The Subversive Encyclopedia
Schroth, Raymond A.
Percy, a study could be made of Greene's priests and Percy's doctors. The unattraetiveness of Greene's priests calls attention to his vision. In "Greeneland," the more repulsive the priest, the...
...Kurosawa's monumental epic, The Seven Samurai, was remade here as one of the most successful Westerns of all time, The Magnificent Seven...
...Hans Kfing, none...
...but, in spite of their influence on the University of Chicago and on the two Saint John's Colleges built around their idea of the Great Books, the American educational establishment has not made the HutchinsAdler vision its own...
...In the Micropaedia, designed and written for the junior high school student, there are illustrations, many of them in color, on every page...
...and Gunther Bornkamm's article on Jesus Christ which begins: "The history of the life, work, and death of Jesus of Nazareth reveals nothing of the worldwide movement to which he gave rise...
...America gets nothing...
...Greene's and Percy's visions are radically different but they fit into the same tradition...
...Working through the books themselves, what can the critical reader say...
...Bernard Lonergan...
...the time-block system that imagines that knowledge is best imparted in a classroom in three 50minute periods a week...
...They are about modern Japan where people wear business suits and work in offices...
...And here we encounter one of the more aggravating characteristics of the Micro: perhaps in its efforts to prove itself up-to-date, it tends to confuse itself with the Celebrity Register, and it has ended up canonizing the questionable values and tastes of contemporary culture...
...Another student told me he had spent two weeks listening to a professor outline the history of a European country, then, during review, had found the same material in Colliers" Encyclopedia...
...Some of the articles are actually single and multiauthored books which the EB would do well to issue separately for classroom use...
...And theologians...
...Nevertheless, the substance of the new Britannica and the material on which it will ultimately be judged is in that part which most resembles the traditional encyclopedia, the Macropaedia...
...and today's college student gets the rhetorical gi'avy but not the meat of a real Liberal education...
...Of course...
...Each entry on a country, for example, is accompanied by a handsome box of national statistics-perhaps even more than an ambassador would need to know--and a small color-map and flag...
...The Commonweal listing is of the short-lived 19th century English socialist magazine...
...Ultimately, this is because, at its profoundest levels, the Catholic experience is infinitely interestng...
...Stuart Roosa who went up in Apollo 14...
...Occasionally they even go out to bars, drink too much Scotch, and make asses of themselves...
...Furthermore, there are some unchanging truths and there is a basic intellectual loremthe so-called humanizing "liberal" arts--to which e~;eryone between 16 and 20 should be introduced...
...The type is 9-point Times Roman (like our book reviews) and the two-column pages are broken up by lots of bold-face sub-heads and marginal notes...
...Adler stresses that the Propaedia is the heart of the system, that this theoretical outline of the whole of knowledge was completed before the articles were commissioned, as if he had mapped out the heavens and set loose a host of demiurges to fill in the stars...
...Thus, in the right (or wrong) hands it is a potentially radical teaching device, perhaps one of the few encyclopedias we could classify as subversive literature...
...I tested the EB on a bright student asking him to compare the articles on psychology, anthropology and the Middle Ages with the courses he had had last year...
...A few critics have already complained that the entries on gout and dragons lack the flavor of the earlier editions and that the picture of Tolstoy is really one of Turgenev...
...Back in the fifties Kurosawa, the classic maker of Samurai sword-fight films, readily found an international audience for his work...
...Description...
...Now, with the publication of the new, completely reconceived and rewritten fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica they have reached their seventh day, and they can rest...
...But why is the entry on the Palamino, "type of horse distinguished by its color-some shade of yellow or gold with a white or silver mane and tail," illustrated in black and white...
...That was before pornography and Kung Fu took over...
...And the small cuts decorating the entries on artists--particularly selections like Arnold Newman's photos of contemporary painters like Kenneth Noland and others with their works--and those of flowers, animals and ancient landmarks are quite striking...
...Like Albert Camus' doctor in The Plague, Percy's heroes have settled for serving man but their creator is very aware that man is more than man, that at the roots of the human is a divine mystery...
...And it is here that the 30 volumes become not just a reference set but an institution, a "university without walls," where the student's initial question about mysticism or the sacraments will lead him to an outline of the whole history and doctrine of Christianity--from Abelard to Zwingli--then to the rest of world religions...
...But not the Loch Ness Monster, who is no less real...
...i i THE SUBVERSIVE ENCYCLOPEDIA RAYMOND A. SCHROTH A look into the new 'Britannica" All of human learning, say Mortimer J. Adler and his senior colleague Robert M. Hutchins, is one...
