Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community

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Postwar Academic Fiction Satire, Ethics, Community

Kenneth Womack

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Postwar Academic Fiction

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

Also by Kenneth Womack BRITISH BOOK-COLLECTORS AND BIBLIOGRAPHERS (3 volumes, co-edited with William Baker)

RECENT WORK IN CRITICAL THEORY, 1989-1995 (compiled with William Baker) TWENTIETH-CENTURY BIBLIOGRAPHY AND TEXTUAL CRITICISM (compiled with William Baker)



FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL (co-edited with William Baker)


Kenneth Womack

Assistant Professor of English, Penn State Altoona



Satire, Ethics, Community

© Kenneth Womack 2002

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0-333-91882-7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Womack, Kenneth. Postwar academic fction: satire, ethics, community / Kenneth Womack. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-333-91882-7

1. College stories, English-History and criticism. 2. College stories, American-History and criticism. 3. English fction-20th century-History and criticism. 4. American fction-20th century-History and criticism. 5. Satire, American-History and criticism. 6. Satire, English-History and criticism. 7. Universities and colleges in literature. 8. Community in literature. 9. Ethics in literature. I. Title. PR888.U5 W66 2001 823'.9109355-dc21 10 9 8 11 10 09

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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


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Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

viii

Introduction: Ethical Criticism and Postwar Literary Theory

1

Reading the "Heavy Industry of the Mind!: Ethical Criticism and the Anglo-American Academic Novel

19

Negotiating the University Community: Lucky Jim and the Politics of Academe

27

Scholar Adventurers in Exile: Nabokov's Dr. Kinbote and Professor Pnin

43

Searching for Goodness and the Ethical Self: Joyce Carol Oates's The Hungry Ghosts

60

The Professoriate in Love: David Lodge's Academic Trilogy and the Ethics of Romance

77

Performing the Academy: Alterity and David Mamet's Oleanna

98

Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project: Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring

109

Academic Nonfction and the Culture Warriors: "Teaching the Conficts! in Gilbert and Gubar's Masterpiece Theatre

127

10 Jane Smiley's Academic Carnival: Rooting for Ethics at Moo U.

143

11 Conclusion: Ethical Criticism and the Academic Novel beyond the Culture Wars

156

Notes

164

Bibliography

188

Index

202

9

vii



Contents

A project of this magnitude and scope only succeeds with the encouragement and guidance of an ethical community of friends and colleagues. I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Craig S. Abbott� Janice M. Arwood� Carol �ookhamer� Richard G. Caram� Ildik� de Papp Carrington� Arra M. Garab� Susan Gubar� James L. Harner� Thomas R. Lis�ka� Matthew T. Masucci� Harrison T. Meserole� Dinty W. Moore� Neal R. Norrick� William P. Williams� Michael W. Wolfe� and Katherine L. Wright. I would also like to thank Todd �. Davis� James M. Decker� and Julian Wolfreys for their assistance with my research and with the direction of this study. I am particularly grateful for the scholarly experience provided by my students in a Summer 2000 seminar at Penn State Altoona on "Reading the Academic Novel.! The fnancial assistance of Dean Jerrold H. �ar of Northern Illinois University in the form of a fellowship greatly expedited the fruition of my project� as did the various travel grants and course-load reductions afforded to me by Kjell Meling� Penn State Altoona's Associate Dean and Director of Academic Affairs� and the Altoona College Advisory �oard. I owe a special debt of thanks to William �aker� David Gorman� and John �. Knapp for their tireless enthusiasm for my work and their many generous efforts on behalf of this volume.

viii



Acknowledgments

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1

Introduction: Ethical Criticism and Postwar Literary Theory

"Every decoding is another encoding . . ." - David Lodge, Small World

How do academic fctions create meaning and value through their satirical narratives in a critical era that bemoans the cultural rel evance of poststructuralist hermeneutics and proclaims the death of literature in a postmodern world? As scholars engage in debate over the social and pedagogical value of critical projects such as deconstruction to contemporary institutions of higher learning, aca demic novels enjoy frequent publication during the latter half of this century, an era marked by the increasing accessibility of postsecondary education. Academic novels often satirize and problematize the contradictions and sociological nuances of cam pus life, yet critics of academic fction - despite the remarkable growth and evolution of the AngloAmerican academic novel as a literary genre since the 1950s - neglect to address the satiric ethos that undergirds the genre's thematic landscape. The scathing repre sentation of professors and institutions alike in these fctions as fgures of deceit, duplicity, and falsehood, moreover, remains unexamined in the scholarly monographs devoted to the study of the academic novel. The brand of satire endemic to the genre of academic fction - a "pejorative poetics" that I will trace through analyses of specifc works in subsequent chapters of this study - fnds its genesis in the disillusionment that marks the professional lives of academics in the twentieth century. Like their forebears in the academic fctions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who languished 1



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Pos�aar A�adem�� F��o�

under the specter of "Oxbridge," modern academic characters suffer from the whimsy of global economic slumps and university budget cuts, the fashionable nature of structuralist and poststructuralist lit erary criticism, growing social and racial divisions on college campuses, and an increasingly hostile academic job market, among a host of other issues. The enormous and expanding oe�vre of aca demic fction confronts its readers with a variety of fgures who encounter similar dilemmas - characters either satirically proffered as amoral, selfserving human forms or as larger, coldly manipula tive, and omnipresent institutional machines. By using the interpretive strategies established by the ongoing project of ethical criticism, I will reveal the manner in which the practitioners of AngloAmerican university fction utilize academic characters and institutional themes as a means for exploring, through the deliberately broad strokes of their satirical prose, the ethical and philosophical questions endemic to their genre that impinge upon such issues as culture, morality, romance, knowledge, and commitment.1 Like the characters in academic fctions who fnd personal and vocational dissatisfaction within the prevailing power structures of modern institutions of higher learning, many literary critics during this same era searched for interpretive methodologies that could provide them with culturally relevant modes of interpretation. The recent incarnation of ethical criticism functions both as a response to the nihilism of poststructuralist theoretical concerns such as deconstruction and postmodernism, as well as to the growing schol arly interest in the humanistic interpretation of literary works.2 By the mid1980s, deconstructionist, Marxist, and postmodernist meth odologies appeared to reach their infuential apex, prompting a critical backlash from a variety of quarters. A brief survey of literary theory's competing voices demonstrates the shape and character of the vari ous contemporary perspectives regarding ethical criticism and its (often controversial) place in the theoretical project. As David Parker remarks in E�h��s, Theory, a�d �he Novel (1994): "The irresistible expansive moment of poststructuralism in the 1970s and early 1980s has suppressed some discursive possibilities which, constituted as we partly are by various religious and humanistic traditions, we stand in abiding need of, and are poorer without. The possibilities I mean are evaluative, and especially ethical ones" (3-4). With the evolution of a number of new, socially and culturally relevant modes of critical thought - including, for example, gender studies, historical criticism, and other forms of cultural criticism - poststructuralist



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schools of interpretation, deconstruction in particular, increasingly endured charges of "antihumanism" and the development of "antitheory" movements that persist in the present. The emergence of these movements, moreover, underscores the value of deriving a critical parlance that accounts for ethical issues and their consider able roles in the creation and interpretation of literary works.3 The current reevaluation of poststructuralism's theoretical hege mony fnds its origins in the initial critical responses that often accompanied the promulgation of the trend's various submovements. This is, of course, not at all unusual, for new critical paradigms inevitably blossom amidst a fury of debate. JeanFran�ois Lyotard's widely acknowledged postmodernist manifesto The Pos�moder� Co�d��o�� a Repor� o� K�oaledge (1979), for example, enjoyed its publication almost concomitantly with the appearance of Gerald Graff's L��era��re aga��s� ��self� L��erary �deas �� Moder� So��e�y (1979), a volume that problematizes "the myth of the postmodern break through" as a literary and critical movement destined to implode because of postmodernism's dependence upon its own extreme elements of skepticism, alienation, and selfparody. As an historical response to modernist conceptions of art as a panacea for the chaos of the early twentieth century, postmodernism posits that art lacks the required faculties of consolation to assuage the human condition in the postindustrial world. "Postmodernism signifes that the night mare of history, as modernist esthetic and philosophical traditions have defned history, has overtaken modernism itself," Graff writes. "If history lacks value, pattern, and rationally intelligible mean ing," he continues, "then no exertions of the shaping, ordering imagination can be anything but a refuge from truth" (32, 55). Rather than asserting its utter impossibility in the postmodern world, Graff's search for truth in literature and criticism underscores one of the principal arguments emanating from the practitioners of ethical criticism: that literature and its interpretation do offer readers the possibilities for locating truth and defning value despite the persis tence of a contemporary landscape that seems to rest upon a skeptical and chaotic social foundation.4 "Postmodern literature," Graff remarks, "poses in an especially acute fashion the critical problem raised by all experimental art: does this art represent a criticism of the distorted aspects of modern life or a mere addition to it?" (55). The criticism that postmodernist literature evokes likewise subverts the normative roles of meaning and value in literary interpretation. In his controversial volume, Aga��s� De�o�s�r��o� (1989), John



��rod��o�


M. Ellis proffers a similar argument regarding deconstruction and what he considers the textual violence that it inficts against the practice of literary criticism. Further, Ellis questions the nature of the deconstructionist argument regarding the indeterminacy of language that Jacques Derrida ascribes to Western philosophy and culture. According to Derrida, this abiding tendency toward ethnocentrism lies in the linguistic construct of logocentrism - a cultural bias that presupposes speech acts over the possibility of a determinant reality.5 Like many of deconstruction's other detrac tors, Ellis seizes upon the inability of deconstruction's proponents, including Derrida himself, to make explicit the critical project's own terminology and the manner in which it functions to create mean ing.6 As Ellis notes, "There is a strong tendency for Derrida's advocates to object that a demand for clarity begs the question at issue and violates the spirit of the deconstructive enterprise" (33). What, then, is the aim of the deconstructive project? How does it provide knowl edge and meaning for its advocates, as well as for readers? Although Derrida's expositors argue that deconstruction endeavors to undermine traditional views of philosophy and literature by exploding the logocentric myth of the determinant, communicative powers of language, Ellis suggests that deconstruction emanates instead from a remarkably conservative position. The ideas that it attempts to deconstruct, through the privileged status that they enjoy during the actual process of being deconstructed, fnd themselves imbued with a state of permanence by virtue of the process rather than being undermined in favor of a more progressive mode of thinking. "Deconstructive writings tend to go over the same ground and use the same vocabulary . . . without substantial modifcation or fresh analysis on each occasion," Ellis writes. "These are not the signs of a genuinely open, intellectually probing new movement" (89). In this way, deconstruction reveals its fundamental inability to construct any form of coherent meaning, although it does, as Ellis notes, provide for the production of a multiplicity of ambiguous possibilities for interpretation (127). While deconstruction's approach to language allows for a host of coexistent meanings to modify a particular sign - for the signifed to be the object of so many disparate signifers it cannot deliver truth and knowledge through the production of an infnite number of conficting assertions.7 Ellis argues that such a process results in "a windowless monad that cannot communicate with any other." Deconstruction, he concludes, "shuts its eyes to how inquiry actually proceeds - through the clash of differing view



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points and the consequent winnowing out of those that cannot hold up" (129). The commentaries produced by Graff and Ellis illustrate the cli mate of uncertainty and reassessment that critical theory endured during the 1980s - an era that saw the publication of a number of texts eschewing critical nihilism and arguing in favor of ethically forceful and socially relevant means of interpretation. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels's infuential 1982 essay, "Against Theory," radically underscores the foundations for this sentiment. Knapp and Michaels challenge the belief that the theoretical project truly supple ments the act of literary interpretation, and the crux of their argument rests upon the validity of the notion of critical intentionality. If critical theory indeed offers readers a valuable guide to prescient literary interpretation, they argue, then theory effectively serves its purpose. "But as soon as we recognize that there are no theoretical choices to be made" in order to achieve meaningful interpretations, they caution, "then the point of theory vanishes. Theory loses" (18). Knapp and Michaels further suggest that the "theoretical im pulse" only separates those essential properties that should remain inseparable during the practice of literary criticism: "on the onto logical side, meaning from intention, language from speech acts; on the epistemological side, knowledge from true belief," they write (29). In short, their argument against the theoretical project takes issue with the machinery of critical theory - the very mechanism that Ellis laments in Aga��s� De�o�s�r��o� because it succeeds in producing an infnite number of conficting assertions rather than the elements of meaning and value that readers ultimately seek. While scholars such as Knapp and Michaels problematize the fun damental nature of the theoretical project, critics such as Peter J. Rabinowitz, Christopher Norris, and Tobin Siebers offer texts that reassess the place of critical theory in an era absorbed with the politics of literary interpretation and the ethical value of poststructuralism to narrative study. Rabinowitz's Before Read��g� Narra��ve Co�ve��o�s a�d �he Pol��s of ��erpre�a��o� (1987) endeavors to explain the manner "in which any interpretive practice is always politically engaged." "Indeed," Rabinowitz remarks, "one of the functions of ideology and literature helps in this function - is to naturalize these power relationships" (5). Rabinowitz reveals the ways in which the act of reading inevitably impinges upon such politically and emotionally charged issues as class, race, and gender - formidable challenges to the coherent interpretation of literary works. In his discussion of



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canon formation and detective fction, Rabinowitz notes that texts by female authors, for instance, often become marginalized because of a masculine language bias that through its encoding denies access to female writers and readers. Rabinowitz argues that only the alteration of our existing evaluative procedures can provide an effective remedy for such a dilemma: "Another course of action suggests itself," he writes, "to teach ourselves to read in new ways . . . that are self conscious about how interpretation itself can be ideological, and ways that can thus help us to make the most of the rich literary heritage that has been passed down to us" (230). In Tr ��h a�d �he E�h��s of Cr��sm (1994), Norris examines the ways in which literary theory must redefne itself in a contemporary hermeneutic circle concerned with epistemological rigor and cultural critique. Norris - himself an admitted apologist for deconstruction during the 1980s - argues that literary theorists can implement a series of correctives that may yet infuse the theoretical project with muchneeded doses of pragmatism and social relevance.8 Norris char acterizes this paradigmatic shift as "the retreat from high theory," as an era in which "a great deal depends on where one happens to be in terms of the wider sociopolitical culture and the local opportunities for linking theory and practice in a meaningful way" (1, 5). By providing readers with the means to establish vital interconnections between texts and the divergent, heterogeneous community in which we live, we can empower the theoretical project with the capacity to produce socially and culturally relevant cri tiques. This way of reading, Norris writes, allows critics to look to "the prospect of a better, more enlightened alternative where the difference a��h�� each and every subject is envisaged as providing the common ground, the measure of shared humanity, whereby to transcend such differences be�aee� ethnic and national ties" (94). In this way, Norris posits an ethics of criticism that selfconsciously assesses the theoretical presuppositions undergirding the moral char acter of contemporary hermeneutics.9 In one of the more forceful ethical critiques of literary theory, The E�h��s of Cr��sm (1988), Siebers identifes the crisis that confronts modern criticism - an interpretive dilemma that "derives in part from an ethical reaction to the perceived violence of the critical act" (15). He further argues that an ethical approach to literary study requires critics to engage their subjects selfconsciously with sustained attention to the potential consequences of their interpre tive choices: "The ethics of criticism involves critics in the process



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of making decisions and of studying how these choices affect the lives of fellow critics, writers, students, and readers as well as our ways of defning literature and human nature." Siebers ascribes the aforementioned crisis in criticism to a linguistic paradox that in evitably problematizes critical practice. "Modern literature has its own cast of characters," he writes. "It speaks in a discourse largely concerned with issues of language, but behind its defnitions of language lie ideals of human character" (10). Siebers argues that acknowledging the place of ethics in critical theory affords practi tioners of the discipline with the autonomy to offer relevant conclusions about literary texts and their considerable social and ideological import. "Literary criticism cannot endure without the freedom to make judgments," Siebers notes, "and modern theory urgently needs to regain the capacity to decide" (41). The ability to render sound, moral interpretations, then, provides the foundation for an ethical criticism that fully engages the remarkably human nature of literary study. Such a reading methodology allows for the selfconscious reassessment of our evaluative procedures and their potential for the production of meaningful critiques. As Siebers concludes: "To criticize ethically brings the critic into a special feld of action: the feld of human conduct and belief concerning the human" (1). Volumes such as Wayne C. Booth's The Compa�y We Keep� a� E�h��s of F��o� (1988) and Martha C. Nussbaum's Love's K�oaledge� Essays o� Ph�losophy a�d L��era��re (1990) demonstrate the interpretive power of ethical criticism, as well as the value of its critical machinery to scholarly investigations regarding the nature of literary character, the cultural landscapes of fction, and the ethical motivations of satire - the narrative maneuver that Booth ascribes to our desire to "make and remake ourselves" (14). Critics such as Booth and Nussbaum avoid the textual violence of censorship to advocate instead a form of criticism that explores the moral sensibilities that inform works of art. In Love's K�oaledge, Nussbaum illustrates the nature of ethi cal criticism's recent emergence as a viable interpretive paradigm: "Questions about justice, about wellbeing and social distribution, about moral realism and relativism, about the nature of rationality, about the concept of the person, about the emotions and desires, about the role of luck in human life - all these and others are debated from many sides with considerable excitement and even urgency," she writes (169-70). In its desire to examine the ethical nature of these artistic works, ethical criticism seeks to create a



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meaningful bond between the life of the narrative and the life of the reader. Although ethical criticism hardly functions as a conven tional interpretive paradigm in the tradition of Marxist, Lacanian, or gender textual readings, it serves effectively nevertheless as a selfrefexive means for critics to explain the contradictory emo tions and problematic moral stances that often mask complex and fully realized literary characters. Ethical criticism provides its prac titioners, moreover, with the capacity to posit socially relevant interpretations by celebrating the Aristotelian qualities of living well and fourishing. In this way, ethical criticism evokes the particu larly "human character" of literature that Siebers extols the merits of in The E�h��s of Cr��sm. In The Reader, �he Tex�, �he Poem� �he Tra�sa��o�al Theory of �he L��erary Work (1978), Louise M. Rosenblatt supplies ethical critics with an interpretational matrix for explaining the motives of readers and their "transactions" with literary texts.10 Rosenblatt identifes two different types of reading strategies - aesthetic reading, in which the reader devotes particular attention to what occurs d�r��g the actual reading event, and nonaesthetic reading, a reading strategy in which the reader focuses attention upon the traces of knowledge and data that will remain af�er the event. Rosenblatt designates the latter strategy as a kind of "efferent" reading in which readers pri marily interest themselves in what will be derived materially from the experience (23-5).11 Efferent readers refect upon the verbal symbols in literature, "what the symbols designate, what they may be contributing to the end result that [the reader] seeks - the infor mation, the concepts, the guides to action, that will be left with [the reader] when the reading is over" (27). Booth argues that ethical criticism functions as a methodology for distinguishing the "efferent freight" that results from this reading strategy (14). Rosenblatt describes the act of reading itself - whether aesthetic or nonaesthetic - as a transaction that derives from the peculiar array of experiences that defne the reader's persona: "Each reader brings to the transaction not only a specifc past life and literary history, not only a repertory of internalized 'codes,' but also a very active present, with all its preoccupations, anxieties, questions, and aspirations," she writes (144). This recognition of the complexity of the reading transaction underscores the deep interconnections between readers and the human communities in which they live and seek personal fulfllment. Rosenblatt argues that the transaction of reading involves "laying bare the assumptions about human beings and society and the



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hierarchy of values that govern the world derived from the text" (149-50), a conclusion regarding the ethical value of art in the human community that John Gardner illuminates in his infuential volume, O� Moral F��o� (1978). He argues that literary art should offer readers the opportunity for receiving knowledge from its pages, the possibility - rather than the didactic requirement - of emerging from a reading experience with a heightened sense of communal awareness. Gardner writes: We recognize art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, openmindedly, to learn what it should teach. It clarifes, like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confrms. As a chemist's experiment tests the laws of nature and dramatically reveals the truth or falsity of scientifc hypotheses, moral art tests values and rouses trustworthy feel ings about the better and the worse in human action. (19) The role of the ethical critic, then, involves the articulation of a given text's ability to convey notions of knowledge and universal good to its readers, whether through the auspices of allegory, satire, morality plays, haiku, or any other fctive means of representation.12 In Gardner's estimation, ethical critics can only accomplish this end through the fomentation of understanding in their readership. "Knowledge may or may not lead to belief," he writes. But "under standing always does, since to believe one understands a complex situation is to form at least a tentative theory of how one ought to behave in it" (139). Thus, ethical criticism examines the ways in which literary characters respond to the divergent forces they encounter in the fctional landscapes that they occupy. Their human behaviors and actions provide the interpretive basis for moral refection and conclusion. As Gardner notes in O� Moral F��o�, however, practitioners of ethical criticism must invariably confront the specter of censor ship, a dangerous commodity rooted in the human tendency to instruct without regard for the plurality of competing value systems at work in both the theoretical realm of literary criticism and the larger world of humankind. "Didacticism," he cautions, "inevitably simplifes morality and thus misses it" (137). 13 Similarly, critics must avoid the perils of attempting to establish models of behavior and codifed moral standards of acceptability, for such practices inevitably



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lead to the textual injustice of censorship. Gardner writes: "I would not claim that even the worst bad art should be outlawed, since morality by compulsion is a fool's morality" (106). Despite his own admonitions to the contrary in O� Moral F��o� - and because of the dearth of genuine scholarly wisdom inherent in his study of moral criticism - Gardner himself nevertheless trolls dangerously close to the shores of censorship when he speaks of carrying out "art's proper work": art "destroys only evil," he argues. "If art destroys good, mistaking it for evil, then that art is false, an error; it re quires denunciation" (15). Such a proposition inevitably leads to the establishment of singular standards of good and evil in the heterogeneous, pluralistic spheres of criticism and human reality. 14 Can e�h��al critics, in good conscience, operate from superior posi tions of moral privilege and arrogant didacticism? Understanding the place of moral philosophy in the latest incar nation of ethical criticism offers a means for exploring this dilemma. Bernard Williams's E�h��s a�d �he L�m��s of Ph�losophy (1985), for instance, discusses the ways in which the tenets of moral philoso phy provide a context for us "to recreate ethical life" in the skeptical world of contemporary Western culture (vii). In addition to exam ining the Johnsonian question of how to live, Williams devotes particular attention to assessing the role of the ethical critic. "Given people who are in some general sense committed to thinking in ethical terms, how should they think?" he asks. "Are their ethical thoughts sound?" (71). The issue of a valid ethical criticism itself poses a spurious philosophical quandary, for it requires the critic to defne standards of moral correctness, or, as Williams concludes, to dispense with establishing them altogether. "An ethical theory is a theoretical account of what ethical thought and practice are," he writes, which "either implies a general test for the correctness of basic ethical beliefs and principles or else implies that there cannot be such a test" (72). Williams suggests that critics can only surmount this dilemma by interpreting a given set of events from an empathetic position, and, moreover, through their "ability to arrive at shared ethical judgments" (97). In this way, ethical critics and moral phil osophers alike can implement a form of ethical practice that allows for the refexive process of critical contemplation, a selfconscious methodology for critically articulating the pluralistic nuances of that which constitutes a shared sense of moral correctness.15 In addition to questioning the nature of our communal sense of ethical propriety, moral philosophers such as Williams attempt to



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account for the motives of those critics who dare to engage in the interpretation of human values. Such critics must assume the risks - whether or not they employ an equitable and pluralistic system of evaluation - of impinging upon the current direction of the philo sophical conversation regarding human ethics. "Critical refection should seek for as much shared understanding as it can fnd on any issue, and use any ethical material that, in the context of the refec tive discussion, makes some sense and commands some loyalty," Williams notes, although "the only serious enterprise is living, and we have to live after the refection" (117). For this reason, the prin ciples of moral philosophy charge ethical critics with the maintenance of a sense of free intellectual discourse, in addition to obliging them to render sound moral conclusions.16 "We should not try to seal determinate values into future society," he warns, for "to try to transmit free inquiry and the refective consciousness is to transmit something more than nothing, and something that demands some forms of life more rather than others" (173). Ethical criticism endeavors, as a matter of course, to communi cate the meaning of this "something" and its greater social relevance through the interpretation of literary works. In The Compa�y We Keep, Booth offers an expansive account of ethical criticism and its potential for literary study, while also attempting to allay any fears that his heuristic rests upon dogmatic foundations. Booth affords particular attention to the range of hermeneutic functions that ethical criticism performs, as well as to its unfortunate lack of clarity as an interpretive paradigm: We can no longer pretend that ethical criticism is passe. It is practiced everywhere, often surreptitiously, often guiltily, and often badly, partly because it is the most diffcult of all critical modes, but partly because we have so little serious talk about why it is important, what purposes it serves, and how it might be done well. (19) Booth notes that ethical criticism's opponents often misread the paradigm's intent as didactic in nature. Instead, Booth argues, "ethi cal criticism attempts to describe the encounters of a storyteller's ethos with that of the reader or listener. Ethical critics need not begin with the intent to evaluate, but their descriptions will always entail appraisals of the value of what is being described." In this way, Booth supports a refexive interpretational methodology, an



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ethical criticism that allows for the recognition of the interconnections between the reading experience and the life of the reader. Ethical criticism acknowledges, moreover, the powerful factors of language and ideology in its textual assessments. "There are no neutral ethical terms," Booth writes, "and a fully responsible ethical criticism will make explicit those appraisals that are implicit whenever a reader or listener reports on stories about human beings in action" (8-9). Booth defnes these instances of appraisal - these practical applications of ethical criticism - as acts of "coduction," referential moments in which critics compare their reading experiences with the conclusions of others.17 Like Siebers, who argues that "the heart of ethics is the desire for community" (202), Booth notes that the act of "judgment requires a community" of trustworthy friends and colleagues (72).18 Coduction, in Booth's schema, valorizes the refexive relationship that develops between texts and their readers, as well as the equally refexive manner in which texts postulate meaning. "The question of whether value is in the poem or in the reader is radically and permanently ambiguous, requiring two answers," Booth writes. "Of course the value is not in there, a��ally, until it is actualized, by the reader. But of course it could not be actualized if it were not there, �� po�e��al, in the poem" (89). Booth also notes ethical criticism's pluralistic imperatives and their value to the un derstanding and operation of ideological paradigms.19 In his analysis of feminist criticism, for example, Booth discusses the ways in which "the feminist challenge" derives from fundamental ethical dilem mas inherent in the construction of literary texts: "Every literary work implies either that women can enter its imaginative world as equals or that they cannot - that instead they must, in reading, decide whether or not to enter a world in which men are a privi leged center" (387). As Booth reveals, feminist criticism itself functions as type of ethical criticism, a means of literary interpretation that seeks to repair an abiding social injustice that, through its misogyny, problematizes the lives of the larger community of readers.20 In Co��ge��es of Val�e� Al�er �a��ve Perspe��ves for Cr��al Theory (1988), Barbara Herrnstein Smith offers an appraisal of an evalua tive criticism's propensity for determining meaning and value in literary study. Like Booth, Smith notes the capacity of an ethical criticism to address the concerns of ideological paradigms, although she remains skeptical that ethical criticism can function as a fully realized interpretive methodology: "Recent moves in the direction of opening the question of value and evaluation in the literary



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academy have come primarily from those who have sought to sub ject its canon to dramatic revaluation, notably feminist critics," she writes. "Although their efforts have been signifcant to that end," she continues, "they have not amounted as yet to the articulation of a welldeveloped noncanonical theory of value and evaluation" (24). Smith also argues that an evaluative criticism would respond to the interpretive gulf left in the wake of the theoretical project's intellectual preeminence during the poststructuralist era. "Beguiled by the humanist's fantasy of transcendence, endurance, and univer sality, [critical theory] has been unable to acknowledge the most fundamental character of literary value, which is its mutability and diversity," Smith remarks (28). Smith valorizes instead an evaluative criticism that "would seek, rather, to clarify the nature of literary and, more broadly, aesthetic - value in conjunction with a more general rethinking of 'value'" (28). For Smith, this production of value through literary evaluation would result in an enhanced understanding of "human culture and behavior," signifcant components themselves in Booth's ethical paradigm (28). In The E�h��s of Read��g� Ka��, de Ma�, El�o�, Trollope, James, a�d Be�aam�� (1987), J. Hillis Miller posits an "ethics of reading" that seeks to explain the refexive process that occurs between the text and the reader, in addition to offering testimony to the ethical pos sibilities of poststructuralism, particularly deconstruction.21 Miller argues that the act of reading ethically transpires when "an author turns back on himself, so to speak, turns back on a text he or she has written, rereads it" (15). For Miller, such a process allows readers - the de fa��o authors of the texts that they appraise - to offer relevant conclusions about the moral properties of literary works and the ethical sensibilities of the readers' theoretical premises, whether they be deconstructive or otherwise. In Vers�o�s of Pygmal�o� (1990), Miller proffers a similar argument regarding the "ethics of narration" and the shifting, performative aspects of reading experiences. Miller derives the title of his volume from the story of Pygmalion in Book 10 of the Me�amorphoses - a narrative in which something inanimate comes alive, just as reading ethically creates a vital, living relation ship between the text and the reader. Miller devotes special attention to the ways in which reading defes stasis, as well as to the manner in which reading ethically, moreover, evolves during successive read ings of a given text: "Reading occurs in a certain spot to a certain person in a certain historical, personal, institutional, and political situation, but it always exceeds what was predictable from those



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circumstances," he observes. "It makes something happen that is a deviation from its context, and what happens demands a new defnition each time" (22). In his paradigm for the ethics of read ing, Miller allows for the negative possibilities of reading, aspects that Booth, in his effort to celebrate ethical criticism and its myriad of affrmative outcomes, prefers to ignore: "A theory of the ethics of reading that takes seriously the possibility that reading might lead to other morally good or valuable actions would also have to allow for the possibility that the reading even of a morally exemplary book might cause something morally deplorable to occur," Miller writes (21). In this manner, Miller postulates a valuable corollary to the refexive properties of ethical criticism and the ways in which context and temporality possess the propensity to alter the quality of reading experiences. Like Williams, Nussbaum advocates an ethical criticism with tenable foundations in moral philosophy, as well as an interpretive mechanism that functions as an impetus for sustaining moral discourse and social interconnection. In addition to her enthusiastic subscription to many of the arguments inherent in Booth's ontology for an ethical criticism, Nussbaum proffers a series of essays in Love's K�oaledge that sharpen the ethical paradigm's focus through her discussion about the interrelations between philosophy and literature, as well as through her close, ethical readings of a diversity of writers, in cluding Henry James, Proust, Ann Beattie, and Samuel Beckett, among others. Drawing upon selected works by these fgures, Nussbaum examines the ways in which style and content impinge upon ethical issues, while also deliberating about the manner in which the ethical interpretation of literary works offers readers a means for exploring the moral import of emotions and locating paths to selfknowledge. Nussbaum affords particular attention to the roles that stylistics, linguistics, and structure play in articulating the moral essence of a given narrative: Form and style are not incidental features. A view of life is �old. The telling itself - the selection of genre, formal structures, sen tences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader's sense of life - all of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life's relations and connections. Life is never simply prese��ed by a text; it is always represe��ed as some thing. (5)



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In Nussbaum's schema, then, the literary artist bears the responsi bility for honorably positing narratives that allow readers the opportunity to discover their own paths to selfunderstanding and meaning, to formulate their own strategies for living well. Like Booth, Nussbaum equates the quality of life with the ethical dimensions of literature.22 "The novel is itself a moral achievement," she writes, "and the welllived life is a work of literary art" (148). In addition to advancing the ethical notion of community in her work, Nussbaum argues for the place of love as a subject in the evolving discourse of ethical criticism. "The subject of romantic and erotic love is not often treated in works on moral philosophy," she admits (336). For this reason, Nussbaum differentiates between the Kantian notions of "pathological" and "practical" love in her analysis. Pathological love, she notes, signifes the often irrational emotions of romantic love in sharp contrast to the more enduring qualities of practical love, an emotion that Nussbaum defnes as "an attitude of concern that one can will oneself to have toward another human being, and which is, for that reason, a part of morality." The moral dimensions of practical love, therefore, merit consider able attention as a methodology for understanding the many ways in which readers respond ethically to literary texts. Moreover, "if one believes, in addition, that the realm of morality is of special and perhaps of supreme importance in human life . . . one will be likely, having once made that distinction, to ascribe high h�ma� worth to practical love" (336-7). In this way, the acknowledgement of practical love provides additional insight into human concep tions of living well and the manner in which literary texts depict love's capacity to produce personal fulfllment. Nussbaum also refnes the communal aspects that mark the ethical paradigm. She extends the metaphor that ethical criticism forges a type of community between text and reader to allow for not only the possibility of living well as an individual, but living together well in a much larger sense of the word. "A community is formed by author and readers," she writes. "In this community separateness and qualitative difference are not neglected; the privacy and the imagining of each is nourished and encouraged. But at the same time it is stressed that living to gether is the object of our ethical interest" (48). In Poe�� J�s��e� The L��erary �mag��a��o� a�d P�bl�� L�fe (1995), Nussbaum advances this concept through her exploration of the value of ethical reading as a means for infuencing political theory and public discourse: "If we think of reading in this way, as combining one's own absorbed



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imagining with periods of more detached (and interactive) critical scrutiny, we can already begin to see why we might fnd in it an activity well suited to public reasoning in a democratic society" (9).23 By widening the scope of the ethical paradigm to account for a range of emotional states, as well as a variety of public and private modes of discourse, Nussbaum shares in the creation of an ethical criticism that provides for the relevant interpretation of the social, political, and cultural nuances of the human community. In Ge��g �� R�gh�� La�g�age, L��era��re, a�d E�h��s (1992), Geoffrey Galt Harpham continues Booth's and Nussbaum's efforts to elabo rate the ethical paradigm as an interdisciplinary means of interpretation. Ethical criticism should "be considered a matrix, a hub from which the various discourses and disciplines fan out and at which they meet, crossing out of themselves to encounter each other," he writes. "Ethics is perhaps best conceived as a 'conceptual base' - neither as organic drive nor as properly conceptual super structure, but rather as a necessary, and necessarily impure and unsystematic, mediation between unconscious and instinctual life and its cognitive and cultural transformation" (17-18). Harpham supports this endeavor through his examinations of such "ethical terms" as "obligation," "o�gh�," "ethical duty," and "ethicity." Through their delineation, he seeks to establish meaningful interconnections between ethical criticism and other means of textual inquiry. 24 Harpham argues that the issue of choice lies at the heart of obliga tion. "One can - one must - choose which principle to be governed by," he observes. "Ethics in general is a species of risk that affords no rigorous way to tell ethical reasons from other reasons, choices from obligations" (37). Harpham further asserts that "at the dead center of ethics lies the o�gh�," or the ethical obligation. This no tion of an o�gh� - the moral obligations of an ethical person reveals that person's "commitments, values, character. To be ethical, an o�gh� must not refer itself to threats or desires, coercion or self ends" (18). Harpham defnes "ethical duty" as a form of critical refection: "One must always refect," Harpham writes. "This is the law that ethical discourse virtually presumes as well as teaches" (42). Finally, in Harpham's conception of an ethical terminology, "ethicity" refers to the interpretive moment in ethical criticism: "the most dramatic of narrative turnings, the climactic point just between the knitting and unraveling of the action, the fort and the da, the moment when the rising line of complication peaks, pauses, and begins its descent into the denouement." Addressing the



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narratological and characterological essences of this evaluative instance - what Harpham calls the "macroturn" - enables ethical critics, through their obligations to their own sets of values and commitments, to refect upon and interpret the moral choices depicted in narratives (171). In the tradition of Harpham and Miller, Stephen R. Yarbrough's Del�bera�e Cr��sm� Toaard a Pos�moder� H�ma��sm (1992) advocates the ethical possibilities of the theoretical project. Yarbrough argues that postmodernism simply needs to reconfgure its modes of dis course in order to account for the recent wave of humanism and its infuence upon literary studies. "If we wish to revitalize criticism as a humanistic exercise of freedom, a certain reorientation is neces sary," he writes (1). Yarbrough aligns himself with the singular conclusion of his ethical precursors, particularly Gardner, Siebers, Booth, and Nussbaum, that ethical thought fnds its useful applica tion in the narrative illustration of the human community, a propitious arena for examining the social factors that infuence the moral choices that literary characters make. "The communal sense is exactly what we need to rediscover and reaffrm if we are ever to regain what . . . we all want so desperately - our capacity to make decisions," Yarbrough observes (23). Like Siebers, Yarbrough depicts poststructuralism in a state of theoretical crisis fomented by recent developments in moral philosophy. Yarbrough's efforts to revitalize postmodernism in an intellectual era marked by a humanist revival seems to underscore, through its very postulation, the growing force fulness of ethical criticism as an interpretive paradigm that provides meaningful accounts regarding the moral properties of our grand narratives. "The present crisis calls for a rediscovery of the sense of the common, which is at the same time a rediscovery of grace, a rediscovery of propriety, a rediscovery of the possibility of discovery," Yarbrough remarks. "Postmodernism can be defned in terms of an intense awareness of the presentday incapacity to discover," he continues, "and postmodern humanism can be distinguished from postmodernism in general by the fact that it takes this incapacity as a problem, as a failure of thought and not as a glorious path to 'freedom'" (35). Yarbrough asserts that his notion of a postmodern humanism - a postmodernism enhanced by its conspicuous attention to ethical issues - will provide critics and readers alike with a mode of dis course that, in addition to allowing for the ethical interpretation of literary works, acknowledges the peculiar places of meaning and



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value in a postmodern world beset by moral chaos and verbal dys function. As Yarbrough concludes: "The crucial task now set before the humanist is that of seeking and articulating a��h�� he d�s�o�rse of pos�moder��sm a still center of common experience from which to order the world" (36).25 Although Yarbrough provides a useful account of recent developments in ethical thought, his promulga tion of a postmodern humanism nevertheless neglects to address the cogent admonition of Knapp and Michaels: "As soon as we recognize that there are no theoretical choices to be made" in or der to achieve meaningful interpretations, they write, "then the point of theory vanishes" (18). Yarbrough's paradigm for a postmodern humanism inevitably rests upon the uncertain and often ar��l��al foundations of the theoretical project, while ethical criticism, by eschewing poststructuralism's privileged modes of critical discourse, concerns itself with the interpretation of personal values and their relevance to the larger, l�v��g human community. Drawing upon the divergent arguments of a range of ethical critics from Booth, Gardner, and Nussbaum to Miller, Harpham, and Yarbrough, the preceding review of ethical criticism's recent incar nation in hermeneutics and its principal voices quite obviously demonstrates its power as a mode of interpretation that intersects a variety of critical spheres and cultural applications. Yet despite its increasingly signifcant role at the fore of the theoretical project an intellectual vantage point that it enjoyed throughout the 1990s and that it clearly seems to be sustaining in the early years of the twentyfrst century - ethical criticism must still establish innova tive and interdisciplinary methodologies in order to persevere as an interpretive paradigm. How, indeed, can ethical criticism chal lenge its own theoretical boundaries while continuing to propound socially and culturally relevant modes of literary analysis?



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Read��g �he �Heavy ��d�s�ry of �he M��d�

19

Reading the "Heavy Industry of the Mind": Ethical Criticism and the AngloAmerican Academic Novel

"An open mind, I need not remind readers, is the key to a successful university life, and may even have indirect ap plications to those living and working outside the academy." - Richard Russo, S�ra�gh� Ma�

The academic novel, through its express desire to critique, by means of satire, the unethical sensibilities that it ascribes to university life, seems a particularly meaningful arena for testing ethical criticism's capacity to produce socially relevant literary interpretations. As the chapters that follow this brief introduction to the genre of aca demic fction will reveal, ethical criticism proves especially revelatory when employed as a means for examining the satires of academic life propounded by the authors of university fction. The very na ture of their craft - through their deliberately derisive fabulation of story and character - underscores the ethical choices that practitioners of the academic novel confront as they construct their critiques of the academy and the hegemony of its institutions, the questionable morality of its denizens, and the fractured philosophical underpinn ings of its mission. Because the very publication of these works of academic fction can be read as a form of social protest, as a means for their authors to document the institutional dilemmas and pro fessional insecurities that problematize postsecondary education, ethical criticism offers a powerful and revealing interpretive method ology for assessing the ethical functions, both real and imagined, of our institutions of higher learning in the postwar world. In this 19



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way, ethical criticism, in its effort to repair cultural and social in justices in the human community, possesses the propensity for producing meaningful critiques of those fctions that confront the moral challenges inherent in contemporary academic life. Although volumes such as Mortimer R. Proctor's The E�gl�sh U�� vers��y Novel (1957) and John Lyons's The College Novel �� Amer��a (1962) offer useful accounts of the genre's long and distinguished history, a brief review of academic fction's emergence as a literary form, particularly during the nineteenth century, accounts for its archly satirical manifestations during the latter half of the twenti eth century. "As a literary genre," Proctor writes, the academic novel "has always refected conditions within Oxford and Cambridge far more closely than it has followed any literary trends or movements" (185). The universal conceptions of Oxford and Cambridge as unique intellectual societies - in short, the fctive terrain of "Oxbridge" inspired centuries of fctions devoted to university life, from Chaucer's Clerk of Oxford through the romanticized academic novels of the early nineteenth century.1 While these narratives poked occasional fun at the ineffectuality of university faculty or the unreality of college life, their plots generally involved sentimental, often melo dramatic portrayals of Oxford and Cambridge. The genre of English university fction fnds its more satiric origins, however, in the various educational reform movements of the midnineteenth century, as well as in the admission of women to the sacred groves of Oxford and Cambridge in the latter half of the nineteenth century.2 During this era, Oxford and Cambridge witnessed an observable decline in the hegemony of their infuence upon English society and culture. Their fctional portrayals, once predicated upon more lofty elements of esteem and erudition, now languished in narratives about "uni versity lecturers who did not lecture, and undergraduates who freely enjoyed all the pleasures of depravity" (Proctor, 11). The acts of reform endured by Oxford and Cambridge found their roots in the 1850s, when a series of reports commissioned by the English gov ernment revealed a set of institutions that operated on an outmoded classical curriculum and blatantly catered to the needs of the so cially privileged.3 While a set of statutes during the 1870s virtually redesigned the governance of both institutions, reform acts in 1854 and 1856 abolished religious tests at Oxford and Cambridge, re spectively, thus providing access to the universities for students outside of the Church of England (Proctor, 56-7). This movement against exclusion ultimately resulted, of course, in the momentous events



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of 1879, when Somerville College frst opened its doors to female students at Oxford.4 In addition to increasing the public's interest in the business of higher education, the nineteenthcentury reform acts at Oxford and Cambridge succeeded in establishing a social landscape ripe for narrative consideration: "Reform," Proctor observes, "brought new causes to urge, and a new cast of characters to add to the tradi tional rakes. With reform, it became more plausible to take an interest in the success of scholars; examination halls became the scenes of triumphs and disasters in which good very nearly always triumphed over evil," he continues (59). Like their English antecedents, American novels about academic life fnd their modern origins in the nine teenth century, an intense era of social change and industrial growth that destabilized the prodigious cultural infuences of privileged in stitutions of higher learning such as Oxford and Cambridge, and in America, Harvard.5 In his examination of the American evolu tion of the academic novel, Lyons remarks: The advance of industrial capitalism during the nineteenth cen tury is another cause for the popular suspicion of the academy. The mechanical sciences which fathered and made this advance possible were eminently practical ones. It was engineering which laid the rails and built the bridges and designed the mills, not philosophy. And the money which engineering made possible was used to buy and sell engineers, so it was unlikely that the capitalist businessman should even respect the engineer when his knowledge brought him so little power. (4) The "popular suspicion of the academy" that Lyons ascribes to the industrialized societies of the latter nineteenth century underscores the emergence of the brand of satire endemic to the AngloAmerican novels about university life. Satire, by its traditional defnition, func tions as a critique of the follies of humankind. Yet Lyons astutely differentiates the modern incarnations of satire in university fction from the texts of the great satirists of the Augustan Age who invari ably situated themselves on the side of "Reason, . . . tempered by humanity and common sense." The satirists of the Augustan era, Lyons notes, often hinted at solutions to the dilemmas depicted in their narratives. Satiric novels of academic life, however, provide no such answers (162-3).6 Their nostalgia for the ivory towers of their prenineteenthcentury cultural and social supremacy prevents





academic fctions from positing solutions in a pragmatic world where the idealism of the academy lacks viability and signifcance. In the frst half of the twentieth century, then, when the world demanded answers to even more complicated social and political predicaments - from the calamities of the First and Second World Wars to the Great Depression and beyond - the academy once again lacked the practical answers to the human community's vexing problems.7 And academic novels fourished as never before. Monographs such as Ian Carter's A��e�� C�l��res of Co��e�� Br�� sh U��vers��y F��o� �� he Pos��War �ears (1990) feature thorough accounts of the genre's enormous output in England since the 1950s.8 Carter affords particular emphasis to the ways in which the prolif eration of provincial "redbrick" universities, like the reform acts of the nineteenth century, undermined the formerly exalted infuence of Oxford and Cambridge and expanded appreciably the public's access to institutions of higher education in England. Unlike Lyons, Carter argues that academic novels, through their satire, do offer implicit solutions for the problems that confront modern readers. For Carter, the answers lie in "taking culture seriously, and taking universities to be important bastions of culture. But the notion of what constitutes culture," he cautions, "must be transformed from that typical of British university fction" (277). In this way, the academic novel proffers - through its satiric depiction of the insti tutional states of malaise inherent in its fctive representations of contemporary universities - a means for both implicitly and explicitly advocating positive value systems. In short, academic novels, by postulating a kind of antiethos in their narratives, ultimately seek to enhance the culture and sustain the community through a more ethically driven system of higher education. This antiethos, what I will later describe as a "pejorative poetics," underscores the satirical motivations of the authors of academic fction and the manner in which their narrative ambitions function as progressive forces when read in regard to the tenets of ethical criticism. In The U��vers��y �� Moder� F��o�� Whe� Poaer �s A�adem�� (1993), Janice Rossen provides a thematic analysis of various works of post war academic fction in a similar effort to explain the reasons for their promulgation. In this valuable text, Rossen identifes a "dy namics of power" that undergirds the genre of English and American academic novels. "We should begin to read these novels less in terms of their actual brilliance or success," she argues, "and more in terms of what they reveal about the dynamics of power between



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the contemporary novelist and his audience" (188). Rossen's para digm for reading the products of academic fction reveals the various structures of power that simultaneously manipulate the life of the individual scholar and the life of the university community. These power structures, she argues, ultimately problematize campus life through their creation of a philosophical paradox that scholars ul timately cannot escape. As Rossen observes, "The scholarly life inevitably consists of life in community, though it is fundamentally predicated on a principle of individualism" (9). Modern universi ties, by virtue of their tenure and research requirements, maintain, at least for the beneft of their nontenured members, the explicit threat of expulsion.9 The ominous power of this vestige of profes sional affliation creates "an imposing fa�ade" in favor of the university, Rossen writes, "which suggests a powerful presence through its ability to exclude potential members" (30). The politics of exclusion - the threat of ultimate severance from the community - functions as a menacing obstacle in the path to institutional success for the individual scholar. For this reason, the nature of academic scholarship receives particular attention in university fctions. As Rossen observes, "All novels about academic life and work exploit the tension between these two poles of idealism and competition, or scholarship as a means to an end and as an end in itself" (140). This tension confronts scholars with an emotional dilemma of staggering proportions: in one sense, campus life purports to offer them an arena to engage their colleagues in free intellectual discourse, while in another sense it necessitates that they confront their colleagues in a highstakes competition based upon the quality and proliferation of their intellectual capabilities in order to ensure their professional security. "The emotional dimension of such work can lead to heightened battles between scholars," Rossen remarks, "and in a way which brings their powerful intellectual abilities and skills to bear on what is fundamentally an emotional issue" (145). The remarkably volatile ways in which the life of the individual intersects the life of the community in the genre of academic fc tion obviously merits the consideration of ethical criticism and its conspicuous attention to the moral choices that individuals encounter while pursuing selfknowledge in their chosen communities. Through their satiric representations of campus life, the practitioners of aca demic fction render de fa��o judgments regarding the prevailing states of affairs in our postsecondary institutions. These ethical





judgments, as the various voices of ethical criticism assert, possess considerable social and ideological import. In the chapters that follow, I will explore the works of fve authors of AngloAmerican univer sity fction from the genre's modern origins during the 1950s through the form's manifestations in the present in an effort to reveal the value of ethical criticism as a salient means of interpretation, as well as to demonstrate the ways in which the ethical paradigm illuminates our understanding of the special contradictions inherent in university life. Particular emphasis will be afforded in this investigation to the function of literary character, especially regarding the rela tionships between scholars and the larger university communities that they populate. In addition to exploring the depictions in academic novels of the rites of scholarly competition, close analysis will be devoted to the academy's marginalization of different classes and social groups, especially regarding the precarious places of women in academe. Attention will also be allotted to recent developments on the global academic scene, including scholarly conferences and their roles in the already competitive arena of scholarly research; the triumphs and perils of multiculturalism; and the predominance of the academic meritocracy and its fomentation of what Rossen calls "intellectual territorialism" (146), the hoarding of manuscripts and knowledge in order to secure the individual scholar's uncertain niche in the larger academic community. For these purposes, I will examine Kingsley Amis's 1954 novel, L��ky J�m, which, in addition to its place as one of the modern progenitors of the genre, features a number of nuances endemic to the satiric narratives of academic fction, exemplifed particularly through Amis's depictions of the inimitable Professor Welch and the forlorn, fedgling academic, Jim Dixon. Attention will also be devoted to P�� (1957) and Pale F�re (1962), novels in which Vladimir Nabokov proffers two sardonic examinations of the academy in the guises of, respectively, Professor Pnin, the hopelessly prolix Russian scholar, and Dr. Charles Kinbote, whose autobiographical pyrotech nics and idolatry adorn - indeed, threaten to overwhelm - his textual commentary of the late John Shade's fnal poetic achievement. I will also examine the colorful assortment of characters who popu late Joyce Carol Oates's The H��gry Ghos�s� Seve� All�s�ve Comed�es (1974). Oates's satiric admixture of disinterested scholars, greedy intellectual dilettantes, and ineffectual plagiarists underscores her overarching thesis regarding the nature of academic malpractice in North American institutions of higher learning. David Lodge's tril



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ogy of academic novels - Cha�g��g Pla�es� a Tale of Tao Camp�ses (1975), Small World� a� A�adem�� Roma��e (1984), and N��e Work (1988) - offers a postmodern progress from the advent of the English redbrick university through the professional and social perils of transatlantic conferences and professorial exchange. Adorned with such characters as the internationally renowned literary critic, Morris �app - that fctive paragon of selfinterested poststructuralism - and the struggling, brilliant young academic, Robyn Penrose, Lodge's fctions explore the intellectual and cultural gamut of contemporary intellectual life and afford particular emphasis to its proclivity for critical fashion and its disdain for intellectual and social stasis. A reading of the flm version of David Mamet's play Olea��a (1992) will focus on the playwright ��m director's narrative about a con temporary professor and his student's inability to communicate with each other on any genuinely meaningful level. Their utter incapa bility of comprehending the nature of their obligations and responsibilities, both to each other and to higher education, predi cates Mamet's brutal musings on sexual harassment and political correctness. I will also offer an analysis of Ishmael Reed's 1993 novel, Japa�ese by Spr��g, the story of an AfricanAmerican junior professor quest ing for tenure amidst a cauldron of infghting and xenophobia at Jack London College. Following a Japanese conglomerate's purchase and cultural redefnition of the institution, he revels in the power associated with his new appointment as a college administrator while the campus descends into racial and political turmoil. In "Academic Nonfction and the Culture Warriors," I will dispatch, if only tem porarily, with the fctional narratives of university fction to address Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Mas�erp�e�e Thea�re� a� A�adem�� Melodrama (1995). Gilbert and Gubar's volume offers a satirical survey of the recent proliferation of even more pejorative, nonfctional academic commentaries regarding the controversial advent of the multicultural project, including such works as Allan Bloom's The Clos��g of �he Amer��a� M��d� Hoa H�gher Ed��a��o� Has Fa�led Demo�ra�y a�d �mpover�shed �he So�ls of Today's S��de��s (1987), Roger Kimball's Te��red Rad��als� Hoa Pol��s Has Corr�p�ed H�gher Ed��a��o� (1990), and William J. Bennett's The De�Val��g of Amer��a� �he F�gh� for O�r C�l��re a�d O�r Ch�ldre� (1992). These volumes, the mono cultural master texts of the "culture wars" of the late 1980s and early 1990s, share an abiding angst over the ills and excesses of contemporary bastions of higher learning. The propagation of such





caustic and often belligerent appraisals of the academy - published, remarkably, as four decades of academic fction reach their acerbic, selfcritical apex - surely warrants further exploration. Finally, a study of Jane Smiley's Moo (1995) will examine the novelist's carnivalesque representation of Moo U.'s administration, faculty, and student body as they engage in a variety of revealing social, cultural, and political transgressions. Selected because of their capacity for illuminating many of moral philosophy's central concepts - including the notions of commu nity, artistic fulfllment, goodness, love, and cultural inheritance the literary works featured in this study will demonstrate the vi ability of ethical criticism as an interpretive methodology. By virtue of my usage of the ethical paradigm, the aforementioned chapters will feature entirely new (and, in some instances, inaugural) read ings of these texts - these "Professorroma�," Richard G. Caram's useful rubric for describing academic fction's growing corpus - while also uniting in an innovative fashion the culturally disparate voices of international moral philosophers and academic novelists from a variety of social and national origins.10 In addition to contributing to the existing body of scholarship devoted to the genre of aca demic fction, this study underscores the ways in which ethical criticism, with all of its contingent pedagogic and interdisciplinary possibilities, provides readers with a useful paradigm for reinvigor ating the theoretical project as the millennium approaches. As the chapters that follow this introduction will further show, ethical criticism affords theorists with a revelatory means for commenting upon the interconnections between the lives of readers and their textual experiences. In this manner, I intend to capture both the shape and nature of the argument, fctional as well as nonfctional, regarding our postsecondary institutions and their ethical roles as social and educational leaders of an expanding global culture.



