Greg Nagan

222 Pages·2011·51.19 MB·English

by  Greg Nagan

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Great Books for the Short Attention Span
G r e g N a g an
Illustrated by Tony Millionaire
A Fireside Book
Published by Simon & Schuster
New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore
For everyone who has ever been forced to read Beowulf.
For my children, without whom I was able to write it.
(I have no children.)
And for my parents, Anne and Doug.
J \.
I
FIRESIDE
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
NewYork, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, and incidents either are products of the
author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by Greg Nagan
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
and colophon are registered trademarks
FIRESIDE
of Simon Schuster, Inc.
&
Designed by Diane Hobbing /Snap-Haus Graphics
Manufactured in the United States ofAmerica
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nagan, Greg.
The five-minute Iliad and other instant classics: great books for the short
attention span / Greg Nagan ; illustrated by Tony Millionaire.
p. em.
1. Parodies. 2. Canon (Literature)-Humor. 1. Title.
PN6231.P3 N34 2000
818'.5407-dc21
00-022750
ISR 0-684-86767-2
"The Five-Minute iliad" was originally broadcast on A Prairie Home Com­
on October 12, 1996, in a somewhat different form.
panioll
Author's Introduction:Why Read the Great Books? 9
The Five-Minute History of Western Civ 11
The iliad by Homer 19
The Divine Comedy: Part I, Inferno by Dante Alighieri 31
Paradise Lost by John Milton 45
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen 63
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens 77
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville 91
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 103
i f
The Picture Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde 119
Dracula by Bram Stoker 135
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka 153
Ulysses by James Joyce 165
1984 by George Orwell 169
J.
The Catcher in the Rye by D. Salinger 183
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway 199
On the Road by Jack Kerouac 211
Acknowledgments 223
! B J § 9 g l E 9 9 9 l E E 9 B l E . E g E 9 l E . E g £ 9.

I will never write such wordy trash again.
-Count Leo Tolstoy, on JIVclr and Peace

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Why R e a J the Gl!'eat Books1
"The unexamined life isn't worth living," Plato said. Scholars like
to quote that line, but they neglect to mention that the remark
was addressed to a buxom young urologist named Bubbles.
The unexamined life is pretty sweet. Let's face it: not many of
us could stand up to the scrutiny of a dozen cable and broadcast
news network reporters camped out in our front yards let
alone actualjournalists.As the ancient Sumerian proverb has it,
"I don't have a drinking problem. I drink. I get drunk. I fall
down. No problem."
Alas for the Sumerians!
(The dwindling attention span is another question worthy of
consideration. )
On the other hand, if you don't familiarize yourself with the
themes and ideas of the Great Books, you're going to lead a mis­
erable life and die.You'li probably lead a miserable life and die
anyway, but an acquaintance with the Great Books can help you
understand your misery and death in a broader context. That's
got to count for something.
Familiarity with the Great Books can also help you impress
people.
"But why should I worry about impressing anyone?" you
ask. (If it wasn't you, it was someone who looked like you.) I'll
tell you: it is my hypothesis that we have all been put on this
wretched rock expressly to impress one another.
Maybe your boss would be more inclined to raise your salary
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if he or she thought you were conversant with Renaissance
literature. Maybe your teacher would give you higher grades if
you peppered your papers with allusions to Homeric mythol­
ogy. Maybe you have to give a speech, and want to make sure.
your audience knows you're smarter than they are. Maybe
you're running for public office in the greater Boston area. Or
maybe you're just one of the millions of adults trying to get into
an English major's pants.
Whatever the reason, sooner or later you're going to have to
impress someone, and I have therefore unselfisWy prepared this
book for your edification.
Exculpatory Remarks (Excuses)
The overwhelming majority of the texts included in this book
were written by white European males, almost all of whom are
dead. This is not my fault. I did not kill any of the authors
(which is not to say I wouldn't have, had the opportunity pre­
sented itself), and I did not decide what books ought to survive
the forced march of history. I therefore smugly absolve myself of
all responsibility for the unequal distribution of genders, cul­
tures, geographies, sexual preferences, and hat sizes represented
herein. The books I chose are all indisputable Western classics.
Harold Bloom says so.
Also, because I couldn't include all the classics, I had to omit
some. That's just how it is. Like everything else, this is not my
fault. I will only observe that I have deliberately omitted the
great humorists, such as Cervantes, Fielding,Voltaire, Swift, and
Twain, because humor is vulgar and has no place in literature.
Lastly, I have tried to maintain the strictest possible academic
standards for this book, in the hopes that it might be mistaken
for a scholarly work. I have therefore included several footnotes.
Unfortunately, I didn't have time to consult any authoritative
texts, so at the time this book went to press the sources cited did
not yet exist. It is my sincere hope that by the time this book
appears in stores, they will.
10 • Greg Nagan
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