An Interview by Maureen McClarnon
This interview was conducted via e-mail in 2001, by a sociology grad student at Duke who was writing about the effects of academic satire on the public perception of academia.
Q: The Wild Colonial Boy is very different from your last two books (in subject, obviously, but also in tone). What possessed you to write supernatural academic satires?
A: It was an accident, actually, or a series of accidents. It’s a long, boring story, but here’s the short version: After The Wild Colonial Boy came out, in 1990, I embarked on a long, ambitious, epic historical novel. On the strength of that, I got a postdoc fellowship at the University of Michigan, at the end of which, I went on the academic job market (an experience like the reality show Fear Factor, only not as pleasant) and basically struck out. One morning I woke up and realized that I was no longer working on the historical novel because I enjoyed it, but because I thought finishing it was necessary for me to get an academic job. Almost overnight, all the air went out of the book, and I put it aside and haven’t picked it up since. That was in October of 1994. At the same time, as I do every year to get myself in the mood for Halloween (my favorite holiday), I was re-rereading some of my favorite Edwardian ghost stories—M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, et al. This annual pastime, plus my sudden loss of faith in the historical novel, provoked the desire in me to write something purely for fun, something purely entertaining, with no intellectual or literary pretensions. There was a measure of defiance in this, namely, to hell with hiring and tenure committees, I want to be Stephen King.
The first one I wrote was “99,” and in the original draft, my doomed protagonist was a traveling American screenwriter, not an anthropologist. Then I wrote “Queen of the Jungle” in about a month, which is the fastest I’ve ever written anything in my life; the version that appears in Publish and Perish, in fact, is pretty much the first draft. It wasn’t until after I finished it that I realized the novella was as much academic satire as horror. It wasn’t a conscious decision on my part; it just came out that way. The collapse of my academic career at the time obviously had something to do with it; my own fear of failure was an easy emotion to exploit, something close at hand that I could give to my main character.
Then I got the idea that if I made the guy in “99” an academic, I’d have two novellas with a similar theme. So I rewrote him as an anthropologist, and showed both novellas to my agent, who liked them, but told me that it would be better if I had three of them. So I started a new novella about a sacked English professor who loses his index finger in a freak accident, etc. After 120 pages or so, I realized that it was going to be too long to be a novella, so I came up with the idea of a jazzed-up, modern-day retelling of M. R. James’s famous horror story, “Casting the Runes.” (I checked first to make sure it was in the public domain.) Meantime, I soldiered on with what became The Lecturer’s Tale, finishing it finally last year. So Publish and Perish was a happy accident. The Lecturer’s Tale, of course, is a little more self-conscious effort, since I wrote at least half of it after the reviews for P&P came out, and I was trying to see how far I could go with this fortuitous combination of satire and Gothic horror.
Q: Is there something about this “moment in history” that lends itself to the academic satire, or is academic satire always appropriate?
A: There certainly seem to be a lot of them lately, don’t there? Honestly, I just don’t know. Most of my reasons (see previous answer) are purely personal and mostly accidental. If I’d known that I was going to spend the rest of my career being compared to David Lodge, I might not have bothered.
But here’s a theory, which you can take or leave (since I’m making it up off the top of my head): The rise of the MFA program since WWII has led to a massive influx of writers into academia. Hence, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, Kingsley Amis, Jane Smiley, Richard Russo: all were professors at one time or another (though I suspect that all of the above, like me, think, or thought, of themselves as writers first, and academics only by necessity). When you combine this fact—that many writers now make a living in academia—with the weird, anti-literary turn that some literary criticism has taken in the last twenty-five years (at least it looks anti-literary to us), you’re bound to get a few pissed-off, defensive writers with a lot to get off their chests.
Q: I think equating the events of academic life with unseen forces, so to speak, is a great metaphor for the arbitrary acts of power inflicted upon academics at all levels—by the time a grad student is smacked by the hand of the academy, it's likely the result of a trickle-down effect that ends in “go home and kick the cat” (although sometimes we're just victims of ego and caprice). How did you make the connection between horror and academia?