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Nego��a��g �he U��vers��y Comm��y

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Negotiating the University Community: L��ky J�m and the Politics of Academe

"It was one of those days when he felt quite convinced of his impending expulsion from academic life. What would he do afterwards? Teach in a school? Oh dear no. Go to London and get a job in an offce. What job? Whose offce? Shut up." - Kingsley Amis, L��ky J�m

In addition to its widely acknowledged place as the quintessential campus novel of the twentieth century, Kingsley Amis's L��ky J�m (1954) illustrates the peculiar dilemmas endured by young scholars in their efforts to achieve selfhood and fnd acceptance within the larger academic community. Often characterized as an unabashedly comic novel, L��ky J�m in fact offers a moral landscape that con fronts the novel's protagonist, Jim Dixon, with a variety of ethical predicaments. For this reason, a few astute critics such as John McDermott refer to Amis as a "serious comic novelist" (1). As I will demonstrate in this chapter, Amis utilizes the m��er of comedy in the novel as a means for delivering his judgments regarding the problematic moral state of academic life during the remarkably frac tious era in which his novel frst appeared. His satiric attacks on the university community fnd their targets, moreover, in those privi leged individuals who endeavor to maintain the academic status quo in their favor through the exploitation of junior colleagues, and, ultimately, through the threat of expulsion from the seemingly sacred groves of campus life. As Amis's novel so stridently reveals, 27



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the very threat of severance from the scholarly community poses as a powerful obstacle in the young academic's path to selfknowledge. L��ky J�m fnds its origins in Amis's wellknown 1946 visit to the Senior Common Room at Leicester University, although it also owes its genesis to the confuence of three historic moments in twentieth century British social and literary history: the passage of the Education Act of 1944, the advent of the redbrick university in England dur ing that same era, and the subsequent apotheosis of L��ky J�m as the mastertext of the Angry Young Man movement in the 1950s. In 1946, Amis visited Philip Larkin at Leicester University, where Larkin, Amis's friend from their scholarship days at Oxford, worked as an assistant librarian. "He took me into the Common Room there," Amis later remarked, "and after about a quarter of an hour I said, 'Christ, someone ought to do something about this lot.'" 1 Amis's experiences during the late 1940s as a junior lecturer at University College, Swansea, only served to confrm his initial impressions about the ethical inequalities of academic life (McDermott, 17). In addition to his personal observations of the university community, Amis found the inspiration for his novel in the social and political turmoil that followed the passage of the Education Act of 1944, an article of legislation that, for the frst time since the landmark edu cational acts of the midnineteenth century, attempted to undermine the place of university education as an exclusive privilege of the upper classes. The Education Act required students to pursue their primary education to at least the age of 15, while also creating a twotiered system of free secondary education that consisted of "Grammar Schools" and "Secondary Modern Schools" (Gardner, K��gsley, 23). During the decades that followed, the Education Act accomplished its intended goal of producing a greater quantity of collegebound workingclass students. Accommodating this infux of postsecondary students likewise necessitated the wholesale expansion of the English university system and resulted in the construction of an assortment of provincial redbrick institutions and "New" universities across Great Britain.2 Despite the Act's intention of assimilating a larger workingclass student population into English university life, Philip Gardner observes that the Education Act of 1944 "gave rise to a signifcant number of deracinated and disoriented young men, no longer at home in their working or lowermiddleclass attitudes and environments, but at the same time not feeling accepted by the social system into which their education appeared to be pushing



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them" (24). This culture of alienation in the 1950s ultimately pro duced the "angry young man," that peculiar social manifestation of cultural angst and intellectual derision depicted in such works as John Wain's H�rry o� Doa� (1953), L��ky J�m, and John Osborne's Look Ba�k �� A�ger (1956), among others. The fgure of the angry young man as a fctive persona reveals himself as a literary charac ter simultaneously oppressed by the hypocritical value system of the same society whose standards and traditions he so desperately strives to oblige. For this reason, protagonists in the literature pro mulgated by such "angry young men" as Amis and Osborne initially founder in their social confusion and ultimately fnd themselves overwhelmed by their own disillusion. Although Richard Bradford remarks that Amis's text succeeds "in refecting the mood and atmo sphere of contemporary life," he also argues that Amis refuses to use the novel "as an instrument of moral judgment or informed social commentary" (32). An ethical reading of L��ky J�m proves otherwise, however, for in Dixon, Amis creates a protagonist who - when confronted with the chaos and trauma of mediating between an upperclass value sys tem beyond his comprehension and the contradictions of academic life - reconfgures his own ethos in an effort to locate a new path to selfhood beyond the campus walls. Dedicated to Larkin, L��ky J�m illustrates the ways in which Dixon, well supplemented in his quest for selfknowledge by a liberal dose of serendipity, negotiates his way through a maze of ethical choices - choices in which he invariably opts for mischief rather than goodness. He emerges never theless as a selffulflled member of the larger human community as opposed to the alienated fgure of deceit that he represented as "tem porary assistant lecturer" in the cloistered academic world. As this chapter will demonstrate, Amis's novel, when considered in terms of the tenets of ethical criticism and its abiding interest in the ethical decisions that literary characters make, functions both as a critique of the academy and as a narrative of surprising social ac commodation. When Dixon effects his own expulsion from university life at the novel's conclusion, his sense of humanity soars when he fnds solace and acceptance in a bona fde community of genuine friends and truly conscientious mentors. Amis's utilization of satire in L��ky J�m underscores his express attempt to undercut the academy by highlighting its contradictions and illuminating the ways in which it subverts goodness and the search for selfknowledge, an end that it accomplishes through its





creation of a miniature society that functions upon existential threats and dubious rites of competition. In this manner, Amis participates in the construction of the pejorative poetics that undergirds the satire inherent in many works of academic fction. By elaborating, through their particularly acerbic brand of satire, the failings and inconsistencies of the university community, writers such as Amis implicitly argue for a revitalized academic milieu, an ethically en hanced world in which the life of the individual fnds acceptance and fruition in an intellectual community that heeds their percep tion of the mission of the university: to imbue human affairs with the collective wisdom produced by the unrestricted discourse of an academic cooperative.3 Such a poetics, a narrative strategy that pro duces, through satire, a series of moral possibilities for the larger human community, fnds its basis in the reading challenges proposed by the ethical paradigm. Ethical criticism, by furnishing readers with the interpretive tools for the analysis of a given narrative's estimations of truth and goodness, reveals the valuable moral insights produced by the satirist's employment of a pejorative poetics. In his discussion of L��ky J�m, for instance, McDermott identifes the usefulness of exploring Amis's novel as an ironic ethical construct: "It is a novel about good people and bad people," he writes, "about right and wrong ways of behaving and thinking, and, as in all the major novels, its main interest and much of its delight lies in feeling the tension between these elements" (54). By highlighting this tension through his broad satiric commentaries regarding the university community, Amis provides readers with a means, then, for self consciously reconsidering the social and ethical roles of the academy and its inhabitants. Amis's careful portrayal of Dixon in L��ky J�m allows him to investigate a number of problematic social and cultural issues related to academic life. In addition to his satiric characterizations of Dixon's senior colleagues, particularly the unforgettable Professor Welch, Amis addresses the perils of scholarly research and publication, as well as the peculiar, unforgiving nature of university politics. Focalizing the narrative through Dixon's workingclass eyes allows Amis to dramatize the uneasy relationships that develop between the privileged upperclass denizens of the university community and their disoriented and insecure junior counterparts. A graduate of Leicester University, Dixon secures a temporary adjunct position at an unnamed provincial redbrick university after besting an Oxford candidate at his job interview. Like the other angry young working



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class men who struggle to fnd acceptance and selfsuffciency in the groves of academe, Dixon hungers for job security amidst a world that both bores and bewilders him. A probationary junior lecturer in medieval history - a subject that he detests, yet seems to offer him the promise of secure employment that he so covets Dixon confesses in the novel that his policy "was to read as little as possible of any given book" (16-17). He harbors little regard for academic research and scholarly publication, although he realizes their esteemed places in the competitive campus arena. As Hazard Adams notes in A�adem�� Tr�bes (1976), "Life in academe is marked by periodic rituals of ascension which bear aspects of trial by per turbation and ordeal" (77). Similarly, Dixon recognizes the value placed on knowledge, or at least the perception of it, by the senior colleagues who will decide his fate, as the following conversation with Professor Welch, the head of the History Department, reveals: "I [Welch] was having a chat the other day with an old friend of mine from South Wales. The Professor at the University College of Abertawe, he is now. Athro Haines; I expect you know his book on medieval Cwmrhydyceirw." Dixon said "Oh yes" in a different tone, but still guardedly. He wanted to indicate clear and devout recognition that should not at the same time imply frsthand knowledge of the work in question, in case Welch should demand an epitome of its argument. (81) At such moments, Dixon opts to disengage his attention, "just keep ing enough of it going to enable him to nod at proper intervals" (81), and lapses into the states of boredom that occupy much of his existence in the academic world.4 In the La�g�age of F��o�� Essays �� Cr��sm a�d Verbal A�alys�s of �he E�gl�sh Novel (1966), David Lodge identifes such instances as products of the incongruities between Dixon's "outer world and his inner world." According to Lodge, "While he [Dixon] tries - not very successfully - to show the outer world the image of an indus trious, respectable wellmannered young man, his mind seethes with caustic sarcasm directed against himself and others, with fantasies of violence done to enemies, of triumph for himself" (251). Dixon expresses the turmoil and disgust of his inner world through a series of facial contortions. Succumbing to stagefright as the hour of his fateful "Merrie England" lecture approaches, for instance, prompts him to effect his "Evelyn Waugh face": "Gripping his tongue between





his teeth, he made his cheeks expand into little hemispherical bal loons; he forced his upper lip downwards into an idiotic pout; he protruded his chin like the blade of a shovel. Throughout, he alter nately dilated and crossed his eyes," Amis writes (220). In this way, Dixon masks the honest expressions of his inner self. As Richard Fallis notes, Dixon only "asserts his freedom in his imagination" (69). For this reason, Amis provides us with Dixon's one true aes thetic vision in the novel, a dream of liberation beyond the walls of the university: As he stood in the badlylit jakes, he was visited again, and un bearably, by the visual image that had haunted him ever since he took on this job. He seemed to be looking from a darkened room across a deserted back street to where, against a dimly glowing evening sky, a line of chimneypots stood out as if carved from tin. A small double cloud moved slowly from right to left. . . . He was certain that it was an image of London, and just as certain that it wasn't any part of London he'd ever visited. He hadn't spent more than a dozen evenings there in his life. Then why, he pondered, was his ordinary desire to leave the provinces for London sharpened and particularized by this halfglimpsed scene? (26) The manner in which Dixon damns and diverts the emotions expe rienced by his inner self results in a series of mischievous attacks upon academic life and its denizens. Harmless misdemeanors against the community rather than wholesale crimes, these incidents include his imagined acts of violence against Professor Welch and his efforts to problematize the relationship between Welch's son, Bertrand, a pretentious artist, and his society girlfriend, Christine Callaghan. Dixon must also contend with the confounding academic activity of scholarly publication and the peculiar romantic advances of a colleague, Margaret Peel. These nefarious forces of university life, the corrosive elements of Dixon's "outer world" of which Lodge speaks, function collectively to dehumanize and annihilate his sense of selfworth. Professor Welch serves as Dixon's primary nemesis in L��ky J�m, as well as the target of many of the novel's satiric barbs. As Amis remarked in a 1975 interview conducted by Dale Salwak: "In my novels . . . there are bad people, and it is essential to make them ridiculous" (5). In Welch, Amis proffers a blistering portrayal of academic pretension and indifference, what Gardner calls "a



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devastating portrait, incidentally, of a certain type of British aca demic" (27). For Dixon, Welch represents everything that he fnds troubling about academic life - from snobbery and cultural affecta tion to vocational ineffectuality and selfindulgence. "No other professor in Great Britain," Dixon muses, "set such store by being called Professor" (7). Dixon fnds himself equally perplexed by the disparity between Welch's academic standing and his vague qualif cations: "How had he become Professor of History, even at a place like this?" Dixon wonders. "By published work? No. By extra good teaching? No in italics" (8). Yet, because Welch possesses the power to decide Dixon's ultimate fate at the university, he remains unable to express his dismay at the inequities of his precarious position as a probationary lecturer. For this reason, he accedes to all of the professor's demands for his service, while secretly imagining the violent acts to which he would subject Welch. In addition to agree ing to attend Welch's "Arty Weekend" of madrigal songs and chamber music - activities that the workingclass Dixon fnds utterly detest able - Dixon conducts his senior colleague's research activities and provides Welch with notes for a lecture that the professor intends to deliver. As McDermott notes: "Welch combines cultural affecta tion . . . with a professional position that has no honest base and is sustained by the efforts of others (notably Dixon) over whom he exercises a control that is absolute" (60). For this reason, when Dixon prods Welch for reassurance regarding the state of his uncer tain position in the department, the professor refuses to show any compassion for his adopted "protege" and nervously avoids Dixon's glance while stammering unintelligibly. Despite all of his efforts to curry Welch's favor, Dixon essentially lacks any palpable identity in the professor's eyes, for Welch frequently refers to him as "Faulkner," the name of a previous temporary assistant lecturer. Welch's careless responses to Dixon's plight and his generally ineffectual demeanor serve to enrage the already bewildered Dixon, prompting the young scholar to fantasize repeated acts of violence against the professor. On one occasion, Dixon confesses his desire "to bundle Welch into the revolving door and whirl him round in it till lunchtime" (172). In yet another instance, Dixon dreams of an elabo rate methodology for literally silencing his overbearing senior colleague: He pretended to himself that he'd pick up his professor round the waist, squeeze the furry greyblue waistcoat against him to expel the breath, run heavily with him up the steps, along the




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During a visit to Welch's home, Dixon even attempts to impress the family ginger cat, Id, into vengeful service against its selfimportant master: "Dixon bent and tickled Id under the ear," Amis writes. "He admired it for never allowing either of the senior Welches to pick it up. 'Scratch 'em,' he whispered to it; 'pee on the carpets.' It began to purr loudly" (180). In sharp contrast with the multidimen sional faces that Dixon covertly sports, Welch - as that selfcentered, iddriven fgure of academic deceit - can produce only one visage, a "longlived, wondering frown" (53). As respective members of the cultural elite and the working class, Welch and Dixon already exist as polar opposites, yet their most notable difference lies in their divergent capacities to occupy ethical spaces and render moral judgments. "What Dixon has against Welch is not that he is an academic, or the head of a department, but that he is a bad one," McDermott astutely observes (56). Welch fts the profle of "a thoroughly bad man," McDermott argues, because of "his egotism's unreserved unawareness of anyone else" (60). This general disinter est in the life of the community underscores Amis's motivation for satirizing those unsavory gatekeepers of academic life, who, like Welch, lack the ethical faculties to perform their duties with humanity and benevolence. Like his father, Bertrand shares in the construction of Dixon's debilitating "outer world," a region distinguished by what McDermott describes as "the linguistic code through which each [character] is presented, explored, and fnally judged" (57). In the novel, Bertrand and Dixon's differences in social class and personal ethics result in a number of verbal altercations, and, ultimately, in a transcendent moment of physical violence that allows Dixon to unite his inner and outer worlds. A pompous, selfimportant artist, Bertrand adopts a variety of measures expressly intended to establish distance be tween himself and the inferior beings that he sees around him. Fiercely dedicated to achieving his desires at any cost, Bertrand even develops his own pretentious jargon, a devious language that allows him to manipulate conversations in an effort to subjugate the needs of his associates and achieve his own selfsh ends. In one instance, Dixon witnesses Bertrand's usage of "you sam," for which Amis provides an extended morphology:



corridor to the Staff Cloakroom, and plunge the toosmall feet in their capless shoes into a lavatory basin, pulling the plug once, twice, and again, stuffng the mouth with toiletpaper. (9-10)


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As Bertrand slowly discovers that Dixon poses a threat to his poten tial intimacy with the delectable socialite, Christine Callaghan, his verbal spats with the young academic occur more frequently. While threatening to use his relationship with his father to get Dixon dismissed from the History Department, Bertrand cautions Dixon about the powerful range of his infuence: "Don't think you can defy me and get away with it, Dixon. People never do" (184). When their confict fnally degenerates into fsticuffs, Dixon appears to defeat his superior's son, although Bertrand punches Dixon in a last, desperate attempt at asserting his dominion over the young scholar. Bertrand's momentary interruption of his rival's triumph affords Dixon with the impetus for blurring the frustrating bound aries between his inner and outer worlds: "The bloody old towserfaced bootfaced totempole on a crap reservation, Dixon thought. 'You bloody old towserfaced bootfaced totempole on a crap reservation,' he said" (209). In addition to demonstrating the manner in which Dixon establishes unity between his inner self and his outer world, this instance exemplifes his victory over the prisonhouse of language. By successfully transforming his mental experience into a fully realized speech act, Dixon undermines the hegemony of Bertrand's absurd phraseology, and, for the frst time, verbally asserts himself in the hostile environs of the academic community. Dixon endures an even more disturbing, emotional form of ma nipulation at the hands of his colleague, Margaret Peel, another junior lecturer in the History Department. Ostensibly Dixon's friend and confdante, Margaret surreptitiously preys upon Dixon's innate senses of guilt and humanity. Depicted in the novel as an anachro nistic predatory female, Margaret establishes her emotional strangle hold upon Dixon after her apparent attempt at suicide over a failed romance.5 Concerned for his colleague's mental health, Dixon allows Margaret to refer to them publicly as a couple, although their romantic relationship never progresses beyond his drunken attempt to kiss her and her subsequent rebuff of his advances during Professor Welch's "Arty Weekend." Dixon emerges from the experience confused



The last word ["sam"], a version of "see," was Bertrand's own coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted into a short "a," as if he were going to say "sat." This brought his lips some way apart, and the effect of their rapid closure was to end the syllable with a light but audible "m." (51)

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Had he really wanted what his actions had implied? . . . The only answer was Yes, in a way. But he wouldn't have tried, would he? or not so hard, anyway, if she hadn't seemed so keen. And why had she decided to seem so keen, after so many weeks of seem ing so not keen? (59) As Dixon's infatuation with Christine develops, Margaret begins to converse with him using a series of theatrical cliches, the narrative's linguistic counterpart to Bertrand's pretentious lexicon. As her emo tional power over Dixon wanes while he pursues his rival's girlfriend, Margaret stages a ft of hysterics in his offce in an effort to enjoy the benefts of his diminishing compassion for her plight. Dixon only discovers her deceptions after meeting with Catchpole, the chimerical lover who functioned as the specious impulse for Margaret's initial, and equally fallacious, mental breakdown. Her efforts to manipulate Dixon's proclivities for human kindness and ethical awareness function, moreover, as a means for underscoring his inherent ability to perceive himself in terms of his own moral code, rather than that of the ethically challenged academic community.6 Dixon must also adapt his evolving ethos to yet another menac ing nuance of his outer world, the arena of scholarly publication and research. Advised by Welch that a forthcoming journal publi cation might enhance his chances of maintaining his position at the university, Dixon submits his essay, "The Economic Infuence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485," to a London editor, Dr. L. S. Caton (15).7 Although Dixon covets the professional rewards of published scholarship, he fnds the rites of academic competition particularly unsettling. He discovers himself equally perplexed by the infated language that adorns the pages of his own article: It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawnenforcing facts, the pseudolight it threw upon nonproblems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and signifcance. "In considering this strangely neglected topic," it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This



about Margaret's intentions, as well as over his ethical role as the trusted friend of a person in her supposedly fragile condition:


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Despite his substantial misgivings about the nature of scholarship and his own haughty prose style, Dixon anxiously awaits Caton's decision. Remarkably, when Caton accepts the article for publica tion yet evades Dixon's queries about the essay's publication date, it is Welch who gossips about the spurious nature of Caton's previous publishing activities. "Don't let this out, will you, Dixon," he cau tions his protege, "but there was something like a forged testimonial or something of the sort, I gathered. Something rather shady, any way" (82). After Dixon learns of Caton's subsequent appointment as Chair of History of Commerce at the University of Tucum�n, Argentina (171), he catches a glimpse of a "fat and luxurious journal" in the department's Common Room: He'd never learnt any Italian, but the name at the head of this article, L. S. Caton, presented no diffculty, nor, after a minute or two, did the general drift of the text, which was concerned with shipbuilding techniques in Western Europe in the later ffteenth century and their infuence on something or other. There could be no doubt about it; this article was either a close paraphrase or a translation of Dixon's own original article. At a loss for faces, he drew in his breath to swear, then cackled hysterically instead. So that was how people got chairs, was it? Chairs of that sort, anyway. (229) Dixon's goodnatured, outward response to Caton's thievery reveals both his recognition of the academy's ethically fractured rites of competition and his evolving public self, a persona that no longer relies upon the construction of obnoxious faces to vent his emo tions. As McDermott remarks, "What chiefy redeems Dixon is that he does see what is wrong in the situation, including himself and the factitiousness of the articles he is obliged to write when schol arship is reduced to the level of a competitive game" (68). In this way, Amis provides a scathing commentary about the fallacious qualities of one of the university community's most revered schol arly proving grounds. Finally cognizant of the elements that render the academy into a bankrupt institution of sham and pretense - including Professor



strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defled and set fre to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool. (14-15)


Welch, Bertrand, Margaret, and the dubious nature of the scholar ship that they venerate - Dixon slowly realigns himself with the human community beyond the university's infuence. As Jerome Meckier argues, "From being a minority of one, Jim becomes in stead a genuine person who has been trapped in a crowd of boobies and fakers" (49). In Christine, Dixon discovers a means for escap ing the convoluted world of the academy. The beautiful niece of the wealthy London art collector, Julius GoreUrquhart, Christine seems at frst glance to be little more than an elaborate plot device, an object over which to establish the rivalry between Dixon and Bertrand. To Dixon, Christine initially appears to serve as a mere ornament for Bertrand's social excursions. She seems to confrm this belief after openly referring to GoreUrquhart as "Uncle" during their frst meeting during the "Arty Weekend": "Dixon wanted to laugh at this," Amis writes. "It always amused him to hear girls (men never did it) refer to 'Uncle,' 'Daddy,' and so on, as if there were only one uncle or daddy in the world, or as if this particular uncle or daddy were the uncle or daddy of all those present" (50). Lodge agrees with this conclusion, arguing that "the character of Christine, admittedly, rarely rises about her archetype, the blonde, beautiful, virginal yet voluptuous object of male desire, and the conversations between her and Jim are often embarrassingly banal" (Introduction, xiii). Yet, as the narrative of L��ky J�m progresses, Christine provides Dixon with a true colleague in every sense of the word, a trusted confdante, who, unlike the pernicious Margaret, shares in his mis chievous attacks on the academy. As Merritt Moseley notes, for Dixon, "Christine is both beautiful and normal, a combination for which he has no preparation" (23). Dixon disavows his original judgment of Christine after she demonstrates her willingness to help him hide the charred bedclothes in his quarters during the "Arty Week end," as well as after she agrees to depart with him from the Summer Ball that she originally attended as Bertrand's date, and later, after she agrees to meet with him secretly at the local pub. Despite Lodge's arguments to the contrary, Dixon's ethical reconsideration of Chris tine imbues her with the attributes of a fully realized literary character. For this reason, Bertrand's demands that the young scholar desist in his relationship with Christine seem all the more meaningless to the ethically reinvigorated Dixon:



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"This business between Christine and myself," Bertrand said, fd dling with his beard, "is a serious business, unquestionably. We've known each other for some considerable period of time. And we're not in it just for a spot of the old slap and tickle, do you follow. I don't want to get married yet awhile, but it's distinctly on the cards that I might marry Christine in a couple of years or so. . . . Just get this straight in your socalled mind. When I see something I want, I go for it. I don't allow people of your sort to stand in my way. That's what you're leaving out of account. I'm having Christine because it's my right. . . . If I'm after something, I don't care what I do to make sure that I get it. That's the only law I abide by; it's the only way to get things in this world." (206, 208) Bertrand's love affair with Carol Goldsmith, the wife of one of his father's colleagues in the History Department, further underscores the artist's commodifcation of Christine. For Dixon, however, she exists as a remarkably healthy personality in contrast to the insular atmosphere of the academy and its inhabitants. Through Christine and his ethical reevaluation of her, Dixon fnally realizes the possi bilities of a new life outside of the university. Along with GoreUrquhart, Christine provides the trappings for Dixon's new community apart from the "boobies and fakers" that Meckier derides. During their conversation moments before Dixon's disastrous "Merrie England" lecture begins, GoreUrquhart evinces compassion and trust in his discussion with Dixon. He affords Dixon with the opportunity, moreover, to articulate his feelings regarding the dismal state of the History Department: "Well taught and sensi bly taught, history could do people a hell of a lot of good," he tells GoreUrquhart, "but in practice it doesn't work out like that. Things get in the way. . . . Bad teaching's the main thing. Not bad students, I mean" (214). After sharing his fask of whiskey with the nervous scholar, GoreUrquhart remarks: "No need to worry; to hell with all this" (221).8 Counseled by Welch that an effective public lecture on behalf of the department might save his job at the university, Dixon's discourse on "Merrie England" functions as the central crisis of the novel, as well as Dixon's supreme, inebriated moment of ethical judgment. Ted E. Boyle and Terence Brown observe that "Jim Dixon sober could not summon suffcient courage to attack the sham of the world he is forced to inhabit" (104). Well fortifed with alco hol, however, Dixon delivers a protracted and forceful parody of





the academy, scholarship, and his senior colleagues. During his "Merrie England" speech, Dixon replaces his inventory of faces with drunken imitations of the voices of Welch, the university Principal, and, fnally, a Nazi stormtrooper. In this way, he posits his fnal, blister ing attack upon the untenable foundations of the academic world of his experience: Gradually, but not as gradually as it seemed to some parts of his brain, he began to infuse his tones with a sarcastic, wounding bitterness. Nobody outside a madhouse, he tried to imply, could take seriously a single phrase of this conjectural, nugatory, deluded, tedious rubbish. . . . A growing mutter, halfamused, halfindignant, arose about him, but he closed his ears to it and read on. . . . He began punctuating his discourse with smothered snorts of derision. He read on, spitting out the syllables like curses, leaving mispro nunciations, omissions, spoonerisms uncorrected, turning over the pages of his script like a scorereader following a pres�o move ment, raising his voice higher and higher. (226) "The point about Merrie England," he concludes, "is that it was about the most unMerrie period in our history" (227). Moments later, the intoxicated Dixon faints in front of his stunned colleagues. While his powerful denunciation of university life certainly fails to convince his History Department audience of the unfortunate state of the academy, Dixon's speech functions nevertheless as a means for fnally establishing his own voice, for fusing together, once and for all, his inner and outer worlds. For this reason, Dixon discovers himself "at a loss for faces" (229) after the lecture and following his expected dismissal from the His tory Department faculty. A series of fortuitous events, however, support the novel's sudden, de�s ex ma�h��a conclusion as Dixon's fortunes shift and he secures a new job, solidifes his incipient relationship with Christine, and prepares for a new life beyond the academy. "It is no accident," Janice Rossen argues, "that many of the best Uni versity novels are about someone leaving academe at the end of the book" (188). An offer of employment from GoreUrquhart, the lib erator of Dixon's inhibitions before the "Merrie England" speech, sets the propitious events of the novel's closing chapters in motion. The job offer surprises Dixon, who believed that Bertrand would receive the coveted position in GoreUrquhart's offces: "I knew young Welch was no good as soon as I set eyes on him. Like his pictures,"



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GoreUrquhart tells him. "I think you'll do the job all right, Dixon. It's not that you've got the qualifcations, for this or any other work, but there are plenty who have. You haven't got the disqualifcations, though, and that's much rarer" (234).9 After Dixon recognizes the role of chance and the possibility of good fortune in his future - forces at work in his life, ironically, only hours after his dismissal from the university - he fashions a new philosophy for governing his newly discovered personal ethos. First, Dixon remarks, "To write things down as luck wasn't the same as writing them off as nonexistent or in some way beneath consid eration" (242), and second, "there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones" (243), he observes.10 When Christine fortuitously misses her train to London, allowing Dixon to meet her at the station and tell her about his upcoming job in the city, he recognizes the degree to which his previous outlook lacked the capacity to express feelings of jubilation: "He thought what a pity it was that all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing," Amis writes. "Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he'd none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token," Amis continues, "he made his Sex Life in Ancient Roman face" (250). Dixon establishes his ultimate connection with the human community beyond academe when he and Christine encounter Professor Welch and Bertrand as they leave the train station. Rather than resorting to the insularity of a facial contortion, Dixon opts for a more heroic - and, perhaps more signifcantly, verbal expression of his victory over the academy: "Dixon drew in breath to denounce them both, then blew it all out again in a howl of laughter" (251). By choosing the more affrmative path to selfhood offered by the conviviality of laughter, Dixon shuns the impulse to denounce his enemies in favor of the oral celebration of his new place in the human community. As Meckier notes, novelists of the Angry Young Man movement such as Amis, in addition to highlighting the frus trating class distortions of the 1950s, also sought to expose "the limitations of anger and its inevitable collapse as an approach to life" (57). In this way, Dixon selfconsciously devises a more opti mistically human mechanism, as opposed to his earlier, angry stance, for rendering ethical judgment. Establishing an exterior persona by which to assert his emotions allows him to accomplish this end. In O� Moral Perso�hood� Ph�losophy, L��era��re, Cr��sm, a�d Self� U�ders�a�d��g (1989), Richard Eldridge underscores the manner in





which human beings, through the unrestricted communication of their emotions, fnd selfknowledge and selfsatisfaction among a larger community: "Our lives as persons," he writes, "emerge as expressions of our being fated to succeed and fail, partially and along various dimensions, in coming to know our nature and to act on principle in an ongoing, fulflling, and cooperative way" (5). Although Dixon enjoys the spoils of victory - indeed, the re wards of moral behavior - at the conclusion of L��ky J�m, he will surely experience failure and disappointment as his fctive exist ence progresses, for living ethically hardly mitigates the experiential risks inherent in life among the many and diverging forces of the human community. As an ethical reading of Amis's novel reveals, however, Dixon emerges from the novel as a more fully realized individual who both recognizes the limitations of his unvoiced anger and seeks to share in the life of a community founded on prin ciples of morality and fairness. Dixon's experiences in the narrative likewise underscore Amis's satiric denigration of the academy's ca pacity to undermine the selfexpression of the individual. For this reason, academic readers of Amis's novel often discover life experi ences not so unlike their own depicted in L��ky J�m's selfrefexive narrative. As Fallis notes, "Much of Jim's hold on us comes because we see him as a fantasized version of our unrealized selves and because we recognize the novel to be a version of heroic fantasy cast into superfcially realistic situations" (66).11 Ethical criticism, in its desire to establish vital interconnections between the life of the individual and the life of the text, provides readers, then, with a methodology for refecting upon the satiric depictions of campus life in academic novels, while also affording us with a means for reconsidering the indiscretions of a world that possesses so much potential for goodness.



42

S��olar ��ent�rers in ��ile

43

Scholar Adventurers in Exile: Nabokov's Dr. Kinbote and Professor Pnin

"I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist." - Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

Ethical criticism presupposes that works of art necessarily implore us, through their depictions of so many morally disparate heroes and villains, to render value judgments based upon our experiences as readers and members of the larger human community. Yet in his published essays, interviews, and correspondence, Vladimir Nabokov consistently reminds us of the dangers inherent in the application of unexamined moral philosophies to works of literature. In a letter of 24 October 1945 to Professor George R. Noyes, for example, Nabokov notes that only an "uninhibited art" offers the possibility of registering a moral impact upon the reader. "Deliberate moraliz ing," he cautions, "does violence to the very notion of art" (56-7). 1 Although he maintains that writers must distance themselves from the infuence of socially constructed moral imperatives during the production of their texts, he ultimately manufactures characters in novels such as Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962) who often suffer tangible consequences for their morally reprehensible actions. In the latter two volumes, Nabokov employs the novel as a forum for illustrating the capacity of academic characters to act with cruelty and emotional negligence in their dealings with their peers, and, in some instances, with their students. He also devotes considerable attention to the false prophecy of academic scholarship, 43



4

Posttar ��a�eii� Fi�tion

an enterprise that functions in his aesthetic as merely the product of misguided personal ambition, rather than as the result of spirited and meticulous research. This chapter will demonstrate that Nabokov - despite his strident opposition to the appropriation of literature as a means for codifying public standards of behavior - neverthe less postulates an ethical schema in his fctions and literary criticism that fnds its roots in his antipathy for what he calls pos�lost, a particularly vulgar form of philistinism.2 In this way, this chapter will underscore his especially vehement arguments regarding the university community and its lust for pos�lost, or what Nabokov derides in Strong Opinions as "academic kitsch" (213), over scrupu lous research and scholarly substance. In Nikolai Gogol (1944), Nabokov defnes pos�lost as a form of counterfeit art, as an ersatz attempt, moreover, to make aesthetic distinctions about perceived objets �aart through the utilization of essentially bankrupt and superfcial value systems. Pos�lost includes "not only the obviously trashy," he writes, "but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attrac tive." Pos�lost seems "especially vigorous and vicious," Nabokov argues, "when the sham is not obvious and when the values it mimics are considered, rightly or wrongly, to belong to the very highest levels of art, thought, or emotion" (68-70).3 In his biographical study, Vla�iiir Naboko�� t�e R�ssian Years (1990), Brian Boyd aptly describes Nabokov's notion of pos�lost as "the enemy of conscious ness, the denial of individual vitality: a desire to conform to the values of one's group, to see the world as others see it rather than to animate it with one's own perceptions" (281). In short, the un warranted elevation of pos�lost art mitigates the aesthetic power of originality. Scholars and critics, therefore, sustain pos�lost's sad hegemony when they simplify true art's inherent complexity in order to accommodate the spurious value systems of yet another, uninitiated audience. Generally regarded as protectors of our shared culture, academics in novels such as Pnin and Pale Fire either explicitly embrace pos�lost in their scholarly endeavors or parasitically ingra tiate themselves with genuine artists in an effort to justify their hallowed places in academe.4 For this reason, Nabokov warns in Nikolai Gogol, pos�lost's tawdry presence can manifest itself "in a book, in a soul, in an institution, in a thousand other places" (64). In "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," a lecture delivered during his tenure at Cornell during the 1940s, Nabokov deepens this aesthetic philosophy through his analysis of morality and



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"commonsense," his useful metaphor for understanding the myster ies of language and beauty and their thoroughly indeterminate qualities. Nabokov also establishes an ethical dimension for commonsense, arguing that an authentic morality, like authentic works of art, assumes the complex proportions of a "round" and wellconstructed literary character. Commonsense, however, seems "square" and ill conceived in contrast with the naturally evolving values of humankind. Nabokov writes: Commonsense is fundamentally immoral, for the natural morals of mankind are as irrational as the magic rites that they evolved since the immemorial dimness of time. Commonsense at its worst is sense made common, and so everything is comfortably cheap ened by its touch. Commonsense is square whereas all the most essential visions and values of life are beautifully round, as round as the universe or the eyes of a child at its frst circus show. (372) Further, in its celebration of complexity over commonality, Nabokov's ontology of commonsense necessarily embraces irrationality in its ethical construction. "The defeat of commonsense," Nabokov remarks, results in an "irrational belief in the goodness of man. . . . It becomes a solid and iridescent truth" (373). In this way, he extols the unin hibited virtues of goodness and truth over the banality of common sense. As this chapter will show, Nabokov attempts to undermine the infuence of commonsense in novels such as Pnin and Pale Fire through his pejorative depictions of the academy, an institution that, in his estimation, provides sanctuary - a place of exile, if you will - for pos�lost and ineffectual scholarship. In this manner, Nabokov, despite his stated distaste for satire as a narrative mode, proffers his own peculiar form of a pejorative poetics.5 The academic characters who populate his fctions clearly illustrate the commonsensical proclivities of institutions of higher learning, and the scholarship that they celebrate and publish in Nabokov's fctive world fnds its origins in the insignifcant and the mundane. Professor Timofey Pnin and Dr. Charles Kinbote, the protagonists of Pnin and Pale Fire, respectively, live in exile as eiigres among their academic communities. Yet, when read together, their characters allow us to observe the ethical matrix that undergirds Nabokov's satire of the academy: Pnin, a thoroughly decent and moral fgure, truly embraces the members of the Waindell College community, although they lampoon his prolixity and awkward mannerisms and





clearly do not deserve his adoration; Kinbote, however, personifes academic pos�lost, pursues his scholarly activities with narcissistic zeal, and regards his colleagues at Wordsmith College with absolute derision, treatment that his peers - at least in the metaphysical dimensions of Nabokov's pejorative aesthetic - seem to merit. An examination of their divergent approaches to scholarship offers simi lar revelations regarding Nabokov's satire of the academy as well. Pnin devotes himself wholeheartedly to teaching and to the com position of a Petite Histoire of Old Russia, a textual labor of love rather than a solution to his tenure problems. Nabokov depicts Kinbote, however, as a fgure of scholarly deceit who literally re moves the manuscript of Pale Fire� a Poei in Fo�r Cantos from the body of his dying friend and neighbor, the celebrated American poet, John Shade. His subsequent critical edition of Shade's poem features his own pretentious and selfindulgent Foreword, in addi tion to the inclusion of his overwhelming Commentary, a selection of selfserving annotations replete with fundamental errors in schol arship. By addressing the narratives of Pnin and Pale Fire in terms of Nabokov's contrapuntal depictions of Professor Pnin and Dr. Kinbote, I will demonstrate the ways in which his philosophies of pos�lost and commonsense inform the ethical critiques of the university communities in his novels. In Pnin, Nabokov's wayward, prolix professor functions as the novel's ethical standard, who, despite his inability to communicate with his colleagues outside of his scholarship and research interests, nevertheless attempts to embrace an academic community of jaded pseudointellectuals, and, in Nabokov's words, "campus dummies" (146). In a letter of 8 December 1955 to Cass Canfeld, Nabokov describes his latest creation: In Pnin, I have created an entirely new character. . . . A man of great moral courage, a pure man, a scholar and staunch friend, serenely wise, faithful to a single love, he never descends from a high plane of life characterized by authenticity and integrity. But handicapped and hemmed in by his incapability to learn a lan guage, he seems a fgure of fun to many an average intellectual. . . . (182) In the narrative, Pnin lives in virtual exile as an Assistant Professor of Russian at Waindell College, a provincial New England institu tion characterized by its hollow and artifcial intellectual society.



