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Literary Review
Insider's tale
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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Introducing a column which will basically be footnotes in booklore: looking at under-rated pulp fiction, under-read books and writers, book collectors and book collecting, bookshops — first-hand and used, rare and second-hand bookshops — and celebrating and lamenting the fate of reading in an electronic age. This month's column looks at a rare genre: the Academic novel.
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NOT just a literary thriller but a literary theory thriller. The Lecturer's Tale is Stephen King meets Camille Paglia via Woody Allen: a suspenseful, brilliant, provocative and blackly comic novel of intellectual shenanigans in one of America's finest universities. The way writers go skewering academia, you'd think there was something undeniably dubious and funny about academic life. And no one has had more fun skewering academia or has done it with more inventiveness than James Hynes.
Take the title of his first novel: Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror (!) — there's enough satirical edge and accuracy here to have you laughing knowingly even before you've opened the book. The book is three horrific, hilarious novellas about university life where "Derrida rules and love is a complicated ideological position." In his latest, The Lecturer's Tale, he's zeroed in on a subject that's worthy of spoof: the culture wars currently raging on American campuses (and perhaps on a few Indian campuses as well?). Literary theory, post-modernism, gender studies, political correctness, queer theory, post- colonial interventions and radical scholars vs. Literature, Dead White Male Authors, Passed-Over White Professors, Lecturers who get a little too friendly with their students and Creative Writers — that is, prize-winning, alcoholic novelists and poets.
The hero of the book, Nelson Humboldt, is trapped between the ideological faction-fighting of the English Department. Because he's a lowly adjunct professor who can't even dream of a full professorship let alone tenure, he discovers that neither side will have him. Worse, as a fair minded, weak liberal caught between the Canon conservatives and the literary theory radicals, he's compelled to see both sides of the argument.
Growing up, Nelson falls in love with classics and sets off to college to major in Lit. Once there, Nelson is lost: he can't understand the hostility reserved for the Canon. "An innocent and self-evident remark he had made in class about Conrad's jumbled chronologies raised snorts of derision form his classmates. A severe young woman from the Indian subcontinent addressed Nelson without looking at him, telling him painfully, in a posh imperial accent that Conrad's racism was the starting point for any discussion of his work. `Read Edward Said,' she added, in a curt postcolonial sotto voce." Now a less nave English lecturer, he still can't understand his colleagues "who had begun to surf the tide of post-modernism, happily so, since it allowed them to ditch their mediocre dissertations on Milton and Pound and do cutting edge work on Ally McBeal, the X-Men, Stark Trek: The New Generation and the complete works of David. E. Kelly."
But all this changes when his index finger, injured in a freak accident, suddenly gives him the power to make others do what he wants them to do — all he has to do is touch them with that finger. The "Midas/Prospero of Academia" now has the power to influence the outcome of the battle being waged in the English department. He'd also like to do some good in the bargain... like getting on the tenure-track.
Not content with writing a novel of academic manners to rival David Lodge's Thinks and Jane Smiley's Moo, Hynes turns this into a gothic horror novel about a Faustian pact with the Devil. The cast of characters on both factions are impeccably drawn and lampooned. The novel's wicked tone and knowingness is best conveyed by looking at its cast of characters.
The chairperson of the department, Anthony Pescecane, "with his Armani suits, silk ties and Italian shoes, physical workouts and foul mouth resembled a mafia boss and he knew it". He saw himself as "the Michael Corleone of literary theory, the Tony Soprano of pedagogy". Victoria Victorinix, the department's tenured full prof and its best-known lesbian, has "survived three or four paradigm shifts in literary theory".
African-American Lester Antilles, the heftiest of the lot in post-colonial studies refused to do his Ph.D. as a protest against the "objectifying colonialist gaze on native subjects'. In practice, this meant he refused to teach or attend seminars or publish. And for this "demanding and theoretically sophisticated subaltern intervention in the dominant discourse, he was given an endowed chair and a bigger salary than the president of the United States."
Professor Stephen Michael Stephen, the school's token African-American appointment, is popular with students because his classes consist only of seeing movies like "Khartoum", "The Sand Pebbles", "55 Days At Peking" and "Lawrence of Arabia" which were used to "introduce his students to issues of race, imperialism and post-colonial theory."
The Serb Marko Kraljevic, the department's premier theorist, sees himself as an "intellectual samurai, the Toshiro Mifune of cultural studies." The radical graduate student, Gillian (doing her dissertation on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") who "has dispensed with her patriarchal surname, in the spirit of such foremothers as Roseanne, Cher and Madonna. She had a military buzz cut, wore a tank-top T-shirt, a denim mini-skirt, torn fishnet stockings, and black, steel-toed Doc Martens. She looked like Irma La Douce played by Arnold Schwarzenegger."
On the other side of the faction are: Mort Weisman who compares Of Grammatology to a Molotov cocktail landing in academia. "Jacques the Ripper, Weismann called the new critical superstar, pleased at his own joke." Timothy Coogan, a fifty-year-old, alcoholic, prize-winning poet teaching creative writing with a reputation for sleeping with his female students. "But because the creative writing faculty were not expected to be as evolved as real scholars, he had managed to escape sexual harassment proceedings". He can't see what poetry has to do with phallogocentrism. The Canadian Lady Novelist whose name nobody can remember. "She was reputed to be like Margaret Atwood, only nicer."
Hynes knows his Lit theory well enough to parody it. He caricatures both sides and shows us why both may have gone too far in defending their ideologies. The Lecturer's Tale is a welcome addition to the rare genre of the Academic novel of manners. If you are an academic (or an academic dropout like me) this send-up of the groves of academe will have you grinning in recognition.
The writer, a Bangalore-based free-lance writer, is a bibliomaniac and a bibliomane.
Email: pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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