Clinging to an illusion
Rodden, John
have been involved in the writing of the text, and with no passion or life of its own. I recently overheard one of my colleagues complaining about having to teach Renaissance poetry to under-...
...Even more, as an English Ph.D., a scholar of George Orwell's work, and a teacher of courses in the history of utopi- anism, I felt also thefrisson of uneasy recognition: Here was a man of precisely my own age (thirty-four), a student of his nation's literature, a onetime idealist who had spent his entire life desperately clinging to utopian illusions...
...Now, no university in Germany will have me...
...Thinking about him I think about what Olaf Stapledon said about H.G...
...Every graduate student in English knows that, to pass the Ph.D...
...He had spent the past ten years at the school, East Germany's second- ranked after the Humboldt University of East Berlin...
...With people like that," she said, "you even have to stoop to enthusiasm...
...You--you've spent your whole life competing...
...It is a betrayal: of the literature and of the human and of the idea that all this stuff matters...
...My career track was clear--dozent, then professor, then ordinarius...
...He had no idea of his future...
...But for me, O'Malley came first...
...I've been blessed enough to work with three great teachers: Frank O'Malley, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloom...
...Does the future of literature really belong to today's careerist technocrats...
...And if you want to call that just first- crush nostalgia, okay, Jack, think about your first crush: did it ever end...
...But what they all had in common was their fierce conviction that we read books to save our lives, to serve the Lord (never mind who he/she is), and to make the lives of our friends and lovers better...
...In time, if I were reasonably productive, it would have all been there...
...That's the only way to escape everyone forever asking me what I did in the party and why I did it...
...Probably I'll have to emigrate...
...it asked that the university return to the hallowed name by which it had been known for more than half a millennium, before the Communists changed it in 1952: the University of Leipzig...
...CLINGING TO AN ILLUSION JOHN RODDEN AN APPARATCHIK REMEMBERS hat was it like, under the Honecker regime in East Germany, to be a junior faculty member at a state university, and a longtime SED (Communist party) supporter...
...Not as long as the memory of O'Malley and Frye, and the presence of Bloom, persist: one hopes...
...On a cold, drizzling afternoon last winter, Jurgen Roth, a wis-senschafilicher assistent [lecturer], sat in a dingy cafe in Leipzig, a few streets from the Karl Marx Universit~it, telling me in his soft German about his life as a party activist and organizer at the university...
...And what I can tell you is that not at Yale, not at the Smithsonian, in Paris, or Berlin, or at the Library of Congress have I had a clearer glimpse of what it might feel like to live in and for a community of ideas and mutual enthusiasm...
...I recently overheard one of my colleagues complaining about having to teach Renaissance poetry to under- graduates...
...I felt as ifI were present at a private reading of our generation's The God that Failed, that powerful collection of memoirs of several leading ex-Communist intellectuals of the 1930s and '40s...
...Yet I now realize that it was I, more than he, who invested our three hours together with such dramatic significance...
...Who was he now ? Even as we talked, the senior faculty in Jurgen's department were drafting a motion dealing with their collective identity, as if overwhelmed by the same deafening question...
...And then Frank, Frye, and Bloom also had their passion for Blake in common: Blake who, at the beginning of the truly modern era, saw that the chances for the future would be either absolute spiritual freedom or absolute imaginative slavery, and who tried so hard to break the chains that freeze our bones and tell us how to do it...
...Once drafted, the motion passed unanimously...
...We haven't...
...He expected to be let go in six months...
...Wells: One does not record one's debt to the air one breathes...
...More than anything, it was his understated, almost deliberately self-deflationary delivery that made Jurgen's words so powerful...
...exam, you don't have to read many of the texts themselves, or really care very much about them: all you have to do is know the jargon of the current gnosticism, and repeat it...
...Jesus...
...It is part of the reason America is becoming the kind of soulless and mercenary shopping-mall that George Bush thinks is just swell...
...I had a place secured, a paved road before me," came the answer, as if from a great distance...
...After all, he had been living for more than a year in the aftermath of the 27 September 1991:547...
...Mind you, I couldn't begin to imagine how those guys would get along together, although I often try...
...And of them all, maybe O'Malley looms the largest: the least-famous, the least-published, the most self-effacing...
...Nervously he flicked the ashes of cigarette after cigarette, his palms wet JOHN RODDEN is a member of the department of rhetoric and com- munication studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville...
...and his wiry frame hunched over our little table...
Vol. 118 • September 1991 • No. 16
