Anyone who has read Sartre's Nausea will recall the character in that novel known as the Self-Taught Man, who has dedicated his life to reading all the volumes in the Rouen public library in alphabetical order. For Sartre he is of course the butt of the academic philosopher's humorous contempt for autodidacts, yet ends up seeming quite an endearing figure. There is a little of the Self-Taught Man in all of us. Leopold Bloom would have recognised him, and hailed his self-improving zeal.
The STM would surely be beside himself at the prospect of the Routledge Classics series, which, according to the publisher, "contains the very best of Routledge publishing over the past century or so, books that have, by popular consent, become established as classics in their field". The first 30 volumes in the series have now appeared, and, somewhat dauntingly, a further tranche is promised in October. These are handsome, sturdy paperbacks, perfect-bound, sadly, but well printed, and handle very nicely. They are very good value indeed, ranging from £6.99 sterling up to a top price of £9.99 sterling (Euro prices are not quoted), and although it is unlikely that many people, self-teachers or otherwise, will buy the entire series - it will set you back, or forward, £235 sterling - the 30 volumes do form a handsome rank on the bookshelves.
Routledge, in its present manifestation - "an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group" - and Routledge Kegan Paul as was, published many of the key texts of the 20th century, and the house now has a treasure-trove of titles in its backlist. Here we find major works by Einstein, by Freud and Jung - two volumes each - by Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida,
Max Weber, by Wittgenstein and by Mauss, by Malinowski . . . the list is not endless, but it is awesome.
Near to the top of the pile, for this self-taught man, is Mary Midgley's Wickedness, her classic study of the nature and causes of evil, first published in 1984, and now reissued with a new preface. Although she retired as long ago as 1980, as Senior Lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle, and is now in her 80s, Midgley is one of the most acute and penetrating voices in current moral philosophy. Her great gift is clarity, both of thought and, especially, of expression. Depressingly many philosophers belong to what Jerry Fodor has recently identified as the "copulating-snakes school of composition", whose sentences writhe and slither and frequently end up suffocating themselves. Mary Midgley writes with point and conciseness, in a tone that is always sensible but never in the least headmistressy. To follow her reasoning through these beautifully crafted pages is like watching a ballet dancer walking in the street: there is a litheness, a gracefulness, an ease of articulation, which attest to years of learning lightly worn.
One turns from Midgley to Freud with a faintly quailing heart. Dubbed variously as "Viennese quack" (Nabokov), "secret artist" (Lesley Chamberlain), and "saturnine self-dramatizer" (Frederick Crews), Freud is at once covert and recklessly arrogant. Always looking anxiously over his shoulder at those who would deny his claim to be a scientist, he wrote with leaden circumspection, dressing up hair-raising theories in the respectable fustian of petit-bourgeois language. For those who have not read him - and he should be read, despite his flaws - his short study, Leonardo da Vinci: A Memoir of His Childhood, is as a good a place as any to start. Even if you find his psychological characterisation of this great artist wholly unconvincing, and possibly merely impudent - he finds the painter to be a repressed homosexual and "makes fate depend on his illegitimate birth and on the barrenness of his first stepmother" - this is still a remarkable exercise in artistic detective work and a genuine celebration of the human being's capacity to endure and survive the deepest spiritual wounds.
Two of Freud's direct, if rebellious, heirs, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, are represented here. Lacan's ╔crit: A Selection contains as much and possibly more than any layman will want to read of this obstreperous psychoanalyst who became a cult figure for French intellectuals in the middle and later years of the 20th century. As is inevitable with totem poles, the woodworms of doubt have made holes in his theories, but his concept of the mirror-image as formative of the notion of the ego surely remains a key insight.
Foucault's Madness and Civilization is an essential text, shedding light as it does into the Piranesian darkness of our attitudes to power, insanity and confinement. Since his death from AIDS in 1984, Foucault has become a highly controversial, and sometimes reviled, figure, but his originality is beyond doubt.
