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction to the First Revised Edition, July 1994

  Introduction to the Original Edition, March 1986

  CHAPTER ONE - American Studies

  CHAPTER TWO - Art History

  CHAPTER THREE - Economics

  CHAPTER FOUR - Film

  CHAPTER FIVE - Literature

  CHAPTER SIX - Music

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Philosophy

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Political Science

  CHAPTER NINE - Psychology

  CHAPTER TEN - Religion

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Science

  CHAPTER TWELVE - World History

  Lexicon

  INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST REVISED EDITION, JULY 1994

  When this book was first published in the spring of 1987, literacy was in the air. Well, not literacy itself—almost everyone we knew was still misusing lie and lay and seemed resigned to never getting beyond the first hundred pages of Remembrance of Things Past. Rather, literacy as a concept, a cover story, an idea to rant, fret, and, of course, Do Something about. Allan Bloom’s snarling denunciation of Americans’ decadent philistinism in The Closing of the American Mind, followed closely by E. D. Hirsch’s laundry list, in Cultural Literacy, of names, dates, and concepts—famous if often annoying touchstones, five thousand of them in the first volume alone—fueled discussion groups and call-in talk shows and spawned a whole mini-industry of varyingly comprehensive, competent, and clever guides to American history, say, or geography, or science, which most people not only hadn’t retained but also didn’t feel they’d understood to begin with. At the same time, there was that rancorous debate over expanding the academic “canon,” or core curriculum, to include more than the standard works by Dead White European Males, plus Jane Austen and W. E. B. Du Bois, a worthy but humorless brouhaha characterized—and this was the high point—by mobs of Stanford students chanting, “Hey hey ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Emerging from our rooms, where we’d been holed up with our portable typewriters and the working manuscript of An Incomplete Education for most of the decade, we blinked, looked around, and remarked thoughtfully, “Boy, this ought to sell a few books.”

  Now, back to revise the book for a second edition, we’re astonished at how much the old ’hood has changed in just a few years. We thought life was moving at warp speed in the 1980s, yet we never had to worry, in those days, that what we wrote on Friday might be outdated by the following Monday (although we did stop to consider whether “Sean and Madonna” would still be a recognizable reference on the Monday after that). When we wrote the original edition, psychology was, if not exactly a comer, at least a legitimate topic of conversation— this was, remember, in the days before Freud’s reputation had been trashed beyond repair and when plenty of people apparently still felt they could afford to spend eleven years and several hundred thousand dollars lying on a couch, free-associating their way from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness. Film, as distinct from movies, likewise still had intellectual appeal (and it made money, too), until that appeal dissolved somewhere between the demise of the European auteur theory and the rise of the video-rental store. We can actually remember a time—and so can you, if you’re old enough to be reading this book—when a new film by Truffaut or Bergman or Fellini was considered as much of an event as the release of another Disney animation is today. And political science, while always more of a paranoiac’s game than a bona fide academic discipline, at least had well-defined opposing teams (the Free World vs. the Communist one), familiar playing pieces (all those countries that were perpetually being manipulated by one side or the other), and a global game board whose markings weren’t constantly being redrawn.

  One thing hasn’t changed, however, to judge by the couples standing in line behind us at the multiplex or the kids in the next booth at the diner: Nobody’s gotten so much as a hair more literate. In fact, we seem to have actually become dopier, with someone like Norman Mailer superseded as our national interpreter of current events by someone like Larry King.

  But then, why would it have turned out differently? If literacy was ever really—as all those literacy-anxiety books implied and as we, too, believed, for about five minutes back in 1979, when we first conceived of writing this one— about amassing information for the purpose of passing some imaginary standardized test, whether administered by a cranky professor, a snob at a dinner party, or your own conscience, it isn’t anymore. Most of us have more databases, cable stations, CDs, telephone messages, e-mail, books, newspapers, and Post-its than we can possibly sort through in one lifetime; we don’t need any additional information we don’t know what to do with, thanks.

  What we do need, more than ever, in our opinion, is the opportunity to have up-close-and-personal relationships, to be intimately if temporarily connected, with the right stuff, past and present. As nation-states devolve into family feuds and every crackpot with an urge to vent is awarded fifteen minutes of airtime, it seems less like bourgeois indulgence and more like preventive medicine to spend quality time with the books, music, art, philosophy, and discoveries that have, for one reason or another, managed to endure. What lasts? What works? What’s the difference between good and evil? What, if anything, can we trust? It’s not that we can’t, in some roundabout way, extract clues from the testimony of the pregnant twelve-year-olds, the mothers of serial killers, and the couples who have sex with their rottweilers, who’ve become standard fare on Oprah and Maury and Sally Jessy, it’s just that it’s nice, when vertigo sets in, to be able to turn for a second opinion to Tolstoy or Melville or even Susan Sontag. And it helps restore one’s equilibrium to revisit history and see for oneself whether, in fact, life was always this weird.

