From the issue dated November 7, 2003
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Rudeness Loves Company
Growing up in an academic family, one of whose members hailed from the South, entailed two views of politeness: (1) Display it; and (2) to hell with that. I blossomed into a small, rude person, seeking out tables on which to rest elbows, interrupting my elders, playing with my food, staring vacantly at horizons when something purportedly interesting was being recounted, and writing thank-you notes for birthday checks received, sullenly ("That's it?"), only under the threat of physical pain. I hated saying "Thank you" because it was polite. I was suspicious of gratitude, and when I read As I Lay Dying, I completely understood the hemming and hawing over accepting help -- I didn't want to be beholden to no man. Screw beholden. Predictably, I soon discovered swearing, and life took an upswing. I swore like a sailor, at family, pets, shrubbery, and furniture. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout discovers obscenity one fine day and at the dinner table asks her father to pass the damn ham. That was me, except I wasn't cute. But I lived in Texas, and one makes do. By the time I became a graduate student, I had left Texas and discovered drinking and smoking, which calmed me down considerably. I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, where fun goes to die, where masochists and nerds and the unbelievably smart and the unbelievably ugly frolic free in the frozen glare of a clay-colored sun. All in all, I felt quite at home. In the course of pursuing my Ph.D., though, a small new fact began to wriggle itself free in my brain -- the fact that I was surrounded by people not only smarter, but ruder than I. There are, of course, varieties of rudeness, as any connoisseur can tell you. Impersonal, environmental, global, and the in-your-face, dead-eyed stare of one-on-one. Dead-eyed stares were perhaps the genre for which the university's environs were best known. People walked down the main drag, 57th Street, with eyes pointed straight ahead, or -- depending on the degree of stoop cultivated (or occurring naturally) -- at 10 to 30 degrees south of the horizon. It was a given that you would not acknowledge anyone. Ever. Hyde Park sidewalks were patrolled by Waste Land shades: I had not thought that death had undone so many, and so many ill dressed. You walked at a swift pace, looking straight ahead, maneuvering around fellow pedestrians, fallen children, or muggings-in-progress with benumbed exactitude. The only person I ever saw check the time on a wristwatch was a blind man. Should you pass any professors, you understood that they would ignore you, so you beat them to the punch and ignored them first. However, all rules present exceptions: I recall seeing a professor in my department coming toward me, his noting that fact (one learned to read the RoboCop faceplate for telltale flickers, or employ a tricky strand of optics and physics to gauge the point at which one entered visual range) and crossing the street to avoid passing me. Overwhelmed, I took this event as a sign of burgeoning intimacy. By comparison, living in the Pacific Northwest, where I moved after graduate school, reminded me of a scene from The Last Seduction (alas, only one scene), in which the Linda Fiorentino character, recently arrived in a small town, gets a newspaper from a stand, then hunkers over it to read it as pedestrians pass her. Good morning, one says. She doesn't look up. Then another: Fine day. She looks up, then down again. But they keep coming: Good morning. Good morning. Hello. That this is to be an unflagging constant slowly registers, and, unable to concentrate, she flees to her parked car to read. She's a tough bitch, but she has her limits. Do I know you? And if so, why are you looking at me? Academics are Travis Bickles, sans the charisma. Artists have long been understood as rude. Those sloppy poets, eating salad with their hands (The Bell Jar); the cursory architects (Ayn Rand); the drunken fiction writers (everyone); the maniacal sculptors, the lecherous painters, the scratching photographers. There are, of course, exceptions: haiku writers, English novelists, Jeffrey Eugenides. Academics, though, have artists beat. Academics in the humanities are the worst. That is not a coincidence. We frequently make nothing, often write badly, and are museless to boot. Further, we are supplied with an endless stream of the fallible, many of whom believe that we warrant respect. That can trigger a reverse biofeedback loop of stimulus and punishment. The student is polite, which engenders either a stifled sense of confusion, suspicion, shamefaced pride, or impotent rage, and accordingly must be treated with the sole weapon at one's disposal, disdain. Stripped even of sadism's zest, this watery form of social intercourse foams anew with each semester's onset. On the other hand, that form of rudeness is more than offset by the way in which academics treat one another. As a new professor, I swiftly learned that meetings do not start on time because someone is always late. Quiet competitions are held: who will be late, later, latest. Someone apparently read somewhere that productive academics are very busy and translated this to mean that productive academics are often late; with the bad logic that kept us out of math and science in the first place, we have concluded that productive academics who are late are important. Ergo: The later you are to a meeting, the more important you must be. If you do not show up at all, you must have won something. It is an unspoken truism that phone calls and e-mail messages are rarely acknowledged, or else returned at intervals so glacial that the original reason for contact has since ivied over (to mix climatic metaphors -- but winter has since turned to spring) into mootness. Everyone has a favorite story of rudeness; here is mine. I have what can only imperfectly be called an acquaintance who works at my institution. After years of looking through my greetings like an acoustic windowpane, there was a sudden and palpable shift. I can only surmise that because of a glancing blow received earlier that morning a neuron had collapsed onto its downstairs neighbor, resulting in a wanton synaptical firing of the biochemical equivalent of "Colleague there." The pathway having been laid, I was now to be greeted, haltingly, after my admittedly unimaginative hellos. And yet that greeting: a sound that I have heard only once before, in the small mouth of a deaf and aged Siamese cat. Issuing from a biped, the strange, truncated keening was even more uncanny, vaguely resembling the word "hello," followed by some deflated pronunciation of a sound akin to my name. My name is, I admit, three syllables, and the effort of rendering it clearly exhausting; following the five-syllable marathon, his head drops onto his chin, and paralysis ensues. I am left with no other choice but to crawl away, which I am happy to do. This regular performance was clearly designed to solicit either pity and wonderment (What could possibly have happened to make such pain so palpable? I would scan the headlines later), or queasy speculation regarding the emergence of a particularly virulent, premature Alzheimer's, for the person is not yet 40. I ruled out the obvious and went for the patent: my distasteful character. This had the virtue of narcissism and accordingly left me untroubled. The problem was that I did not remember having slighted the speaker. But then, at last, it came to me: I was wrongly endowing the phatic with content. It wasn't me (or only slightly; I had started it); this was simply innocuous rudeness -- not meant to kill, or even cripple, just existing, like art, for its own sake. This is all simply business as phyllophagously usual in the verdant fields of academe. My colleague and I have seen each other again this fall and repeated our sad dance. I say hello, he resignedly advertises the fact that my greeting pains him deeply and moves on to presumably fresher hells. Go in peace, my dear. I thus find myself in the unusual position of advocating that which does not come naturally, for I am genetically terse, tense, and quick to find fault. I laugh when I shouldn't and am forced to photocopy pages from library books for course readers because the margins of my own books are so littered with obscenities that I would be sued, rightly, for sexual harassment were they to find their way into students' hands. I am a model of little more than how to get a discount at Barneys. Actual politeness -- promptness, returned e-mail messages, tidy and scrutable greetings -- has, however, acquired an exotic charm. If only for contrarian reasons, it has pleased me to discover that nothing baffles my kindred more than noting that they are there, that they exist -- quite possibly in sentient form. It couldn't be less important, says a David Mamet character. To which the other replies, What could be better? Thank you for your time. Jessica Burstein is an assistant professor of English at the University of Washington at Seattle. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 11, Page B5 |
Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education