STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE 25.3

April 2003 | 25.3

Dale Bailey and Jack Slay, Jr.

With the publication of Richard Russo’s Straight Man (1997), Philip Roth’s Human Stain (2000), and Francine Prose’s National Book Award nominee Blue Angel (2000), the campus novel, as defined by Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954), is enjoying a renaissance. Such novels portray the academy as a realm of erudition, contemplation, and abstruse theory far removed from everyday lives. Paradoxically, they also depict the campus as a microcosm, a Lilliputian world riven by the same moral complacency, elitism, political posturing, and bed-hopping we see everywhere else. In other words, for the satirist, the university is an easy, target-rich environment.

In the nearly fifty years since Lucky Jim Dixon first made his scene, however, some interesting dichotomies have cropped up on campus. The earlier novels are about leaving the academy; more recent novels tend to be about staying. Mary McCarthy’s Groves of Academe (1952) ends with several characters resolving to quit their small college; Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys (1995) finds Grady Tripp, fired from one college, immediately hired by another. The last chapter of Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution (1954) is titled “They All Go.” Fired from Cascadia College, Sam Levin of Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961) departs into an uncertain future with the heartening news that his prospective spouse is pregnant, giving added resonance to the title. Jane Smiley’s Moo (1995) concludes with a series of marriages, reconciliations, and professional affirmations. On the other hand, Straight Man’s Hank Devereaux, clearly a glutton for punishment, not only stays in the academy, he also starts teaching high school.

Adam Begley sees this desire to stay as the result of a kinder view of academia, a way of “looking at the bright side, laughing off misgivings, learning tolerance and accommodation” (40). A closer reading, however, reveals that recent campus novels are more scathing than their predecessors; this is a life, as Devereaux observes, where earning a promotion is “a little bit like being proclaimed the winner of a shit-eating contest” (27). These more recent campus novels, David G. Bevan notes, portray a “world of trivia and perversion, of vanity and deceit, of plagiarism and gratuitousness, of patronage and pretentiousness, of personal advantage rather than the pursuit of learning” (103). Such is the case in Publish and Perish (1997) and The Lecturer’s Tale (2001), by James Hynes. Nelson Humboldt, the protagonist of The Lecturer’s Tale is, as Amy Reiter calls him, your typical “everystraightmid-westernwhiteman” who envisions an idealistic future “where scholarship and pedagogy, theory and praxis, were equally balanced, where the women of the Composition Department . . . had offices side by side with the young queer theorists and the old New Critics” (238). However, this is a vision that Hynes goes to considerable lengths to undermine.

While the gloom of intellectual pretension and self-aggrandizing ambition is not entirely unrelieved by gleams of a shattered idealism—the novel concludes with the moral regeneration of department chair Anthony Pescecane, who renounces deconstructionism for undergraduate education--pessimism prevails. Pescecane’s redemption occurs in the midst of a still more insidious corruption, American consumerism. Sold to the highest bidder, the Ivy-quality University of the Midwest becomes plain old Midwestern, a corporate McUniversity where the teachers wear company blazers and the school football team is unapologetically an NFL franchise. Like Philip Roth, Francine Prose, and so many other contemporary campus novelists, Hynes ultimately finds the institution beyond salvation.

For all the familiar cynicism, however, Hynes also brings something new to the academic novel—the funky, unruly energy of modern horror fiction, and an affection for popular culture that is, ironically, all the academic rage. The subtitle of Publish and Perish, Three Tales of Tenure and Terror, says it all: these are both campus satires and serious horror stories in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. It is a potentially spectacular hybrid. As Tobin Harshaw notes about Hynes’s novels, “[B]oth put us in a world without absolute truths, where the supernatural or the ludicrous can be explained away in terms of perception and relativism.” What’s more, Hynes mostly pulls it off, crafting seriously compelling tales from plot germs that read like rejects from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Queen of the Jungle,” the first of three tales in Publish and Perish, depicts the vengeance of a demonic cat on an adulterous postdoc. The second novella, “99,” describes how postcolonial anthropologist Gregory Eyck becomes the victim of a Druid cult in the isolated English village of Silbury. It also contains the best line in the whole book, when Eyck protests his fate on the basis of professional seniority: “This can’t be happening to me,” he objects. “I have tenure” (188). Tenure-based humor is also featured in the third tale, “Casting the Runes,” which describes the travails of Virginia Dunning, a promising assistant professor who needs just one more publication to bring before her tenure committee. Her new monograph is accepted for publication at the last moment, but things turn ugly when the unscrupulous editor demands she add his name as collaborator. Virginia refuses, only to find herself on the receiving end of a retaliatory voodoo curse. As Hynes himself notes in a brief Afterword, “Casting the Runes,” is a pastiche of an M. R. James story by the same name. Furthermore, his love and knowledge of the supernatural tale is evident in the allusions he drops throughout. “Casting the Runes,” for example, includes references to the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft and features professors named after gothic writers Sheridan Le Fanu and Algernon Blackwood.

