It is with sadness that we note the passing of our friend
Roger Shattuck, teacher, poet, essayist, and literary observer par
excellence. Roger was the sort of man-of-letters one reads
about but scarcely encounters any more: literary to his
fingertips, but graced with manly common-sense and
instinctive independence of mind: a gentleman in the highest
sense of that retired epithet. Roger was never part of any
school or clique or movement. He regarded fads like
deconstruction with amused distaste: something to hold one’s
nose about while disposing of it quickly and with as little
comment as possible. His most famous book, in some ways his
best, was also his first: The Banquet Years: The Origins of
the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (1958), a
quirky, seductive, utterly original romp through the work of
Henri Rousseau, Alfred Jarry, Erik Satie, and
Guillaume Apollinaire. Roger made connections—made
sense—out of themes and continuities that no one had sensed
before but that now seem obvious. Roger’s mind was
omnivorous, as at home in anthropology and moral philosophy
as it was in literature. He wrote on Proust; on
“the Wild Boy of Aveyron,” the feral child discovered in
France in the nineteenth century; and all manner of literary
controversy and incident.

One of Roger’s most thoughtful and ambitious (and by accident most
contentious) books
was Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
(1996), which began with the arresting question:
“Are there things we should not know?”
Today, shallow intellectuals bandy about words like “subversive” and
“transgressive” as terms of endearment. But the age-old uneasiness
about the subversive potentialities of unfettered knowledge reveal a
recognition that knowledge can bring unhappiness and ruin as well as
insight and liberation. This thought is embedded in countless myths
and stories, many of which Roger anatomizes in the course of
his book.

Since the Enlightenment, it has been increasingly difficult for us in
the West to give much credence to or even properly to understand the
kind of moral-religious criticism that Augustine (for example) mounts
against unfettered curiosity. We are increasingly secular creatures
who rankle at the very prospect of there being “limits” to knowledge,
let alone ones prescribed by any human agency. It is one of Mr.
Shattuck’s most impressive achievements to have been able to bring
readers back behind this Enlightenment assumption and reanimate the
kinds of questions posed by Augustine and the many authors he discusses,
from Homer and Aeschylus to Milton, Melville, Montaigne, and Molière.
In the “applications” part of his book, Roger
concentrates on three
cases studies: the decision to build and use the atomic bomb in
World War II; the human genome project and the prospect of
genetic engineering; and the question of whether certain
extreme forms of pornography (the Marquis de Sade furnishes
his chief text) ought to be controlled.
Where do
we find the authority to say the limit should be just here? Or here?
Or here?
There are no
simple answers to the urgent quandaries that Mr. Shattuck illuminates
in this impressive study. We must be grateful to him for bringing the
questions to life once more. As the eighteenth-century aphorist G. C.
Lichtenberg once observed, “Today we are trying to spread knowledge
everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be
universities for re-establishing our former ignorance?”