Suck It: Reification Posing as Irony

Tonight I finished reading James Hynes' The Lecturer's Tale, and was reflecting on what a downhill experience reading it has been, how ultimately disappointing. And I should love this book. The critiques of literary criticism, queer theory, postmodernism, the politics and absurdities of academia, all of that ring very true. There are some lovely imbedded references to literature, primarily the hoary old chestnuts of the canon, with a few nods to the New Canon of Tokenistic Inclusion. It's self-aware and ironic and yet also strangely earnest. These are all things which pluck at my little heart strings and make me all gooey and willing to forgive an author a great many faults.

In short, I should be the perfect audience for this book.

And yet. When I started it, I was really enjoying it, reading a portion out loud to David on Friday, outlining characters and their similarities to people in UCSD's Literature department during my time there over lunch with Anthony on Saturday. At first, I was savoring a few chapters at a time, enjoying the many send-ups and call-outs of idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies I've witnessed in my own experience of academic life. Then, it slowed, and I started lagging to read it, almost dreading the next turn of the plot; by the end, finishing it became the subject of more morbid curiosity than genuine suspense. I'll give it a 3 out of 5 primarily because rarely does anyone so accurately send up a Lit department, and I've got my own axes to grind on that score.

It had so much to recommend it, so what went wrong? There are plenty of issues: the plot is a pastiche of a handful of very well known, canonical tales, for one. That's not inherently a problem, especially if you hold to the Campbellian view that there are only the few megamyths. But, if you're writing an insider's book, a send-up of the sense and sensibilities of a literature department, you should probably expect that some of your audience will not only get your references, but will in fact get there somewhat ahead of you. So, knowing that, shouldn't you do more than mug at the readership and have the characters engage in battles of literary quotation?

It becomes a hall of mirrors, a reinstitution of the "great works" as an aesthetic position, as self-serving political conservatism, and worst as just another lazy writing tactic. Case in point: throughout the text, Nelson's ongoing academic research projects comment upon the character's circumstances and parallels to canonical texts. This bugs because it doesn't go anywhere, it just points out some obvious readings of the text. I actually can really enjoy a novel that deconstructs while you read it; I have love for Gertrude Stein's very difficult The Making of Americans and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. But this one kept irritating me. Either Hynes doesn't trust the audience to "get" his reappropriation of Shakespeare et al and can think of no better way to impart the themes than to come out and state them or he's just so impressed by his own observational skills and knowledge of the western canon that he's got to tell the reader about it, effectively making it a puffing up of his academic chest, the blustering self-congratulation of the deeply insecure. If you're going to be snottily superior about your own erudition and cleverness, then you had better dazzle me, and this just doesn't get it done.

That's not the worst of its sins, though. The big issue for me comes as a reader, rather than a critic: the lead character is a douche due several metric tons of comeuppance. And while the author all but transparently tells the reader that he thinks of old Nelson as a charismatic Gatsby or a Hemingway broken-heart or some other (allegedly) lovable ass and that we should too, the fact that the author has to step forward to tell you that you should love the guy, accept his utter lack of redeeming qualities, and find him "charismatic" in the bargain should have been a hint to the author and editors that, as written, he's an alienating jerk to read about, and I for one don't root for him even once after about fifty pages in.

I can't think of anyone whose poor-little-mes interest me less, or ring more false. Nelson is the guy who's pissed off he's not going to make it into the history books personally for the exact reason that it's already full of guys exactly like him. He thinks he's really getting screwed because history's full of guys like him--mediocre white guys--who became rich, famous, and powerful, and yet he's grinding out a middle class life. That guy never sees that his life is easier, safer, and more comfortable than almost everyone else's in dozens of large and small ways not despite his unexceptionality but because of it. In this sense, Nelson is the spiritual brother of Tyler Durden, another middle class white man who thinks his own stultifying mediocrity is actually him being oppressed and victimized by outside agents. Like Durden, his solution is to impose his will on those Others. The imperial narrative, the will to power. Rinse, repeat. Yawn. The fact that Hynes (and Nelson) can point out that they know the critique of their positions doesn't, in fact, change their positions. It's like when a guy prefaces a flagrantly sexist story or opinion with "I love women," or "I consider myself a feminist, but" or my personal favorite, "let's be honest..." Your disclaimer and self-awareness do not excuse or redeem you. So, suck it.

I don't want to spoiler plot, so I won't get into specifics, but the whole mishmash falls apart under its own preciousness and self-congratulation by the third act. Like the main character, it can cite chapter and verse of literature and can ape the jargon of theory, but it comprehends not. It starts out an incisive if bitter satire and ends up a paean to the mediocre but entitled middle class white professional man who rages at the world which promised him a kingdom and then told him he had to earn his keep. In the final analysis: if you're a lit grad student, academic grunt, or disenchanted humanities major, give it a read at least through the first 100 pages for the gleeful calling-out of the b.s. run amok in literature departments. After that, it's your call.