A: Again, see my first answer. It wasn’t a conscious process, but the happy accident of a love of classic horror fiction (those Edwardian gents again) combined with my own emotions at a time when my academic career, such as it was, was going down with all hands. Perhaps my love of M. R. James had a subliminal effect: I first read his stories when I was ten years old, and have loved them ever since. Though he’s best-known now as the author of some of the best ghost stories in the English language, he was a very prolific biblical scholar during the last turn of the century; the bibliography of his scholarly writing runs to twelve pages. Many of the characters in his stories are Edwardian bachelor scholars. His original story “Casting the Runes” begins with a dispute between an independent scholar and an academic. So the link between academia and horror has been kicking around in my lizard brain for years.
Some of the reviews of Publish and Perish gave me credit for things I hadn’t thought of at the time I was writing the book (at least not consciously). Cathleen Schine’s review in the New York Times Book Review called Virginia’s stalking by Karswell in my version of “Casting the Runes” a brilliant metaphor for sexual harassment. While I’m perfectly happy to take credit for it, this never once occurred to me as I was writing it. One of the glories of writing fiction is that stuff churns up out of your subconscious that you didn’t even know was there.
Q: What audience are you writing for? Do you think a non-academic audience would get less—or different—enjoyment out of these books? After all, these stories are riddled with allusions to particular real-life academics and their work, as well as to tales of the supernatural, so in order to “get” all of the jokes, a person would need a pretty broad range of knowledge, or at least an informative book review.
A: This is a very vexing question for me. When I’ve been asked it in the past, I’ve often said—a tad defensively, I’ll admit—that I don’t have anyone in mind. Or that I write to amuse myself, or write the kind of books that I’d like to read. This is still mostly true. I often enjoy reading books that are dense with detail about something that I know nothing about. I love reading Pynchon, whose books are full of arcane knowledge, some of it true, some of it made up, and I’m not always able to tell the difference. I love Don DeLillo for the same reason. And even though I gave up (at least for now) on my own historical novel, I love reading them, especially the uncompromising ones that assume a certain knowledge of the subject that I don’t always have—John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus, Marguerite Yourcenar’s The Abyss, or even those Patrick O’Brien novels about the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I love this effect even in popular novels, such as John Le Carre’s espionage thrillers and William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. What both authors have in common is their uncompromising use of atmosphere and detail. They both throw a lot of jargon (mostly made-up) at the reader and never once stop to explain any of it. It’s sink or swim, and you either get into it, or you fling the book across the room. Just last year I read Neil Stephenson’s massive, brainy pop novel Cryptonomicon, and, frankly, much of the stuff about cryptography and computer technology went right by me. But I loved the book anyway, because of the blizzard of arcana and not in spite of it. (That said, there has to be a balance: I’ve read a couple of Richard Powers’s novels and they’ve left me cold. They’re brilliant but lifeless finally; his polymath erudition overwhelms whatever literary value the books might have. I can’t remember a single character or memorable moment from either of them, only acres of brilliant but emotionless riffing on various highly technical topics.)
All of the above books force the reader to pay attention and truly engage the text (because if you don’t, you’ll just get lost), and the pleasure in this for the reader is that he or she is completely immersed in the world of the book, at a level of intensity you just don’t get with some breezy beach novel or some sparely written mainstream literary novel about, I dunno, somebody’s marriage breaking up. Paradoxically, mainstream literary novels often overexplain things, making it easier for the reader, while the kinds of novels I’m talking about make you work to understand, force you to guess at the meanings of things from their contexts, which means once you do get it, it sinks to a deeper part of your brain. It’s certainly a more satisfying reading experience, at least for me.