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Nabokov evinces these particular nuances of academic life at Waindell College through his description of a large mural "displaying recognizable members of the faculty in the act of passing on the torch of knowledge from Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Pasteur to a lot of monstrously built farm boys and farm girls" (9). An ethically vacant employer of unproductive scholars and profigate teachers, the college and its phony pretensions provide the backdrop for Pnin's tragic progress from tenuretrack professor endeavoring to fnd friendship amid an indifferent community to his emergence at the novel's conclusion as a lonely but competent intellectual, a "schlemielhero," in the words of David Cowart ("Art," 206). For the denizens of Waindell College, Pnin seems little more than an international oddity, a linguistically challenged clown who pro vides them with an entertaining diversion from their ineffectual professional lives. His awkward attempts at conversation and his frequent social gaffes make him a fgure of legendary comic propor tions on campus. At the beginning of the novel, for example, Nabokov depicts Pnin traveling by train to deliver a lecture - "Are the Rus sian People Communist?" - to the Cremona Women's Club. Using an outdated, fveyearold timetable, Pnin succeeds in missing his stop. When he belatedly arrives in Cremona, moreover, he discov ers that the paper in his coat pocket - "Dostoevski and Gestalt Psychology," rather than his intended lecture - actually belongs to Betty Bliss, a Waindell College graduate student (16-19). Although they malign these frequent social and scholarly pratfalls, Pnin's colleagues fail to realize that his errors actually result from his efforts to a�oi� the inevitable cultural clashes that problematize life for him in his adopted homeland. As the narrator of Pnin, a fellow eiigre, remarks: Pnin, it should be particularly stressed, was anything but the type of that goodnatured German platitude of last century, �er zerstre�te Professor. On the contrary, he was perhaps too wary, too persistently on the lookout for diabolical pitfalls, too painfully on the alert lest his erratic surroundings (unpredictable America) inveigle him into some bit of preposterous oversight. (13) For this reason, Pnin's efforts to overcorrect his behavior, rather than his absentmindedness or lack of sophistication, make him a comic fgure in the eyes of his peers. During his trip to Cremona, for instance, Pnin only employs the partially obsolete timetable in





an effort to arrive in town early so as to avoid his inevitable con ficts with the frustrating dilemmas of life in a foreign, and often unfriendly, locale. The timetable debacle likewise results in the loss of Pnin's luggage, which contained his suit - a suit in whose pockets, of course, his intended Cremona lecture safely rests. As the Cremona incident demonstrates, Pnin's inability to sur mount the linguistic and social hurdles of life in the United States ultimately renders him unable to communicate with his colleagues. As Pnin's Waindell College associate Professor Clements observes, "Our friend . . . employs a nomenclature all his own. His verbal vagaries add a new thrill to life. His mispronunciations are mytho poeic. His slips of the tongue are oracular. He calls my wife John" (165). Frustrated by such language barriers, Pnin attempts to com municate with his peers using the only means at his disposal, the international parlance of scholarship. As the narrator of the novel explains, Pnin "was utterly helpless without the prepared text" (15). Without the beneft of scholarly language, Pnin stumbles blindly and embarrasses himself frequently in his attempts to socialize with his new American "friends." When he meets his latest landlord, for example - after a succession of lodgings including the College Home for Single Instructors - he bluntly remarks, "I must warn: will have all my teeth pulled out. It is a repulsive operation" (34). Yet in other instances, with the wisdom of scholarly research at his disposal, Pnin fnds solace in his capacity to pursue academic research and ultimately communicate knowledge to his peers. After his colleague, Roy Thayer, asks him about a Russian bird, Pnin - the "annotator par excellence," according to Lucy Maddox (86) - diligently retires to the college library and studies its origins. At their next meeting, Pnin tells Thayer: "I have to report, sir, on the skylark, z�a�oronok in Russian, about which you made me the honor to interrogate me. Take this with you to your home. I have here tapped on the type writing machine a condensed account with bibliography" (157). Once again, Pnin o�erindulges himself in the activity at hand, providing Thayer with a detailed bibliography when a simple response might suffciently answer his colleague's query. Yet for the linguistically frustrated Pnin, no other means exists for establishing vital inter connections with his community. Ironically, Nabokov depicts Pnin in the novel as a thoughtful teacher and a capable scholar in sharp contrast with his professorial peers - "academic nonentities," Nabokov writes in Strong Opinions - who perform their academic duties with little zest or evidence of



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scholarly productivity (55). Despite their ineffectual teaching and scholarship, Pnin's colleagues enjoy tenure and success in a univer sity community that treats the adroit Pnin as a comic fgure, ultimately expelling him from its sacred groves. As Cowart notes, "In an aca demic milieu that seems to reserve its highest esteem for the successful disguise of ineptitude, Pnin invariably fails to avoid the public display of shortcomings that, however venial, expose him to ridicule" ("Art," 198). As teachers, the professors at Waindell College seem particularly ineffective in comparison to Pnin. While Pnin conducts his classes with benevolence and sprinkles his lectures with generous doses of spontaneity, his colleagues appear content to indulge their students with the "stale goods" of previous course sections (12). Professor Clements, for example, offers his annual "EOS" seminar. "This stood for the Evolution of Sense," the narrator reveals, "his greatest course (with an enrollment of twelve, none even remotely apostolic) which had opened and would close with the phrase destined to be overquoted one day: The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evo lution of nonsense" (32-3). Professor Hagen, yet another teacher in Pnin's orbit at Waindell, advocates a pedagogy that allows the instructor "to lock the student up in a soundproof cell and eliminate the lecture room." As Hagen gleefully observes, "The world wants a machine. . . . Phonograph records on every possible subject will be at the isolated student's disposal" (161). Finally, Professor Thomas lauds the merits of class room discussion, "which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss for ffty minutes something that neither the teacher nor they know" (161). In this way, the profes sors in Nabokov's satire of academic life function as the purveyors of an unexamined pos�lost culture, rather than as the trustworthy articulators of wisdom for America's naIve youth. As active and publishing scholars, Pnin's colleagues seem perhaps even more incompetent. Unlike their more productive eiigre friend who devotes himself to the careful composition of his history of Old Russia, the faculty of Waindell College only pursue those scholarly interests that allow them to indulge their egos and maintain their intellectual status. In addition to referring to Professor Blorenge as "a mummy, a bore, one of the stucco pillars of education" (30), Nabokov undermines Professor Lake's stature as a "recognized art expert": "While endowed with the morose temper of genius," Nabokov's caustic narrator remarks, Lake "lacked originality and was aware of that lack; his own paintings always seemed beautifully





clever imitations, although one could never quite tell whose manner he mimicked" (95-6). When a number of the faculty members gather for Pnin's disastrous housewarming party at the novel's conclusion, Nabokov's careful, blistering description of them serves as a virtual catalogue of their communal ineffectuality. Professor Thomas, for example, glows with delight after receiving a $10,000 grant to visit Havana and interview "palmclimbing fshermen." Remarkably, he gladly admits that "most of the actual feld work has been done already by others" (155). Yet another party guest, Professor Thayer, a member of Waindell's Department of English - that "aerie of hy pochondriacs," Nabokov writes - toils at his discipline in absolute anonymity. Thayer steadfastly refuses to discuss English literature, Nabokov's narrator tells us; moreover, he had squandered a decade of gray life on an erudite work dealing with a forgotten group of unnecessary poetasters, and kept a de tailed diary, in cryptogrammed verse, which he hoped posterity would someday decipher and, in sober backcast, proclaim the greatest literary achievement of our time - and for all I know, Roy Thayer, you might be right. (157) Ironically, the Waindell scholar who exhibits the most originality in his research, Professor Clements, also languishes as the "least liked scholar on campus." At the housewarming party, Clements, "fatter than ever, dressed in nice gray fannels, sank into the easy chair and immediately grabbed the frst book at hand, which hap pened to be an EnglishRussian and RussianEnglish pocket dictionary. Holding his glasses in one hand, he looked away, trying to recall something he had always wished to check but now could not re member," Nabokov's sardonic narrator observes (154). At the party, Clements, not unlike the exiled Pnin, can only communicate with his colleagues through his latest scholarly indulgences. As the evening progresses, for instance, Clements obsesses pretentiously about the dustjacket photograph that will adorn his latest book on the "Phil osophy of Gesture" (162). In this manner, Nabokov establishes the culture of artistic "commonsense" that defnes the campus community of Waindell College, itself a satiric microcosm of the selfinterested academic world inherent in Nabokov's aesthetic. The novel fnds its most ironic and revealing moments, however, in the author's depiction of himself as Pnin's pompous eiigre narrator.6 An ethically vacant



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fgure of comic proportions, the novel's narrator alludes to his identity during Pnin's visit to that eiigre haven, The Pines. In this instance, Nabokov refers to a coterie of exiled Russian authors, including Sirin, Nabokov's penname during his early years as a novelist (117).7 The following exchange between Professor Chateau and Pnin re garding butterfies - one of Nabokov's own abiding passions - also directs our attention to the identity of the novel's elusive narrator: "Pity Vladimir Vladimirovich is not here," remarked Chateau. "He would have told us all about these enchanting insects." "I have always had the impression that his entomology was merely a pose." (128) As Michael Wood notes, Nabokov endows the narrator "with all his own literary gifts . . . and [has] invited us to view him with the deepest moral suspicion" (161). In Pnin, the narrator, himself a pos�lost fgure in the tradition of the Waindell professorial faculty, problem atizes Pnin's life at every turn, hence Pnin's acerbic remark about Sirin's entomology. Nabokov's unsavory narrator later remembers meeting the young Pnin on "an April night in the early twenties, at a Paris cafe" (179). He likewise refects upon his earlier experiences with the love of Pnin's life, the aspiring poet, Liza, who once inaug urated a correspondence with the writer in an effort to secure a famous advocate for her verse: I wrote back telling Liza that her poems were bad and she ought to stop composing. Sometime later I saw her in another cafe, sitting at a long table, abloom and ablaze among a dozen young Russian poets. She kept her sapphire glance on me with a mock ing and mysterious persistence. We talked. I suggested she let me see those poems again in some quieter place. She did. I told her they struck me as being even worse than they had seemed at the frst reading. (181) In addition to offering sardonic refections upon Pnin's preexile years, the narrator refers to Pnin pejoratively as "a happy, footnote drugged maniac" (143), and, in the novel's closing pages, alludes to himself as "the fascinating lecturer" who will replace Pnin as Pro fessor of Russian at Waindell College (169). Pnin learns of his imminent dismissal from the college at the conclusion of his housewarming party, an affair that, if only for a





feeting instant, unites the disparate faculty members under the hospitable care of Pnin, their ethical host. Yet his party comes to its disastrous and halting close when Pnin asks Professor Hagen about his future at Waindell: "'Naturally, I am expecting that I will get tenure at last,' said Pnin rather slyly. 'I am now Assistant Profes sor nine years. Years run. Soon I will be Assistant Emeritus'" (167). Pnin understandably becomes livid when he learns about his un savory replacement, although much of his anger stems from his genuine interest in establishing himself among the fragmented university community at Waindell College, a prospect that suddenly dissolves with his denial of tenure. Pnin's banishment from academe allows him, however, to maintain the optimism and intellectual autonomy that differentiate him from the pseudointellectuals that populate such institutions. Charles Nicol astutely argues, moreover, that Pnin's "character development lies in his rejection of . . . Nabokov's per sona" (103). Indeed, Pnin steadfastly refuses throughout the novel to adopt the jaded mindset of his eiigre successor. By rebuffng Sirin's unethical ways in favor of his own integrity, Pnin opts for exile over compliance with the contradictory and unethical proclivities of his colleagues. As our sardonic narrator himself remarks, "Ge nius is nonconformity" (89). Nabokov underscores the true genius of Pnin through his scathing depiction of the protagonist's unwor thy peers, particularly through the characterization of his scornful narrator. Vladimir E. Alexandrov asserts that "Nabokov's purpose in portraying purblind, and, consequently, morally tarnished charac ters" establishes "a satirical contrast that makes his cognitive and aesthetic values stand out in bolder relief" (131-2). For this reason, Nabokov depicts an academic world that places scant value upon the employment of a competent and ethical scholar such as Pnin, and thus offers a devastating critique of postsecondary institutions and the pos�lost that their laziness and ineffectuality breeds. In Pale Fire, Dr. Kinbote embodies these very elements through his esoteric commentary and annotations to Shade's epic verse effusion, as well as through the fabulation of his own dramatic netherworld, the kingdom of Zembla, in his notes to Shade's poem. Kinbote's enigmatic approach to both his subject and his scholarly duties as the editor of a critical edition of Shade's Pale Fire� a Poei in Fo�r Cantos underscores, moreover, the ways in which academics create pos�lost works of art through their hyperawareness regarding the signifcance of their own roles in the maintenance of our larger artistic culture. In Kinbote's case, this selfindulgence results in his



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"epic and vandalously solipsist misreading of John Shade's poem," according to Martin Amis (118). This reifcation of the self in both the Foreword and the Commentary to the poem - in this instance, the self of the annotator rather than the self of the artist - allows Kinbote to satisfy his monomaniacal desires as a scholar over the ethical requirements of judicious scholarship that his editorial project necessarily entails. As Martine Hennard notes, Kinbote's reading of Shade's poem also "exemplifes in a parodic form the elusive nature and ambivalent status of any creative or interpretive activity" (300). In this way, Nabokov questions both the ethos of scholarship as well as the slippery requirements of the act of interpretation. De picting an academic madman engaged in scholarly activity of such a remarkably selfimportant nature also enables Nabokov to satirize the hallowed duties of scholarly editors and their efforts to reconfgure the mastertexts of our artistic culture in their own images.8 In his Foreword and Commentary to the poem, Kinbote frequently identifes himself as the friend and confdante of Shade, although a series of covert remarks in the text will simultaneously unhinge the extended hoax that Nabokov, in the narrative guise of Kinbote, establishes in the novel. Kinbote meets the poet when he accepts a teaching post at Wordsmith College in New Wye, Appalachia, and subsequently rents the house next door to Shade's. Nabokov's de scription of the institution demonstrates his abiding angst for the general perception of the academy as a bastion of culture and learning. Like Waindell College, Nabokov adorns Wordsmith College with the surreal and otherworldly trappings of an idealized vision of academe in contrast with the problematic scholars who populate its campus: Here are the great mansions of madness, the impeccably planned dormitories - bedlams of jungle music - the magnifcent palace of the Administration, the brick walls, the archways, the quad rangles blocked out in velvet green and chrysoprase, . . . the prisonlike edifce containing our classrooms and offces (to be called from now on Shade hall), the famous avenue of all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare, . . . the turquoise dome of the Observatory, wisps and pale plumes of cirrus, and the poplar curtained Romantiered football feld, deserted on summer days except for a dreamyeyed youngster fying - on a long control line in a droning circle - a motorpowered model plane. Dear Jesus, do something. (92-3)





Kinbote's descriptions of his friendship with Shade seem equally contradictory. He depicts their relationship as "on that higher, ex clusively intellectual level where one can rest from emotional troubles, not share them. I experienced a grand sense of wonder whenever I looked at him," he continues, "especially in the presence of other people, inferior people" (27). These "inferior people," especially the Wordsmith College faculty, receive particular attention in Kinbote's deceitful Commentary to the poem. In his Foreword, Kinbote fre quently documents his ostensibly Herculean efforts to capture Shade in the act of composing his masterpiece, when in fact he illustrates himself in the clandestine activity of spying on his neighbor: "I had learned exactly when and where to fnd the best points from which to follow the contours of his inspiration," Kinbote writes. "My binoculars would seek him out and focus upon him from afar in his various places of labor" (88-9). Such instances afford Nabokov with the opportunity to highlight the discrepancy between Kinbote's zeal for his subject and the actual manner in which he annotates Shade's poem. In this way, then, Nabokov satirizes the selfserving impetus that motivates academic research - the "slings and arrows of outrageous American academe," according to Priscilla Meyer (201) - as well as the fallacious scholarly distance that academics osten sibly maintain between themselves and the art that they critique. In his Foreword to Shade's poem, Kinbote himself initially adopts the persona of a meticulous and methodical textual editor through his identifcation of the poem, the nature of its composition, and the 92 extant index cards upon which the poet composed Pale Fire. The monumental narrative intrusions endemic to his critical edition quickly reveal themselves, however, when he remarks in his intro duction that "there is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings" (13). Kinbote's prolifc moments of textual interruption, motivated by the annotator's desire to establish his identity despite its dangers to the integrity of the Urtext of Shade's poem, underscore Nabokov's intent in the novel to illustrate the creation of academic pos�lost. In many instances, Kinbote's editorial intrusions seem irrelevant to the exegesis of Shade's verse. The explanatory note to line 130 of the poem ("I never bounced a ball or swung a bat"), for example, demonstrates the erratic intrusiveness of Kinbote's own ego: "Frankly I too never excelled in soccer and cricket; I am a passable horseman, a vigorous though unorthodox skier, a good skater, a tricky wrestler, and an enthusiastic rock climber," Kinbote writes, with little regard for his rejoinder's lack



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I wish to say something about an earlier note (to line 12). . . . It is the only time in the course of the writing of these diffcult comments, that I have tarried, in my distress and disappoint ment, on the brink of falsifcation. I must ask the reader to ignore these two lines (which, I am afraid, do not even scan properly). I could strike them out before publication but that would mean reworking the entire note, or at least a considerable part of it, and I have no time for such stupidities. (227-8) In another instance, his note to line 697 ("It heaved and went on trudging to a more/Conclusive destination"), Kinbote concludes one of his more circuitous notes with the simple, albeit irrelevant, remark: "I think I shall break this note here" (253). Finally, in his note to lines 747-8 ("It was a story in a magazine/About a Mrs. Z."), Kinbote declines to delineate the origins of Shade's arcane allusion, arguing that "anybody having access to a good library could, no doubt, easily trace that story to its source and fnd the name of the lady; but such humdrum potterings are beneath true scholarship" (256). David Packman remarks that in Pale Fire Nabokov postulates a "parody of the vertigo of interpretation" (68), an intensely satirical depiction of the hermeneutic circle. While these examples demon strate Kinbote's inherently intrusive editorial persona, his greatest sins as a textual critic lie in the fundamental errors in scholarship that mark his commentary to Shade's poem. His most glaring error concerns the Shakespearean origins of the title of Shade's work. In his note to line 962 ("Help me, Will! Pale Fire."), Kinbote rightly ascribes the title of the poem to Shakespeare: "Paraphrased, this evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for something I might use for a title," he sarcastically remarks. "But in which of the Bard's works did our poet cull it?" he asks, while ceding his textual auth ority to an implied audience: "My readers must make their own research." Although Kinbote admits to possessing "a tiny vest pocket edition of Tiion of �t�ens," he fails to locate the origins of Shade's title in the play. "It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded



of pertinence to the passage in question (117-18). In his note to line 550 ("Iph borrowed some peripheral debris"), moreover, Kinbote - in a moment of outlandish editorial circularity - actually refers to the text of a supposedly problematic earlier note that continues to nag at his conscience:


as an equivalent of 'pale fre' (if it had, my luck would have been a statistical monster)," Kinbote concludes (285).9 Kinbote offers a vir tually untenable reading of the aesthetic quality of Shade's verse in his note to lines 557-8 ("How to locate in blackness, with a gasp,/ Terra the Fair, an oracle of jasp"). Remarkably, Kinbote describes this instance in Pale Fire as "the loveliest couplet in this canto" (228). In Literary Syibiosis� t�e Re�ongg�re� Te�t in Ttentiet�Cent�ry Writing (1993), Cowart argues that such "fabricated variants" lend credence to the verisimilitude of Kinbote's commentary, "which parodies the practice of critical annotation" (82). Such a maneuver allows Nabokov, then, to problematize once again the selfrefexive nature of academic scholarship and its propensity for the unwarranted elevation of pos�lost art. While Kinbote utterly fails to recognize the monumental editorial intrusions and scholarly errors that he effects in Pale Fire, he re serves special contempt nevertheless for his equally ineffectual colleagues at Wordsmith College, as well as for the international coterie of "Shadeans" who devote themselves to the study of the late poet and his works. Like the denizens of Pnin's Waindell College, Kinbote's peers at Wordsmith, a locale that he describes disdainfully as "academic suburbia" (24), embrace their scholarly duties because of their selfindulgent possibilities of tenure, salary, and selfpromotion. Drawing upon his penchant for "covert polylingualism" (267) Joseph Nassar's metaphor for the annotator's adhoc denigration of his colleagues - Kinbote comments about the shallow intellectual activities of the professoriate. In addition to mocking the "United English Department" and its "Freudian fancies" (228), Kinbote ma ligns the visiting "delegates to the New Wye Linguistic Conference, all of them lapellabeled, and representing the same foreign language, but none being able to speak it, so that conversation was conducted . . . in rather ordinary AngloAmerican" (279-80).10 He harbors particu lar malice for the college's "bloated Russian Department" and its Head, the rejuvenated "Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings" (155). Kinbote's animus for his colleagues also fnds its roots in his discovery of an English department memorandum questioning his scholarly capacity to edit his late neighbor's poem. According to the memo, circulated by the Head of the department, Professor Nattochdag: Several members of the Department of English are painfully con cerned over the fate of a manuscript poem, or parts of a manuscript



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Marianna Torgovnick argues that Kinbote's feud with the Shadeans in the Department of English over the disposition of the late poet's manuscript underscores Nabokov's satire regarding "the attitudes of veneration and scholarship unto deadliness that have made so much literature solely the province of the academy" (24). By depicting Kinbote in the act of reconfguring the meaning of Shade's poem for his own nefarious ends, moreover, Nabokov problematizes the academy's exclusive domain over the mastertexts of our culture. In "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," Nabokov observes that "a madman is reluctant to look at himself in a mirror because the face he sees is not his own: his personality is beheaded" (377). Pale Fire illustrates Kinbote's own deranged machinations as he at tempts to redefne his elusive personal identity through the transformational matrix of scholarship. As Nabokov's novel clearly demonstrates, academic research, when entrusted to the wrong hands - or in Kinbote's case, to the hands of the insane - affords the commonsensical critic with the power to shrink the distance that sound scholarship demands between the critic and the text. In Lit erary Syibiosis, Cowart writes that "Kinbote's reading of Shade's poem also reveals a ridiculous desire to participate in its production and Nabokov, hinting that many a critic is motivated by precisely this ignoble confession of creative impotence and envy," Cowart continues, "anticipates to devastating effect the pretensions of a later generation of literary analysts who routinely attempt to place their own necessarily dependent and even parasitic work on the same plane as original works of the imagination" (81).11 Pale Fire under scores this parasitic behavior through Nabokov's depiction of Kinbote's actions throughout the novel, as well as his behavior moments after Shade's murder. By illustrating Kinbote's manifold attempts to forge his own imprint upon Shade's text, Nabokov es tablishes the ways in which the overzealous critic strives to participate in the creative process. When Shade becomes the victim of an assassin's bullet at the novel's conclusion, Kinbote makes cer tain that "the poem was safe" before ascertaining the poet's condition. He then locates Shade, lying "prone on the ground with a red spot on his white shirt." Although Kinbote "still hoped that he [Shade]



poem, left by the late John Shade. The manuscript fell into the hands of a person who not only is unqualifed for the job of editing it, belonging as he does to another department, but is known to have a deranged mind. (195)


had not been killed," he fnds a place in his house to conceal the manuscript of Shade's poem before calling for an ambulance. Kinbote later admits in the fnal pages of his Commentary to literally wearing the manuscript as an article of clothing for several days. He confesses to distributing "the ninetytwo index cards about my person, twenty in the righthand pocket of my coat, as many in the lefthand one, a batch of forty against my right nipple and the twelve precious ones with variants in my innermost breast pocket." In this manner, Kinbote transcends his scholarly identity and unites himself at last with the object of his research: "Thus with cautious steps, among deceived enemies, I circulated, plated with poetry, armored with rhymes, stout with another man's song, stiff with cardboard, bullet proof at long last," Kinbote writes (300). In his effort to reveal the demented scholar in the act of collaps ing the boundaries between life and art, between prudent scholarship and pos�lost, Nabokov satirizes the academy and its often unfortu nate sanctifcation of selfindulgent scholarly inquiry over more socially and culturally relevant academic endeavors such as effec tive teaching or even poor Pnin's carefully researched history of Old Russia. In Vla�iiir Naboko�� t�e �ieri�an Years (1991), Boyd argues that "Pale Fire portrays the isolation of the soul as the funda mental condition of mortal life" (447). Like Pnin, Nabokov's latter novel banishes its protagonist to virtual exile in its concluding chap ter. Kinbote's fnal words themselves indicate the dangers of pos�lost and its enduring threat to the valid interpretation of the artistic gems of our culture: "I shall continue to exist," he warns. "I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet on another campus . . ." (300). Pnin's exodus from the narrative, however, leaves the reader with a sense of optimism jus tifed by the elements of humanity and integrity that defne his persona. At Pnin's conclusion, Nabokov's narrator watches as Pnin's "little sedan boldly" departs Waindell College, and, "free at last, spurted up the shining road, . . . where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen" (191). The narrative of Pale Fire, of course, rewards the eiigre Pnin with a new position and yet another opportunity to fnd selfhood and interconnection in New Wye. For this reason, Andrew Field argues, "it is Kinbote - not merely mad, but also supremely confdent, who may be spoken of as truly 'alien ated'" (319). In Nabokov's philosophy of pos�lost, Kinbote operates by virtue of a bankrupt value system, a selfaggrandizing schema that lauds the pursuit of personal achievement over the needs of



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the community. As F. G. Bailey asserts in Morality an� ��pe�ien�y� t�e Folklore of ��a�eii� Politi�s (1977), "The scholar's frst obligation is to serve mankind . . . by scrutinizing continually and carefully the likely effects of new knowledge on the world" (40). In the ethi cal world of Professor Timofey Pnin - despite his prolixity and his pratfalls - a magnanimous doctrine such as Bailey's truly matters.




60


Searching for Goodness and the

Ethical Self: Joyce Carol Oates's

T�e H�ngry G�osts

"The academy is, despite everything, a good place" " " "" - Geoffrey Hartman, Criti�isi in t�e Wil�erness

In an effort to abstain from the textual violence of censorship, con temporary ethical criticism naturally eschews the strict codifcation of moral standards to afford readers instead with a pluralistic means for examining the depiction of concepts such as truth and goodness in narratives" Yet as Lawrence Douglas observes, "For all our savvy and theoretical sophistication, we have lost the capacity to make very simple judgments about a text - such as, for example, whether it claims to be true or intends to make us laugh" (A56)" For this reason, ethical critics advocate the parlance of moral philosophy over the critical fnesse of poststructuralism" The rhetoric of moral philosophy empowers critics with the interpretive latitude to account for ethical issues and their substantial roles in the creation and interpretation of literary works" In their desire to highlight the inter connections between readers and their textual experiences, proponents of an ethical paradigm challenge us to render value judgments about narratives and their propensity to enlighten us about the human condition" In this manner, ethical criticism informs us about the essential nature of ourselves, while inviting us to deliberate, moreover, about our own notions of good, evil, truth, and knowledge, among other moral issues" In her important volume of moral philosophy, T�e So�ereignty of Goo� (1970), Iris Murdoch elaborates upon the concept of goodness 60



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and the ways in which our personal confgurations of it govern human perceptions regarding the relationship between the self and the world" Murdoch's paradigm for understanding goodness func tions upon the equally abstract notions of free will and moral choice" "Good is indefnable," Murdoch writes, "because judgments of value depend upon the will and choice of the individual" (3)" Postulating any meaning for goodness, then, requires individuals to render per sonal observations about the nature of this precarious expression and its role in their life decisions" Although Murdoch concedes that goodness essentially fnds its origins in "the nature of concepts very central to morality such as justice, truthfulness, or humility," she correctly maintains, nevertheless, that only individual codes of morality can determine personal representations of goodness (89)" "Good is an empty space into which human choice may move" (97), she asserts, and "the strange emptiness which often occurs at the moment of choosing" underscores the degree of autonomy in herent in the act of making moral decisions (35)" Individuals may also measure their personal conceptions of goodness in terms of its foul counterpart, evil, which Murdoch defnes generally as "cyni cism, cruelty, indifference to suffering" (98)" Again, though, like good, evil fnds its defnition in the personal ethos constructed by indi viduals during their life experiences in the human community" Because such ontological concepts remain so vitally contingent upon personal rather than communal perceptions of morality, Murdoch suggests that their comprehension lies in the mysterious fabric of the self" "The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion," she observes, and "goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness" (93)" In Murdoch's philosophy, then, good ness manifests itself during the meaningful pursuit of selfawareness and selfknowledge" In T�e H�ngry G�osts� Se�en �ll�si�e Coie�ies (1974), Joyce Carol Oates offers a collection of short stories that, when read as a thematic ensemble, provide a fascinating portrait of the academic self and its fragmented ethical construction"1 Oates "mockingly looks at the fears and phobias, the stock characters and situations of the socalled ivorytower life, the cruelty, cowardice, plagiarism, pedantry, jeal ousy, and rivalry among academic peers," Joanne �" Creighton writes (128)" Her satiric tales depict intellectuals looking inward to satisfy their own desires with scant concern for the larger, and often more urgent, needs of their communities"2 This abiding selfimportance,



Sear��ing for Goo�ness an� t�e �t�i�al Self


in addition to an insatiable appetite for power and status, ensures that Oates's academic characters remain virtually unable to main tain interpersonal relationships" In a letter of 22 September 1974 to the Net York Tiies Book Re�iet, Oates defends her acerbic attack on the academy in T�e H�ngry G�osts: "In writing about the academic and literary world, I wanted only to illustrate from the inside, so to speak, how ambition, lust for fame and prestige, and egotism, can rule the lives of presumably intelligent people" (43)" Particularly infuenced by her experiences as an English professor at such insti tutions as the University of Windsor, the University of Detroit, and Princeton University, Oates's academic fctions demonstrate the ways in which scholars opt for personal satisfaction over universal good ness"3 As Mary Kathryn Grant writes, "Running throughout Oates's fction is the persistent absence of community, of loving, support ive, enduring commitments to others" (22)" This enduring lack of positive human interconnection underscores Oates's pejorative as sessment of the academy and its inability to produce an environment conducive to its populace's instinctive desires for selfknowledge and community" In T�e H�ngry G�osts, Oates draws upon the tenets of Eastern religion in her effort to weave a satiric metaphor for the academic self and its misplaced value system" An epigraph to the volume explains Oates's motivation for the collection's title: "A preta (ghost) is one who, in the ancient Buddhist cosmology, haunts the earth's surface, continually driven by hunger - that is, desire of one kind or another," she writes (6)" In this manner, Oates establishes a vi able means for reading her tales about the academy and the ghostly selves who roam its corridors" In the seven stories collected in T�e H�ngry G�osts, Oates depicts a coterie of intellectuals - including professorial faculty, creative writers, and graduate students - engag ing in a range of selfindulgent activities" Oates's academic characters "remain immobilized in the trance of the self," according to Stanley Trachtenberg" "Their small successes are not only seldom satisfy ing," he writes, "but always quickly overshadowed by the diffculties resulting from an exclusive reliance upon intellect as a way of per ceiving the world" (52)" This hyperintellectualized worldview invariably ensures - at least in Oates's fctive universe - that aca demics struggle to establish selfidentity in the shadows of the academy's unfriendly environs" "Preoccupied with the spasmodic, failed gestures of the ego," in the words of Eileen T" Bender, Oates's intellectuals rarely emerge triumphant from her tales; indeed, they



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rarely fall in love ("Autonomy," 49)" Instead, Oates depicts them in the act of haunting the halls of their respective institutions of higher learning, searching for yet another means to sate their desires for the validation of their intellectual prowess" As this chapter will demonstrate, an ethical reading of T�e H�ngry G�osts underscores the ways in which Oates's academic characters vie for infuence and prestige in an effort to assert their intellectual dominion over their colleagues" In her essay, "New Heaven and Earth," Oates observes that "in many of us the Renaissance ideal is still powerful, its voice tyrannical" It declares: I will, I want, I demand, I think, I am" This voice tells us that we are not quite omnipotent but must act as if we were," she continues, "pushing out into the world of other people or of nature that will necessarily resist us, that will try to destroy us, and that we must conquer" (53)" For Oates's academic characters, this abiding need to "conquer" one's peers - this compulsion to establish a kind of intellectual "omnip otence" - inevitably results in a series of problematic moral choices that often leave them in a state of personal and professional crisis" Murdoch writes that "the world is aimless, chancy, and huge, and we are blinded by self" (100)" In Oates's fctive world, the academic self's craving for validation blinds her characters to their innate desires for interpersonal connection and community" For this reason, many of her academic tales conclude with her intellectual protag onists struggling in the throes of loneliness and selfconscious despair, frantically searching for some form of goodness to transform their socially vacuous lives" By depicting her academics in such a desul tory state - predicated, of course, by their own egotistical quests for selfvalidation - Oates succeeds in creating her own brand of a pejorative poetics, a satiric mechanism for highlighting the ethical contradictions inherent in the obsessive life of the mind" When read as an aggregate text, the stories comprising T�e H�ngry G�osts illustrate the hermetic lives of academics and their enduring incapacity, at least in Oates's satiric schema, to establish human interconnection in their competitive intellectual milieu" Subtitled as "allusive comedies," Oates's tales in the volume share the titles of several wellknown texts, including John Bunyan's T�e Pilgriias Progress, Friedrich Nietzsche's T�e Birt� of Trage�y, Alexis de Tocqueville's Deio�ra�y in �ieri�a, Booker T" Washington's Up froi Sla�ery, and William Blake's Des�ripti�e Catalog�e" In "Democracy in America," Oates renders a stunning portrait of a young academic, Ronald Pauli, and his existential struggle to locate the scattered





pages of his manuscript in the decrepit apartment of his late copy editor, Mr" Dietrich" Like many of the characters in Oates's aca demic fctions, Ronald fnds his notion of selfidentity challenged by the professional requirement to "publishorperish"" Determined to retrieve the only extant copy of his book manuscript - a 385 page opus on Tocqueville, of course - Ronald visits Dietrich's squalid quarters after the copy editor's death in an effort to recapture the text that promises to ensure his employment security at a nearby university" "My life seems so haphazard," Ronald complains, and "having my book accepted by the Press was the one certain thing, the one reality " " " and Dr" Mercer said he was sure I'd be kept on, he was sure the Department's executive committee would be im pressed with it, my having a book accepted" It means so much to me" (19-20)" After receiving access to Dietrich's apartment from the late editor's sympathetic neighbor, Mrs" Novak, Ronald bristles at the remarkable scene of disarray that awaits him in Dietrich's di sheveled residence: What an odor! - and what a sight! He started" The room was a jumble of chairs, boxes, bedding, books, magazines, and stray papers" " " " Everywhere there was debris - empty tin cans, empty milk cartons, and frozen food packages" The smell in the room made Ronald's eyes water, it was so sharp and acrid" He looked at the clutter for several long moments, in silence" He had never anticipated anything like this" (13-14) Ronald discovers himself even more perplexed when he realizes that his manuscript lies strewn amidst the refuse of Dietrich's quarters" "How could anyone live like this?" Ronald wonders (16)" Although he initially registers concern over Dietrich's putrid lifestyle, Ronald soon becomes enrapt in his own desires for self suffciency and professional reward" "It's almost as if this all happened on purpose," he exclaims to Mrs" Novak" "I realize it wasn't Mr" Dietrich's fault that he died, I realize it was a tragic thing" " " " But I've been very upset about many things, it wasn't certain until the middle of the summer whether I still had a job here" (19)" As Ronald searches through the debris in Dietrich's rooms, he discovers pages of his manuscript tucked into the late editor's soiled bed, mixed amongst old university leafets and memos, stuffed into drawers, and lying crumpled on the flthy tiles of the bathroom foor" Ronald even happens upon another, more scholarly forceful manuscript on



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Tocqueville amidst the wreckage of Dietrich's apartment: "Though he had no time to waste, he couldn't resist glancing through the pages " " " he felt a strange lightheadedness, a bewilderment tinged with envy," Oates writes" "Whoever had written these pages seemed much more confdent of his argument than Ronald had been; his own writing now struck him as weak and tentative" (22)" Con sumed with the need to sate his own desires with little regard for the miserable existence of his copy editor, Ronald pauses in his search for the pages of his text only to stuff the offending leaves of his mysterious rival's manuscript in a desk drawer, as well as to glance lasciviously at Mrs" Novak, the wife of one of his senior colleagues: "Ronald had the impulse to grab hold of her" She was such a pretty woman," he thinks to himself, "even in this place!" (19)" Yet as Ronald sifts through the sad, fnal residue of Dietrich's life he becomes acutely aware of "the tattered pieces of his own identity," Creighton writes (130)" Remarkably, Ronald begins to re gret the manner in which he trampled through the disorder of Dietrich's apartment on such a selffulflling mission, and, as the story concludes, feels a kinship with Dietrich and their similarly dismal prospects without the support and friendship of the larger, caring human community" "It isn't fair," he sobs to Mrs" Novak as he departs" "I'm so afraid" (30)" Although Trachtenberg argues that "Democracy in America" re veals "the indignity to which an academic will submit in attempting to advance his career," the story illustrates, perhaps even more sig nifcantly, the paltry rewards of a fragmented ethical system that values personal achievement over communal goodness (41)" In this way, Oates undercuts the academy and its elevation of text over community, while also deriding the ways in which it reveres hol low individual accomplishments and ignores the more meaningful dividends of interpersonal connection" Along with three of the other stories collected in T�e H�ngry G�osts, Oates situates "The Birth of Tragedy" in the fctional campus setting of Hilberry University, located in southwestern Ontario"4 Like "Democracy in America," this cam pus vignette explores the woeful costs of intellectual selfindulgence" Frequently read from the point of view of the story's protagonist, graduate student Barry Sommer, "The Birth of Tragedy" in fact oper ates as a satiric critique of the persona of Barry's faculty supervisor, Professor Robinson Thayer, the English department's resident Re naissance specialist"5 An Oxford graduate, Thayer achieved academic stardom for publishing a wellreceived critical study devoted to





Shakespeare and legal imagery" After being hired at Hilberry to serve as Thayer's teaching assistant, Barry learns that the university only admitted him and his peers to maintain enrollment in a graduate program that they ultimately intend to scuttle" The fedgling scholar's university experience becomes even more problematic, however, under Thayer's tutelage" The senior professor ostensibly takes Barry into his gentle confdence, generously providing his assistant with the opportunity to lecture on Hailet to his undergraduate Renais sance drama course, in addition to sharing freely the fruits of his academic experience with his new student: "It's a very complex, sinister world here - but of course exhilarating, if you don't weaken," he tells Barry" "It's like a Shakespearean play - without the ffth act" The fourth act just goes on and on, scenes of high tragedy alternate with scenes of the most contemptible, gross comedy" (112)" In this way, Oates establishes a metaphor between dramatic tragedy and academic life" For Thayer, the "gross comedy" of his campus experiences manifests itself in the ironic arrogance with which he conducts his professional business" Although he presents himself as an accomplished and confdent senior scholar, Thayer in fact labors in mediocrity" In addition to staking his professional reputation on a fimsy theory that Shakespeare plagiarized the works of Sturgess, an obscure Renaissance dramatist, Thayer frets about the "spies" that he believes the student newspaper sends to observe his lec tures" The real tragedy of the professor's existence fnds its origins in his abject loneliness" Despite his standing as the department's most renowned scholar, Thayer rarely associates with his fellow faculty members and confnes himself to his room at a local Hol iday Inn, where he relocated after a mysterious dispute with his landlord" The story's central moment of crisis occurs when Thayer presumably invites Barry to his motel room to prepare for his assistant's upcoming lecture" Consumed with anxiety over his as signment, Barry arrives in desperate need of his senior colleague's counsel" Instead, he encounters Thayer in all of the professor's tragic loneliness" When Barry rebuffs Thayer's amorous advances and begs him for advice regarding his impending lecture, the professor expels the graduate student from his motel room and angrily remarks, "Now you've taken your place among them, among my enemies" (122)" Utterly ill prepared for his assignment, Barry delivers a lecture that rivals the comic proportions previously established by Jim Dixon's drunken speech on "Merrie England" in Kingsley Amis's L��ky Jii (1954)" A catastrophic discourse comprised of false starts and prolixity,



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Barry's lecture nevertheless posits the younger scholar's own theory of tragedy" For Barry, tragedy only occurs - in dramatic contrast with the jaded belief system of his paranoid superior - when people neglect to avail themselves of the liberating possibilities of freedom" "Hamlet's problem," in Barry's estimation, "was that he didn't run like hell to some other country when the ghost showed up" (129)" As Barry leaves the lecture hall, he encounters one of Oates's most sinister incarnations of evil in her academic fctions, the de ranged persona of Thayer grinning maliciously and tightly gripping a tape recorder "as if prepared to defend himself" with it" Struck by the tragedy of Thayer's emotional state, Barry determines at that moment to leave - indeed, to liberate himself from - the academy: "The hell with Thayer," he concludes, "the hell with all of them" Something was dead but something else was living" " " " Barry with an advanced degree or without an advanced degree, what did it matter?" (130)" By opting for the possibilities of goodness that life outside of Thayer's evil, insular world seems to offer, Barry strives to elude the professor's lonely fate" As Trachtenberg astutely ob serves, "The isolation of the individual from the community results only in tragedy" (44)" While "The Birth of Tragedy" demonstrates Oates's narrative denigration of the hermetic aspects of academic life, "Up from Slavery" underscores the ways in which unsavory campus characters use the university community as a means for satisfying their own nefarious ambitions" As Ellen G" Friedman notes, "Oates repeatedly describes the excesses of will, the excesses of the isolated ego" (7)" In "Up from Slavery," Oates illustrates the destruc tive power of personal will and its potential for mitigating the community's capacity for ensuring justice and promoting universal goodness" Although much of the story purports to consider the marginalized experiences of Franklin Ambrose as an AfricanAmerican professor at Hilberry University, "Up from Slavery" also demonstrates the many ways in which Frank, despite his racial distinction among the university's predominantly white faculty, operates as an insider within the ranks of the institution's political establishment" Hermann Severin argues that this tale "is not very much concerned with the specifc features and problems of the academic world, and therefore adds little to Oates's general view of the intellectual" (121)" Yet "Up from Slavery," when explored in terms of its depiction of the un ethical proclivities of academic politics, seems to speak volumes about university life and the selfsh propensity of individuals, in





this case, intellectual ones, to satisfy their own ambitions rather than adhere to the community's desires for fairness and justice" Severin incorrectly attributes Oates's satire in this instance to the "rather narrow thematic scope" that he perceives in T�e H�ngry G�osts (134)"6 Oates's campus tales interpret academic life as a social microcosm, however, that embodies the same ethical dilemmas and cultural ills that plague the larger human community" Her intellec tual characters function in her analysis of the self, moreover, as an express means for critiquing the academic condition and its peculiar elevation of the needs of the individual over the notion of a universal good" In "Up from Slavery," Oates depicts Frank indulging the whimsy of his preternatural ego instead of considering the more urgent needs of a colleague in professional jeopardy" A Harvard graduate and a Fulbright Fellow, Frank quickly establishes himself as Hilberry's most popular professor of English" Bored with his routine existence in the university's remote locale, Frank fnds solace in a series of affairs with his coterie of fawning young undergraduates" In one instance, Frank's extracurricular activities nearly erupt in scandal when the parents of one of his students notify the Board of Trustees about his behavior" After a fourhour conference in the President's offce, how ever, Frank "managed to be forgiven" when he "promised not to be 'indiscreet' again" (67)" Yet his ultimate crisis of the self occurs after he agrees to serve on the Appointments and Promotion Committee, a powerful com mittee that faculty members in the department privately refer to as the Hiring and Firing Committee" Although Frank appears unim pressed with candidates from Yale and Oxford, respectively, he fnds himself transfxed by the University of Chicago's Molly Holt, the candidate "who rushed in ffteen minutes late for her interview, wearing a very short leather skirt and bright gold boots"" A divorcee with a threeyearold son and the author of a dissertation entitled "Crises of Sexual Identity in Trollope and Dickens," Molly espouses her commitment "to the struggle for equality between men and women" during her interview (67)" Although he deftly convinces the other committee members to hire Molly as a Lecturer, Frank becomes perplexed as she resists his numerous sexual advances" After she angrily rebuffs his firtations, Frank implores the Head of the department, Dr" Barth, to convene an emergency meeting of the Appointments and Promotion Committee to consider Molly's em ployment status" During the meeting, Frank falsifes a number of



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accusations regarding her abilities as a teacher" In addition to argu ing that her students disrespect her because she mispronounces words, Frank tells the committee that she deliberately presents them with misinformation in the classroom" "I wonder about her professional commitment," Frank informs the committee (73)" After the com mittee votes overwhelmingly for Molly's dismissal from the department, Dr" Barth sanctimoniously remarks, "Frank, we belong to a profession with extremely rigorous standards" " " " I'm sure Miss Holt will be happier in another university, with less demanding criteria of excellence" (75)" As the story closes, Frank pities himself for enduring such a "draining emotional experience" and retires to his study where he enjoys a "delicate, sensitive, almost poetic mel ancholy" (76)" In this manner, Oates proffers a "satiric incarnation of the academic egoist," according to Bender (Joy�e, 106)" Amaz ingly, it is Frank who feels emotionally and ethically violated after engineering Molly's dismissal when she refuses to satisfy the needs of his egotistical academic self" When he maneuvers politically to ensure Molly's nonrenewal in the department, Frank only succeeds in eroding the qualities of fairness and communal good that the academy ostensibly seeks to represent" In addition to exploring the ways in which the academic self sacrifces the prospect of goodness in order to sate its own desires, Oates examines the creative writer's similarly desperate place in the academy in such stories as "Rewards of Fame" and "Angst"" In Oates's satiric vision of the academy, her characterization of writers underscores the peculiar interconnections between pedagogy and creativity, between the private and public lives of the mind" Her writers initially long for the comfort and stability of academic life, yet ultimately aspire to the selfindulgent qualities of fame and its promises of success beyond the insular walls of academe" Greg Johnson argues that "for Oates's academics, words replace a tawdry but threatening external world and become the tools of their re trenchment within the safety of institutional power" (32)" For this reason, Oates's ghostly creative writers employ language as their most dangerous weapon against their perceived enemies within the academy" Frequently overwhelmed by the dysfunctionality of their interpersonal relationships, Oates's writerprotagonists hunger for the selfliberation of academic fame yet secretly covet "the triumphant annihilation of [their] enemies," in the words of Ildik6 de Papp Carrington (149)" By highlighting the interconnections between her creative writers' scholarly duties and their artistic desires, Oates





underscores this perpetual state of fux in which her writerintellectuals struggle to fnd their particular notions of selfhood" In "Rewards of Fame," Oates traces the life of uncertainty en dured by a middleaged poet, Murray Licht, as he attempts to provide sustenance for an assortment of children and exwives through a series of nonrenewable lectureships and poetry readings" Through out the story, Murray desperately attempts to make contact with Rosalind, the object of his current affections who presumably in tends to marry him when he returns to New York from the latest stop on his reading tour, a small midwestern college in Kitimit, Iowa" Troubled by the apparently precarious state of his romantic relationship as well as by his stagnating poetic reputation, Murray stumbles through his visit to the campus in a daze of selfdoubt" Murray's dismal emotional state becomes further exacerbated when he learns the identity of the poetry weekend's keynote speaker, Joachim Myer, Murray's rival and former schoolmate" Once an aspiring poet himself, Myer achieved renown as one of the academy's rising stars after publishing an infuential essay in the Net York Re�iet of Books "that dealt in an elliptical manner with issues raised by Marshall McLuhan and George Steiner and Wittgenstein; a masterpiece of criticism and style" (168)" A remarkably successful poetry reading in front of a packed auditorium allows Murray to forget tempor arily about Myer's impending visit to the campus" Murray's venom for Myer increases, however, when he learns that the critic will earn $1,000 for his efforts, in dramatic contrast with the lowly $300 that Murray receives for his poetry reading" Myer's lecture entitled "What Was Poetry?" - largely consists of a stream of vague phrases about freedom and popular culture: "If the act be not ordained with its imperishable wordimage, how shall it be experienced?" Myer asks the audience" "I bring you freedom! total liberation! the food of the polymorphousperverse cosmos denied you by your parents and by our archoppressor, Poetry!" (169)" During his con cluding remarks, Myer glibly refers to Murray as "the last, the very last, of the famous poets" (173)" Rather than registering anger at Myer's disparaging comment, Murray pathetically fnds solace in the fact that anyone, even someone as repellent to Murray as Myer, once thought of his verse as signifcant: "Had he been famous all this time, without knowing it?" Murray wonders to himself (174)" By depicting the poet in the act of chasing the vague threads of a literary reputation that has already eluded him, Oates reveals the remarkable power of words in the lives of her writerprotagonists"



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Even the mere possibility of fame excites Murray into a dizzying state of emotional chaos: "He felt razed, emptied, broken, beaten, annihilated - exhausted and defeated, yes, and yet so eerily, so in voluntarily happy," Oates writes (177)" In addition to demonstrating the manner in which the academy values the artifcial linguistic pyrotechnics of Myer's scholarship over the artistic substance of Murray's verse, "The Rewards of Fame" illustrates the ways in which Oates's writerintellectuals long for literary fame to the detriment of their selfesteem and their possibilities for selfsuffciency" Like "Rewards of Fame," "Angst" examines the precarious emotional state of Oates's creative writers and their diffculties negotiating between the requirements of fame and their obligations to the academy" Murdoch notes that angst, "in the popular modern form, is a disease or addiction of those who are passionately convinced that person ality resides solely in the conscious omnipotent will" (39)" In Oates's story, Bernadine Donovan travels to the annual Modern Language Association convention, where she awaits a panel discussion de voted to her fction that will convene the following morning" In addition to the anxiety that she feels regarding the impending seminar of "Donovan specialists," Bernadine nervously prepares for the arrival of her lover, Herman Geller, also an academic (183)" Devoted to the meticulous research and composition of her novels, Bernadine has continually rejected Herman's proposals of marriage during the previous seven years" She simply cannot interrupt her drive for literary fame in favor of the interpersonal encumbrances that such relationships invariably entail" Bernadine harbors particular malice for her scholarly interpreters, the academics who impress their critical wills upon her work and threaten the autonomy of her aesthetic and the duration of her fame" When she encounters Martin Stanley, one of her recent in terviewers, at a cocktail party the evening before the panel, Bernadine bristles at the mysterious will that the critic exerts over her" Although Stanley described her "as one of t�e fnest of living American women writers" in his concluding remarks to the interview, he completely rewrote her dialogue and argued that she "had not yet located her true subject or a style in which to express it"" As Bernadine gazes upon the critic at the party, she realizes that she both "hated and feared him" (191)" Her experiences at the panel the following morning prove even more debilitating" Partially disguised in glasses and donning a plastic badge that identifes her as "B" G" Sullivan," Bernadine watches in horror as the moderator, Sister Bridget of





St" Anne's College, and the three panelists prepare for the session" After Sister Bridget praises the event as "a very very important date in American letters," Erich Larson, a scholar from a small com munity college in New Rochelle, delivers a virtually untenable paper on "The Infuence of Woolf's Mature Style on the Fiction of Bernadine Donovan" (196)" Bernadine feels even more insulted by the absurd presuppositions made in the next paper, "Angst and Irony in Donovan," delivered by an unnamed female professor from San Diego State" The scholar "read her paper without pause," Oates writes, "quoting a number of reviewers and critics at great length, contemptuously, pointing out how every one of them had erred" (197)" The panel fnally concludes with an essay entitled "Donovan and Swift" by Atlanta State College's Edna Corrington"7 Trembling nervously on the brink of tears as the session mercifully comes to a close, Bernadine watches in horror - like a ghost observing her corporeal self - as an audience member jumps up to the dais and shouts: "All of you I know who you are! I knot! You're lying about me, aren't you lying about me, Bernadine Donovan - all of you telling nasty flthy lies about me" (198)" Suddenly transfxed by the manner in which her entire notion of selfidentity crumbles before her eyes, Bernadine listlessly roams the halls of the Palmer House, gazing at the ecstatic conventioneers" "She walked aimlessly," Oates writes, "staggering as if exhausted" " " " It had happened" Something had happened" (200)" In this manner, Oates illustrates the ways in which the scholarly interpretation of Bernadine's works and the audience member's spontaneous mas querade contribute to the writer's emotional breakdown and the subsequent usurpation of her self" In "A Descriptive Catalogue" and "Pilgrims' Progress," the fnal two stories included in T�e H�ngry G�osts, Oates investigates her intellectual characters' capacity for destroying the ethical centers of their colleagues in order to sate their scholarly egos" "A Descriptive Catalogue" specifcally explores the competitive tensions propagated by the Hilberry University English department's publishorperish policy" In the tale, Ron Blass, the department's resident poet and its most published member with more than 350 poems to his credit, faces charges of plagiarism leveled by his ineffectual junior colleague, Reynold Mason, a former student of Northrop Frye's at the University of Toronto" As Bender observes, in Oates's fctions issues such as "plagiary assume moral and social dimensions" (180)" Hired on the basis of his association with Frye, Mason faces the prospect of an impending tenure review with only



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a few relatively dated publications to his name" Rather than pursu ing the scholarly research that may save his position at Hilberry, Mason begins a careful investigation of the affable Blass's published corpus" After completing his research, Mason confronts Ron in the presence of the department's chair, Dr" Barth: "I accuse him of will ful and gross plagiarism," Mason remarks, "possibly criminal plagiarism" (84-5)" During the initial hearing regarding Ron's alleged plagiarism, Mason reveals his case before the department's senior faculty, a collection of intellectuals whose own publications and scholarly activities hardly comprise an adequate tenure case themselves" Dr" Barth, for example, enumerates such accolades on his ��rri��l�i �itae as his memos to the university senate and the speeches that he delivers before local PTA meetings" After Mason demonstrates that a number of Ron's poems seem little more than minor stylistic reconfgurations of verse written by Gerard Manley Hopkins, among other luminaries, the poet admits that his plagiarism fnds its origins in the prevailing university pressure to publish or perish: "I wanted you to be proud and happy that you had a poet," he tells the tribunal" "I was so happy here, my teaching and my family and everything made me so happy, oh Dr" Barth, I was so happy, I just didn't have anything more to say" (94)" Although the hearing initially results in Ron's incipient alcoholism and the deterioration of his selfesteem, he later decides to research the originality of his peers' published works before the committee convenes for its second hearing to determine his punishment" Only scant days before the meeting convenes, Ron places a collection of bulky manila envelopes in the departmental mailboxes of his col leagues, and his own detective efforts prove effective when the committee unanimously votes to exonerate the poet rather than face a tribunal themselves" As the hearing comes to its hasty close, the angry and frustrated Mason attempts to justify his position: "All I did was - I tried to maintain - I - I labored for weeks to present my case - my ethical responsibilities" (100)"8 Remarkably, Mason tries to mask his professional jealousy in the guise of his ethical duties to the academy" Murdoch observes that "it is signifcant that the idea of goodness (and virtue) has been largely superseded in Western moral philosophy by the idea of rightness," and Oates's plagiarism episode underscores the manner in which the intellectual ego equates virtue with the notion of being correct (53)" "The secret of this story's success," John Alfred Avant aptly writes, "is that Oates





knows how hilarious professional bitchiness can be" (37)" "A De scriptive Catalogue" also reveals Oates's powerful cognizance of the academic self and its propensity for celebrating the intellect - even to the point of utter hypocrisy - over a colleague's efforts to achieve goodness, no matter how dubious those efforts may be" Finally, in "Pilgrims' Progress," Oates explores the ways in which a charismatic intellectual leader carelessly destroys the lives of his colleagues in order to satisfy his lust for power and infuence" Oates's story largely traces the progress of two naIve junior faculty mem bers at Hilberry University, Wanda Barnett and Erasmus Hubben" When Wanda accepts a lectureship in the English department, she falls under the spell of Saul Bird, a senior colleague whose "won derfully energetic" voice "wound about her like fne ribbon" (34)" While scanning the titles of the books in her offce - which he nonchalantly dismisses as "dried crap" - Bird remarks to Wanda that "if you love teaching, if you love working with young people, you've certainly come to the wrong university" (33-4)" A nontradi tional teacher who allows his students to formulate their own grades at the end of each term, Bird proudly reveals to Wanda that the university has given him notice of nonrenewal for the following academic year" As the story unfolds, Bird establishes an hypnotic stranglehold over his disciplecolleagues after locating - and later, manipulating - their emotional weaknesses" After Bird boldly chooses the loca tion of Wanda's new apartment, for example, he demands that she come to dinner with his other followers" "A wave of nausea rose in Wanda," Oates writes, "but she could not protest" (39)" Erasmus discovers himself similarly unable to resist Bird's charismatic charms" An introverted and ineffectual new lecturer in philosophy at Hilberry, Erasmus also agrees to dine with Bird after the senior professor admonishes him into signing a petition calling for Bird's reinstate ment" Wanda and Erasmus soon fnd themselves members of Bird's exclusive clique of disciples that meets for hours each evening at the professor's home" "Intelligent discourse between humanists is the only means of bringing about a revolution," Bird tells his mes merized followers, "until the need for violence is more obvious, I mean" (44)" Wanda and Erasmus subsequently become transfxed by the sense of community that they enjoy as Bird's apostles: "I have friends now" I have real friends," Erasmus thinks to himself "ffty times a day, in amazement" (48)" "I was always lonely," Wanda likewise