...SCHROTH, $ . J . , who teaches journalism at Fordham and is an associate editor of Commonweal, is author of Thr Eagle and Brooklyn (Greenwood Press...
...For in many ways the most interesting thing about the new Britannica is not just the excellence of its scholarship but the way in which the promoters and editors have re-created what an encyclopedia is...
...I particularly enjoyed New York Times' reporter Murray Schumach's story on New York...
...In "Greeneland," the more repulsive the priest, the more powerful is the presence of God...
...TWICE-TOLD TALES 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN 1 suppose it's easy to see why, among all the great Japanese directors of the post-war era, Yasujiro Ozu has been the last to receive recognition outside Japan...
...Hutchins and Adler have been saying these things all their lives...
...and this new project should be seen as another attempt to influence the curriculum of American secondary and higher education...
...To gain your block of Britannica turf it helps to be an athlete, actress, or astronaut...
...Ivanovich Belyayev who piloted Russia's eighth manned space flight...
...John Courtney Murray gets four lines...
...James Brown the soul singer and Jim Brown the football player movie star...
...Besides 55 pages of sports records, there are 'bios' of Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron and Bob Cousy...
...Ozu's Commonweal: 83...
...They have transformed it from a research tool, or a status symbol foisted on parents by a foot-in-the-door salesman as if it were a brain transplant for an underachieving child, to an active invitation to a liberal education...
...Ozu's films, on the other hand, have only begun to appear in this country in the last couple of years, even though he died over a decade ago...
...Lots of space for Joan Crawford and Bette Davis...
...First, that they are beautiful...
...They are, above all, educators...
...At least Ozu's don't have obscure medieval settings...
...He answered that his own Middle Ages course could have been called "The Middle Ages Day-by-Day," but that the EB articles corresponded with what he had learned...
...The Macro presents "knowledge in depth," 4,207 major articles--some of them book-length, like the over 180,000-word section on Education--on the whole range of human knowledge...
...Whatever else we may say of him, God is not boring...
...inflexible sequences of courses and requirements...
...the hack lecturer, the instructor who really doesn't want to be there but is impelled to drone "basic" biology, geography, or history into the unwilling heads of passive listeners who thirst only for the end of the final exam...
...Roy Rogers and Nelson Eddy...
...The Abominable Snowman, yes...
...To Americans who had had the Western as a staple of their movie diet, Samurai films seemed entirely familiar...
...At this rate, how about space for the "stars" of a few yeaxs ago...
...With over 1,600 words a page, there are 178 pages under Western Literature, plus 22 pages in Anthony Burgess' brilliant and personal piece on The Novel, in which he ranges over into his theories of criticism, observing that the best critic of fiction is the novelist manqud, whereas the successful novelist, "shorn of self-doubt," brings to other men's work a kind of "magisterial blindness...
...In one way it might seem that Ozu's postwar films--he had already been directing for fifteen years before the war--should be even easier to take in than Kurosawa's...
...The popularity of Greene's latest novel The Honorary Consul suggests that there will always be room in the Catholic tradition for Greene's vision...
...It would seem that this student and others like him would be better off spending less time in class, reading the EB guided by the Propaedin, and taking an exam...
...The 10-volume Micropaedia is the key, a glorified dictionary and index with 102,214 short entries (under 700 words) with cross references to, and capsule versions of, the major articles in the 19-volume Macropaedia...
...Yet, the Macro is a precious library in which the world's outstanding scholars, freelaneers and journalists have summed up not only the present state of knowledge in a given field, but their own life's work as well...
...I would imagine one reason his films haven't reached us earlier is that in Japan itself he was always thought too Japanese to be exportable...
...All Japanese art seems to spawn genres in extraordinary quantity, and even so recent an art as filmmaking permits of subtle distinctions like that between the hahn mono, or "mother" picture, and the tsuma mono, or "wife" picture...
...And yet, despite this concern with the Westernization of Japan, I'm sure that at home Ozu is considered the most Japanese and insular of all the postwar directors...
...No doubt Ozu was, too, in the way he practiced his craft, a very traditional artist...
...He has the grit of his beloved city under his fingernails...
...And Hutchins and Adler, great teachers that they are, will go on feeling what all teachers necessarily feel--incompleteness, the gnawing of so much work still undone...
...Used creatively, it could be subversive in that it would subvert some of the university's more inhibiting structures: the mandatory introductory course which often repeats high school material...
