‘Breaking Bread With the Dead’ Review: Old Books in a New Class

WSJ · by Agnes Callard

Photo: Getty Images

By Agnes Callard

Dec. 9, 2020 6:13 pm ET

Alan Jacobs reports that, though he has been teaching old books to classrooms full of students for many years, lately when he walks into a classroom “fairly regularly the first thing I see is every head bowed before a glowing screen.” Ever-present screen-based entertainment, a 24-hour news cycle and the constant connectivity of social media place us in a constant sensory flux. This is not a hospitable environment for the study of great books, but Mr. Jacobs argues that our current predicament provides even more reason for turning to them: Reading old books promises to lengthen our “now,” situating and stabilizing us so that we become possessed of more tranquil minds and less dominated by impulse. Those who can tie themselves to the great minds of the past, Mr. Jacobs tells us, will achieve greater “temporal bandwidth.”

Mr. Jacobs, a professor at Baylor University, frames his book “Breaking Bread With the Dead” as an expansion of the humanistic classroom: Set aside your phones, I will teach you to pay attention to Homer, and Horace and Milton. As a fellow teacher, I was eager to see how he would encourage and invite the uninitiated reader, the one beset by an internet of distractions, to “overcome the gravitational pull of the moment” by “breaking bread with” such difficult authors. His book, a loosely linked series of essays, does not exactly deliver on this promise.

Much of it is given over to illustrating and defusing a potential worry: You might think we shouldn’t read old books because, to put it gently, ancient authors do not have modern moral sensibilities. Aristotle argued in favor of slavery; Shakespeare seemed to think shrews needed taming. Mr. Jacobs spends a lot of time telling us that it is possible to take the moral failings of a work seriously without dismissing its virtues, but he rarely pauses to mount a thorough defense of any particular author.

Mr. Jacobs’s concern is not so much to tell us how to sort through individual cases as to encourage and exhort us: Serious engagement with old books is possible not only in spite of, but even because of, our moral differences with them. But why did this point need to be hammered home? In my classroom experience—and I would be very surprised to hear that Mr. Jacobs’s differs—the problem that the uninitiated have with “The Iliad” is not that they are offended by its sexism. Yes, it is true that women are conceived as prizes, but this is not why people struggle to partake of the wonders of Homer. Students struggle because they are bored and confused.

Photo: WSJ

Mr. Jacobs is right that there are real wonders in “The Iliad”; he is right to say that when “old King Priam goes to his knees to beg his son’s killer for his son’s body, a powerful electrical current leaps across the millennia.” But this scene comes in Book 24, and that means you have to get through 23 books of Greek epic first. I would describe getting through those 23 books as the main problem my students face in relation to “The Iliad.”

There are, of course, wonderful moments in those books, but there is also a lot of just plain killing. Moreover, “The Iliad” is weird. It’s a war story that doesn’t start when the war started—but rather with infighting among the “good” (Greek) guys. And it doesn’t end when the war ends—but rather by celebrating the heroism of one of the “bad” (Trojan) guys. It takes a lot of work to get “The Iliad” to “come together,” to give a contemporary reader some sense of what Homer was up to. This is work a good teacher might do, but work that Mr. Jacobs’s book doesn’t do—for any author.

If Mr. Jacobs’s reader hasn’t already read the authors he refers to—Milton, Horace, Ibsen, Homer, Virgil—it is hard to see how this book will spark an interest. Each author surfaces for no more than a few pages, in which Mr. Jacobs offers us one or two quotations, an occasional biographical reference, and some discussions of what might (from a contemporary standpoint) constitute the moral failings of the work. The delights of these authors are referred to and (emphatically) insisted on, and they are defended (at least in abstract terms) from the clutches of would-be cancelers. But they are not exactly shared. Mr. Jacobs references “a permanent banquet” of great ideas, but, if I can channel the point of view of one of my first-year students, my guess would be that he would feel he is watching others eat.

Worries about the gender and racial politics of an old book are more characteristic of the soul-searching of people such as Mr. Jacobs and myself—professors anxious to square their liberal moral values with their conservative taste in books—than of the uninitiated readers who struggle to make a basic kind of sense of the text. For this reason, Mr. Jacobs’s emphasis suggests something about who his real audience is: not the novice reader who has yet to “break bread with” the author in question, but rather the proficient, well-versed reader. If I am right that Mr. Jacobs’s many exhortations throughout the book are directed at people like himself—and me—as much as anyone else, this points to the existence of an unspoken fear.

Could it be that those of us whose connection with the past is supposed to be rock solid, who are supposed to profess the deepest and most abiding love of great books, are struggling with our own attention problems? That we no longer see the lives described in Plutarch as continuous with the ones we are living now? Are we self-professed “lovers of the past” ourselves starting to lose our “temporal bandwidth”? These are hard questions for a humanist to ask—so hard that even posing them gives me the feeling of standing on the edge of a yawning chasm of despair and emptiness.

Nonetheless, I could imagine a set of essays that bravely tackled them. It would make the best possible case for the conclusion that reading old books is just not worth it anymore—and would go on to address that case. It would be called “Rekindling Your Romance With the Dead.” I hope Alan Jacobs writes it.

Ms. Callard, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming.”

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the December 10, 2020, print edition as 'Old Books In a New Class.'