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admits" "I was always left out" (49)" Bird eventually convinces his group of devotees to stage a brutal occupation of the Humanities Building in order to protest his dismissal from the university" In addition to proffering their resignations to university offcials, both Wanda and Erasmus suffer injuries during the melee, a violent event that Bird himself thought best to avoid" Following the rally, Bird asks Wanda to watch over his son Philip while he and his wife travel to Chicago" A few days later, Bird telephones Wanda and requests that she drive his son to the airport because he has pro cured another job there" "This has happened before," Philip admits to the stunned lecturer" "But what will I do with the rest of my life?" Wanda cries as the story concludes (59)" In this way, Oates underscores the fragility of the academic self and its propensity for manipulation by a charismatic, selfserving intellectual such as Bird" Although Grant wisely observes that "selfidentity is not possible without fraternity," Oates aptly demonstrates the remarkable power of the false fraternity that Bird engenders among his loyal group of disciples (65)" When Bird subsequently exits their lives after greed ily securing a new position for himself in Chicago, he reveals the chimerical qualities of their cause for political activism, in addition to destroying the notions of selfidentity that Wanda and Erasmus established as his followers" "Their surrender of ego has brought these forlorn academics to the edge of violence," Trachtenberg writes, "but without an ideological base of their own they are unable to fnd in their actions a cathartic release" (42)" As the story comes to its tragic close, moreover, Wanda and Erasmus fnd themselves un employed as well as emotionally shattered" They willingly sacrifced their notions of self for a cause that seemed to be rooted in goodness, yet originated instead in the unchecked ambitions and selfindulgence of Bird, their illusory "colleague"" In this way, Oates satirizes the slippery notions of goodness and community that ultimately undermine her protagonists' quests for selfhood among the haunted groves of academe" While her preta characters unscrupulously scour the earth for the intellectual manna with which they will temporarily sate their desires for power and infuence, they simultaneously erode their community's possibilities for fairness, goodness, and justice through their selfimportant moral decisions" G" F" Waller argues that Oates's "main philosophical target is, specifcally, the frightening plausibility yet spiritual inadequacy of the modern phenomenological account of the self" (40)" In T�e H�ngry G�osts, Oates implores us to observe the roles of goodness





and community in the construction of the academic self" By con fronting her readers with the greedy transgressions of the academic characters depicted in her stories, Oates demonstrates the immorality and ineffcacy of an institution that rewards its members for intel lectually dominating their colleagues to the point of emotional trauma" Her irreverent critique of the academy enables her, moreover, to underscore the remarkable power of satire - her pejorative poetics, if you will - and its value for addressing the ethical disparities between the professional ambitions of individuals and the often more urgent needs of their communities" As Murdoch observes: "Art transcends selfsh and obsessive limitations of personality and can enlarge the sensibility of its consumer" It is a kind of goodness by proxy," she writes (87)" By illustrating the wholesale mitigation of goodness engineered by the intellectual characters in her academic tales, Oates challenges us, then, to reconsider the interpersonal con sequences of our rage for intellectual dominion and individual achievement"



76

The Professoriate in Love: David Lodge's Academic Trilogy and the Ethics of Romance

"What is it to love another person, and is it ever a good idea?" - Annette Baier, "Unsafe Loves"

In addition to affording readers with the critical machinery for exploring the function of concepts such as truth and goodness in narratives, ethical criticism provides us with a useful rhetoric for examining the depiction of love in literary works. "Contemporary philosophers frequently connect consciousness with virtue," Iris Murdoch observes in The Sovereignty of Good, "and although they constantly talk of freedom they rarely talk of love" (2). Because of its abiding interest in establishing vital interconnections between the reader and the text, ethical criticism devotes particular attention to highlighting the emotional transactions through which literary characters indulge their desires to give and receive affection. The investigation of their intimate motives and experiences likewise illuminates our own conceptions of the impulse for love and its role in the interpersonal fabric of the human community. In The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994), Martha C. Nussbaum argues that "in our time, when religious sources of individual salvation are widely mistrusted, personal erotic love (along with other secular sources of value) has come, even more intensely, to bear the weight of many people's longing for transcendence, for a perfection more than earthly, for mysterious union with that perfection" (142). By drawing upon the conclusions of contemporary moral philosophy, ethical criticism reveals the ways in which love operates both as a means for emotional fulfllment, as well as a 77



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mechanism for subverting social and intellectual progress. In this way, the ethical paradigm deepens our textual experiences through its observation of the most sensitive regions of our quests for selfknowledge. Through an analysis of David Lodge's trilogy of academic novels - Changing Places: a Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: an Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work (1988) - this chapter will underscore the role of erotic love in university fction as an emotional transaction that provides its consumers with a diversion from the intellectual rigors of the academy and its inability to satisfy their desires for human interconnection.1 Lodge's academic trilogy also demonstrates the manner in which this drive for romance sublimates the professional instincts and ambitions of his academic characters. In his essay, "Crosscurrents in Modern English Criticism," Lodge describes the pleasures of academic life as "the rise and fall of reputations, the interweaving of trends and movements, the alliances and rivalries, feuds and conspiracies" (248). In his novels, Lodge satirizes these nuances of academe with playful abandon, although his academic characters augment their intellectual pursuits with a dizzying array of sexual dalliances and clandestine romances. As Terry Eagleton asserts, "Sex provides Lodge with a suburban substitute for the high emotional currents which the careful comic distancing of his fctions otherwise expels" (98). While sex also functions in Lodge's aesthetic as a mechanism for relieving the scholarly woes of his intellectual characters, it operates as a means for engendering interpersonal communication between his often introverted and hyper-intellectualized academics as well. In this way, the pejorative poetics undergirding Lodge's fctions creates an ironic construct: although Lodge's academic characters ostensibly possess superior language skills, they remain virtually unable to communicate among themselves without the beneft of their impersonal scholarly jargon or the essentially physical nature of their erotic assignations. The precepts of contemporary moral philosophy generally support Lodge's fctive arguments regarding the paradoxical function of erotic love as both a means for emotional transcendence and a mechanism that often subverts the will of the self and ultimately hinders self-realization and social progress. "The pursuit of love provides meaning in life," Irving Singer remarks, "but the experience of it varies greatly in the quantity and quality of the happiness that results. Though love may often make life worth living," he



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continues, "no one can promise that any life - including a life of love - will always be a rose-garden of delight." In fact, he concludes, "it rarely is" (176). We often covet love, of course, because it seems to offer us the promise of emotional transcendence and self-awareness through the mutuality of a symbiotic relationship. In The Ethics of Rendezvous: Morality, Virtues, and Love (1993), MaijaRiitta Ollila postulates her useful ontology regarding the ethical possibilities of rendezvous - the desire for interdependence that inspires individuals to avail themselves of the possibilities of human interaction and communal interconnection. "The good life of individuals includes mutual love between people," she writes. "The reason for loving," she elaborates, "is the commonly held view of the good life, not only of the morally but also of the aesthetically good life: in order to make life beautiful and full, love is a prerequisite for the care and trust that characterizes good relationships between people" (155). By allowing us to celebrate the possibilities of living well and sustaining healthy interpersonal relationships, love establishes a vital locus for maintaining the life of the community while intensifying the life of the individual. Romantic love also functions as a social mechanism that extols the value of the self and validates the very existence of lovers because of the shared experiences that accompany their intimate associations. As Robert M. Polhemus notes, "Men and women in the hold of erotic faith feel that love can redeem personal life and offer a reason for being" (1). Contemporary moral philosophers also contend that love provides a means for exceeding the boundaries of the self and fomenting self-suffciency and self-awareness. "A life directed toward transcendence," Kathryn Pauly Morgan observes, "is a life open to the future, a life self-originated rather than based on preexisting identity. Transcendent subjects invent, act, make choices," she adds (393). In this manner, love offers us the possibility of enlivening our personal experiences as a result of our encounters with other autonomous selves. As Alan Soble notes in The Structure of Love (1990), "Love involves the desire to share intense and important experiences; the intimacy of love is, or results from, the satisfaction of the desire for shared experiences" (183). Although more problematic feelings of jealousy or inadequacy frequently accompany these moments of romantic communion, love invariably imbues us with the notion of self-worth that we so desperately desire. "Love is always subject to frustration and rejection, and commonly bound together with such dangerous emotions as jealousy, hate, and fear,"



The Professoriate in Love


Robert Brown writes in Analyzing Love (1987), "but this fact merely emphasizes that the beloved can be valued as having inherent worth even when giving pain and not simply when giving pleasure" (127). In this way, moral philosophy accounts for the multifaceted nature of erotic love and its simultaneous propensity for human interconnection and social disruption. Because romantic love - even in its healthiest incarnations inevitably mitigates the autonomy of the self, it necessarily threatens the stability of both the individual and the community.2 As Nussbaum remarks in The Therapy of Desire, love "is subversive of society: it engenders anxious cares that distract the lover from politics and community; and the relationship itself, with its instability and its mutual sadism," she adds, "cannot be the basis for a marriage that would, by raising children in an atmosphere of tender concern, promote the ends of community" (185). For this reason, Julia Kristeva describes erotic love as an "exquisite mixture of destructive possession and idealization" (61). Romantic love demands, moreover, that seemingly autonomous selves render themselves vulnerable to the needs and desires of the object of their affections, an emotional state that naturally threatens the independence and security of the self that dares to love. As Robert C. Solomon observes, "The process of mutual self-identifcation runs into confict with one of its own presuppositions - the ideal of autonomous individualism" (513). In this way, love challenges the individual's capacity for maintaining self-assurance and self-suffciency during the passionate throes of an intimate relationship. Although the tenets of contemporary moral philosophy generally problematize erotic love as a subversive emotional force, an ethical paradigm for reading must recognize, nevertheless, the remarkable power of love as the essence of interpersonal connection and a signifcant means for transcending the boundaries of the self.3 In addition to demonstrating the ethical implications of erotic love as a subversive narrative conceit, this chapter will examine Lodge's satiric commentary on the romantic relationships enjoyed by selected intellectual characters in his trilogy of Professorroman. Essentially unable to communicate with each other without the impersonal aid of scholarship, Lodge's academics engage instead in a series of equally unsatisfactory love affairs. Challenged by prevailing social conventions, the professional rigors of academic life, and the prison-house of language, his intellectuals struggle and ultimately fail in their efforts to establish meaningful interpersonal



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connection. For this reason, the academic characters in Lodge's university fctions eagerly divert themselves with the triviality of departmental infghting, pedantic scholarly debate, and an unceasing tide of international conferences and clandestine affairs. In The University in Modern Fiction (1993), Janice Rossen astutely observes that Lodge's over-arching "portrayal of promiscuity" in his academic fctions provides him with a means for illustrating his characters "reacting to their professional disappointments by engaging in sexual pursuit instead" (152). In short, "screwing virtually replaces reading" for Lodge's intellectuals, Rossen writes (150). Characterized by their brevity and their propensity for failure, the erotic dalliances depicted in Lodge's academic narratives underscore his intellectual characters' inability to foster and sustain interpersonal relationships, particularly because of their anxieties about the indeterminacy of language. In this way, Lodge offers a satiric appraisal of erotic love's function in university life as a desperate means for establishing intimate communication among academics who fnd themselves emotionally silenced by the rigid constraints of scholarly discourse. In Changing Places, Lodge traces the intellectual and sexual lives of Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp, the academic characters whose professional and social intersections grace each of the narratives in Lodge's academic trilogy. An introverted and ambitionless lecturer at an English redbrick university, Swallow distinguishes himself among his peers at the University of Rummidge because of his superior skills as an examiner, rather than because of his reputation as a literary scholar. "He is a mimetic man," Lodge writes, "unconfdent, eager to please, infnitely suggestible" (10). In sharp contrast with Swallow's ineffectual scholarly career, Zapp enjoys considerable scholarly renown for his numerous well-received studies of Jane Austen. A full professor of English at the State University of Euphoria in the United States, Zapp plans to embark upon an ambitious critical project that would treat each of Austen's novels from every conceivable hermeneutic perspective: "historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist, Christian-allegorical, ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it." In this way, Zapp plans to exhaust Austen's canon of novels for future critical study. "There would be simply nothing further to say," Lodge remarks, "periodicals would fall silent, famous English Departments [would] be left deserted like ghost towns" (44-5). Swallow and Zapp's lives collide in 1969 when they agree to participate in an annual professorial exchange scheme





that exists between their respective institutions. During their transatlantic experiences, the two scholars not only exchange their students and colleagues, but their wives and families as well. The manner in which they literally swap their entire worlds with one another underscores Lodge's satiric critique of his academic characters and the ease and alacrity with which they exchange the emotional and sexual discourses of their respective lives. As with Small World, Lodge liberally employs the literary devices of coincidence and Romance in the narrative of Changing Places. The conventions of the Romance provide him with the narrative freedom to imbue his novel with the exaggerated qualities of parallelism that mark Swallow and Zapp's textual adventures.4 Lodge "uses ironic juxtapositions and rich coincidences to expose the human frailties of the academics," Merritt Moseley observes, and his work "is romantic in its freedom from the laws of probability which would otherwise rule out the extensive play of coincidences; it is romantic in being plot-rich, character-diffuse, multifarious, and multifoliate" (85). In Changing Places, Lodge employs the forces of chance in order to synchronize the parallel experiences of his protagonists as they simultaneously search for love in all of its variant forms. Lodge depicts Swallow and Zapp concurrently venturing into topless bars, for instance, while also synchronizing their airplane fights, as well as their participation in student-protest movements on their respective surrogate campuses. Lodge further unites their exploits through an epistolary chapter, the Joycean discourse of newspaper headlines, and a concluding section written in the form of a dramatic play text.5 These narrative devices allow Lodge to highlight further the commonality of Swallow and Zapp's intellectual and interpersonal experiences, particularly their erotic indulgences. After ensconcing himself as a visiting member of the Department of English at the State University of Euphoria, known locally as Euphoric State, Swallow embarks upon a sexual progress away from the comfortable inroads of his previous life with his wife Hilary and the stagnating industrial environs of Rummidge. Euphoria's sunny, Edenic clime lends itself to the exhilaration of Swallow's awakening, and he soon fnds himself enrapt with the casual, erotic demeanor of Melanie Byrd, an undergraduate at Euphoric State, and, unbeknownst to Swallow, Zapp's daughter by his frst wife.6 After a brief sexual encounter with Melanie, Swallow discovers himself wracked with guilt over his betrayal of Hilary, particularly after Melanie



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calls him "Daddy" as she sleeps beside him (103). His guilty conscience further deteriorates when he learns the identity of Melanie's father from Zapp's estranged second wife, Desiree. In a letter to an understandably irate Zapp, Desiree describes Swallow's stunned response when he ascertains Melanie's lineage: "He went white, Morris," she writes. "I mean if he'd just discovered that he'd screwed his own daughter, he couldn't have looked more shocked. I suppose, on refection," she concludes, "there is something kind of incestuous about sleeping with the daughter of the guy you've exchanged jobs with" (144). Swallow's guilt eventually subsides, however, when he realizes "how needlessly he had complicated it [the affair with Melanie] with emotions and ethics" (116). By choosing to divest himself of the emotional and moral obligations of his previous life in England, Swallow avails himself of a radically different system of ethical values, opting for the erotic possibilities of adultery over the quiet stability of his marital commitment to Hilary. In Adultery and the Novel: Contract and Transgression (1979), Tony Tanner argues that the rigid boundaries of the marriage contract inevitably lead to disruption of the union via transgression. "The breaking of a marriage must suggest a collapse back into a state of severance and separateness in which bonds and contracts do not hold," he observes (60). "The problem is," Tanner adds, "that by defnition you cannot transform transgression and profanation into a regular way of life" (376).7 Swallow continues in his own quest for erotic self-liberation - his "quest for intensity of experience," in the words of Daniel Ammann (120) - after he meets Desiree at a faculty cocktail party. Although he initially recoils at the brooding presence of his counterpart's wife, Swallow soon engages her in an intriguing conversation about the American and British cultural obsession with education. Assisted by the convivial ambience of the party and several mixed drinks, Swallow fnds himself unusually verbose in Desiree's company. His uncharacteristically extroverted behavior underscores Tanner's contention that "adultery can provoke an excessive loquacity, to the point of a rampant spillage of words, something like language as nausea" (40). Liberated temporarily from the rigid boundaries of his marriage and the institutional requirements of his lectureship in Rummidge, Swallow transcends his ineffectual persona through the personal freedom that his new adulterous lifestyle promises. After Swallow meets Desiree at yet another faculty party, she offers him a place to stay when a torrential rainstorm and a subsequent landslide destroy





his lodgings. Although their arrangement quickly evolves into an erotic affair, neither Swallow nor Desiree desire to temper their romantic bliss with the social and legal obligations of marriage. While Swallow readily admits that he has "no experience in adultery," he also recognizes the liberating aspects of his relationship with Desiree: "I have felt very free these last few weeks," Swallow remarks, "freer than I've ever felt in my life" (175). Unlike Swallow, Zapp agrees to their professorial exchange in an explicit attempt to emancipate himself from the growing tensions in his marriage, as well as in his career. Having already achieved the rank of full professor of English while amassing numerous scholarly accolades, Zapp fnds himself unsatisfed with the status quo that inevitably follows such a period of extraordinary professional success. The enormity of the literary critic's ego, moreover, leaves his marriage to Desiree in a desultory state. "Being married to you is like being slowly swallowed by a python," she tells Zapp. "I'm just a half-digested bulge in your ego. I want out. I want to be free. I want to be a person again" (40). Desperately attempting to divert her pleas for a divorce, Zapp agrees to travel to Rummidge so that Desiree might reconsider her position during his absence. In sharp contrast with Swallow, whose experiences away from home dramatically alter his senses of self-awareness and selfsuffciency, Zapp discovers a previously unrealized ethical component of his persona during his stay in England, a country which he once held in absolute disdain. Before his trip to Rummidge, Zapp reserved particular disgust for English scholars and their prejudices against American literary critics. Lodge writes that Zapp had neither affection nor respect for the British. . . . Their publications were vapid and amateurish, inadequately researched, slackly argued, and riddled with so many errors, misquotations, misattributions, and incorrect dates that it was amazing they managed to get their own names right on the title page. They nevertheless had the nerve to treat American scholars, including even himself, with sneering condescension in their lousy journals. (47) Yet Rummidge provides Zapp with a quiet forum for personal refection, not only about his English scholarly counterparts, but also regarding the unethical manner in which he conducts his personal life and career. As James Acheson notes, "The small world of Rummidge has a morally enlarging effect" on Zapp, Lodge's most



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acerbic of academic characters (88). Zapp establishes his English lodgings in the enormous house of Dr. O'Shea, an Irish physician with a large family with whom the scholar eventually shares his rented color television. Zapp initially seems alarmed about his incipient state of generosity and goodwill: "Some creeping English disease of being nice, was it?" he wonders to himself (93). Although Zapp temporarily falls out of favor with O'Shea after he good-naturedly loans a pornographic magazine to the doctor's niece, his most extraordinary moments of ethical renewal occur, rather ironically, during his love affair with Hilary. During his frst visit for dinner in the Swallow household, Zapp cheerfully entertains Philip's children with humorous stories and assists Hilary with the dishes. The evening ends disastrously, however, after Zapp fnds a well-annotated copy of a Festschrift including one of his essays in the Swallows' lavatory. Zapp storms out of the house without a word after concluding that Swallow must be the critic responsible for a malicious review of his essay years before in the Times Liter ary Supplement. "This guy [the reviewer] really wanted to hurt," Zapp remarks. "I mean, he wasn't content merely to pour scorn on my arguments and my evidence and my accuracy and my style, to make my article out to be some kind of monument to imbecility and perversity in scholarship," he continues, "no, he wanted my blood and my balls too, he wanted to beat my ego to a pulp" (127). Zapp and Hilary begin their romantic relationship after she generously provides him with a room during the renovation of O'Shea's house. When subsequently consulted by the University of Rummidge's vicechancellor about Swallow's possible promotion to senior lecturer, Zapp recommends his counterpart's advancement despite his belief that Swallow authored the TLS review: "It wasn't, after all, only Swallow's happiness and the prosperity that were at stake here," Lodge writes. "Hilary and the children were also involved, and for their welfare he felt a warm concern" (222). Although he later learns that Gordon Masters - the psychotic former chair of Swallow's department - actually wrote the unfavorable TLS review, Zapp nevertheless derives a genuine ethical satisfaction from his unselfsh efforts on behalf of Swallow and his family. In this way, Zapp and Swallow's radically divergent experiences in Changing Places underscore the conficting conclusions of moral philosophers regarding the ethical possibilities of erotic love. In addition to releasing him from his marital obligations to Desiree, love imbues Zapp with a sense of ethical renewal and the selfess





propensity for acting favorably on behalf of his community. For Swallow, however, love provides a mechanism for emancipating himself from the rigid boundaries of his personal and professional lives. In short, love reaffrms his sense of self. Although adultery and the liberating distance of the professorial exchange program allow each scholar to experience an obscure periphery of their selves, it offers limited possibilities for the future. Again, as Tanner argues, "by defnition you cannot transform transgression and profanation into a regular way of life" (376). As the narrative of Small World unfolds, we fnd Zapp and Swallow once again ensconced in the comfortable scholarly and interpersonal inroads of their respective worlds. While their private lives seem to follow a rather predictable course - Swallow returns to married life with Hilary and Desiree delivers on her promise to divorce Zapp the worldwide reinvigoration of their profession in the late 1970s irrevocably alters their academic experiences through the auspices of international conferences and global scholarly trends. "The day of the single, static campus is over," Zapp triumphantly announces in Small World, and with its demise arrives a new generation of globe-trotting scholars equally beset by the professional and interpersonal contradictions inherent in academic life (72). In Small World, Lodge again draws upon the narrative freedom of the Romance in order to illustrate his intellectual characters' global search for erotic fulfllment and human interconnection. "Romance is a genre depicting the search to gratify desire," Blake Morrison argues, "and the academic questers in Small World are profoundly restless and ungratifed. . . There's a deep disenchantment at the heart of Lodge's fction," he concludes (293). This disenchantment fnds its origins in the inability of Lodge's academic characters to sustain intimate relationships in a discipline that questions the communicative properties of language and celebrates those scholars who defeat their colleagues intellectually in the often brutal rites of academic competition. In the novel, Lodge traces the international scholarly and romantic exploits of Zapp, Swallow, and a wide range of other intellectuals bent on exerting their professional and erotic wills upon one another.8 "A mock metaromance," in the words of Siegfried Mews, Small World explores the ways in which a multinational selection of literary scholars relentlessly pursues the self-gratifying rewards of romance and desire (723). A rousing keynote address delivered by Zapp at a conference hosted by Swallow at the University of Rummidge inaugurates the novel's thematic exploration of erotic love and its narrative



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possibilities for interpersonal fulfllment. Entitled "Textuality as Striptease," Zapp's lecture discusses the inadequacy of language and scholarship as mechanisms for communication. Because it fundamentally encourages the act of interpretation, language necessarily denies itself the capacity to articulate any singular meaning with precision and exactitude. Scholarship suffers from a similar interpretive malady. As Zapp astutely remarks, "Every decoding is another encoding" (29). Like the text, which contains so many convoluted layers of unattainable meaning, the striptease, Zapp argues, entices the viewer with elements of curiosity and desire while ultimately defying possession. This struggle for erotic authority motivates the quests for love embarked upon by Lodge's academics in Small World, and its consummate elusiveness challenges their capacity for fnding self-satisfaction in the competitive community of scholars. For this reason, Lodge presents a wide variety of intellectual characters engaged in a seemingly inexhaustible search for love and power among the increasingly international groves of academe. In his essay, "The Reader as Discoverer in David Lodge's Small World," Frederick M. Holmes unreasonably contends that "Lodge's novel is peopled by one-dimensional, morally polarized characters caught up in improbable sequences of events heavily dependent upon preposterous coincidences" (49).9 Although Lodge clearly avails himself of the exaggerated narratological vestiges of the Romance in Small World, several of his erotic protagonists in fact operate as multidimensional, fully realized literary characters in the novel's dynamic narrative terrain. In addition to detailing once again the sexual and professional exploits of Swallow and Zapp, Lodge traces in Small World the erotic quests of such fctive critical luminaries as Arthur Kingfsher and Fulvia Morgana, as well as the romantic experiences of the naIve lover and scholar, Persse McGarrigle, a fedgling young academic from University College, Limerick. In the novel, Persse's search for the elusive independent scholar, Angelica Pabst, functions as a framing device for the erotic quests of Lodge's other intellectual characters. He crisscrosses the globe, exhausting his savings in a wild international pursuit of the evasive Angelica while sporadically encountering Lodge's other protagonists in such disparate locales as Rummidge, Amsterdam, Geneva, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Honolulu, Jerusalem, and fnally, New York, where Lodge's entire coterie of academics reconvenes for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Persse frst encounters Angelica at Swallow's conference at the





University of Rummidge. Dazzled by her keen critical intellect and her engaging "smile of complicity," Persse falls deeply in love with her during the conference's early stages and proposes to her shortly thereafter (13). Although she quickly rebuffs his offer because of her belief that the marital contract mitigates personal and professional freedom, she nevertheless hoodwinks Persse into sneaking into her bedroom like Keats's dreamy suitor in "The Eve of St. Agnes": "You could hide in my room and watch me go to bed," she tells him, "then I might dream of you as my future husband" (47). After Persse naIvely complies with her ruse, he discovers an empty bedroom, save for the presence of Robin Dempsey, a linguist also duped by the charms of the deceptive Angelica. Her artifce inspires Persse to follow her across the globe as she travels from one academic conference to another. Cheryl Summerbee, a skillful Heathrow ticket agent, functions as Persse's de facto guide - his "agent of fate," according to Wenche Ommundsen (137) - throughout his international search for the mysterious Angelica. After pursuing Angelica unsuccessfully throughout the summer conference season, Persse temporarily suspends his quest on the advice of Zapp. "Don't despair, Percy," the critic tells him, "come to the next MLA. Anybody who's a conference freak is sure to be at the MLA" (350). Persse fnally locates Angelica in an "Ad hoc Forum on Romance" at the MLA convention in New York. In her paper, a feminine counterpart to Zapp's overtly masculine discourse on the striptease, Angelica muses on the multiple orgasmic qualities of the Romance, a genre whose textual pleasures offer "not one climax but many. . . . No sooner is one crisis in the fortunes of the hero averted than a new one presents itself," she argues, "no sooner has one adventure been concluded than another begins. The narrative questions open and close, open and close, like the contractions of the vaginal muscles in intercourse, and this process is in principle endless," she concludes (366). After subsequently spending an afternoon of tumultuous lovemaking with the woman whom he perceives to be the elusive object of his affections, Persse learns that Angelica has deceived him yet again when the person in bed with him identifes herself as Lily, Angelica's twin sister. "You're not really in love with Angelica," Lily observes. "If you can't be sure whether the girl you just screwed is Angelica or not, how can you be in love with her? You were in love with a dream" (371). In this way, Lily - through the literally disembodied voice of Angelica - instructs Persse on the indeterminacy of language, particularly romantic discourse, as a chimerical



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means for communicating the reality of our experiences. After the conference concludes, Persse returns to the Heathrow ticket counter in search of Cheryl, who, much to his surprise, no longer works for British Airways and has embarked on world travels of her own. Gazing at Heathrow's massive Departures board, Persse begins his romantic adventures anew as he wonders "where in all the small, narrow world" he should start searching for Cheryl (385). As Robert A. Morace observes, "Persse's demystifcation decrowns, liberates, and restores, curing those who are present of their various forms of impotence - sexual, literary, and intellectual. It helps bring about the renewals, rebirths, and reconciliations that proliferate" in Small World (206). Likewise, Swallow and Zapp learn similar lessons about the slippery nature of love and language during their sporadic intersections with Persse. Now chair of Rummidge's English department, Swallow languishes once again in the quiet domestic routine of his marriage with Hilary, an increasingly listless state interrupted periodically by Swallow's frequent travels to academic conferences. During one such sojourn in Genoa a few years before the narrative of Small World begins, Swallow takes an "irrevocable leap into moral space" when he enjoys a one-night stand with Joy Simpson, the wife of an English diplomat, after narrowly escaping disaster in an airplane fre over the Italian countryside (83). "It was as if, having passed through the shadow of death, I had suddenly recovered an appetite for life that I thought I had lost for ever, since returning from America to England," he confdes to Zapp (82). Although his brief affair with Joy provides him with a profound sense of erotic renewal, Swallow learns of her death in an airplane crash in India during the following year. In the narrative fabric of Lodge's hyper-exaggerated Romance, however, reality becomes transfgured by the demands of improbability, and Swallow discovers Joy alive and well in Ankara during a Turkish lecture tour after sharing his secret with Zapp. When Joy and Swallow rekindle their earlier romance, Swallow fnds that "he was not, after all, fnished, washed up, ready for retirement. He was still capable of a great romance," Lodge writes (247). Yet their erotic association, like the other rendezvous in Lodge's academic trilogy, never progresses beyond the simulacrum of a committed relationship. Although they travel together from Ankara to another conference in Jerusalem, a chance encounter with Swallow's son during an excursion to the Dead Sea brings a hasty conclusion to their romance. As Eva Lambertsson Bjork correctly argues in Campus Clowns and





the Canon: David Lodge's Campus Fiction (1993), "These brief episodes of transgression always end in a renewed commitment to marriage, a commitment that is anticipated and consistently foregrounded in the texts through the treatment of the adulterous relationship as a state of mental intoxication that can only last while concealed from the actuality of society" (104). Feigning Legionnaire's Disease, Swallow likewise leaves the conference and returns home to the comfortable inroads of his life with Hilary. "I failed in the role of romantic hero," Swallow later remarks to Persse. "I thought I wasn't too old for it, but I was" (381). Although Zapp claims that he too no longer desires the erotic interconnection that romantic relationships offer, his experiences in Small World challenge his vow of celibacy at every turn. As he comments to a stunned Hilary during his visit to Rummidge: I gave up screwing around a long time ago. I came to the conclusion that sex is a sublimation of the work instinct. The nineteenth century has its priorities right. What we really lust for is power, which we achieve by work. When I look around at my colleagues these days, what do I see? They're all screwing their students, or each other, like crazy, marriages are breaking up faster than you can count, and yet nobody seems to be happy. Obviously they would rather be working, but they're ashamed to admit it. (68) The publication by Desiree of her best-selling feminist autobiography, Diffcult Days - an unfattering expose of her marriage to Zapp also understandably sours him on love. A devotee of jogging - "it's very fashionable these days in American academic circles," he tells Persse - as well as the author of Beyond Criticism, Zapp nevertheless has a chance encounter with Fulvia, a renowned Marxist critic from the University of Padua, on an airplane bound for Milan (48). During their fight, Fulvia informs Zapp about the upcoming UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism, a $100,000 annual, tax-free appointment to be chosen by Kingfsher, the doyen of international literary criticism. For Zapp, the UNESCO chair represents his fnal professional ambition - to be the highest paid literary critic in the world. After their arrival in Milan, Fulvia arranges for Zapp to spend the night at the luxurious Milanese home of herself and her husband, a professor of Italian Renaissance literature. Fulvia soon convinces Zapp to go to bed with her despite his oath of celibacy, although he



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suddenly halts their erotic encounter when she produces a set of handcuffs and her husband eagerly joins them in Fulvia's elaborately mirrored bedroom. 10 When he later learns of Swallow's reunion with and "love" for Joy, Zapp responds with incredulity: "Hasn't he learned by now that this whole business of being 'in love' is not an existential reality," Zapp wonders to himself, "but a form of cultural production, an illusion produced by the mutual refections of a million rose-tinted mirrors: love poems, pop songs, movie images, agony columns, shampoo ads, romantic novels?" (281). Ostensibly motivated only by the prospect of obtaining the salary and prestige that the UNESCO chair promises for its holder, Zapp ironically fnds time - once again, despite his latest vow of celibacy, as well as his kidnapping by Italian extortionists - to enter into yet another romantic relationship, in this instance with Thelma Ringbaum, the estranged wife of Howard Ringbaum, a former colleague of Zapp's at Euphoric State who lost a tenure-track position there after admitting during a parlor game to having never read Hamlet. Zapp's hopes for receiving the UNESCO chair lie in the expert hands of Kingfsher, the "king among literary theorists," according to Zapp. In Lodge's satire, moreover, Kingfsher functions as the ultimate example of academic dysfunctionality. Secluded in his penthouse suite high above Chicago, Kingfsher lies naked in bed with a scattered selection of critical quarterlies and his delectable Korean research assistant, Song-Mi Lee, by his side. An emeritus professor of Columbia and Zurich Universities, Kingfsher spends his days writing reviews of the latest monographs of hermeneutics while watching pornographic movies on television. "A man who has received more honorary degrees than he can remember, and who has at home, at his house on Long Island, a whole room full of the (largely unread) books and offprints sent to him by disciples and admirers in the world of scholarship," Kingfsher, Lodge writes, can unfortunately no longer "achieve an erection or an original thought" (105). Lodge's unsavory depiction of Kingfsher consuming pornography while simultaneously engaging in the act of literary criticism underscores Lodge's often debilitating critiques of the academy and one of its most cherished mechanisms for professional advancement. As Mews notes, "There is behind the satire and hilarity of Lodge's global campus novel in the guise of romance a serious questioning of the purpose of literary studies and of the institution of academic criticism itself" (726). Kingfsher suddenly emerges from his intellectual





and physiological stupor, however, after breathing the fresh air provided by an open window in his hotel suite in New York. Reinvigorated and fnally able to consummate his relationship with Song-Mi, Kingfsher resumes his throne as the leading international literary critic by choosing himself as the UNESCO chair over a host of other applicants, including Zapp, Swallow, and Fulvia. Yet as the novel comes to a close, Lodge invokes the narrative latitude of the Romance and concludes Small World on an optimistic note through a series of impending marriages and romantic reunions. As Bernard Bergonzi notes, "The novel ends in a mood of general reconciliation: marriages which have been coming apart are put together again, and other people announce their intention of getting married" (22). In this manner, Lodge employs the residue of love as an all-purpose curative for the interpersonal failures of his intellectual characters. Yet Lodge's novels consistently demonstrate the ineffectuality of love - particularly in its adulterous manifestations - as nothing more than a temporary diversion from the social and professional ills that problematize the efforts of his academics to achieve selfhood. Although Lodge dispenses with the Romance in the narrative design of Nice Work, the fnal selection in his academic trilogy, he continues his exploration of his academic characters and their inability to fnd solace in romantic relationships, particularly because of the inadequacy of language as a vehicle for communicating their desires. Loosely based on Victorian industrial novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), Nice Work examines the uneasy relationship that often exists between the academy and the "real world," between the competitive forces of the intellect and the freemarket forces of industry. In addition to questioning the relevance of literary theory to the problems that plague the world beyond the walls of the academy, the novel attempts to provide readers with a sense of reconciliation regarding the tenuous relationship between industry and academe through the medium of an erotic affair between the novel's protagonists, Victor Wilcox, the managing director of an engineering frm, and Robyn Penrose, a temporary lecturer at the University of Rummidge. The dramatic consummation of their relationship seems to offer the possibility of mutual understanding between these remarkably disparate characters, yet the instability of love and language depicted in the novel's closing pages ultimately undermines their genuine attempts at ideological compromise. Robyn agrees to participate in the "Shadow Scheme" that eventually



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draws her into Vic's orbit on the advice of Swallow, still chair of the department at Rummidge, although he is beginning to succumb to incipient deafness. The brainchild of the university's vice-chancellor, the Shadow Scheme endeavors to enhance the university's understanding of the commercial world by requiring a faculty member to "shadow" a senior managerial fgure in the local manufacturing industry. Swallow believes that Robyn's participation in the exercise might allow her to keep her Rummidge lectureship beyond her current three-year allotment. A gifted and well-published scholar, Robyn remains unable to secure a position in England's depressed academic job market, despite her extraordinary professional credentials. A specialist in the industrial novel of the Victorian era, Robyn possesses a curriculum vitae that already lists two forthcoming monograph publications, her thesis, The Industrious Muse: Narrativity and Contra diction in the Industrial Novel, as well as a second volume, Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females: Woman as Sign and Commodity in Victorian Fiction. Well versed in the parlance of contemporary literary theory, particularly deconstruction, Robyn currently languishes in a virtually sexless relationship with her "lover," Charles, himself a lecturer at the University of Suffolk. For Robyn and Charles - as devotees of poststructuralist poetics - "sexual desire was a play of signifers," Lodge writes, "an infnite deferment and displacement of anticipated pleasure which the brute coupling of the signifeds temporarily interrupted" (33). By reducing their erotic needs into emotionless linguistic constructs, Robyn and Charles likewise diminish their desire for one another, evinced in the novel by their regular attempts at a number of "trial separations." Vic, Robyn's industrial counterpart, lives in a similarly celibate state with his wife, Marjorie, whom Lodge conspicuously depicts in the act of falling asleep beside her captain of industry while clutching a copy of Enjoy Your Menopause. Although the monetary rewards of his position as Marketing Director of J. Pringle and Sons Casting and General Engineering allow Vic and his family to live comfortably, like Robyn, his employment lacks permanence, for Vic's success depends entirely upon the whimsy of the marketplace. A skillful manager and engineer, Vic's greatest moments of pleasure occur during his daily commute to and from the factory. During these moments of "musical masturbation," Vic listens to his cherished collection of tape-recorded works by female jazz and soul vocalists. "The subtle infexions of these voices," Lodge writes, "honeyed or slightly hoarse, moaning and whispering of





women's love, its joys and disappointments, soothe his nerves and relax his limbs." Emotionally estranged from his wife and children, Vic harbors disdain for the value of higher education and views the university as a "small city-state" characterized by its "air of privileged detachment from the vulgar, bustling city in which it is embedded" (14-15). Robyn possesses a similar distrust for members of the private sector and their commercial activities. Her ideological and social differences with Vic likewise manifest themselves on a number of occasions throughout their association during the Shadow Scheme. Robyn reacts in horror, for example, when she visits the factory's dark, inner recesses: "It was the most terrible place she had ever been in her life," Lodge writes. "To say that to herself restored the original meaning of the word 'terrible': it provoked terror, even a kind of awe" (90). Her revulsion at the squalid conditions in the factory later result in a spontaneous strike after she warns one of the laborers of his imminent dismissal. In addition to a number of instances in which Vic and Robyn disagree on the role of semiotics in culture, Robyn causes further dissension in the factory after objecting to the array of pornographic pin-ups that adorn the plant's walls. While Vic and Robyn come into confict over a variety of ideological and moral issues during the Shadow Scheme, they also discover, much to their mutual surprise, that their ethical standards are not so dissimilar. When a hired stripper interrupts Vic's speech to the factory personnel, for instance, Robyn hastily comes to his assistance and leads the woman, one of her tutorial students, away from the factory foor. Her experiences as Vic's shadow in the world outside of the academy allow her to realize, moreover, that critical theory - which literary theorists "argue about and read about and write about endlessly," she remarks to Charles - remains meaningless in the world beyond the ivory towers of academe (152). In this way, Ammann notes, "Lodge not only refers to and explains Robyn Penrose's deconstructionist approach to literature, but questions its viability by contrasting it with Victor's pragmatic attitudes" (84). The Shadow Scheme reaches its dramatic climax when Robyn agrees to accompany Vic on a business trip to Frankfurt, where her knowledge of German allows Vic to negotiate the purchase of a machine for the factory at an exceptional price. Absorbed with the success of their cooperative effort as business negotiators, Robyn and Vic retire to her suite for a sexual encounter: "The captain of



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industry at the feet of the feminist literary critic - a pleasing tableau," Robyn muses to herself (207). When Vic admits to Robin that "I've been in love with you for weeks," she quarrels with the semiotics of erotic love. "There is only language," she tells him, and "the discourse of romantic love pretends that your fnger and my clitoris are extensions of two unique individual selves who need each other and only each other and cannot be happy without each other for ever and ever" (210). Although Vic defers to her interpretation of their erotic association for the duration of the encounter, the following morning he reaffrms his love for her. "Love, that sort of love," she tells Vic before traveling back to Rummidge alone, "is a literary con trick" (213). Back in England, their relationship continues to deteriorate rapidly. "When Wilcox screwed you, it was like the factory ravished the university," Robyn's friend Penny observes (212). Robyn and Vic only achieve reconciliation after he visits the university as her "shadow," as well as after the factory discharges Vic from his position as managing director. Using the proceeds of her inheritance from the estate of a recently deceased relative in Australia, Robyn salvages their relationship when she good-naturedly offers to invest in Vic's plans to design a revolutionary spectrometer. In this manner, Vic and Robyn opt for a working relationship over the semiotic and interpersonal struggles of romance. Robyn's own professional fortunes eventually soar after Zapp fortuitously arrives in Rummidge - about to embark upon his annual European conference tour, of course - and negotiates the American rights of her second monograph for Euphoric State's university press. The novel's deus ex machina conclusion reaches its fruition when Swallow fnally, almost predictably, locates the funding to extend Robyn's contract for another year at the University of Rummidge. Although Nice Work's rather pat ending allows Lodge to establish a state of reconciliation between industry and academe, a number of critics object to the improbability of the novel's serendipitous conclusion. Bjork argues, for example, that the rapprochement between industry and the university seems merely "superfcial" because the "ideological coming to consciousness here necessitates a rejection of feminism and radical theory, together with an acceptance and assimilation of the politics of compromise" (109, 112-13). Ian Carter also problematizes Lodge's deus ex machina conclusion in Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the PostWar Years:





"Lodge restates the Victorian debate about culture and utility," Carter observes, "but ends with each still in its own box" (256). Finally, Eagleton contends that "theory and practice can no more combine politically than they can sexually: at the sexual climax of the work, there is no real alternative between Vic's Romantic hermeneuticism - his pathetic over-investment of the event with meaning - and Robyn's blank postmodernist insistence on its brute, meaningless factuality" (102). Each critic astutely recognizes the incapacity of erotic love as a mechanism for bridging, even metaphorically, the ideological gap that exists between industry and the academy. As Robert S. Burton observes: "The title Nice Work might appear to be a self-congratulatory compliment by the author, in recognition of the fact that he has manipulated his characters in such a way as to bring them, and everything they represent, together in a symbolic act of physical union" (239). But as the novels in Lodge's academic trilogy consistently reveal, romantic love simply lacks the interpretive durability for mitigating the ideological dilemmas that its semiotic construction necessarily entails. For Lodge's academic characters, language lacks the capacity - because of its fundamental indeterminacy - for communicating desire and establishing genuine interpersonal connection. Consequently, like Swallow, Zapp, and Robyn, the intellectuals in Lodge's academic novels inevitably choose the professional diversions of their vocation over the semiotic contradictions of love. As Zapp remarks in Small World, "Sex is a sublimation of the work instinct" (68). While they may dabble temporarily in the discourse of erotic love, Lodge's academics invariably return to their respective ideologies and to the composition of scholarly products that nobody, save for their colleagues, reads or takes seriously. Indeed, "There are millions of people out there who haven't the slightest interest in what we do," Robyn pessimistically laments in Nice Work (151). The intellectual characters in Lodge's novels recognize with equal cynicism the inadequacy of scholarship as a means for interpersonal communication among themselves, much less with their industrial counterparts. For Lodge's academic characters, then, love functions as a desperate attempt to establish community, no matter how feeting, with the immutable world that surrounds them. "Love is neediness, longing, awareness of incompleteness," Allan Bloom observes in Love and Friendship (1993). "It is a passion of the soul that palpably and visibly engages the body and points to the union, however uneasy, of the two" (547). Although erotic love only briefy



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sates their desires for romantic connection before the prison-house of language inevitably traps them in the walls of ineffectual discourse, Lodge's scholarly characters nevertheless reach out, time after time, for the interpersonal nirvana that love promises, yet never seems to deliver.