  Consequently, what we’ve set out to provide in An Incomplete Education is not so much data as access; not a Cliffs Notes substitute or a cribsheet for cultural-literacy slackers but an invitation to the ball, a way in to material that has thrilled, inspired, and comforted, sure, but also embarrassed, upset, and/or confused us over the years, and which, we’ve assumed with our customary arrogance, may have stumped you too on occasion. In this edition, as in the first, we’ve endeavored—at times with more goodwill than good grace—to make introductions, uncover connections, facilitate communication, and generally lubricate the relationship between the reader (insofar as the reader thinks more or less along the same lines we do) and various aspects of Western Civ’s “core curriculum,” since the latter, whatever its shortfalls, still provides a frame of reference we can share without having to regret it in the morning, one that doesn’t depend for its existence on market forces or for its appeal on mere prurient interest, and one that reminds us that we’re capable of grappling with questions of more enduring—even, if you think about it, more immediate—import than whether or not O.J. really did it.

  Finally, a note to those (mercifully few) readers who wrote to us complaining that the first edition of An Incomplete Education failed, despite their high hopes and urgent needs, to complete their educations: Don’t hold your breath this time around, either. We’ll refrain from referring you, snidely, to the book’s title (but for goodness’ sake, don’t you even
look before you march off to the cash register?), but we will permit ourselves to wonder what a “complete” education might consist of, and why, if such a thing existed, you would want it anyway. What, know it all? No gaps to fill, no new territory to explore, nothing left to learn, education over? (And no need for third and fourth revised editions of this book?) Please, write to us again and tell us you were just kidding.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION, MARCH 1986

  It’s like this: You’re reading the Sunday book section and there, in a review of a book that isn’t even about physics but about how to write a screenplay, you’re confronted by that word again: quark. You have been confronted by it at least twenty-five times, beginning in at least 1978, but you have not managed to retain the definition (something about building blocks), and the resonances (something about threesomes, something about birdshit) are even more of a problem. You’re feeling stymied. You worry that you may not use spare time to maximum advantage, that the world is passing you by, that maybe it would make sense to subscribe to a third newsweekly. Your coffee’s getting cold. The phone rings. You can’t bring yourself to answer it.

  Or it’s like this: You do know what a quark is. You can answer the phone. It is an attractive person you have recently met. How are you? How are you? The person is calling to wonder if you feel like seeing a movie both of you missed the first time around. It’s The Year of Living Dangerously, with Mel Gibson and that very tall actress. Also, that very short actress. “Plus,” the person says, “it’s set in Indonesia, which, next to India, is probably the most fascinating of all Third World nations. It’s like the political scientists say, ‘The labyrinth that is India, the mosaic that is Indonesia.’ Right?” Silence at your end of the phone. Clearly this person is into overkill, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to say something back. India you could field. But Indonesia? Fortunately, you have cable—and a Stouffer’s lasagna in the freezer.

  Or it’s like this: You know what a quark is. Also something about Indonesia. The two of you enjoy the movie. The new person agrees to go with you to a dinner party one of your best friends is giving at her country place. You arrive, pulling into a driveway full of BMWs. You go inside. Introductions are made. Along about the second margarita, the talk turns to World War II. Specifically, the causes of World War II. More specifically, Hitler. Already this is not easy. But it is interesting. “Well,” says another guest, flicking an imaginary piece of lint from the sleeve of a double-breasted navy blazer, “you really can’t disregard the impact Nietzsche had, not only on Hitler, but on a prostrate Germany. You know: The will to power. The Übermensch. The transvaluation of values. Don’t you agree, old bean?” Fortunately, you have cable—and a Stouffer’s lasagna in the freezer.

  So what’s your problem? Weren’t you supposed to have learned all this stuff back in college? Sure you were, but then, as now, you had your good days and your bad days. Ditto your teachers. Maybe you were in the infirmary with the flu the week your Philosophy 101 class was slogging through Zarathustra. Maybe your poli-sci prof was served with divorce papers right about the time the class hit the nonaligned nations. Maybe you failed to see the relevance of subatomic particles given your desperate need to get a date for Homecoming. Maybe you actually had all the answers—for a few glorious hours before the No-Doz (or whatever it was) wore off. No matter. The upshot is that you’ve got some serious educational gaps. And that, old bean, is what this book is all about.

  Now we’ll grant you that educational gaps today don’t signify in quite the way they did even ten years ago. In fact, when we first got the idea for this book, sitting around Esquire magazine’s research department, we envisioned a kind of intellectual Dress for Success, a guidebook to help reasonably literate, reasonably ambitious types like ourselves preserve an upwardly mobile image and make an impression at cocktail parties by getting off a few good quotes from Dr. Johnson—or, for that matter, by not referring to Evelyn Waugh as “she.”

  Yup, times have changed since then. (You didn’t think we were still sitting around the Esquire research department, did you?) And the more we heard people’s party conversation turning from literary matters to money-market accounts and condo closings, the more we worried that the book we were working on wasn’t noble (or uplifting, or profound; also long) enough. Is it just another of those bluffers’ handbooks? we wondered. Is its guiding spirit not insight at all, but rather the brashest kind of one-upmanship? Is trying to reduce the complexities of culture, politics, and science to a couple hundred words each so very different from trying to fill in all the wedges of one’s pie in a game of Trivial Pursuit? (And why hadn’t we thought up Trivial Pursuit? But that’s another story.)