Even my first novel, which on the face of it is much more accessible to the “general reading public” (whoever they are) than The Lecturer’s Tale, is crammed full of detail about the history and politics of Ireland. This actually worked against me as a commercial matter: a lot of people, including me, assumed that the book would be catnip to movie studios, since it was a thriller full of violence and even a little sex, with two young Americans as the protagonists. But every producer who considered it turned it down finally, as being too “dense” and “morally complex.” These two qualities, of course, are virtues as far as the book’s literary worth is concerned, but they also meant I didn’t get the big truckload of money from Hollywood I was frankly hoping for.
As for the two satires, I think Publish and Perish is accessible to a pretty wide audience; the storytelling and the elements of horror predominate over the (relatively brief) passages of straight academic satire. And I know from poking around the Internet that the book’s readers include a fair number of horror fans, not to mention mainstream readers who just like a good read. In the end, “Queen of the Jungle,” for example, is basically about a guy cheating on his wife and trying to hide the fact, and my version of “Casting the Runes” is about an ambitious young woman whose career is threatened by a bullying older colleague; you don’t need to be an academic to understand those situations. The book was written in a spirit of fun, as was, indeed, The Wild Colonial Boy; both books are meant to be more entertaining than edifying.
Having said all of the above (and I do go on—this is what happens when you ask a novelist about himself), the writing of The Lecturer’s Tale was a much more self-conscious process, more so, in fact, than was altogether comfortable for me. I was aware throughout that many of the jokes and references would be accessible only to an academic reader. But there’s also a great deal of the book that is accessible to any intelligent reader (and lower than that I’m not willing to go): a laboriously set up pun like “You DeMan,” which is comprehensible only if you know who Paul DeMan was, is in the same book as the scene where Nelson drops his pants and Vita walks in on him. In the end I only included the jokes that actually made me laugh—I never completely shut off the entertainer in me—but obviously some jokes are going to fly right by many readers. All I can do is fall back on what I said above: I enjoy reading books which I don’t entirely understand, and I can only hope other readers do, too. The basic story and situations should be clear to any intelligent reader, even a non-academic; when I was writing it, I described it to people as a cross between Faust and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. And even if you don’t know the big-name players in modern day literary studies, the vanity and ambition of my characters should be readily evident. But I also like the idea that someone in the know will get an extra kick out of the book.
There’s also the fact that after a certain point, how a text is read is out of the writer’s hands. Take, for example, the definitive satire in modern Western culture, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. My Oxford paperback edition is full of footnotes that explain in great, and unfunny, detail just who each character is supposed to represent—some of them are types, while some are particular people in the English court—but outside of scholars and grad students, I suspect that most people read Gulliver these days as a sort of mildly satirical fantasy; in fact, I’ll bet most people read it as children, when most of the satire goes over their heads anyway. I doubt this how Swift intended it to be read, but the fact remains that the book survives and is read with pleasure by people who have no idea of the author’s original intent.
Q: How do you think books like these—academic satires—influence the way “the public” regards academia? Are you playing into pre-existing public opinions?
A: The answer to the first question is, I honestly don’t know. Neither of my academic satires were bestsellers by any stretch of the imagination, though I know that they’re fairly well-known among academics. Influence is a function of who reads the book, not just how many people, and I know (for example), that Elaine Showalter really liked The Lecturer’s Tale (she gave it a very nice review in the Chronicle of Higher Education). So that makes the book count for something, I suppose.
But I doubt I have to explain to a sociology grad student that the term “the public” is extremely problematic. Which public are you talking about? The vast majority of the public that watches Survivor, for example, is no doubt completely unaware that my books exist. Even the “general reading public,” a slightly more specific but scarcely less problematic entity, are much, much more likely to be reading John Irving or Barbara Kingsolver than they are to be reading me. I could spend pages, of course, narrowing it down, but in the end, the “public” that reads my books is probably limited, more or less, to book reviewers and academics and a relatively small number of readers of literary fiction. We’re talking at best, I dunno, fifty thousand readers? Probably fewer, if the figures on my royalty statement are any indication (The total sales of all my books put together don’t even come close to fifty thousand copies; I’m assuming some copies, such as library copies, are read by more than one person). And since, with these last two books, most of my readers are academics who already have their own strong opinions about academia, I doubt my influence is very great. Rather, I think it’s the other way around: readers who find their opinions of academia confirmed in The Lecturer’s Tale and Publish and Perish will like the books, and those who don’t, won’t.
