Free Why Read? by Mark Edmundson Page B

self-absorbed. Where
are the others? What is Wordsworth to give to the poor? What is Wordsworth's role in the larger human hope for liberation
or freedom from want? These are valuable questions. And if the answers—and there are answers—do not satisfy the individual
reader, then he will legitimately look for another place to put his allegiances, another circle to expand into. Or perhaps
he will stay with some enhanced confidence in his own.
    But asking critical questions should not devolve into a mere parlor game. That is, we should not teach our students that the
aim of every reading is to bring up the questions that might debunk the wisdom at hand, then leave it at that. We must ask
the question of belief. Is this poem true? Can you use this poem? Or are you living in a way that's better than the poem suggests you might live? To these queries, we should
expect only heartfelt answers.
    By refusing to ask such questions once we have coaxed the work's vision forward, we are leaving our students where we found
them. And if we leave them in the grasp of current social dogma, we are probably leaving them in the world of the normal nihilist;
we are leaving them to the ideology of the consumer university, center of training and entertaining, in its worst manifestations.
We may turn "Tintern Abbey" into a species of diversion, or we may turn it into an occasion for acquiring analytical techniques,
but in doing so we are mistaken. For there is a deep force in the poem that we can put to saving uses in the present.
    We ask often what we think of great works. What, we might also ask, would the creators of those works think of us? What would
the Wordsworth of "Tintern Abbey," replete with drawbacks though that poem may seem to some, think of our posturing analytics?
    But, one might say, all I have produced here is a reading, itself a translation of Wordsworth, no different from the application
of, say, Foucault's terms to Wordsworth's poem. Isn't that right?
    I don't think so.
    Granted, my account of Wordsworth would not match the poet's own, word for word. Granted, there are points at which, brought
to life to listen, the poet might part company with the description at hand (or with the more expansive account of the work
that I would offer in a classroom). But I have tried to be true to the poem. I have attempted, acting something like its advocate
before the court of readers' opinion, to make the best possible case for its application to life. And as a teacher I have
done so, in fact I must do so, as though I believed in the poet's every word.
    The fact is that I do not. I may want, in time, to register my quarrels with this vision of experience, and I may want to
offer the criticisms of others. But before those criticisms arrive, the poem needs to have its moment of maximum advocacy;
it requires, and by its power it has earned, a display of full faith. And the testament to that faith takes place in a language
integrally related to the language of Wordsworth. The teacher speaks of nature and childhood and memory. And that is a much
different thing from speaking of discipline and norms and discourses, as Foucault might do in the face of this work. There
is a difference between evocative description and what Eagleton and Macherey call rewriting. Both reimagine the work. Both
bring the past into the present. But the difference in approach is so great as to constitute not a difference in degree, but
a difference in kind. One is re-presentation, one translation.
    The activity I have in mind is in some regards anticipated by Nietzsche's precursor in philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. "What
is life?" That, to Schopenhauer, is the question at the core of all consequential art works. Schopenhauer believes that "every
genuine and successful work of art answers this question in its own way with perfect correctness." The reader's task is to
bring the works' wisdom to the fore: "The works of the poets, sculptors, and representative artists in