From the issue dated February 16, 2001
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Academic Predators, Poseurs, and Heroes in Three New Academic NovelsBy ELAINE SHOWALTERWhen literature professors, especially English professors, write novels, they tend to write about what they know best: other people's books. Even in some of the most celebrated and familiar academic satires, rewriting literary conventions is as important as mocking campus attitudes. In Small World, for example, David Lodge used the structure of the romantic quest as the basis for his comic view of jet-setting conference junketeers,
There's plenty of criticism and celebration, as well as story and message, in three new books by Frank Lentricchia, Joanne Dobson, and James Hynes. Lentricchia is a chaired professor of literature at Duke University and the author of numerous highly regarded books on literary theory, Robert Frost, and Don DeLillo. He's sometimes been described as "the Dirty Harry of literary criticism" (because of the muscle T-shirt he wore in a book-jacket portrait and his macho style of writing), and he has called himself "a somewhat uneasy Italian-American aesthete." But, in 1996, Lentricchia publicly renounced literary theory and its kingdoms in an essay, "Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic." There, he declared the existence of his secret self -- "me-the-reader" -- and proclaimed his preference for teaching undergraduates and his willingness to go "happily underground in order to talk to people, who, like me, need to read great literature just as much as they need to eat." Since his manifesto, Lentricchia has published a memoir, The Edge of Night, and three novels. In Lucchesi and the Whale, his protagonist, Thomas Lucchesi, an unmarried professor and writer, is a "mad Ahab of reading," obsessed, in particular, with the "secret meaning of Moby-Dick." In addition to Melville, Lentricchia acknowledges the influence of a Salvador Dali essay, "The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus," Bertrand Russell's letters, DeLillo's White Noise, Franco Moretti's Modern Epic, Charles Feidelson's annotated edition of Moby-Dick, and Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein. That's a lot of literary influences for a 115-page book, and the references to contemporary criticism also fly thick and fast. Like Jack Gladney in DeLillo's masterpiece White Noise, Lucchesi is obsessed by death and its relation to writing; citing DeLillo, he links plot lines to death. But when his own parents are dying, he takes off on a South Seas cruise to retrace Melville's three-year adventure at sea and to try to comprehend the vastness of Melville's unique American classic. "Did Melville have a plan?" Lucchesi asks about Moby-Dick. "The book as a whole has a one-of-a-kind, made-up quality, like a homemade recipe. It's just a weird invention (70 years before Ulysses and The Waste Land). Story, anti-story; rhythm, underrhythm. The book is a whole, alright, but a discontinuous whole, whose major sections hold each other close by the forces of their mutual repulsion." Perhaps, Lucchesi speculates, a book without a plot can be a book of life. Lucchesi and the Whale follows a similar model of disjunction, intermingling the hero's bizarre dreams, including one of standing in for Pavarotti at La Scala; his tender and comic memories of an Italian-American childhood and adolescence; his scatological fantasies of encounters with Mafia dons; and his mystical chants and obscene rants in his seminar on classic American literature at Central College, which have prompted complaints from "campus feminists, gays, and bisexuals." Lentricchia's meditations on Melville's art, and his parodies of an academic correspondence, which takes place in the novel in something called the Wittgenstein Society Quarterly, are probably not for Oprah's Book Club, but academic readers will be impressed and moved by his passionate conviction that language transcends its human bearers, and that, as Lucchesi concludes, "the actual death of a man is incidental to his true life in culture and history." Like Frank Lentricchia, Joanne Dobson, an associate professor of English at Fordham University, is an Americanist who also writes novels -- in her case, a series of mysteries. But Dobson's academic interests are as different from Lentricchia's as her sexy, nurturant, unassuming, feminist protagonist, Karen Pelletier, is from the lonely, belligerent Thomas Lucchesi. Dobson is the author of a book on Emily Dickinson, and a specialist on 19th-century American women writers. Her sleuth, Pelletier, comes from a working-class family in Lowell, Mass., and had to give up a scholarship to Smith when she became pregnant in high school. Divorced from her abusive husband, disowned by her family, Pelletier fought her way back to a Ph.D. with help from the Salvation Army, waitressing, night classes, and scholarships. Now she is an assistant professor at classy Enfield College in western Massachusetts, recovering from an unhappy love affair with a New York police detective, and working on a book on gender and class in the American classics. In each book in the series, Pelletier encounters