A footnote on the decline of the West

I like Penguin Classics because they're available as affordable paperbacks, with footnotes that explain things I'm too ignorant to understand, like what an "embrasure" is. They also include introductions that are frequently detestable, unreadable, or both-literary criticism these days being primarily the province of small-minded scholars. Take a razor to its introduction, however, and your typical Penguin Classic is a bargain.

I treasure such small efforts at cultural preservation. Most Americans prefer Danielle Steele to Fyodor Dostoevsky, but sales of the former help keep the latter in print. I view it as a hedge strategy of sorts-using ignorance to subsidize cultivation in a roundabout way.

It struck me recently, however, that the editors at Penguin assume-most likely with good reason-that their readers have virtually no biblical knowledge. Thus when the Count says, in Bram Stoker's Dracula, "But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one," the editor dutifully provides a footnote to explain that this alludes to the book of Exodus. Ditto for a reference to "men like trees walking" (Mark 8:24), and to Methuselah.

Meanwhile, in the Penguin Classic edition of Jane Eyre, when Jane says of her aunt, "But I ought to forgive you, for you knew not what you did," the editor is ready with a footnote, lest the reader miss that Jesus likewise forgave his persecutors. Similarly are half a dozen references to the Sermon on the Mount faithfully footnoted, so the reader will catch their import.

It's a peculiar enterprise, trying to shore up Western civilization in the absence of Christ. This seems a bit like trying to build an ice cream sundae with only nuts and whipped cream. But to their credit, the good people at Penguin forge ahead, printing the books that many of us ought to have read but haven't, and explaining in dribs and drabs who Jesus happens to be. If you don't understand Christian dogma, as it turns out, then you won't really understand Dracula or Jane Eyre, which perhaps explains the illegible introductions prepended to each of their Penguin Classic editions.

Come to think of it, maybe this will prove to be a postmodern form of evangelism. We can't get most intellectuals within spitting distance of a church any more, but maybe we can reach them through footnotes. It's better than the alternative, I suppose, which is continuing to pretend that Western civilization can stagger much further bled of the faith that once infused it.