Similar supernatural hijinks animate The Lecturer’s Tale, a wish-fulfillment fantasy modeled after W. W. Jacobs’s masterpiece “The Monkey’s Paw.” When his index finger is amputated in a freak campus accident, lecturer Nelson Humboldt gets a chance to make real his dream of a “department that rises above petty politics, that melds the best of both worlds, of traditional scholarship and the best of cutting-edge theory” (369), a counterhegemonic world, to use Nelson’s own term. The reattached finger turns out to have the power to make anyone Nelson touches do as he wishes. World peace and frenzies of sexual gratification would seem to loom on the horizon, but Nelson turns out to be both singularly unimaginative and unfailingly honorable: all he wants is an equitable English department. In typical horror novel fashion, however, even these mundane aspirations go spectacularly wrong; by the end of the book, his meddling has culminated not only in his own moral corruption but in a fiery conflagration that consumes the very icons of literary fame that he most admires—the great books themselves.

Not that Hynes should be construed as a strict canonist. He is as hard on the traditionalists as he is on every other English department type: Midwest’s New Critic, Morton Weissmann, an obvious Cleanth Brooks clone, is a pompous ass, and Nelson Humboldt himself, with a last name that simultaneously sounds like humbug and recalls the officious scholar of Lolita, is something of a fool. Moreover, both books fairly bristle with knowing references both to the mundane world of popular culture and the rarefied realms of contemporary literary theory. Hynes gives us cats named for the Bronte sisters and epigraphs from Derrida alongside references to Rock ‘n’ Roll P.J. (“Barbie’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend!”) (13). In “Queen of the Jungle,” he depicts a corrupt postdoc working on a monograph entitled “My (M)other the Car: Difference and Memory in the Matriarchal Narrative”—composed to the intoxicating harmonies of the Beach Boys— and he drops savvy popular culture allusions to everything from Baywatch to the Butthole Surfers. In The Lecturer’s Tale, chapter titles such as “Nelson in Nighttown” and “The Story of O” appear alongside “The Curse of Fu Manchu” and “Victoria’s Secret.” And at one point, he even describes a coffee table littered with copies of Critical Inquiry, PMLA, and Seventeen.

The deliberate juxtaposition of these two levels of discourse—academic journal and teenage fashion magazine—is itself a sign of the confidence with which Hynes moves from a nuanced analysis of the most esoteric literary theory to an offhand but thorough knowledge of the larger-than-life personalities who dominate our popular cultural landscape. “Whose ‘gun’ did O.J. hold to his ‘head’ in the Slow Speed Chase?” jennifer manly, the novel’s pre-eminent queer theorist, inquires, adding, “Was it a ‘naked gun’?” This is an easy joke, of course, but in the next few sentences Hynes gives the humor an unexpected theoretical kicker. manly argues that “O.J.’s rage at constrictive and heterosexist constructions of gender had led him to a profoundly transgressive metaphorical act, murdering a ‘man’ and a ‘woman’ nearly simultaneously, thus placing the reductive dualism of ‘gender’ itself sous rature” (220). Among academics, the humor resonates because manly’s analysis is so absurdly plausible; somewhere even as you read this, a promising young queer theorist is working on this very paper.

Similarly complex theoretical humor crops up constantly in the novel. Hynes never passes up an easy laugh—consider the name he assigns the novel’s postcolonial theorist, Lester Antilles—but his jokes almost always conceal a more pointed satirical barb. Antilles’s professional success, it turns out, is predicated on his ideological purity: as a graduate student, he refuses to attend classes or complete a dissertation lest he “participate in the marginalization of indigenous voices or . . . become complicit with the hegemonic discourse of Western postcolonial cultural imperialism” (204). The reward for this act of conscience is nothing less than an endowed chair at Columbia, where Antilles earns his six-figure salary by refusing to teach, hold office hours, or publish.