  Then we realized something. We realized that what we were really going for here had less to do with competition and power positions than with context and perspective. In a world of bits and bytes, of reruns and fast forwards, of information overloads and significance shortfalls (and of Donald Trump and bagpersons no older than one is, but that’s another story) it feels good to be grounded. It feels good to be able to bring to the wire-service story about Reagan’s dream of packing the Supreme Court a sense of what the Supreme Court is (and the knowledge that people have been trying to pack it from the day it opened), to be able to buttress one’s comparison of Steven Spielberg and D. W. Griffith with a knowledge of the going critical line on the latter. In short, we found that we were casting our vote for grounding, as opposed to grooming. Also that grounding, not endless, mindless mobility, turns out to be the real power position.

  And then something really strange happened. Setting out to discover what conceivable appeal a Verdi, say, could have on a planet that was clearly—and, it seemed at the time, rightly—dominated by the Rolling Stones, we stumbled into a nineteenth-century landscape where the name of the game was grandeur, not grandiosity; where romanticism had no trashy connotations; where music and spectacle could elicit overwhelming emotions without, at the same time, threatening to fry one’s brains. No kidding, we actually liked this stuff! What’s more, coming of age in a world of T-shirts and jeans and groovy R & B riffs apparently didn’t make one ineligible for a passport to the other place. One just needed a few key pieces of information and a willingness to travel.

  And speaking of travel, let’s face it: Bumping along over the potholes of your mind day after day can’t be doing much for your self-esteem. Which is the third thing, along with power and enrichment, this book is all about. Don’t you think you’ll feel better about yourself once all those gaps have been filled? Everything from the mortifying (how to tell Keats from Shelley) to the merely pesky (how to tell a nave from a narthex)? Imagine. Nothing but you and the open road.

  Before you take off, though, we ought to say something about the book’s structure. Basically, it’s divided into chapters corresponding to the disciplines and departments you remember from college (you were paying that much attention, weren’t you?). Not that everything in the book is stuff you’d necessarily study in college, but it’s all well within the limits of what an “educated” person is expected to know. In those areas where our own roads weren’t in such great repair, we’ve called on specialist friends and colleagues to help us out. Even so, we don’t claim to have covered everything; we simply went after what struck us as the biggest trouble spots.

  Now, our advice for using this book: Don’t feel you have to read all of any given chapter on a single tank of gas. And don’t feel you have to get from point A to point B by lunchtime; better to slow down and enjoy the scenery. Do, however, try to stay alert. Even with the potholes fixed, you’ll want to be braced for hairpin turns (and the occasional five-car collision) up ahead.

  American Literature 101

  You signed up for it thinking it would be a breeze. After all, you’d read most of the stuff back in high school, hadn’t you?

  Or had you? As it turned out, the thing you remembered best about Moby-Dick was the expression on Gregory Peck’s face as he an
d the whale went down for the last time. And was it really The Scarlet Letter you liked so much? Or was it the Classics Illustrated version of The Scarlet Letter? Of course, you weren’t the only one who overestimated your familiarity with your literary heritage; your professor was busy making the same mistake.

  Then there was the material itself, much of it so bad it made you wish you’d signed up for The Nineteenth Century French Novel: Stendhal to Zola instead. Now that you’re older, though, you may be willing to make allowances. After all, the literary figures you were most likely to encounter the first semester were by and large only moonlighting as writers. They had to spend the bulk of their time building a nation, framing a constitution, carving a civilization out of the wilderness, or simply busting their chops trying to make a living. In those days, no one was about to fork over six figures so some Puritan could lie around Malibu polishing a screenplay.

  Try, then, to think only kind and patriotic thoughts as, with the help of this chart, you refresh your memory on all those things you were asked to face—or to face again—in your freshman introduction to American Lit. JONATHAN EDWARDS (1703-1758)

  Product of:

  Northampton, Massachusetts, where he ruled from the pulpit for thirty years; Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he became an Indian missionary after the townspeople of Northampton got fed up with him.

  Earned a Living as a:

  Clergyman, theologian.

  High-School Reading List:

  The sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), the most famous example of “the preaching of terror.”

  Jonathan Edwards’ church, Northampton, Massachusetts

  College Reading List:

  Any number of sermons, notably “God Glorified in the Work of Redemption by the Greatness of Man’s Dependence on Him in the Whole of It” (1731), Edwards’ first sermon, in which he pinpoints the moral failings of New Englanders; and “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God” (1737), describing various types and stages of religious conversion. Also, if your college professor was a fundamentalist, a New Englander, or simply sadistic, one or two of the treatises, e.g., “A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Freedom of the Will” (1754), or the “Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended” (1758). Not to be missed: a dip into Edwards’ Personal Narrative, which suggests the psychological connection between being America’s number-one Puritan clergyman and the only son in a family with eleven children.