Seems the French regard the good ol’ shiny wrapper round a paperback as a bit daring, to judge from a piece in Le Figaro. Can this one really be an example of what worries them? (It’s the 2009 winner, Trois femmes puissantes by Marie Ndiaye.)

Are they “behind” us with other forms of in-yer-face promotion?

(Click on the pic.)

Which reminded me of Auden’s ‘Under Which Lyre’, a rhyming address to Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard 1946.

Encamped upon the college plain
Raw veterans already train
As freshman forces;
Instructors with sarcastic tongue
Shepherd the battle-weary young
Through basic courses.

Among bewildering appliances
For mastering the arts and sciences
They stroll or run,
And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter
Are shot to pieces by the shorter
Poems of Donne.

If you stick around and pay attention, what you’re disposed to say will eventually get said better by someone else.  (Accepting this is another of the pleasures of aging.)  This is Leon Wieseltier, talking about how Marxism once appealed to him.

The intellectual sophistication of the tradition seemed incontrovertible; and I was not yet familiar with the stylistic cunning of apologetics and polemics, modern or medieval, which can spin into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations. I was a liberal, but an infirm one–infirm liberalism being the liberalism that fails to engage its enemies on the left as ferociously as its enemies on the right. It is hard for a young man to walk away from the satisfactions of radicalism, in the way that it is hard for a young man, say, to understand Middlemarch. So I read widely in the Marxist tradition, despite my belief in the inadequacy of a materialist view of life and the absurdity of the idea that justice may be established by means of a dictatorship. I half-wanted to fall under its spell, to find a small place in its saga.

That captures exactly a few years in which I tried to understand Brecht and the Brecht-cult in theatre studies.  The more I read of Brecht, the more I came to hate the man and to understand that, like any commissar, he would say or do anything, licensed by the belief that what was good for Brecht was good for the down-trodden. ( My views of the work are more nuanced, but don’t belong here.)

The lure of a ‘humane’ Marxism operated strongly on my generation, anti-capitalist, anti-liberal as we were – and ignorant of both. When I eventually came across Leszek Kolakowski, the great critic of Marxism, whose recent death is the occasion of Wieseltier’s piece, I had already come to my senses. I wonder if Kolakowski is read by those in our English Departments – both in schools and universities – who peddle ‘Marxist’ approaches to literature? Or are they too busy spinning ‘into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations’?

In the current New Republic, there’s a thorough and interesting review (by John Banville) of the first volume of Beckett’s letters. It runs to 752 pages, costs US$50 and there are to be three more volumes. Beckett stipulated that, of the 15,000 letters he wrote, only those should be printed which related to his work. An impossible brief. It looks like a very long wait for the complete correspondence, an expensive investment in the meantime, and to hell with the general reader.

The review quotes a passage which will no doubt go straight into the Beckett primers.

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

As Banville says, this is the kind of pronouncement that has enthralled critics of modernism and it’s gravy for the deconstructionists.

? yet reading again this famous manifesto from the party of the Nothing, one is driven to ask, however timidly, the simple question: why? Why are grammar and style irrelevant, and what is it they are irrelevant to? Why is language “best used where it is most efficiently abused”? Why should we contribute to the disrepute of language as the next best thing to dismissing it altogether?

One day, I hope, someone will be able to trace the full variety of motives for the twentieth century’s attacks on the organised and ordered word and the various goals of the attackers.

Oh, Banville gave me an idea for the next Wordability competition. Sharpen your keyboards.

Leighton, 'Study'

For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read.

“At a time of immense cultural pessimism, the NEA is pleased to announce some important good news. Literary reading has risen in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter century,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. “This dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working. Cultural decline is not inevitable.”

Maybe not. But any statistician will tell you to wait for the next survey, and maybe the one after that: it may be a dead cat bounce. Still, it’s way better than more decline. Pity about poetry and drama – still sinking.

The full report can be downloaded here, and in the same place you can find a six page summary of the Reading at Risk report which started the heartburn.

Elsewhere in the university, it’s notorious that the bones of Marx and Freud, are kept over in the English Department. (It won’t be long before the remains of Foucault and Derrida join them.) What for some of us is still astonishing, even after all these years, is the situation summarised by Professor Mark Edmundson in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip, as so often, to Arts and Letters Daily.)

? the student who has heard the teacher unfold a Marxist reading of a work probably doesn’t get to study Marx per se. He never gets to have a potential moment of revelation reading The Manifesto or The Grundrisse. Marx too disappears from the scene, becoming part of a technological apparatus for processing other works. No one asks: “Is what Marx is saying true?” “Is Foucault onto something?” “Is what Derrida believes actually the case?”

Overstatement, maybe, but close. There’s a good reason, of course. To discuss at university level whether what Marx says is true involves actually reading Marx and his principal commentators. No time for that, so the student accepts the lecturer’s summary – as often as not itself based on secondary sources – and then they all set to work ‘applying’ the ideas, as Edmundson says, like paint.

Its intellectual squalor is not the worse aspect of such a practice. As Edmundson says, it removes from students the possibility of discovering the text for themselves and making their own kind of sense of it. Such responses to the text are said to be ‘insufficiently theorised’. Now there’s language as magic.