Perhaps the ultimate example of this brand of humor grows out of Nelson’s epiphany in Midwest’s Thornfield Library, where he realizes that “everything was text, at every level of existence, all the way up from quarks to queer theory” (255). This theoretical “truth” becomes enacted metaphor at the end of the novel, when Thornfield Library literally deconstructs itself in an enormous fire, a fire from which Nelson escapes by leaping from a third-floor window onto a stack of books “that had tumbled from the canon . . . Sir Walter Scott and Edmund Spenser . . . and John Galsworthy” (362). The scene reifies the fears of many conservative English professors, who perceive a genuine threat to the western tradition in contemporary literary theory. All the dead white males are literally tossed out the window, and the library itself burns to the ground. And as always, Hynes tries to have it both ways: for the academic literati in the box seats, there are the playful jabs at deconstructionism and canon revision and an allusion to Jane Eyre and for the horror fiction groundlings, he tosses in a supernatural sprite, a gunfight with automatic weapons, and the excitement of the conflagration itself.

In both Publish and Perish and The Lecturer’s Tale, this desire to have it both ways is simultaneously Hynes’s strength and his weakness. His familiarity with the tropes of horror fiction certainly energizes the conventions of the campus novel, but in the end one suspects neither horror readers nor academics walk away entirely satisfied. In the climax of The Lecturer’s Tale, for example, Hynes works so hard to keep his subtextual literary theory consistent that the horror plot dissolves into virtual incoherence. Just who or what is the sprite that haunts Thornfield Library? The academic reader, on the other hand, may well find herself put off by the scene’s over-the-top violence.

In the end, the center does not hold—not even thematically. For the fact is, Hynes seems to find little to admire either in the world of popular horror or in the academy which so often holds such fiction in disdain. Yet he cannot bring himself to walk away from either one. This is perhaps nowhere as evident as in a key scene in the closing chapters of “Casting the Runes,” a scene which revolves around Hector Quiroga, a university security guard and aspiring horror novelist who is reading a “paperback horror novel” emblazoned with a blurb by contemporary horror luminary Clive Barker (“There’s a new name for terror!”) (326). Hynes treats Hector with the same disdain he lavishes upon his academic characters. Poor Hector is none too bright, and while he is a sufficiently perceptive reader to recognize an H. P. Lovecraft pastiche when he sees one, his sole interest in horror fiction seems to be rooted in the voyeuristic thrill of gory description. “Just now, the Other World beastie was stalking a pregnant woman,” Hynes writes, “and Hector had put down his meat-loaf sandwich. . . . This is going to be good, he was thinking” (326). There is certainly plenty of gore in contemporary horror—and no doubt there are readers like Hector Quiroga out there as well—but the work of writers as diverse as Jack Cady, Elizabeth Hand, and—yes—James Hynes suggests that at its best horror can and should be more.

Moreover, in spite of his obvious disdain for English Departments, James Hynes clearly is not eager for graduation. In an interview with The Austin Chronicle, Hynes admits to a “love-hate relationship with academia,” and notes that he is looking for a teaching position. Perhaps that is why Publish and Perish and The Lecturer’s Tale are, like so many campus novels, exercises in ambivalence. Yes, his academics are boorish and pompous and self-aggrandizing, but Hynes’s loving attention to every last nuance of contemporary literary theory suggests that they are also the audience he most wishes to cultivate. In a telling passage from the same interview, Hynes describes Cathleen Schine’s New York Times Book Review critique of Publish and Perish as his “dream review.” Significantly, Schine’s first paragraph concludes: “The result is delicious, a genre book for those who don’t really like genre books—pure entertainment that is not a waste of time” (5). The passage seems to embody the kind of intellectual elitism Hynes elsewhere decries; ironically, it is also remarkable for the very lucidity with which it reveals the value system implicit in Hynes’s academic satires, a value system which draws an unmistakable line between the worlds of low and high culture, a value system which, carried to Cathleen Schine’s logical extreme, dismisses “paperback horror novels” with blurbs by Clive Barker as “a waste of time.” Hynes’s obvious love and knowledge of horror fiction suggests that he really doesn’t want to go that far. But his equally obvious attempts to write for an academic audience suggest that, like the protagonists of so many contemporary campus novels, he is not quite ready to abandon the tenure track either.

Begley, Adam. “The Decline of the Campus Novel.” Lingua Franca 7.7 (Sept. 1997): 39-46.

Bevan, David G. “Images of Our Tottering Tower: The Academic Novel as a Metaphor for Our Times.” The Dalhousie Review 65.1 (1985): 101-10.

Harshaw, Tobin. “Wanton Deconstruction.” The New York Times Book Review 21 Jan. 2001 <http://pr…/pqdweb?Did= 000000067031803&Fmt...>.

—. Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror. New York: Picador USA, 1997.

Reiter, Amy. “‘The Lecturer’s Tale’ by James Hynes.” Salon.com 23 Aug. 2001 <www.salon.com/books/ review/2001/ 02/21/hynes>.

Smith,Clay.“Social Studies.”The Austin Chronicle 19 Jan. 2001 <www.auschron.com/issues/dispatch/2001-01-19/books>.