American Musicology and “The Archives of Eden”

Abstract

In his T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures delivered at the University of Kent in March, 1971, and subsequently published as In Bluebeard's Castle or Some Notes Towards A Re-definition of Culture, George Steiner apostrophized the condition of American culture in the following way:

America is the representative and premonitory example [of the democratization of high culture]. Nowhere has the debilitation of genuine literacy gone further (consider the recent surveys of reading-comprehension and recognition in American high schools). But nowhere, also, have the conservation and learned scrutiny of the art or literature of the past been pursued with more generous authority. American libraries, universities, archives, museums, centres for advanced study, are now the indispensable record and treasure-house of civilization. It is here that the European artist and scholar must come to see the cherished after-glow of his culture. Though often obsessed with the future, the United States is now, certainly in regard to the humanities, the active watchman of the classic past.

So far, so good. But Steiner's encomium (notwithstanding that second sentence) carried with it a conditional scrutiny which was less attractive in its implications.