The answer to the second question is, likewise, I don’t really know, since I don’t know what “the public’s” pre-existing opinions are. In large part, I write a book on a particular topic as a way of explaining it to myself; each of my books represents me thinking out loud about revolutionary politics (in my first book), or academic politics (in my next two). I don’t even necessarily come to any firm conclusions. Anybody who picks up The Lecturer’s Tale looking for an angry white male screed at the damn women’s libbers is likely to be put off at my portrayal of Morton Weissmann. And a lot of people—see the Amazon web page for the book—are flat-out pissed off about the climactic scene in the tower, which blows most readers’ expectations all to hell. My favorite review of the book, in fact, is the Showalter review in the Chronicle, since she points out that the book is the revenge of reading and teaching against the reign of theory (which is true), and that I’m also half in love with the theory I’m attacking (which is also true). Unless you know who Judith Butler is and what she claims about gender, the scene in the tower doesn’t make a lick of sense. So I guess I’m sort of answering your question by claiming that The Lecturer’s Tale, at least in part, goes out of its way to confound pre-existing opinions.
Having said that, I should also add that several years ago I copied out a quote from Kingsley Amis onto an index card and taped it to my computer monitor. I’m looking at it right now, in fact. It says, “Novels aren’t supposed to be fair.”
Q: What appeal do academic satires hold for readers?
A: You’d have to ask them. Me, I like them for the same reason I like any satire: they deflate the pompous and the phony, and they make me laugh. In fact, I’d say that all satire is really about the same set of vices: vanity, ambition, greed, pretension, hypocrisy, etc. Successful satires, and not just academic satires, say out loud what most people think but are reluctant or afraid to say. The really great ones—Gulliver’s Travels, Heller’s Catch 22, some of Evelyn Waugh—say things that actually make the reader uncomfortable.
Q: What opinion do you hold of your characters, or alternatively, how would you characterize your depiction of these people and situations?
A: I politely decline to answer. It’s this sort of question that led one of my heroes, the late, great Stanley Kubrick, to decline giving interviews. Whenever anyone asked him what 2001 was about, he would say, “Watch the movie.” If anybody wants to know what I think of any of the characters in my books, I say, read the book. If I could summarize what I wanted to say in a few sentences, I wouldn’t have taken up writing novels.
Q: Would you agree that “the battles are so vicious because the stakes are so low”?
A: Well, I’m not so sure the battles in academia are necessarily more vicious. Academics get a reputation for viciousness, I think, because as a rule they’re more articulate, and more likely to say what they think, than most people are. But in the end, I doubt that the battles over curriculum and hiring practices, etc., in academia are more vicious than, say, battles over whether a factory or a discount store should unionize, or whether a company should send its jobs overseas, etc. Perhaps because “the public” (whoever they are) think that academics are fundamentally more ridiculous than meat-packers, they find a tenure struggle more amusing than a battle over whether to close a meat-packing plant in Iowa, say. The latter struggle just seems grim and desperate, while the former seems just plain silly. In both cases, though, jobs and livelihoods are at stake.
I’m not even sure the stakes are so low. As someone who has staked his life on the creation and appreciation of literature, the fate of literature matters to me more than anything. In the end, I think literature will survive on its own strengths and merits, but there’s no denying that its fate is at least partially influenced by the state of literary studies (which is not the same thing as literature). And these days, for better or for worse, the study of literature is pursued almost exclusively in universities.
