Teach Your Children Well . . .

by Suzanne Poor

They’re bringing back the Western Canon in obscure places where people want to know the literary standards on which we base our language and its treasure chest of allusions.

According to a New York Times report a few years back, high school graduates considered not ready for a four-year institution were flocking to a night school class at Wilbur Wright Community College on Chicago’s North Side. The majority of the students were Hispanic or black, apparently eager to absorb the “so-called” great books of Western Civilization. From Plato to Keats and Yeats to Swift, Eliot and Joyce — all those dead, white males many schools rejected several years ago. These students, though, along with those at dozens of others around the country are indeed immersing themselves in western literature to better their chances of employment.

It would seem that college students today interested in joining the communications industry would or should also be guided into liberal arts literature courses. But they’re not. When we speak at the public relations breakout sessions on Career Day, our first question is, “How many of you have taken a liberal arts course?” No hands are raised. “Who among you knows what a gerund is?” Not one in all three sessions respond.

How, I ask, can one enter into this field without knowledge of the language and literature that shaped this country’s history? How can one relate to isolated quotes or allusions that add depth and panache to articles in newspapers and magazines or dialogue in dramatic presentations? For example, “Panglossian” refers to what? Who wrote the center does not hold, and why? What does “I celebrate myself” mean? How does the fog come in on little cat’s feet, and where? When one reads the words “rage, rage, do not go gentle into that good night,” what feelings are aroused?

Call me Ishmael. Do I dare to eat a peach. The quality of mercy. What does Shakespeare bring us today?

A while ago we interviewed a potential new client — a techie totally enraptured with the search engine Yahoo. When asked if he knew the provenance (or where the word came from), he demurred. He didn’t know Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms. He didn’t care, either.

There are some of us who do care, however, and hopefully so will more and more professors in departments other than English. But so should all communicators from PR practitioners to copywriters to account people, who must judge their associates’ prose.
I see the words “Modest Proposal” in headlines constantly. But do the people reading the article know the headline is the title of Swift’s satiric essay proposing that young Irish mothers fatten up their babies for a year then sell them for food? “My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk” refers to Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale and Socrates’ execution by his peers, double levels that bring understanding and excitement to what might have been a dull piece. There are more: “The world is too much with us late and soon/Getting and spending we lay waste our powers” . . . “He was at sixes and sevens.”

Maureen Dowd in her New York Times column constantly quotes from the Canon. It may be just one word as in “Panglossian” (a reference to Voltaire’s Candide and Pangloss’s ignoring the reality of things). If one doesn’t get her allusion, the reader misses the point of her tirade or fury.

By the way, what the hell has Plato’s Cave to do with anything? Or cogito, ergo sum? Think about it.