The Apocalyptic New Campus Novel
In Christine Smallwood’s story of scholarly precarity, what the
academy wastes above all is human potential.
JAN FEINDT FOR THE CHRONICLE
THE REVIEW
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By Charlie Tyson
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/author/charlie-tyson>
Chronicle of higher education, MARCH 22, 2021
Early in graduate school, I had a curious dream. I had finished my
dissertation, but no job was forthcoming. Taking pity on me, my
department hired me to perform the functions of a
janitor-cum-chambermaid. A pathetic scene followed. I found myself down
on my hands and knees, scrubbing the floor tiles of the humanities
building, choking on the fumes of cleaning fluid, squeezing my rag into
a bucket of dirty suds. Students teemed past holding lattes. My former
professors averted their eyes. “At least I can tell people I work at
Harvard,” I thought madly, as hot tears spilled down and mingled with
the lemon disinfectant.
We are all going extinct. But academic literary critics, Smallwood
suggests, are going extinct a little faster.
I recalled this nightmare of bourgeois indignity while reading Christine
Smallwood’s debut novel of academic precarity,/The Life of the
Mind/(2021) — the book’s key theme is the production of waste, and the
task of cleaning up afterward. Smallwood’s sendup of contemporary
academic life follows Dorothy, an adjunct instructor in the English
department of a private university in New York City. The novel opens
with Dorothy on the toilet in the middle of a bowel movement. It ends
with her dumping a sheaf of student essays, each marked with a desultory
A-minus, one by one into the trash.
Along the way, Dorothy muses obsessively on what we might call the
metaphysics of garbage. After staring at a bespectacled graduate student
in the library doggedly making his way through Kant’s aesthetics, she
walks out into the rain and imagines a mountain of broken umbrellas and
discarded consumer goods — a vision of “the garbage sublime.” Reflecting
on her failed writing samples, she laments “producing so much waste.”
She weighs the respective merits of garbagemen and academics and
concludes that while sanitation workers dispose of trash, all she does
is move it around. She thinks of herself, finally, as “a janitor in the
temple” who keeps sweeping not because she still believes in the gods
but because she has nowhere else to go. The novel’s parade of rubbish
marches toward an abrasive suggestion: Today’s academy is in the
business of producing at best detritus, at worst excrement, all fated to
be swept away.
Yet Smallwood’s critique of the academy is not so simple. When we meet
Dorothy, she has just had a miscarriage of an accidental pregnancy. The
novel’s most powerful image of waste, then, is not an abandoned
manuscript; nor is it mucus or feces or vaginal blood or an exploding
cyst (although all of these things are described in the text with an
impassive candor that recalls Ottessa Moshfegh, as well as what Kristina
Quynn hascalled
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/interactives/20191216-DisgustingCampusNovel>the
“disgusting” campus novel). It is a grainy photo Dorothy takes home from
the gynecologist: a sonogram of an empty womb. Her pregnancy, like her
intellectual career, is interrupted before it has a chance to develop.
In this story of scholarly stagnation, what the academy wastes above all
is human potential.
The campus novel began as an oddball subgenre. Its origins as a distinct
tradition date to 1950s fictions by Mary McCarthy and Kingsley Amis
following the postwar expansion of higher education in the United States
and England. From the start, the academic novel tasked itself with
skewering professorial pretension and dissecting campus manners. Such an
enterprise may seem like the ultimate insiders’ game, of little interest
beyond the closed world of the campus. Who cares about the foibles of
the faculty?
Everyone, it would seem. This minor tradition has quietly become one of
contemporary American literature’s ruling genres. Philip Roth, Joyce
Carol Oates, Zadie Smith, Francine Prose, and Jane Smiley are only a few
of the eminent writers who have turned their hand to campus fiction. If
we include allegories of academic life — such as Colson Whitehead’s/The
Intuitionist/(1999), a novel about elevator inspectors who study at the
Institute for Vertical Transport and quarrel about which texts belong in
the elevator-studies canon — this list would be even longer. More recent
works by Brandon Taylor, Susan Choi, and others suggest the endurance of
the campus novel not as an oddity but as one of mainstream literature’s
prestige forms.
The surprising dominance of the campus novel in the literary field is in
part due to the academicization of literature. The proliferation of
creative-writing programs, the role of college syllabi in canon-making,
the degree to which the university functions as a patronage system for
writers — all these are signs of literature’s close entanglement with
the academy. Many novelists are, like scholars, academics writing for
other academics.
But campus novels reflect more than these institutional facts. They
reflect a broader cultural obsession with the institutions that serve as
sorting mechanisms for America’s shrinking middle class. Historians of
the future might be forgiven for thinking that in the early 21st
century, our country’s colleges were more powerful, and more nefarious,
than its military. Certainly the former gets more scrutiny and
attention. Our media environment indicates that the taste for campus
satire is strong. Some corners of the media are, in effect, sprawling,
serialized campus novels, filled with discontinuous and never-ending
tales of politically correct absurdities. For some right-wing outlets,
academic culture is virtually the only topic. Campus satire has become
the preferred genre of conservative journalism — although their mockery
is laced with fear.
This situation is treacherous for the would-be academic satirist. On the
one hand, the ubiquity of campus fiction has diluted its satirical
acidity. The campus has become a default literary setting, not
outlandish but ordinary. On the other hand, because conservatives now
specialize in the task of ridiculing academic tastes, the satirist risks
having her work mistaken for a reactionary attack. There is also the
risk that making fun of academics may just be petty. Scholars,
thin-skinned as a rule, have grown increasingly harried, bludgeoned by
right-wing caricatures and, especially in the humanities, by a jobs
crisis that portends the collapse of several academic fields and a
marginal sphere of influence for the survivors.
