Mark Edmundson has
another long essay out (“When I Was Young at Yale”) – describing his
experiences as a rebellious graduate student at Yale’s famed English
department. It’s again beautifully written, and provides a most sublime
“reading experience.” I sometimes tell students that such texts give me a real
high – and most laugh, but it’s true. Which does not mean I necessarily accept
Edmundson’s assessment on all issues. Most probably, the lofty ideals explored
in “the best that has been thought and said” in literature and the humanities were not set free of any moral restraint by the jibes a few “deconstructionists”
pseudo-debunkers. In fact, 16.5 years ago Edmundson himself seemed to acknowledge
as much.
In another striking essay
typed back then (“The Uses of Liberal Education: 1. As Lite Entertainment for
Bored College Students”), Edmundson bemoaned the extent to which most of his
students lacked the desire or ability to relate to Freud and the tragic – and a
sparkle in their eyes. I assume most had not been spoiled by reading Derrida or
de Man. Many had perhaps never taken an English class taught by one of
Edmundson’s colleagues who could no longer take ideals seriously. And yet…
Reading Edmundson’s
latest, I was reminded of an old essay by Ortega y Gasset (of which I may have
written previously). In it, he described how the young intelligentsia over a
century ago started quite suddenly to lose their taste for narrative plots,
rhymed verse, tonal music, representative art, etc. And of course, Prof.
Edmundson must be familiar with all the theories postulating a creeping
“disenchantment of the world,” desacralization, anomie, ennui, estrangement,
alienation, “homelessness” of the human mind, you name it. Many of these
diagnoses go back to the 19th century, and had been preceded by the
less conceptual, more artistic lament of some Romantics. Apparently, Nitzsche
was not the only one who once noticed that the “de-vinization” of the human
universe was already beyond the point of no return.
I wish reading the
“great books” could still turn back the Zeitgeist. And this is probably
something all the great dystopian books got wrong – in the totalitarian state
of the future, books will not need to
be banned or censored. Why bother, if they have already lost so much of the evocative,
quasi-transcendental and life-enlarging powers Edmundson treasures so much in
his favorite texts? Especially when “read” on a tablet – or whatever clever
gadget the next Steve Jobs may bestow on the masses…