a lost manuscript by some American woman writer who has either been ignored or reviled and whose anti-canonical work she proceeds to defend against those traditionalists who would stereotype, diminish, or destroy it. In The Northbury Papers (1998), for example, she champions the so-called sentimental novelist Serena Northbury (partly based on the 19th-century writer Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth), whose style is very much the opposite of Melville's. Pelletier defends Northbury's work, saying, "She's the only novelist I know from that era who writes about the kind of courage it takes to get through life day by day. No white whales. No uncharted forests. No scarlet letters. No great heroics at all. Just food and drink and perseverance. And ordinary kindness. And ordinary love." There's not much kindness and love in the English department at Enfield, which has an extraordinarily high homicide rate, the most sexually predatory and unprincipled male faculty members in the world, an unusual number of single parents, abandoned children, and secret affairs, and a large percentage of rich, obnoxious student majors. The dramatis personae of university departments in fiction has changed a lot since Lucky Jim and The Groves of Academe, and the one Dobson imagines is fairly standard today. It includes a flamboyant, publicity-seeking sexuality specialist, Sally Chenille, whose hair changes color weekly, and faculty members in queer studies, postmodernism, postcolonialism, post-Shakespeare studies, neo-Shakespeare studies, and "animality." "The usual crew," observes Pelletier, seemingly without irony. Enfield also has its pretentious Palaver Chair in Literature, its boring meetings on revising the curriculum, and its standard range of faculty sinners and sins. But what makes this series so fascinating and entertaining for the academic reader is Dobson's ability to concoct the lost imaginary texts; as a writer, she is more like A.S. Byatt in Possession, weaving past literary genres into modern whodunits, than the academic mystery writer Carolyn Heilbrun in her series featuring the detective Amanda Cross. Dobson doesn't just describe, but invents, Northbury's lost interracial romance, Child of the North Star: "Armand circled Emmy with his strong arm, as they looked from the ship's deck back at the receding land of both of their births. She took one final glance at that receding green where the child of her heart slept the long, deep sleep, then turned to her protector, blue eyes gazing deeply into brown." In the 1999 The Raven and the Nightingale, Dobson gives us the journals and poems of Emmeline Foster (based on Fanny Osgood and others). Foster was rumored to have drowned herself after an unhappy affair with Poe, and her poems include "The Bird of the Dream," said to be an influence on "The Raven." This novel also features a wonderful Poe-esque nightmare in which Pelletier bricks up the director of women's studies behind a wall of patriarchal texts, from Edmund Spenser to Ernest Hemingway. Indeed, books are frequently used as weapons in Dobson's books; in Quieter than Sleep (1997), Pelletier brains one of her antagonists with a heavy red volume of Jane Eyre. In Dobson's most recent book, Cold and Pure and Very Dead, the lost woman writer is Mildred Deakin, author of the 1950's bestseller Oblivion Falls (think Grace Metalious and Peyton Place), and Dobson turns her hand to producing a scandalous feminist blockbuster, with scenes of abduction and abortion: "Blood was everywhere, all over Sara, all over Cookie, all over the gray plush of the Packard's wide backseat. When the doctor had hustled Sara out his side door and into the car he'd thrust a wad of towels in with her and told Cookie what to do with them. Then he slammed the car door and took the odor of gin away with him." While Lentricchia needs "great literature" to sustain and recharge him, Dobson raises questions about the significance of "greatness" and the accidents of birth, class, and sexuality that keep women's writing marginal. Lucchesi champions the most difficult and prestigious male writers and thinkers, the great white whales of literature and philosophy. But Pelletier writes about the dangers faced by smaller fish in the literary sea, defending their value and vision. James Hynes, now a full-time writer, is also a brilliant rewriter and inventor of literary texts, and an admirer of the supernatural and occult as well as the gothic. In his hilarious, hard-hitting The Lecturer's Tale, two English professors fling piles of books "that had tumbled from the canon or never quite made it" -- Sir Walter Scott, Edmund Spenser, Thornton Wilder, Edna Ferber, James Hogg -- from the window of the Thornfield Library (one of many references to Jane Eyre and its hellish conflagrations). Hynes studied philosophy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and got an M.A. at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; he has taught writing at Michigan and at the University of Texas at Austin, where he now lives. As the title suggests, his novel is about the pilgrimage of a lowly lecturer, Nelson Humboldt, through the University of the Midwest in