These conditions have fed a Schmittian tendency among academics to class
people as either with them or against them, with no gradations in
between. The stance of the satirist observing her own tribe, however,
requires a more ambivalent or detached relation between the individual
and the group. The most penetrating satire arises from conflicted affection.
Smallwood’s solution to this quandary is to select a protagonist who is
doubly removed from her community. As a contingent faculty member,
Dorothy is not a full member of the academy; nor is she entirely out of
it. But above all, she’s too tired to care. She is detached from the
academy not because she deems herself superior but because her academic
career, like her life, is stagnant.
Through the vantage point of this listless heroine, Smallwood satirizes
the protocols of English departments with a specificity that recalls the
delicious Thatcher-era campus romps of David Lodge — especially/Nice
Work/(1988), which, like this novel, scrutinizes the academy’s
precarious working conditions. One gleefully ridiculous sequence is a
flashback to Dorothy’s graduate-school years. She is sitting outside her
adviser’s office, attempting to read Pierre
Bourdieu’s/Distinction/(1979). Dorothy’s rival Alexandra — later to win
a tenure-track job at Berkeley — is meeting with the adviser they share.
From inside the office, Dorothy hears her adviser make a pronouncement:
Alexandra’s argument is “significant.”
Dorothy is shaken. Professors have described her work as “clever” or
“promising,” yes. But “significant”? Never. Involuntarily stabbing holes
in the pages of Bourdieu with her mechanical pencil, Dorothy jumps when
Alexandra appears smirking over her shoulder. And then:
As Dorothy rose, Alexandra made a show of holding the door, which
was already open. Dorothy interpreted this action of door-holding,
which a stranger would have described, if they noticed it at all, as
desultory politeness, as Alexandra’s way of drawing attention to the
door itself, i.e., to herself, i.e., to Alexandra, because
Alexandra’s research was about — doors.
Alexandra does not study the symbolic meanings attached to doors in the
Victorian novel, as Dorothy first supposes, but instead the materiality
of doors, who made them, what “power relations” doors indicate. This
might seem farcical. But anyone who has inhabited an English department
in the last decade will recognize it as not just plausible but familiar.
/The Life of the Mind/is filled with snippets of academic discourse. We
have nods to Franco Moretti and Lauren Berlant, Silvan Tomkins and Mary
Douglas; we have slogans about the radicality of “the episodic” and
glimpses of the course Dorothy is teaching about apocalypse. But “ideas”
enter the novel only superficially. We see little of the talent or
passion that propelled Dorothy into academic life in the first place.
Looking at her ultrasound at the doctor’s office (she likens her vaginal
walls to Plato’s cave — a humorous reminder that “the life of the mind”
cannot exist without the body), Dorothy thinks that the experience is
“nothing like” her favorite scene in Thomas Mann’s/The Magic
Mountain/(1924), in which Hans Castorp has his X-ray taken. And
Smallwood’s book, too, is “nothing like” Mann’s great novel of ideas.
Compared with, say, J.M. Coetzee’s/Elizabeth Costello/(2003), this is an
academic novel in which intellectual matters are hardly discussed. The
novel thus responds in kind to an academic system inhibited by fads,
careerism, and pointless factional disputes, in which real intellectual
inquiry is all too rare. Smallwood spoofs the academy’s shallowness by
setting a big scholarly conference in Las Vegas — an appropriate
encapsulation of an academic system in which the job market has become a
lottery.
In keeping with the novel’s deflation of the romance of intellectual
life, Dorothy’s academic field — 19th-century British literature — is
brought down to earth, made sordid. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient
mariner becomes a raving homeless man on the subway; Wilkie Collins’s
woman in white appears in the waiting room of Dorothy’s ob-gyn. Dorothy
is, by allusion, Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George
Eliot’s/Middlemarch/(1871-72); she is also “Dodo,” an awkward creature
slated for extinction. (In contrast, the adviser who gives Dorothy this
Eliotic pet name is likened to an ostrich — glamorous, fearsome, sinewy.)
The Victorian writer who serves as the novel’s presiding spirit,
however, is Thomas Hardy. Dorothy wonders whether she is somehow
superfluous. The novel underscores this fear by providing her with a
series of substitutes or doubles: Alexandra, her adviser’s favorite, who
gets the job Dorothy hoped for; her best friend Gaby, who sings the
karaoke song Dorothy meant to sing. In Vegas, Dorothy gives her paper on
Hardy’s novel/Jude the Obscure/(1895), in which the problem of
superfluous life is shockingly dramatized in English literature’s most
famous suicide note: “Done because we are too menny.” Dorothy’s attitude
toward her own apparent superfluity is, in the end, more apathetic. “It
didn’t have to be her,” she reasons, “who did what could be done so well
by someone else.”
We are all going extinct. But academic literary critics, Smallwood
suggests, are going extinct a little faster. Can the campus novel
survive the fall of the English department?/The Life of the
Mind/suggests it can. Brooding on apocalypse, the novel depicts an
academic world in which absurdities are unavoidable. Lacking an office,
Dorothy hides out in toilet stalls and faces off against scornful
librarians. (“Are professors not allowed in the library?” she challenges
a librarian while having a meltdown in front of a broken printer.) The
campus novel is in its classic form a novel of manners. That some of the
most educated people in the society can also be some of the most
childish has long served as grist for comedy. As academic institutions
weaken further, we should expect manners to get worse, not better;
disputes over whatever tiny allotment of power remains in the hands of
academic humanists will no doubt become more bitter and sanctimonious.
All this will be bad for scholars. Whether it will be good for novelists
is another question.
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