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Performing the Academy: Alterity and David Mamet's Oleanna

"All one can say of communication and transcendence is their incertitude"" - Emmanuel Levinas, "Substitution"

In dramatic contrast with David Lodge's academic characters who engage in seemingly endless quests for romance, the protagonists in David Mamet's Oleanna (1992) have little use for love within the more tenuous boundaries of their own, much smaller world" Ut terly unable to communicate on nearly any meaningful level, Mamet's characters retreat into their own situational ethos and cede respon sibility for their predicaments outward to their academic others" Mamet's pejorative poetics reaches its satirical zenith when he forces his characters, in the play's fnal act, to confront their expectations about the intellectual - and, in many instances, social - manna that they feel the academy s�o�l� be obligated to provide them" The resulting tension between each of the protagonist's expecta tions and their inevitable power struggle allows Mamet to establish the premise for his academic satire in Oleanna" Simply put, the play illustrates his contention that the ethical dilemmas inherent in the academy's various hierarchies fnd their origins in a fawed system for distributing knowledge and creating genuine learning" While many critics correctly read Oleanna as Mamet's brutal musings on what he perceives to be the vagueness of sexual harassment and the ineptitude of political correctness, the play's title pointedly di rects us to the sacred groves of higher education, the playwright's principal satirical target" Oleanna's title originates from a folk story that refers to Ole, a 98



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man who purchases swampland with his wife Anna and then sells it as farmland to unsuspecting buyers willing to risk their life savings in the transaction" By the time that the wouldbe farmers realize that Ole and Anna have duped them, the culprits have vanished" 1 Known as the "Oleanna swindle," the couple's shenanigans inspired the composition of a folk song, which Mamet excerpts as his play's second epigraph: "Oh, to be in Oleanna,/That's where I would rather be"/Than be bound in Norway/And drag the chains of slavery" (7)" The metaphor itself is fairly simple to decipher" For Mamet, the academy functions as a kind of "Oleanna swindle" in which unsus pecting consumers literally risk their life savings - or, at the very least, their intellectual lives - in order to procure a fallacious and perhaps useless product" Richard Badenhausen astutely reads Mamet's satire as "a play about teaching, reading, and understanding: how to do those things well and the consequences of doing them poorly" As such," Badenhausen adds, "Oleanna offers an ominous commen tary on education in America and more particularly functions as a dire warning both to and about those doing the educating" (2)" For the purposes of this chapter, however, Mamet's frst epigraph, a quotation from Samuel Butler's T�e Way of �ll Fles� (1903), seems to imbue Oleanna's satire with perhaps even more signifcance when understood in terms of the playwright's ethical imperatives: "Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting them selves to circumstances" Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from fnding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness" (v)" The passage refers to Butler's Pontifex family, who had - in a line that Mamet slyly omits from his epigraph "the best education that could be had for money"" This phrase in itself offers a fairly obvious indictment of higher education" Yet Butler's words refer to a more compelling ethical issue, for Mamet at least, that involves the vagaries of human discourse and the ways in which we imagine our responsibilities and ethical obligations to one another" The very fact that young people "can be prevented from fnding out" - that they can be denied knowledge and that this act of denial can be carried out by sustaining their own ignor ance and ceding them the blame for their own lack of knowledge occasions a variety of intriguing ethical conficts regarding our conception of responsibility and obligation" In short, Mamet's play asks us to consider the ethical roles of these issues in the academy's economic distribution of knowledge" Are professors required explicitly



Perforiing t�e ��a�eiy


to disseminate knowledge or merely to provide direction for their students' own selfdriven pathways to learning? What, moreover, are the student's obligations in the educational enterprise? Should students simply genufect to higher education's wellestablished hi erarchies or demand that their educators furnish them, in Butler's phraseology, with "the best education that could be had for money"? Such philosophically vexed issues as obligation and responsibil ity are perhaps most usefully considered via Emmanuel Levinas's conceptions of alterity, contemporary moral philosophy's sine q�a non for understanding the nature of our innate responsibilities to our human others" In "Is Ontology Fundamental?" Levinas discusses the ethical signifcance of other beings in relation to the needs and desires of ourselves" Our ethical obligations to others, Levinas reasons, fnd their origins in our inability to erase them via negation" Sim ply put, unless we succeed in negating others through violence, domination, or slavery, we must comprehend others as beings par e��ellen�e who become signifed as "faces," the Levinasian term that refers to the moral consciousness and particularity inherent in others" This "primacy of ontology," in Levinas's words, demonstrates the nature of the collective interrelationships that human beings share with one another (10)" In "The Trace of the Other," Levinas argues that "the relationship with the other puts me into question, empties me of myself" (350)" More importantly for our purposes here, Levinas describes the concept of the face as "the concrete fgure for alterity" (qtd" in Robbins, 23)" The notion of alterity itself - which Paul Laurent Assoun characterizes as "the primal scene of ethics" (96) refers to our inherent responsibilities and obligations to the irre ducible face of the other" These aspects of our human condition fnd their origins in the recognition of sameness that we fnd in others" This similarity of identity and human empathy establishes the foundation for our alterity - in short, the possibility of being "altered" - and for the responsibilities and obligations that we afford to other beings" In Tiie an� t�e Ot�er (1979), Levinas identifes the absolute exteriority of alterity, as opposed to the binary, dialectic, or recipro cal structure implied in the idea of the other" Hence, alterity implies a state of being apprehended, a state of infnite and absolute other ness" In "Philosophy and the Idea of Infnity," Levinas writes that "we can say that the alterity of the infnite is not canceled, is not extinguished in the thought that thinks it" In thinking infnity the I from the frst t�inks iore t�an it t�inks" Infnity does not enter into



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the i�ea of infnity, is not grasped; this idea is not a concept," he continues" "The infnite is radically, absolutely, other" (54)" Alterity's boundless possibilities for registering otherness, for allowing us to comprehend the experiences of other beings, demonstrates its ethical imperatives" Its exteriority forces us to recognize an ethics of differ ence and of otherness" Such encounters with other beings oblige us, then, to incur the spheres of responsibility inherent in our alterity" When we perceive the face of the other, we can no longer, at least ethically, suspend responsibility for other beings" In such instances, Levinas writes in "Meaning and Sense," "the I loses its sovereign selfconfdence, its identifcation, in which consciousness returns triumphantly to itself to rest on itself" Before the exigency of the Other (��tr�i), the I is expelled from this rest and is not the already glorious consciousness of this exile" Any complacency," he adds, "would destroy the straightforwardness of the ethical movement" (54)" In the 1994 flm version of Oleanna, Mamet, as writer an� direc tor, examines what transpires when his academic characters allow themselves to comprehend the face of the other" By examining the nature of the "altered" relationship that exists between his befuddled protagonists John and Carol, Mamet establishes a kind of ethical tension between the sense of responsibility inherent in their alterity, as well as the limits of their capacity for empathizing with - radi cally or otherwise - the subjective experiences of their counterpart"2 In a far more strident fashion than in the sparse text created for the original play production of Oleanna, Mamet's flm employs mu sic and larger theatrical spaces to deliver his ethical pronouncements upon what he clearly perceives to be the academy's moral failings" In a number of instances, Mamet's characters seem on the verge of truly registering the subjective experiences of the other and taking responsibility for their places in their altered relationship" Yet Mamet's pejorative poetics - his satiric interest in revealing the various ways in which his characters ultimately choose the needs of the self over the perhaps more ethical desires of the other underscores his obvious contention that alterity can hardly sustain itself in an academic world driven by insularity, ideology, and self interest" By allowing his characters to recognize alterity and then to replace it once more with their seemingly larger personal or political ends, Mamet illustrates the ways in which higher education functions as an "Oleanna swindle" in which its participants eschew ethics, genuine intellectual growth, and cultural improvement in favor of their own, ostensibly more urgent desires"





The flm mimics the play via the tripartite structure that separates each of the three, increasingly volatile encounters between John (William Macy) and Carol (Debra Eisenstadt)" Drawing upon a wist ful choral score that laments the passing of an era that is now "long ago and far away," Mamet's flm establishes an intriguing tex tual disjunction between a seemingly more innocent past and the ethically vacant present" The play and flmic versions of the text take place almost entirely in John's unbelievably spacious offce, easily the largest of its kind in the history of the professoriate" Yet Mamet employs nearly every nook and cranny of John's quarters in order to exploit the various hierarchies that exist between John and Carol as professor and student, respectively" A junior professor on the verge of a favorable tenure announcement, John plans to purchase a new home for himself and his family to celebrate his expected promotion" As a struggling young student who is failing one of his courses, Carol surely represents an unlikely obstacle along John's route to nearly certain scholarly success" Already the author of a monograph that describes higher education as the "virtual warehousing of the young" (11), John seems destined for approval when the tenure committee meets, despite the fact that he despises them and admits to Carol that he "wouldn't employ [any of the committee's membership] to wax my car" (23)" John effects a similarly condescending attitude toward Carol via a series of hierarchical gestures that he uses during their frst, pro tracted conversation" In addition to impinging frequently upon Carol's sense of personal space, John manipulates the scene's power dy namics in a variety of ways, from his constant refrain of "sit down" to his multiple interruptions of her questions and even her answers to questions that he himself poses" The design of John's offce itself affords him with an assortment of power constructions, including the institutional capital inherent in the old portraits that adorn the walls, his array of gilded, timeworn books, and the desks from which he can sit behind and judge his visitors" In addition to paus ing occasionally to read during Carol's remonstrations about her confusion in his class and throughout campus life in general, John takes numerous phone calls during their (largely oneway) discus sion and, when he fnally seems to engage in a truly intellectual exchange with Carol, evinces pity for her with curt, unemotional and unconvincing remarks such as "I'm sorry for you" and "every one has problems" (21)" John's condescension for Carol is only surpassed by his contempt for the academic world itself, especially



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in terms of its grading procedures and its "ritualized" place in so ciety as a form of professional entitlement" In addition to describing higher education as "somethingotherthanuseful" (28), John views the academy as a kind of "prolonged and systematic hazing" (35)" He seems to reserve special contempt for the manner in which it judges others via exams, grades, and other forms of arbitrary assess ment: "The tests, you see, which you encounter, in school, in college, in life, were designed, in the most part for idiots" By idiots," he tells her" "There is no need to fail at them" They are not a test of your worth" They are a test of your ability to retain and spout back misinformation" Of �o�rse you fail them" They're nonsense" (23)" Rather than removing the communicative barriers that exist be tween himself and Carol, John's condescending moments in many ways make it even more diffcult for them to create a rapport" Their various opportunities for enjoying an altered relationship - for es tablishing a genuine sense of empathy with one another - evaporate in Mamet's flm almost as quickly as they arise" Mamet employs a ringing telephone for precisely this purpose, both in the play and perhaps even more so in the flm" Clearly meant to signify John's more signifcant connections with the outside world, the ringing telephone serves as a device that periodically interrupts John's ca pacity for communing intellectually with Carol" Their conversations in the frst segment rarely rise above the level of small talk; much of the dialogue concerns John's vacillation between leaving to meet his wife at the house that they are attempting to buy and staying behind, almost out of a guilty sense of professional duty, to allay Carol's fears about the course and her larger concerns about aca demic life" In one notable instance, the ringing telephone interrupts as a distraught Carol attempts, fnally, to explain the very source of her fears and confusion: "I always " " " all my life " " " I have never told anyone this " " " All of my life " " " " (38)" In other moments, a desperate John chooses poorly in his efforts to console his student and often sends contradictory signals to Carol that only function to render her even more confused" At one point, for example, he tells her, rather sternly, that "I'm not your father" (9)" When he later places a paternal arm around her shoulder as a gesture of comfort, Carol is understandably fustered and apprehen sive" In this manner, one of his rare attempts at comprehending alterity - although clearly inappropriate in its physicality - is ulti mately fruitless" Carol's similar attempts on John's behalf prove to be ineffectual, including her various questions, which go largely





unanswered, about the progression of his tenure process and the diffculty of his realestate negotiations" Mamet concludes the scene, rather deftly, with John and Carol sitting in silence moments after she at last registers genuine empathy for his urgent need to be with his family: "You have to go" " " " They're proud of you" (40-1)" Al though their interpersonal relationship has fnally become "altered" in the Levinasian sense of the phrase, they have nevertheless pierced the boundaries of the studentteacher relationship on a variety of occasions, including an awkward moment in which John tells an inappropriate joke in order to explain the provocative demeanor that he employs on occasion in the classroom as a rhetorical de vice: "When I was young somebody told me, are you ready, the rich copulate less often than the poor" But when they do, they take more of their clothes off" Years" Years, mind you, I would compare experiences of my own to this dictum," he continues, "saying, aha, this fts the norm, or ah, this is a variation from it" What did it mean? Nothing" It was some jerk thing some school kid told me that took up room inside my head" (32)" The silence that concludes the scene, then, seems rather apt, given John and Carol's various failed attempts at empathy and at altering their perspectives of one another beyond the more rigid require ments of the studentteacher relationship" In the wordless montage that bridges the frst and second segments of the flm, John point edly sits alone in the new house and sips a warm glass of champagne" His tenure victory and the purchase of his family's new home seem to be hollow victories in Mamet's innocuous academic world" In the flm's second segment, John and Carol appear in more formal attire" Defending his teaching style, John remarks that "when I found I loved to teach, I swore that I would not become that cold, rigid automaton of an instructor which I had encountered as a child"" John quickly shifts the discussion to an allout defense of his drive for tenure, of which he admits to being "covetous" (43)" He re marks that "tenure, and security, and yes, and �oifort, were not, of themselves, to be scorned; and were even worthy of honorable pur suit" (44)" �iewers - indeed, readers of the text of Mamet's flm soon learn that Carol has lodged a formal complaint with John's tenure committee, alleging that her instructor's behavior includes inappropriate sexist, elitist, and, by virtue of his aforementioned joke, pornographic manifestations" Mamet deftly conceals the fact of Carol's complaint, thus allowing his audience to recognize the subtle power shifts that have occurred in the interim between



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Oleanna's frst and second segments" The effect, although brief in duration, momentarily destabilizes the viewer's comprehension of the scene's revised social and gender frameworks" With the power dynamics in their relationship suddenly skewed, John attempts to coerce Carol into retracting her complaint by ap pealing to her sense of empathy" In short, he plans to "alter" her point of view by asserting his otherness, by forcing Carol to con front the subjectivity inherent in his Levinasian "face," if you will" John attempts to accomplish this end by entreating her, at least initially, to think about the potential damage to his family, as well as to herself" The process of hearing her complaint, he tells her, is "l��i�ro�s" Don't you know that? It's not ne�essary" It's going to �� iiliate you, and it's going to cost me my �o�se" (48)" Her response, which marks the flm's most signifcant tonal shift, almost irrevo cably redraws the boundaries of their relationship: "I don't care what you feel" Do you see? DO YOU SEE? You can't �o that any more" You" Do" Not" Have" The" Power" (50)" Moments later, John attempts to reestablish their teacher-student relationship by sug gesting that their dilemma is nothing more than the byproduct of spirited academic debate: "You don't have to fght with me," he tells her" "I'm not the subject" (53)" In concert with the thrust of Mamet's more implicit critique of the academy, John retreats to his institutional role in the professoriate as Carol's arguments become ever more strident and credible" Yet, tellingly - and every time he seems on the verge of winning back her sense of empathy - John shortcircuits Carol's capacity for showing compassion for his increasingly perilous situation via a variety of rhetorical miscues, particularly through his sexist refer ence to the tenure committee as "good men and true" - and despite the fact that the committee includes a female faculty member" The offhanded and demeaning manner in which John dismisses Carol's feminist colleagues - "everyone needs advisers" (55) - proves even more disastrous as it forces her to defend her ideological position with even greater resolution" Alterity, quite obviously, can hardly emerge in such an entrenched environment of dogmatism and mis trust" The second segment concludes, rather aptly, with John once again invading Carol's personal space as he attempts to restrain her from leaving in a desperate attempt to compel her to confront the Levinasian face of his ostensibly altered persona" All the while, he scarcely begins to glimpse the face of Carol's own being" As the scene comes to a close, Carol stumbles from John's grasp and escapes





into a hallway flled with passersby who witness - whether rightly or wrongly, accurately or inaccurately - what appears to be a mem ber of the college's faculty in the midst of a physical altercation with a student" In the montage between the flm's second and third segments, Mamet treats the audience to the image of a forlorn John accepting room service in a hotel, with all of the attendant impli cations regarding the state of his married life and the potentially dismal outcome that awaits his professional career" Meanwhile, Mamet's camera shifts to Carol, whom we observe in the act of confdently manufacturing and posting political banners for her group"3 In sharp contrast with Oleanna's frst scene, in which a wellgroomed and genteel John sips lazily from an elegant teacup, the flm's fnal segment depicts the professor as unshaven, disheveled, and ner vously smoking a cigarette" Conversely, a reserved and resolute Carol sits before him; clearly, the text's power shift from teacher to stu dent is complete" In the frst scene, Carol barely spoke, and when she did, it was merely to evince her confusion" During Oleanna's fnal segment, Carol controls the pace of much of their conversa tion, which largely concerns John's imminent dismissal from the institution" As with the flm's earlier scenes, John eschews the promise of alterity and blames Carol for various intellectual faws in her thinking every time that she seems ready to sympathize, if only on a strictly human level, with his position" Forced, yet again, to de fend her complaint against him, Carol challenges the academy's fundamental precepts regarding tenure and its most sacred vestiges of academic freedom: Why do you question your suspension? You believe in what yo� �all freedom of thought" Then, fne" Yo� believe in freedomof thought an� a home, and, an� prerogatives for your kid, an� tenure" And I'm going to tell you" You believe not in "freedom of thought," but in an elitist, " " " protected hierarchy which rewards you" And for whom you are the clown" And you mock and exploit the system which pays your rent" You're wrong" I'm not wrong" " " " You think that I'm full of hatred" I know what you think I am" (67-8) In a maelstrom of language, Mamet's narrative fnally arrives at the core of his pejorative poetics, which contends that the concept of academic freedom exists as a pretense upon which functionaries



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such as John make their dubious livings" Thunderstruck by the clarity of her position, John admits that he despises her for causing his "misfortune" and for effecting the power shift in their institution ally devised relationship" Moved by his sudden respect for her, Carol suggests that her group might withdraw their complaint if he would agree to removing certain books, including his own, from the university's curriculum" John's fery response - "You're �angero�s, you're trong, and it's my job " " " to say no to you" (76) - precipitates the flm's conficted and complex conclusion in which each character belatedly recog nizes the extent of the other's being" Wearing the metaphorical robes of academic freedom, John champions, if only briefy, the rites of academic freedom against what he perceives to be a cultural on slaught of political correctness, clearly one of Mamet's satirical targets in Oleanna" When Carol discovers that John has been living in a hotel for two days, she fnally empathizes with his predicament and entreats him to answer his eternally ringing telephone: "You haven't been home in two days" " " " I think that you should pick up that phone" (76-7)" Yet once again John and Carol fnd themselves unable to see the face of the other when larger ideological con cerns impede their capacity for genuinely communicating" John subsequently learns that Carol has charged him with attempted rape because of the altercation that concluded the second segment" Later, when she scolds him for referring to his wife as "baby" during yet another telephone call, he erupts in a fury of anger at her ideological power over him: "You vicious little bitch" You think you can come in here with your political correctness and destroy my life?" (79)" In the melee that follows, John attacks Carol physically, verging upon doing much more serious harm to her" As she cowers on the foor, Carol repeats, as if in a trance, "Yes" That's right" (80)"4 While Carol's fnal words in the flm and John's subsequently stunned reaction at his own, terrible capacity for violence seem to suggest a belated recognition of each other's otherness, Mamet's pejorative poetics surely argues for a more damning conclusion about higher education's penchant for political correctness and its ram pant intellectualism in a world that so often demands more nuanced and pragmatic solutions" Perhaps more signifcantly, as an academic satire, Mamet's Oleanna seeks to depict the university as an ethi cally problematic environment in which alterity ceases to be possible" How, indeed, could the bifurcated world of his text ever hope to establish a frmament of hope, empathy, and reconciliation? Oleanna





posits no easy answers to the fractious issues that it proposes" Rather, Mamet's narrative dares us to consider our own obligations and responsibilities in the context of Oleanna's overtly drawn portrait of academic disjunction" In S�a�ots of �t�i�s� Criti�isi an� t�e J�st So�iety (1999), Geoffrey Galt Harpham observes that "ethics does not solve problems, it structures them" (37)" In his own, fairly un subtle fashion, Mamet attempts in Oleanna to construct new dialogues about what amount to remarkably old problems regarding elitism, gender dynamics, and ideological entrenchment"5



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Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project: Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring

"Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious and useless political asset in election campaigns, racism is as healthy today as it was during the Enlightenment." - Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

Although ethical criticism offers a valuable discourse for exploring concepts of community, goodness, and love and their centrality in the moral construction of literary works, it also provides us with a useful methodology for considering the function of these philo sophical constructs in regard to the most fractious issues that confront the academy today, the especially divisive notions of culture and race. As Samuel Fleischacker perceptively observes in The Ethics of Culture (1994), "Writers on culture usually show little understand ing of what makes an argument or decision ethical, while writers on ethics have rarely done much serious thinking about culture" (ix). Because issues associated with racial prejudice and cultural div ision continue to plague our postsecondary institutions, they merit particular attention in any study of contemporary academic fction. The ethical interpretation of these enduring social dilemmas in novels about university life also underscores the tremendous ideological gulf that exists between monoculturalism and multiculturalism, the two disparate schools of thought that dominate the intellectual conversation regarding these subjects. The controversial emergence of the multicultural project in recent decades - as well as the ensu ing "culture wars" that bifurcated the national debate over higher 109



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education during the late 1980s and early 1990s - demonstrates the incendiary nature of the scholarly and media response to the multiculturalist agenda for engendering an atmosphere of pluralism and racial and cultural inclusiveness in our institutions of higher education. In Japanese by Spring (1993), Ishmael Reed satirically illustrates the social and intellectual rancor that accompanied the localization of the culture wars during the early 1990s. In addition to depicting the divergent nuances of the scholarly response to multiculturalism, Reed's novel offers a blistering attack upon the various cultural and racial factions of the academy and the bankrupt value systems that he critiques from within its hallowed corridors. Reed's academic satire intersects a number of signifcant intellectual issues, more over, including the ethics of multiculturalism, the dangers inherent in the monoculturalist position, and fnally, the fundamental no tions of authorship and narrative authority. By approaching his text from so many disparate perspectives, Reed demonstrates the ways in which racism and cultural exclusion infect our institutions of higher learning from a wide range of often unexpected locales. In this manner, Reed posits his own notion of a pejorative poetics because his narrative in Japanese by Spring consistently problematizes the ethical stances of his academic characters in the novel, espe cially those fgures who champion the tenets of monoculturalism. In his essay, "Soyinka among the Monoculturalists," for example, Reed reveals his particular antipathy for academics who deride the pluralistic intentions of the multicultural project: "I distrust the monoculturalists' point of view so much that when they praise some thing I become suspicious," he writes, "and when they condemn something, I feel that there must be something praiseworthy about it" (211). In his Introduction to Multi-Ethnic America: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace (1997), Reed describes monoculturalism as an "antiintellectual coalition" that frequently employs dubious phraseology about a "common culture" in order to resist the ethical mandates of multiculturalism (xvii). Reed's caustic misgivings regarding monoculturalism typify his satiric attacks on the academy in Japanese by Spring, likewise under scoring his implicit support for the multicultural project and its socially and racially inclusive agenda for higher education. Multi culturalism fnds its particular scholarly roots in the academic desire to broaden our approach to a wide range of national cultures and literatures, to represent the diversity of humankind rather than simply



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validating the cultural achievements of its most powerful and re sourceful progeny. In this way, the multicultural project attempts to undo the insular shackles of ethnocentrism, a cultural phenomenon "rooted in the impossibility of escaping from one's experience," Jaime S. Wurzel writes (6). Adopting the values of a multicultural education, however, allows us to recognize the array of cultural nuances that comprise the human community and its artistic and historical accomplishments, thus, as Wurzel observes, "expanding our cultural vision to provide us with the ability to become multi cultural individuals in a multicultural world" (3). Multiculturalism also seeks to reshape our pedagogical approach to cultural studies, an educational domain once exclusively perceived in terms of the hegemony of Western culture and history. "The prose and poetry, the narratives and theories, the conceptual structures and method ologies of Western Culture that the curriculum was expected to hand down to future generations," Jane Roland Martin argues, "were authored by the educated white man, for the educated white man, and about the educated white man and his world or, if about other people and other worlds, from his perspective" (151). By endeavoring to operate from a broad perspective, the multicultural project - with its express emphasis upon the pluralistic needs of a human culture that fnds its origins in diversity and difference - resists the politics of cultural exclusion to embrace instead a policy of inclusiveness and tolerance. Like the ethical paradigm, multiculturalism - in its effort to provide readers with a textual approach that allows for the hetero geneity that characterizes the human community - operates from a critical stance marked by its desire for celebrating pluralism and universalism. As David A. Hollinger remarks in Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995): "The oncepopular notion that there might be an American character or even culture was widely dis credited as a nationalist equivalent of a universalism understood to deny diversity" (64). By acknowledging such a vast range of cultural differences, multiculturalism addresses the notions of indi viduality and autonomy that distinguish our experiences. "Di versity of cultures is exactly what is most distinctive about the human species," Michael Novak observes, because "it fows from human freedom; it expresses human sociality" (451). Inter preted in this manner, multiculturalism seems peculiarly ethical. Like ethical criticism, it attempts to provide readers with a means for establishing vital interconnections between texts and the heterogeneous



Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project


community in which we live. As David B. Wong astutely notes: "One need not be a skeptic or relativist to recognize moral accom modation as an important value that has frequent application to our lives" (22). Although an affnity for pluralism undergirds the moral philoso phies of both multiculturalism and ethical criticism, Jeremy Waldron reminds us that pluralism functions as the expansive mindset that makes the multicultural project possible. "To say that a society is pluralistic is not the same as saying it is multicultural: pluralism may relate to individual lifestyles, vocations, religious faiths, ethics, politics, and experiences, with no assumption that these differences coalesce into the shared and abiding entities we call Icultures,'" Waldron remarks. "Pluralism is the genus," he adds, while "cultural diversity is a species of it" (96). Multicultural education, then, pro vides teachers with a valuable avenue for underscoring the merits of pluralism and the humanistic benefts of exploring cultural differences.1 "Multicultural education," David T. Abalos writes in Strategies of Transformation totard a Multicultural Society (1996), "seeks to restore the integrity of the curriculum by taking seriously the scholarship of all groups in our nation" (98). Furthermore, a pedagogy that avails itself of the merits of multiculturalism necessarily sanctions the celebration of cultural identity and diversity.2 "Multiculturalism," Fleischacker notes, "is an ideal that requires going beyond one's own position" (216). Like the proponents of the ethical paradigm, multiculturalism's advocates recognize the humanistic value of plu ralism and the selfrefexive manner in which autonomous individuals approach works of literary art. Similarly, multiculturalists comprehend the ethical dimensions of literary studies and their signifcance to our understanding of the human community. Reed's efforts in support of the multicultural project manifest them selves in his satiric novels directed toward the American institutions that, at least in Reed's estimation, bear the responsibility for the nation's bankrupt cultural value systems.3 Yet Reed's narratives fre quently confound readers because of his intentional elevation of ideology over character in his fctions. The unusual brand of satire that marks Reed's narratives fnds its roots in his aesthetic of Neo HooDooism, which, in the words of Jay Boyer, "refers to those forces which do not lend themselves to an understanding through reason" (8). A complex amalgamation of historical, cultural, and artistic elements, HooDoo perceives the dangerous ways in which social institutions invariably displace, and ultimately control, individual



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When I say that I am working on a "hoodoo" aesthetic I know I'm serious and I know what I'm talking about and this falls in line with that. They have in Voodoo a thing they call gros-bonange, and the gros-bon-ange is that which separates from the person after death. It carries all of his essential elements, the qualities that make him unique from other individuals. And this is what I try to do. I'm not interested in rendering a photograph of a person. I'm interested in capturing his soul and putting it in a cauldron or in a novel. (35) In this manner, Reed attempts to reinvigorate fctionally the cultural and moral life of the individual in the face of an omnipresent Western culture. Yet "the evils Reed attacks are not just AfricanAmerican problems," Kathryn Hume writes, because "his focus on control demonstrates that he belongs to a group of bitter satirists - female and male, black and white - whose experience with cultural lies appalls them" (516). Reed's especially volatile form of satire seeks to expose the ways in which institutions, particularly academic and governmental bodies, abuse their missions in order to maintain their circles of power and fulfll the personal ambitions of their leaders. "A selfproclaimed saboteur of historical orthodoxy," according to Julian Cowley (1236), Reed explores a variety of satiric targets in Japanese by Spring, a novel that traces Benjamin "Chappie" Puttbutt's quest for tenure on the campus of Jack London College, a den of racism and monocultural education in Oakland, California. Puttbutt encounters racial and cultural prejudice in nearly every quarter of the institution, from the jingoistic student newspaper and the monolithic administration to the exclusionary Department of African American Studies and the ironically named Department of "Humanity." In Ishmael Reed and the Net Black Aesthetic Critics (1988), Reginald Martin writes: "As satire is usually based on real types, Reed draws from history and the news as nonfctional events to satirize America's monocultural arrogance and the price paid in the face of that arrogance by those who are not Ivital people,' that is, a member of the dominant culture or the moneyed class" (108). In Japanese by Spring, however, institutional power infuses the policy makers and intellectual gatekeepers of Jack London College with the "vitality" of which Martin speaks, although this state of affairs



identity through their collective power. In a 1972 interview with John O'Brien, Reed describes his narrative approach:


suddenly ends with the purchase of the college by a Japanese con glomerate that subsequently initiates a devastating program of cultural redefnition on campus.4 As this chapter will show, Reed's depiction of Jack London College's existing racial problems - later compounded by the cultural dilemmas that accompany the Japanese occupation of the institution - reveals his interest in highlighting the ways in which any monoculturalist ideology ultimately results in racist and culturally exclusive policies. In this way, Reed offers a scathing commentary on the insular, self serving philosophy of multiculturalism's opponents. An ethical reading of Japanese by Spring demonstrates the manner in which Reed implicitly composes a moral corrective for the cultural infractions of the monoculturalist agenda. Because of its emphasis upon repairing the cultural and social injustices of the human community, ethical criticism possesses the capacity for producing meaningful critiques of narratives such as Reed's Japanese by Spring that confront the moral challenges inherent in contemporary academic life. Because of Reed's own interest in satirizing monoculturalism and the unethical manner in which ideological regimes enforce compliance with their political and cultural agendas, ethical criticism provides a particularly useful method for reading Japanese by Spring. Ethical criticism offers a powerful mechanism, moreover, for ex plaining the manner in which Reed's HooDoo aesthetic operates in his fctions as an unconventional means for capturing a given character's essence in order to satisfy the novelist's satirical aims. Reed's commitment to the HooDoo aesthetic - and its emphasis upon ideology over character - produces many of the reading diffculties that often antagonize and alienate his audience. In con trast with many practitioners of the academic novel, Reed employs his characters as onedimensional vessels for his critiques of monoculturalism and university life. Unlike David Lodge's Philip Swallow - one of the multidimensional characters from Lodge's trilogy of academic novels, Changing Places: a Tale of Tto Campuses (1975), Small World: an Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work (1988) Puttbutt functions as the onedimensional vehicle for Reed's satire in Japanese by Spring. While Lodge revels in his characters' inter personal experiences and satirizes academic life via their adventures at scholarly conferences and as they pursue the latest intellectual trends, Reed manipulates the deliberately fat characters of his fctions in order to achieve his narrative objectives. For Lodge, academic characters such as Swallow and Morris Zapp provide him with



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opportunities for satirizing academic life as they eagerly divert them selves with the triviality of departmental infghting, pedantic scholarly debate, and an unceasing tide of international conferences and clan destine affairs. In Japanese by Spring, Reed employs his literary characters as ideological types - or, in the case of Puttbutt, as ideo logical ciphers via which the novelist can contrast the exclusionary politics of monoculturalism with the pluralist aims of multiculturalism. Because Reed eschews conventional characterization in favor of the depiction of the HooDoo essences of his characters, the symbolic representations of his protagonists and the ideological impact of the rhetoric and images that they encounter take on greater signifcance in his fctions. In Japanese by Spring, Puttbutt - an AfricanAmerican junior pro fessor at Jack London College and a product of the affrmativeaction era - adopts an accommodationist attitude in order to secure tenure from the institution's predominantly white power structure. In addition to questioning the ethical stances of the institutional forces that seek to derail Puttbutt's campaign for tenure at Jack London College, Reed critiques Puttbutt's selfeffacing motives when the Japanese regime engages in its own monocultural power play with his apparently eager support. A former Black Panther, erstwhile chairperson of the black caucus at the Air Force Academy, and the author of a Master's thesis in which he traces instances of racism in Shakespeare's Othello, Puttbutt abandons his progressive racial agenda when he arrives at Jack London College in an effort to curry the favor of the institution's largely white administration, a coterie of rightwing intellectuals led by President Bright Stool, allegedly hired by the Board of Trustees "because he vowed to put an end to capricious demands for a global university" (41). As the narrative of Japanese by Spring unfolds, Puttbutt enjoys a substantial inter national reputation as the author of the recent bestseller, Blacks, America's Misfortune, a volume in which he inaugurates his persona as an AfricanAmerican apologist. "We blacks must buckle down so that the whites will respect us," he tells a television reporter. "Unless we do so, we will become like some of our less fortunate brothers and sisters; part of a permanent underclass." In this way, Puttbutt registers his racially stylized image as a "team player." "He hoped that those who were about to reward him lifetime security were listening," Reed writes of Puttbutt's television inter view, and that they "would read these quotes. Would respect him. Would award him tenure" (18-19). Despite the publication of





numerous critical articles and frequent invitations to participate in European speaking engagements - lectures that, remarkably, account for more than twenty percent of his income - Puttbutt seems un able to earn tenure among his less prolifc, and often less celebrated, colleagues.5 As the meeting of Puttbutt's tenure committee approaches, he intensifes his efforts to win support from the college's largely white establishment, as well as from the powerful chairman of the Department of AfricanAmerican Studies, Dr. Charles Obi, and Jack London College's most generous alumnus, Robert Bass, Sr. Although Dr. Jack Milch, chairman of the Department of Humanity, reassures Puttbutt about the prospects of his upcoming tenure hearing, the junior professor becomes concerned during his visit with Milch because of his senior colleague's overt feminist posturing. While in Milch's offce, "Puttbutt noticed that the entire walls were covered with photos of Anita Hill," Reed writes. "Every inch. Covers of magazines with Anita Hill's picture. Newspaper clippings" (22). Puttbutt also sees volumes of verse on Milch's desk by April Jokujoku, a prominent AfricanAmerican feminist rumored to be considering a lucrative position at Jack London College. While Puttbutt prepares for his visit with Dr. Obi, Effe Singleton, one of the chairman's numerous secretaries, warns Puttbutt about impending budget cuts and the fragility of his position on campus: "The word is," she tells him, "that they're going to bring in April Jokujoku to take your job" (27). During his visit with Dr. Obi, a monoculturalist prac titioner of Afrocentrism and an advocate of the African language of Yoruba, Puttbutt endures a lecture from the senior professor regard ing his "counterproductive" behavior. "Man, you one serious motherfucker," Obi observes; "you never come to the black faculty cocktail parties, and the liberals in the Humanity department say that you don't mix with them. How do you expect to get ahead if you're not collegial�" Obi exclaims (31). Rather than merely focusing on Puttbutt's response to his senior colleagues' remonstrations, Reed concentrates our attention instead upon the monoculturalist parallels between Milch's accommodationist rhetoric - evidenced most notably by the conspicuous images of Hill and the prominently placed volume of Jokujoku's poetry - and Obi's strident Afrocentrism. By highlighting these signifers of academic power and acceptance against the fat contrast of Puttbutt's onedimensional character, Reed succeeds in demonstrating the junior professor's tenuous position in the academy.



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In his abiding effort to win tenure at any cost, Puttbutt also tacitly contributes to the college's racial malaise through his regressive accommodationist persona. In the classroom, for example, he only tolerates the outrageous, white supremacist behavior of Robert Bass, Jr., so as not to antagonize his student's father, the powerful owner of Oakland's multinational Caesar Synthetics and the college's most spirited patron. Sporting a shaved head and wearing a swastika armband, Bass, Jr., frequently disrupts Puttbutt's lectures with racial diatribes. He also irritates the junior professor through his prejudicial caricatures of Puttbutt in the college's rightwing newspaper, �oons and �ikes. Yet the administration of Jack London College remains "reluctant to discipline some of the rightwing students," Reed notes, "because the students received full backing from rightwing corpor ations and law frms" (14). Reed's depictions of student racism in the postcivilrights era fnd their origins in the cultural and political realities of contemporary postsecondary institutions. As Shelby Steele observes: "What has emerged on campus in recent years - as a result of the new equality and of affrmative action and, in a sense, as a result of progress - is a politics of difference, a troubling, volatile politics in which each group justifes itself, its sense of worth and its pursuit of power, through difference alone" (178). Yet Puttbutt's singleminded drive for tenure prompts him to remain silent regarding Jack London College's own "politics of differ ence," to operate instead as an apologist for racial unrest on campus. During his television interview, for instance, the junior professor effects a frown of concern to underscore the gravity of the college's racial conficts, while simultaneously undermining the progressive efforts of AfricanAmerican students in order to bolster his personal crusade for job security by currying the favor of the white campus power structure: "The black students bring this on themselves," he said, sucking on a menthol cigarette. . . . "With their separatism, their inability to ft in, their denial of mainstream values, they get the white students angry. The white students want them to join in, to par ticipate in this generous pie called the United States of America. To end their disaffliation from the common culture. Black students, and indeed black faculty, should stop their confrontational tactics. They should start to negotiate. They should stop worrying these poor whites with their excessive demands. Affrmative action. �uotas. They get themselves worked up. And so it's understandable




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By coldly accepting the white students' racist behavior as the natural product of their anger and racial animus, Puttbutt abdicates his ethnic identity for the express purpose of securing lifetime employment among the culturally and ethically fractured environs of Jack London College, as well as for the possibility of someday having the fnancial capacity to live among the college elite in posh Oakland Hills, the predominantly white neighborhood overlooking the campus. Yet community, Lawrence Blum warns, "should not come at the ex pense of racial justice and cultural identity" (200). In Puttbutt's ethically challenged world, however, the interpersonal consequences of his rage for professional acceptance seem insignifcant in com parison with his desire to align himself with the prevailing ideology. Puttbutt supplements his tireless enthusiasm for tenure with his study of the Japanese language, an enterprise that he began in Colo rado Springs during his tour of duty with the Air Force. He believes that knowledge of Japanese will provide him with the key to his future, although he sycophantically tells Dr. Marsha Marx, the head of the Women's Studies department, that he wants to learn Japanese in order to translate the verse of "some medieval women court poets" (58). In fact, "Puttbutt fgured that with Japanese under his belt he would adjust to the new realities of the coming postsettler era," Reed writes, "a time when the domination of the United States by people of the same background would come to an end" (47). In this way, Reed demonstrates Puttbutt's secret accord with the multicultural project, despite his monocultural public persona. While awaiting the college's tenure decision, Puttbutt travels weekly to downtown Oakland, where he studies Japanese with Dr. Yamato, the tutor who introduces the junior professor to Japanese by Spring, Puttbutt's textbook for his language studies, as well as the Urtext of Reed's novel. 6 Puttbutt feels that he can acquire Japanese as easily as he had once mastered the artifce of literary criticism: "All you had to do was string together some quotes from Benjamin, Barthes, Foucault, and Lacan and you were in business," Puttbutt muses (49). Despite the assurances from the chairpersons of the AfricanAmerican Studies, Women's Studies, and Humanity departments, the college, fulflling Effe's covert prophecy, ultimately denies Puttbutt the tenure that he so covets, although "they hoped that he would continue on the yeartoyear basis and that they felt him to be an



that they go about assaulting the black students. The white students are merely giving vent to their rage." (6)

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asset to the department" (69). His anger reaches a fever pitch as he recounts his recent, blasphemous activities on behalf of job security - "denouncing affrmative action, criticizing blacks for exploiting white guilt." He remembers writing an editorial against divestment in South Africa; he also recalls arguing that "racism was an illusion" (70). He becomes further outraged when he learns that the administration has utilized the savings from his chimerical promotion in order to procure the services of Jokujoku, who will be appointed full professor in the departments of Women's Studies and AfricanAmerican Studies at the dazzling sum of �150,000 per semester. The college also promises her an array of computer equip ment, two secretaries, a bodyguard, and a mountain retreat - fringe benefts awarded to Jokujoku in spite of the fact, Reed ironically observes, "that her whole pitch was about the oppression of underclass females in the ghettos" (32).7 Puttbutt's own accommodations at the college amounted to a poorly lit offce that he shared with the other lecturers and two teaching assistants. After learning about Jokujoku's appointment, Puttbutt drowns his sorrows, appropriately enough, in several bottles of sake. Again, such scenes resonate - not because of Reed's deliberately indifferent narration of Puttbutt's supreme moment of emotional crisis - but rather, because of the novelist's overt description of the symbolic nuances of cultural power and ideology. By contrasting Jokujoku's astonishing fringe benefts with the junior professor's lowly professional accommodations, Reed highlights the power discrepancies engendered by policies of monoculturalism. When Puttbutt returns to Jack London College after a long night of turmoil in which he symbolically tries on his old Black Panther beret, he discovers an institution at sea in its own identity crisis. During the night, an unidentifed Japanese organization purchases the college for �100 million. The Japanese occupation of Jack London College and their subsequently radical redefnition of its mission, its culture, and its curriculum provides Reed with a valuable means for demonstrating the dangerous results of a monoculturalist agenda. The cultural redefnition of the college by the Japanese also allows Reed to underscore the awesome capacity of racial difference as a mechanism for effecting cultural change. "Race is, by any standard, an unprincipled source of power," Steele notes, "and on campuses the use of racial power by one group makes racial, ethnic, or gender difference a currency of power for all groups" (182). By depicting the Japanese in the act of reshaping the institution in their cultural





and historical image, moreover, Reed underscores the derogatory core of racism and its penchant for asserting the superiority of one race over another. As Mitchell Silver observes: "Racism holds that some human groups, defned by their nationality, language, culture, ancestry, or belief systems, are biologically incapable of certain cultural achievements or certain forms of social life" (53). As practitioners of biological racism, the Japanese in Reed's satire reveal the ways in which a monocultural ideology must reconfgure both the historical past and the political landscape of the present in order to implement their program of cultural redefnition. Capitalizing on his anger against the existing administrative establishment of Jack London College, the Japanese cleverly choose Puttbutt as the vehicle for their monocultural ideology. After being mysteriously summoned to the president's house, Puttbutt discovers the identity of the college's new president, Dr. Yamato, his language tutor. Having forced President Stool into early retirement, Yamato shares with Puttbutt his agenda for "civilizing" the faculty and students of Jack London College. "The reason that the Americans are so backward is because of what they call their core curriculum," he tells Puttbutt. "We will help them. . . . Show them that there are some things that all educated people must know in order to be culturally literate," he continues. "�et them to realize that there's more to life than Captain Video" (89). After appointing Puttbutt as his second in command and rewarding him with a spacious offce, Yamato outlines his plans for altering the college's cultural philoso phy. In addition to proposing the dismissal of many of Puttbutt's colleagues, Yamato intends to shut down the Department of Humanity, while collapsing the departments of African Studies, Chicano Studies, AsianAmerican Studies, NativeAmerican Studies, and AfricanAmerican Studies into a single unit, the Department of European Studies. Yamato also wishes to eliminate the study of Plato, Milton, and, most notably, Hegel - "This ignorant man maintained that the Chinese had no philosophy. What rubbish," he bellows. "The entire history of Western philosophy could be covered in one week" (90-1). By concentrating our attention upon the manner in which the culturally insular practices of one regime beget those of another, Reed demonstrates the ways in which unregulated bastions of power quickly avail themselves of monoculturalism's politics of hegemony. Puttbutt engages in the process of culturally redefning Jack Lon don College with unchecked, vengeful glee. He revels in delight,



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for example, as he informs Dr. Obi and Dr. Milch of the new status of their departments on campus. He particularly enjoys demoting Professor Crabtree, whom he correctly credits with undermining his tenure case, to a lectureship in freshman composition. "Chappie was so happy," Reed writes, "that he was beside himself" (132). As he informs each faculty member about their altered professional status on campus under the Japanese regime, Puttbutt cheerfully presents each stunned employee with a copy of Japanese by Spring. In one instance, Puttbutt fnds special satisfaction in a visit from Robert Bass, Sr., who apologizes for his son's white supremacist be havior and indentures Bass, Jr., into functioning as Puttbutt's servant. As a New Critic, Puttbutt takes particular pleasure in the dismissal of Jack London College's a�ant-garde literary theorists: He had sent a letter to the campus deconstructionists, informing them of their termination. The letters said you're fred. Those who believed that the words "you're fred" meant exactly that could fnish the semester. Those who felt that the words only referred to themselves would have to leave immediately. (132) In addition to satirizing the unethical ways in which Yamato's regime implements the tutor's monocultural program of Japanese acculturation on campus, Reed clearly questions the spiteful man ner in which Puttbutt effects his revenge upon the former elite of Jack London College. Reed further underscores the dangers of monoculturalism by illustrating Puttbutt's enthusiastic absorption of Yamato's cultural doctrine for the express purpose of possessing institutional power. In addition to renaming the institution after a Japanese war criminal, Yamato disbands the college newspaper and removes the giant statue of Jack London from its esteemed place in the center of campus. He also changes the name of the Student Union building to Isoroku Yamamoto Hall in honor of the mastermind behind the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor. As one faculty member remarks about the new profle of Jack London College, "It's become nothing but an indoctrination center for Japanese propaganda" (153). Yamato later institutes a culturally skewed I� test for the college's faculty and students, while also expelling all Americanborn Chinese and Japa nese students because he believes that they might act as agents for American interests. Rumors also persist that Yamato tortures student dissenters and drafts attractive coeds into service as geisha girls. 8





After most of the college's faculty and student population fail the I� test, Yamato considers hiring an entirely Japanese professoriate. "Maybe Americans should be put to work at things that will not strain their capacities," Yamato argues, "wrapping packages and opening doors for their betters, or ladling out ice cream, taking hotel reser vations lest they become a permanent underclass among developing nations" (145). Even Puttbutt fnds himself increasingly unable to fathom the rightwing fanaticism of Yamato's rage for a Japanese culture unadulterated by the excesses of Western life and thought. "Homogeneous," Reed writes, "Puttbutt was having a humongous pain from this word" (108). As Yamato's radical monoculturalist agenda becomes even more pronounced on the former campus of Jack London College, the national news media and the American intelligentsia begin to respond to the tutor's despicable campaign against pluralism and diversity. Yamato's culturally regressive antics particularly vex the multicultural sensibilities of the public persona of Ishmael Reed, who appears as a character within his own narrative. As the antithesis of Roland Barthes's late author who "enters into his own death" when "writing begins" (142), Reed appears in Japanese by Spring as a fully realized representation of his biographical self. "Remember," Reed playfully remarks, "the author was dead in the age of theory" (129). Reed not only undermines traditional conceptions of authority, but also pro vides himself with yet another voice for registering his disgust with any culturally exclusive program, especially one as derisive and unsettling as Yamato's.9 Reed's narrative self operates, moreover, as the author's personal forum for undergirding his satire with several useful anecdotes regarding the value of the multicultural project, while also providing readers with an ethical corrective for Puttbutt's perfunctory efforts on behalf of Yamato's monocultural redefnition of Jack London College. Reed's narrative counterpart makes his most dramatic appearance during a visit to the college's Faculty Club, where he encounters an ebullient Puttbutt at the height of his powers as Yamato's right hand man. Puttbutt had once written a book review of one of the fctive Reed's novels during his era as an AfricanAmerican apolo gist. "For those looking for plot, character development, and logic, skip this one," Puttbutt writes about Reed's work. In addition to observing the fawning manner in which Puttbutt's colleagues parade about him, Reed's visit to the Faculty Club allows him to report on the evolution of the junior professor's formerly polemical



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cultural mindset. "I'm not taking sides anymore," Puttbutt informs Reed; "from now on my policy is one of enlightened selfinterest." Puttbutt later tells the novelist about his dream of someday owning a palatial estate in Oakland Hills, while also regaling Reed with his cultural vision of the future. "This is the book that got me to where I am now," he tells the novelist after giving him a copy of Japanese by Spring. "You'd better get with it brother," Puttbutt continues, because "the twentyfrst century is going to be a yellow century." Reed's fctive counterpart departs the Faculty Club in a state of confusion regarding Puttbutt's cultural development: "This man who was a oneman black public relations department on behalf of Western civilization was now a big Asia booster," the bewildered novelist muses (131). Reed's fctional visit with Puttbutt underscores the wide spectrum of the junior professor's cultural state of mind, an intellectual progress that catapults Puttbutt from Black Panther to AfricanAmerican apolo gist to, fnally, a selfinterested, ethically vacant capitalist. Reed's appearance as a character in the novel also allows him, as author, to extol the humanistic benefts of multiculturalism, while simulta neously demonstrating what he considers to be the antipluralistic agendas of women's studies, Afrocentrism, and Eurocentrism, among other biological and cultural biases. Yet, as Robert Elliot Fox argues in Conscientious Sorcerers (1987), the "danger for Reed" in presenting his public self in his fctions "is that of selfcaricature" (6). A number of instances in the novel indeed seem to lend credence to Fox's assertion. At one juncture, for example, Reed writes: "Ishmael Reed was wondering was there no end to the sacrifces he would be called upon to make on behalf of Western civilization" (200). In other moments he refers to himself as "a real Ishmaelite" (46) and "Dear I. R." (187). Unfortunately, Reed's fctional appearance in Japanese by Spring threatens to dilute his very meaningful message regarding the dangers of monoculturalism. As Tsunehiko Kato astutely remarks: "What troubles me about Reed's position is not that he criticizes Eurocentrists, Afrocentrists, or accommodationists among black intellectuals, but rather the way in which he creates the impression that he is the only one doing the right thing" (127). Reed's activities as a literary character allow him, as a matter of course, to privilege his multicultural agenda over the ethically and culturally questionable voices, at least in his estimation, that he wishes to critique, particularly those of the feminist movement. Like Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, Reed vilifes feminism for the exclusive





nature of what he believes to be its monocultural cause. Reed's attacks upon feminist ideology receive special attention in Sandra M. �ilbert and Susan �ubar's �etters from the Front (1994). �ilbert and �ubar object to the ways in which the protagonists of Reed's fctions "re taliate against ferocious, predatory feminists who appear to have abrogated the pacts between the sexes and the generations" (357-8). Reed's acerbic characterization of Jokujoku, her outlandish appoint ment at Jack London College, and the marginalization of Puttbutt in order to satisfy her staggering fnancial demands seem to truly support �ilbert and �ubar's conclusion. In his review of Japanese by Spring, Kato similarly admonishes Reed for failing "to do justice to black women writers who deserve credit for raising the level of current debates" (127). Yet Reed ascribes his satire of the feminist movement to his express interest in challenging what he perceives to be its demonization of the AfricanAmerican male. "I have always had a suspicion," he remarks in a 1993 interview with Bruce Dick, "that black men have been singled out by the white feminist move ment to bear the burden of misogyny" (345). In addition to describing the feminist treatment of AfricanAmerican male culture as "barbarism," Reed defends his enduring battle with the feminist movement as an effort "to try and keep an AfricanAmerican male heritage intact" (348-9). Reed's elevation of ideology over character in his fctions in order to deliver his cultural salvos clearly succeeds in alienating various social and ethnic factions of his potential readership. Yet his scathing depiction of the powerful trappings of cultural hegemony allows him to underscore the tenuous spaces inhabited by charac ters like Puttbutt who - despite his overt willingness to accommodate the whims of any dominant ideology in Japanese by Spring - never truly succeed in walking amongst the privileged corridors of cultural and institutional power. In this way, Reed reminds us of the inherent dangers of any agenda that neglects to avail itself of the values of inclusiveness and plu ralism. While the harshness of Reed's critiques of feminism often results in his own vilifcation as a misogynist, his skepticism about the feminist movement's neglect of the culture of AfricanAmerican men emerges from his distaste for any even remotely monoculturalist ideology. For this reason, Reed consistently challenges the agenda of Afrocentrism in Japanese by Spring. In addition to mocking Dr. Obi's adoption of the Yoruba tongue, Reed infuses the latter half of his narrative with liberal doses of Yoruba phraseology reproduced without the beneft of English translation. Through his depiction of



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the Yoruba language, Reed implicitly demonstrates the exclusionary nature of any unfamiliar dialect, and likewise, what he believes to be the monoculturalist ideology of Afrocentrism.10 Although Reed clearly problematizes the cultural singularity of the Afrocentric movement, he recognizes nevertheless the precarious social status of African Americans in the present day - an uncertain social position that Reed illustrates through his intentionally fat characterization of Puttbutt. As Lucius T. Outlaw cautions, "The increasing social diversity and complexity in America being played out in the debate and efforts regarding multiculturalism present the challenge of once again having to work out what it means to be African and American in the late twentieth century" (48). Reed also laments the separatism that continues to divide the races in contemporary American culture. While he notes somewhat despondently in Airing Dirty �aundry (1993) that "America is a land of distant cousins" (273), Reed offers a re markably optimistic vision of the future in Japanese by Spring. Although Puttbutt ultimately fees the racially hostile environs of Jack London College as United States military forces descend upon Yamato's regime and the posh real estate of Puttbutt's beloved Oakland Hills burns in an apocalyptic effgy, he chooses the dis tant shores of Japan as the next destination on his progress away from the monocultural ideals that plagued his youth and the pro fessional crises of his middle age. In this manner, Reed creates a surprising accommodation in his narrative between the nation of Yamato's ethically bankrupt ideological machine and the Japan of the historical present, with its own possibilities for the inclusive, multicultural future of Reed's vision. Reed's powerful denunciation of monoculturalism in Japanese by Spring also underscores the ethical potential of multiculturalism as a means for establishing community and embracing difference. As Manthia Diawara notes: "Cultural studies, in its attempts to draw attention to the material implica tions of the worldviews we assume, often delineates a literal and candid picture of ways of life that embarrass and baffe our previous theoretical understanding of those forms of life" (202). For this reason, Patricia S. Mann adds, "The academy must transform itself in response to the culturally diversifed community of students" (208). In his forceful satire of modern American academic life, Reed champions the ethics of multicultural education through his disturbing illus tration of the devastating aftermath of an extremist ideology's rise to power. In a 1990 interview with �eorge Paul Csicsery, Reed notes that "in the twentieth century we've seen a lot of disasters happen




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because of people who thought that they were right and everybody else was wrong" (338). In Japanese by Spring, he implicitly chal lenges us to consider the possible validity of another point of view, to attempt to understand and embrace racial difference, and to re alize, fnally, the ethics of cultural studies.