Hamilton Groves, Minn. Midwest was also the setting for Hynes's wickedly funny Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Terror and Tenure (1997), and some of the same characters appear in both books. Indeed, Hynes had originally intended The Lecturer's Tale to be one of the novellas he created for Publish and Perish, but then realized that he had an epic story. While the earlier stories ingeniously revisited such sources as the ghost tales of M.R. James and the anthropological debate about the death of Captain Cook, The Lecturer's Tale is a Norton Anthology of a novel, a course in a book, covering all the literary material of an introductory survey in English literature. In particular, though, Hynes goes for the epic and the Satanic: The university coffee shop is called Pandemonium, and Milton's Hell is not far from his image of the modern university department of literature. Humboldt, the hero, is an academic outsider like Lucchesi and Pelletier. Humboldt's father was an embittered, A.B.D. high-school teacher who raised him on bedtime stories from the literary canon ("Beowulf in the bassinet, Piers Plowman in the crib") so that he has "an unusually thorough memory" of the classics. His college mentor lent him books by Trilling and taught him prosody, so that by the time he got to graduate school, among multiculturalists and theorists, his first lesson "was to keep his mouth shut." Eventually, Nelson tried to conform; he had wanted to write his dissertation on "Guilt and Predestination in the Works of James Hogg, 1770-1835" (an old-fashioned approach to an unfashionable Scottish novelist), but had been persuaded by the trendy to write on Conrad and postcolonialism instead. Having received the Ph.D. and landed a job at Midwest, Nelson desperately tries to get with the theoretical program, grinding out "Hogg article after Hogg article, ending up with a book-length manuscript of unpublished and mutually exclusive chapters, each of which proved with equal conviction that James Hogg was a virgin and a libertine; a misogynist and an early feminist; hegemonic and transgressive; imperialist and postcolonial; patriarchal and matriarchal; straight, bisexual, and queer." Finally, Humboldt writes "The Transgendered Calvinist: James Hogg in Butlerian Perspective," and gives up in despair. Unpublished, he is demoted to the level of adjunct lecturer, then dismissed from even that job and its meager security. On one level, The Lecturer's Tale is the return of what has been repressed in academe; it is the revenge of reading and teaching against theory, particularly Judith Butler's theories of gender performativity. But Hynes is also half in love with the theory he satirizes, and he shows on every page how well he knows Butler, Foucault, and Lacan, as well as the literary canon. The novel begins with an epigraph from "The Pardoner's Tale" ("O cursed synne of alle cursednesse!") and ends with a close parody of Chaucer's "Retraction," or afterword, to The Canterbury Tales. (Hynes's version reads: "Wherefore I beseech you meekly, for the Mercy of God, that you pray for me and forgive me my sins and especially my many, many quotations from better books and more pious writers." Chaucer actually wrote, "Foryive me my giltes, and namely of my translacions and enditinges of worldly vanities, the which I revoke in my retractions.") The English department's structure is taken from The Tempest and Paradise Lost; the faculty come out of the Gothic novel, Bloomsbury legend, and gender theory; chapters feature titles like "Nelson in Nighttown," "Discipline and Punish," and "The Story of O"; sly allusions to everyone from Catharine MacKinnon to Borges abound. From the first sentence, as the library clock strikes 13 (as in Brave New World), to the last sentence, which echoes David Copperfield, Hynes has managed to get in apt, surprising, and clever references to a huge range of canonical writers, critics, and texts. On a second level, the novel is about Nelson's actual revenge against the department that dismissed him, threatened to throw him out of university housing, and undermined his ability to support his wife and children. In a bicycle accident near campus, Nelson's right index finger is severed, and, when it is sewn back on in the university hospital, proves to have magical powers that enable him to make those he touches do his bidding. He uses this supernatural power to win back his job, and also to attempt to get tenure for his one departmental ally and friend, Vita Deonne, a wan gender theorist who works on the lesbian phallus in literature. Vita, whose name not only alludes to Virginia Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West, the inspiration for Orlando, but also allows Hynes to make some clever puns throughout, is a person whose work on performative gender theory is also truly the story of her life and sexual identity, as Nelson is shocked to understand. Further, Nelson wants to overthrow the unjust structure of his department, in which the rich and powerful have offices and secretaries at the top of the tower, and the composition program is housed in the shabby basement and made up of pale women whom Nelson imagines as "the