LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)

Confining the Classics

To the editor,

Your reflections on the use of highlighters and underlining text ("From the Editor's Desk," Spring 1999) brought to mind a visit of the formidable Professor Philip Rieff to Concordia's Great Books Liberal Arts College in Montreal. Those of your readers who have had the privilege of listening to Professor Rieff expound on Freud, universities, and modern culture (as we did on several occasions) will understand how this anecdote connects to this brilliant scholar and teacher. To your other readers, I urge you to get to a library and perhaps get a sense of why some of us consider Professor Rieff one of the outstanding intellects of the twentieth century.

Professor Rieff was leading a College seminar on Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and at random chose a text sitting on the table. (The professor was late.) As he scanned the book, he noted, with evident displeasure, that the book was underlined. Our seminar's first half hour turned into a condemnatory and chastising peroration befitting an Old Testament prophet on how underlining violates reading, thinking, and the written word. We listened with awe, embarrassment, and I thought, now I know the meaning of a "hidden text."

In some sense the student (as narrated by editor Pinsker) who was underlining what seemed to be the entire text was closer to Professor Rieff's wisdom than Professor Pinsker's observation that "highlight means to select matter that's important--the very opposite of what this highlighter-mad student was doing." Professor Pinsker's explanation why selective underlining is necessary is, ironically, Professor Rieff's explanation why we should not underline. Professor Pinsker writes: "Serious books are read to be reread--as books change us, we change our minds about books." Professor Rieff called such books "thick texts." To underline Freud was to defile the text; it is to privilege our glancing and first impressions against the carefully chosen words of a master--and here we were selecting out and highlighting words that we needed to learn in their entirety as Freud wrote them. Professor Rieff then went on to a seemingly obscure reference to St. Francis of Assisi in Civilization and Its Discontents (no one had underlined this passage) brilliantly to show how this reference was the key to understanding Freud's great work.

Every year I continue to think of Professor Rieff as I begin to reread the Great Books with new students and uncomfortably look for my underlinings and marginal observations as I lead the seminar. Over the years, these annual rereadings produce more underlinings in various colors and angles, and more marginal notes so small that I cannot read them anymore. So Professor Rieff ultimately prevails as more and more of the text becomes highlighted and less and less of Shulman is retrievable. Every few years I reread a fresh, clean text and again have the opportunity of reading "thick texts" the way they were written, not the way I confined them.

 
Harvey Shulman 
Concordia University 
Montreal, Canada