Academic Nonfction and the Culture Warriors: "Teaching the Conficts" in Gilbert and Gubar's Masterpiece Theatre

"Who are these homegrown enemies, more dangerous even than Saddam Hussein with his arsenal of chemical weapons? The answer: professors of literature" You know, the kind of people who belong to that noted terrorist organization, the Modern Language Association"" - Stephen Greenblatt, "The Politics of Culture"

Because ethical criticism necessarily recognizes the vital intercon nections between readers and the larger human communities in which they live, it functions as an equally useful paradigm for inter preting the humanistic foundations of nonfctional texts, in addition to the ethical properties of literary works" While academic novels such as Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring (1993), illustrate the local ized fallout of the "culture wars" during the early 1990s, Sandra M" Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Masterpiece Theatre: an Academic Melo drama (1995) considers the national and international implications of the controversy over higher education during this era" Known throughout the academy and beyond as the "culture wars," this ideological struggle fnds its origins in the multicultural project, particularly regarding the efforts by academic pluralists to broaden the reading canon to include works by previously disenfranchised literary voices" In the mid1980s, William J" Bennett, President Reagan's Secretary of Education, and Allan Bloom, a distinguished professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago, fred the opening monoculturalist salvos 127



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in the highly publicized academic debate over canon revision" Their booklength arguments on behalf of the sanctity of the Western cultural tradition and the ensuing intellectual crisis begat a stream of attacks on the curricular policies of higher education from such fgures as Lynne �" Cheney, the former director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as E" D" Hirsch, Jr", Charles J" Sykes, Dinesh D'Souza, and Roger Kimball, among a host of others"1 Essentially a work of nonfction, Gilbert and Gubar's melodrama explores the ethical dimensions of the culture warriors' assault on the contemporary issues of canon revision and the effcacy of the theoretical project, while also assessing their attacks on the personalities and critical proclivities of a number of celebrated academics" Gilbert and Gubar's pejorative poetics exposes - through their wideranging and often lacerating use of satire and popular culture - the ethical contradictions inherent in the culture warriors' antiegalitarian ideology" In addition to demonstrating the false logic that motivates many of the attacks on multiculturalism and the drive for canon revision, Gilbert and Gubar's nonfctional drama tization of the culture wars reveals the paranoia and insularity that undergird the conservative critique of higher education" As they remark in their Introduction to Masterpiece Theatre, "The fate of the text and of aspiring teachers of English hangs in the balance" " " " Will the humanities," they continue, "endure as a recognizable disci pline, transform itself, or slide toward extinction in the future world of letters?" (xxiii)" Their "academic melodrama" focuses special attention upon the movement that they describe as the "Back to Basics" squad, the contingent of largely conservative voices who argue that the educa tional establishment should celebrate the cultural truths embodied by the texts of such canonical stalwarts as Shakespeare, Milton, Plato, and Homer" The proponents of the Back to Basics movement, according to Gilbert and Gubar, fnd the politicization of the hu manities by contemporary academics to be reprehensible, and further, dangerous to the survival of what they generally perceive to be the collective wisdom inherent in the Western intellectual and artistic tradition (Introduction, xiv-xv)" Although students of the culture wars typically attribute the inauguration of the intellectual crisis in higher education to Bennett's 1984 governmental report on the humanities, To Reclaim a Legacy, the former Secretary of Education further outlines his arguments in his 1992 commercially published volume, The DeValuing of America: the Fight for Our Culture and Our



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Children"2 In this often abrasive formulation of the conservative position on multiculturalism and the canon, Bennett laments the imposition of a "radical leftwing political orthodoxy" and "a drop in the quality of teaching as professors fee the classroom for their research projects"" According to Bennett, the modern academy suffers from a "loss of moral and intellectual purpose" (156)" Bennett reveals his inability to comprehend the inclusive objectives of the multi culturalist agenda, moreover, when he asks: "Does anyone doubt that selecting works based on the ethnicity or gender of their authors trivializes the academic enterprise?" (171)"3 While the power and publicity concomitant with Bennett's cabi net post provided him with the public voice necessary to strike such a strident initial chord within the American public, Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: Hot Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students imbued the culture wars with the intellectual cachet of a scholarly voice" Bloom derides the contemporary state of the humanities as an "almost submerged old Atlantis"" In the humanities, he writes, "there is no semblance of order, no serious account of what should and should not belong, or of what its disciplines are trying to accomplish or how" (371)" In addition to arguing that higher education wallows in a state of chaos with little evidence of a scholarly or an ethical agenda, Bloom descries the pluralistic motives of canon revisionists, pausing only occasionally to sneer at the artistic blasphemy of rock and roll music" Like the cultural warriors who follow the ideologi cal lead of The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom champions the literary touchstones of Western culture because of the sacred truths that these works would ostensibly, perhaps even magically, impart to the minds of young readers" Remarkably, Bloom - himself a veteran of a lifetime's worth of teaching - neglects to account for the roles of educators in the interpretation and dissemination of these great works of literature and culture" Bloom also attacks the "furious effort to make them uptodate, largely by treating them as the matter formed by some contemporary theory - cultural, historical, economic, or psychological" (375)" Bloom's insistence upon the atemporality of literary works characterizes much of the Back to Basics attack upon contemporary efforts to widen the cultural and political scope of the canon" As Michael Berube remarks, "From the Right's perspective, inquir ing into the historical production and reception of cultural artifacts is the most subversive enterprise of all, for it threatens to undo the



Academic Nonfction and the Culture Warriors


very notion of artistic autonomy and timelessness" (148)" Indeed, the conservative critique of higher education during the 1980s and early 1990s refuses to acknowledge the powerful roles of historical and cultural production in the actual postulation of these great works of Western civilization" In addition to sharing in Bloom's inaugura tion of a rhetorical tradition of elongated subtitles, Hirsch's Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Knot (1987) offers a sus tained attack upon our "curriculum of cultural fragmentation and illiteracy" (144)" Like Sykes in ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (1988), Hirsch scolds modern instructors for abdi cating what he believes to be their institutional responsibilities for the maintenance of Western culture and values" Sykes's scathing assault upon the professoriate includes his principal contention that its "relentless drive for advancement " " " has turned American uni versities into vast factories of junkthink, the byproduct of academe's endless capacity to take even the richest elements of civilization and disfgure them into an image of itself" (7)" In addition to call ing for the broad abolition of tenure, Sykes refuses to address the multicultural project's wisdom of tolerance when he demands the unequivocal restoration of a Eurocentric canon and curriculum: "Without apology," he writes, "the undergraduate curriculum should be centered on the intellectual tradition of Western civilization" Quite simply," he adds, "there are certain books and certain authors that every college graduate should read if he is to be considered truly educated" (260)" As the culture wars advanced into the present decade, proponents of the conservative position continued the culture warriors' on slaught against canon revision, while also increasingly objecting to the manner in which contemporary scholars resort to the politicization of literary and cultural studies" In Tenured Radicals: Hot Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education (1990), Kimball laments what he perceives to be a concerted Leftist effort "to dismantle the traditional curriculum and institutionalize radical feminism, to ban politically unacceptable speech and propagate the tenets of deconstruction and similar exercises in cynical obscurantism" (167)" Kimball also trivializes the theoretical project as a type of professional selfaggrandizement motivated solely by the pro fessoriate's desires for selfpromotion and job security, rather than any interest in developing our understanding of literary works and their social and ideological impacts upon our lives" 4 In his strangely belligerent and often racially unsettling volume, Illiberal Education:



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The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991), D'Souza challenges the politicization of literary studies by contemporary scholars, in addition to echoing Bennett and Bloom's tired dictum regarding the apparently tenuous future of the Western canon" "The problem is that many of the younger generation of faculty in the universities express lack of interest, if not contempt, for the Western classics," he writes" "Either they regard the books as fawed for their failure to endorse the full emancipation of approved minorities," he con tinues, "or they reject their metaphysical questions as outdated and irrelevant" (255)" Perhaps even more amazingly, D'Souza argues that the contem porary academy, with its ubiquitous mantra of pluralism, provides American students with "an education in closedmindedness and intolerance" (229)" Yet, as Berube reminds us, "as it so happens, very little canon revision is launched at anything so large and pon derous as Western Civilization" Instead," he adds, "canon revision is today most likely to involve redesigning and reshuffing the English department's standard 'period' courses" (145)" If nothing else, aca demic proponents of canon revision and multiculturalism espouse openmindedness and tolerance, not only for the marginalized works of previously disenfranchised writers, but also for the literary touch stones of Western culture that they reinvigorate through the auspices of historical criticism and gender studies, among a host of other au courant interpretive methodologies" In Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense - and What We Can Do about It (1995), Cheney amplifes, like D'Souza and Kimball before her, Bennett and Bloom's attacks on canon revision and the politicization of academic scholarship"5 In addition to nearly over dosing on a succession of ominous Orwellian quotations, Cheney's volume admonishes the academy for its institutionalization of theory, particularly deconstructionist and postmodernist projects, and assails the Modern Language Association, an organization "whose policy statements, publications, and conventions," Cheney writes, "had epitomized the politicization of teaching and learning" (60)" Although contemporary hermeneutics unquestionably relies on ideological critique as a fundamental means for contextualizing many of its debates over literature and literary theory, Cheney hardly begins to concede the political components of her own remarkably partisan discourse" In the conclusion to her study, for example, Cheney remarks: "The virtues that we have increasingly come to believe we must nurture if we are to be successful as a culture





simply make no sense if we turn away from reason and reality" (206)" To whose virtues does Cheney refer? Whose sense of reason and whose reality does she represent? While conservative commen tators such as Bennett and Cheney often bristle at the academic jargon that they encounter in contemporary scholarship, the above excerpt from Telling the Truth surely demonstrates the function of political code words in the discourse regarding the culture wars" "We face the outraged reactions of those custodians of Western culture who protest that the canon, that transparent decanter of Western values, may become - breathe the word - politici�ed," Henry Louis Gates, Jr", observes" "That people can maintain a straight face while they protest the irruption of politics into something that has always been political," Gates continues, "says something about how re markably successful offcial literary histories have been in presenting themselves as natural objects, untainted by worldly interests" (195)" Gates's arguments underscore the manner in which ideology, despite the cultural warriors' vehement claims to the contrary, invariably infuences the selection and historical survival of cultural artifacts, even great Western ones" As this chapter will show, Gilbert and Gubar's Masterpiece Theatre interrogates the various theoretical premises of the cultural warriors in order to demonstrate the political nature of their own attacks upon higher education" By undermining the logic of their cultural opponents, Gilbert and Gubar implicitly defend the merits of plural ism and intellectual inclusiveness" An ethical reading of Gilbert and Gubar's melodrama, moreover, will reveal the ways in which they satirize the cultural warriors' polemics regarding Western and nonWestern literary texts and the pursuit of knowledge, the poli tics of canon revision and multiculturalism, and the effcacy of the theoretical project" In addition to exploring the surprising benefts of the culture wars to contemporary educators, this chapter will also examine the ethically dubious manner in which Gilbert and Gubar depict themselves in Masterpiece Theatre, as well as the other personalities that populate the academic star system of their melo drama, including such fgures as Harold Bloom, Helen �endler, Jacques Derrida, Frank Lentricchia, and Julia Kristeva, among others" Although their satire ultimately challenges the ethically questionable premises of the culture warriors in a very meaningful way, Gilbert and Gubar's volume regrettably fulflls their opponents' contention that works of scholarship inevitably privilege the critical self over the agenda of the text"



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While Gilbert and Gubar ostensibly present their narrative as a dramatic text, Masterpiece Theatre derives its nonfctional origins from the authors' utilization of quotations from published books and articles in their construction of many of the characters' lines" A kind of postmodern closet drama, Gilbert and Gubar's satiric and often hilarious volume pits the Back to Basics group described above in confict with what they call the "Forward into Instability" group, a coterie of wellknown scholars characterized by their interest in establishing a broader, multicultural canon" Motivated largely by their desires for inclusiveness and critical diversity, these academics nevertheless harbor serious skepticism, in the words of Gilbert and Gubar, about "monolithic, fxed interpretations of the cultural past"" Although this critical school of thought defnes itself in terms of its pluralistic intentions and its cultural tolerance, Gilbert and Gubar caution us, somewhat ironically, that "many prac titioners within this school privilege theory and metacriticism over serious textual interpretation" Not only do artist and art get lost in the critical shuffe," they add, "but critical selffetishization is often cast in an uncommonly jargonridden, even incomprehensible, idiom" (Introduction, xvii)" Divided into three acts, Masterpiece Theatre examines the intellectual skirmishes between the Back to Basics and Forward into Instability groups in Act I, "The Perils of the Text," while Act II, "Foreign Intrigues," focuses on the theoretical conficts between conservative critics and the contemporary post structuralist contingent"6 Act III, "The Final Deletion," traces the media response to academe and the culture wars in the contemporary literary marketplace" Narrated, naturally, by Alistair Cooke, the plot of Gilbert and Gubar's Masterpiece Theatre unfolds after a mysterious villain ties an unnamed Text, itself a character in the melodrama, to a stretch of railroad track near the campus of Boondock State University in Boondock, Indiana" Unidentifable within the imaginative bound aries of Gilbert and Gubar's narrative, the Text functions as a form of pliable wisdom, a seemingly signifcant cultural artifact that re quires a team of specialists to interpret both its identity and its meaning" Replete with the intellectual treasure of what Foucault calls the "a priori authority of knowledge," the Text in Gilbert and Gubar's melodrama represents the metaphorical grail in the culture wars mounted by the Back to Basics and Forward into Instability groups" After being discovered by two Boondock State University students and the appropriately named Offcer Friendly, the Text and





its tenuous plight come to the attention of a young, untenured pro fessor of English at Boondock State, Jane Marple, the detective cum intellectual in Gilbert and Gubar's narrative" When Offcer Friendly proves unable to assist her in the search for the Text's identity and the interpretation of its contents - "We're up to our ears in sexual harassment cases down here," Friendly complains to the professor as he withdraws from the affair - Marple seeks the advice of her learned, and eminently more celebrated, critical colleagues (11)" Gilbert and Gubar underscore their arguments regarding the divi sions between the respective factions of the culture wars during the nationwide alert that follows the discovery of the nameless Text in Boondock" They depict an embattled Bennett in Washington, DC, for example, as he receives word about the Text near Boondock State University and its impending interpretation by a group of radical literary specialists" "Rumor has it that a text - title unknown - has been singled out for assassination or deconstruction," the directive reads" "Recommend that you take special measures to safeguard all touchstones, masterpieces, and monuments of unaging intellect," it continues (7)" As Bennett scans a list of proposed works for the Western canon, Gilbert and Gubar portray him in the act of pre serving works by Aristotle, Jane Austen, and T" S" Eliot, while simultaneously deleting texts by Aeschylus, Charlotte Bront�, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Sigmund Freud" Meanwhile, Robert Scholes, a professor of semiotics and an advocate of multicultural education, receives an urgent message from a doubleagent at the National Endowment for the Humanities: "Most texts suspected of subversion of American Way of Life! Mass execu tion expected soon," it reads (8)" As Scholes scans the list of writers under canonical consideration, he never presses the delete key, in contrast with Bennett, and, in addition to preserving the works previously eliminated by the former Secretary of Education, he accepts texts by Umberto Eco, Ursula Le Guin, Michel Foucault, Louis L'Amour, Danielle Steel, Alfred Hitchcock, Alex Haley, Hirsch, and even works by Bennett himself" In this way, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrate their principal issue of contention regarding the culture wars and the debate over canon revision, the effcacy of the multicultural project, and the value of interdisciplinary literary study" Their pejorative representation of Bennett, for instance, reveals what they believe to be the principles of exclusiveness and monoculturalism that inform the Back to Basics approach to the Western canon" Gilbert and Gubar's characterization



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of Scholes, however, argues that the academy, for all its politicization and selfpromotion, operates from a position of inclusiveness and pluralism" Hence, Scholes readily accepts each text for canonical inclusion regardless of its cultural, racial, or ideological origins" Similarly, Gilbert and Gubar present Bennett and Cheney in ani mated conversation over the perilous future of "endangered texts," while Marple concomitantly seeks the sympathetic advice of Phyllis Franklin, the executive director of the Modern Language Associa tion" Unable to convince her department chair about the seriousness of the Boondock Text's plight - "He says every text he can think of is safe and sound in the Norton anthologies," an exasperated Marple remarks - the young professor enlists Franklin to act on the unidentifed Text's behalf: "This is bad," Franklin observes" "This may call for a task force or a commission, perhaps even a confer ence," she continues (12)" Back in Washington, DC, however, Bennett worries that the endangered Text "might ask some of 'the perennial questions of human life"' It might have been written by one of the 'great souls,'" he adds" Concerned that it might be a text written by "Milton or Shakespeare," Cheney and Bennett fy to Boondock in order to protect the Text from the "leftwing ideologues" and "the narrow research specialists" (14)" As the aforementioned examples once again demonstrate, Gilbert and Gubar's narrative representation of the culture wars questions the ethical foundations of the Back to Basics group's interest in academic and canonical issues"7 Why, indeed, do the notions of textual inclusiveness and canon revision so trouble them? George A" Kennedy ascribes the rage for canon formation to "a basic human instinct, perhaps related to selfpreservation: the assertion of control over chaos, the marking out of one's turf" (229)" Stemming confusion and protecting the sanctity of those cultural and literary works that endorse their values provides movements such as the Back to Basics group with a form of intellectual power" Speaking for the realworld forces that comprise Gilbert and Gubar's imaginary Forward into Instability group, Richard Rorty argues that canon expansion, rather than exclusively looking backward to those works that espouse the norms and values of another historical moment, might prove benefcial in terms of the cultural and sociological dilemmas that confront readers in the present day: "My hunch is that certain specifc changes in the canon - those that will help students learn about what it has been like (and often still is like) to be female, or black, or gay will be the chief accomplishment of the contemporary cultural left"





It will not amount to a transformation of society," he warns, "but it will make life much less cruel for a lot of people, and will make America into a more decent place" ("Two Cheers," 239)" In Masterpiece Theatre, Gilbert and Gubar devote special attention to lampooning the cultural warriors' emphatic response to the ca nonical apotheosis of Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), a Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award winning novel" The Back to Basics group's interest in the status of Walker's novel fnds its genesis in a 1986 editorial by Christopher Clausen, the current chair of Penn State's Department of English, in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "I would bet that The Color Purple is taught in more English courses today than all of Shakespeare's plays combined," Clausen allegedly wrote in jest (A52)" The cultural warriors subsequently appropriated Clausen's words as a rallying cry both against diversity as well as the ostensibly radical ways in which English specialists intend to reconfgure the Western canon" In addition to remarking upon the incident several times within their melodrama, Gilbert and Gubar even employ Walker herself as a character in their satire" In yet another instance in Masterpiece Theatre, Bennett calls texts such as Walker's "handmaiden[s] of ideology" and exclaims that "it's well known that 'The Color Purple is taught in more English courses today than all of Shakespeare's plays combined,' " thus parroting and distorting Clausen's infamous line (14)"8 Although Gilbert and Gubar clearly take this opportunity to poke fun at the Back to Basics contingent's repeated usage of Clausen's words, their sarcastic treat ment of Bennett in this instance also challenges his argument that professors of English make their pedagogical selections lightly and without any set of ethical imperatives" Paul Lauter discovered otherwise, however, while collaborating on the compilation of the culturally progressive Heath Anthology of American Literature" "We found that our primary task involved re constructing our own standards of value," he reports (186)" By establishing ethical standards of selection, scholars such as Lauter ensure that their literary choices refect the diversity of cultures and values that mark their student populations" As Gregory Jay notes, the inclusive editorial choices made by Lauter and other scholars offer the possibility of a wide range of social and cultural benefts" "For marginalized groups," Jay writes, "an appreciation of their culture can improve student performance and so reverse the effects of bigotry and discrimination" (117)" Gilbert and Gubar also explore the Back to Basics group's skeptical response to multiculturalism and the



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usefulness of its application to literary studies" In one instance, Gilbert and Gubar depict Kimball and Sykes seated across the aisle from Marple and the Text in a jumbo jet bound for Europe, where the professor hopes to locate the identity of the still unidentifed narra tive" Sipping champagne and staring greedily at the Text that they intend to "liberate from the 'obscurantists, sorcerers, and witch doctors of profthink,' " Kimball and Sykes contemplate the commercial rewards that surely await them after they publish books about "this latest academic scandal"" Meanwhile, Kimball pejoratively attributes the academic motivation for the multicultural project to "liberalism's belief in meritocracy" and "intellectual tyranny" (67)" In yet another instance, Gilbert and Gubar depict Bennett in the act of interrogating the Text" Speaking in a "sinister tone," Bennett unfurls the Back to Basic group's ideology regarding multiculturalism and its policy of textual inclusiveness: Do you know what happens to texts that pretend to be more important than they really are? They are exiled from the library and go to �ook Depositories" There they are shelved by size, in two ranks on each shelf, and catalogued not by title, not by subject, not by author, but only by accession number! No one will ever fnd you in such a place" The temperature is kept low and the lights are dimmed" In short, you will be in cold storage and in darkness perpetual! As my colleagues are no doubt aware, there just isn't enough room in our libraries for all the books that have been published" Information glut" (114) In addition to trivializing the frightened Text's contents and ident ity, Bennett's fctive persona in Masterpiece Theatre castigates the Text's future and attributes, at least metaphorically, the Western canon's infexibility to an apparent lack of adequate storage space" Gilbert and Gubar's fctional representation of D'Souza espouses similar fears about the possibility of a multiculturalist agenda lurking behind the scholarly interest in the identity of the Text" "That text must be expunged," he remarks to Camille Paglia at one juncture" "I'm sure it's a new syllabus or curriculum - multicultural, postcolonial, deconstructionist rot - that will be inficted as an 'illiberal educa tion' on our best and brightest student minds," he adds (129)" In this manner, Gilbert and Gubar satirize the Back to Basics group's incapacity for recognizing the pluralistic motives of the multicultural project, an intellectual program that its proponents ascribe, often





incorrectly, to shameless academic desires for tenure and advance ment" Yet, as Kathryn Mohrman remarks, "In both scholarship and education, questions of diversity are moving from the periphery to the center of the university, not from a sense of noblesse oblige or political correctness, but because attention to diversity is increas ingly linked to academic excellence in research and teaching" (199-200)" Critics of the theoretical project, like the advocates of the Back to Basics agenda, also attribute what they perceive to be the academic rage for tenure and selfpromotion to the advent of poststructuralism and other theoretical projects in recent decades" In American Literature and the Academy (1986), Kermit �anderbilt grimly describes critical theory's gathering storm above the previously sacrosanct realm of literary studies: "Over the horizon beyond the '60s, a gathering smorgasbord of interpretive theories awaited the professor alert to movements and fads - semiotics, grammatology, audience response, structuralism, deconstruction, a newly seasoned Freud and Marx, and more" (539-40)" �anderbilt's words, like the arguments of the Back to Basics platoon, admonish the politicization and institution alization of the theoretical project" In Masterpiece Theatre, Gilbert and Gubar lampoon the stalwarts of literary theory, while at the same time they underscore the manner in which the act of inter pretation will always remain decidedly political" "Obviously," Gilbert and Gubar write in their Introduction to the melodrama, "the work we ourselves do, like the work of our antitraditionalist cohorts, is based on a consciousness of the politics of reading, writing, and canon revision" (xviii)" In their narrative, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrate the project's penchant for jargon and political commentary" In one instance, a grimfaced Fredric Jameson reveals his Marxist colors while chatting with punk author Kathy Acker and others regarding the fate of the Text" "In a culture of appropriation, commodifcation, and specious unifcation, we mustn't just thematize incoherence, we must enact it," says Jameson" "Originality is a bourgeois capitalist plot," Acker adds, and "so is narrative" (135)" On numerous occasions throughout their melodrama, Gilbert and Gubar satirize the lofty pretensions of their theoretical colleagues, in addition to illustrating the wide range of critical debates that mark the theoretical project" They demonstrate the disparate ideo logical stances of Paglia and Andrea Dworkin, for example, in an effort to underscore the manner in which literary critics - in this case, feminist ones - become entrenched in the radical critiques



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that they espouse" As the literary world of Gilbert and Gubar's narrative frantically searches for the Boondock Text, Paglia enters the narrative at various junctures and revels in her regressive, anti feminist rhetoric" "Feminists are really deluded, with their heads up their ass," she explains to her very receptive companions, Bennett, Cheney, and D'Souza (130)" Later, during a debate with Robert Bly, Paglia reasons that "if civilization had been left in female hands, we'd still be living in grass huts" (156)" Gilbert and Gubar counter Paglia's antifeminism with Dworkin's own radical antimasculinist and antipornography stance" "Don't kid yourself," Dworkin tells her colleagues, including Gilbert and Gubar themselves, "the male body is the word and it is the word as weapon" 'Intercourse re mains a means,' " she continues, "'of physiologically making a woman inferior'" (163)" By illustrating Paglia and Dworkin's divergent ideological stances regarding current feminist thought, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrate the ways in which disparate ideologies invariably critique each other during the throes of literary criticism" Proponents of the Back to Basics group, with their principal interest in maintaining a static curriculum, have no other recourse but to problematize the Forward into Instability movement's progressive, albeit chaotic, drive toward an intellectual unknown" As Gerald Graff observes in Professing Litera ture (1987), "The age of theory that seems to be superseding the age of criticism has stimulated a promising critique of the very routin izing processes to which it has been prone"" By constantly engaging in a form of selfcritique, Graff argues, the critical project propels itself into "generating further theoretical awareness" (242)" Gilbert and Gubar's narration of the act of criticism in Masterpiece Theatre proves instructive, moreover, because of the manner in which it highlights the political machinations that inevitably confgure any school of thought" "Political ideologies and ethnocentric tradition alism of one kind or another have never stopped shaping the discipline," Franklin E" Court remarks in Institutionali�ing English Literature (1992)" "Since English literary study has been politically and racially centered all along, there is nothing inherently threat ening in admitting that it continues to be politically and racially centered today," Court adds (164)" In addition to combating the cultural warriors' concerns over the politicization of higher education, Gilbert and Gubar's melodrama satirizes their attacks on academic professionalism and tenure" The Back to Basics group's disdain for avantgarde literary theory and





what it perceives to be the academy's overarching rage for promotion and job security receive particular attention in Masterpiece Theatre" In his study of the modern university, Henry Rosovsky defnes aca demic research as "an expression of faith in the possibility of progress," as well as the product of the "belief that new things can be discovered, that newer can be better, and that greater depth of understanding is achievable" (89)" In their melodrama, however, Gilbert and Gubar undermine those scholars who seem to revel in the rhythms of their theoretical prophecies instead of postulating any meaningful discoveries" Gilbert and Gubar's fctive representations of Derrida and Kristeva, for instance, satirize the ways in which critical theorists often become recognizable merely for the manner in which they postulate their supposedly revolutionary ideas, rather than for the ideas themselves" Because both theorists often employ double columns in their respective critical discourses, Gilbert and Gubar depict Derrida and Kristeva in the act of literally speaking in double columns (92, 103)" Although this method of narration obvi ously hinders the performative aspects of their melodrama, it also allows Gilbert and Gubar to poke fun at the discursive techniques that academics utilize in order to set themselves apart from the more conventional textual practices of their peers" In such moments in their narrative, Gilbert and Gubar satirize the institutional commonplace of professionalism, or the means by which members of a given profession distinguish themselves within their discipline" In Professional Correctness (1995), Stanley Fish also questions the effcacy of the academic drive for professionalism" Because academics largely produce their discoveries within the shadows of their respective institutions, Fish reasons, they remain virtually unable to impact the lives of anyone but their equally isolated colleagues" Such a scholarly vacuum, according to Fish, di minishes the professoriate's capacity for producing what he calls "public intellectuals," or those individuals who "reach out to the inhabitants of other public spaces" beyond the university (117)" Ironically, when Marple chooses to venture outside of Boondock State University in order to save the Text - on a mission, moreover, with broad cultural implications - she receives notifcation of her dismissal" In his letter to Marple, Boondock's Dean Petty writes: "Unfortunately your misguided activism in behalf of a single aberrant text appears to have prevented you from making signifcant contri butions in the three key areas of Research, Teaching, and Service as outlined on page 24 of The Faculty Handbook's 'Rules for Retention,



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Tenure, and Promotion' " (131)" By implicitly valorizing Marple's decision to champion the Text's cause, Gilbert and Gubar succeed in problematizing the existing framework for tenure review and promotion" Unlike their Back to Basics opponents, however, Gilbert and Gubar's critique of the ethics of academic employment standards falls well short of the culture warriors' demand for the termination of academic tenure" Instead, their satire questions, like Fish, a pro fession that limits its members' capacity for impacting the larger, nonacademic world in which they live"9 Although Gilbert and Gubar's critique of the culture wars registers a number of meaningful jabs at the ethics of the Back to Basics group's assault on higher education - while also, incidentally, under mining some of the academy's own questionable practices - their melodrama loses its considerable satiric force when they privilege the personalities of themselves and their celebrated academic cohorts over workaday intellectuals like Marple, their beleaguered protagonist" As Terry Caesar notes, even the name of Marple's institution, Boondock, seems somehow insignifcant" "Boondock exists to be negated," Caesar writes (226)" Rather than attempting to interpret the Text herself after she discovers it strapped to the railroad track near Boondock, Marple opts instead to deliver it to the learned hands of her more celebrated peers" It would seem that in Gilbert and Gubar's narra tive, Marple must inevitably defer to the stars of PMLA and Critical In�uiry" For Gilbert and Gubar, Caesar adds, Boondock could never exist "other than for the edifcation of far loftier and more prepos sessing institutions, where morepoliticallycorrectthanthou critics can war agreeably among themselves" (228)" Their attempt at self parody only seems to bolster Caesar's criticism" In their narrative, for example, Gilbert and Gubar depict themselves as "SG1 and SG2," nameless collaborators who fnish each other's sentences" Unfortu nately, the manner in which they dramatize the personality quirks and ideological nuances of themselves and their wellknown col leagues merely validates the culture warriors' contention that academics fnd their only motivations in selfpromotion and their quests for job security, rather than in teaching and celebrating cul tural achievement" Conversely, Masterpiece Theatre fnds its greatest strengths when Gilbert and Gubar address the ethical implications of the culture wars, when they attempt to "teach the conficts," in the words of Graff, in lieu of simply vilifying their Back to Basics opponents"10 "Instead of pretending we can eliminate political confict from teaching,"





Graff argues in �eyond the Culture Wars (1993), "we should start making use of it" (170)" In Masterpiece Theatre, Gilbert and Gubar deploy the broad strokes of their satire both in an effort to combat the culture warriors' rhetoric of antipluralism, as well as to self consciously critique the academy and its own offenses against its cultural and humanistic mission" Although their desire to promote the interests of the humanities occasionally lapses into uncomfort able arenas of selfindulgence, Gilbert and Gubar's narrative largely adheres to Graff's meaningful dictum for "making confict the basis of community" (188)" Because they assess the ethics of all of the competing factions that engage in the intellectual crisis regarding multiculturalism and canon revision - the Back to Basics group, as well as the Forward into Instability movement - Gilbert and Gubar employ their text as an instructive means for sustaining useful debate over the future of the academy and the ways in which it might better serve students, faculty, and the community at large that make higher education possible" "Ethical imperatives inform political change," Jay astutely notes, "since concepts of justice and of right include a moral dimension" (126)" By entreating us through their satire to recognize the cultural and ethical ramifcations of the culture wars, Gilbert and Gubar challenge us to consider the possibility of bridging our ideological differences and engaging in a truly inter disciplinary exchange"



142

Jane Smiley's Academic Carnival: Rooting for Ethics at Moo U.

"I cannot recall a time when American education was not in a 'crisis.'" - John Searle, "The Storm over the University"

In Moo (1995), Jane Smiley focuses a sharp, satiric eye upon the political machinations and ambitions of the administration and faculty of Moo U., a large midwestern university well known for its agricultural department. Rife with social and scholarly intrigue, Smiley's narrative admonishes the bankrupt value systems of a powerful institution of higher learning obsessed with its agenda for technological and fnancial superiority. Smiley allots conspicuous attention to all of the competing voices that comprise Moo U.'s political maelstrom - from the contentious professoriate in the Horticulture and English departments to the institution's dubious administration, an often bemused and vacant student population, and a giant hog named Earl Butz who resides in an abandoned building in the middle of Moo U.'s campus. In Moo, Smiley's pejorative poetics - her satire of contemporary higher education's rampant consumerism - functions on a variety of narrative levels. In addition to her penetrating critique of university life's economic circle - an endlessly negating system of consuming and being consumed - Smiley addresses the interpersonal motivations and imperatives exhibited by her array of administrative, professorial, and undergraduate characters. Smiley devotes particular emphasis to the notion of academic freedom and its sacred and revered place in higher education. In short, how will her characters comport themselves after being afforded with the considerable institutional freedom and power inherent in the university's bureaucracy? 143



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One of academic fction's few genuine best-sellers, Moo offers a thinly veiled portrait of life at a modern land-grant institution. While Smiley dismisses suggestions that Moo U. fnds its origins in her own experiences as a faculty member at Iowa State University, the similarities between the novel's fctive locale and the economic expectations and activities of large state universities are readily apparent at nearly every turn.1 Of particular interest to this study is the manner in which Smiley deftly replicates Moo U.'s roots in the landgrant university system established in July 1862 via the passage of the Morrill Act. Devised by United States Congressman Justin Smith Morrill as a means for donating public lands to state governments for the creation of colleges that beneft the agricultural and mechanical arts, the Morrill Act - along with the G. I. Bill during the twentieth century - effectively ended the elitism previously inherent in the American university system. As Coy F. Cross writes in �ustin Smith Morrill: Father of the LandGrant Colleges (1999), "Before 1862, America's university students were affuent, white males. Land-grant colleges opened the door of higher education to women, blacks, the working classes, immigrants, and other minorities" (88). The First Morrill Act of 1862 - in concert with the Second Morrill Act of August 1890, which allowed for the fnancial endowment and support of the landgrant university system - irrevocably altered the face of academic life. Simply put, the Second Morrill Act provided the land-grant colleges with the economic means for competing with existing institutions of higher learning in the intellectual, cultural, and technological marketplaces. Commemorating the centennial of the act's passage, Harvard University Professor W. K. Jordan observed that "it was responsible for the democratization of education and for the establishment of a healthy diversity in our whole structure of higher education" (Morrill Land-Grant Centennial Committee, 13).2 For land-grant institutions such as Smiley's fctive Moo U., the concept of academic freedom is inextricably bound with the university's capacity for asserting intellectual and economic dominion over (or at least in favorable comparison to) its scholastic competitors. As Neil Nakadate writes, "Particularly in ambitious, research-conscious, 'second-rate' schools such as Moo U. - striving, after all, to achieve fallibility at a frst-rate level - there is plenty of evidence for considering the university one of the most curious enclaves of American cultural life" (187). In the novel, Smiley replicates this drive for scholarly and economic superiority by depicting the assortment of divergent voices that account for Moo U.'s virtual chorus of aca-



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demic consumerism. The chapters themselves function as variations on such themes as love, sex, secular humanism, deconstruction, and the ubiquity of university memoranda, among a host of other topics that serve as unifying mechanisms that coalesce Moo's ensemble of disparate characters. In her perceptive review of the novel, Lorrie Moore likens the narrative to a richly nuanced Ars Nova painting: As portraiture, perhaps Moo is more Van Eyck than, say, Goya. Instead of the quicker, satirical strokes of the Spaniard, we have, with Moo, the fantastically overstudied picture: Giovanni Arnolfni (with his tricky mirror), his bride, his tenure, his chairman, the chairman's family, students, staff, lovers, the departmental votes, administrative memorandums, text from student catalogs, furnishings, restaurant menus, all the campus plants and animals, plus the press - local and national. It is a little like the author as clipping service. The book bulges and spins. It throbs and fzzes. It is a plethora. But it remains a skillful depiction of the current American university as deal maker, money grubber, corporate sibling, and government client; it is a portrait of the Midwestern research institution - "Moo University" - which, in moving into the future (what other way?), is not only leaving its ivory towers behind but detonating them before it goes. (135-6) By affording readers with such a concentrated and immersed representation of a thriving contemporary research university, Smiley reveals the many ways in which institutions such as Moo U. attempt to navigate the increasingly stormy seas of education, consumerism, and economics. Mikhail M. Bakhtin's narratological theories of heteroglossia and carnival provide a particularly valuable scholarly framework for reading the hybrid nature of Smiley's novel, especially in terms of the various ways in which she attempts to account for the university's fragmented and ideologically fractious identity. Bakhtin's conception of heteroglossia assists us, for example, in understanding the manner in which Moo functions on a microlinguistic level by intersecting a wide variety of competing utterances and speech acts. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (1975), Bakhtin writes that heteroglossia involves "specifc points of view of the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specifc world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings, and values" (291-2).



�ane Smiley's Academic Carnival


Heteroglossia refers to the centripetal (or offcial) and centrifugal (or unoffcial) forces that permeate the rhythms of daily life, and these forces register our responses to the events that mark our workaday worlds. Our interaction with them, according to Bakhtin's astute expositors Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (1990), subsequently reinscribes the nature of our cultural institutions, our various languages, and ourselves.3 Drawing upon Bakhtin's notions of heteroglossia and carnival, this chapter will demonstrate that the resulting cacophony of institutional voices establishes a carnivalesque atmosphere of sorts in the novel that imbues Smiley's characters with the freedom to engage in a variety of revelatory social, cultural, and political transgressions. Bakhtin's postulation of carnival as a narratological phenomenon fnds its origins in Ra�elais and His World (1968), which includes Bakhtin's analysis of various aspects of carnivalesque folk-culture in the Renaissance-era writings of French humanist Fran�ois Rabelais. For Bakhtin, carnival refers to the celebratory period in which offcial hierarchies and texts become inverted by populist, utopian notions of society and festivity. In short, low culture replaces high culture as the primary determinant of social structure and language; exuberance, scatology, and excess trump decorum, etiquette, and restraint. In Ra�elais and His World, Bakhtin writes: "As opposed to the offcial feast, one might say that carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time," he adds, "the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed" (10). Characterized by the suspension of hierarchical precedence, carnival establishes equality and elevates the roles of communication and experience in human interrelations. Carnival consists, moreover, of a "continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings," Bakhtin writes. "It is to a certain extent a parody of the extracarnival life, a 'world inside out'" (11). Carnival, in the Rabelaisian sense, devotes particular attention to the body's various experiences and transformations during the carnivalesque moment. How does the body assert itself among other bodies? How does it transgress offcial channels of communication and effect cultural, intellectual, and economic commerce with other, equally transgressive bodies?4



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Smiley's skillful satire in Moo - her creation of a pejorative poetics that ridicules the offcial languages and value systems of the dominant culture in order to posit, if only implicitly, a more ethical vision of higher education - involves a carnivalesque rendering of university life and all of its competing voices and ideologies. Rather amazingly, a number of Smiley's critics object to the mere notion of Moo as either a form of satire or as yet another entry in the burgeoning genre of academic fction. In her review of the novel, for instance, Cathleen Schine writes that "as a metaphor for the intrinsic corruption of the modern university, not to mention society at large, a pig [Moo's Earl Butz] is about as crudely satirical as you can get. But, incredibly, Moo is not a satire. Smiley's subverts satire, making it sweeter, and ultimately more pointed" (38).5 Yet a novel with a giant, 700-pound hog as its centerpiece - not to mention an executive secretary who functions as the university's shadowpresident, an elusive administrator known only as "Chairman X," and a paranoid farmer-inventor who still believes in the spirit of the institution's land-grant mission - smacks of satire at nearly every turn. Schine's suggestion that Moo functions as a sentimental paean to university life yields little, if any, scholarly force. Indeed, the novel's conclusion, despite its nearly epidemic weddings and quirks of fate, leaves little doubt about the manner in which consumerism and recrimination have infected the academy's educational and social imperatives. Nakadate also suggests that Moo transcends the satiric pretensions of academic fction as a literary genre: "Smiley's point is precisely that Moo U. is of rather than separate from the culture at large" (187). Yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, the novel pointedly underscores the social idiosyncrasies and cultural quirks endemic to Moo U. and its particularized academic environs at almost every juncture. In the novel, Smiley's ethical critique of higher education converges, rather literally in the thematic climax of Moo's narrative, around Earl Butz, the enormous Landrace boar who resides in Old Meats, an unused agricultural building and former slaughterhouse in the center of Moo U.'s campus. Part of a secret experiment being conducted by a faculty member in order to ascertain just exactly how large a boar can become when it is allowed to do nothing but consume his massive daily allotment - a diet of corn, alfalfa, wheat, peanuts, soybeans, barley, and skim milk - Earl functions in the novel as the university's ultimate insider in a campus populated





largely by outsiders for whom Moo U. exists as an economic and intellectual engine of consumption.6 As Moore perceptively observes, "At a university, as with a large city or any place of demographic variety or institutional democracy, no one particular group or person is in charge; no one really owns the thing. . . . All academics are outsiders of a sort. And so a culture of community complaint, artful vying, caustic comment, witty self-loathing, operatic headshaking, kvetching, and general wringing and throwing up of hands pervades such a place," she adds, "and no one, fnally, is particularly threatened or surprised" (139). Smiley's coterie of perennial outsiders ranges from the campus elite - including Chairman X, Dr. Lionel Gift, and Mrs. Loraine Walker - and the enduringly disenfranchised faculty community, particularly evidenced by the interrelationship between Tim Monahan and Cecelia Sanchez, to various members of the student body and the enigmatic local farmer and inventor Loren Stroop. The discrepancy between the offcial and unoffcial voices of Moo U.'s outsiders, each with their own peculiar worldviews, social proclivities, and ethical imperatives, underscores the manner in which Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia enhances our understanding of Smiley's satirical aims in the novel. As interlopers of a sort who operate, somewhat ironically, within the university's hallowed corridors, Smiley's characters slyly manipulate the campus's offcial and unoffcial channels of communication and privilege - the centripetal and centrifugal forces of Bakhtin's critical parlance - for their own, largely self-driven ends. Their feeding frenzy, if you will, functions as one of the novel's most signifcant central crises. Indeed, what does transpire when a substantial group of often highly educated and evolved individuals, with their own divergent needs and desires, attempts to devour the cash cow that provides them with social, economic, and cultural sustenance? The offcial hierarchy of Smiley's academic community is led by Chairman X and Dr. Gift. The head of Moo U.'s horticulture department, Chairman X evinces many of the novel's few genuinely ethical motivations. Perhaps most importantly in terms of Smiley's ethical schema, Chairman X dutifully tends a garden on the sloping grounds of Old Meats, the campus's moral center. Unlike his more self-serving counterparts, Chairman X thoughtfully remembers the university's less-heralded place in the natural world, where it merely exists as yet another nuance of geography and landscape: "The campus tempted most of its denizens to nest - to crawl into their books and



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projects and committee work and pull their self-absorption over their heads like bedcovers," Smiley writes, "but Chairman X never lost the sense of that slope, and the sweep of forces across it" (39). In sharp contrast with Chairman X, Dr. Gift functions as the novel's most dangerous - and clearly most anti-ethical - infuence. A seemingly respectable and distinguished Economics professor of international reputation and aplomb, Dr. Gift lives by the simple principle that "all men, not excluding himself, had an insatiable desire for consumer goods, and that it was no coincidence that what all men had an insatiable desire for was known as 'goods,' for goods were good, which was why all men had an insatiable desire for them" (31). Moo U.'s highest-paid member of the professoriate and the infuential leader of its Promotion and Tenure Committee, Dr. Gift devotes particular attention to his work as a consultant for various governments. The ways in which Dr. Gift masterminds the demolition of a rare Costa Rican cloud forest, under the offcial guise of the university no less, in exchange for lucrative research grants and beachfront property underscores Smiley's adroit satire of higher education's often shadowy association with the corporate world. As Gary Krist remarks, "Greed has become the new engine of academia - satisfaction of greed its ultimate, forever-unattainable goal. In the world of Moo," he adds, "the modern university has become a kind of self-interested Darwinian entity devoted primarily to the propagation of careers, buildings, and political agendas via the accumulation of grants and tuition" (680). Dr. Gift's relentless consumerism - and the easy manner in which he exploits the university's centripetal and centrifugal communicative avenues for his personal gain - highlights Smiley's critique of the processes via which contemporary higher education often blurs its educational prerogatives in order to fulfll its economic interests. Of particular signifcance to any reading of Moo is the complex role of Mrs. Walker, the Provost's secretary, in the university's superstructure. A furtive player in the institution's power confguration, Mrs. Walker negotiates Moo U.'s channels of information with relative alacrity and ease. As the university's de facto president, she has clearly mastered the offcial and unoffcial languages that propel Moo U.'s institutional machinery. "Opinionated, well connected, and well informed," Juliet Fleming writes, Mrs. Walker "is a dexterous hacker of computer fles who exercises a charismatic grip over every secretary on campus. Personally disinterested, sometimes indeed wondering if it is worth saving, she runs the university, moving





personnel, secretly transferring funds, and effecting policy decisions by discarding or re-routing documents" (20). For Mrs. Walker, the university no longer exists as a collection of buildings and edifces. From her more enlightened perspective, Moo U. consists of telephone lines, computer servers, and fax machines. "The stony walls and concrete paths, the closed windows and doors, the trees and shrubs, all the elements of the campus that seemed to separate people," Smiley writes, "had become permeable membranes undetectable in the wafting currents of information." For Mrs. Walker, the institution's offcial administrators are nothing more than a collection of anointed ciphers "whose lives, like those of chimps, were made up of nitpicking, stroking, and jockeying for dominance" (137). Not surprisingly, Moo U.'s faculty and student body seem equally displaced by their discrepant profles as outsiders on their own campus attempting to establish interpersonal relationships in a place where little genuine notion of community exists. As a tenured professor of creative writing and a junior Spanish professor, respectively, Tim and Cecelia discover little human solace within the university's largely emotionless environs. Never arriving for a new semester more than twelve hours before classes commence, Tim walks forlornly among Moo U.'s populace: "As he neared Stillwater Hall, the numbers of people he knew and greeted thickened, until he had, in fact, spoken to ten or twelve friends, two women he had dated, and one woman he had lived with for two years. Such as it was, this was home. He accepted that" (15-16). Even the prospect of a sexual encounter with the delectable Cecelia leaves him "only 80 percent excited" (100). As an Hispanic woman on an overwhelmingly white faculty, Cecelia feels both intellectually and socially bifurcated, as well as denied access to the centripetal and centrifugal channels of power that might reward her with success amongst Moo U.'s intelligentsia. As students on a campus in which the administration blithely refers to them as "customers," Moo U.'s student body seems similarly disaffected. A student in Tim's introductory course on creative writing, Gary Olson struggles to fnd a writerly voice as he wades through endless revisions of his assignments at his professor's behest. His inability to succeed underscores the institution's own powerlessness to establish an atmosphere in which language can acquire meaning and ultimately fulfll the needs of its practitioners. As dormitory roommates in the campus's Dubuque House - the institution's dream of multicultural diversity and for which, by necessity, it offers



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a 20 percent rebate on tuition and housing - Mary and Keri likewise labor to discover themselves among Moo U.'s bewildering environs. Keri's interpersonal dilemmas fnd their origins in her tragicomic desire to preserve a potentially embarrassing secret from the recent past - her one-year reign as the Warren County Pork �ueen. As an African American from Chicago, Mary's fears about life at a midwestern university are decidedly more substantial than her white counterpart's. Mary can scarcely "imagine" herself at Moo. U. "She could watch herself walk across the campus, enter classrooms, study in the library, eat in the commons or in the Dubuque House dining room, dance with [her boyfriend] Hassan at a party, but still not grasp where she was going or why she was doing anything. When she thought of the campus or her classes or even her room, she was absent," Smiley writes. "There wasn't even a space where a black person should be" (381). Ironically, it is only the farmer and quasi-inventor Loren Stroop - with his naIve belief that the administration continues to adhere to the Morrill Act's implicit dictum about its mission of service to the community - who approaches Moo U. with the confdence of being an insider amongst the institution's conficted ivory towers and sacred groves. Paranoid about the security of the vague invention that he plans to bestow upon an ostensibly grateful university, Loren dons a bulletproof vest as "his best protection against the FBI, the CIA, and the big ag businesses, all of whom, he knew, wanted to get him out of the way before he perfected and marketed his invention, which was going to revolutionize American agriculture" (85). In Smiley's sardonic vision of the academy, it seems that only a madman could hope for a place among Moo U.'s distorted cultural landscape. During the latter portions of Smiley's novel, Moo erupts in a series of carnivalesque moments in which her characters engage in simultaneous acts of transgression and complicity - acts, that is, in which Smiley's academics both reject and cleave to Moo U.'s social, economic, and political hegemony. In a virtual carnival of texts, Smiley's characters exploit the offcial and unoffcial "languages" of knowledge, sexuality, the media, innuendo, and interoffce correspondence in order to effect their own self-driven ideologies and agendas. In a chapter entitled "The Common Wisdom," for example, Smiley surveys her characters' divergent perspectives of the institution's fnancial and hierarchical conditions. Smiley enumerates the common knowledge about Moo U. from a wide range of





viewpoints, including the state's citizens, for whom "it was well known" that "the university had pots of money and that there were highly paid faculty members in every department who had once taught Marxism and now taught something called deconstructionism, which was only Marxism gone underground in preparation for emergence at a time of national weakness." In addition to registering the voices of the state legislature - for whom "it was well known that the faculty as a whole was determined to undermine the moral and commercial well-being of the state" - Smiley reports the faculty's equally politicized view that the governor and the state government planned to diminish their research opportunities and replace them with "computer-graded multiple choice" exams. For Moo U.'s janitorial staff, "it was well known" that "if you wanted to maintain your belief in human nature, it was better never, ever to look, even by chance, into any wastebasket." Finally, for the students, common wisdom dictates that the campus populace frequently endures unreported attacks by axe murderers, an administration that intentionally overbooks the dormitories, and a nefarious cafeteria staff whose Thursday afternoon chili "contained all the various kinds of leftover meat from the preceding week, even meat left on plates" (19-20). By highlighting the vague intersections between fction and reality in the arena of campus communication, Smiley demonstrates the manner in which centripetal and centrifugal voices create various levels of community and understanding at Moo U. Smiley accomplishes a similar end in a chapter entitled "Who's in Bed with Whom," an extended narrative in which she recounts her academic characters' sexual proclivities and liaisons. For Mary, sex with Hassan - a Palestinian graduate student at Moo U. - affords her with a new means of imagining her place in the student population's ethnic hierarchy. "A virtue she doesn't like to admit to herself," Smiley writes, is that Hassan "is neither black nor white. When she tells her black friends and her white friends that he is Palestinian, both sets are impressed. Both sets suspend the judgments they would otherwise make" (97). For Tim and Cecelia, sex provides a vague communion. Tim fnds it diffcult to concentrate on the activity at hand, while Cecelia is understandably troubled by his disinterest. In bed with her lesbian lover Mrs. Lake, Mrs. Walker exerts a predictable degree of control during sex. In addition to refusing to employ euphemisms about the female sexual anatomy, Mrs. Walker periodically interjects bits of campus gossip during the couple's various



