ABSTRACT
In Picture This, his first major novel since Catch-22, Joseph Heller combines the story of Rembrandt’s famous painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer with the story of Aristotle, imagined as a man sitting without complacency for his portrait, contemplating meanwhile his own intellectual debts to Socrates and Plato.1 The novel’s topics are art and its production, from seventeenth-century Holland to today, and philosophy (especially political philosophy) and its production, from fourth-century Greece to twentieth-century America. Heller sees connections between the political history of the United States in the early 1960s, the sale of the Rembrandt for $2,300,000 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in November 1961, and the immense publicity for the museum’s acquisition, which resulted in a wave of popular enthusiasm for Greek philosophy. “Paperback editions of works by Aristotle appeared on bestseller lists, and publishers, underestimating demand, ran out of stock” (304). Picture This is packed with Heller’s rewritings or dramatizations of Greek political history, and sardonic accounts of American political history; for example:
The auction [of the Rembrandt] was held that autumn between the Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile crisis that brought the former allies Russia and the U.S. to the brink of war again. In less than three years, U.S. troops would be sent to Vietnam to protect American interests in an area that had none except these U.S. troops. (300)
It is not my purpose here to explore these sallies per se, although the antimilitarism of Picture This, like Catch-22 itself, has acquired
a new topicality subsequent to publication. Instead, I wish to bring out the practical and theoretical value of the account of Plato that Heller produces for an audience and a context I imagine he did not envisage, for an academic audience embroiled in a “Great Books” debate and pondering its implications for intellectual freedom. In his flamboyant melange of ancient and modern cultures, his alignment of political philosophy, “real” politics, and the representational arts, and in particular in his reading of the Laws, the last and most unpopular of Plato’s dialogues, for a popular audience, Heller provides an eccentric and therefore sharp focus on problems that have been obscured by disciplinary boundaries and institutional protocols. Specifically, the Laws is, among classical and canonical texts, a proposal for a society in which censorship is ubiquitous; and Picture This is only the most recent and most candid of a series of interpretations of and commentaries upon the Laws in our century, readings which, while normally made in an academic context and assuming scholarly objectivity, in fact appropriate Plato’s dialogue, affirmatively or negatively, for an argument about what sort of society we ought to endorse. It matters, then, whether we continue to read this dialogue, and what we read about it. As Heller’s novel creates a personality for Aristotle, the story I will tell involves biographical and autobiographical fictions of various kinds that have leached into a kind of discourse supposedly impervious to them; it leads eventually to Leo Strauss and his pupils, whose approaches to reading Plato have political motivations as strong as Heller’s, though not so explicit; and eventually the Laws themselves will connect these modern perspectives, and the cautions I derive from them, to the early modern writers with which this study is primarily concerned.