Morlocks of the Eloi world" and the mythic denizens of Hades, ruled over by the program director Proserpina. To Nelson, the place feels like a sweatshop: "In each cubicle a thin woman in thrift shop couture sat earnestly tutoring some groggy student ... and each woman looked up at Nelson as he passed with the hollow-eyed, pitiless gaze of the damned. ... Most of the comp teachers were divorced moms and single women with cats who taught eight classes a year and earned a thousand dollars per class. ... They were the steerage of the English department, the first to drown if the budget sprang a leak." On the eighth floor is the office of the department chairman, Anthony Pescecane, an Italian-American native of Hoboken who wrote a celebrated dissertation on Milton called "To Reign in Hell" and a book called Screw Free Speech. The power-mad Pescecane also has been quoted as saying "that the finest thing in life is to take an academic department and bend it to one's will." (M.L.A. members may see hints here of Stanley Fish, but in The New York Times Book Review, a nonacademic critic described Pescecane, to my delight, as "the evil spawn of Elaine Showalter and Tony Soprano.") Playing Caliban to Pescecane's Prospero is the stumpy administrative assistant Lionel Grossmaul, a once-brilliant theorist reduced by writer's block to "following his grad school friend from triumph to triumph in a series of dead-end administrative jobs." The undergraduate chair, Victoria Victorinx, with her "bloodless manner," is a lesbian vampire who writes about LeFanus Carmilla and is famous for her theory of clitoral hegemony. Among the full professors who round out the cast: the traditional, Cleanth Brooks clone Morton Weissman (i.e., dead white man); the predatory Miranda DeLaTour; the sex theorist Penelope O., holder of the Hugh M. Hefner Chair in Sexuality Studies, who says "my sexual preference is undergraduate"; the professionally Irish poet Timothy Coogan, self-named "The Coogan"; and the anarchic Marko Kraljevic and his lover, Lorraine Alsace. One of those people is sending the others poison-pen letters, made up of a collage of quotations from Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Wilde, and Charlotte BrontĪ. (The poison-pen letter is a standard plot device for novels about departments of literature: see also the 1999 Le Problème avec Jane, by the Yale French professor Catherine Cusset.) Moreover, the department is conducting a search for a new appointment, and Nelson hijacks the three finalists -- David Branwell, in celebrity studies, who delivers a virtuoso lecture on Elvis; Lester Antilles, who holds the Cecil Rhodes Chair in Postcolonial Studies at Columbia and has taken a permanent vow of non-publication as a gesture against the empire; and Jennifer Manley, who is the candidate in black and queer studies. As Nelson, armed with his magical finger, struggles against all these figures and forces, the novel becomes increasingly literary, apocalyptic, and carnivalesque, an explosion of masques, infernos, labyrinths, shape-shifters, ghosts, spirits, and conspirators. Nelson even thinks of sending The Chronicle of Higher Education a short, funny article about literary criticism as "wrestling with the dead." Eventually, he has to face his own complicity in the gender politics of the university, and to realize that he himself is the Dead White Male haunting the library, the mad adjunct in the Poole Annex. In a utopian happy ending, he plans a new department on the ruins of the old one. It will be "a department that rises above petty politics, that melds the best of both worlds," traditional scholarship and cutting-edge theory, teaching and research. Even Chairman Pescecane renounces literary theory in a "high-profile article in The New York Times Magazine," and commits himself "for the rest of his life to teaching undergraduates, and only undergraduates, to love the same great, canonical works of literature that had rescued him from the docklands of New Jersey." Sound familiar? So we come back full circle to Frank Lentricchia. Some reviewers have seen The Lecturer's Tale as nasty and grim, but I disagree. Indeed, while all three authors discussed here mock the current state of literary study and cast professors of literature as predators and poseurs, all three also share an idealistic view of what the university might be, as well as a mutual passion for poetry and fiction. Hynes, even more than Lentricchia and Dobson, writes so brilliantly, inventively, and lovingly about the sins of academe that the reader ends up, like Milton's Satan, even more eager to serve in Hell. The Hynes book closes with Nelson preparing to teach his class and wondering if reading novels can make any difference at all in people's lives. "Would The Great Gatsby raise their pay? Would Wuthering Heights lighten the burden of a dead-end job?" Never to know, he decides, is both the hard truth of teaching literature -- and its glory. That's a message that academics as authors seem to share. Elaine Showalter is a professor of English at Princeton University. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B11
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education