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moanings and gropings. The chapter concludes with a fgurative reference to Dr. Gift being "in bed," in a business and political sense, with Arlen Martin, a billionaire with whom the economics professor plans to annihilate the Costa Rican cloud forest for fnancial gain. As he dreams alone in bed, "the thought of being personally bought and sold by Arlen Martin two thousand times brings him to such a pitch of excitement that he wakes up and can't go back to sleep" (105). Later, in the chapter entitled "Mass Media" - which inaugurates a virtual string of such chapters that establish a narrative tension of sorts and bring Moo to its dramatic conclusion in "Some Weddings" - Smiley traces the public dissemination of Dr. Gift's plans to eradicate the rain forest. Initially pleased by the "amazing" fashion in which he and Martin "had orchestrated the whole thing during the winter recess," Dr. Gift reads a politically embarrassing article bearing the headline, "New Pressures on Central American Countries to Exploit Resources in Protected Regions," on the front page of the New York Times (309). During the same instant, Smiley reports, "Dr. Cecelia Sanchez was asleep," while Tim stands in front of an English class on campus and negotiates the political correctness, or lack thereof, of requiring his students to subscribe to the New York Times. Loren Stroop remains blissfully unaware of the incriminating article, as the "New York Times was not sold in the town near Loren Stroop's farm," where he still lives "untouched and unsabotaged by the FBI, the CIA, and the big ag companies" (313). For Mrs. Walker, though, the article comes as no surprise. "The reporter had called her Friday and thanked her for being such a terrifc help in linking Gift . . . and Arlen Martin," Smiley writes. Mrs. Walker also knows that yet another article will soon appear, again at her behest, that recounts Martin's appalling environmental record. After Dr. Gift yells at her about the ensuing damage to his reputation, Mrs. Walker makes "a mental note to do a careful audit of all of Dr. Gift's university accounts" (315). In "Conspiracy Theory," Smiley fashions a series of newspaper stories in order to provide her readers with a sense of Moo U.'s power structure and with an understanding of its institutional semantics. A Reuters article, for example, recounts recent payoffs to the Costa Rican government in an attempt by unknown groups to gain access to the country's virgin rain forests. A Wall Street �ournal story details the bankruptcy of Seven Stones Mining, which planned to exploit the Costa Rican cloud forest, and whose owner, Arlen Martin,





shrugs off the company's fnancial woes, telling reporters that "sometimes you can crow, sometimes you gotta squawk, but that's business" (325). Yet another article in the State �ournal offers a favorable expose of Dr. Gift's celebrated life and work, praising, in particular, the professor's elegant home, professional demeanor, and intellectual sophistication. In a letter to the editor of the State �ournal shortly thereafter, Chairman X notes recent student protests of Dr. Gift's Costa Rican activities, while observing that "our natural world is teetering on the brink of disaster, and writers in the State �ournal tiddle on about oak paneling and kitchen conveniences. This sort of journalism is not only maddening, it is dangerous. Please cancel my subscription" (328). Smiley concludes her textual carnival with yet another article in the State �ournal that reports Governor O. T. Early's plans for a series of budget cuts in the state's support of higher education as a punitive measure for the recent protests on Moo U.'s campus. Governor Early also suggests that the university administration "fre all those bozos up there who are getting the sons and daughters of the people of this state stirred up" (331). By commingling offcial and unoffcial voices from the media, the campus, and the state government, Smiley succeeds in revealing the hierarchical and ideologically motivated nature of discourse, as well as the many ways in which an individual's ethical perspective ultimately determines the nature of his or her response to a given set of external circumstances. In "A Little Deconstruction," Smiley's novel reaches its ridiculous nadir in a chapter in which she challenges her characters to confront higher education's various intellectual and cultural crises on a very personal basis. For Smiley, the demolition of Old Meats and Earl Butz's subsequent demise function as metaphors for Moo U.'s ethical decline, as well as for the larger academy's moral deterioration. Each character refects upon and responds to the chapter's events in a highly particularized fashion. For Chairman X, "the result of it all was that when the crane with its clam bucket came and bit down Old Meats, he didn't have the heart to order his troops to lie down in front of it, or, indeed, to lie down in front of it himself" (365). Mrs. Walker somberly watches as Earl Butz fees from the wreckage of Old Meats. For her, the sight of the frightened animal seems "poignant. Even as she jumped back, she held out her hand as if to pat him on the head" (372). Interestingly, many of Smiley's coterie of academics either miss the destruction of Old Meats completely or view the day's sad events in silence. When his body fails him after the exertion of his epic, fnal trot across



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campus, Earl Butz fnds himself subconsciously drawn to Keri - one of Moo U.'s freshman and part of the institution's hazy future despite the pain shooting through his being: "Was he drawn by her green coat? By something about her odor? By an instinctive animal recognition that she had served a year as Warren County Pork �ueen?" (373). After Earl Butz heaves his last, enormous sigh on the grounds of Moo U. - and after Moo's carnival of narrative voices reaches its tragicomic conclusion - Smiley affords her readers with an intentionally over-sentimentalized vision of the campus's future, a world that dissolves in a food of weddings and concludes with "an astonishing, and even legendary, kiss" (414). Having allowed the university, in academic fction's well-honed deus ex machina tradition, to eschew fnancial ruin via the production and implementation of Loren Stroop's revolutionary agricultural machine, Smiley ostensibly seems content to let her characters enjoy the simple pleasures inherent in a happy ending. Yet her often acerbic critique of higher education's growing tendency toward consumerism and away from its educational imperatives usurps the power of the novel's saccharine conclusion. As Nakadate observes, "The thematic lifeline of Moo is revealed in the fow of money, the raw material out of which come new products, new patents, and more arguments for more grants" (190). Although Smiley's carnivalesque chapters serve in many ways as a unifying mechanism that brings socially and ideologically disparate characters and textual voices together, the technique nevertheless allows her to posit a damning critique of the ways in which people with supposedly similar professional goals frequently fnd themselves at odds over the differing and seemingly more urgent needs of the self. "The fundamental problem for humanism," Daniel Jacobson writes, "is to explain what we learn from art that is of ethical signifcance, and that we do not already know" (334). In Moo, Smiley's satirical evaluation of unbridled consumerism concerns precisely such a social dilemma, albeit one that has obviously been dissected on many previous occasions.7 Yet Smiley's self-conscious retelling of consumerism's cautionary tale - of what happens when a beast like Moo U. is permitted to gorge itself at the trough of other, ethically dubious creatures - affords us with a narrative that never loses its value, that always proves compelling.




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Conclusion: Ethical Criticism and the Academic Novel beyond the Culture Wars

"I want to suggest a different metaphor for theoretical work: the metaphor of struggle, of wrestling with the angels" The only theory worth having is that which you have to fght off, not that which you speak with profound fuency"" - Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies"

Despite the publication during the last decade of a number of vol umes devoted to the humanistic study of literary works - a roster of monographs that includes David Parker's �t�i�s� T�eory� an� t�e No�el (1994), Martha C" Nussbaum's Poeti� J�sti�e� t�e Literary Iiagination an� P�bli� Life (1995), Kim L" Worthington's Self as Narrati�e� S�bje� ti�ity an� Coii�nity in Conteiporary Fi�tion (1996), Colin McGinn's �t�i�s� ��il� an� Fi�tion (1997), Robert Eaglestone's �t�i�al Criti�isi� Rea�ing after Le�inas (1998), and Geoffrey Galt Harpham's S�a�ots of �t�i�s� Criti�isi an� t�e J�st So�iety (1999) - ethical criticism must still successfully contend with several issues of historical and con temporary import in order to authenticate itself as a viable interpretive paradigm" Apart from continuing to underscore its usefulness to lit erary study, ethical criticism must effectively differentiate itself from the contemporary critical prejudice associated with the "traditional humanism" previously associated with such fgures as F" R" Leavis and Northrop Frye" By also demonstrating its signifcant pedagogical value, as well as establishing itself as a meaningful - and remarkably inter�is�iplinary - component in the future of the theoretical project, 156



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the ethical paradigm can indeed confrm Wayne C" Booth's vision in T�e Coipany We �eep� an �t�i�s of Fi�tion (1988) of a reading methodology that shuns theoretical dogma in favor of "critical plu ralism" and highlights the ethical interconnections between the lives of readers and their textual experiences (489)"1 Although ethical criticism continues to assert itself as both an interpretive reading paradigm and a corrective for the social irrel evance of the theoretical project's critical machinery, its detractors often question its capacity for intellectual endurance, as well as its usefulness as a means for ideological critique" Paul A" Bove's acerbic comments in Intelle�t�als in Poter� a Genealogy of Criti�al H�ianisi (1986) demonstrate the prevailing critical misgivings about human ism and its application to literary works" "Critical scholarship should seize the power function of 'truth,'" he writes, "and sophistically enlist it for political work intended not only to reveal the dark side of humanism's oppression but also to knock the underpinnings from humanism and the dominant regimes it supports" Criticism must be negative," he continues (309-10)" Bove's remarks clearly illustrate the nature of the theoretical project's anxiety about humanism's capacity for postulating any sustained political critique" Yet, as Nussbaum reminds us in T�e Fragility of Goo�ness� L��k an� �t�i�s in Greek Trage�y an� P�ilosop�y (1986), the ethical study of literary works provides readers with a powerful means for interpreting the ideological and interpersonal clashes that defne the human experi ence" The ethical investigation of literature, she writes, "lays open to view the complexity, the indeterminacy, the sheer diffculty of actual human deliberation"" Such humanistic criticism, she adds, underscores "the vulnerability of human lives to fortune, the muta bility of our circumstances and our passions, the existence of conficts among our commitments" (13-14)" In short, contrary to Bove's dra conian outlook, the ethical paradigm supplies us with a useful mechanism for interpreting the political struggles that invariably plague the human condition" In addition to Bove's pessimistic arguments regarding what he believes to be the ideological ineffectuality of humanist forms of literary critique, recent observations by critics such as Gerald Graff and Morris Dickstein implicitly problematize the contemporary force fulness of ethical reading paradigms" In "The Future of Theory in the Teaching of Literature," for instance, Graff laments what he perceives to be the "fragmented" nature of "traditional humanism" (260), while in his review of Nussbaum's Poeti� J�sti�e, Dickstein



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paternalistically describes her "love of literature and insistence on its social value" as "refreshingly oldfashioned" (19)" Amazingly, and despite the recent theoretical achievements of ethical critics such as Booth, Nussbaum, and J" Hillis Miller, Graff's and Dickstein's comments seem to locate the heyday of humanistic literary study somewhere in the distant past" Similarly, in his essay, "The Com mon Touch, or, One Size Fits All," Stanley Fish unfatteringly compares T�e Coipany We �eep, Booth's ethical manifesto, with the regressive and ethically questionable texts published by several of the infamous culture warriors, including Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Dinesh D'Souza" In his discourse on the ethical agenda, Fish unfairly charges writers such as Booth with championing "moral relativism" and rendering "the act of judgment" into a "meaningless and trivial" exercise (250-1)" Ethical critics such as Booth in fact argue that morality remains decidedly contingent upon the norms and standards particular to the localized practices of autonomous selves" As S" L" Goldberg perceptively recognizes in �gents an� Li�es� Moral T�inking in Literat�re (1993), "there is no unwritten constitutional rule about what everyone should mean by 'moral'" (88)" Rather than attempting to articulate any codifed systems of be havior, ethical criticism strives to address the manner in which individuals arrive at their decisions, while also assessing how the results of those choices affect the larger human community in which we live"2 In this study's evaluation of ethical criticism and the Anglo American academic novel, for example, the institutional practices and professional activities of university life receive particular atten tion" By drawing upon the tenets of contemporary moral philosophy, moreover, I have demonstrated the ways in which intellectuals and institutional bodies often detract from the ethical intentions of their scholarly missions in order to satisfy their personal and political desires" In addition to providing readers with individual models of ethical and unethical behavioral patterns, the characters in the eleven works featured in this study underscore the ways in which the practitioners of academic fction utilize satire as an implicit means for advocating the merits of positive value systems, as well as a mechanism for commenting upon the nature of the academy and its institutional politics, its occasional veneration of false - or pos�lost - art, its cultural practices, and its various interconnections with such concepts as community, goodness, and love" Further, by engag ing in what I describe as a form of pejorative poetics, the authors of the works included in this study deliver their humorous attacks



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upon the academy while simultaneously employing a form of Swiftian satire that attempts to instruct readers about the ways in which their intellectual targets depart from the university's mission for unim peded discourse, fairness, and the unrestricted pursuit of knowledge" Amis's L��ky Jii, for example, reveals the manner in which the political undercurrents inherent in Jim Dixon's unnamed redbrick institution - manifested, most notably, by the fctive persona of Professor Welch - undermine his capacity for selfexpression and individuality, ultimately resulting in his dismissal, and fortunate liberation, from the academy" Nabokov's satire of pos�lost art in Pnin and Pale Fire functions as an ethical metaphor for the bank rupt value systems that undergird the academy's scholarly and artistic standards" His characterization of the renegade Dr" Charles Kinbote, the spiritual antithesis of Malcolm Bradbury's earnest Professor Stuart Treece in �ating People Is Wrong (1959), likewise personifes Nabokov's estimation of the scholarly rage for selfpromotion and intellectual acceptance" Similarly, in T�e H�ngry G�osts, the intellectual charac ters in Oates's short stories consistently subvert the possibilities of goodness and community in their respective academic worlds be cause of their unchecked ambitions and outrageous desires for power and preeminence over their colleagues" Drawing upon a wide range of scholarly characters in Lodge's trilogy of academic novels, I have also demonstrated the ways in which the aforementioned profes sional motives challenge the scholarly capacity for experiencing the intimacy and human interconnection that often accompany romantic love" Like Bernard Malamud's ineffectual S" Levin in � Net Life (1961), Lodge's academics remain unable to balance their desires for institutional accomplishment with their fundamental needs for erotic fulfllment" In Oleanna, Mamet's academic characters verge on enjoying a truly "altered" relationship, yet fnd themselves, time and time again, stymied by the academy's ethically fractured structures of interper sonal dynamics and by the seemingly inevitable barriers inherent in their competing ideologies" The racial cauldron that comprises Jack London College in Reed's Japanese by Spring, moreover, cri tiques the ethical contradictions inherent in a social and scholarly milieu that functions upon a monocultural school of thought" By implicitly celebrating the merits of multiculturalism, Reed's novel argues in favor of the ethical sensibilities of a pluralistic ideology that advocates intellectual freedom and inclusiveness" Gilbert and Gubar's nonfctional "melodrama," Masterpie�e T�eatre, demonstrates



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the ethics of multiculturalism and canon revision through their dramatization of the perils of an unidentifed Text and its struggle for academic recognition" The latter two volumes, with their em phasis upon cultural assimilation and pluralism, remind us that, in the words of J" L" Mackie, "cultural inheritance is itself a part of the good life" (172)" Finally, Smiley's Moo offers an archly satirical reading of an institution of higher learning's rage for scholarly dominion" In addition to critiquing Moo U"'s shadowy relationship with the corporate world, Smiley demonstrates exactly what transpires when the university's various unchecked appetites of consumption replace its ostensibly more important - and seemingly more ethical - edu cational prerogatives" By challenging the ethical failures of higher education through their respective pejorative poetics, the authors of each of these works underscore the particular value of ethical criticism to the investigation of academic narratives" The exegesis of their textual depiction of such a wide range of ethical issues also reveals the signifcant pedagogic value of ethical criticism, a reading paradigm that challenges students and teachers alike by establishing vital interconnections between the life of the reader and the narrative experience" Yet, as Susan Resneck Parr notes, very few professors avail themselves of the educational possibilities of ethical criticism" "Many teachers, like their students, see questions of morals and values as distinct from knowledge," Parr writes" They "tend to avoid issues with any ethical component," she adds, "insisting that teaching ought to be valuefree" (9)" Proponents of the ethical paradigm, however, recognize the tremendous pedagogical benefts of ethical study and its capacity for enhancing existing teaching methodologies in the humanities" "Literary works," James Battersby writes, "provide us with 'ethical samples' of ethical possibilities, and they are, in a very large and untrivial sense, the schools of our moral sensibilities, teaching us surreptitiously much about the nature and bases of right behavior" (194)" In this way, the ethical criticism of literature encourages educators to highlight the selfrefexive nature of reading and the manner in which our existing social and moral inclinations inform, and thus share in the construction of, our narrative experiences" In addition to providing readers with a valuable means for recon sidering their ethical biases in relation to the moral proclivities of the larger human community, the ethical paradigm invites us to test our value systems in relation to those inherent in the works of literature that we consume"3 Lynne Tirrell ascribes this phenom



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enon to a form of "moral agency" in which literary texts urge us to project our value systems upon their narratives" "It is through the articulation of events, motives, and characters that we become moral agents," Tirrell argues, and "in telling stories one develops a sense of self, a sense of self in relation to others, and a capacity to justify one's decisions" (125)" By challenging readers to reaffrm their existing moral sensibilities through their textual experiences, ethical criticism encourages prospective students to consider spheres of experience and cultures beyond themselves, to recognize a plurality of human conditions and realities" Patricia Meyer Spacks further argues that these reading experiences - although powerful and affecting - may be understood as activities that invite ethical experimentation, the trying on of new possibilities without the fnality or consequences of life beyond the boundaries and artifciality of our narratives" "Because novels have the power to engage us morally, they give us choices - not merely acceptance versus nonacceptance, but accep tance versus refusal," Spacks observes" "Paradigms are not imperatives but possibilities," she continues, and "the paradigms of fction provide an opportunity for moralplayfulness: costfree experimentation" (203)" By emphasizing the selfrefexive nature of reading, ethical criticism offers a wide array of pedagogic possibilities for educators inter ested in inspiring their students both to reevaluate their own value systems, as well as to look beyond the often insular boundaries of the self" Developing an ethical terminology for the investigation of literary works in the classroom and beyond, Christopher Butler adds, will allow us "to make sense of the life we actually live" (245)" As the chapters in this study of the academic novel have demon strated, the ethical paradigm and its reliance on the tenets of contemporary moral philosophy offer a broad range of applications to literary study" Because of its inherently interdisciplinary nature, moreover, ethical criticism proves further illuminating as a reading methodology for a host of other felds of study, including feminist criticism and rhetorical study, to name only a few"4 The recent emergence of ethical criticism as a viable reading methodology may yet prove benefcial to the fractious contemporary life of the theo retical project as well" Arriving on the criticaltheoretical scene during an era when poststructuralism fnds itself under siege for its anti humanistic and highly politicized interpretive activities, the ethical paradigm provides literary theory with a means for evaluating the status of its ideological critique" As Robert Scholes reminds us, "To have an ethics means to have standards, canons, protocols" (154)"



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Ethical criticism, with its emphasis upon the observation of inter pretive norms and the value systems of readers, furnishes critical theorists with a meaningful context for addressing the direction of literary study as the new century rapidly approaches" "Any critical act is an expression of values," Christopher Clausen argues in T�e Moral Iiagination� �ssays on Literat�re an� �t�i�s (1986), and "much conservative criticism is overtly or covertly moral" So is most radical and feminist criticism," he continues, "even if often disguised as ideological critique" (22)" The infusion of an ethical imperative into the various subgenres of critical theory during this latepoststructuralist moment might indeed provide scholars with a useful discourse for contextualizing the theoretical project's current internal reassessment of its value systems and interpretive norms" The contemporary preoccupation with ethical concerns also un derscores the ethical paradigm's value as a progressive and pluralistic means of direction for the future of literary study in a cynical era of institutional budget restrictions and shrinking employment op portunities in higher education" It should hardly be surprising, then, that the ethical reevaluation of literary theory emerges during a period in postsecondary education characterized by its adherence to a bottomline mentality and the necessity of selfjustifcation" �incent P" Pecora further attributes the apotheosis of ethics to ideo logical fuctuations on the international political scene" "It is perhaps no accident that at a time when the possibility of a viable adversary politics in Western Democracies " " " has been once again reduced to mere neurotic fantasy," Pecora writes, "ethics should return to critical discourse" (204)" Regardless of the reasons for its recent incarnation as a reading paradigm, ethical criticism supplies its proponents with an intelligible parlance for articulating the value of literary study to a Western populace in signifcant need of a critical methodology that elevates cultural pluralism and communal responsibility over cynical and monoculturalist theoretical agendas" In "Is There an Ethics of Reading?" J" Hillis Miller concedes that "surely no one can be expected to master the intricate rigor of the deconstructive way of reading and apply it habitually" We need to get on with it," he adds, referring to the business of ethically reinvigorating our existing methods of literary critique (80)" By demonstrating the use fulness of secular humanism and contemporary moral philosophy to literary study, ethical criticism highlights the pedagogic and in terdisciplinary value of literary study to an increasingly diverse and expanding global community" "Philosophy is the childhood of



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the intellect," Thomas Nagel warns us in T�e Viet froi Not�ere (1986), "and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up" (12)" With its accent upon literary study and its wideranging possibilities for intellectual and interpersonal development, ethical criticism elu cidates so many of the ways that the life of the text intersects the life of the mind"



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Notes

Chapter 1: Introduction 1 As Wayne C. Booth observes in The Company We Keep: an Ethics of Fiction (1988), "the word 'ethical' may mistakenly suggest a project concentrating on quite limited moral standards: of honesty, perhaps, or of decency or tolerance." In Booth's postulation, however, "ethical" refers to "the entire range of effects on the 'character' or 'person' or 'self.' 'Moral' judgments are only a small part of it" (8). In this study, I will elaborate upon Booth's usage of the term in order to share in the establishment of a reading paradigm that, in its effort to investigate the interconnections between the lives of readers and their textual experiences, eschews censorship and the codifcation of moral standards. 2 Although in this instance ethical criticism operates as a partial rejoin der to the excesses of the poststructuralist theoretical project, the notion of reading ethically fnds its foundations in a number of historical antecedents. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, for example, establishes precedents for the understanding of happiness (1.5), goodness (1.7), virtue (2.5), pleasure (3.10), justice (5.1), and friendship (8.3). In "The Poet" (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson calls for a transcendental artifcer to engage nature and language as a "sayer," a "namer," and a "liber ating god" who can articulate the value of reason, love, and beauty to an emerging nation (219, 231). Similarly, in his controversial volume, The Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater endured charges of hedonism for his examinations of art and its power to yield both aesthetic meaning as well as an expanded sense of consciousness: "Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us," he writes. "Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake" (153). While his arguments ultimately border on censorship and critical exclusion because of his unduly high liter ary and moral standards, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948) ascribed value to the works of writers that celebrated the moral fabric of the human community. Such writers, Leavis writes, "are signifcant in terms of the human awareness they promotej awareness of the possibilities of life" (10). Finally, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957) posits that the concept of an ethical criticism pre supposes the idea of artists as moral focalizers for their communities: "The social context of art is also the moral context of art," Frye notes. "Hence the moral view of the artist is invariably that he ought 164



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to assist the work of his society by framing workable hypotheses, imitating human action and thought in such a way as to suggest realizable modes of both" (113). In Canons and Consequences: Refections on the Ethical Force of Imagina tive Ideals (1990), Charles Altieri addresses the necessity of deriving an ethical parlance for contemporary literary criticism. "Lacking a language for adjudicating truth claims," he writes, "literary theory can do no more. Yet confronted by the pressures of academic orthodoxy under prevailing models that cannot adequately handle questions of responsibility and community, it dare do no less" (18). Additionally, the inclusion of Geoffrey Galt Harpham's chapter on "Ethics" in the second edition of Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin's Critical Terms for Literary Study (1995) underscores the emergence of ethical criticism as a viable reading paradigm during the past decade. As Harpham notes: "Understanding the plot of a narrative, we enter into ethics. Ethics will always be at the fashpoint of conficts and struggles," he continues, "because such encounters never run smooth" (404). As Stephen R. Yarbrough cautions, "The dream of Truth is itself man's most formidable enemy" (25). By truth, in this instance, I mean the human construction, through language, of various states of being. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Richard Rorty remarks: "Truth cannot be out there - cannot exist independently of the human mind - because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own - unaided by the describing activities of human beings - cannot" (5). Derrida attributes the indeterminacy of language to its structural in consistencies. In Of Grammatology (1967), he writes: "Language is a structure - a system of oppositions of places and values - and an oriented structure. Let us rather say," he continues, "that its orientation is a disorientation" (216). In ReThinking Theory: a Critique of Contemporary Literary Theory and an Alternative Account (1992), Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller argue that, at least terminologically, "the very conception of decon struction seems incoherent. For it rests on two prima facie inconsistent claims. On the one hand, it claims to be constrained to work with and within the very concepts it seeks to deconstructj on the other, however, it claims to provide a means of radically overturning these concepts. There is, then, we believe a simple and disabling contradiction at the heart of the enterprise, and the attempt to rename the contra diction 'paradox' - as some have been inclined to do - does not remove the contradiction, however consoling the attempt may be" (119-20). For this reason, critics such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith refer to deconstruction as a form of "antihermeneutics" that functions at variance with methodologies of literary interpretation such "as his torical description, textual analysis, and explication" that continue "to be practiced as a magisterial privilege in the classrooms of the literary academy" (23-4).



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8 Norris's The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction (1985) answers various critical charges that deconstruction operates as "a form of unbridled linguistic nihilism whose effects - if somehow put into practice - would include the dissolution of the individual subject and his or her ethical rights before the law" (191). Although he neglects to demonstrate the paradigm's value as a means for pos tulating any kind of relevant cultural critique, Norris rightly challenges those legal philosophers who attack deconstruction as a theoretical project that mitigates individual autonomy. 9 While Norris's articulation of the necessity of an ethics of criticism adequately demonstrates the contemporary critical mindset, his argu ments must be distinguished from the brand of ethical criticism that will be described below. Unlike Norris's call for an ethically forceful redefnition of critical theory, ethical criticism provides readers with a more synthesized paradigm for textual evaluation that establishes vital interconnections between the text and the reader. 10 Rosenblatt's contributions to readerresponse criticism receive special attention in Terence R. Wright's reviewessay, "ReaderResponse under Review: Art, Game, or Science?" The value of Rosenblatt's transac tional theory of reading, Wright argues, "lies in its recognition of both sides of the 'reading transaction,' reader and text" (542). 11 Rosenblatt derives efferent from the Latin effere, which means "to carry away" (24). 12 For a more forceful defnition of "universal good," I defer in this instance to the tenets of moral philosophy and Nussbaum, who, in Love's Knowledge, explains that "knowledge of a good, that is to say a value, in the world requires, we see, knowledge of evil, that is to say of the possibility of confict, disorder, the contingent necessity of breaking or harming" (131). 13 Gardner further illustrates this point through his discussion of Adolf Hitler's political autobiography, Mein Kampf (1925-7), the text that infuenced the emergence and direction of the Nazi movement. "In the long run," he writes, "cornball morality leads to rebellion and the loss of faith. I do not mean, either, that what the world needs is didactic art. Didacticism and true art are immisciblej and in any case, nothing guarantees that didacticism will be moral. Think of Mein Kampf " (19). 14 Gardner addressed the issue of postulating standards of behavior during an interview with the English Department faculty of Pan American University on 21 April 1981: "I think that presenting sort of noble models of behavior, which is not to say perfect people - I don't believe in such things but by presenting noble models of behavior, you give people a model for their own lives, for their own feelings. In a way, you give them permission to feel the nobler things that they do feel without feeling that they are making fools of themselves. I think that all art has always done that" (260). In The Company We Keep, Booth argues nevertheless that Gardner's position in On Moral Fiction suggests that "the only acceptable fction will be whatever meets his announced moral standards. He always implies that one might



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arrive at his secure judgments by the same logic with which he de fends them" (54). As Booth concludes regarding the issue of ethical criticism and the dangers of censorship: "There may be one universal supreme good for all human beings to aspire to. . . . But there is surely not one supreme quality that all good art - and therefore all good narratives - should aspire to" (56). Altieri warns, however, that such a process of critical refection requires a kind of historical refexivity, a selfconscious concern for the morals of the historical past, as well as those of the more immediate present. Only then, he argues, can narratives truly perform their ethical func tions. "If works and authors are confned to their historical parameters, it is impossible to rely on traditional images of literature's educational functions," Altieri writes. "Texts still provide knowledge, but the knowl edge has no direction or authority. Texts are a record of symptoms, at times of heroic efforts to resist entrenched values, but their specifc ren dering of experience provides only a historically determined scheme. So the study of the past must get its direction from forms of thinking that are shaped by our interests in the present" (165). Unlike the false prophecy of censorship, this notion of a refexive and free intellectual discourse offers, I believe, a more effective inter pretation of ethical criticism's pedagogic intentions. In Love's Knowledge, Nussbaum compares this type of open discourse to the beliefs of "the ethical philosophers and the tragic poets" who "understood them selves to be engaging in forms of educational and communicative o activity, in what the Greeks called psuchagogia," or the "leading of the soul." In Nussbaum's estimation, then, teachers - indeed, ethical critics - can provide students and readers with the benefts of their own, carefully considered "values and judgments" (16-17). Booth derives the neologism of coduction from co ("together") and ducere ("to lead, draw out, bring, bring out"). Booth further defnes coduction as "what we do whenever we say to the world (or prepare ourselves to say): 'Of the works of this general kind that I have experienced, comparing my experience with other more or less qualifed observers, this one seems to me among the better (or weaker) ones, or the best (or worst). Here are my reasons'" (72-3). In Booth's critical matrix, the notions of "friends" and "friendship" take on greater proportions, for in The Company We Keep he estab lishes the metaphor that a work of literature functions as a friend. Booth writes: "Considered under the friendship metaphor, the implied authors of all stories, fctional or historical, elevated or vulgar, welcoming or hostile on the surface, purport to offer one or another of these friendships" (174). In Love's Knowledge, Nussbaum deepens the elements of moral philosophy inherent in Booth's metaphor: "People care about the books they readj and they are changed by what they care for both during the time of reading and in countless later ways more diffcult to discern. But if this is so, and if the reader is a refective person who wishes to ask (on behalf of herself and/or her community) what might be good ways to live, then it becomes not only reason able, but also urgent to ask: What is the character of these literary



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Notes friendships in which I and others fnd ourselves? What are they doing to me? To others? To my society? In whose company are we choosing to spend our time?" (231). In Narrative Ethics (1995), however, Adam Zachary Newton suggests that "ultimately it is the author - whether freestanding or represented by his text - who will turn out to be a better or worse friend for us" (64-5). In this instance, I defer to Nussbaum's usage of "pluralism," for she cogently argues that Booth's defnition of pluralism is all too inclu sive. Booth's "pluralism . . . leads to ethical confusion," she writes in Love's Knowledge. "I think Booth is, at this point, bending over back wards to answer his real or imagined critics in the literary world, hastening to reassure them that he is no dogmatist, no stuffy de fender of logic." Instead, she argues that we should read "pluralism as multiplicity, as contextualism, and as multiple specifcation" (243). Although Booth's inclusion of feminist criticism under the auspices of ethical criticism received praise from feminist advocates, critics such as Siebers found problematic Booth's efforts to embrace this region of ideological criticism. Regarding the publication of Booth's 1982 essay, "Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism," Siebers remarks: "While feminists have welcomed Booth's statements, his essay is awkward in many ways. He ignores the litera ture of feminism, as if women have made no contributions to issues of interpretation, and uses his spouse as a character in his morality play, in which she appears as the patient homemaker, doing the iron ing, as he engages in intellectual pursuits" (189). In Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics (1992), Geoffrey Galt Harpham further argues that ethical criticism operates from a masculine bias: "Those interested in ethics must reckon with a stubborn and resilient streak of patriarchalism within ethical discourse, and with the possibility that a contemporary revival of ethics as an area of academic interest signals not just a resistance to various forms of antihumanism or irrationalism but also a specifc resistance to feminism as a discipline and a cultural force" (14). As Booth's postulation of an ethical para digm emphatically reveals, however, ethical criticism - just as its seeks to avoid the spurious demands of censorship - provides readers with an open forum for the communal evaluation and remediation of social injustices and inequalities. Remarkably, Miller refers to this ethical revitalization of critical theory as "the presentday triumph of theory," a "critique of ideology" that examines "the hidden assumptions of our procedures of teaching and of the general institutionalization of literary study." This theoretical victory - although perhaps slightly "overdetermined," Miller admits seems little more than a belated attempt to assert the social and pol itical relevance of poststructuralism (83). His celebration of critical theory's triumph underscores, rather, the conclusions of Knapp and Michaels, who argue that the "theoretical impulse" only serves to separate, unnecessarily, the reader from the text through its reliance upon the artifcial necessity of "theoretical choices" (29). Booth writes: "Even the life we think of as primary experience - that



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is, events like birth, copulation, death, plowing and planting, getting and spending - is rarely experienced without some sort of mediation in narrative. . . . We all live a great proportion of our lives in a sur render to stories about our lives, and about other possible livesj we live more or less in stories, depending on how strongly we resist sur rendering to what is 'only' imagined" (14-15). 23 See Richard H. Weisberg's Poethics, and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (1992), which, like Nussbaum's volume, explores the ethical interconnections between the study of law and the interpretation of literary texts. 24 In Ethics, Theory, and the Novel, Parker objects to Harpham's postula tion of an ethical terminology, particularly Harpham's usages of "obligation" and "ought." Parker argues that Harpham's ethical terms unnecessarily challenge the philosophical integrity of the arena of "free intellectual discourse" that Williams espouses in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (205). Harpham's motives for positing an ethical parlance, however, underscore Parker's own proclamation that ethical criticism, as a new form of evaluative discourse, must "sustain an adequate theoretical account of itself" (198). Harpham's efforts to establish an ethical discourse would seem to support the spirit of Parker's dictum. 25 Despite the efforts by critics such as Yarbrough, Miller, and Harpham to reinvigorate poststructuralist critical projects such as deconstruction and postmodernism with muchneeded doses of ethical refection, Parker argues nevertheless that "poststructuralism of course displaces ques tions of literary value in other ways - by insisting that literary meaning is fnally undecidable, for example. If we cannot have hermeneutic discourse, what is the point of evaluation, which must to some ex tent depend upon it?" (201). Indeed, if meaning ultimately resists interpretation, then why posit an ethics of criticism for its evaluation?

Chapter 2: Reading the "Heavy Industry of the Mind" 1 For an extended account of the evolution of the university novel through the early nineteenth century, see Proctor's The English Univer sity Novel (11-50). In his essay, "From Narragonia to Elysium: Some Preliminary Refections on the Fictional Image of the Academic," Richard Sheppard also provides readings of early academic novels and their depictions of university life from the fourteenth through the nine teenth centuries. For useful reference guides to American academic fction, see John E. Kramer, Jr.'s The American College Novel: an Anno tated Bibliography (1982), as well as Lisa Johnson's survey, "The Life of the Mind: American Academia Refected through Contemporary Fic tion" (1995). Finally, Lyons's 1974 essay, "The College Novel in America, 1962-1974," updates his original investigation of the academic novel as a literary genre. 2 See Susan J. Leonardi's Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (1989) for an excellent account of the various



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Notes literary depictions of the admission of female students at Oxford and the acrimonious debate that followed over granting them degrees. Further, Nadya Aisenberg and Mona Harrington's Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove (1988) offers discussion regarding the contemporary experiences of women in the academy competing for tenure amidst a genderbiased university climate whose "ancient norms," they argue, still "cast women in subordinate, supportive roles in both their private and their public lives" (xii). Sheppard notes that for universities this era in English history also marks the shift from their function as clerical institutions devoted to producing educated priests to their emergence as the precursors of our modern research institutions (11). As Janice Rossen notes in The University in Modern Fiction: When Power Is Academic (1993), the exclusion of women from the university com munity still resonates within the pages of academic fction. "There has been nothing else like the wholesale resistance to the admission of a particular, coherent group to the University in Britain, and this is part and parcel of the subject," Rossen writes. "The two facts are inextricable - women got into the University, and women were bit terly opposed in their efforts to do so. The powerful initial resistance to their inclusion in the University would certainly have affected how they saw themselves and their place in that community for some time to come" (34). Lyons traces the frst American academic novel to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Fanshawe, published in 1828. Set at Harley College in the wilderness of New England during the eighteenth century, Hawthorne's novel which he later attempted to suppress - explores a number of themes endemic to modern academic fctions, including Hawthorne's depic tion of the eccentric Dr. Melmoth, an absentminded and ineffectual scholar who later becomes the institution's president (5-6). Further, in his essay, "Inside Jokes: Familiarity and Contempt in Aca demic Satire," Brian A. Connery observes that academic satire - in contrast with neoclassical satire, which only attacks the vices and follies of an absent or unknowing target - also aims its satiric barbs at the reader. In this way, he argues, academic novelists deny their readers the ironic, selfcongratulatory pleasures of neoclassical satire because the readers themselves, often academics, function as the texts' ultimate targets (124-6). W. Scott Blanchard's Scholar's Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renais sance (1995) illuminates the interconnections between the satiric ambitions of the Menippean writers and the motivations of twentiethcentury academic novelists: "Menippean satire is a genre both for and about scholarsj it is an immensely learned form that is at the same time paradoxically antiintellectual," he writes. "If its master of ceremonies is the humanist as wise fool, its audience is a learned community whose members need to be reminded . . . of the depravity of their overreaching intellects, of the limits of human understanding" (14). Unlike the aforementioned commentaries by Proctor and Lyons, Blanchard's text implicitly establishes the place of modern academic



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satire in a more richly developed and lengthy satiric tradition. 8 In addition to the aforementioned studies by Proctor, Lyons, Carter, and Rossen, remarkably few monographs attempt to traverse the aca demic novel and its devastating accounts of the scholarly community. The university novel does receive attention in two recent collections of essays, however. David Bevan argues in his Introduction to Univer sity Fiction (1990) that conficting nuances of "deformation, divination, desecration, [and] damnation" adorn the "disturbing hall of mirrors constituted by that emergent genre" of university fction (3), while Ben Siegel identifes the fundamental existential contradiction inher ent in the genre in his Preface to The American Writer and the University (1989), a collection of essays examining the interconnections between creative writers and universities: "No other institution rivals the Ameri can university in harboring so many who criticize and even revile it while refusing to leave it," he writes (7). 9 Rossen suggests that students, through the necessity of entrance re quirements and performance standards, endure similar threats of expulsion from the university community. Undergraduates must con form, moreover, to a form of communal disruption each term as their lives redefne themselves around new course schedules and holi day breaks: "What undergraduates in all of these novels seem to experience primarily is an intensely intimate, private world with their peers - and one in which they suffer from either ambitions to be included . . . or yearning to fnd love and acceptance," Rossen ob serves. "The unique feature of community life for undergraduates is that the small world which they create for themselves vanishes when the students disperse at the end of their University terms" (118). A number of novels treat the undergraduate experiences of students in the academy, including Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers (1973), Clare Chambers's Uncertain Terms (1992), and Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction (1987), among others. Finally, Marion Rosen's Death by Education (1993) explores student life in a secondary educational institution. 10 Caram writes that the concept of the Professorroman is "a term of my own coining, in the tradition of slightlypompous Germanic schol arship. . . . The Professorroman has distinctive features which qualify it as a subgenre of literature similar to the Kinstlerroman or the Bildungsroman" (42).

Chapter 3: Negotiating the University Community 1 In his Memoirs (1991), Amis places the event in 1948, although a number of other accounts locate this particular visit to Leicester Uni versity during 1946. As Amis recalls in his Memoirs: "On the Saturday morning he [Larkin] had to go into college and took me ('hope you won't mind - they're all right really') to the common room for a quick coffee. I looked around a couple of times and said to myself, 'Christ, somebody ought to do something with this.' Not that it was



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Notes awful - well, only a bitj it was strong and sort of developed, a whole mode of existence no one had got on to from outside, like the SS in 1940, say" (56). Eric Jacobs's 1995 volume, Kingsley Amis: a Biography, confrms 1946 as the year in which Amis visited Leicester University's Senior Common Room (143). For additional discussion regarding the mission of the redbrick uni versity, see Bruce Truscot's 1943 manifesto, Redbrick University, a volume that outlines the perceived risks of the redbrick enterprise and its in evitable clashes over funds with the more established English institutions of higher learning, particularly Oxford and Cambridge. David Daiches's The Idea of a New University: an Experiment in Sussex (1964) details the founding of the University of Sussex and the fnancial and institu tional dilemmas inherent in such a project. In his essay, "What Are Universities For?" Louis Menand argues that an increasingly utilitarian approach to postsecondary education has usurped the traditional mission of the modern academy, which he defnes as "the liberalization, through exposure to art, literature, and philosophy, of the undergraduate mind" (92). Contemporary college students, he notes, generally fnd their intellectual motivation in the pursuit of the fnancial achievements upon which our culture places value and esteem, rather than in the development of the mind and the cultural nourishment of the soul. As Menand concludes: "Aca demic thought may have been heading left in the last ten years or so, . . . but college students themselves have been heading straight into the mainstream. Even comfortably middleclass students feel an econ omic imperative almost unknown to middleclass students of twenty years ago. When I was a freshman, in 1969, I didn't have a thought in my head about how I was eventually going to support myself. I suppose I imagined that I would just hitchhike around the country with my guitar (which I didn't know how to play) reciting my poetry (which I didn't know how to write)" (90). In yet another instance, Dixon even goes so far as to imagine that his enduring sense of ennui might yet provide him with the occupational security that continues to elude him in his academic life. "I'm the boredomdetector," he remarks. "I'm a fnelytuned instrument. If only I could get hold of a millionaire I'd be worth a bag of money to him. He could send me on ahead into dinners and cocktailparties and nightclubs, just for fve minutes, and then by looking at me he'd be able to read off the boredomcoeffcient of any gathering. Like a canary down a minej same idea" (215). In his Introduction to the 1992 reprint of Lucky Jim, Lodge notes that Amis's portrayals of Christine and Margaret both seem anachronistic when "judged by 1990s standards of what is Politically Correct." As Lodge observes, Amis largely depicts Christine in terms of her beauty, while the novelist characterizes Margaret as "hysterical, deceitful, and sexually frigid" (xvi). Amis's treatment of women in his novels has enjoyed substantial critical attention, especially in such works as Hermione Lee's reviewessay, "Kingsley and the Women," and McDermott's Kingsley Amis: an English Moralist (1989). In his essay,



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"Kingsley's Ransom: Why Have the British Been Bashing the Original Amis?" James Wolcott argues that, "for a misogynist, Amis often gives the women the choicest comebacks - if not the last word, then the knockout nexttolast word" (55). In his essay, "Changing Social and Moral Attitudes," James Gindin remarks that the establishment of a personal ethos requires the ac knowledgment of the plurality of other selves who populate the community: "The moral framework is social as well as individual," Gindin writes, "contingent on the recognition that the world con tains many others besides the self" (137). Dixon's rambling title likely fnds its origins in the sprawling title of Amis's own Oxford undergraduate thesis, "English NonDramatic Poetry, 1850-1900, and the Victorian Reading Public" (Gardner, Kingsley, 26). In The AntiEgotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters (1994), Paul Fussell identifes the character of GoreUrquhart as a standard plot mechanism in Amis's fction. "He stands as Amis's type of the traditional magna nimous man, implicit as a hero in all Amis's writings," Fussell writes (16). Gardner argues that Bertrand, like Margaret before him, falls victim to a "twotimer" theory that seems to undergird the ethos of Lucky Jim's narrative: "One notes in both cases the operation of a severe and perhaps oversimple morality," he writes. "People who twotime (Bertrand with Carol, Margaret by trying to involve two men in her 'suicide') can be discarded" in Amis's fctive world (Kingsley, 31). Fallis notes the limited role of luck as the singular means by which Dixon should redefne his behavioral patterns, however: "Jim revels in his trickiness," Fallis observes, but "in the end, all his trickery gets him nowherej he is not saved by his own manipulations of himself but by that of luck, his fate or wyrd over which he has no real control" (69). In his essay, "Lucky Jim and After: the Business of University Novels," J. P. Kenyon argues otherwise. "I doubt if University Novels are re garded by those who read them as especially relevant to 'real' universities," Kenyon writes. "Firstly, the profound cynicism and disgust displayed by their authors is dismissed as a quirk of the cloistered academic. No layman regards a professor as being quite of this world" (83).

Chapter 4: Scholar Adventurers in Exile 1 Scholars and critics frequently irritated Nabokov with queries about the moral value of art and literature. In a September 1966 interview with Herbert Gold, for instance, Nabokov remarks, "I do not give a damn for public morals" (Strong Opinions, 93). In 1969, Kirk Polking of Writer's Digest offered the author $200 for 2,000 words on the ethical responsibility of the artist. In a letter of 13 June 1969, Nabokov replied: "My answer to your question 'Does the writer have a social responsibility' is: NO[.] You owe me ten cents, Sir" (453). Finally, in a letter of 10 September 1969 to Brother Joseph Chvala of St. Edward High School in Cleveland, Ohio, Vera Nabokov, the author's wife, reiterated Nabokov's argument that literature should not function as



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Notes an express means for establishing moral standards: "My husband asks me to tell you that he does not believe that an artist is responsible to societyj he believes that an artist is responsible only to himself" (457-8). For the purposes of this chapter, I will employ the diplomatic and truncated transliteration, poshlost, to replicate the Russian IOIJOCTb. See Nabokov's Strong Opinions for an example of this usage (100-1). In Strong Opinions, Nabokov further defnes poshlost as "corny trash, vulgar cliches, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudoliterature" (101). Menand disagrees with the widely held assumption that academics, by virtue of their esteemed places in our institutions of higher learn ing, are somehow entrusted with the care of "the common culture." "Professors are people trained to study culture," he writes, "not to conserve it (whatever that would mean). . . . Nor is it a favor to the culture," he rightly adds, "to hand it over to academics for its nour ishment and protection" (99). As the following analysis of Pale Fire will vividly demonstrate, consigning a cultural artifact to the care of academics bent on indulging their personal artistic ambitions can produce devastating consequences indeed. For a discussion of Nabokov's employment of narrative structure as a means for satire in Pale Fire, see Keith Reierstad's essay, "Most Artisti cally Caged: Nabokov's SelfInclusive Satire on Academia in Pale Fire." In a letter of 3 February 1954 to Pascal Covici, Nabokov confesses his role as a character in his own novel: "At the end of the novel, I, V.N., arrive in person to Waindell College to lecture on Russian literature," he writes (143). Some critics, Gennadi Barabtarlo among them, seem uncomfortable with the author's intrusion into the narra tive of Pnin. In Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's Pnin (1989), for example, Barabtarlo refers to the narrator vaguely as "N-" (16). Other critics fnd it diffcult to fathom Nabokov's narrative intrusion, par ticularly Laurie Clancy. In Clancy's problematic 1984 volume, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, he writes: "I regard the suggestion of the narrator's being Nabokov himself as too manifestly absurd to be worthy of serious discussionj there is not one shred of actual evidence to sup port it" (122). In addition to a range of narrative clues that hint at Nabokov's shadowy role as the novel's narrator, his correspondence offers convincing proof regarding his role in the novel. Nabokov published his frst nine novels - from Mary (1926) through The Gift (1937-8) - in Russian as "V. Sirin." Nabokov, of course, endured the wrath of a number of critics, par ticularly Edmund Wilson, over his translation and annotation of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin: a Novel in Verse, published in a lavish fourvolume edition in 1964. While Wilson derided Nabokov's literal translation of Pushkin's long poem, other critics objected to the profundity of his massive textual apparatus, a commentary that featured nearly a thousand pages of explanatory notes. Although Nabokov's edition remains an invaluable tool for the study of Pushkin's text, critics such as Cowart in Literary Symbiosis note its ironic juxtaposi tion with Pale Fire's own infated editorial apparatus (67).



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9 Shade, unbeknownst of course to Kinbote, found the inspiration for his title in Timon of Athens: "The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction/Robs the vast seaj the moon's an arrant thief,/And her pale fre she snatches from the sun" (4.3.436-8). Nabokov lampoons this academic practice elsewhere in Pale Fire when he maligns the "fashion able device of entitling a collection of essays . . . with a phrase lifted from a more or less celebrated poetical work of the past. Such titles possess a specious glamor acceptable maybe in the names of vintage wines and plump courtesans but only degrading in regard to the talent that substitutes the easy allusiveness of literacy for original fancy," he writes (240). 10 Nabokov's descriptions of the English department's "Freudian fancies" reveal his particular animus for the overarching infuence of Freudian psychoanalysis upon twentiethcentury letters. In Speak, Memory: an Autobiography Revisited (1951), for instance, he refers to Freud as "the Viennese Quack," while in Strong Opinions he calls him "that fgure of fun" (47, 66). According to Boyd, Nabokov "detested the way Freud befouled something he held as precious as family love" (American Years, 161). In his note to line 929 of Shade's poem ("Brutes, bores, classconscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,/Fake thinkers"), Kinbote lam bastes the psychoanalytical interpretation of literary works and concludes, "Do those clowns really believe what they teach?" (271). 11 In addition to Cowart, several other critics, including Torgovnick, Hennard, and David Rampton, argue that Nabokov anticipates the interpretive practices of poststructuralism and other arenas of literary theory. While Torgovnick describes Pale Fire as a "fable for contempo rary criticism" (38), Hennard fnds similarities between the "metacritical activity displayed in Pale Fire" and the "Derridean and Kristevan poetics" inherent in contemporary critical theory. Rampton argues that "Nabokov anticipates both the methods of poststructuralist crit ics and their preoccupations, the notion of language as a play of differences, the revealing of selfreferential paradox and selfconscious indeterminability, [and] the emphasis on interpretation as misinterpre tation" (105).

