Academics in Literature

The experience of higher education is an increasingly common feature of American life. In imaginative literature, the portrayal of academics ranges from the commonplace to the bizarre.

By Catharine R. Stimpson

Moo

The Human Stain

The Crazed

As I write, I am haunted by the memory of my friend Carolyn Heilbrun, who died in October 2003. She wrote mystery novels under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, a self-divided name that combines the vivacity of a Noel Coward character, the Amanda of Private Lives, with an irascible mood, crossness. Not surprisingly, her mystery novels, set in universities, also embody a dual nature. They crossly expose the awful faults of universities: the pretentiousness, sententiousness, lethal power games, back-biting, prejudices, hypocrisies, and twitty timidities. Yet Kate Fansler, Heilbrun's heroine, an academic and amateur detective, displays some of the attractive possibilities of academic life: learning, urbanity, wit, cleverness.

This contradictory representation of academic life—at once positive and negative—has a rich history. A 2003 book, Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination, by A. D. Nuttall, finds traces of its beginnings in the story of the Garden of Eden. The Western classics are another source. Socrates, alive from the waist up and down, dominates Plato's Dialogues, that transcendent fusion of philosophy, drama, and pedagogy. However, it has been the great growth of higher education since the nineteenth century that has inspired an equally great growth in the literary treatments of the academy and academics, a burgeoning to which movies and television contributed in the twentieth century.

This growth has had several consequences. Among the most important is that the experience of higher education, as it has become more demographically widespread, has become a staple—even a fixture—of the bildungsroman, the narrative of growing up, the formation of a person. The university has also lost much of its exoticism and remoteness. If a writer wants to make a professor a character, he is more apt to be portrayed as the nice guy or the nerd mowing the lawn next door than the sterling character or fraud in a black gown strolling through Gothic cloisters. The rise of the social sciences in the twentieth century has added representations of these disciplines to those of the humanities and sciences. The worldly, tough-minded economist has joined the other-worldly, woolly minded theologian or classicist in the literary repertoire.

Despite such growth, imaginative literature about academic life has often been narrowly gauged. One popular genre, the story of college life, focuses too exclusively on the young, whether it be the apple-cheeked football hero or the snarky slouch. Such a genre has a counterpart, the story of college life that focuses on the aging professor, usually male, a member of the Viagra generation, with too many books still unwritten and too many women still unloved or unloving. Moreover, academic life, with its squishy ambivalences about sex and power, lends itself to satire and mockery. Here, the tension between a positive and a negative valence dissipates as the negative dominates and moves in for the kill. Finally, many imaginative writers simply do not know much about the intricate operations of universities and colleges. C. P. Snow, the English author, is an obvious exception to my rule. Writers may coolly observe a creative writing program or an English department going at full tilt, but be incapable of seeing the whole complex shebang.

Academic literature has magnitude when it presents a character so robust that he or she takes off from the page and lands to nest in our ordinary parlance. Ravelstein, the eponymous hero of Saul Bellow's 2000 novel, is such a lively bird. The size of the book is even greater when a writer embeds the academy in major or mythic events. It then becomes not simply a target but a vital feature of a field of time.

Three contrasting examples are Moo by Jane Smiley, The Human Stain by Philip Roth, and The Crazed by Ha Jin.

Moo

Moo may be the funniest American academic novel ever written. Smiley gives us a panoramic view of a midwestern land-grant university in the multicultural late twentieth century—the students, parents, alumni, faculty, physical plant employees, administrators, and government authorities, one of whom, the state governor, lip-synchs the rhetoric of the corporate university. Of the figures whom she foregrounds, one is a sympathetic young Chicana English professor; another is the aging radical Chairman X, a horticulturalist, locked in mortal combat with the highest-paid professor on campus, Dr. Lionel Gift, an economist.

If Moo were only this, it would be a broad and delicious parody of the multiversity. Smiley, however, has larger ambitions. First, she is asking how the multiversity can survive, for it has made too many promises to too many constituencies, although each promise and each constituency has its value. The multiversity has said it would provide economic development, social and medical healing, truth, beauty, and, for the young, freedom and social mobility. Next, more lyrically, she is affirming that even in this huge yet fragmented and fragile institution, the good can prevail. Luck, pluck, and love can win out. Offering the hope of human and natural renewal, Moo moves from satire to the more luminous laughter of comedy.

