Novelist David Gates talks about his overeducated, self-tormenting characters, the genius of Dickens and the seductive pursuit of perfect taste. At this point, we'll believe anything, but a trashy new bestseller still strains credibility.
European scholars can only guess.
The ideologies he spawned may have tumbled along with the watchtowers and barbed-wire walls that accompanied them, but something about the Old Man proves irresistible to the sensitively academic and to the affluently dissatisfied. In an age of corporate tyranny, his extravagant Old Testament beard, gimlet eyes and air of apocalyptic indignation seem to satisfy a desperate nostalgia for moral fire. Like most academics who march under his flag, Marx never set foot in a real factory or mine, but this lack of relevant experience only seems to make his condemnations of industrial alienation all the more appealing and lyrically impervious to criticism. In a strange way, with his neuroses and his journalistic violence, he is psychologically tailor-made for us. Two new books appearing this fall, one American, one European, ask us to reconsider the credibility of Marxism in the modern university.