Chapter 5: Searching for Goodness and the Ethical Self 1 Remarkably, Oates's contributions to the genre of academic fction remain unexamined in the available scholarly monographs devoted to its study. In a 1978 interview with Robert Phillips, Oates describes the unity of composition inherent in her volumes of short stories: "Each of the story collections is organized around a central theme and is meant to be read as a whole - the arrangement of the stories being a rigorous one, not at all haphazard" (222). For this reason, The Hungry Ghosts surely warrants consideration among the academic novels produced during the latter half of this century. 2 In Academic Tribes, Hazard Adams notes the essential paradox that undermines the very notion of an academic "community." Such an



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Notes institution, he argues, necessarily regards itself as "the vision of an ideal of cultural achievement," yet its members function nevertheless as employees rather than cultural guardians (26). "That the faculty are employees," he writes, "refects the postEdenic condition of public education and the growing call for accountability of public institutions to the people" (15). This tension, then, between cultural responsibility and public accountability reveals the ideological contradictions that problematize the mission of the academic community, as well as the ethical dilemmas that confront its members. In addition to setting a number of her short stories in the sacred groves of the academy, Oates devotes considerable attention to uni versity life in several of her novels, particularly Unholy Loves (1979) and the intensely autobiographical Marya: a Life (1986). Oates reiterates her usage of Hilberry University as an academic set ting in such later stories as "The Transformation of Vincent Scoville" and "The Liberation of Jake Hanley," both of which appear in Cross ing the Border (1976). See Trachtenberg's essay, "Desire, Hypocrisy, and Ambition in Academe: Joyce Carol Oates's Hungry Ghosts," for further discussion regarding the institution's role in these later tales (45-46). See, for example, Hermann Severin's The Image of the Intellectual in the Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates (1986), which examines the story in terms of "the humiliating experiences of a young graduate stu dent" (125), while unnecessarily mitigating the satiric import of Oates's characterization of Dr. Thayer in "The Birth of Tragedy." In "The Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates," Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., registers a similar complaint: "The pictures of academic life are the stuff from which Miss Oates's weakest tales are made," he writes. "We are given dreary people with dull vices wandering in psychological mazes. Certainly such people exist, but they constitute only a part, not the whole, of any world, academic or otherwise" (221). Like Severin, Pickering fails to recognize Oates's satiric argument that such behav ior, although equally plausible in the larger human community, offers important commentary regarding the social politics of academic life. Oates's inspiration for the events at the MLA convention in this story undoubtedly arose from her experiences at the 1971 meeting of the MLA at the Palmer House in Chicago. On 28 December, Sister Enda Eileen Byrne of Our Lady of Holy Cross College chaired a session entitled "Joyce Carol Oates." The panelists included, respectively, James R. Giles, Rose Marie Burwell, and Ildik� de Papp Carrington. Carrington reports that Oates in fact attended the session, although the writer unlike the meek and nervous Bernadine Donovan of her story - fully participated in the event, literally marginalizing the panelists and their papers in the process. See the November 1971 program issue of PMLA for more session details (1131). Carrington astutely notes that Mason functions ironically in the story as the only "ethical critic" among the Hilberry English department faculty. Yet after Ron exposes the other professors as wholesale pla giarists, Mason - himself a disciple of one of the most ethical of critics, Northrop Frye - ultimately suffers a nervous breakdown for



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his efforts (137). Creighton recognizes the irony of Mason's fate as well: "The satiric target is less on Ron's shoddy poetry than on his colleagues' cowardice," she writes (131).

1 In 1993, Penguin inaugurated its exclusive publication of the three novels in England as A David Lodge Trilogy. 2 Although the arguments of contemporary moral philosophy generally support this view, Singer correctly reminds us of the communal possibilities of erotic love's healthier incarnations: "The ideal of sexual love envisages a happy confuence between sexuality and love," he writes. "It treats lasting and benefcial interdependence between two persons as the making of a good society. To this extent, sexual love is inher ently a social love, like friendship or love within the family" (71). 3 In The Culture of Love (1992), Stephen Kern further illustrates roman tic love's propensity for transforming the rigid boundaries of the self. "Desire takes the subject beyond itself toward another self," he writes, and it "returns the self to itself dialectically at a higher level of self awareness" (91). In this way, love operates as a means for establishing human interconnection, as well as a mechanism for promoting the individual's capacity for acknowledging the emotional needs of other, equally autonomous selves: "The focus of the history of selfhood in loving is on awareness of oneself as a self," he adds, "which varies between the extremes of fusion and autonomy" (281). 4 Lodge cites Nathaniel Hawthorne's prefatory dictum on the Romance in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) as an infuence upon his academic fctions and their frequent narrative perambulations. In his Preface to the novel, Hawthorne writes: "When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to writing a Novel" (1). 5 Lodge's narrative experiments underscore the wide range of textual variation that marks the genre of academic fction, an ostensibly con ventional literary format characterized by satire as its metier. Academic narratives enjoy a variety of narrative forms, moreover, including verse - Galway Kinnell's "The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson" (1994)j drama - David Mamet's Oleanna (1992j see Chapter 7) and Susan Miller's experimental Cross Country (1977)j the epistolary novel - Michael Frayn's The Trick of It (1989)j a farcical short story - Stephen Dobyns's "A Happy Vacancy" (1994)j and the narrative dislocation of parallel texts - A. S. Byatt's Possession: a Romance (1990) and John Updike's Memories of the Ford Administration (1993). Academic novels also fre quently employ the conventions of the murder mystery, as evidenced by such texts as Amanda Cross's Death in a Tenured Position (1981), P. D. James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), D. J. H. Jones's Murder at the MLA (1993), and Estelle Monbrun's Meurtre chez Tante



Chapter 6: The Professoriate in Love

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Notes Leonie (1995). While Christine BrookRose draws upon the textual nuances of postmodern pastiche in Textermination (1991), Lodge him self uses parody in his 1965 narrative reconfguration of Joyce's Ulysses (1922), The British Museum Is Falling Down. In Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors: a Critical Fiction (1990), Austin M. Wright offers one of academic fction's more innovative works. In his quasi nonfctional study, Wright satirizes contemporary literary criticism through his reproduction of two imaginary essays on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930) by a pair of feuding instructors whose students sub sequently meet at "Phil's Pub" in order to critique the quality of their professors' divergent arguments. The academic novel reaches its ex perimental apex in Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat (1981), a work that features stylistic forays into such genres as blankverse drama, the sermon, the diary, the fable, poetry, the essay, and formal oration, among a host of others. Rummidge's workingclass locale loosely resembles the terrain surrounding the University of Birmingham, where Lodge served as a professor of English for three decades. Likewise, Euphoria bears more than a pass ing resemblance to the University of California at Berkeley, where Lodge taught as a visiting professor in the late 1960s. His essay, "The People's Park and the Battle of Berkeley" (1969), refects his experi ences during his stay at the university during a protracted era of student unrest. Tanner also contends that adultery will eventually lose its force as a narrative construct as the social value of marriage decreases. "When a society ceases to care much about marriage, and all that is implied in that transaction, by the same token it will lose contact with the sense of intense passion," he writes. "Adultery, we may say, no longer signifes" (89). As Lodge's novels demonstrate, however, Tanner's argument simply neglects to account for the literary power of adultery in contempo rary novels such as Changing Places and Small World. In his own review of Tanner's volume, Lodge writes: "One might be impressed, rather, by the durability of adultery as a theme for fction, persisting in spite of all of the changes of literary and moral fashion over the past hun dred years" (119). In his valuable work of moral philosophy, Love and Friendship (1993), Allan Bloom refers to this phenomenon as amourpropre, "the imperi ous need to subjugate another's will . . . because every ounce of one's selfesteem depends on success in the venture" (176). By indulging their selfprotective desires for amourpropre, lovers subsequently elevate the needs of the self over the functional life of their romantic rela tionships. As Nussbaum notes in The Therapy of Desire, "lovers infict pain on one another. They do so because they perceive their desire for the other person as a source of pain - a wound or ulcerous sore in the self" (259). Ammann registers similar reservations about Lodge's characterization in David Lodge and the ArtandReality Novel, arguing that "most of his characters in Small World . . . tend to be 'fat'" (110). In David Lodge: How Far Can You Go�, Moseley also observes that the plot of



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the novel "remains fairly broad and unsurprising." He writes: "That people go to conferences to advance their careers and slake their lust as well as to learn about literature, that many papers are dull repeti tive things to which nobody listens, and that professors are at least as ambitious as members of other professions, these are not revelations, unless it is to a naIve public for which Small World is a searing expose" (91). Yet Moseley, like Ammann, fails to recognize the many moments of meaningful interpersonal exchange depicted in Lodge's novel. As this chapter demonstrates, Lodge's academic characters - even as the indeterminacy of language and the contradictions of their profession invariably thwart their desires - continue in their decidedly human quest for community and love. In this way, Lodge invests his charac ters, much like ourselves, with the capacity to hope for and dream of a better life in some foreseeable future. 10 Lodge's characterization of Fulvia clearly underscores Bjork's conten tion that university novelists typically depict academic women as either frigid or sexually deviant. "In campus literature," Bjork writes, "femi nists are often portrayed as inficting pain upon their partnersj Lodge's own creation in the novel Small World, the sadistic Italian professor Fulvia Morgana, is a case in point" (121). Bjork rightly concludes that "a constructive dialogue cannot be created by means of carica ture" (125).

Chapter 7: Performing the Academy 1 See James Berardinelli's online review of the flm for additional dis cussion regarding the title's folklore origins and the legend of the Ole and Anna land swindle. Interestingly, the play version of Oleanna begins with John engrossed in a telephone conversation in which he remarks, "And what about the land. The land. And what about the land? What about it?" (1). 2 In Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (1998), Robert Eaglestone argues, rather unconvincingly, that "Levinas's thought cannot be turned into a methodology: it is not a philosophy that can be applied. . . . To ask for a Levinasian critical method is to ask for something that cannot and should not exist" (176j italics added). In fact, Eaglestone offers little evidence demonstrating the thrust of his contention be yond his observation that "there is obviously no one critical process which embodies Levinas's ideas, no one answer" (176). Yet Levinas's ethical philosophy quite obviously posits its own terminology - in cluding such concepts as "adequation," "alterity," "the face," and "negation," among a host of others. Simply put, Levinasian philoso phy, despite Eaglestone's misgivings, can easily be applied as an interpretive matrix in much the same interdisciplinary fashion as gen der studies, psychology, history, and sociology - to name but a few of literary criticism's multitudinous allied disciplines, each of which possesses its own contingent of thinkers with their own critical vocabularies.



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3 Thomas H. Goggans offers a useful reading of the feminist group's function in Oleanna: "Carol appears to embrace the ideological rigor of the Group because it provides her with a readymade tool allow ing her to identify and challenge a world which she perceives as her victimizer. And John's fatuous pedagogy, revealing an essentially pa triarchal position, is worthy of measured criticism. But the specifc allegations of sexual harassment and assault seem unreasonable," he writes. "Instead, it seems to be misinterpretation fated by her personal history and merely mischanneled by the selfinterested Group which pursues, in John, a legitimate perpetrator of hierarchic abuse, but the wrong representative of Carol's literal 'patriarchal' abuse. Carol's rela tionship with her Group thus becomes a type of exploitation itself, which emphasizes the complexity of Carol's role within the text and validates the signifcance of her struggle" (440). 4 Craig Stewart Walker argues, rather intriguingly, that Carol might perform a more oblique narrative role in Oleanna as "an extension or projec tion of John's thought." Hence, "we imagine the play to be occurring entirely in John's imagination, like a nightmare" (159). 5 Mamet received largely poor notices for the flm version of Oleanna, in contrast with the generally rave reviews that the play enjoyed. Roger Ebert writes that "experiencing David Mamet's play Oleanna on the stage was one of the most stimulating experiences I've had in theater. In two acts, he succeeded in enraging all of the audience the women with the frst act, the men with the second." Yet the flm "lacks fre and passion," he adds. "Watching it was like having a pale memory of a vivid experience." Eschewing any acknowledgment of the similarities between the dialogue in Oleanna's play and flm versions, Cynthia Fuchs attributes the flm's problematic screen transformation to "a lazy script, in the sense that potential complications are made infammatory rather than provocative, and responsibility (on the part of either character) is made inconsequential rather than political or structural." In one of the flm's few positive notices, James Berardinelli writes that "Oleanna probes deeply into some of the darker facets of human interaction, and anything with this keen an edge will likely cause discomfort." He argues that "this flm has been made for those willing to look beneath the surface to see a taut, intellectual sparring match where there is no absolute truth."

Chapter 8: Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project 1 In The Ethics of Multicultural and Bilingual Education (1992), Barry L. Bull, Royal T. Fruehling, and Virgie Chattergy further argue that a multicultural pedagogy functions upon an ethical ideal. Multicultural education, they write, demonstrates "that the ideal of unity in diver sity has a moral and not just a pragmatic meaning. That ideal concerns not only how culturally, religiously, and ethnically different people can live together but also how they should live together" (4). 2 Likewise, the concept of individuality remains central to the multi



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culturalist agenda. "We need a notion of respect for persons that is sensitive," Waldron argues, "to the fact that for every man and woman the construction of an identity . . . is a painfully individual task. We need, accordingly, a conception of multicultural education that is sensitive to the fact that each individual's identity is multicultural and that individuals can no longer be regarded in the modern world (if indeed they ever could) as mere artifacts of the culture of the one community to which they think they ought to belong" (114). Although Reed actively supports the aims of the multicultural project, he nevertheless problematizes the movement's terminology in a 1995 interview: "We were the frst ones to use the term 'multicultural,' and I wish we never used it because now it doesn't mean anything. Academia got a hold of it and now it's just a big hustle. Anybody is multicultural" ("A Gathering of the Tribes," 373). In a 1994 interview with Wolfgang Binder and Harold Zapf, moreover, Reed acknowledges the rich, sa tiric terrain of the United States and its institutions of higher learning, the setting of Japanese by Spring: "I can go from issue to issue, from event to event in the United States, and I can have an ironic twist on it. The United States provides endless material for me" (110). In the novel, Reed clearly employs the historical persona of Jack Lon don as an ironic metaphor for racism. Despite his socialist desire for the creation of a classless society during his lifetime, London also espoused the merits of the evolution of a "superrace" not unlike the monoculturalist vision later espoused by the Japanese occupants of Jack London College. See Lee Clark Mitchell's "Naturalism and the Languages of Determinism" for further discussion regarding London's ambiguous social policies (540-2). Reed also includes several references to Japanese racial atrocities in the Pacifc theater of the Second World War - evinced, most notably, by their cruel organization of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines in 1942. Like his depiction of Lon don, Reed surely appropriates the racism of the Japanese historical past as an implicit metaphor for illustrating the brutality and hypoc risy of xenophobic behavior in Japanese by Spring's fctive present. Reed's depiction of Puttbutt's struggle for tenure surely fnds its ante cedent in the novelist's own tenure dilemmas in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley during the mid-1970s. The department ultimately denied him tenure because, incredibly, "two colleagues felt that Reed's work was too innovative to win acceptance within the department," according to Jon Ewing. In a 1977 interview with Ewing, Reed recalls the events surrounding his own tenure battle: "I told the chairman of the department that I thought racism was a factor. I didn't say it was a racist decision. . . . I'm not so simplistic as to believe that it was merely racism. But I think if you get 40 whites in a room, there's going to be some racism, a racist element. I think you could put that into a computer" (219, 221). Like the respective academic protagonists of Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985) and Jane Smiley's Moo (1995), Puttbutt indulges in extracur ricular language study and experiences the unethical proclivities of a hostile campus administration. DeLillo's novel, for instance, traces the



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Notes intellectual progress of Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at the fctitious CollegeontheHill who surreptitiously learns the German language during the evenings in an effort to avoid being exposed before his colleagues for not knowing the native language of his life's work. See Chapter 10 for analysis of Moo's satiric depiction of the insular world of university administration. Clearly, Puttbutt's dismay regarding the nature of Jokujoku's outra geous salary and perks hardly results from a monoculturalist ideology, but rather, from an academic world that has come to revere its own star system, as well as to rely upon management models that reward select individuals while marginalizing others. Interestingly, Jokujoku's name derives from the Yoruba word jokujoku, which literally means "corpseeater" and refers to a bird of prey. In his review of the novel, Tsunehiko Kato objects to the ineffcacy of Reed's depiction of Yamato's rightwing extremist organization: "Reed's satire on this point is an example of the exaggeration which often characterizes his narratives," Kato argues. "Actually there are no right wing groups in Japan with clout and money who seek to restore the Shogunate. There is no social and cultural basis for the existence of such groups since the capitalist economic developments dating from World War II. Reed's knowledge of Japan," he adds, "is still rooted in stereotypes of old Japan or images of the new Japan that are narrowly focused on its potential as a market for American commodities" (126-7). Reed's depiction of his own public persona contributes to the roman a clef favor of Japanese by Spring, a novel that also features thinly disguised portraits of the "culture warriors" of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Such fgures include, perhaps most notably, Reed's pejo rative characterization of D'Gun ga Dinza, a loosely veiled portrait of Dinesh D'Souza, the controversial author of Illiberal Education: the Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991). D'Souza appears in Reed's narrative as an "antidiversity personality" and a "foreign mercenary" from an "Eastern think tank" (109, 112). In addition to drawing heavily from a wide range of personalities from American popular culture, Reed offers a satiric portrayal of Jack London College's Pro fessor Himmlar Poopovich, a paranoid scholar with a Nazi past who maintains that blacks lack the equivalent brain size of whites, thus undermining their collective intelligence. In this instance, Reed likely targets the phrenological studies of J. Philippe Rushton, a develop mental psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. Rushton's arguments regarding race, brain size, and intelligence ignited an inter national controversy during the early 1990s. Several of his colleagues subsequently called for his dismissal from a tenured professorship as a result of his controversial biological study, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: a Life History Perspective (1995). While Reed problematizes the exclusionary practices of Afrocentrism, he hardly approaches the animus of Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1996), in which Lefkowitz argues that Afrocentrism "teaches young



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students to distrust all Europeans, past and present. . . . In short, the Afrocentric myth of antiquity does not educate its adherents. Instead, it keeps them in a state of illusion, both about the true course of history and also of the ways in which people have always been able [to] learn from cultures other than their own" (156, 158). Khaula Murtadha offers a useful response to the words of Lefkowitz, as well as a spirited defense of Afrocentrism's multicultural possibilities: "The critics of Africancentered education, and even some of its adherents, incorrectly assume that the only purpose of Afrocentricity is an at tempt to make African Americans feel good about themselves, building selfesteem, and taking pride in historic accomplishments. These critics fail to recognize the signifcance of examining the historical record as a means for evaluating social, political, and economic events as well as their consequences and ramifcations for the impact on people's lives" (360).

Chapter 9: Academic Nonfction and the Culture Warriors 1 For thorough examinations of the culture wars and their principal voices, see Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature (1990), Gerald Graff's Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conficts Can Revitalize American Education (1993), Todd Gitlin's The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (1995), John K. Wilson's The Myth of Political Correctness: the Conservative Attack on Higher Educa tion (1995), and Lawrence W. Levine's The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (1996). 2 In To Reclaim a Legacy, Bennett argues that the politicization of literary and cultural studies accounts for the general decline in the number of humanities majors since the 1970s. Bennett claims that humanities professors - because of what he believes to be their rage for ideological modes of criticism - marginalized the master texts of Western culture and essentially drove students away from the humanities community. 3 In General Knowledge and Arts Education: an Interpretation of E. D. Hirsch's 'Cultural Literacy' (1994), Ralph A. Smith's misreading of the multicultural project demonstrates precisely the way in which the cul ture warriors fail to understand the movement's pluralistic aims: "What makes multiculturalism a matter for serious concern," he writes, "is its transformation into an extreme ideology whose purpose is to under mine the signifcance of Western civilization by claiming that Western traditions, owing to their purported racism, sexism, and elitism, are the cause of most of our modern problems" (78). Smith's defnition of the multiculturalist agenda, however, fails to account for the widely held belief among scholars that its investiture would actually broaden the existing reading canon rather than shrink it. 4 David E. Purpel's The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education: a Curricu lum for Justice and Compassion in Education (1989) also problematizes the hegemony of professionalism within our institutions of higher learning. The academy's "major preoccupation is with perpetuating a



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Notes system based on the individual competitive struggle for material suc cess," Purpel writes. "This goal, however, is masked in the rhetoric of concern for knowledge and truth, and hence the schools do not even pretend to seek higher truth, higher meaning, or wisdom," he adds (60). In this manner, Purpel also admonishes academe for its lack of a spiritual imperative in its scholarly pursuits. For additional discussion regarding the culture warriors' assault on tenure, see Martin Anderson's Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals Are Destroying Our Uni versities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future (1992), particularly his chapter on "Culprits and Solutions" (194-210). Incredibly, Page Smith attributes what he considers to be the demise and politicization of contemporary scholarship almost entirely to the activities of Jacques Derrida. In Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America (1990), Smith describes Derrida's philosophy as "an acid eating away at the dominant structures of the academic world, French, English, and American. He has quite literally 'deconstructed' higher educa tion," Smith adds, "and left us with the question of how we are to regain our moral and intellectual equilibrium" (304). Similarly, Bruce W. Wilshire reiterates Smith's vilifcation of Derrida in his 1990 vol ume, The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation. Wilshire credits Derrida's writings with the current state of "creative chaos in the humanities." In Wilshire's estimation, Derrida's deconstructionist critique has been "little more than a fad, for caught up in jargon it has lost touch with the very tradition which lent it sense and direction: the recuperation of vital possibilities of philo sophical growth and coherence in the positions of past Continental thought" (157-8). Gilbert and Gubar originally published Act I of their melodrama in a 1991 issue of Critical Inquiry as the culture wars reached their contro versial apex. The controversy that accompanied Harold Bloom's 1994 publication of The Western Canon: the Books and School of the Ages underscores the Forward into Instability group's animus toward the proscriptive pro cess of canon formation, an act that by its very defnition demands the exclusion of some texts in order to preserve the legacy of others. Bloom endured particular scholarly censure for his postulation of several expansive appendices, or "canonical prophecies," tracing the publication of cultural artifacts from the "Theocratic Age" through the present "Chaotic Age." In Bloom's defense, however, his literary canons typically cross a broad range of cultural, racial, and gender lines, while also intersecting an impressive array of national litera tures. See Bloom (531-67). See D'Souza's Illiberal Education (68, 185) and Smith's General Knowl edge and Arts Education (39) for further examples of the Back to Basics movement's appropriation of Clausen's statement for their ideo logical ends. In The Myth of Political Correctness, Wilson refutes Clausen's conclusion through a rudimentary survey of the 1991 syllabi for English courses at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Wilson estimates that during that school year "nearly 100 Shakespeare plays



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were read for every copy of Alice Walker's book" (85). A survey of the 1986 course syllabi in the Department of English at Northwestern University conducted by Gerald Graff produced similar results. See Graff's Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conficts Can Revi talize American Education (1992) for a detailed analysis of the controversy that erupted regarding Clausen's statement (20-1). 9 The ethics and implications of tenure receive special attention in a 1996 special issue of Academe. See Hamilton Beazley and John Lobuts, Jr.'s "Ransomed Teaching, Indentured Research, and the Loss of Reason" (30-3), William R. Cotter's "Why Tenure Works" (26-9), and Stephen Joel Trachtenberg's "What Strategy Should We Now Adopt to Protect Academic Freedom?" (23-5) for various arguments regarding the need for tenure reform. In addition to fending off attacks from the Back to Basics contingent, Trachtenberg writes, "It is particularly urgent that those employed in American higher education adopt a tone and perspective that is sensitive to the profound economic insecurity now affecting their fellow Americans" (25). 10 In "Cooling the Polemics of the Culture Warriors," Sanford Pinsker adds: "A glance at the uncivil world around us should be enough to convince academics that pursuing rhetorical strategies that rely on anger and insult has done us no more good than it has politicians and talkshow hosts. And if attempting to become better models also means a decline in books that preach to the choir by taking cheap shots at the opposition," he continues, "I probably won't be the only one rejoicing" (A56).

Chapter 1�: �ane Smiley�s Academic Carnival 1 Smiley has been teaching at Iowa State University since 1981. Signifcantly, she served on the Faculty Senate from 1987 to 1989. In an article in the Des Moines Register regarding Moo, she remarks that "I not only didn't consciously base it on Iowa State, I didn't subconsciously base it on Iowa State" (Bunke, 1T-2T). Smiley likewise objects to readers who associate Moo with the academic novel as a literary genre. As Smiley notes, "I would never have written an ivorytower comic novel. I call my novel a slipperyslope academic novel, in which academia is not cut off from the world, but is constantly contaminating the world, is constantly both recreating the world in its own image and re creating the world" (11A). 2 The impact of the First and Second Morrill Acts upon American life is simply unprecedented in the world of higher education. According to Cross, "In 1994, 29 tribal colleges joined the landgrant system, increasing the total to 104 [colleges and universities]. Three million students attended landgrant colleges and universities in 1997, includ ing about 150,000 at the nine campuses of the University of California, the largest, and fewer than 2,500 at Kentucky State University, the smallest university. The landgrant institutions have granted twenty million degrees, including onethird of all masters degrees and more



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Notes than half of all doctorates. The landgrant schools have also pro duced eleven American presidents" (88). Morson and Emerson caution against confusing the notion of heteroglossia with the concept of polyphony. Quite obviously, both terms refer to aspects of multiplevoiced narratives, yet "polyphony is not even roughly synonymous with heteroglossia," Morson and Emerson write. "The latter term describes the diversity of speech styles in a language, the former has to do with the position of the author in a text. . . . The two concepts pertain to fundamentally different kinds of phenomena, although the critical practice of confating Bakhtin's categories has tended to blur the distinction for many readers" (232). As Michael Gardiner reminds us, though, it is important to remain cognizant of the offcial culture's signifcant place in the same social phenomenon that produces the carnivalesque moment. Synchronous with carnival's utopian effervescence, offcialdom's hegemonic nature ensures that it will attempt to stabilize the cultural continuum via a series of staid, conservative, and potentially oppressive gestures. As Gardiner observes, "A crucial aspect of carnival is its critical function, the refusal to acquiesce to the legitimacy of the present social system which, for many theorists, is the hallmark of the oppositional utopia" (260). Adam Begley similarly describes Moo as a "muffed satire" and a "cel ebration of the pleasures of university life, pleasures that should go hand in hand with security, a little money, and good company nearby" (44). In her review of the novel, Allison Lurie writes that "for a sati rist, Ms. Smiley is remarkably fairminded and kind" (26). The boar's name fnds its historical origins in Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture during the Nixon and Ford administrations who pro moted a "get big or get out" approach to establishing a marketoriented agriculture in an increasingly global economy (Nakadate 192). While reviewer Michael Carlson largely (and playfully) dismisses Moo as "an almost udder bore," he lauds the "700pound porker" as "the novel's most endearing, if not necessarily most complex character" (44). Susan Johnston perceptively argues for the artistic value of - and, indeed, our abiding need for - such ethical models for living: "As human selves we are always involved in normative claims, and thus . . . we require a theoretical model that does not dismiss or indict such claims, which are in fact the sine qua non of both emancipatory theory and ethical criticism. Without such a model we will indeed by irrel evant" (99).

Chapter 11: Conclusion 1 Annette Baier's "Doing without Moral Theory?" outlines the interdis ciplinary possibilities of contemporary moral philosophy, which itself provides the theoretical underpinnings for ethical criticism. In her essay, Baier calls for moral philosophy's mergence with other disciplines in order to assist philosophers in avoiding the "arrogance of solitary intellect." See Baier (41-6).



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2 In Find You the Virtue: Ethics, Image, and Desire in Literature (1987), Irving Massey argues that readers also engage in the ethical investiga tion of literary works in order to locate the moral structures unavailable to them within the boundaries of their real lives. "Even in this postliterate, postaesthetic, and possibly postethical age, we all continue to seek out art, with its unnameable ethical satisfactions, ambiguous as the very status of ethics itself may be. If ethics be a delusion," he adds, "it is at least a delusion shared by saints and sinners alike" (189). 3 For examples of the practical application of ethical criticism in the classroom, see Anne Barbeau Gardiner's "The Teaching of Ethics through Literature and Dante's Inferno." As Gardiner argues, "Surely it is time to do some civilization building and return the art of moral discern ment to the public classroom" (26). In "Putting Head and Heart on the Line," Robert Coles writes that "students need the chance to di rectly connect books to experience." Literary texts, Coles adds, allow educators to "address our humanity with subtlety - conveying the willingness to do justice to our variousness and to the complexities, ironies, and ambiguities that shape our lives" (A64). Finally, in "Is There an Ethics of Reading?" J. Hillis Miller astutely argues that as the millennium approaches "it would be benefcial to the health of our society to have an abundance of good readers" (100). 4 In "Moral Understandings: Alternative 'Epistemology' for a Feminist Ethics," for instance, Margaret Urban Walker elaborates upon ethical criticism's value to feminist criticism. "Feminist ethics clarifes the moral legitimacy and necessity of the kinds of social, political, and personal changes that feminism demands in order to end male domination," she writes, "or perhaps to end domination generally" (165). Likewise, in "Teaching Rhetoric and Teaching Morality: Some Problems and Possibilities of Ethical Criticism," Frederick J. Antczak discusses ethical criticism's contributions to contemporary rhetorical study. "We can teach our students," Antczak observes, "how to see ethical issues taking shape in and shaping the most important material for the constitution of their characters, the most important medium for their ethically signif cant choosing, acting, and living - that is, for their rhetoric" (22).



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Index

Abalos, David T", 112

Acheson, James, 84

Acker, Kathy, 138

Adams, Hazard, 3, 175-6

adequation, 179

Aeschylus, 134

aesthetic reading, 8

Afrocentrism, 116, 125, 182-3

Aisenberg, Nadya, 170

Alexandrov, �ladimir E", 52

Alighieri, Dante, 187

alterity, 100-1, 103, 106, 107, 179

Altieri, Charles, 165, 167

Amis, Kingsley, Lucky Jim, 24,

27-42, 66, 159, 171-3

Amis, Martin, 53, 171; The Rachel

Papers, 171

Ammann, Daniel, 83, 94, 178, 179

Amour-propre, 178

Anderson, Martin, 184

Angry Young Man movement, 28,

29, 41

Antczak, Frederick J", 187

Aristotle, 8, 47, 134, 164; The

Nicomachean Ethics, 164

Arnolfni, Giovanni, 145

Assoun, PaulLaurent, 100

Austen, Jane, 81, 134

Avant, John Alfred, 73-4

Badenhausen, Richard, 99

Baier, Annette, 77, 186

Bailey, F" G", 59

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 145-6, 168

Barabtarlo, Gennadi, 174

Barthes, Roland, 118, 122

Battersby, James, 160

Beattie, Ann, 14

Beazley, Hamilton, 185

Beckett, Samuel, 14

Begley, Adam, 186

Bender, Eileen T", 62-3, 69

Benjamin, Walter, 118

Bennett, William J", 25, 127,

128-9, 131, 132, 134-7, 139,

183

Berardinelli, James, 179, 180

Bergonzi, Bernard, 92

Berube, Michael, 129-0, 131

Bevan, David, 171

Bildungsroman, 171

Binder, Wolfgang, 181

Bjork, Eva Lambertsson, 89-90, 95,

179

Blake, William, A Descriptive

Catalogue, 63

Blanchard, W" Scott, 170

Bloom, Allan, 25, 96, 127, 128-9,

131, 158, 178

Bloom, Harold, 132, 184

Blum, Lawrence, 118

Bly, Robert, 139

Booth, Wayne C", 7, 8, 11-13, 14,

15, 17, 157, 158, 164, 166-7,

168-9

Bove, Paul A", 157

Boyd, Brian, 44, 58, 175

Boyer, Jay, 112

Boyle, Ted E", 39

Bradbury, Malcolm, Eating People

Is Wrong, 159

Bradford, Richard, 29

Bront�, Charlotte, 134

BrookeRose, Christine,

Textermination, 178

Brown, Robert, 79-80

Brown, Terence, 39

Buddhism, 62

Bull, Barry L", 180

Bunke, Joan, 185

Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim's

Progress from This World to That

Which Is to Come, 63

Burton, Robert S", 96

Burwell, Rose Marie, 176

Butler, Christopher, 161

202



Index

Butler, Samuel, The Way of All

Flesh, 99

Butz, Earl, 186

Byatt, A" S", Possession: a Romance,

177

Caesar, Terry, 141

Canfeld, Cass, 46

canon revision, 127-8, 130, 131,

135

Caram, Richard G", 26, 171

Carlson, Michael, 186

Carnival, 146-7, 151, 154, 155,

186

Carrington, Ildik6 de Papp, 69,

176

Carter, Ian, 22, 95-6, 171

censorship, 10, 166-7, 168

Chambers, Clare, Uncertain Terms,

171

Chattergy, �irgie, 180

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 20

Cheney, Lynne �", 128, 131-2,

135, 139

Chvala, Joseph, 173

Clancy, Laurie, 174

Clausen, Christopher, 136, 162,

184, 185

coduction, 12, 167

Coles, Robert, 187

commonsense, 45-6, 50, 57

Connery, Brian A", 170

consumerism, 143, 147, 155

Cooke, Alistair, 133

Cotter, William R", 185

Court, Franklin E", 139

covert polylingualism, 56

Covici, Pascal, 174

Cowart, David, 47, 49, 56, 57,

174, 175

Cowley, Julian, 113

Creighton, Joanne �", 61, 64, 176

Cross, Amanda, Death in a

Tenured Position, 177

Cross, Coy F", 144, 185

Csicsery, George Paul, 125

culture wars, 25, 109, 127-42, 156,

158, 182, 183-5

203

Daiches, David, 172

Darwinism, 149

deconstruction, 2-5, 6, 93, 121,

145, 152, 154, 165, 166, 184

DeLillo, Don, White Noise, 181-2

Derrida, Jacques, 4, 132, 140, 165,

175, 184

Deus ex machina, 40, 95, 155

Diawara, Manthia, 125

Dick, Bruce, 124

Dickens, Charles, 67

Dickinson, Emily, 134, 177

Dickstein, Morris, 157-8

didacticism, 9-10, 11, 166

Dobyns, Stephen, "A Happy

�acancy," 177

Douglas, Lawrence, 60

Douglass, Frederick, 134

D'Souza, Dinesh, 128, 130-1, 137,

139, 158, 182, 184

Dworkin, Andrea, 138, 139

Eaglestone, Robert, 156, 179

Eagleton, Terry, 78, 96

Ebert, Roger, 180

Eco, Umberto, 134

Education Act of 1944, 28

Eisenstadt, Debra, 102

Eldridge, Richard, 41-2

Eliot, T" S", 134

Ellis, Bret Easton, The Rules of

Attraction, 171

Ellis, John M", 4-5

Emerson, Caryl, 146, 186

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 134, 164;

"The Poet," 164

erotic (romantic) love, 15, 79, 80,

177

ethical duty, 16

ethicity, 16

ethnocentrism, 139

Eurocentrism, 111, 123, 130

Ewing, Jon, 181

face, 100, 101, 105, 179

Fallis, Richard, 32, 42, 173

Faulkner, William, As I Lay Dying,

178



Index

Index

Field, Andrew, 58

First Morrill Act of 1862, 144, 151,

185

Fish, Stanley, 140, 158

Fleischacker, Samuel, 107

Fleming, Juliet, 149

Ford, Gerald R", 177, 186

Foucault, Michel, 118, 134

Fox, Robert Elliot, 123

Franklin, Phyllis, 135

Frayn, Michael, The Trick of It,

177

Freadman, Richard, 165

Freud, Sigmund, 134, 138, 175

Freudian psychoanalysis, 56, 81,

175

Friedman, Ellen G", 67

Fruehling, Royal T", 180

Frye, Northrop, 72, 156, 164-5,

176

Fuchs, Cynthia, 180

Fussell, Paul, 173

Gardiner, Anne Barbeau, 187

Gardiner, Michael, 186

Gardner, John, 9-10, 17, 18, 166

Gardner, Philip, 28, 32, 173

Gaskell, Elizabeth, North and South,

92

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr", 132

GI Bill, 144

Gilbert, Sandra M", 25, 124,

127-42, 159-60, 183-5;

Masterpiece Theatre: an Academic

Melodrama, 25, 127-8, 132-42,

159-60, 183-5

Giles, James R", 176

Gindin, James, 173

Gitlin, Todd, 183

Goggans, Thomas H", 180

Gold, Herbert, 173

Goldberg, S" L", 158

goodness, 60-1, 63, 65, 75-6, 158,

159, 164, 166

Goya, Francisco, 145

Graff, Gerald, 3, 139, 141-2,

157-8, 183

Grant, Mary Kathryn, 62, 75

Greenblatt, Stephen, 127

Gubar, Susan, 25, 124, 127-42,

159-60, 183-5; Masterpiece

Theatre: an Academic Melodrama,

25, 127-8, 132-42, 159-60,

183-5

Haley, Alex, 134

Hall, Stuart, 156

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 16-17,

18, 108, 156, 165, 168, 169

Harrington, Mona, 170

Hartman, Geoffrey, 60

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Fanshawe,

170; The House of the Seven

Gables, 177

Hennard, Martine, 53, 175

Heteroglossia, 145-6, 148, 186

Hill, Anita, 116

Hirsch, E" D", Jr", 128, 130, 134, 183

Hitchcock, Alfred, 134

Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, 166

Hollinger, David A", 111

Holmes, Frederick M", 87

Homer, 128

HooDooism, 112-13, 114-15

Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 73

Hume, Kathryn, 113

infnity, 101

intellectual territorialism, 24

Jacobs, Eric, 172

Jacobson, Daniel, 155

James, Henry, 14

James, P" D", An Unsuitable Job for

a Woman, 177

Jameson, Fredric, 138

Jay, Gregory, 136, 142

Johnson, Greg, 69

Johnson, Lisa, 169

Johnson, Samuel, 10

Johnston, Susan, 186

Jones, D" J" H", 177

Jordan, W" K", 144

Joyce, James, Ulysses, 178

Jungian criticism, 81

Kant, Immanuel, 15

Kato, Tsunehiko, 123, 124, 182



204

Keats, John, "The Eve of St"

Agnes," 88

Kennedy, George A", 135

Kenyon, J" P", 173

Kern, Stephen, 177

Kernan, Alvin, 183

Kimball, Roger, 25, 128, 130, 137,

158

Kinnell, Galway, "The

Deconstruction of Emily

Dickinson," 177

Knapp, Steven, 5, 18, 168

Kramer, John E", Jr", 169

Krist, Gary, 149

Kristeva, Julia, 80, 132, 140, 175

K�nstlerroman, 171

Lacan, Jacques, 118

Lacanian psychoanalysis, 8

L'Amour, Louis, 134

Larkin, Philip, 28, 29, 171

Lauter, Paul, 136

Leavis, F" R", 156, 164

Lee, Hermione, 173

Lefkowitz, Mary, 182-3

Le Guin, Ursula, 134

Lentricchia, Frank, 132, 165

Leonardi, Susan J", 169-70

Levinas, Emmanuel, 100-1, 105, 179

Levine, Lawrence W", 183

Lobuts, John, Jr", 185

Lodge, David, 25, 31, 38, 77-97,

98, 114, 159, 173, 177-9; The

British Museum Is Falling Down,

178; Changing Places: a Tale of

Two Campuses, 25, 78, 81-6, 114,

178; A David Lodge Trilogy, 177;

Nice Work, 25, 78, 92-6, 114;

Small World: an Academic

Romance, 1, 25, 78, 86-92, 114,

178

logocentrism, 4

London, Jack, 181

Lurie, Allison, 186

Lyons, John, 20-1, 22, 169, 170, 171

Lyotard, JeanFran�ois, 3

Mackie, J" L", 160

macroturn, 17

205

Macy, William H", 102

Maddox, Lucy, 86

Malamud, Bernard, A New Life,

159

Mamet, David, 25, 98-108, 159,

177, 179-80; Oleanna, 25, 98-9,

101-8, 159, 177, 179-80

Mann, Patricia S", 125

Martin, Jane Rowland, 111

Martin, Reginald, 113

Marx, Karl, 138, 175

Marxism, 2, 8, 81, 90, 152

Massey, Irving, 187

McDermott, John, 23, 28, 30, 33,

34, 37, 173

McGinn, Colin, 156

McLaughlin, Thomas, 165

McLuhan, Marshall, 70

Meckier, Jerome, 38, 41

Menand, Louis, 172, 174

Menippean satire, 170-1

Mews, Siegfried, 86, 91

Meyer, Priscilla, 54

Michaels, Walter Benn, 5, 18,

168

Miller, J" Hillis, 13-14, 17, 18, 158,

162, 168, 169, 187

Miller, Seumas, 165

Miller, Susan, Cross Country, 177

Milton, John, 128, 135

Mitchell, Lee Clark, 181

Modern Language Association

(MLA), 71, 87, 88, 131, 135,

176, 177

Mohrman, Kathryn, 138

Monbrun, Estelle, Meurtre chez

Tante Leonie, 177-8

Moore, Lorrie, 145, 148

Morace, Robert A", 89

moral agency, 161

moral relativism, 7, 112, 158

Morgan, Kathryn Pauly, 79

Morrill, Justin Smith, 144

Morrison, Blake, 86

Morrison, Toni, 109

Morson, Gary Saul, 146, 186

Moseley, Merritt, 38, 178-9

Murdoch, Iris, 60-1, 63, 76, 77

Murtadha, Khaula, 183



Index

Index

Nabokov, � era, 173-4

Nabokov, �ladimir, 24, 43-59,

159, 173-5; Lolita, 43; Nikolai

Gogol, 44; Pale Fire, 24, 43, 44,

45, 46, 52-8, 159, 174-5; Pnin,

24, 43, 44, 45, 46-52, 56, 58-9,

159, 174; Speak, Memory: an

Autobiography Revisited, 175;

Strong Opinions, 43, 48, 173

Nagel, Thomas, 162-3

Nakadate, Neil, 144, 147, 155, 186

Nassar, Joseph, 56

National Endowment for the

Humanities (NEH), 128, 134

negation, 179

Newton, Adam �achary, 168

Nicol, Charles, 52

Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of

Tragedy, 63

Nixon, Richard M", 186

nonaesthetic (efferent) reading, 8,

166

Norris, Christopher, 5, 6, 166

Novak, Michael, 111

Noyes, George R", 43

Nussbaum, Martha C", 7, 14-16,

17, 18, 77, 80, 156, 157, 158,

166, 167, 169, 178

Oates, Joyce Carol, 24, 60-76, 159,

175-7; Crossing the Border, 176;

The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive

Comedies, 24, 60-76, 159, 175-7;

Marya: a Life, 176; Unholy Loves,

176

Obligation, 16, 99, 169

O'Brien, John, 113

Ollila, MaijaRiitta, 79

Ommundsen, Wenche, 88

Orwell, George, 131

Osborne, John, Look Back in

Anger, 29

Ought, 16, 169

Outlaw, Lucius T", 125

Oxbridge, 2, 20

Packman, David, 55

Paglia, Camille, 137, 138, 139

Parker, David, 2, 156, 164, 169

Parr, Susan Resneck, 160

Pasteur, Louis, 47

Pater, Walter, The Renaissance, 164

pathological love, 15

Pecora, �incent P", 162

Pejorative Poetics, 1, 22, 30, 45,

63, 76, 98, 101, 107, 110, 128,

147, 158

Phillips, Robert, 175

Pickering, Samuel F", Jr", 176

Pinsker, Sanford, 185

Plato, 128

Polhemus, Robert M", 79

political correctness, 98, 138

Polking, Kirk, 173

Polyphony, 186

Poshlost, 44-5, 46, 49, 52, 54, 56,

58, 158, 159, 174

postmodern humanism, 17-18

practical love, 15

Proctor, Mortimer R", 20-1, 169,

171

professionalism, 140

Professorroman, 26, 80, 171

Proust, Marcel, 14

Psuchago-gia, 167

Purpel, David E", 183-4

Pushkin, Alexander, Eugene Onegin:

a Novel in Verse, 174

Rabelais, Fran�ois, 146

Rabinowitz, Peter J", 5-6

Rampton, David, 175

Reagan, Ronald W", 127

redbrick universities, 22, 25, 28,

30, 81, 159, 172

Reed, Ishmael, 25, 109-26, 130,

159, 180-3; Japanese by Spring,

25, 110, 115-26, 130, 159, 180-3

Reierstad, Keith, 174

Rendezvous, 79, 89

Robbins, Jill, 100

Rorty, Richard, 135-6, 165

Rosen, Marion, Death by

Education, 171

Rosenblatt, Louise M", 8-9, 166

Rosovsky, Henry, 140

Rossen, Janice, 22-3, 40, 81, 170,

171



206

Index

Salwak, Dale, 32

Schine, Cathleen, 147

Scholes, Robert E", 134-5, 161

Searle, John, 143

Second Morrill Act of 1890, 144,

185

Severin, Hermann, 67, 176

Shakespeare, William, 47, 53,

55-6, 66, 115, 128, 135, 136,

184; Hamlet, 66, 67, 91; Othello,

115; Timon of Athens, 55, 175

Sheppard, Richard, 169

Siebers, Tobin, 5, 6-7, 8, 12, 17,

168

Siegel, Ben, 171

Silver, Mitchell, 120

Singer, Irving, 78-9, 177

Smiley, Jane, 26, 143-55, 160, 181,

182, 185-6; Moo, 26, 143-5,

147-55, 160, 181, 182, 185-6

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 12-13,

165

Smith, Page, 184

Smith, Ralph A", 183, 184

Soble, Alan, 79

Solomon, Robert C", 80

Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 161

Steel, Danielle, 134

Steele, Shelby, 117

Steiner, G", 70

Swift, Jonathan, 72

Swiftian Satire, 159

Sykes, Charles J", 128, 130, 137

Tanner, Tony, 83

Theroux, Alexander, Darconville's

Cat, 178

Tirrell, Lynne, 160-1

Tocqueville, Alec de, 63, 64;

Democracy in America, 63

Torgovnick, Marianna, 57, 175

Trachtenberg, Stanley, 62, 64, 67,

75, 176

Trachtenberg, Stephen Joel, 185

Trollope, Anthony, 68

Truscot, Bruce, 172

United Nations Educational,

Scientifc, and Cultural

Organization (UNESCO), 90, 91, 92

Updike, John, Memories of the Ford

Administration, 177

�anderbilt, Kermit, 138

�an Eyck, Jan, 145

�endler, Helen, 132

Wain, John, Hurry on Down, 29

Waldron, Jeremy, 112, 181

Walker, Alice, 136, 185

Walker, Craig Stewart, 180

Walker, Margaret Urban, 187

Waller, G" F", 75

Washington, Booker T", Up from

Slavery, 63

Waugh, Evelyn, 31

Weisberg, Richard H", 169

Williams, Bernard, 10-11, 14, 169

Wilshire, Bruce W", 184

Wilson, Edmund, 174

Wilson, John K", 183, 184-5

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 70

Wolcott, James, 173

Wong, David B", 112

Wood, Michael, 51

Woolf, �irginia, 72

Worthington, Kim L", 156

Wright, Austin M", 178

Wright, Terence R", 166

Wurzel, Jaime S", 111

Yarbrough, Stephen R", 17-18,

165, 169

�apf, Harold, 181



Rushton, J" Philippe, 182

Russo, Richard, Straight Man, 19

207

Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community

Satire

Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (Asia's Transformations)

Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America

Ethics in Public And Community Health (Professional Ethics)

Ethics and Community in the Health Care Professions (Professional Ethics)

Reclaiming community in contemporary African-American fiction

Ethics in Community-Based Elder Care

Character and Satire in Post War Fiction (Continuum Literary)

The Literature of Satire

Abche Abche-Political Satire

The Anatomy of Satire

Christopher Smart and Satire

Satire gegen Hitler

Early Irish Satire

Satire and Romanticism

Medical Analogy in Latin Satire

Postwar Japan as History

Self and community in the fiction of Elizabeth Spencer

Postwar Dinosaur Blues

It's Academic

Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community

Medical Analogy in Latin Satire

It's Academic

It's Academic

It's Academic

It's Academic

Academic Viewpoint

It's Academic

Academic Writing

Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community

Satire

Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (Asia's Transformations)

Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America

Ethics in Public And Community Health (Professional Ethics)

Ethics and Community in the Health Care Professions (Professional Ethics)

Reclaiming community in contemporary African-American fiction

Ethics in Community-Based Elder Care

Character and Satire in Post War Fiction (Continuum Literary)

The Literature of Satire

Abche Abche-Political Satire

The Anatomy of Satire

Christopher Smart and Satire

Satire gegen Hitler

Early Irish Satire

Satire and Romanticism

Medical Analogy in Latin Satire

Postwar Japan as History

Self and community in the fiction of Elizabeth Spencer

Postwar Dinosaur Blues

It's Academic

Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community

Medical Analogy in Latin Satire

It's Academic

It's Academic

It's Academic

It's Academic

Academic Viewpoint

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Academic Writing

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