Which prompts a little digression on my part. Looking back over what I’ve written here, it occurs to me that what people really mean when they call a book an “academic satire” is “a satire of the modern English department.” Think about it: can you think of a single famous academic satire that isn’t about an English department? Where are the hilarious, wickedly funny satires of law schools? Or sociology departments? Where are the caricatures of well-known med school professors or botanists? This overemphasis on English departments is due in large part to the fact that most fiction writers teach in English departments, of course, but there’s something more to it, I suspect. Perhaps the real question is not, “What does the public think of academia?” but, “What does the public think of literature, and the people who create and study it?”
Q: Has the advent of the “two Ps”—postmodernism and p.c.—made academia a more fertile playground for satire than previously? Or are the Ps just the most visible and easily-mocked foibles?
A: In the satires of an earlier generation—Jarrell, McCarthy, Nabokov, Amis—academics were funny because they were dotty and peculiar; the struggles there were pettier struggles over departmental power. Yet, in all those books, all of the combatants at least agreed that there was such a thing as literature, and that it was worth studying and passing on to their students, even if they disagreed over individual authors and interpretations. What makes the modern academic satire angrier and sharper is that now you have a significant subset of English professors who not only attack individual authors for their objectionable politics, but who attack the very idea of literature itself, and even the idea that writing is ever about anything other than itself. For writers and readers who believe in the beauty of language and the power and truthfulness of stories, these are infuriating ideas. From our point of view, these aren’t just “foibles,” but attacks on what we hold most dear in the world. Perhaps this answers your previous question, about what’s at stake.
Q: On the other hand, academics are often portrayed as foolish; the modern academic satire popped up in the early 1950s with books from Amis, Jarrell, and Nabokov, all published within a year or so of each other. Why did higher education fall from grace at that point? Could there be some sort of implicit comparison between the real life-and-death struggles of World War II versus the sort of political squabbling in universities? Or perhaps because women and minorities were entering universities in greater numbers?
A: I’m not sure academia as a whole “fell from grace.” The three authors you mention are all writing about literature professors in small, provincial universities; I reiterate my point that most satires are about English departments, and that the vast majority of academia has remained largely untouched by satire. (I haven’t read Jane Smiley’s Moo, though I’ve heard her book ranges more widely.) At the same time as the modern English department satire was gaining ground, other branches of academia, particularly the sciences, were receiving huge infusions of federal research money. Think of all the money that the feds gave to physicists, computer engineers, cancer researchers, agricultural botanists, and others over the last fifty years; that hardly represents a fall from grace. Perhaps writers like me have missed the boat: instead of whining about how unfair Edward Said is to Jane Austen, we should have been writing novels about all those other, non-liberal-arts academics who were inventing the hydrogen bomb and starting the war in Vietnam (see Halberstam’s The Best and Brightest for the culpability of social scientists in the Vietnam War). My point here is that the real story of academia in the second half of the twentieth century is probably going to be the huge innovations in computer science, medicine, engineering, etc., that were developed in the universities, or by university-trained scientists, with the federal government footing the bill; the squabbles over literary studies are going to look like brush fires by comparison.
As for the advent of women and minorities in universities, I’m sure it has been a factor in academic satires, whether the satirists admit it or not. I commend to you Malcolm Bradbury’s first novel, Eating People Is Wrong, in which he makes fun of an African student at an English university, and then makes fun of himself for making fun of the student, in a very funny and very incisive disquisition on the stereotype of “The Funny Foreigner.” It’s also interesting to note that three of the sharpest academic satirists are women: Mary McCarthy, Jane Smiley, and Francine Prose. I’m not sure a man could have gotten away with writing Blue Angel.
Q: What's your reaction when people connect themselves to the characters in your books and are flattered?
A: God bless ‘em.
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
A: No, I think I’ve said enough. I’ve already moved on to my next novel, which has nothing to do with academia, blessed be. Good luck on your project!