A thinker and critic from an earlier generation, Theodor Adorno, brought petulance to the level of high philosophy. His Marxist commentaries on modern culture - or "culture" - are masterpieces of sustained invective. He is best-known for works such as Negative Dialectics and The Jargon of Authenticity, but the volume that Routledge has chosen to include in the series is The Culture Industry, a coruscating series of essays examining mass culture, identifying the cynically exploitative role of big business in the marketing of popular artistic products, and attacking the pernicious cultural influence of what has come to be known as "the media", by now a singular noun. The opening essay, 'On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening' - "The liquidation of the individual is the real signature of the new musical situation" - is worthy of Nietzsche at his most virulent in his late onslaughts on Richard Wagner.
There are less-well-known works in the series, and we must be grateful to Routledge for putting them back into general circulation. Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good - who else but Murdoch would have risked such a title? - is an endearing curiosity, while McLuhan's Understanding Media is still provocative, even if it is past its sell-by date. Georges Lefebvre's The French Revolution is probably the greatest study ever written of the earthquake of 1789 and its aftermath - though why Routledge should have chosen to use a cupcake to illustrate the cover is a mystery, unless it is a reference to the old canard about Marie-Antoinette's recommendation to the breadless people to eat cake.
It is good also to revisit Eric Patridge's highly enlightening, and even more highly entertaining, Shakespeare's Bawdy, a direct overturning of the Rev Thomas Bowdler's dredging of the Swan of Avon's murkier reaches. Open Partridge at random for delight and questionable edification. You will learn, for instance, the real meaning of such terms as "lag end, little finger, loins, nose, Pillicock, R, Roger, tale, thing", or marvel at the "very odd fact" that of the nine terms that in Shakespeare which can be taken to refer to masturbation, "only one . . . alludes to a man so caressing a woman's genitalia that she is likely to experience an orgasm, whereas seven refer to a woman so caressing a man that, whether deliberately or unintentionally, she will probably cause him to have a sexual spasm and 'make love's quick pants'." As Stephen Dedalus observed, if Will hath a will, then Anne hath a way.
It has been possible here only to give a sampling of the wealth of this series - we have only got to "P", after all - a venture for which Routledge is to be congratulated. Just when it seemed that the great days of publishing were over, along comes this batch of masterpieces to disprove one's gloomiest presentiments. Rejoice, STMs everywhere.
Here is the complete list; prices are in sterling: ╔crits, Jaques Lacan, £9.99; Leonardo da Vinci, Sigmund Freud, £6.99; Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl Gustave Jung, £7.99; On the Nature of the Psyche, Carl Gustave Jung, £7.99; The Psychology of Intelligence, Jean Piaget, £9.99; Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud, £7.99; Principles of Literary Criticism, I. A. Richards, £9.99; Shakespeare's Bawdy, Eric Partridge, £7.99; The Pursuit of Signs, Jonathan Culler, £9.99; The Wheel of Fire, G. Wilson Knight, £9.99; What is Literature?, Jean Paul Sartre, £7.99; Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault, £7.99; The Fear of Freedom, Erich Fromm, £9.99; The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch, £6.99; Wickedness, Mary Midgley, £7.99; Writing and Difference, Jacques Derrida, £9.99; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, £7.99; Sex and Repression in Savage Society, Bronislaw Malinowski, £9.99; Oppression and Liberty, Simone Weil, £7.99; The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, Frances Yates, £9.99; A General Theory of Magic, Marcel Mauss, £7.99; Medicine, Magic and Religion, W.H.R. Rivers, £7.99; Myth and Meaning, Claude LΘvi-Strauss, £6.99; The Course of German History, A.J.P. Taylor, £7.99; The French Revolution, Georges Lefebvre, £.99; The Culture Industry, Theodor Adorno, £9.99; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber, £9.99; The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek, £9.99; Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan, £9.99; Relativity, Albert Einstein, £7.99.
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times