Academics in Literature

Academe, May/Jun 2004 by Stimpson, Catharine R

Academics in Literature

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

Moo Jane Smiley New York, A.A. Knopf/Random House, 1995

The Human Stain Philip Roth Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2000

The Crazed Hajin New York, Pantheon Books, 2002

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, backbiting, prejudices, hypocrisies, and twitty timidities. Yet Kate Pansier, 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 midwestem landgrant university in the multicultural late twentieth centurythe 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.