...The vocation of doctor is more humble, more ordinary, but it fits Percy's vision of man's living commitment to serve mankind...
...Forget it...
...Finally, the one-volume Propaedia outlines this knowledge in ten parts (Matter and Energy, the Earth, Life on Earth, Human Life, Human Society, Art, Technology, Religion, the History of Mankind and the Commonweal: 81 Branches of Knowledge), introduces us to each branch with essays by celebrated scholars like Rene DuBos, Loren Eiseley, Jacques Barzun and Adler himself, then directs us to the sections of the Macropaedia where we can follow through...
...Second, the books are fun...
...To draw back from this traditional lore in favor of pragmatic vocationalism, specialization, or a cafeteria collection of unrelated "credits"--which much of American higher education now threatens to do (egged on by Gerald Ford's observation that there is little correspondence between educational goals and the job market)-would be to succumb to the anti-intellectualism that has long been America's crippling curse...
...Compare his work to that of Akira Kurosawa, who was the first to receive such recognition...
...Pictures and 'bios' of it would seem---every ballet dancer ever...
...and, although the hackneyed illustrations of Central Park, Park Avenue and Lincoln Center belie the tension of his treatment, the city that emerges from his 15-page portrait is the authentic one--the magnificent swarming conglomeration of violent ghettos and charming neighborhoods, as awesome as its skyline and as intimate as its quietest cafe, the "dying" metropolis that is "far more alive on its deathbed" than the dreary suburbs to which so many of its more timid citizens have fled...
...But Hutchins and Adler will not rest well if their new EB is merely read, admired and bought...
...and in Manhattan just off Forty-Second Street, where all the mass-audience action films play, there used to be a theater that showed Japanese Samurai films exclusively...
...Commonweal readers might turn to articles by Commonweal contributors: John Cogley on Pope John XXIII, Avery Dulles on Revelation, Martin Marty and John MacKenzie on Roman Catholicism, Wallace Fowlie on Jean Coeteau and Stendhal, Denis Donoghue on Yeats, etc . . . . and then spend some time with some rather provocative articles like that on Pacifism and Nonviolent Movements by Wilhelm Emil Mtihlmann, in which he calls on pacifism to renounce its perfectionist illustrations, acknowledge human limitations, and settle for intelli25 October 1974:82 gent planning that would offset overpopulation and pollution, and just be happy to keep armed conflicts localized...
...However, to the extent that Vatican 11 theology forms the Catholic community, Percy's type of novel will become more and more significant...
...But meanwhile, in a period of general educational caution and retrenchment, when so many of the educational experimentations of the 1960s (when one man's innovation was always in danger of becoming another man's strait jacket) appear to have flopped, when the job market glut has cowed both timid faculty and students into benign passivity, the newborn EB is in danger of just sitting there in its cradle---certainly not stillborn, but perhaps just once-born...
...And, since learning is a circle, an inquiring mind can enter anywhere and follow a chain of ideas through to a total educational experience...
...This reallocation of time might put the academic hack out of business and free the great lecturers (of which each university has about three), the good researchers, and discussion-seminar leaders, and the more motivated students to deal with the results of their own research, to discuss original texts or more recent or controversial books, and ask questions about the value of what they have learned...
...From time to time these two intellectual entrepreneurs have taken their case to a more appreciative public and come up with academic and commercial devices (some would say gimmicks)--like the 1952 54volume Great Books of the Western World with Adler's Syntopicon of the "Great Ideas" and Hutchins' Great Conversations, or Adler's How to Read a Book: The RAYMOND h...
...The editors have divided the 30-volume set into three sections...
...Not even Tom Mix...
...But Playboy...
...The Catholic novel is infinitely interesting...
...Dizzy Dean and James Dean...
...Janis Joplin...
...Never...
...It's fun to just play around with them, relishing the style of some of the more felicitous essays, like Howard Nemerov's on poetry, or anticipating the historical judgments in the biographical studies ("history is unlikely to place him [Pius XII] among the great creative popes"), or simply quarreling with the editors on whom or what they have decided to immortalize...
...Art o[ Getting a Liberal Education (1940, revised and updated 1972, with Charles Van Doren) or Hutchins' Santa Barbara Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions-to put flesh on their words, to bind and box on the shelf what Truth and Value would look like if we could hold them in our hands...
...and I am tempted to complain that the illustration of Poe is from a littleknown 1845 oil portrait rather than the familiar mustachioed glowering visage in the photo we have come to love and fear...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 4