The Human Stain

In contrast, The Human Stain, driven by the rhythms of rage, is propelled from satire to the choking laughter of tragedy. Because of Roth's well-deserved fame, and because of the movie version of the novel, its story line is familiar. Its protagonist, Coleman Silk, a classics professor and dean at Athena College in New England, decides as a young man to reject his African American identity and pass as white and a Jew. His career is successful until an African American student accuses him of making a racist remark. Roth is ruthless, as he echoes a conservative critique, about the contemporary academy, its jargon, and its pieties. His strongest condemnation is made by Coleman's dignified sister, Ernestine. "Sounds . . . (like) anything is possible in a college today. Sounds like the people there forgot what it is to teach. Sounds like what they do is something closer to buffoonery," she says.

Even more passionately, The Human Stain, like much of Roth's other work, is after the reality of America, still living with the aftermath of the Vietnam War and, in the attempt to impeach President Bill Clinton, having another of its recurrent spasms of the "ecstasy of sanctimony." An even deeper question is about the attractions, compulsions, and limits of freedom. Choosing to be white, Silk constructs an admirable identity, an "I," and a trap.

As deeply, Roth is seeking bedrock knowledge about our species. He places Silk between two women who are foils for each other: Delphine, a clever and ambitious literature professor from France, and Faunia, an incest victim who has led a survivor's rough life and is now a cleaning woman and farmhand. She becomes Silk's much younger mistress. The women have much in common; both, for example, are the daughters of a local aristocracy. However, the professor is a hysterical, dangerous fool; the cleaning woman offers the central truth of the book, the nature and meaning of the human stain, our "impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there's no other way to be here," she asserts.

The Crazed

The political correctness of the American academy that Roth excoriates is the babbling play of a privileged child compared with the political correctness of the Chinese academy of The Crazed. Ying Peng, a comparatively uneducated woman, is the Communist Party Secretary of the graduate literature department of provincial Shanning University. As such, she controls the department and the careers of its faculty and students. In 1989, a revered professor, Shenmin Yang, lies dying of a stroke in a local hospital, nursed by two of his students, one of them, Jian, engaged to Yang's daughter. Jian, who aspires to be a professor if he can pass his doctoral entrance exams to Beijing University and stay in Ying Peng's good graces, has a much-noted academic temperament: he is "a typical bookworm, high strung and a bit morose." Professor Yang was condemned as a "demon-monster" during the Cultural Revolution. Now, terminally ill and perhaps—but only perhaps—berserk, he unleashes streams of language: recitations of Dante, erotic seductions, patriotic songs, cries of hatred. In Beijing, students are participating in demonstrations that will culminate in the bloodshed in Tiananmen Square.

Yes, The Crazed is a bildungsroman. Jian must learn the complexities of the identity of his mentor and magisterial figure, Professor Yang; the nature of China, his homeland; and his capacities for work and for love. Ultimately, in an act of choice and necessity, he decides to flee into exile. The Crazed, with admirable economy, gives us the vast moral, social, and economic landscapes of contemporary China. Doing so, like much of the other literature written about authoritarian or tyrannical governments, it probes the terrible tensions for intellectuals and scholars during bad times. Their traditional role—to be learned, detached, disinterested—is distinguished, even noble. Who else will keep the classical poetry of East and West alive? Despite the deep virtues of their calling, to themselves the scholars may be nothing more than linguistic game players. To the men and women in charge, they may be "just a piece of meat on a chopping board." When the students rebel, they are brave, and leave a legacy of courage, but many of them are homeless, wounded, or dead.

Significantly, all three of these wonderful novels lie within the zig-zaggy, porous boundaries of realism. As pundit after pundit tells us, higher education—the advanced production, distribution, and consumption of knowledge—is changing radically. Indeed, it is. The literature that most acutely and imaginatively represents the emergence of the new is neither realism nor punditry but speculative fiction. Think, for example, of the work of William Gibson. Read these narratives of possible futures as well as the realistic narratives about the past and present. The future is the mystery we will never unravel. Speculative narratives are both positive and negative about institutions of higher education, but they will blow your mind about what might be coming as much as realism now breaks your heart about what is here—the stupidities and follies that the handsome hoods and mortarboards of the academy fail to veil.

Catharine Stimpson is university professor and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University.

 Printer-Friendly Page